That a writer who died only twenty years ago, who was my contemporary for a time, should so willingly address on the page such large questions about life and the universe, and do it, moreover, with such fullness of intellect, technical knowledge and reflective depth, may help explain Loren Eiseley’s appeal. Thanks in part to his generous sharing of sufferings and chagrin, he has actually brought me around to like nature and science writing.
Henry Miller:
Exhibitionist of the Soul
Steve Erickson
OF COURSE HENRY MILLER remains the forbidden writer of American fiction. Where once he was forbidden for the right reasons, he is now forbidden for the wrong, where once he was forbidden by conservatives and moralists he is now forbidden by liberals and the culturally correct—though what originally made him forbidden hasn’t really changed at all. He is forbidden because he speaks from the dark heart of some place beyond ideology or the refinements of civilization, he is not progressive or regressive but the literary inhabitant of a place in the psyche where human experience recognizes no forward or backward, where the shadows of the soul know no time.
I’m not here to make excuses for him now. I’m certainly not here to make excuses for myself or for the way, as when I heard Ray Charles for the first time, Henry Miller rearranged the furniture in my head, where the sofa of “aesthetics” had been placed just so, against the window, and the reclining chair of “taste” had been moved ever so carefully before the fireplace, and everything was where I and all my teachers and all the other writers I had read assumed they were supposed to be. Miller swept through and left everything in shambles and in the process said, to paraphrase the notorious opening declaration of Tropic of Cancer, here is a gob of spit in the face of excuses. So I won’t make excuses for him; he would hate it and I would hate myself. Clearly much of what he wrote about women is infantile when it isn’t appalling, as further demonstrated, for whomever needs the demonstration, by the evidence of his own biography, ever younger women populating an ever aging life, until all you could do was be embarrassed for him. That he was first and foremost a romantic cannot excuse some of these attitudes, since a romantic can be as destructive to women as the stalker hiding around the corner at midnight; in his own mind, of course, the stalker is a romantic himself. It was Miller’s own emotional limitations that prevented him from transcending the botched and bleeding love affair he had with his second wife, that made him unable to really write about her at all until it was too late, at which point love had ebbed away leaving only wounds. That he could not change the way he loved left him a man who, for periods of his life, apparently could not love at all in any way that could fulfill himself, let alone a woman.
It excuses nothing to point out that all of his gorgeous spleen is part and parcel of an assault on the artifices of human dignity as democratic as it is gleeful. One sometimes wishes of course that he had confined this assaultive gusto to those who could afford it most, such as the powerful and the social elite, and spared those who could afford it least, particularly in the thirties when scapegoating would be raised first to political art, then to governmental institution, ultimately to millennial nightmare. The truth was that Miller’s feelings about Jews, for instance, were nearly as complicated as those about women, anchored as they were by his deepest disgust of all, which was for the Aryan, which is to say himself, since Miller openly hated everything about his German heritage and strove to reinvent himself free of it, perpetuating the self-image of a carefree bohemian living in happy and willful squalor when it has been duly recorded he was the most teutonic of housekeepers, the tidiest of domestic managers, the most compulsive and anal antithesis of the joyful anarchist in Tropic of Cancer who watches the lice leap to and fro on the bed mattress with great amusement and jauntily chucks extra francs and centimes out the taxi window just because they get in the way of his lower finances.
This may be where I come in. I am not German but I am half Scandinavian, which is altogether close enough to being German, sharing that pathological German orderliness and, as Miller did, so detesting it that once, years ago, I begged an old girlfriend to go into my apartment and completely disorganize all my books and records beyond recognition, while I waited outside. Naturally, as soon as she finished I cried out in anguish, “My God, what have I done?” and rushed back into the apartment and frantically put everything back in its place. So for me the heroism of Henry Miller is the way that he—or, to be more precise, his literary incarnation—disrupted the order of my head beyond repair; after I read Tropic of Cancer as an aspiring young novelist of twenty-one there was no putting everything back where it was. Art was not about rules or formalism or structure or “dramatic unity” or what the literature teacher could diagram on the blackboard, it was about passion and imagination and courage, and when it wasn’t about those things in at least some measure, there was no point to it at all and it was just a waste of everyone’s time. And for all the many things that Miller was wrong about in his work, he was right about that; one of his best books, called The Books of My Life, so renews its reader with the exhilaration of reading that by the time the reader has finished, it has become one of the books of his or her life.
Henry Miller. Photograph by George S. Barrows, Jr. Courtesy New Directions Publishing Corporation.
He wrote only one truly great novel, his first published and still his most famous. Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn and The Cosmological Eye fill out the story and almost constitute the Miller bible that Lawrence Durrell encouraged his mentor to write; but Tropic of Cancer remains the great hurled gauntlet of early twentieth-century fiction, a book that more persuasively and passionately than any other says to art and history and all their mavens: I truly do not give a fuck. On one level this is pure nihilism; beneath that is the level of pure outrage; but beneath that there is the brave Moment in which, when everything else seems shallow and fleeting, all of us sooner or later aspire to live, and end up wondering why we cannot. The narrator of Tropic of Cancer is another literary American henry pushed through the glass darkly, the Henry James who lived in America but was haunted by Europe now returned to the heart of Europe only to be haunted by America, and in the process returning with a voice and heart stripped of all continental sensibilities, an American voice stripped of every reassurance but Whitman’s electric song and the Ginsberg howl to come, in rapacious pursuit of one sensual interest above everything else. That interest, of course, is eating. There is a misconception, largely among those who have never read Tropic of Cancer, that the book is about sex. In fact Miller’s interest in sex in Tropic of Cancer is only intermittent, which was the truly shocking thing about the book when it first appeared, that it talks about sex not heatedly but casually, and no differently than it talks about survival in general. What Miller really cares about in Cancer is scoring a good meal. He constantly puts his genius to the matter of getting fed with a determination he only rarely applies to getting laid, devising an elaborate plan that finally commits seven different friends to each inviting him to dinner one night a week.
Though it is the book I have read more often than any other—I suppose a half dozen times, but out of respect to Miller’s anarchy I’ve tried not to keep track—I would certainly not want a whole literature of Tropic of Cancers. A literature of Tropic of Cancers just becomes cranky and self-indulgent in an obvious and cheap way; it is one of the very greatest American novels, but only in the context of an American literature that also includes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Light in August and Invisible Man and Appointment in Samarra and The Member of the Wedding and The Long Goodbye and Moby Dick and Native Son and The Sheltering Sky and Tender Is the Night and A Lost Lady and Red Harvest and Cane and The Deer Park and The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Violent Bear It Away and Go Tell it on the Mountain and The Killer Inside Me and The Names and Blood Meridian and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and Ozma of Oz. You can’t always live among overturned furniture. Whether
the reclining chair is before the fireplace or not, sooner or later you want to sit on it. But though you might not approve of it, though you might reproach the book, remove Tropic of Cancer from the above canon and, if you’re honest, you will acknowledge that everything about fiction in the twentieth century changes, and it changes for the worse. Everything about twentieth-century fiction becomes less vital, less alive and of course less free; it is startling to note how recently and publicly Miller has been dismissed by writers whose very right to sensational provocation was won in the battles Miller fought for them. That’s all right, though, because Miller’s true importance is not as a pioneer of free expression but as an exhibitionist of the soul, and lies in the triumph of one man over chaos that is achieved in an ironic collusion with chaos. The great passion of Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer is nothing less than life-sized, or maybe even cosmos-sized, the relentless raging juxtaposition of the gutter with the heavens, of the beastly with the transcendent, never judging one above the other, loving not the harmony of it all but the disharmony, delirious at the prospect of the great pending Crack-Up of mankind. This is a writer beyond the reach of your reproach, because he has so completely obliterated the value of that reproach; his is the long love-riddled guffaw of failure that is too mad to be fearful and too sane to survive unscarred.
Ambrose Bierce. The Granger Collection, New York.
Bierce
Mac Wellman
TALES TOO TERRIFYING, TOO real to be told in polite circles; epigrams too dark for easy appreciation. A body of work too real for realism. Ambrose Bierce may be the most unjustly (and unwisely) neglected of great American writers.
Multiple viewpoints, withheld information, inquests that establish nothing and reports from beyond the grave all support a linguistic architecture as complex, as impressive as any in our literature. And yet, and yet.
Birth: the first and direst of all disasters; a definition of the sort that damns Bierce as a cynic, a limited writer. Contrariwise, Samuel Beckett’s very similar observation certifies him a genius.
But Bierce is so much more than the jaundiced hack-author of a dozen or so memorably scary stories. The implicit moral profusion of his work seems to involve every atom of it, perceptible or not. Indeed, strange absences are almost common in his work; positive, aggressive absences that tear the unlucky, or unwary, out of the fabric not only of life, but of being itself. “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” for instance, or in his definition of the word “kill”: to create a vacancy without nominating a successor. In a wholly other context, the ancient Greeks named this anangke, and it is one of the primal motors of tragedy, a kind of positive, and therefore paradoxical, negation.
I see him as a drastic moralist; like Nathanael West, Ezra Pound and Katherine Anne Porter. Absolutists all, absolutists of moral intuition. Bierce’s craft is impeccable, uncompromised and of a classical elegance that is as uncanny as his vision itself.
The drastic moralist functions as the scourge of sentimentalism; and in our American context, this sentimentalism may be defined as a nostalgia for what never existed (another bizarre absence). This force is as strong, perhaps, as anything in the culture, and Bierce certainly knew what his odds were in the struggle against it. On a more mundane level, he fought as a convicted abolitionist in the Civil War most of the better class of yankee writers avoided; and, later, against the San Francisco real estate and railroad tycoons in a truly epic war of words. Yet, who today can be bothered to consider the importance of such unfashionable struggles?
Sentimental America still hates Bierce, as well it should. He and his writing stands for everything we have not become.
Frederick Prokosch
Lawrence Osborne
THE FATE OF FREDERICK PROKOSCH’S REPUTATION is a hard lesson in the laws of vagary. In 1935, the twenty-nine-year-old won international acclaim with one of the century’s most eccentric and iridescent novels, The Asiatics, a work hailed as a masterpiece by the likes of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus and André Gide. To this day, The Asiatics is among the most read American novels in France, where Prokosch has always been adored, and French translations of his books were omnipresent in the Latin America of the fifties and sixties, demonstrations of lyrical hyperreality which the magical realists took to heart.
