O the wonderful recesses in the toilet! To them I owe my knowledge of Boccaccio, of Rabelais, of Petronius, of The Golden Ass. All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. At the worst, Ulysses, or a detective story. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet—if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content. And this is not to denigrate the talent of the author. This is simply to move him a little closer to the good company of Abelard, Petrarch, Rabelais, Villon, Boccaccio—all the fine, lusty genuine spirits who recognized dung for dung and angels for angels. Fine company, and no rari nantes in gurgite vasto. And the more ramshackle the toilet, the more dilapidated it be, the better. (Same for urinals.) To enjoy Rabelais, for example—such a passage as HOW TO REBUILD THE WALLS OF PARIS—I recommend a plain, country toilet, a little out-house in the corn patch, with a crescent sliver of light coming through the door. No buttons to push, no chain to pull, no pink toilet paper. Just a rough-carved seat big enough to frame your behind, and two other holes of dimensions suitable for other behinds. If you can bring a friend along and have him sit beside you, excellent! A good book is always more enjoyable in good company. A beautiful half hour you can while away sitting in the out-house with a friend—a half hour which will remain with you all your life, and the book it contained, and the odor thereof.
No harm, I say, can ever be done a great book by taking it with you to the toilet. Only the little books suffer thereby. Only the little books make ass-wipers. Such a one is Little Caesar, now translated into French and forming one of the Passions series. Turning the pages over it seems to me that I am back home again reading the headlines, listening to the god-damned radios, riding tin buggies, drinking cheap gin, buggering virgin harlots with a corn cob, stringing up niggers and burning them alive. Something to give one diarrhea. And the same goes for the Atlantic Monthly, or any other monthly, for Aldous Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dreiser, etc. etc. . . I hear no bell ringing inside me when I bring these birds to the water closet. I pull the chain and down the sewer they go. Down the Seine and into the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe a year hence they will bob up again—on the shores of Coney Island, or Midland Beach, or Miami, along with dead jellyfish, snails, clams, used condoms, pink toilet paper, yesterday’s news, tomorrow’s suicides . . .
No more peeping through keyholes! No more masturbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible à la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible—it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, murder, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicides, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale; and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age.
A classic purity, then—and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the wall of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheatre, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human bones—whilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!
When I touch the subject of toilets I relive some of my best moments. Standing in the urinal at Boulogne, with the hill of St. Cloud to the right of me and the woman in the window above me, and the sun beating down on the still river water, I see the strange American I am passing on this quiet knowledge to other Americans who will follow me, who will stand in full sunlight in some charming corner of France and ease their full bladders. And I wish them all well and no gravel in the kidneys.
In passing I recommend certain other urinals which I know well, where perhaps there may be no woman to smile down at you, but where there is a broken wall, an old belfry, the façade of a palace, a square covered with colored awnings, a horse trough, a fountain, a covey of doves, a bookstall, a vegetable market . . . Nearly always the French have chosen the right spot for their urinals. Offhand I think of one in Carcassonne which, if I chose the hour well, afforded me an incomparable view of the citadel; so well is it placed that, unless one be burdened and distraught, there must rise up again the same surging pride, the same wonder and awe, the same fierce attachment for this scene as was felt by the weary knight or monk when, pausing at the foot of the hill where now runs the stream that washed away the epidemic, he glanced up to rest his eyes on the grim, battle-stained turrets flung against a wind-swept sky.
And immediately I think of another—just outside the Palais des Papes, in Avignon. A mere stone’s throw away from the charming little square which, on a night in spring, seems strewn with velvets and laces, with masks and confetti; so still flows the time that one can hear little horns blowing faint, the past gliding by like a ghost, and then drowned in the deep hammer-stroked gongs that smash the voiceless music of the night. Just a stone’s throw away from the obscure little quarter where the red lights blaze. There, toward the cool of the evening, you will find the crooked little streets humming with activity, the women, clad in bathing suit or chemise, lounging on the doorsteps, cigarette in mouth, calling to the passers-by. As night falls the walls seem to grow together and from all the little lanes that trickle into the gulch there spills a crowd of curious hungry men who choke the narrow streets, who mill around, dart aimlessly here and there like tailed sperm seeking the ovum, and finally are sucked in by the open maws of the brothels.
