World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  The world around Rilke was alive and would devour him. To see, to be, in such a place, to accept and to interiorize experience as his hero felt he must … well, it was as though he had taken flies alive into his belly. Henry Miller, on the other hand, like Katsimbalis, is the threat. He is the monster. His are the glances which light like flies. He will sniff the filthy undergarments of the city. He will swallow Paris like a whale: plate scrapings from the restaurants, bookstalls entire, including brittle paper, dog ears and prints of fingers, tarts too, the endless streets and every odor, St. Sulpice, the Trianon, the Dôme. “I could have eaten Lola’s hair as a delicacy, if there’d been a piece of flesh attached to it.”

  The more urgent our needs, the less discriminating we are about them. Finer points become pointless, because, in the democracy of desire, pies equal potatoes equal stewed meats equal apples equal snails (we’ll roast rats, eat our dogs and cats, crunch the bones of our canaries, devour one another the way Saturn swallowed his children); meanwhile every quality is shed but edibility, and what we eventually consume is merely the member of a class, a naked abstraction: Food … and what we do is naked too: we Feed.

  We have in Miller an ideal instance of the interested eye, one filled with more ego than light, an “I” which lives in a world of utility and blunt satisfactions. Since objects are reduced to their signs (I am edible, I am drinkable, I am beddable), such signs are surreally enlarged and related, so that a woman is simply a collection of hungry concavities which must be approached warily but always with phallus aforethought.

  Alas, the penis is such a ridiculous petitioner. It is so unreliable, though everything depends on it—the world is balanced on it like a ball on a seal’s nose. It is so easily teased, insulted, betrayed, abandoned; yet it must pretend to be invulnerable, a weapon which confers magical powers upon its possessor; consequently this muscleless inchworm must try to swagger through temples and pull apart thighs like the hairiest Samson, the mightiest ram.

  To enter the cave and escape alive—that is the trick. Every boy on the block wants to be brave; every boy on the block knows that a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand; but the difficulty is that one is eaten by what one eats.

  … life is merchandise with a bill of lading attached, what I choose to eat being more important than I the eater, each one eating the other and consequently eating, the verb, ruler of the roost … The plate and what’s on it, through the predatory power of the intestinal apparatus, commands attention and unifies the spirit, first hypnotizing it, then slowly swallowing it, then masticating it, then absorbing it.

  So we are safe with women only when what they see when they see us, what they feel when they feel us, above all, what they think of us as they see and feel and contain us, cannot possibly matter, is of no consequence (like servants, their awareness is belowstairs, and like slopeheads and gooks, who cares?); so women are pinioned, subjugated, as food is chewed, coolly, casually, with professional detachment and male disdain; evaluations are made the way we size up cattle, and our comfortable, self-serving theory is that the lamb really bleats to be sacrificed; that we should not treat women as persons because they want to be relieved of conventional decencies in the moment they are relieved of their clothes, which explains why so many of Miller’s women pretend not to notice what’s happening, they like to feign disinterest, confusion, or sleep; consequently they should be hammered, pounded, slammed, until their sexuality expresses itself in purely masculine terms, until they cry “give it to me” with dreamy frequency; because when any woman’s modesties have been driven away, when she has been made as mindless as any man, when mouths appear all over her like hives and she yowls like an animal in heat, she will have made that most satisfactory of all admissions: that she has no high-and-mighty refinement, no superior cultivation or spirituality, tenderness or sophistication; that she is, thank sex, no better than we are—a cow, a sow, a pig; that her “mother morality” is a lie.

  Yet that “mother morality” is exactly what we want to believe in—we motherless men—and because mother does indeed belong to the same sex we degrade and despise; because she, who did not do it with dad except out of duty and did not want us to do it even in the line of duty; that same “she” is implicated in each of our proofs so that every success is a failure.

