The Devil at Large (19 page)

The “supernal light” has transformed Henry.

One would have to be a toad, a snail, or a slug not to be affected by this radiance which emanates from the human heart as well as from the heavens.

“The only paradise in Europe,” he calls Greece—and for him this was true. In Greece his “heart filled with light”; he opened like a flower.

I don’t know which affected me more deeply—the story of the lemon groves just opposite us or the sight of Poros itself when suddenly I realized that we were sailing through the streets. If there is one dream which I like above all others it is that of sailing on land. Coming into Poros gives the illusion of the deep dream. Suddenly the land converges on all sides and the boat is squeezed into a narrow strait from which there seems to be no egress. The men and women of Poros are hanging out of the windows, just above your head. You pull in right under their friendly nostrils, as though for a shave and hair cut en route. The loungers on the quay are walking with the same speed as the boat; they can walk faster than the boat if they choose to quicken their pace. The island revolves in cubistic planes, one of walls and windows, one of rocks and goats, one of stiff-blown trees and shrubs, and so on. Yonder, where the mainland curves like a whip, lie the wild lemon groves and there in the Spring young and old go mad from the fragrance of sap and blossom. You enter the harbor of Poros swaying and swirling, a gentle idiot tossed about amidst masts and nets in a world which only the painter knows and which he has made live again because like you, when he first saw this world, he was drunk and happy and care-free. To sail slowly through the streets of Poros is to recapture the joy of passing through the neck of the womb. It is a joy too deep almost to be remembered. It is a kind of numb idiot’s delight which produces legends such as that of the birth of an island out of a foundering ship. The ship, the passage, the revolving walls, the gentle undulating tremor under the belly of the boat, the dazzling light, the green snake-like curve of the shore, the beards hanging down over your scalp from the inhabitants suspended above you, all these and the palpitant breath of friendship, sympathy, guidance, envelop and entrance you until you are blown out like a star fulfilled and your heart with its molten smithereens scattered far and wide.

Summing up what Greece taught him, Henry says, “I can see the whole human race straining through the neck of the bottle here, searching for egress into the world of light and beauty.”

Maroussi
shows Henry climbing up out of the bloody womb of time into the radiance of eternity. The book works on many levels. It is the odyssey of fallen man moving from darkness into light, from mortality to immortality, from mutability to permanence, from benighted materialism to enlightened spirituality. It also tells the story of the world at the exact fulcrum of the twentieth century. In 1939, this planet with its millions of war-bound inhabitants was crossing an inexorable divide from the pre-Nuclear to the Nuclear Age, from the illusion of species immortality to the conviction of species mortality, from the war to end all wars to the understanding that war would be with us always in various forms—both cold and hot. Henry’s odyssey in
Maroussi
is exactly the odyssey the human race needed in 1939—but failed to take. It is prophetic that it concludes with the line “Peace to all men, I say, and life more abundant!”

Maroussi
creates a new form for the spiritual travel book, building on and extending Thoreau. It astonishes me that so few of the people who have written about Miller have seen this. The sex of the Paris books has blinded them. They do not even
look
at
Maroussi.

Mary Dearborn acknowledges the beauty of
Maroussi
’s prose, but she dismisses the book in a few lines: “[H]is recounting of one spiritual experience after another tends to bore readers who are not taken up with mysticism.”

Of course, “mysticism”—the very word has become pejorative—is always boring to those who believe only in materialism. “Boring” is in itself a codeword for fear—as any psychoanalyst can tell you. There is a whole school of journalists and critics who will dismiss as “New Age claptrap” everything from
Maroussi
to
Walden
to the
Tao Te Ching
to Shirley MacLaine’s bestsellers as if there were no difference in quality or in kind.

Probably the fear of enlightenment is greater in some people than the attraction toward it, but some of us are drawn to it, while others stubbornly turn their backs, claiming the light does not exist. One cannot argue about the possibility of enlightenment any more than one can argue about the existence of god and goddess. It requires a leap of faith, an act of amazing grace. Miller made that leap of faith in Greece. Many of his chroniclers cannot follow him.

