BOOKS

Laughing Jeremiah

By ERIC MOTTRAM 1.Vhen the cancer completes its devouring, a great silence will descend, chaos will be 'the score linPGn Which reality is written.' For the post-1946 the in America, Miller, with Reich, is h „ Prophet of the private citizen in contem- ', en'ar), chaos, a world where it is even difficult bLni. be private in bed, owing to the intrusive andishments of psychological advertising. The corilde and bridegroom grow increasingly mechani- ath The return to innocence can take place _er°ngh an anarchism of the self; endless con- - vnintrated autobiography is the contemporary „.._aterial of art, and 'behind the word is chaos.' vale rest is cancer, imprisonment, nightmare, pri- di tragedy---`the atmosphere is saturated with e;aster, frustration, futility.' Exhilarated, Miller a:es for more disasters, grander failures; the liurbage life of poverty in Paris is preferable to 4'rde:ring catastrophe. We need not geniuses but s who are willing to give up the ghost and °II flesh.'

the 1961 Miller predicts the inevitable end of nrld of things.' The inventive labour of has been in vain; now we must explore not j!IlY the lev mysteries of space but 'some greater sieZ1 nf being' within our own divine nature. brinkef machines and• therapies, we are on the think. a 'magical existence.' Don't struggle or kHOW, painlessly, easily. Lie fallow. Nothing our sick brains invent can add an tceuni cee f. joy to this thoroughly empty exis- And this drunken mechanic, this • Plish-button maniac, thinks to explore the outer Universe. What a joke I No, Homo Sapiens will never make it. He is in the last stages of devolu- "-• . The pity is that he could have come ,,se close—and missed. vy her Dot C did he fail? By asking for power and rnastrnastery of the self, the mind. What is brother0 You can only prepare for it through wd,Z.erlY love, following the heart-- 'play, not ven7i create and not add invention upon in-,

Meditating thus, in a jet, above the

WHEN the Obelisk Press published Tropic of Cancer in 1934, the world opened up to .„_tlenry Miller for the first time. He was forty- 4 -ee, and living the life of the expatriate bum In Paris. His alter ego, Boris, begins the book and the subsequent career : There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating Us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change. The other Miller opposes with affirmation of the private life, and the dialectic is on: I have no money, no resources, no hopes, I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six Months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that Was literature has fallen from me. There are

no more books to be written, thank God. clouds, he concludes: 'We live as ghosts amid a world in ruins. All is senseless repetition.' Now we must return to standing still like the saints of meditation. Best on the journey from New York to San Francisco are the peaceful deserts; the rest is 'the tracks of a maniac, a monster of a chess master who had forgotten the rules of the game.' Soon the man-made world will become 'one vast interlocking machine of a machine' and the endless nightmare will end in a perfect steel womb of helplessness into which men yield their once essential privacy.

Miller encountered theosophy in California when he was twenty-one. In 1913 he met the anarchist Emma Goldman. In the 1920s he 'worked for five years as employment manager for Western Union. The decision to enter a life of initial poverty and misery as an expatriate writer, befriended by Alfred Perles and Richard Osborn, culminated in Tropic of Cancer, an 'act of desperation.' The Greek experience of 1939 is recorded in Colossus of Maroussi (1941). In 1940 Miller returned to America and his tour lid to The Air-Conditioned Nightmare* of 1945. These are the landmarks in the career of the prophet, looking for home. New York was home 'with all the ugly, evil, sinister connotations which the word contains for the restless soul.' Miller made that recurrent American outward journey from the streets of Ward 14, Brooklyn, where as a child he 'acquired the typical Ameri- can gangster spirit.' Standing in Agamemnon's tomb revelation seizes him : I am done with civilisation and its spawn of cultured souls.. . . From now on I am a nomad, a spiritlial nobody.