  According to pre-Lib wisdom, Mailer observes, there is something in a woman which wishes to be slain, namely, the hypocrisies of her asexual upbringing. He writes that “in every whore is an angel burning her rags,” but it seems to me that the social decencies which are outraged and removed in the sexual act are shown to be merely veneers the moment the angel moans, and when the angel moans it’s always the whore we hear. In that case, it’s not puritan morality Miller is complaining about; rather the fact that that stern dye hasn’t evenly colored the whole cloth.

  In The Tropic of Cancer and The Colossus of Maroussi, where Miller is at his best, in spectacular bursts, in similar fits and starts throughout his oeuvre, there is an eager vitality and exuberance to the writing which is exhilarating; a rush of spirit into the world as though all the sparkling wines had been uncorked at once; and the language we watchfully hear skip, whoop and wheel across Miller’s pages makes an important esthetic point, especially to those of us who are more at home with Joyce or Woolf or James or Proust, and that is that beneath all the quiet ruminations of the mind, the slendered sensibilities, the measured lyricism of finer feelings, even nearby the remotest precincts of being, is a psyche like quicksand, an omnivorous animal, the continually chewing self.

  It is a manner—this virility of noun and verb—which is so originally and genuinely male, yet really so deeply human that until women can find an openly lustful, quick, impatient, feral hunger in themselves, they will never be liberated, and their writing, however elegant or well observed or composed of sexual bouts like a fight card, in pallid imitation of the master, will lack that blood-congested genital drive which energizes every great style, whether it’s that of a bawdy Elizabethan or a coolly decorous Augustan, of Jane Austen, Colette, or Cardinal Newman.

  As Miller’s prose extends itself like a weather front over the thousand and more pages of The Rosy Crucifixion, this reader at least begins to feel it no longer expresses the hunger of someone who is thin and empty, but the greed of someone who is full and fat, someone who is attempting to remedy an old lack; futilely, too, for today’s dinner will not nourish yesterday’s body, and the women whom Miller’s narrator causes to cry “uncle” with such unreal, therefore pornographic, regularity, are not yielding themselves to the man in him who is, but to the boy in him who was; so that another feature of Miller’s work (noted nicely by Mailer) becomes disfiguringly large like a wart on the rampage.

  It is an element in every author’s impulse to speech and exposure: the desire to present the worst in oneself in the guise of a gift, as the child feels he has when he’s used his pot. Having dined on life, Miller makes us a present of what he cannot stomach, that part of the world which only the front half accepted; and in laying his heart bare (as Baudelaire threatened), he has instead dropped his pants; by shaping this enormous stool of words he expects our parental applause; thus Miller’s work in this regard (like Céline’s throughout) becomes a splendid example of the excremental style.

  Some styles are celebrational, as Miller’s often is; some are penitential, like Joyce’s, full of self-imposed barriers, hardships, ordeals and penalties; and some are excremental—where the idea is simply to get it out, to write like hell and never look back, as Mailer says, until the words amass and mount in books which resemble the rubble of a prolonged catharsis.

  Henry Miller’s works are not written, and do not belong to the page like Pynchon’s; nor are they spoken as Gaddis’s are; nor do they employ the more formal oral eloquence of Sir Thomas Browne; they are talked, yarned like a sailor, endlessly gabbed; and his male readers at last must be reminded of the bluff good-fellow voice of the locker-room brag, the pool-hall cue-fondler’
s side-mouthed secrets, the man-to-manness of the autumn gunman, or the good ole boy greased on booze: well let me tell you when I saw her huge X, my! it was so Y that I nearly Z’d; and we can hear the Gee-Whiz, Aaaah-Come-Off-It, and Don’t-Hand-Me-That-Mulch of a skeptical, envious, invisible audience; and then we can feel the skazlicher redouble his efforts to astonish, amuse, and above all, prove … so that the narrator’s consciousness is one of permanently uneasy anecdotal exaggeration, endeavoring again always to prove … to prove … the omnipresence of the lust for power? corruption in low places? hypocrisy of the church? exploitation by the monied? perhaps … to prove that one’s OK? functioning? manly? alive? able? maybe; but mainly to prove that one and all, rich or poor, married or single, cultivated or crude, humble or hoity-toity, fat or thin, dressed or naked, alone or together, in knickers or nightie … that they … they are all alike—they’re Ccccczzzs—nothing but Ccccczzzs—and may they roast for it.

  So Miller the author and Miller the fictional figure soon separate their lives with lies, not only because there is a natural inflation of event in beguiling the boys, but because Miller has opinions. He has more opinions than his narrator has emissions, and surrounding the action and ennobling the sex are ruminations, conclusions, points.

  Miller’s omnivorousness extends to print, and print now and then expresses thought, contains ideas—mind food which Miller devours with the delightful but unwary eagerness of the self-taught. Sometimes he actually sounds like a sage. More often, however, the noise is that of a crank. Mailer doesn’t think very highly of Miller’s thought or of the metaphysics of the letter F which Miller has spent so much energy and even intelligence elaborating; indeed Mailer’s description of his hero’s weak feet and unsound shoes seems to me penetrating, fair and laudable, because it gives Mailer’s admiration greater authority: that of a critic in the form of a very knowing friend, and not a mindless worshipper or glassy fan.

  We’ve been led through these ruins before, by Lawrence Durrell, principally, who tried to take a representative sample, and by Thomas Moore, who was interested only in Miller’s writings on writing. Our present guide is not going to let us see everything. He will push us past the pornographic paintings a dozen times; we’ll spend hours in the very impressive portrait gallery (and there is something of Goya and Velázquez in Miller’s portraits); but he’ll not let us near Philosopher’s Leap. The Books in My Life gets short shrift, as does The Cosmological Eye. Not even a wink and a bribe will get us a peek in Critic’s Cottage, where something obscenely clean and straight and bourgeois must be going on, so there is nothing from Miller’s study of Rimbaud or any of his Lawrence or Balzac stuff, nor is there much from the collections of short pieces or any of the other pasted-up books by Miller which publishers have placed in the world for their profit and our puzzlement. Not all Miller’s moods are represented either; for instance, none of his usually embarrassing burlesques are included (though I persist in liking what—in Plexus—is done to Goldilocks and the three bears).

  Miller has more than one horse in his stable of hobbies, and he tends to ride them yawn and on, so these deletions are by and large a favor to the reader (Mailer is an entertaining, properly garrulous guide), but the picture of Miller and his work which emerges is more than slightly askew. Although there are some good examples of Miller’s rant (and he is one of the best ranters in the ranting business), there is absent, everywhere, except in the editor’s overview, Miller’s reason why, his open-road Whitmanism, his love of books, lists, and the sound of words, his sincere wish to embrace, accept, and live in harmony with nature.

  Mailer’s commentary is valuable and his judgments generally legitimate if not beyond dispute, though occasionally Miller’s style seems to infect and weaken Mailer’s, and Mailer will condemn a slack flat passage of Miller’s in order to praise a merely flatulent one. Miller anthologizes well because his completed works are usually shapeless, repetitious and shamelessly self-indulgent; but this is a catastrophic condition when it comes, finally, to estimating Miller’s position as an artist, for he is simply not a shaper. Overcome by content, he grows repetitive but not recursive, and his work expands without getting deeper. He has great gifts, but his psyche has remained adolescent; and as Mailer himself observes, the mirror-named central female figures (Mona or Mara or Maude or Monica, as well as others of other letters) never succeed in freeing themselves from Miller’s obsessions as some of the men do. The narrator, unlike Proust’s Marcel, rarely escapes being merely Henry (as Berryman’s Henry does), and his ties are not turned into triumphs of vision and form.

