The Henry Miller Reader

by Lawrence Durrell

  As I cross the bridge at Boulogne, along the road that leads to Meudon, I turn round and roll down the hill into Sèvres. Passing through a deserted street I see a little restaurant in a garden; the sun is beating through the leaves and spangling the tables. I dismount.

  What is better than reading Vergil or memorizing Goethe (alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, etc.)? Why, eating outdoors under an awning for eight francs at Issy-les-Moulineaux. Pourtant je suis à Sèvres. No matter. I have been thinking lately of writing a Journal d’un Fou which I imagine to have found at Issy-les-Moulineaux. And since that fou is largely myself I am not sitting at Sèvres, but at Issy-les-Moulineaux. And what does the fou say when the waitress comes with the big canette of beer? Don’t worry about errors when you’re writing. The biographers will explain all errors. I am thinking of my friend Carl who has spent the last four days getting started on a description of the woman he’s writing about. “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” he says. Very well, says the fou, let me do it for you. Begin! That’s the principal thing. Supposing her nose is not aquiline? Supposing it’s a celestial nose? What difference? When a portrait commences badly it’s because you’re not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you. Take Van Norden—he’s another case. He’s been trying for two months to get started with his novel. Each time I meet him he has a new opening for his book. It never gets beyond the opening. Yesterday he said: “You see what my problem’s like. It isn’t just a question of how to begin: the first line decides the cast of the whole book. Now here’s a start I made the other day: Dante wrote a poem about a place called H——. H-dash, because I don’t want any trouble with the censors.”

  Think of a book opening with H-dash! A little private hell which mustn’t offend the censors! I notice that when Whitman starts a poem he writes:—“I, Walt, in my 37th year and in perfect health! . . . I am afoot with my vision . . . I dote on myself . . . Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding . . . Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs . . . Here or henceforward it is all the same to me . . . I exist as I am, that is enough . . .”

  With Walt it is always Saturday afternoon. If the woman be hard to describe he admits it and stops at the third line. Next Saturday, the weather permitting, he may add a missing tooth, or an ankle. Everything can wait, can bide its time. “I accept Time absolutely.” Whereas my friend Carl, who has the vitality of a bedbug, is pissing in his pants because four days have elapsed and he has only a negative in his hand. “I don’t see any reason,” says he, “why I should ever die—barring an untoward accident.” And then he rubs his hands and closets himself in his room to live out his immortality. He lives on like a bedbug hidden in the wallpaper.

  The hot sun is beating through the awning. I am delirious because I am dying so fast. Every second counts. I do not hear the second that has just ticked off—I am clinging like a madman to this second which has not yet announced itself . . . What is better than reading Vergil? This! This expanding moment which has not defined itself in ticks or beats, this eternal moment which destroys all values, degrees, differences. This gushing upward and outward from a hidden source. No truths to utter, no wisdom that can be imparted. A gush and a babble, a speaking to all men at once, everywhere, and in all languages. Now is the thinnest veil between madness and sanity. Now is everything so simple that it mocks one. From this peak of drunkenness one rolls down into the plateau of good health where one reads Vergil and Dante and Montaigne and all the others who spoke only of the moment, the expanding moment that is heard forever . . . Talking to all men at once. A gush and a babble. This is the moment when I raise the glass to my lips, observing as I do so the fly that has settled on my pinkie; and the fly is as important to this moment as my hand or the glass it holds or the beer that is in the glass or the thoughts that are born of the beer and die with the beer. This is the moment when I know that a sign reading “To Versailles,” or a sign reading “to Suresnes,” any and all signs pointing to this or that place, should be ignored, that one should always go toward the place for which there is no sign. This is the moment when the deserted street on which I have chosen to sit is throbbing with people and all the crowded streets are empty. This is the moment when any restaurant is the right restaurant so long as it was not indicated to you by somebody. This is the best food, though it is the worst I have ever tasted. This is the food which no one but genius will touch—always within reach, easily digested, and leaving an appetite for more. “The roquefort, was it good?” asks the waitress. Divine! The stalest, the wormiest, the lousiest roquefort that was ever fabricated, saturated with the worms of Dante, of Vergil, Homer, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Goethe, all the worms that ever were and have passed on into cheese. To eat this cheese one must have genius. This is the cheese wherein I bury myself, I, Miguel Feodor François Wolfgang Valentine Miller.

