The Devil at Large (21 page)

The city boy from Brooklyn and Paris was beguiled by the grandeur of the Pacific Coast. It was to be his last earthly stop.

In the last reaches of being there is but one true marriage; each person wedded to himself.

— HENRY MILLER IN A NOTE TO BILL PICKERILL, SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH

I
STAYED IN HENRY
Miller’s Big Sur studio one night in 1974. Henry was already living in Pacific Palisades, and I was his daughter Valentine’s guest in the old homestead on Partington Ridge.

It was one of the most glorious, cold, foggy and uncomfortable places I’ve ever stayed. Henry’s “studio” was a shack with practically no insulation, and my then-lover and I clung to each other to keep warm. We were too cold to get up to go to the bathroom, too cold to sleep, except fitfully. The wind whistled through the slats of the cabin. The damp settled in our bones. And I had the most amazing dreams—undersea dreams, sailing dreams, flying dreams. Henry’s paradise was about as comfortable as the Andes, but spiritually it was magical. You felt that if Big Sur did not exist, Henry would have invented it—as he invented Brooklyn, Paris, and Greece.

Writers and places constitute a strange synergy. Do we absorb the energy from the place, or do we find the place when our own energy is right?

Big Sur seems to have taught Henry many spiritual lessons. Both the arduousness of the life there (and the beauty) and the strange way he came to find his home were lessons he needed. He wanted a home, but could not afford one, and then he discovered what we all discover on spiritual journeys:

When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance…. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing….

The home in Big Sur came to Henry in an almost magical way. He described the process to Anaïs Nin:

I told you I am getting a piece of property—a home. It came about strangely. It
is
almost impossible to get land or house here. There was a neighbor on the hill where I lived, a Mrs. Wharton, who seems to understand me—without reading the books. She is supposed to be a Christian Scientist—but she’s outgrown that. She’s the only person I know who uses the word Reality as I do. That’s our meeting ground … [S]he is virtually offering me her place…. [T]he price is ridiculous…. Sometimes I think, in offering me my dream, she is only teaching me another lesson. She says, for instance, in explaining her willingness to relinquish it, that it is now inside her, can’t be lost…. Have I not become more and more aware latterly that the things I deeply desire come without struggle?

After the house came watercolors, came devoted friends like Emil White, the Austrian book dealer—“boon companions” the like of whom he had not known since his Paris days. All he needed was another June. Henry’s romances in the second part of his life always seemed to be attempts to conjure the past, just as his early romances had been attempts to conquer his mother.

He hadn’t been happy with the first June, and he wasn’t destined to be happy with the second. She turned up like a sort of mail-order bride, provided by a friend in New York who had known the first June.

Henry’s romance-by-letter with June II (June Lancaster) seems inexplicable to anyone but another writer, who knows that the disease of our kind is to invent our lovers out of whole cloth, so that they may become characters in our books. Henry did this often and expertly. He decided to fall in love and then conveniently invented the person to fall in love with.

True, he needed certain reference points: the name
June
was one. June Lancaster had been a taxi dancer and an artists’ model. She had what Henry called a “metamorphic” personality—meaning that he thought he could shape her according to his needs—and she was young enough to be his daughter. This was a May-December relationship, one of a series that was to form a repeating pattern throughout the latter part of Henry’s life.

A friend of Miller’s, Harry Herschkowitz, went to New York to “interview” (and mattress-test) her on Henry’s behalf. He also apparently tested various other potential mail-order Mrs. Millers. Harry triumphed, and brought June II to Big Sur, where, despite her beauty and sensuality, she didn’t last long. Miller could whip himself up into a frenzy of long-distance infatuation, but even he could not counterfeit lasting love. And June II was too undomestic to be much help in as rugged a place as Big Sur. Without indoor plumbing or running water to cook and wash, Big Sur required a pioneer-woman spirit for survival. June II didn’t have it.

Lepska did. At least for seven years or so.

