by Henry Miller
“You trust me, don’t you, Val?”
I nod a silent assent. (It’s not an “ecumenical” question.)
When the tune switches, when I learn from her own lips that it was not Anastasia she spent the night with but her own mother—mothers too get ill—I know what any idiot would have known long before, viz., that there’s something rotten in Denmark.
What harm, I ask myself, would there be in talking to her mother—over the telephone? None whatever. The truth is always enlightening.
So, impersonating the lumber king, I pick up the receiver and, amazed that it is a mother speaking to me, I inquire in the most casual tone of voice if Mona is there, if so, I would like to talk to her.
She is not there. Very definitely not.
“Have you seen her lately?” (Still the noncommittal gentleman inquiring after a lady fair.)
Not a sign of her in months. The poor woman sounds distressed. She forgets herself to the extent of asking me, a perfect stranger, if her daughter could possibly be dead. She virtually implores me to inform her should I by chance get wind of her daughter’s whereabouts.
“But why don’t you write to her husband?”
“Her husband?”
There follows a prolonged silence in which nothing registers except the ocean’s deep hum. Then, in a weak, toneless voice, as if addressing blank space, comes this: “So she really did get married?”
“Why certainly she’s married. I know her husband well.…”
“Excuse me,” comes the far-off voice, followed by the click of the receiver being hung up.
I allow several nights to pass before broaching the subject to the guilty one. I wait until we are in bed, the lights out. Then I nudge her gently.
“What is it? What are you poking me for?”
“I was talking to your mother yesterday.”
No answer.
“Yes, and we had quite a long conversation.…”
Still no answer.
“The funny thing is, she says she hasn’t seen you for ages. She thinks maybe you’re dead.”
How much longer can she hold out? I wonder. Just as I am about to let out another mouthful I feel her spring to a sitting position. Then comes one of those drawn-out, uncontrollable fits, of laughter, the sort that makes me shudder inwardly. Between spasms she blurts out: “My mother! Ho ho! You were talking to my mother! Hah, hah, hah! It’s too good, just too good for words. Hee, hee, hee! Val, you poor sap, my mother is dead. I have no mother. Ho ho ho!”
“Calm yourself!” I beg her.
But she can’t stop laughing. It’s the funniest, the craziest thing she’s ever heard.
“Listen, didn’t you tell me you stayed with her the other night, that she was very ill? Was it your mother or wasn’t it?”
Peals of laughter.
“Maybe it was your stepmother then?”
“You mean my aunt.”
“Your aunt then, if that’s who your mother is.” More laughter.
“It couldn’t have been my aunt because she knows I’m married to you. It was probably a neighbor. Or my sister maybe. It would be like her to talk that way.”
“But why would they want to deceive me?”
“Because you were a stranger. If you had said you were my husband, instead of impersonating someone else, they might have told you the truth.”
“It didn’t sound to me as if your aunt—or your sister, as you say—were putting it on. It sounded thoroughly genuine.”
“You don’t know them.”
“Damn it all, then maybe it’s time I got acquainted with them.”
Suddenly she looked serious, very serious.
“Yes,” I continued, “I’ve a good notion to run over there one evening and introduce myself.”
She was angry now. “If you ever do a thing like that, Val, I’ll never speak to you again. I’ll run away, that’s what I’ll do.”
“You mean that you don’t ever want me to meet your folks?”
“Exactly. Never!”
“But that’s childish and unreasonable. Even if you did tell me a few lies about your family.…”
“I’ve never admitted anything of the kind,” she broke in.
“Come, come, don’t talk like that. You know damned well that that’s the only reason why you don’t want me to meet them.” I allowed a significant pause to intervene, then said: “Or maybe you fear that I will find your real mother.…”
She was angrier than ever now but the word mother got her to laughing again.
“You won’t believe me, will you? Very well, one day I’ll take you there myself. I promise you.”
“That wouldn’t do any good. I know you too damned well. The stage would be all set for me. No sir, if there’s any going I go alone.”
“Val, I warn you … if you dare do that…”
I interrupted her. “If I ever do it you won’t know about it.”
