The Colossus of Maroussi

BOOKS BY HENRY MILLER AVAILABLE FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

Aller Retour New York

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

The Books in My Life

The Colossus of Maroussi

The Cosmological Eye

A Devil in Paradise

From Your Capricorn Friend

Henry Miller on Writing

The Henry Miller Reader

Into the Heart of Life

Just Wild About Henry

Letters to Emil

The Nightmare Notebook

Sextet

The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

The Time of the Assassins

The Wisdom of the Heart

Copyright © 1941 by Henry Miller

Introduction copyright © Will Self 2010

Afterword copyright © Ian S. MacNiven 2010

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Miller, Henry, 1891-1980.
The colossus of Maroussi / Henry Miller; introduction by Will Self; afterword by Ian S. MacNiven.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1915-0
1. Greece--Description and travel. I. Title.
DF726.M63 2010
914.9504'74—dc22

2009050057

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011

I FIRST WENT TO GREECE IN THE SUMMER OF MY SEVENTEENTH
year. In the 1970s flying was an expensive option, so we took the bus from London to Athens. It cost £40 round-trip, and took four days each way.
In The Colossus of Maroussi,
Henry Miller writes of his first-ever experience of flight: “I felt foolish sitting in the sky with my hands folded…We were probably making a hundred miles an hour, but since we passed nothing but clouds I had the impression of not moving. In short, it was unrelievedly dull and pointless.”

I can’t imagine that Miller would’ve found the four-day grind across England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Yugoslavia (as it was then) any less unrelievedly dull; as I recall it, the national distinctions were meted out in lavatorial styles—from Helvetian spotlessness to Italian maculate to the active middens of the Balkans—until we ground down through Macedonia and reached the Greek peninsula. Miller, who had a pithy line in aphorisms when he wanted to, subsumes air travel to his aggressive primitivism: “Mechanical devices have nothing to do with man’s real nature—they are merely traps which nature has baited for him.”

Not that the writer flew to Greece—his plane trip was from Athens to Crete—but while water was his preferred traveling element, and
Colossus
contains memorable descriptions of his wave-tossed crossing of the Aegean and small boats near foundering in the Adriatic, Miller is no snob—inverted or otherwise—when it comes to getting around. He’ll take the fancy Packard if it’s on offer, and if not make do with bus or train; he has an omnivorous attitude, seeking—like some monstrous bivalve—to suck up
everything.
Besides: “The
wheel
was the great discovery; men have since lost themselves in a maze of petty inventions which are merely accessory to the great pristine fact of revolution itself.”

No, the year in which I first went to Greece was almost midway between Miller’s voyage and the present day; and with the benefit of so much hindsight—and so many plane flights—it seems an appropriate homage to acknowledge that Miller was right, by 1977 we were gorging on the bait: massed phalanxes of European youth sleeping on the rooftops of Athens, cluttering up Syntagma Square, tramping down the Acropolis, then shipping out to fart around the Cyclades on rented motorcycles or to get drunk in open air discotheques. I remember coming back from Paros on a rusty ferry—the sparkling wine light flickering across red vinyl banquettes in the saloon; the Dutch girls in a lesbian phase, wearing denim overalls and sporting pendants in the shape of double-headed battleaxes, who sat on the deck rolling cigarettes. I scampered up and down, wired on amphetamines, and when we reached the Piraeus the crowds thronging the quayside were all reading newspapers blazoned with the face of the King Rat. It was August the 17th and Elvis was dead.

Now, of course, in 2009, the trap has been sprung. Although he was in his late forties in 1939, the Miller of
Colossus
is the companion I would’ve wished for my own fiery baptism in the crucible of Western European culture—sort of. Here, as in the pre-war phantasmagoria, he is a relentless fabulist who advances murderous solipsism to the status of one of the fine arts. But to this he adds other talents, becoming a compulsive expositor and a deranged didact, the alpha and omega of whose teaching is: “The Gods humanized the Greeks.” A decade before the Denver days of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, when gay poet and car thief, fueled by Benzedrine, sat cross-legged opposite one another to indulge in marathon rap sessions, spinning the word web from which the hairy spider of “the beats” would crawl forth, Henry Miller went in search of his own beatitude. Back in those Parisian days as grey as slops slung against stone steps, he had wished for this breakthrough as he wrote in
Tropic of Cancer,
“…all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life.” And so, ground down by typing and poverty and the failure of the world to see his incandescent genius, Miller was drawn towards Greece as a moth might be drawn to a votive statue of a moth god, were it a creature subject to the deceptive bends of self-consciousness.

For that’s Henry Miller: he may present
Colossus
as a portrait of the Athenian
homme de lettres
George Katsimbalis, but his description of magniloquence is surely a self portrait; to read this book is to feel yourself trapped in a confined place—a plane flight, perhaps, or a four-day bus ride—and simultaneously assaulted and enthralled by a brilliant monologist, incapable of
leaving anything out.
Miller is confident you will be as interested in his bowel movements as you are in the state of his clothes, or the emptiness of his wallet; he mixes then matches the sublime and the ridiculous. He is cocksure: no matter that he is ignorant of Greek history, nor that he has never read “a word” of Homer, his opinions have a validity by virtue of the fact that he is a man—a
mensch
one might even say.

