Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion, Book I

by Henry Miller

  I looked across the river to the Jersey shore. It looked desolate to me, more desolate even than the boulder bed of a dried-up river. Nothing of any importance to the human race had ever happened here. Nothing would happen for thousands of years perhaps. The Pygmies were vastly more interesting, vastly more illuminating to study, than the inhabitants of New Jersey. I looked up and down the Hudson River, a river I have always detested, even from the time when I first read of Henry Hudson and his bloody Half Moon. I hated both sides of the river equally. I hated the legends woven about its name. The whole valley was like the empty dream of a beer-logged Dutchman. I never did give a fuck about Powhatan or Manhattan. I loathed Father Knickerbocker. I wished that there were ten thousand black powder plants scattered on both sided of the river and that they might all blow up simultaneously....

  14

  A sudden decision to clear out of Cockroach Hall. Why? Because I had met Rebecca....

  Rebecca was the second wife of my old friend Arthur Raymond. The two were now living in an enormous apartment on Riverside Drive; they wanted to let out rooms. It was Kronski who told me about it; he said he was going to take one of the rooms.

  Why don't you come up and meet his wife—you'll like her. She could be Mona's sister. What's her name? I asked. Rebecca. Rebecca Valentine.

  The name Rebecca excited me. I had always wanted to meet a woman called Rebecca—and not Becky.

  (Rebecca, Ruth, Roxanne, Rosalind, Frederika, Ursula, Sheila, Norma, Guinevere, Leonora, Sabina, Malvina, Solange, Deirdre. What wonderful names women had! Like flowers, stars, constellations.... )

  Mona wasn't so keen about the move, but when we got to Arthur Raymond's place and she heard him practising, she changed her tune.

  It was Renee, the younger sister of Arthur Raymond, who opened the door. She was about nineteen, a spit-fire with heavy curly locks full of vitality. Her voice was like a nightingale's—no matter what she said you felt like agreeing.

  Finally Rebecca presented herself. She was right out of the Old Testament—dark and sunny clean through. Mona warmed to her immediately, as she would to a lost sister. They were both beautiful. Rebecca was more mature, more solid, more integrated. One felt instinctively that she always preferred the truth. I liked her firm hand-clasp, the direct flashing look with which she greeted one. She seemed to have none of the usual female pettinesses.

  Soon Arthur joined us. He was short, muscular, with a hard, steely twang to his voice and frequently convulsed by explosive spasms of laughter. He laughed just as heartily over his own quips as over the other fellow's. He was inordinately healthy, vital, jolly, exuberant. He had always been that way and in the old days, when Maude and I first moved into his neighborhood, I was very fond of him. I used to burst in on him all hours of the day and night and give him three and four hour resumes of the books I had just read. I remember spending whole afternoons talking of Smerdiakov and Pavel Pavlovitch, or General Ivolgin, or those angelic sprites which surrounded the Idiot, or of the Filipovna woman. He was married then to Irma, who later became one of my associates in the Cosmodemonic Telefloccus Company. In those early days, when I first knew Arthur Raymond, tremendous things occurred—in the mind, I should add. Our conversations were like passages out of The Magic Mountain, only more virulent, more exalted, more sustained, more provocative, more inflammable, more dangerous, more menacing—and much more, ever so much more, exhausting.

  I was making a rapid throw-back as I stood watching him talk. His sister Renee was trying to keep up a waning conversation with Kronski's wife. (The latter always went dead on you, no matter how absorbing the theme might be.) I wondered how we would get along, the lot of us, under one roof. Of the two vacant rooms Kronski had already preempted the larger one. The six of us were now huddled together in the other room which was nothing more than a cubby-hole.

  Oh, it'll do, Arthur Raymond was saying. God, you don't need much room—there's the whole house. I want you to come. We're going to have a great time here. God! He exploded with laughter again.