  The approach to the bridge is paved with cobblestones. I ride so slowly that each cobble sends a separate and distinct message to my spinal column and on up through the vertebrae to that crazy cage in which the medulla oblongata flashes its semaphores. And as I cross the bridge at Sèvres, looking to the right of me and left, crossing any bridge, whether it be over the Seine, the Marne, the Ourcq, the Aude, the Loire, the Lot, the River Shannon or the Liffey, the East River or the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Colorado, the Amazon, the Orinoco, the Jordan, the Tigris, the Iriwaddy, crossing any and every bridge and I have crossed them all, including the Nile, the Danube, the Volga, the Euphrates, crossing the bridge at Sèvres I yell, like that maniac St. Paul—“O death, where is thy sting?” In back of me Sèvres, before me Boulogne, but this that passes under me, this Seine that started up somewhere in a myriad simultaneous trickles, this still jet rushing on from out a million billion roots, this still mirror bearing the clouds along and stifling the past, rushing on and on and on while between the mirror and the clouds moving transversally I, a complete corporate entity, a universe bringing countless centuries to a conclusion, I and this that passes beneath me and this that floats above me and all that surges through me, I and this, I and that joined up in one continuous movement, this Seine and every Seine that is spanned by a bridge is the miracle of a man crossing it on a bicycle.

  This is better than reading Vergil . . .

  Heading back toward St. Cloud, the wheel rolling very slowly, the speedometer in the crazy gray cage clicking like a newsreel. I am a man whose manometer is intact; I am a man on a machine and the machine is in control; I am riding downhill with the brakes on; I could ride just as contentedly on a treadmill and let the mirror pass over me and history under me, or vice versa. I am riding in full sunlight, a man impervious to all except the phenomena of light. The hill of St. Cloud rises up before me on the left, the trees are bending over me to shadow me, the way is smooth and never ending, the little statue rests in the bell of the temple like a cotyledon. Every Middle Age is good, whether in man or history. It is full sunlight and the roads extend in every direction, and all the roads are downhill. I would not level the road nor remove any of the bumps. Each jolt sends a fresh message to the signal tower. I have marked all the spots in passing: to retrace my thoughts I have only to retrace my journey, refeel these bumps.

  At the St. Cloud bridge I come to a full stop. I am in no hurry—I have the whole day to piss away. I put my bicycle in the rack under the tree and go to the urinal to take a leak. It is all gravy, even the urinal. As I stand there looking up at the house fronts a demure young woman leans out of a window to watch me. How many times have I stood thus in this smiling, gracious world, the sun splashing over me and the birds twittering crazily, and found a woman looking down at me from an open window, her smile crumbling into soft little bits which the birds gather in their beaks and deposit sometimes at the base of a urinal where the water gurgles melodiously and a man comes along
with his fly open and pours the steaming contents of his bladder over the dissolving crumbs. Standing thus, with heart and fly and bladder open, I seem to recall every urinal I ever stepped into—all the most pleasant sensations, all the most luxurious memories, as if my brain were a huge divan smothered with cushions and my life one long snooze on a hot, drowsy afternoon. I do not find it so strange that America placed a urinal in the center of the Paris exhibit at Chicago. I think it belongs there and I think it a tribute which the French should appreciate. True, there was no need to fly the Tricolor above it. Un peu trop fort, ça! And yet, how is a Frenchman to know that one of the first things which strikes the eye of the American visitor, which thrills him, warms him to the very gizzard, is this ubiquitous urinal? How is a Frenchman to know that what impresses the American in looking at a pissotière, or a vespasienne, or whatever you choose to call it, is the fact that he is in the midst of a people who admit to the necessity of peeing now and then and who know also that to piss one has to use a pisser and that if it is not done publicly it will be done privately and that it is no more incongruous to piss in the street than underground where some old derelict can watch you to see that you commit no nuisance.