The pivotal women in Miller’s life were always highly intelligent—and certainly this was true of Janina Lepska, now known as Lepska Warren, Henry’s third wife. There is little about Lepska in his writings, but the watercolors he painted of her (recently published in
Henry Miller: The Paintings. A Centennial Retrospective
) depict her as a serious, Athena-like blonde and himself as a floating, Chagall-inspired lover.

He first met Lepska in 1944, while on a trip East to visit his mother. Louise was being operated on for cancer, and Henry arrived like the dutiful son he really was. Then, with his mother out of danger, he visited Lepska at Yale, where she was studying philosophy, and where Henry had an important literary pen pal in Wallace Fowlie. It wasn’t long before the romance between Henry and Lepska became serious and they headed out West together, marrying in Denver in December 1944, with Henry’s friends the Neimans as witnesses.

Henry recorded the marriage in a watercolor called
Marriage sous la lune
(1944). It shows a blue crescent moon above a jagged mountain range, and a twinkling six-pointed star that says “Lepska.”

“There was a near conjunction of Venus with the moon on the day we were married,” Lepska Warren writes of the watercolor. “At that elevation, everything was luminous.” The lovers returned to Big Sur and took up life in their Spartan paradise.

We have a glimpse of the idyllic beginning of their marriage in one of Henry’s letters to Larry Durrell:

Going to bed now. End of a quiet Sunday at Big Sur. My Polish wife, Lepska, has just been telling me stories of Poland. I’ve only learned two words of that language so far—Good Morning: sounds like Gin Dobrie…. Every day we take a sun bath. It’s like Spring now. Amazing climate and gorgeous scenery. Something like Scotland, I imagine. It’s one of the few regions in America you would like. I must describe it to you some day. One of the features of it are the vultures. The other is the fogs. And the third is the lupine which is like purple velvet over the mountain sides. There are also four crazy horses which I meet on my walks through the hills. They seem glued to the spot. And two of them are always in heat. I have a wonderful cabin, you know, dirt cheap—ten dollars a month. I have a young wife (21), a baby on the way probably, food in the larder, wine
à discrétion
, hot sulphur baths down the road, books galore, a phonograph coming, a radio also coming, good kerosene lamps, a wood stove, an open fireplace, a shower, and plenty of sun—and of course the Pacific Ocean, which is always empty. Alors, what more? This is the first good break I’ve had since I’m living in America. I open the door in the morning, look towards the sun rising over the mountains, and bless the whole world, birds, flowers and beasts included. After I have moved my bowels I take the hound for a walk. Then a stint of writing, then lunch, then a siesta, then water colors, then correspondence, then a book, then a fuck, then a nap, then dinner, and so to bed early and up early and all’s well except when I visit the dentist now and then.

Henry’s fame—and notoriety—were growing in a cultish sort of way; he had many helpers and admirers—almost too many—but money continued to be tight.

When Valentine, his second daughter, was born in 1945, he was still sending out begging letters for baby food, money, and clothes. Watercolors and handouts continued to be a more reliable source of income than his books. He was nearing sixty and a father of three.

In the forties, the press began circulating rumors of Henry Miller’s “cult of sex and anarchy” at Big Sur, and admirers kept arriving on the rugged coast looking for same. Henry complained of these tourists and hangers-on, but often invited them in to talk and eat, and it fell to Lepska to cook and entertain them. She must have felt like Madame Tolstoy with the Tolstoyans.

Whatever its myth, life at Big Sur was difficult, and Henry and Lepska quarreled over the children, the visitors, their differing views of how life should be run. There is no question that Lepska understood and admired Henry as an artist, but that doesn’t mean she found it easy to share his life. In his later years, Henry often seems to be using women as appliances to make himself more comfortable. A monumental selfishness, ironically, accompanies the blossoming of the sage.

Henry adored Val and Tony and spent time with them that he never spent with his first child. He was an enchanted, middle-aged father, and he once confessed to me that the greatest defeat of his life after Lepska left was his inability to care for his children totally. He was astounded, he said, by the power of women to raise children. “The greatest wrestler or boxer in the world would be worn out in one week if he had to take care of two little children. Feed them! Put diapers on them. Wipe their ass,” Henry said to me with sheer amazement in 1975. He thought that if the next generation were left to men, the human race would surely perish.