Even Robert Ferguson, who is a somewhat less grudging and bitter critic of Henry than Mary Dearborn, says of
Maroussi
that “a second rebirth, coming so soon after the first one in Paris with
Tropic of Cancer
, might seem like one rebirth too many.” But spiritual experiences are cumulative. They gather like waves and result in breakthroughs. Creative life does not proceed by accumulating anthills of “facts.” Rather there is a slow accretion of experience, of learning one’s craft, of growing spiritually, until suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, one soars to a new level. If you’ve experienced it, you believe it. If you haven’t, you disbelieve.

Of all Henry’s biographers, Jay Martin best comprehends Miller’s mission to free his readers. He records the sense of liberation and ease Miller felt in Greece. After the frenzy of the Paris years, where he wrote and wrote to empty himself of the bitterness of his past, he was finally able to draw a long breath of life and light. He returned to America a new person. In a sense, his soul had been shriven.

Perhaps
Maroussi
is played down by Miller’s biographers because it is “a book without sex,” as one of his Greek friends predicted. It doesn’t fit the Miller stereotype, so it is safer to ignore it than to acknowledge that Miller was multifaceted, both as a human being and as a writer. In this age of electronic sound bites and media stereotyping, few public figures are allowed complexity, complication, or chiaroscuro. Miller is seen as the antic goat, nothing more. How can we notice that his central book is full of sea and sun, not slime and sperm? It would make our precious point of view seem wrong! The truth is that Miller was on a spiritual journey his whole life—and Greece was at the heart of it.

In Greece, Henry mingled with poets and philosophers and traveled to ancient sites—Poros, Nauplia, Epidaurus, and Mycenae—with George Katsimbalis, whom Henry was to immortalize as
The Colossus of Maroussi.
Like Henry, Katsimbalis was a great talker as well as a writer. As he led Henry on a spiritual and literary journey, he also captivated him.

Henry turned serene, almost seraphic in Greece, and all his friends noticed the change. He began his lifelong romance with the wisdom of the ages—yoga, Zen, the I Ching. His friend Ghika (whom he called Giks), the painter from Hydra, predicted that Greece would change Henry: “If you came to Greece as a Parisian bohemian, you have become a pilgrim,” he said. “Henceforth your writing must be different.”
Maroussi
was to prove Ghika right.

In September 1939, Henry’s publisher at Obelisk Press, Jack Kahane, died, and Miller’s modest monthly stipend from
Tropic of Cancer
and
Black Spring
was interrupted. Durrell was going to fight with the Greeks against Italy; Paris was in chaos, preparing for war. Like it or not, it was time for Miller to return to America. He always fled war when he could, knowing its uselessness. Just three weeks before his forty-eighth birthday on December 26, all Americans were told to leave Greece, and Henry’s friend George Katsimbalis, the mad word-spinner, took Miller to see a fortune-teller.

Like the fortune cookie he later gave me (“your name will be famous in the future”), the prediction he received was also destined to come true: Henry was to be a joy-giver, fated never to die, but simply to disappear from the earthly sphere like Lao-tzu. The prediction was truer than Henry would know, even in his own lifetime, for though obscurity and struggle awaited him in his homeland, he had already written most of the books that would bring him immortality. All except
Maroussi
, which he wrote in New York upon his return.

When Henry arrived in his native city in January 1940, he was as broke as when he had left ten years earlier, unknown to the general reading public and still without a nurturing mate.

Anaïs had also fled Europe and returned to New York, but she was ill and didn’t meet Henry’s ship, the
Exocharda,
when it docked. She was, anyway, retreating from Henry with each passing year.

This was no triumphal return from abroad. Henry had published only one book in the States,
The Cosmological Eye
, a miscellany of pieces brought out by James Laughlin of New Directions in 1939, and it had not done at all well even in literary circles. Henry was afraid and ashamed to see his elderly parents, terrified of being wholly unable to write in America, terrified of being claimed by the Cosmodemonic New York he had fled.

New York was a city of failures and defeats for him, and yet somehow he was able to sit in its midst and write
The Colossus of Maroussi
and some of his best essays (
The World of Sex
and “Reflections on Writing”) in Caresse Crosby’s apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street. She was the widow of Harry Crosby of The Black Sun Press, and another returned expatriate—albeit a solvent one.