Nowadays, as one stands in the urinal beside the Palace, one is hardly aware of this other life. The Palace stands abrupt cold, tomblike, before a bleak open square. Facing it is a ridiculous-looking building called Institute of Music. There they stand, facing each other across an empty lot. Gone the Popes. Gone the music. Gone all the color and speech of a glorious epoch. Were it not for the little quarter behind the Institute who could imagine what once was that life within the Palace walls? When this tomb was alive I believe that there was no separation between the Palace and the twisted lanes below; I believe that the dirty little hovels, with their rubbled roofs, r
an right up to the door of the Palace. I believe that when a Pope stepped out of his gorgeous hive into the glitter of sunlight he communicated instantaneously with the life about him. Some traces of that life the frescoes still retain: the life of outdoors, of hunting, fishing, gaming, of falcons and dogs and women and flashing fish. A large, Catholic life, with intense blues and luminous greens, the life of sin and grace and repentance, a life of high yellows and golden browns, of winestained robes and salmon-colored streams. In that marvelous cubicle in a corner of the Palace, whence one overlooks the unforgettable roofs of Avignon and the broken bridge across the Rhône, in this cubicle where they say the Popes penned their bulls, the frescoes are still so fresh, so natural, so life-breathing, that even this tomb which is the Palace today seems more alive than the world outdoors. One can well imagine a great father of the Church sitting there at his writing table, with a Papal bull before him and a huge tankard at his elbow. And one can also easily imagine a fine, fat wench sitting on his knees, while down below, in the huge kitchen, whole animals are being roasted on the spit, and the lesser dignitaries of the Church, good trenchermen that they were, drinking and carousing to their hearts’ content behind the comfort and security of the great walls. No schisms, no hair-splitting, no schizophrenia. When disease came it swept through hovel and castle, through the rich joints of the fathers and the tough joints of the peasants. When the spirit of God descended upon Avignon, it did not stop at the Musical Institute across the way; it penetrated the walls, the flesh, the hierarchies of rank and caste. It flourished as mightily in the red light district as up above on the hill. The Pope could not lift up his skirts and pass untouched. Inside the walls and outside the walls it was one life: faith, fornication, bloodshed. Primary colors. Primary passions. The frescoes tell the story. How they lived each day and the whole day long speaks louder than the books. What the Popes mumbled in their beards is one thing—what they commanded to be painted on their walls is another. Words are dead.
II
All this hocus-pocus about Russia disturbed me a little. She got so excited about it, Tania, that we finished almost a half dozen bottles of vin ordinaire. Carl was jumping about like a cockroach. He has just enough Jew in him to lose his head over an idea like Russia. Nothing would do but to marry us off—immediately. “Hitch up!” he says, “you have nothing to lose!” And then he pretends to run a little errand so that we can pull off a fast one. And while she wanted it all right, Tania, still that Russia business had gotten so solidly planted in her skull that she pissed the interval away chewing my ear off, which made me somewhat grumpy and ill at ease. Anyway, we had to think about eating and getting to the office, so we piled into a taxi on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, just a stone’s throw away from the cemetery, and off we whizzed. It was just a nice hour to spin through Paris in an open cab, and the wine rolling around in our tanks made it seem even more lovely than usual. Carl was sitting opposite us, on the strapontin, his face as red as a beet. He was happy, the poor bastard, thinking what a glorious new life he would lead on the other side of Europe. And at the same time he felt a bit wistful, too—I could see that. He didn’t really want to leave Paris, any more than I did. Paris hadn’t been good to him, any more than it had to me, or to anybody, for that matter, but when you’ve suffered and endured things here it’s then that Paris takes hold of you, grabs you by the balls, you might say, like some lovesick bitch who’d die rather than let you get out of her hands. That’s how it looked to him, I could see that. Rolling over the Seine he had a big foolish grin on his face and he looked around at the buildings and the statues as though he were seeing them in a dream. To me it was like a dream too: I had my hand in Tania’s bosom and I was squeezing her titties with all my might and I noticed the water under the bridge and the barges and Notre Dame down below, just like the post cards show it, and I was thinking drunkenly to myself that’s how one gets fucked, but I was sly about it too and I knew I wouldn’t ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth. It was a fine afternoon, I was thinking to myself, and soon we’d be pushing a feed down our bellies and what could we order as a special treat, some good heavy wine that would drown out all this Russia business. With a woman like Tania, full of sap and everything, they don’t give a damn what happens to you once they get an idea in their heads. Let them go far enough and they’ll pull the pants off you, right in the taxi. It was grand though, milling through the traffic, our faces all smudged with rouge and the wine gurgling like a sewer inside us, especially when we swung into the Rue Laffitte which is just wide enough to frame the little temple at the end of the street and above it the Sacré-Coeur, a kind of exotic jumble of architecture, a lucid French idea that gouges right through your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly in the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and yet doesn’t jar your nerves.