The years 1944–48 were important ones for Miller in many ways, but, creatively, they were less fertile. The birth of Val and Tony and the flowering of the reputation of his Paris books were important to him, as was the defense of his literary reputation by French intellectuals such as Sartre, Camus, and Gide. Henry wrote
Sexus
,
The Time of the Assassins
, and
The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder
in these years, but one gets the feeling that he was mostly rehashing old experiences. Why was he delving again into his marriage to June—the first June—in
The Rosy Crucifixion
trilogy? The books are full of wonderful digressions on writing and all manner of other things, but the relationship with June hardly seems a sturdy enough theme on which to base a whole trilogy. Was Henry written out? Or did he lack a new muse?

There is also a sense in
Sexus
,
Nexus
, and
Plexus
that Henry is imitating himself, trying to repeat what had been so fresh, new, and explosive in
Cancer
,
Capricorn
, and
Black Spring
, and which now has become stale. Often the sex in
The Rosy Crucifixion
is formulaic, and the women seem robotic. They have become nothing but isolated holes, begging to be filled. Henry did not fulfill his early promise with these books. It seems that at this point, Henry had no shit-detector: he did not know his good writing from his bad.

Both Anaïs Nin and Gore Vidal have commented trenchantly on the sloppiness that began increasingly to invade Miller’s writing. In a letter of 1937, Nin assails Miller for his tendency to reduce “all women to an aperture,” and she calls this “a disease.” In a brilliant essay on “The Sexus of Henry Miller,” written in 1965, Gore Vidal faults not only Miller’s “hydraulic approach to sex” but also his tendency to reduce all characters except his autobiographical protagonist to “shadows in a solipsist’s daydream.” The criticism is apt. Henry’s writing is nowhere more uneven than in
The Rosy Crucifixion.

After the liberation of Paris, Maurice Girodias, the son of Henry’s first publisher, Jack Kahane, wrote to Henry with the good news that his early books were selling. They were being constantly reprinted, probably for the GI market, and Henry had accumulated more money in royalties than had passed through his hands in his whole life. (No trip to Paris at this time would have been complete without the purchase of
Tropic of Cancer
and
Tropic of Capricorn.
One edition even bound them together in paper covers with
Jane Eyre
printed on the front!) For the briefest of moments, Henry was rich in France—the owner, in name only, of a fortune in French royalties that, for a few months, was worth an astonishing $40,000. But before he could collect this small fortune or move to France and spend it, the franc was devalued and his royalties all but evaporated.

Everyone wanted a piece of Henry’s uncollectible fortune—his ex-wife June, the IRS, freeloaders who arrived in Big Sur to sit at the master’s feet, old friends from Paris like the astrologer Conrad Moricand, whom Henry wrote about in the “Paradise Lost” section of
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.

Henry’s financial life reads like a surrealist farce. Even when he had money, he sometimes couldn’t get his hands on it, and when he didn’t have any, the fates or his water-colors provided. He really needed the philosophy he espoused—the philosophy of the
Tao Te Ching
, the eternal ebb and flow of riches, both spiritual and material. His life was almost a constant lesson in letting go. He had to cultivate the detachment of the Zen sage, or go mad.

By 1949, the Paris books were appearing in sufficient numbers in the United States—smuggled in by returning Americans—to bring Henry a new burst of attention from the postwar generation of writers and readers.

The Happy Rock
, printed by Bern Porter in California in 1945, shows the way Miller’s reputation was growing in postwar years. Dedicated “to the freedom of the Press—should there ever be any,” this little volume contains an odd assortment of selections from Kenneth Patchen, Nicholas Moore, Wallace Fowlie, Lawrence Durrell, William Carlos Williams, and others.

Porter was a Berkeley physicist who established his own small press with the exclusive purpose of furthering Miller’s career.
The Happy Rock
is a strange festschrift, but one that shows how much Miller’s work meant to many literary people, and how, despite the relatively small numbers of his books available in his native land, he was transforming the culture.