  I am a man who pisses largely and frequently, which they say is a sign of great mental activity. However it be, I know that I am in distress when I walk the streets of New York. Wondering constantly where the next stop will be and if I can hold out that long. And while in winter, when you are broke and hungry, it is fine to stop off for a few minutes in a warm underground comfort station, when spring comes it is quite a different matter. One likes to piss in sunlight, among human beings who watch and smile down at you. And while the female squatting down to empty her bladder in a china bowl may not be a sight to relish, no man with any feeling can deny that the sight of the male standing behind a tin strip and looking out on the throng with that contented, easy, vacant smile, that long, reminiscent, pleasurable look in his eye, is a good thing. To relieve a full bladder is one of the great human joys.

  There are certain urinals I go out of my way to make—such as the battered rattle-trap outside the deaf and dumb asylum, corner of the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée, or the Pneu Hutchinson one by the Luxembourg Gardens, corner Rue d’Assas and Rue Guynemer. Here, on a balmy night in spring, through what concatenation of events I do not know or care, I rediscovered my old friend Robinson Crusoe. The whole night passed in reminiscence, in pain and terror, joyous pain, joyous terror.

  “The wonders of this man’s life”—so reads the preface to the original edition—“exceed all that is to be found extant; the life of one man being scarce capable of a greater variety.” The island now known as Tobago, at the mouth of the mighty Orinoco, thirty miles N. W. of Trinidad. Where the man Crusoe lived in solitude for eight and twenty years. The footprints in the sand, so beautifully embossed on the cover. The man Friday. The umbrella . . . Why had this simple tale so fascinated the men of the eighteenth century? Voici Larousse:

  “. . . le récit des aventures d’un homme qui, jeté dans une île déserte, trouve les moyens de se suffire et même de se créer un bonheur relatif, que complète l’arrivée d’un autre être humain, d’un sauvage, Vendredi, que Robinson a arraché des mains de ses ennemis . . . L’intérêt du roman n’est pas dans la vérité psychologique, mais dans l’abondance des détails minutieux qui donnent une impression saisissante de réalité.”

  So Robinson Crusoe not only found a way of getting along, but even established for himself a relative happiness! Bravo! One man who was satisfied with a relative happiness. So un-Anglo-Saxon! So pre-Christian! Bringing the story up-to-date, Larousse to the contrary, we have here then the account of an artist who wanted to build himself a world, a story of perhaps the first genuine neurotic, a man who had himself shipwrecked in order to live outside his time in a world of his own which he could share with another human being, même un sauvage. The remarkable thing to note is that, acting out his neurotic impulse, he did find a relative happiness even though alone on a desert island, with nothing more perhaps than an old shotgun and a pair of torn breeches. A clean slate, with twenty-five thousand years of post-Magdalenian “progress” buried in his neurons. An eighteenth-century conception of relative happiness! And when Friday comes along, though Friday, or Vendredi, is only a savage and does not speak the language of Crusoe, the circle is complete. I should like to read the book again—and I will some rainy day. A remarkable book, coming at the culmination of our marvelous Faustian culture. Men like Rousseau, Beethoven, Napoleon, Goethe on the horizon. The whole civilized world staying up nights to read it in ninety-seven different tongues. A picture of reality in the eighteenth century. Henceforward no more desert isles. Henceforward wherever one happens to be born is a desert isle. Every man his own civilized desert, the island of self on which he is shipwrecked: happiness, relative or absolute, is out of the question. Henceforward everyone is running away from himself to find an imaginary desert isle, to live out this dream of Robinson Crusoe. Follow the classic flights, of Melville, Rimbaud, Gauguin, Jack London, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence . . . thousands of them. None of them found happiness. Rimbaud found cancer. Gauguin found syphilis. Lawrence found the white plague. The plague—that’s it! Be it cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, or what not. The plague! The plague of modern progress: colonization, trade, free Bibles, war, disease, artificial limbs, factories, slaves, insanity, neuroses, psychoses, cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, anemia, strikes, lock-outs, starvation, nullity, vacuity, restlessness, striving, despair, ennui, suicide, bankruptcy, arteriosclerosis, megalomania, schizophrenia, hernia, cocaine, prussic acid, stink bombs, tear gas, mad dogs, auto-suggestion, auto-intoxication, psychotherapy, hydrotherapy, electric massages, vacuum cleaners, pemmican, grapenuts, hemorrhoids, gangrene. No desert isles. No Paradise. Not even relative happiness. Men running away from themselves so frantically that they look for salvation under the ice floes or in tropical swamps, or else they climb the Himalayas or asphyxiate themselves in the stratosphere . . .