  Except in those surreal moments when precisely that happens, and Mailer’s judgment of Miller, which I find romantically overblown, is sustained by a style which not only carves its object out of words, but modulates our understanding through it seems a thousand keys (reminding us of Rilke’s unreal city, unreal rooms), so that we pass from dissonance to harmony, from ouch! to whee! and back again, the way the stomach falls and the breath leaves when we enter the shoot-the-chutes: for example, in this exemplary passage from The Tropic of Cancer:

  And down this corridor, swinging his distress like a dingy lantern, Van Norden staggers, staggers in and out as here and there a door opens and a hand yanks him in or a hoof pushes him out. And the further off he wanders the more lugubrious is his distress; he wears it like a lantern which the cyclists hold between their teeth on a night when the pavement is wet and slippery. In and out of the dingy rooms he wanders, and when he sits down the chair collapses, when he opens his valise there is only a toothbrush inside. In every room there is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he’s so disgusted with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits with his big heels.

  1 Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller, by Norman Mailer (New York: Grove Press, 1976), pp. 405–06.

  Groping for Trouts

  Yonder man is carried to prison.

  Well; what has he done?

  A woman.

  But what’s his offense?

  Groping for trouts in a peculiar river.

  I want to begin with a problem that’s also a bit of history. It may at first appear as far from my topic—art and order—as the Andes are from their valleys, or as such remote and glacial mountain slopes must seem to some swimmer whose nose is full of salt. The problem concerns the measurement of nature, and I don’t in the least mind saying that on any number of counts it’s like groping for trouts in a peculiar river.

  We have each seen the motion in bodies. We ourselves live. The newsboy delivers the daily paper. The dime which has slipped from our fist runs in a tightening spiral till, like a bug, we flat it with our foot. Spirits rise, rumors travel, hopes fade. The flesh crawls, felts and satins roughen, and when we lick our ice cream we can even taste the melt. Yes, Heraclitus calls the tune, and like the sound of an accordion is the noisy meeting and passing of trains.

  The movements everywhere around us—in us—seem, well … too numerous, too vague, too fragile and transitory to number, and that’s terribly unsettling, for we always feel threatened when confronted with something we can’t count. Why should we be surprised, then, to find out that creating and defending a connection between what William James called the buzzing, blooming confusion of normal consciousness—of daily life with its unstimulating bumps, its teaseless, enervating grinds—and the clear and orderly silences of mathematics, a connection which will give us meaning, security, and management, in one lump sum, is what our science—is what our art, law, love, and magic—is principally about?

  That newspaper—we might mistake it for the white wings of a passing pigeon. Do we see the line it draws? Think how Galileo would have rendered it. He’d notice neither newspaper nor pigeon. He discovered that the distance
which the paper might be tossed could be expressed—how wonderful his image—as the area of a rectangle. The match-up was astonishing: Velocity could be laid out on one side, time on another, and since he knew so much more about rectangles than he did about motion, his little Euclidean model (for that’s what he’d managed), to the degree it held firm, would immediately make a science of physical movement possible … in terms of dots and dashes, points and paths … and he went on to describe all evenly accelerating motion in the cool and classic language of the triangle. Had Dante been more daring? I think not.

  Now imagine that Alice (the girl conceived by Carroll—minister, poet, and logician), having eaten what she’s been told to and drunk according to instructions, is swelling as she tip-toes through her tunnel, and imagine in addition that there is a light like those which warn low planes of towers, chimneys, or intrusive steeples, attached to the top of her head. Can’t we see her as an elongating wand whose end is then a point upon a curve? A most monstrous metaphor, yet inspired. Any curve, Descartes decided, could be considered to enclose a set of lines whose ends like trimmed logs lay against it. Only moments later, so it seemed, so swift is thought translated into history, Descartes had devised a language to describe these points and lines, these curves and squares, in numbers. Every place upon a line had its address, and with that went directions: you went along Rue X a while, and then up Y till you were there. As simple as children, but all quite absurd, for motion only alters the overlaps of colors—we know that; there is nothing rectangular about passage; and surely squares and curves are never numbers—abstract, inert, and purely relational; they stretch their legs like cats. Yet in a generation (we speak now like the critics), Galileo, Fermat, and Descartes had first created, then speeded up, mechanics. Beyond the Pythagoreans’ wildest dreams, motion had become number.