“So much the worse,” she answered. “You could never do that without my hearing about it sooner or later.”
She was pacing up and down now, puffing nervously at the cigarette which dangled from her lips. She was growing frantic, it seemed to me.
“Look here,” I said finally, “forget about it. I’ll.…”
“Val, promise me you won’t do it. Promise me!”
I was silent a few moments.
She got down on her knees beside me, looked up at me imploringly.
“All right,” I said, as if reluctantly, “I promise.”
I hadn’t the slightest intention, of course, of keeping my word. In fact, I was more than ever determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. However, there was no need to hurry. I had the feeling that when the right moment came I would find myself face to face with her mother—and it would be her real mother.
17
“And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty, and if I were asked to find a formula for my relation to the latter I should say that I had made of his “outlook” (Ausblick) an “overlook” (Uberblick). But Goethe was, without knowing it, a disciple of Leibnitz in his whole mode of thought. And, therefore, that which has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a German philosophy.” (Blankenburg am Harz, December 1922.)
These lines from the preface to The Decline of the West are to haunt me for many a year. It happens that I have taken to reading the book during the lonely vigils which have begun. Every evening after dinner I return to the room, make myself snug and cozy, then settle down to gnaw at this immense tome in which the panorama of human destiny is unrolled. I am fully aware that the study of this great work represents another momentous event in my life. For me it is not a philosophy of history nor a “morphological” creation, but a world-poem. Slowly, attentively, savoring each morsel as I chew it, I burrow deeper and deeper. I drown myself in it. Often I break the siege by pacing to and fro, to and fro. Sometimes I find myself sitting on the bed, staring at the wall. I look right through the wall: I look deep into a past which is alive and fathomless. Occasionally a line or phrase comes with such impact that I am forced out of the nest, flung headlong into the street, where I wander like a somnambulist. Now and then I find myself in Joe’s restaurant at Borough Hall, ordering a big meal; with each mouthful I seem to be swallowing another mighty epoch of the past. Unconsciously I stoke the furnace in order to gird myself for another wrestling bout with the omnivorous one. That I am of the borough of Brooklyn, one of the natives, seems preposterous. How can a mere Brooklyn boy ingest all this? Where is his passport to the distant realms of science, philosophy, history, et cetera? All that this Brooklyn boy knows has been acquired through osmosis. I am the lad who hated to study. I am the charming fellow who consistently rejected all systems of thought. Like a cork tossed about on an angry sea I follow in the wake of this morp
hological monster. It mystifies me that I should be able to follow him even distantly. Am I following or am I being sucked under by a vortex? What is it that enables me to read with understanding and delight? Whence the training, the discipline, the percipience which this monster demands? His thought is music to my ears; I recognize all the hidden melodies. Though I am reading him in English, it is as if I were reading the language he wrote in. His vehicle is the German language, which I thought I had forgotten. But I see I have forgotten nothing, not even the curricula I once planned to follow but never did.
From Nietzsche the questioning faculty! That little phrase sets me dancing.…
Nothing is so inspiring to one who is trying to write as to come upon a thinker, a thinker who is also a poet, a thinker who looks for the soul which animates things. I see myself again as a mere youth, asking the librarian, or the minister sometimes, to lend me certain profound works—“deep” I called them then. I see the astonished look on their faces when I mention the titles of these formidable books. And then the inevitable—“But why do you want those books?” to which I always rejoined: “And why shouldn’t I want those books?” That I was too young, that I hadn’t read enough to cope with such works, meant nothing to me. It was my privilege to read what I wanted when I wanted. Was I not a born American, a free citizen? What did age matter? Later, however, I had to secretly admit that I did not understand what these “deep” works were about. Or rather, I understood that I did not want the “abscesses” which accompanied the knowledge they secreted. How I yearned to grapple with the mysteries! I wanted all that had soul in it and meaning. But I also demanded that the author’s style match the mystery he was illuminating. How many books possess this quality? I met my Waterloo at the very threshold of life. I retained my ignorance, dreaming that it was bliss.