  I knew he was desperate. Too proud, however, to admit that he needed money. Rebecca looked at me expectantly. I read very clearly what was written in her face. Mona spoke up suddenly: Of course we'll take it. Kronski rubbed his hands gleefully. Sure you will! We're going to make a grand stew of it, you'll see. And then he fell to haggling with them about the price. But Arthur Raymond wouldn't talk about money. Make your own terms, he said, wandering off to the big room where the piano stood. I heard him pounding the piano. I tried to listen but Rebecca stood in front of me and kept plying me with questions.

  A few days later we were installed. The first thing we noticed about our new domicile was that everybody was trying to use the bathroom at once. You got to know who the last occupant was by the smell he left behind. The sink was always clogged up with long hairs and Arthur Raymond, who never owned a toothbrush, would use the first one that came to hand. There were too many females about, for another thing. The older sister, Jessica, who was an actress, came frequently and often stayed the night. There was Rebecca's mother, too, who was always in and out of the place, always wreathed in sorrow, always dragging herself along like a corpse. And then there were Kronski's friends and Rebecca's friends and Arthur's friends and Renee's friends, to say nothing of the pupils who came at all hours of the day and night. At first it was charming to hear the piano going: snatches of Bach, Ravel, Debussy, Mozart and so on. Then it became exasperating, especially when Arthur Raymond himself was practising. He went over and over a phrase with the tenacity and persistence of a madman. First with one hand, firmly and slowly; then with the other hand, firmly and slowly. Then two hands, very firmly, very slowly; then more and more rapidly, until he reached the normal tempo. Then twenty times, fifty times, a hundred times. He would advance a little—a few more measures. Ditto. Then back again, like a crab, from the very beginning. Then suddenly he'd scrap it, begin something new, something he liked. He'd play it with all his heart, as if he were giving a concert. But maybe a third of the way through he'd stumble. Silence. He'd go back a few measures, break it down, build it up, slow, fast, one hand, two hands, all together, hands, feet, elbows, knuckles, moving forward like a tank corps, sweeping everything before him, mowing down trees, fences, barns, hedges, walls. It was agonizing to follow him. He was not playing for enjoyment—he was playing to perfect his technique. He was wearing his fingers-tips off, rubbing his ass smooth. Always advancing, progressing, attacking, conquering, annihilating, mopping up, realigning his forces, throwing out sentries and sentinels, covering his rear, digging himself in, charging in prisoners segregating the wounded, reconnoitering, ambushing his men, sending up flares, rockets, exploding ammunition plants, railway centers, inventing new torpedoes, dynamos, flame-throwers, coding and decoding the messages that came in....

  A grand teacher, though. A darling teacher. He moved about the room in his khaki shirt, always open at the neck, like a restive panther. He would stand in a corner listening, with his chin in the palm of his hand and the other hand supporting his elbow. He'd walk to the window and look out, humming softy as he followed the pupil's manful attempts to live up to that perfection which Arthur demanded of all his pupils. If it were a very young pupil he could be as tender as a lamb; he would make the child laugh, would pick her up in his arms and lift her off the stool. You see ... ? and he would very slowly, very gently, very carefully, indicate the way it should be done. He had infinite patience with his young pupils—a beautiful thing to watch. He looked after them as if they were flowers. He tried to reach their souls, tried to soothe them or inflame them, as the case might be. With the older ones it was still more thrilling to observe his technique. With these he was all attention, alert as a porcupine, his legs stanced, swaying, balancing himself, raising and lowering himself on the balls of his feet, the muscles of his face moving rapidly as he followed with glittering eagerness the transition from passage to passage. To these he spoke as if they were masters already. He would su
ggest this or that manipulation, this or that interpretation. Often interrupting the performance for ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, he would launch into brilliant expositions of commanding techniques, comparing one with another, evaluating them, comparing a score with a book, one writer with another writer, a palette with a texture, a tone with a personal idiom, and so on. He made music live. He heard music in everything. The young women, when they had concluded a seance, swooned through the hall, unconscious of everything but the flames of genius. Yes, he was a life-giver, a sun-god: he sent them reeling into the street.

