The Devil at Large (17 page)

The “June book,” which was to become
Tropic of Capricorn
,
was also beginning to grow its wings and claws. An attempt to make sense of his relationship with June would occupy Henry for much of the rest of his writing life, eventually inspiring four huge novels:
Capricorn
,
Sexus
,
Nexus
, and
Plexus.
And yet the theme of Henry’s abasement before his women was all foretold in “Mademoiselle Claude”:

Where women are concerned I always make an ass of myself. The trouble is I worship them and women don’t want to be worshiped….

Anaïs Nin was the muse to whom Henry dedicated
Black Spring.
It was published in June 1936, by Obelisk, though it had first been under contract to Michael Fraenkel’s tiny Carrefour Press. It is the second published book that cements a writer’s identity. A first book may be a fluke, but with the second, one becomes a writer.
Black Spring
let Henry know that he had found his
métier.

That winter, Henry and Anaïs made another brief trip to New York. Anaïs was ending her connection with Rank’s institute and Henry was resuming his literary assault on his hated native land.
Tropic of Cancer
was garnering fame and readers around the world, making Henry an underground celebrity. But he was still irked to be unavailable in “Amurrica.” He had conquered Paris, but “America winged and sexed” still eluded him. Though the breakthrough of Joyce’s
Ulysses
in 1934 had given him and other writers some vague hope of having the customs ban lifted for books of “recognized value,” it seemed unlikely to benefit
Tropic of Cancer.
As Edward de Grazia shows in his important study of censorship
Girls Lean Back Everywhere
(1992),
Ulysses
did not open the door for other sexually explicit books because it was admitted to the United States on the grounds that it was
not
arousing to the average reader. Not until 1962–63 would the Hicklin rule be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court for
Tropic of Cancer.
Now I fear we are giving it new life in our various proposed legislations against pornography.

But Henry found another way into America for
Tropic of Cancer.
Frances Steloff and David Moss, the owners of the Gotham Book Mart in New York, met Henry in 1936 and became his most important patrons.

It is impossible to overstate the role of avant-garde booksellers in the spread of new works of art during the twenties and thirties. From Shakespeare & Company in Paris, to the Gotham in New York, important contemporary writers of that era came to us through the indispensable offices of open-minded booksellers, often women, who were truly the midwives of literary culture. (Once again women were more easily accepted in this role than in the role of creators in their own right.)

The story continues today with independent bookstores all over the U.S. who have the gumption to stock and hand-sell the unpopular, the new, the politically incorrect, the literary. Bookselling remains a business of passion and conviction, however much the corporate computer and unfair discounting practices that discriminate against the independents try to eliminate all passion from the process. As large media conglomerates expand their stranglehold on what can and cannot be published, new small presses also make their way into the world through the good offices of independent booksellers, who are still fighting to keep literacy alive in a world that seems to want to crush it on all sides.

Henry, like Joyce and Zola, was to be the beneficiary of such feisty booksellers and publishers all his writing life. Without Frances Steloff, Jack Kahane, Maurice Girodias, James Laughlin, and Barney Rosset, Henry Miller would be unknown to us today. I cannot help but wonder where all the future Henry Millers are, and whether we shall ever even know of their existence. It grows harder and harder to break through the indifference of “official” publishing with all its rationalizations for publishing ghostwritten celebrity books to the exclusion of almost everything else.

The years 1936 to 1938 were years of amazing fecundity for Miller. Both his inner and his outer life were unbelievably rich. While writing
Capricorn
, Henry also worked on one of his most delightful books,
The Hamlet Letters
, a correspondence (about almost everything but
Hamlet)
with his friend Michael Fraenkel. The play of Miller’s mind in correspondence, the mischievous ideas about literature, the sprightliness of the writing, make this book (first published in very limited editions in 1939 and 1941 and published in abridged form in paperback in 1988) one of Miller’s most revealing. Henry was made for the epistolary book and digression was his art form. In
The Hamlet Letters
, he ranges over every subject from Shakespeare to anti-Semitism, from Buddha to reincarnation. He reveals the sage at his most contemplative and entertaining. We are immersed in Henry’s mind, which is like no other.