Yet Prokosch’s fame in the land of his birth is all but extinct. Although Warner Brothers made his wartime novel The Conspirators into a 1944 Hedy Lamarr movie complete with a super-spy hero named The Flying Dutchman, Prokosch’s aristocratically aloof and resolutely internationalist fiction failed to mesh with the growing parochialism and bloated realism of postwar American culture. In a literary mall now gone mad with gut-wrenching confessions, family incest and TV overspill, he is more exotic than ever.
In fact, America has little time for its own exiles now, and even less for landscapes which are not its own, unless they can be decked out with winsome “third world” political credentials determined by a connection with ethnicities or ideologies largely present in its own interior. The psychological voyage out into the exterior world of an “undeveloped” existence must now drip with sanctimonious excuses and pseudo-political reportage. The lonely, austere odyssey of a Paul or Jane Bowles or a Frederick Prokosch—Americans trying deliberately to expand or sabotage their inherited cultural wiring in places which have no relevance whatsoever either to American guilt or to geopolitical self-interest—is now only vaguely irritating and confusing. Recently, it took the efforts of an indignant Spanish schoolgirl to have Jane Bowles’s remains disinterred from under a planned parking lot in Malaga. Perhaps the greatest American woman writer of the twentieth century doesn’t even have a grave largely because she had the whimsical impertinence to die abroad. It would be like Colette being buried under a Grand Union in Poughkeepsie and no one in the French-speaking world caring less.
Of course, the cruel roulette of Fame has its necessarily unfortunate turns. Not every deserver gets a winning number. Is Prokosch silenced because he turned his back on the gigantic hugger-mugger of American suburbia which has given other postwar writers their chloroformed but instantly recognizable field of dreams? One cannot say. Perhaps the gentle and the aloof simply get pushed aside, unprotesting, and resign themselves to their grim transparence in a cultural landscape dominated mainly by airports.
In a long and affectionate essay on Prokosch for the New York Times Book Review fifteen years ago, Gore Vidal, considering the propensity for Amnesia (America) to forget yesterday’s dinner, describes a hilarious evening long ago in the sixties when the already forgotten Prokosch visited Vidal in the Hudson Valley. The two attend a party of “hacks and hoods” from the local grove of Academe, who snub Prokosch mercilessly. “They knew he had once been famous in Amnesia but they had forgotten why.” Prokosch listens politely to the absurd literary chit-chat, in the course of which a tenured radical declares the classics of Western civilization to be irrelevant and oppressive. Prokosch then quietly begins to recite in Latin a passage from Virgil. The room grows “very cold and still.” “It’s Dante,” one of the professors murmurs to his wife. “Those words,” Prokosch says when he has finished, “are carved in marble in the gardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome. I used to look at them every day and think, that is what poetry is, something that can be carved in marble, something that can still be beautiful to read after so many centuries.” Stunned silence.
So Prokosch has entered the sinister twilight zone of nonfame, or postfame, a state so terrifying and colder-than-death to Americans that they cancel out all trace of such catastrophic possibilities, whatever the glory of the allotted fifteen minutes. Yet with canons tumbling and rising again, and general insurgence setting off corks in all directions, it is now a good time to become eccentric and maraudingly revisionist readers. Prokosch speaks to us with his lightning-flash peacock-dandy prose, his gorgeously lithographic travel writing, his luminous and brush-quick descriptions, his thirties aerodynamism and lyrical sleekness. He wanders homeless through imag
inary landscapes shaped like continents that seem to be geographically real until we realize that Prokosch never travelled in any of them. Prokosch wrote most obsessively about Asia, not in the old spirit of ex oriente lux, but as a way of enacting a purely internal voyage which had to have some outward form. In fact, his books always wander through worlds that are thoroughly hybrid and unreal, populated with characters as extravagantly miscegenated as those of Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland.
Frederick Piokosch. Provence, France, 1986. Photograph by Nancy Crampton.
I first came across The Asiatics in a bookstore in Marrakesh many years ago when I was a student spending a summer at Ouazazarte in the Sahara. It was the ideal book for a solitary odyssey into the desert at the far side of the Atlas and I remember reading it in the bouncing back of a bus hauling its way over the gloomily Gothic peaks of Tizin-Tichka, the highest mountain in Africa. At once I found myself with the very opening images of the book: a night watchman singing to himself in a street in Beirut, an air filled with mosquitoes, shabby Ford cars, silent prostitutes standing on the far side of the street and an old man in whom “loneliness had sharpened [the] instincts.” The swift cinema scenes unconnected by logical narrative swept me along roads almost exactly like the ones passing below my own window. The road to Damascus with its beautiful Syrian boys, its tin-roofed slums and villages slumped among giant cactus, caves filled with outcast families and then the sad apricot trees of Damascus and deserts rustling with locusts, “a pathetic sort of antiquity … cheap with age.”
Tributes Page 32
