Henry Miller: Reflections of a Cosmic Tourist

Henry Miller — “confused, negligent, reckless, lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man that I am”; author of many famous and infamous books “filled with wisdom and nonsense, truth and falsehood, toenails, hair, teeth, blood and ovaries” (his words) — has been called everything from “a counterrevolutionary sexual politician” (Kate Millet) to “a true sexual revolutionary” (Norman Mailer); an author who neglects “form and mesure” (Frank Kermode) to “the only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past” (George Orwell).

Now 83, and in spite of recent illnesses still painting and writing, Miller is still accepting what he once called our Air-Conditioned Nightmare with joyful incredulity, still continuing to find out and tell us who he is. This past year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first Paris edition of Tropic of Cancer — Miller’s first published book — and it is now indisputably clear that Miller’s more than 40 subsequent volumes must be read simply as one enormous evolving work — a perpetual Bildungsroman — mani festing the always changing, yet ever the same, awareness and celebration of the recovery of the divinity of man, as well as of the way of truth which, Miller says, leads not to salvation but to enlightenment. “There is no salvation, really, only infinite realms of experience providing more and more tests, demanding more and more faith. … When each thing is lived through to the end, there is no death and no regrets, neither is there a false springtime; each moment lived pushes open a greater, wider horizon from which there is no escape save living.”

Gentile Dybbuck (as he once called himself), patriot of the 14th Ward (Brooklyn), American anarchist, Parisian voyou, cosmic tourist in Greece, sage of Big Sur, Henry Miller is today an inhabitant of an improbable-looking Georgian colonial house in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles — a house teeming with posters, paintings, sketches and photographs, all tokens and traces of Miller’s ebullient, peripatetic life.

There are a number of his radiant “instinctive” watercolors hanging in the living room. (“If it doesn’t look like a horse when I’m through, I can always turn it into a hammock,” he once said of his “method” of painting in “The Angel Is My Watermark.”) On one wall is a hand-inscribed poster listing the names of scores of places Miller has visited around the world — with marginal comments:

Bruges — the Dead City (for poets)
Imperial City, California (loss of identity)
Pisa (talking to tower all hours)
Cafe Boudou, Paris: Rue Fontaine (Algerian whore)
Grand Canyon (still the best)
Corfu — Violating Temple (English girl)
Biarritz (rain, rain, rain)

In the kitchen, posted on a cabinet, is his Consubstantial Health Menu, which announces favorite dishes: e.g., Bata Yaku! Sauerfleisch mit Kartoffel-klösze, Leeks, Zucchini ad perpetuum, Calves’ Liver (yum yum)… and a strong warning: Please! No Health Food.

Across one end of his study is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf containing hundreds of his own works translated into scores of languages, while two other walls are completely decorated with graffiti and drawings, all contributed by visitors, friends and by Henry himself: “Kill the Buddha!” “Let’s Case the Joint!” “Love, Delight and Organ Are Feminine in the Plural!” “The Last Sleeper of the Middle Ages!” “Don’t Look for Miracles. You Are the Miracle!”

Most fascinating of all is the author’s famous bathroom — a veritable museum which presents the iconography of the World of Henry Miller: photos of actresses on the set of the filmed version of Tropic of Cancer, Buddhas from four countries, a portrait of Hermann Hesse (“Most writers don’t look so hot,” Miller says. “They’re thin blooded, alone with their thoughts.”), a Jungian mandala, Taoist emblems, a Bosch reproduction, the castle of Ludwig of Bavaria, Miller’s fifth wife Hoki (from whom he’s now separated and about whom he wrote: “First it was a broken toe, then it was a broken brow and finally a broken heart”), the head of Gurdjieff (“of all masters the most interesting”) and, hidden away in the corner, a couple of hard-core photos “for people who expect something like that in here.” (Tom Schiller’s delightful film, Henry Miller Asleep and Awake — distributed by New Yorker Films — is shot in this very bathroom and presents the author taking the viewer around on a guided tour.)

I really hate greeting you like this, in pajamas and in bed,” Miller says as I enter his bedroom. Smiling and talking with a never discarded bristly, crepitated Brooklyn accent and a tone of voice blending honey and rezina, he continues: “I just got out of the hospital again, you see. They had to replace an artificial artery running from my neck down to the leg. It didn’t work, it developed an abscess, and so they had to take out both the artery and the abscess. I’m really in bad shape, no?” Miller says, laughing. “And this is all attributable to those damned cigarettes. I was an athlete when I was young — don’t you know? I was good at track and a bicycle rider. I didn’t smoke until I was 25, and then it was incessant. And all my wives smoked, too. If I start again it means death. My circulation will stop, and they’ll have to cut off my legs.”