While this flurry of activity was going on,
Tropic of Cancer
began to make new friends for Henry—friends like George Orwell, Lawrence Durrell, and James Laughlin (then a Harvard student, later the founder of New Directions and one of Henry’s publishers to this day). This is one of the most amazing results of publishing a first book: it reaches out into the world for the author and inevitably changes the author’s life.

In time the Villa Seurat became a sort of magnet for creative people. An informal group of painters and writers gathered around Henry. They boosted each other’s work and had wonderful times together. Among them were Betty Ryan, David Edgar, Hans Reichel, Alfred Perlès, Michael Fraenkel, Abe Rattner. The atmosphere was electric and Henry was the current that ran through it.

Henry Miller radiated from No. 18. Radiated is the correct word. There was a quixotic mood of coercion hanging about the place, like an atmosphere. On approaching, the least sensitive visitor must have become aware of an exceptional presence. Even I who had by now known him for nearly six years, even I couldn’t mount the stairs to his first-floor studio without experiencing a queer feeling of exultation and enthusiasm. I seldom entered without pausing outside the door for a minute or two to take in the familiar Miller noises within. Usually it was the clatter of the typewriter I caught. The door to the sanctum was peppered with notices and
avis importants:
“If knock you must, knock after 11 A.M.”—“Am out for the day, possibly for a fortnight.”—“
La maison ne fait pas de crédit
.”—“
Je n’aime pas qu’on m’emmerde quant je travaille.
” And so forth. He pinned these notes to the door because he hated to be pestered while at work. But he never fooled me: I always knew when he was
genuinely
out: I smelled it.

Anaïs Nin still visited Henry a couple of afternoons a week, when her husband came into town to take painting lessons with Hans Reichl. Their projects together were literary as well as sexual at this point. Hugo knew yet did not know or did not
let himself know
that he knew. Anaïs, for her part, did not know about Betty Ryan. She once imperiously ordered Ryan to knock on a pipe that went up from her apartment to Henry’s studio should Hugo appear. What a busy place the Villa Seurat was.

Henry and Anaïs worked together on
The Booster
, a turgid publication of the American Country Club of Paris that was shanghaied by Henry’s Villa Seurat circle and turned into a literary joke. (Imagine a country club publication being taken over by a group of surrealists!) Henry and his writer friends were able to get their hands on a printing press and they turned
The Booster
from puffery for rich expatriates to a genuine avant-garde magazine. They also produced the Siana series of books for Obelisk Press
(Anaïs
spelled backward). Georges Belmont’s literary magazine
Volontés
and
The Phoenix
, an American journal devoted to D.H. Lawrence, also attracted Henry’s abundant energy during his Villa Seurat days.

At what point did Henry give up all hope of marrying Anaïs? Probably not until the war broke out and they both returned to America. But he never ceased to credit Anaïs for his breakthrough as a writer. As late as 1939, he wrote to Huntington Cairns, a lawyer and admirer of Henry’s work, who advised U.S. customs on censorship (and was therefore an important contact for Henry):

I owe nearly everything to one person—Anaïs Nin. I want you to remember, if you survive me, what I have said and written about her Diary. I haven’t the slightest doubt that one hundred years from now this stupendous document will be the greatest single item in the literary history of our time. Anyway, had I not met her, I would never have accomplished the little I did. I could have starved to death here, for all the French care.

In 1937, at the Villa Seurat, Henry made another of the great friendships of his life—with Lawrence Durrell. Durrell often joked that he had found
Tropic of Cancer
in a public toilet on Corfu, where it had been abandoned by a disgusted reader. The truth was that Barclay Hudson, a friend of his, had given it to him during a literary discussion in Greece. It changed Durrell’s life—and Henry’s. Durrell immediately—in August 1935—wrote to Henry: “I love its guts…. It really gets down on paper the blood and bowels of our time.”

Miller immediately replied: “You’re the first Britisher who’s written me an intelligent letter about the book … it’s curious how few people know what to admire in the book.”