With Tania back on the scene, a steady job, the drunken talk about Russia, the walks home at night, and Paris in full summer, life seems to lift its head a little higher. That’s why perhaps, a letter such as Boris sent me seems absolutely cockeyed. Most every day I meet Tania around five o’clock, to have a Porto with her, as she calls it. I let her take me to places I’ve never seen before, the swell bars around the Champs Elysées where the sound of jazz and baby voices crooning seems to soak right through the mahogany woodwork. Even when you go to the lavabo these pulpy, sappy strains pursue you, come floating into the cabinet through the ventilators and make life all soft soap and iridescent bubbles. And whether it’s because Sylvester is away and she feels free now, or whatever it is, Tania certainly tries to behave like an angel. “You treated me lousy just before I went away,” she says to me one day. “Why did you want to act that way? I never did anything to hurt you, did I?” We were getting sentimental, what with the soft lights and that creamy, mahogany music seeping through the place. It was getting near time to go to work and we hadn’t eaten yet. The stubs were lying there in front of us—six francs, four-fifty, seven francs, two-fifty—I was counting them up mechanically and wondering too at the same time if I would like it better being a bartender. Often like that, when she was talking to me, gushing about Russia, the future, love, and all that crap, I’d get to thinking about the most irrelevant things, about shining shoes or being a lavatory attendant, particularly I suppose because it was so cozy in these joints that she dragged me to and it never occurred to me that I’d be stone sober and perhaps old and bent . . . no, I imagined always that the future, however modest, would be in just this sort of ambiance, with the same tunes playing through my head and the glasses clinking and behind every shapely ass a trail of perfume a yard wide that would take the stink out of life, even downstairs in the lavabo.
The strange thing is it never spoiled me trotting around to the swell bars with her like that. It was hard to leave her, certainly. I used to lead her around to the porch of a church near the office and standing there in the dark we’d take a last embrace, she whispering to me, “Jesus, what am I going to do now?” She wanted me to quit the job so as I could make love night and day; she didn’t even care about Russia any more, just so long as we were together. But the moment I left her my head cleared. It was another kind of music, not so croony but good just the same, which greeted my ears when I pushed through the swinging door. And another kind of perfume, not just a yard wide, but omnipresent, a sort of sweat and patchouli that seemed to come from the machines. Coming in with a skinful, as I usually did, it was like dropping suddenly to a low altitude. Generally I made a beeline for the toilet—that braced me up rather. It was a little cooler there, or else the sound of water running made it seem so. It was always a cold douche, the toilet. It was real. Before you got inside you had to pass a line of Frenchmen peeling off their clothes. Ugh! but they stank, those devils! And they were well paid for it, too. But there they were, stripped down, some in long underwear, some with beards, most of them pale, skinny rats with lead in their veins. Inside the toilet you could take an inven
tory of their idle thoughts. The walls were crowded with sketches and epithets, all of them jocosely obscene, easy to understand, and on the whole rather jolly and sympathetic. It must have required a ladder to reach certain spots, but I suppose it was worth while doing it even looking at it from just the psychological viewpoint. Sometimes, as I stood there taking a leak, I wondered what an impression it would make on those swell dames whom I observed passing in and out of the beautiful lavatories on the Champs Elysées. I wondered if they would carry their tails so high if they could see what was thought of an ass here. In their world, no doubt, everything was gauze and velvet—or they made you think so with the fine scents they gave out, swishing past you. Some of them hadn’t always been such fine ladies either; some of them swished up and down like that just to advertise their trade. And maybe, when they were left alone with themselves, when they talked out loud in the privacy of their boudoirs, maybe some strange things fell out of their mouths too; because in that world, just as in every world, the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth, sordid as any garbage can, only they are lucky enough to be able to put covers over the can.
As I say, that afternoon life with Tania never had any bad effect upon me. Once in a while I’d get too much of a skinful and I’d have to stick my finger down my throat—because it’s hard to read proof when you’re not all there. It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma than to epitomize Nietzche’s philosophy. You can be brilliant sometimes, when you’re drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proofreading department. Dates, fractions, semi-colons—these are the things that count. And these are the things that are most difficult to track down when your mind is all ablaze. Now and then I made some bad blunders, and if it weren’t that I had learned how to kiss the boss’s ass, I would have been fired, that’s certain. I even got a letter one day from the big mogul upstairs, a guy I never even met, so high up he was, and between a few sarcastic phrases about my more than ordinary intelligence, he hinted pretty plainly that I’d better learn my place and toe the mark or there’d be what’s what to pay. Frankly, that scared the shit out of me. After that I never used a polysyllabic word in conversation; in fact, I hardly ever opened my trap all night. I played the high-grade moron, which is what they wanted of us. Now and then, to sort of flatter the boss, I’d go up to him and ask him politely what such and such a word might mean. He liked that. He was a sort of dictionary and timetable, that guy. No matter how much beer he guzzled during the break—and he made his own private breaks too, seeing as how he was running the show—you could never trip him up on a date or a definition. He was born to the job. My only regret was that I knew too much. It leaked out now and then, despite all the precautions I took. If I happened to come to work with a book under my arm this boss of ours would notice it, and if it were a good book it made him venomous. But I never did anything intentionally to displease him; I liked the job too well to put a noose around my neck. Just the same it’s hard to talk to a man when you have nothing in common with him; you betray yourself, even if you use only monosyllabic words. He knew god-damn well, the boss, that I didn’t take the least bit of interest in his yarns; and yet, explain it how you will, it gave him pleasure to wean me away from my dreams and fill me full of dates and historical events. It was his way of taking revenge, I suppose.
The Henry Miller Reader Page 4