  Arguing with Kronski he was a different person. That mania for perfection, that pedagogic fury which was such a powerful asset to him as a music teacher, reduced him to ridiculous proportions when he launched into the world of ideas. Kronski toyed with him as a cat toys with a mouse. He delighted in tripping his adversary up. He defended nothing, except his own nimble security. Arthur Raymond had something of the Jack Dempsey style, when it came to a heated discussion. He bore in steadily, always with short, swift jabs, like a chopping block fitted with dancing legs. Now and then he made a lunge, a brilliant lunge, only to find that he was grappling with space. Kronski had a trick of vanishing completely just when he seemed to be on the ropes. You would find him a second later hanging from the chandelier. He had no recognizable strategy, unless it was to elude, to jibe and taunt, to infuriate his opponent, and then do the disappearing stunt. Arthur Raymond seemed to be saying all the time: Put up your dukes! Fight! Fight, you bastard! But Kronski had no intention of making a punching bag of himself.

  I never caught Arthur Raymond reading a book. I don't think he read many books, yet he had an amazing knowledge of many things. Whatever he read he remembered with astonishing vividness and accuracy. Aside from my friend Roy Hamilton, he could extract more from a book than any one I knew. He literally eviscerated the text. Roy Hamilton would proceed millimetre by millimetre, so to speak, lingering over a phrase for days or weeks at a time. It sometimes took him a year or two to finish a small book, but when he was through with it he did seem to have added a cubit to his stature. For him a half dozen good books were sufficient to supply him with spiritual fodder for the rest of his life. Thoughts to him were living things, as they were to Louis Lambert. Having read one book thoroughly he gave the very real impression of knowing all books. He thought and lived his way through a book, emerging from the experience a new and glorified being. He was the very opposite of the scholar whose stature diminishes with each book he reads. Books for him were what Yoga is to the earnest seeker after truth: they helped him unite with God.

  Arthur Raymond, on the other hand, gave the illusion of devouring a book's contents. He read with muscular attention. Or so I imagined, observing their effect upon him. He read like a sponge, intent upon absorbing the writer's thoughts. His sole concern was to ingest, to assimilate, to redistribute. He was a vandal. Each new book represented a new conquest. Books fortified his ego. He didn't grow, he became puffed with pride and arrogance. He looked for corroborations in order to sally forth and give battle. He wouldn't permit himself to be made over. He could render tribute to the author he admired but he could never bend the knee. He remained adamant and inflexible; his carapace grew thicker and thicker.

  He was the type who, upon finishing a book, can talk of nothing else for weeks to come. No matter what one touched upon, in conversing with him, he related it to the book he had just devoured. The curious thing about these hangovers was that the more he talked about the book the more one felt his unconscious desire to destroy it. At bottom it always seemed to me that he was really ashamed of having permitted another mind to enthrall him. His talk was not of the book but of how thoroughly and penetratingly he, Arthur Raymond, had understood it. To expect him to give a resume of the book was futile. He gave you just enough information about its subject matter to enable you to follow his analyses and elaborations intelligently. Though he kept saying to you—You must read it, it's marvelous, what he meant was—You can take it from me that it's an important work, else I shouldn't be wasting my time discussing it with you. And what he implied, moreover, was that it was just as well you hadn't read it because you would never by your own efforts be able to unearth the gems which he, Arthur Raymond, had found in it. When I get through telling you about it, he seemed to say, you won't need to read it. I know not only what the author said but what he intended to say and didn't.

  At the time I speak of one of his passions was Sigmund Freud. I don't mean to imply that he knew only Freud. No, he spoke as though he had an acquaintance with the whole swarm, from Krafft-Ebing and Stekel on down. He regarded Freud not only as a thinker but as a poet. Kronski, on the other hand, whose reading was wider and deeper in this field, who had the advantage of clinical experience as well, who was then making a comparative study of psycho-analysis and not merely endeavoring to assimilate one new contribution after the other, irritated Arthur Raymond beyond words by what the latter was pleased to call his corrosive skepticism.