At the time Durrell discovered it,
Tropic of Cancer
was beginning its underground life, being admired by many and sold at the Gotham Book Mart, but receiving almost no official literary recognition.

“It is almost unobtainable,” Henry wrote to Durrell, who answered: “I always imagine the book scorching through apathy like a hot knife in butter.”

Miller was dazzled (as I was forty years later) at being understood by a kindred spirit.

As Henry described in one of his letters to me, he had to fight to have his book read. The world never knows it needs a new book. And only the insane tenacity of the author ever gets it to those who need it most.

Durrell responded to Henry in a way that was essential: “the only man-sized piece of work which this century can really boast of,” he wrote of the book. And Henry loved him, as we always love everyone who understands us.

When Durrell first wrote to Miller in 1935, neither was known except to a coterie. The two were destined to influence each other, and to give each other courage.

Here is Perlès’s account of the beginnings of their friendship:

I arrived at the Villa Seurat somewhat out of breath. Lawrence Durrell was there with Henry. He had arrived fresh from Corfu, a handsome young fellow in his middle twenties with golden hair and a boyish face that made him look like a cherub. The two were drinking wine and seemed to be getting along splendidly. Durrell’s wife, Nancy, was preparing food in the kitchenette at the back of the studio; she was tall and slender, like an elegant flamingo.

Both Henry and Larry were in high spirits. They seemed to have recognized each other immediately as “old souls”—people of the same atavism who have everything in common with one another. They had been talking and drinking and making merry all day and by the time I arrived were already bosom friends. A veritable
coup de foudre à la russe
.

The first evening with the Durrells (there were many more to follow) was an unforgettable event. Nancy had prepared a delicious dinner of filet steak (only the English know how to grill a steak so that it is neither underdone nor carbonized but just à point, as the French always say but never do), and we were in fine fettle as we settled down to the feast. We drank a lot of wine, but the wine didn’t make us drunk—we were intoxicated with one another. The conversation flowed like music. No one tried to monopolize the table talk: no tedious monologues, no indigestible intellectual pronunciamenti. Larry was scintillating and radiantly happy. He was the first truly civilized Anglo-Saxon I had come across since Henry Miller himself; he was sufficiently civilized to make his culture and erudition palatable—which is a great deal. Already a poet of distinction despite his youth, he had just completed his second book,
The Black Book
, “a chronicle of the English Death,” he called it, which was to be published a few months later by the Obelisk Press.

The correspondence with Durrell (which began in 1935) and the face-to-face friendship (which began in 1937) were both important because these were the years that Henry finally found the courage to tackle the June-book in its ultimate form—
Tropic of Capricorn.
He had attempted this book in
Crazy Cock
and
Moloch
, and for years he had carried around the notes of his relationship with June, hoping he could effect their transformation into fiction. When the time came, however, he was better off forgetting his notes and letting the book rip.
Cancer
and
Black Spring
had prepared him to tackle his New York life with abandon. At last he was ready. He began by dedicating
Tropic of Capricorn
“To Her,” and exploding with his own Abelard—like
historia calamitatum
, a flashback to his New York life in the twenties from his Paris present in the thirties.

What a difference a decade can make in a writer’s life! With literature left behind, Henry was ready to capture “Her” forever. June had been the “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,” the Ayesha of his life (after Louise), the primal Lilith-Eve, the Sorceress, the torturer, the muse. He had to subsume life into literature in order to capture her and conquer her forever. The process of writing was essential to overcoming the obsession. What Henry says in his “coda” to
Capricorn
is true of every writer who ever lived:

It came over me, as I stood there, that I wasn’t thinking of her any more; I was thinking of this book which I am writing, and the book had become more important to me than her, than all that had happened to us. Will this book be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God? Plunging into the crowd again I wrestled with this question of “truth.” For years I have been trying to tell this story and always the question of truth has weighed upon me like a nightmare. Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our life, and I have always told the truth. But the truth can also be a lie. The truth is not enough. Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible.