Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

by Miller, Henry

  What does one do in such a case—the wild waves going up and down, the gulls screaming at you, the buzzards sniffing at you as if you were already so much tripe, and the sky so full of glory yet empty of hope? I’ll tell you what you do, if you have an ounce of sense left in you. I’ll give it to you the way William Blake answered when a visitor once asked him what he did in moments of dire extremity. William Blake calmly turned to his good wife Kate, his helpmate, and he said to her: “Kate, what do we do in such cases?” And his dear Kate replied: “Why, we get down on our knees and pray, don’t we, Mr. Blake?”

  That’s what I did, and that’s what every bleeding mother’s son has to do when things get too unbearable.

  8.

  If ever I should find time hanging heavy on my hands I know what to do: hop in my car, drive to Los Angeles, and search out the files which are kept in steel cabinets in the Special Collections Division of the University Library there. In these files are the thousands of letters which, at their urgent request, I have been turning over to the library ever since I have been in Big Sur. They are for posterity, I suppose. Unfortunately, some of the best ones, the maddest, the craziest, I burned (at my wife’s instigation) shortly before the library made its request. Before that, in New York, and again in Paris (when leaving for Greece), I got rid of a short ton of correspondence which I then thought of no importance, even for “posterity.”

  With the letters, bien entendu, arrive manuscripts, beautifully printed poems, books of indescribable variety, checks, wedding and funeral announcements (why not divorce notices also?), photos of newborn infants (the spawn of my fans), theses (dozens of them), lecture programs, excerpts from books, clippings, reviews in a dozen different languages, requests for photos or autographs, plans for a new world, appeals for funds, pleas to help stop the execution of this or that innocent one, pamphlets and monographs ranging in subject matter from dietary cures to the true nature of Zoroastrianism.

  It is assumed that I am vitally interested in all these subjects, projects and proposals. What I am most interested in, naturally, is checks. If I see an envelope which bears promise of containing a check, that is the one I open first. Next in order come those which bear the postmark of exotic countries. The ones I put away to read some rainy day are the thick envelopes which I know in advance contain abortive stories, essays or poems which I am generally told that I may consign to the waste basket if I choose—the sender never has the courage to do this himself! On the other hand, a real fat one from someone I adore I may save until I go to the sulphur baths, there to enjoy it in peace and quiet. But how rare are these in comparison with the slew of crap which pours in day in and day out!

  Sometimes it is a very brief letter, in an exquisite or else an execrable hand, which will “send” me. It is usually from a foreigner who is also a writer. A writer I have never heard of before. The short letters which exasperate me are from ultralucid spirits to whom I have presented a knotty, complicated, usually legal or ethical, problem, and who are adept in cutting through fog and grease with three or four scimitar-like lines which always leave me exactly where I was before posing the problem. The type I have in mind is the judicial type. The better the lawyer, the bigger the judge, the briefer and more bewildering the reply.

  Let me say at the outset that the most vapid letter writers are the British. Even their handwriting seems to reveal a paucity of spirit which is glaring. From a calligraphic standpoint, they appear to be crouching behind their own shadows—skulking like poltroons. They are congenitally incapable of coming out with it, whatever it may be that impelled them to write me. (Usually I discover that it is about themselves, their spiritual poverty, their crushed spirits, their lowered horizon.) There are exceptions, to be sure. Splendid, remarkable exceptions. As epistolary virtuosi, no one can equal Lawrence Durrell, the poet, or John Cowper Powys, the returned Welshman. Durrell’s letters awaken the same sure delight which comes with viewing a Persian miniature or a Japanese wood-block print. I am not thinking of the physical aspect of his letters, though this too plays a part, but the language itself. Here is a happy master of prose whose style is pure and limpid, whose lines sing, bubble, effervesce, whether writing a letter or writing a treatise. From wherever he sits penning his letter there is wafted the fragrance, the wonder and the eternality of landscape, to which is added the spice of fable and myth, of legend and folklore, of customs, ritual and architecture. He has written me, Lawrence Durrell, from such places as Cos, Patmos, Knossus, Syracuse, Rhodes, Sparta, Delphi, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cyprus. The very names of these stopping places make my mouth water. And he has put them all in his books and in his poems….

  As for “Friar John,” as Powys sometimes styles himself, the very look of his letters puts me in ecstasy. He probably writes with a pad on his knee, a pad which is pivoted on invisible ball bearings. His lines flow in a labyrinthian curve which permits them to be read upside down, swinging from a chandelier or climbing a wall. He is always exalted. Always. Trifles become monumental. And this despite the fact that he has lost the use of one eye, has no teeth to chew with, and until fairly recently—he is now in his eighties—suffered unremittingly from gastric or duodenal ulcers. The oldest of all my correspondents (excepting Al Jennings), he is also the youngest and the gayest, the most liberal, the most tolerant, the most enthusiastic of all. Like William Blake, I feel certain that he will die singing and clapping his hands.

  Few are they who are able to write freely and effortlessly about anything and everything—as Chesterton and Belloc did. The name of the sender usually apprises me of the nature of the contents of a letter. One writes perpetually about his ailments, another about his financial difficulties, another about his domestic problems, another about his run-ins with publisher or dealer; one guy is hepped on pornography and obscenity, can never get off the subject; another talks only about Rimbaud or about William Blake; another about the Essenes; another about the stratospheric complexities of Indian metaphysics; another about Rudolf Steiner or the “masters” in the Himalayas; some are Dianetic bloodhounds, others Zen enthusiasts; some write only of Jesus, Buddha, Socrates and Pythagoras. You might suppose the latter breed to be stimulating minds. On the contrary, they are the dullest, the windiest, the dryest of all. Genuine “gaseous vertebrates.” They are only surpassed in dullness by the nimble wits who are always ready to relay the latest joke overheard at the office or in a public toilet.

  The letters that really set me up for a few days are the “isotopes” which come by carrier pigeon—from cranks, freaks, nuts and plain lunatics. What a splendid insight into an author’s life we would have if such missives were collected and published occasionally. Whenever a celebrated author dies there is a stampede to unearth the correspondence exchanged between him and other world-wide celebrities. Sometimes these make good reading, often not. As a devotee of French literary weeklies, I often find myself reading snatches of correspondence between men like Valéry and Gide, for example, and wondering all the while why I am so sleepy.

  Some of those I roughly classify as “nuts” are not wacky at all but eccentric, raffish, perverse and, being genuine solipsists, all of them, of course at odds with the world. I find them most humorous when they are pathetically whining about the cruelty of fate. This may sound malicious, but it is a fact that nothing is more hilarious to read about than the troubles of a person who is “somehow” always in trouble. What seem like mountains to this type are always molehills to us. A man who can enlarge on the tragedy of a hangnail, who can elaborate on it for five and six pages, is a comedian from heaven sent. Or a man who can take your work apart with hammer and tong, analyze it to nothingness, and hand you the missing members in an old-fashioned bidet which he normally uses for serving spaghetti.

  There was one sly coyote who used to write me direct from the asylum, a chap to whom in a moment of weakness I had sent a photograph and who for weeks thereafter bombarded me with letters ten, twenty, thirty pages long, in pencil, crayon and ce
lery stalks—always about my supposed kidney trouble. He had noticed the pouches under my eyes (an inheritance from Franz Josef on the paternal side) and he had deduced that I was destined for a speedy end. Unless I followed his recommendations for the care and preservation of the bladder, which required a number of instalments to elucidate. The regimen he prescribed began with physical exercises of a highly unorthodox character and were to be performed without the slightest deviation six times a day, one of these times being in the middle of the night. Any one of these exercises would have tied the perfect gymnast into a sailor’s knot. The exercises were to be accompanied by dietary feats which only a madman could think up. For example….