  It was in our cubicle that these discussions, which were not only bitter but interminable, took place. Mona had given up the dance hall and was looking about for work in the theatre. Often we all ate together in the kitchen, attempting towards midnight to disperse and reach our respective quarters. But Arthur Raymond had absolutely no regard for time; when he was interested in a subject he thought nothing of food, sleep or sex. If he went to bed at five in the morning he would get up at eight, if he chose to, or remain in bed for eighteen hours. He left it to Rebecca to rearrange his schedule. Naturally this sort of life created an atmosphere of chaos and postponement. When it got too complicated Arthur Raymond would throw up his hands and walk out on it, sometimes remaining away for days. After these periods of absence strange rumors would come floating back, stories which shed quite a different lustre upon his character. Apparently these excursions were necessary to complete the physical being; the life of a musician couldn't possibly satisfy his robust nature. He had to get away occasionally and mix with his cronies—a most incongruous assortment of characters, incidentally. Some of his escapades were innocent and amusing, others were sordid and ugly. Brought up as a sissy, he had found it imperative to develop the brutal side of his nature. He enjoyed picking a quarrel with some burly, blustering idiot much bigger than himself and cold-bloodedly breaking the man's arm or leg. He had done what so many little fellows always dream of doing—mastered ju-jitsu. He had done it in order to have the pleasure of insulting the menacing giants who make up the world of bullies which the little man dreads. The bigger they were the better Arthur Raymond liked it. He didn't dare to use his fists for fear or injuring his hands, but, rather meanly I thought, he would always pretend to fight and then of course take his adversary by surprise. I don't admire that in you at all, I told him once. If you played me a trick like that I'd break a bottle over your head. He looked at me in astonishment. He knew that I didn't care to fight or to wrestle. I wouldn't mind, I added, if you resorted to those tricks as a last extremity. But you just want to show off. You're a little bully, and a little bully is even more obnoxious than a big one. Some day you'll tackle the wrong man....

  He laughed. I always interpreted things in a queer way, he said.

  That's why I like you, he would say. You're unpredictable. You have no code. Really, Henry—and he would give a hearty guffaw—you're essentially treacherous. If we ever make a new world you'll have no place in it. You don't seem to understand what it means to give and take. You're an intellectual hobo.... At times I don't understand you at all. You're always gay and affable, almost sociable, and yet ... well, you have no loyalties. I try to be friends with you ... we were friends once, you remember ... but you've changed ... you're hard inside ... you're untouchable. God, you think I'm hard ... I'm just cocky, pugnacious, full of spirits. You're the one who's hard. You're a gangster, do you know that? He chuckled. Yes, Henry, that's what you are—you're a spiritual gangster. I don't trust you...

  It nettle
d him to observe the easy rapport which existed between Rebecca and myself. He wasn't jealous, nor had he reason to be, but he was envious of my ability to create such a smooth relationship with his wife. He was always telling me of her intellectual attainments', as though that should be the basis of attraction between us, but in a discussion, if Rebecca were present, he behaved towards her as if her opinions were of negligible importance. Mona he listened to with a gravity that was almost comical. He listened, of course, just long enough to hear her out, saying Yes, yes, to be sure, but actually giving no heed whatever to what she was saying.

  Alone with Rebecca, watching her ironing or cook a meal, I had those sort of talks which one can only have with a woman if she belongs to another man.

  Here there was really that spirit of give and take which Arthur Raymond complained of missing in me. Rebecca was earthy and not at all intellectual. She had a sensual nature and she loved to be treated as a woman and not as a mind. We talked of the most simple, homely things some ‘times, things which the music master found no interest in whatever.