The questioning faculty! That I never abandoned. As is known, the habit of questioning everything leads one to become either a sage or a skeptic. It also leads to madness. Its real virtue, however, consists in this, that it makes one think for himself, makes one return to the source.
Was it so strange that in reading Spengler I began to appreciate all over again what truly wonderful thinkers we were as boys? Considering our age and our limited experience of life, we nevertheless managed to propound to one another the most profound and vital questions. We tackled them manfully, too, with our whole being. Years of schooling destroyed the art. Like chimpanzees, we learned to ask only the right questions—the ones the teachers could answer. It is on this sort of chicanery that the whole social structure is reared. “The university of life!” Only the desperate ones choose this curriculum. Even the artist is apt to go astray, because he too is obliged, sooner or later, to observe on which side his bread is buttered.
The Decline of the West! I can never forget the thrill which ran up my spine when I first heard this title. It was like Ivan Karamazov saying—“I want to go to Europe. Maybe I know that I shall go only to a cemetery, but it will be to the dearest of cemeteries.”
For many a year I had been aware that I was participating in a general decline. We all knew it, all felt it, only some succeeded in forgetting about it more quickly than others. What we hadn’t understood so clearly, most of us, was that we were part of this very “West,” that the West included not only Europe but North America. To us America had always been a chancy place—one day hot, one day cold, one day barren, one day fertile. In short, according to how you struck it, it was either all myrrh and frankincense or plain undiluted horse manure. It was not our way to think in terms of historical destiny. Our history had begun only a few years back—and what there was of it was dull and boring. When I say “we” I mean we boys, we youths, we young men who were trying to sprout long pants under our skirts. Mamma’s boys, all of us, and if we had a destiny it was to become crackerjack salesmen, cigar store clerks or chain store managers. The wild ones joined the Army or Navy. The incorrigible ones got themselves safely stowed away in Dannemora or Sing Sing. No one pictures himself as a plodding engineer, plumber, mason, carpenter, farmer, lumberman. One could be a trolley car conductor one day and an insurance agent the next day. And tomorrow or the day after one might wake up and find himself an alderman. Order, discipline, purpose, goal, destiny? Unknown terms. America was a free country, and nothing one did could ruin it—ever. That was our world outlook. As for an “Uberblick,” that led to the bughouse. “What are you reading, Henry?” If I showed the book to my questioner he was sure to say: “You’ll go nuts reading that sort of junk.” This “junk,” incidentally, was usually the world’s choice literature. No matter. To “them” or “us” such books were of prehistoric vintage. No, no one was thinking consciously and deliberately in terms of a world decline. The decline was nonetheless real, and it was hollowing us out. It revealed itself in unsuspected ways. For example, nothing was worth getting excited about. Nothing. Or, one job was as good as another, one man the equal of another. And so on. All baloney, naturally.
Nietzsche, my first great love, hadn’t seemed very German to me. He didn’t even seem Polish. He was like a fresh-minted coin. But Spengler immediately impressed me as being German to the core. The more abstruse and recondite his language, the easier I followed him. A prenatal language, his. A lullaby. What is erroneously called his “pessimism” struck me as nothing more than cold Teutonic realism. The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death. Let us be honest. In the whole metaphysic of Europe has there ever been any truth but this sad German truth which, of course, is a lie? Suddenly, thanks to this historical maestro, we glean that the truth of death need not be sad, particularly when, as happens, the whole “civilized” world is already part of it. Suddenly we are asked to look into the depths of the tomb with the same zeal and joy with which we first greeted life.
“Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.”
Try as I might, I could never finish a chapter without succumbing to the temptation to glance at the succeeding chapters. The headings of these chapters obsessed me. They were enchanting. They belonged to a grimoire rather than to a philosophy of history. The Magian World: Act and Portrait: On the Form of the Soul: Physiognomic and Systematic: Historic Pseudomorphoses.… And the last chapter of all, what else could it be but MONEY? Had anyone ever written of Money in this fascinating language? The modern mystery: MONEY.