  “Eat only the stem of the spinach plant, but grind first with a pestle, then mix in chickweed, parsley, dandelion that has gone to seed, nutmeg and the tail of any rodent which has not been domesticated.

  “Eschew all meats except the flesh of the guinea pig, the wild boar, the kangaroo (now put up in tins), the onager of Asiatic origin—not the European variety!—the muskrat and the garter snake. All small birds are good for the bladder, excepting the finch, the dart and the miner bird.”

  He counseled strongly against standing on one’s head, which he described as an atavistic praxis of supernatural origin. Instead, he recommended walking on all fours, particularly over precipitous terrain. He thought it advisable, nay indispensable, to nibble between meals, particularly to nibble minute particles of caraway seeds, sunflower seeds, watermelon seeds, or even gravel and bird seed. I was not to take much water, nor tea, coffee, cocoa and tisanes, but to drink as much whiskey, vodka, gin as I could—a teaspoonful at a time. All liqueurs were taboo, and sherry, no matter what the origin, was to be shunned as one would a witch’s brew. He explained in a footnote that he had to be stringent in this regard because, after years of research (in a laboratory, supposedly) he had discovered that sherry, however and wherever manufactured, contained traces of the arnica root, liverwort and henbane, all poisonous to the human organism though rarely deleterious when given to convicts in the death-cell or to micro-organisms employed in approved formulae for the making of antibiotics. Even if I were at the point of death, I was not to resort to any of the sulfa drugs, penicillin or any of the allied miracle drug family based on mud, urine and fungus.

  Aside from the rapidity with which time flies, unbelievably so!, there is another aspect of life at Big Sur which always stupefies me, viz., the amount of trash which accumulates daily. The trash has to do with my correspondents. For, in addition to photographs, theses, manuscripts and so on which accompany the letters, come articles of clothing, stationery, talismans and amulets, albums of records, rare coins, rubbings (frottages), medallions, ornamental trays, Japanese lanterns and Japanese gimcrackery, art supplies, catalogues and almanacs, statuettes, seeds from exotic blooms, exquisite tins of cigarettes, neckties galore, hand-winding phonographs, carpet slippers from Jugoslavia, leather pantouffles from India, pocketknives with multiple accessories, cigarette lighters (none that ever work!), magazines, stock market reports, paintings (huge ones sometimes, which cost time and money to return), Turkish and Greek pastries, imported candies, rosaries, fountain pens, wines and liqueurs, occasionally a bottle of Pernod, pipes which I never smoke (but never cigars!), books of course, sometimes complete sets, and food: salami, lachs, smoked fish, cheeses, jars of olives, preserves, jams, sweet and sour pickles, corn bread (the Jewish variety), and now and then a bit of ginger. There is hardly a thing I need which my correspondents cannot supply me with. Often, when short of cash, they send me postage stamps—filched from the till, no doubt. The children also receive their share of gifts, from toys of all kinds to delicious sweets and exquisite items of wearing apparel. Whenever I make a new friend in some outlandish part of the world I invariably remind him to send the children something “exotic.” One such, a student in Lebanon, sent me the Koran in Arabic, a diminutive volume in fine print, which he urged me to teach the youngsters when they came of age.

  One can easily see, therefore, why we always have plenty with which to start a fire. Why we always have enough paper, cardboard and twine to wrap books and parcels. In the old days, when I had to walk up and down the hill, the gift business presented a problem. Now, with a Jeep station wagon, I can haul a cartload if need be.

  Certain individuals who write me regularly never fail to repeat like a refrain—“Be sure to let me know if you need anything. If I don’t have it or can’t get it, I know someone who can and will. Don’t hesitate to call on me—for anything!” (Only Americans write this way. Europeans are more conservative, so to speak. As for the Russians—the exiled ones—they will offer you heaven too.) In this group there are certain individuals who by any standard of measurement are exceptional. One is a radio operator for an air line, another is a biochemist who runs a laboratory in Los Angeles, another is a student of Greek parentage, another is a young script writer from Beverly Hills. When a package comes from V., the radio operator, I am apt to find literally anything in it, barring an elephant. The main item in the package is always carefully wrapped in wads of newspaper (newspapers from India, Japan, Israel, Egypt, anywhere he happens to be at the time) together with French, German and Italian illustrated weeklies. In the French weeklies I am always certain to find at least one text on a subject which I happen to be interested in at that moment. It’s as if he divined my need! Anyway, sandwiched in and around the precious object he has sent will be Turkish delight, fresh dates from the Orient, sardines from Portugal, smoked Japanese oysters and other little delicacies he thought up at the last minute. … F., the laboratory man, when shipping typewriter paper, carbon or ribbons that I am in need of, never fails to include a newfangled pen or pencil, a bottle of extra-ultra vitamins, a jar of lachs, a huge salami and a loaf or two of genuine corn bread, the one and only bread, as far as I am concerned, and now getting to be as scarce, and almost as expensive, as sturgeon. He would send sweet butter, too, if it traveled well…. K. and M., the other two, always offer to type my scripts or get things printed for me. If I ask for one or two tubes of water colors they send me a year’s supply, to say nothing of blocks of excellent water-color paper. K. used to keep his grandmother busy knitting socks and sweaters for me—and making loukoumi for the children.

  Some, like Dante Z., render service by doing research work for me. Dante will go through the thickest tomes and give me a summary of the contents, or track down a buried passage which, at the moment, I deem important to have on tap in my files, or translate difficult passages from obscure works, or find out if such and such an author wrote such and such a work and why, or dig into ancient medical treatises for data which I may never use but which I like to have on hand in the event that I engage in dispute with some learned ass.

  Or there is a great soul like Dr. Leon Bernstein who will, if I ask it, take a plane to visit a poverty-stricken devil who is in need of treatment, and not only will he do everything that is needed (gratis) but he will see to it that the poor devil is provided for during the long period of convalescence.

  Is it any wonder that John Cowper Powys is forever extolling the Jews and the Negroes? Without the latter, as I have often remarked, America would be a joyless, immaculate, superabundant museum of monotonous specimens labelled “the white race.” Without the Jews, charity would begin at home and stay there. Every artist, in America certainly, must be indebted a hundred times over to his Jewish friends. And indebted not for material services only. Think, chers confrères, who is the first among your friends to give encouragement, to read your work, look at your paintings, show your work around, buy your work (on the instalment plan, if necessary). Buy it, I say, and not beg off with the lame excuse—“If only I could afford it!” Who lends you money to carry on, even when he has no money to spare? Who else but the Jew will say: “I know where to borrow it for you, don’t you do a thing!” Who is it thinks to send you food, clothing, and the other vital necessities of daily life? No, the artist—in America, at least—can
not avoid coming into contact with the Jew, becoming friends with him, imitating him, imbibing from him the courage, the patience, the tolerance, the persistence and the tenacity which this people has in its blood, because, to be an artist is to lead a dog’s life, and most Jews begin life that way. Others do too, certainly, but they seem to forget it as they rise in life. The Jew seldom forgets. How can he, living in the midst of a drama which is endlessly repeated?

  And now I think of the letters which come regularly from Palestine, from Lilik Schatz, son of Boris, who has become my brother-in-law. Lilik lived for several years at Krenkel Corners, which is a sunken hollow midway between Partington Ridge and Anderson Creek. While living in Berkeley he made a trip to Big Sur one day expressly to induce me to do a silk-screen book with him, which we did, after much labor and struggle, and from scratch.* This book, Into the Night Life, the conception, the making, and its sale (which remains steadily at zero), was the beginning of a great friendship. It was only after he had returned to his home in Jerusalem that I got to know his wife’s sister, Eve, and married her. If I hadn’t found Eve I would be a dead duck today.