  What fascinated the men of the eighteenth century was the vision of the end. They had enough. They wanted to retrace their steps, climb back into the womb again.

  THIS IS AN ADDENDUM FOR LAROUSSE:

  What impressed me, in the urinal by the Luxembourg, was how little it mattered what the book contained; it was the moment of reading it that counted, the moment that contained the book, the moment that definitely and for all time placed the book in the living ambiance of a room with its sunbeams, its atmosphere of convalescence, its homely chairs, its rag carpet, its odor of cooking and washing, its mother image bulking large and totem-like, its windows giving out on the street and throwing into the retina the jumbled issues of idle, sprawling figures, of gnarled trees, trolley wires, cats on the roof, tattered nightmares dancing from the clotheslines, saloon doors swinging, parasols unfurled, snow clotting, horses slipping, engines racing, the panes frosted, the trees sprouting. The story of Robinson Crusoe owes its appeal—for me, at least—to the moment in which I discovered it. It lives on in an ever-increasing phantasmagoria, a living part of a life filled with phantasmagoria. For me Robinson Crusoe belongs in the same category as certain parts of Vergil—or, what time is it? For, whenever I think of Vergil, I think automatically—what time is it? Vergil to me is a bald-headed guy with spectacles tilting back on his chair and leaving a grease mark on the blackboard; a bald-headed guy opening wide his mouth in a delirium which he simulated five days a week for four successive years; a big mouth with false teeth producing this strange oracular nonsense: rari nantes in gurgite vasto. Vividly I recall the unholy joy with which he pronounced this phrase. A great phrase, according to this bald-pated, goggle-eyed son of a bitch. We scanned it and we parsed it, we repeated it after him, we swallowed it like Cod Liver Oil, we chewed it like dyspepsia tablets, we opened wide our mouths as he did and we reproduced the miracle day after day five days in the week, year in and year out, like worn-out records, until Vergil wa
s done for and out of our lives for good and all.

  But every time this goggle-eyed bastard opened wide his mouth and the glorious phrase rolled out I heard what was most important for me to hear at that moment—what time is it? Soon time to go to Math. Soon time for recess. Soon time to wash up . . . I am one individual who is going to be honest about Vergil and his fucking rari nantes in gurgite vasto. I say without blushing or stammering, without the least confusion, regret or remorse that recess in the toilet was worth a thousand Vergils, always was and always will be. At recess we came alive. At recess we who were Gentile and had no better sense grew delirious: in and out of the cabinets we ran, slamming the doors and breaking the locks. We seemed to have been taken with delirium tremens. As we pelted each other with food and shouted and cursed and tripped each other up, we muttered now and then—rari nantes in gurgite vasto. The din we created was so great, and the damage so vast, that, whenever we Gentiles went to the toilet the Latin teacher went with us, or if he were eating out that day then the History teacher followed us in. And a wry face they could make, standing in the toilet with delicate, buttered sandwich in hand listening to the pooping and squawking of us brats. The moment they left the toilet to get a breath of fresh air we raised our voices in song, which was not considered reprehensible, but which no doubt was a condition greatly envied by the bespectacled professors who had to use the toilet now and then themselves, learned as they were.