Henry began
The Colossus
between the winter and spring of 1940, and it covers the period in Greece that immediately preceded it. It feels like a book that was written in a blaze of inspiration. It is not labored, but clean and true. Henry Miller’s letters to Anaïs Nin from Greece have the same clarity. Greece had focused his energies. He was almost fifty, and ready to enter the next phase of life.

During Henry’s New York sojourn another important literary event occurred that illuminates Miller the writer. Always desperately hard up, and unable to sell his work to mainstream publishers, Henry was tempted to try his hand at pornography-on-demand, writing for a rich collector at a dollar a page. He proved as unsuited for this “job” as for the others he’d taken in his life, and, like them, he lost it.

He did turn out a few pieces, some of which have unfortunately been published posthumously as “Sous les Toits de Paris,” “Rue de la Screw,” and “France in My Pants” in
Opus Pistorum
(1983), but his “career” as a paid pornographer was to prove Vladimir Nabokov’s maxim that pornography lovers insist on their smut being “limited to the copulation of clichés.” “Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust,” Nabokov says in
Lolita.
Henry couldn’t write pornography for long. The porno collector found him “too poetic.”

This shows how little most censors, critics, and even sober First Amendment specialists understand about the impetus to write about sex. As Nabokov says in his afterword to
Lolita
, “no writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual.” Life contains both, and in order to evoke it, writing must also contain both.

But the porno fancier is seeking something else altogether—a masturbatory aid. Too much poetry distracts him from his single goal: an efficient orgasm. Henry’s goals were always far less single-minded and far less efficient. The sex in his books was there just as the spirituality was—to awaken, to enlighten, to bring the reader to his senses. Those who confuse the Paris books with pornography clearly do not know how tedious and repetitive pornography really is. Those who accuse Henry of putting in the sex “to sell” do not realize that in his case the sex was an impediment to his “career.” But he had no choice. He wrote what “the voice” dictated.

The posthumous publication of Henry’s small output of for-hire pornography has, sadly, further besmirched his reputation—not only because it is sexual, but because it is so dreary, dull, and badly written.

At the same period, in 1940, in New York, he wrote his truest book about the uses of sex in literature. It is a brief essay entitled
The World of Sex
, and in it Miller discusses the various responses to his sexual books. He explains that people either despise them or see them as liberating, but that very few readers can make sense of the way the sexual and the spiritual are interrelated. Henry speaks of his oeuvre as if his place in literature were already established.

For me
The World of Sex
remains the last word on the still misunderstood subject of sex and spirituality. Like Flaubert, Henry did not choose his subject matter, he submitted to it. That he wrote
The World of Sex
hard on the heels of
Maroussi
and the pornography-for-hire experiment is fascinating. Henry could
only
be himself. That is surely one definition of genius.

In New York, Henry at last found the courage to visit his parents, who were old, poor, ill, and very glad to see him. The empathy he felt for them, the transformation of his feelings of anger, also had a profound effect upon his writing and his life to come. His parents finally accepted him, not because of his work—by their standards an underground writer was a failure—but as their son, which is perhaps more important.

Maroussi
was turned down by ten publishers, including Blanche Knopf, and it finally came out with a small, financially strapped San Francisco press called Colt. Although Henry was rejected again and again, he still would not allow Penguin Books to bowdlerize
Tropic of Cancer
just to get it published in America (an offer that came to him at this time). Some hostile Miller critics imply that he would do anything for money, but the fact is that his stubborn individualism always made his economic life very difficult. He simply could not compromise with the taste of the mainstream. He couldn’t even publish in
The Kenyon Review
,
Esquire
, or
The New Republic.
He was so far ahead of his time that even the little magazines and literary quarterlies were afraid of him. And
The New Yorker
turned up its aristocratic nose at his work. Nor could he get a grant from the Guggenheims. Henry has a wry take on grants in his coda to
Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
Though he “answered all questions faithfully” and “submitted names of persons of good repute” who would vouch for the fact that he was neither a “moron, adolescent, insane or alcoholic,” he did not get the grant. Of the list of nineteen professors, journalists, and psychologists who made the grade in 1941, when Henry Miller didn’t, not one has been heard of since.