From “The Meaning of Numbers” to “Money”—a thousand large, dense pages, all written out in three years. A bomb that failed to go off because another bomb (World War One) had blown the fuse.
And what footnotes! To be sure, the Germans love footnotes. Was it not about the same time that Otto Rank, one of the twelve disciples of Freud, was busy appending his fascinating footnotes to his studies of the Incest Motif, Don Juan, Art and Artist?
Anyway, from the footnotes to the index in the back of the book—like a journey from Mecca to Lhasa, on foot. Or from Delphi to Timbuctoo, and back again. Who but Spengler, moreover, would have grouped such figures as Pythagoras, Mohammed and Cromwell? Who other than this man would have looked for homologies in Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism? Who had dared to speak of the glorious Renaissance as a “contretemps”?
Walking the streets, my head spinning with all the dazzling references, I get to thinking of similar periods, periods in the distant past, it now seems, when I was completely absorbed in books. One period especially comes back to me vividly. It is the period when I first got to know Maxie Schnadig. There he is, dressing the show window of a haberdashery store not far from Kosciusko Street, where he lived. Hello Dostoevski! Hoorah! Back and forth through the winter snows—with Dostoevski, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Andreyev, Chekhov, Artzibashev … And Oblomov! A new calendar of time for me. New friends, new perspectives, new sorrows. One of these new friends proves to be none other than Maxie’s cousin. He is a man much older than us, a physician from Novgorod. That is to say a Russian Jew, but a Russian just the same. And because h
e is bored with family life he suggests to us that we form a little study group, the three of us, to while the evenings away. And what do we choose to study? The sociology of Lester F. Ward. But Lester F. Ward is only a springboard for the good doctor. He literally bounces into those subjects which represent the missing links in our lamentable scheme of knowledge—magic, symbols, herbology, crystalline forms, the prophets of the Old Testament, Karl Marx, the technique of revolution, and so on. A samovar always on the boil, tasty sandwiches, smoked herring, caviar, fine teas. A skeleton dangling from the chandelier. He is happy that we are acquainted with the Russian dramatists and novelists, delighted that we have read Kropotkin and Bakunin, but—do we know the real Slavic philosophers and thinkers? He reels off a string of names which are utterly unknown to us. We are given to understand that in all Europe there never were such daring thinkers as the Russians. According to him, they were all visionaries and Utopists. Men who questioned everything. Revolutionaries all of them, even the reactionary ones. Some had been fathers of the Church, some peasants, some criminals, some veritable saints. But they had all endeavored to formulate a new world, usher in a new way of life. “And if you consult the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” I recall him saying, “you will discover nothing about them. They are not even mentioned.” What these Russians were striving for, he emphasized, was not the creation of a rich cultural life but “the perfect life.” He would discourse at length about the great wealth of the Russian language, how superior it was even to the language of the Elizabethans. He would read Pushkin aloud to us in his own tongue, then throw the book down with a sigh and exclaim: “What’s the use? We’re in America now. A kindergarten.” He was bored, supremely bored with the American scene. His patients were nearly all Jewish, but American Jews, and he had little in common with them. To him America meant apathy. He missed the talk of revolution. To be truthful, I think he also missed the horrors of the pogrom. He felt that he was rotting away in the hollow tomb of democracy. “Sometime you must ask me about Fedorov,” he remarked once. But we never got that far. We got bogged down in Lester F. Ward’s sociology. It was too much for Maxie Schnadig. Poor Maxie was already poisoned by the American virus. He wanted to go ice skating, wanted to play handball, tennis, golf. And so, after a few months the study group dissolved. Never once since have I heard mention of Lester F. Ward. Nor have I ever again seen a copy of this great work. As compensation, perhaps, I took to reading Herbert Spencer. More sociology! Then one day I fell upon his Autobiography, and I devoured it. There was indeed a mind. A lame one, but it served its purpose. A mind dwelling alone on an arid plateau. Not a hint of Russia, of revolution, of the Marquis de Sade, of love. Not a hint of anything but problems. “The brain rules, because the soul abdicates.”