Reading
Colossus,
I was insistently reminded of Julian Jaynes’s masterfully wacky
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Jaynes theorized that the Homeric Greeks who composed the earliest verses of the
Iliad
were functioning schizoids, not yet possessed of a unitary mind, so that when their right lobe spake unto their left, they experienced this as the voices of the gods. By the time the
Odyssey
was being declaimed, the first inklings of the thinking “I” were glimmering, and so the corpus callosum fused the brain, while the gods disappeared in a puff of evolutionary psychology. Miller remains rived: his ego cloven in two by Elysian ecstasy and corybantic abandon. Left lobe Miller closely observes the crazy antics of right lobe Miller—then writes it all down, convinced of its divinity.

The declarative essentialism you would expect such a throw-back to produce is everywhere in
Colossus
: “Every single thing that exists, whether made by God or man, whether fortuitous or planned, stands out like a nut in an aureole of light, of time and of space.” Miller is the tourist in a drip-dry hat that thrusts his camera into your hand and demands you take his picture while he poses with quiddity. There’s an odd selflessness about such self-absorption—and we are carried forward by
the great discovery,
that just as history repeats itself—for without, presumably, having read a word of any of them, Miller is a disciple of Spengler and Vico—so the successive revolutions of his frenzied sub-clauses, ranking up until they form sentences fifty, a hundred, two hundred words long—become an incantation, an
om mani padme hum.
“Imagine what it would be like to find two businessmen and a stenographer on Easter Island! Imagine how a typewriter would sound in that Oceanic silence!”

Sad to relate, I have found two businessmen and a stenographer on Easter Island—or, at any rate, their third-millennial equivalents.

Miller, scuttling along the Mediterranean littoral under the scudding cloud of the coming world war, sees the landscape about him lit up by divine light then plunged into the darkness of the American century. For him, there is no phenotype that cannot be stereotyped: “The French…know neither how to give nor to ask for favors…It’s the wall again. A Greek has no walls around him; he gives and takes without stint.” Whereas: “The Englishman in Greece is a farce and an eyesore: he isn’t worth the dirt between a poor Greek’s toes.” And again: ‘For centuries the Greeks have had the cruelest enemy a people could have—the Turks.”

This is no mere braggadocio—Miller has seen the future, and it is Dubya, Dick Cheney and the Neocons. “The present way of life, which is America’s, is doomed as surely as that of Europe. No nation on earth can possibly give birth to a new order of life until a world view is established.” Naturally, the establishment of any such “world view” is, for Miller, as impossible as going back to the future. For students of the writer’s development, you can see here in
Colossus,
with its furious denunciations of the “go-getting” American century (
I can’t stand this idea, which is rooted in the minds of little peoples, that America is the hope of the world
—and even more fierce condemnations of the pernicious and corrupting influence of the USA on returning Greek economic migrants), the shape of Miller’s coming anti-American jeremiad
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,
for an essentialist can never be beaten to the punch; given that he seeks esoteric knowledge that lies outside of space and time, he must already know the given shape of any bruise.

But if
Colossus
is politically prescient, it is culturally as well. In shaping the contours of what has come to be known as multiculturalism (even if this entails riffs of a fruity primitivism such that would make a Henry Moore bronze blush), Miller is
sans pareil.
He loves peoples in so far as they exemplify themselves—loathes them in as much as they betray that essentialism. In Greece, and in particular at her ancient sites, he finds the long golden thread of cultural transmission lying in the dust; so, Minotaur that he is, he doesn’t simply follow it—but yanks hard. Like I said, I could have done with him for a companion when I was first smitten by the aching cerulean of the Attic sky, when I first glugged the wood-smoky retsina and lugged on a Karelia cigarette.

I could’ve done with Miller by my side when my tour bus jolted into Delphi, and the polyglot cultural sheep were herded off to be deracinated. I tried my best, and when the site closed for the night, hid among the jumble of temples, waiting to have the place to myself so I could run races in the gymnasium, drink from the Castalian spring and consult the sibyl. No dice. Forty years of rising disposable income and a concomitant Malthusian population explosion had done their work: scores of guards with flashlights fanned out among the ruins, so I took to the scrubby mountainside and spent the night, shivering and mosquito plagued, stuck on a ledge. The following day my eyes were so swollen I could barely
see
Antinous, let alone conceive of him—as Miller had—as the last of the gods.

“Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt. The gods were of human proportion: they were created out of the human spirit.” Nowadays, alas, while the presence of the gods may still be felt in Greece, I wonder if there’s anyone much who can feel it. That may be, but if you believe in the brand of sympathetic literary magic that Henry Miller purveys, perhaps you will take his existential leap, go there yourself—and feel it anew. That’s what he would have wanted.

True avant-garde—still had torsion. Delphi. The rest is noise.

LONDON
, 2009