When we have ceased to murder, then we may regain divinity, but not in the 'irrigated Paradises' of the West. His feet 'chained to the earth,' he dedicates himself to 'the recovery of the divinity of man,' peace and 'life more abundant.' Then this American Ishmael returns home, emerges from the tomb and enters the American nightmare, the image of all modern living that he loves and hates. Miller is firmly in this American tradition at all points of his nonconformity. He condemns the city machine and that unpardonable sin which makes men instruments for whatever cause. He says, 'No! in thunder,' and his life becomes a monologue of ironic condemnation, typical of the modern writer who draws to a single form, the autobiographical soliloquy of a dissident ego. In America it began with Emer- son, Thoreau and Whitman, continued in Henry Adams, and continues in Ginsberg and Mailer. Absence of conversation becomes a prophetic howl in the American wilderness, and in mid- twentieth century the American condition appears to be more and more the image of the human condition itself. The Air-Conditioned Night-

* THE AIR-CONDITIONED NicarrmARE. By Henry Miller. (Heinemann, 30s.)

mare excoriates purposeless capitalist democracy with some of the emotion of Tawney's The Acquisitive Society. Whole sections describe a 'beat' flight from the jungle of cities. But Miller is really hunting down necessary men and landscapes.

He passes from Vivekananda's unknown heroes, 'pure Sattvikas' of absolute stillness, to the propagandists—the Buddhas and Christs—and then to the sages of America, among whom he would count himself: men like Sherwood Ander- son and Kenneth Patchen, 'the one looking for poetry everywhere and the other driven almost mad by the evil and Ugliness everywhere.' Miller's rhetoric of critical hope explores the homeland and the interior self. In common with the major writers of the inter-war period he ex- poses the mean conversion of the private citizen into the worker-soldier-consumer, the instru- ment of irresponsible power. His tirades gather some of the strength of New England jeremiads. But he recalls men not to God but to first prin- ciples of imiividuality, the need for human transformation, perspectives of men in infinity.

Nostalgia for Europe. where the old never en- tirely yields to the new, penetrates Miller's journey of 'reconciliation with my native land.' Post-Depression, New Deal America seems merely `the same veneer of fatuous optimism' over sceptical defeatism. Hart Crane met Poe strap-hanging in the Brooklyn Tunnel; Miller's horror begins in the Holland Tunnel, and he is soon aware that the artist here is a convict, a 'moral leper,' once he refuses to be a victim of other people's mistakes, as well as his own. Miller makes for the deserts of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, and glances scorn- fully over his shoulder at the dictators of Europe. But the American Dream of the poets and seers he was nourished on is lost. There is no point in defending it, so his book is rich with impending disaster which arouses his best Swiftian irony. Why defend the type of capi- talism?

The fat, puffy, vt attle-faced man of forty-five who has turned alexual is the greatest monu- ment to futility that America has created. He's a nymphomaniac of energy accomplishing nothing. He's an hallucination of the Paleo- lithic man. He's a statistical bundle of fat and jangled nerves for the insurance man to convert into a frightening thesis. He sows the land with prosperous, restless, empty-headed, idle-handed widows who gang together in ghoulish sororities where politics and diabetes go hand in hand....

In the slums of Chicago a man spits to demon- strate his signing of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, while on the wall its says: GOOD NEWS! GOD IS LOVE!:

1 am sure that when the citizens of Chicago read these lines they will get up en masse and make the pilgrimage to that house. It is easy to find because it stands in the middle of a vacant lot on the South Side. You climb down a manhole in La Salle Street and let yourself drift with the sewer waste. You can't miss it because it's written in white chalk letters ten feet high. All you need to do when you find it is to shake yourself like a sewer-rat and dust yourself off. God will do the rest.

The prose fantasy moves into a claustrophobic vision of a chaotic universe of pain, recalling nothing less than the conclusion of the Dunciad. But what in America does Miller ad- mire? In the swamps of New Iberia, Weeks Hall's house and tropical garden exemplify beautiful independence whose centre is a man in love with Tibet, living in a womb room, his painting-arm smashed, a prisoner amid the most distinctive pieces of art which America can boast of. In New Orleans, Dr. Suchon, the surgeon painter

of primitives, is Miller's man of wisdom and vitality, opposing the 'curious correlation be- tween fecundity and the scrap-heap.' The artist manages not to become a drudge or a parasite, the modern norms.

Miller's basic faith is that only in America can these eccentric life-givers survive. Olsen, the Arizona Desert Rat, believes in the Indian legends of the downfall of the Whites. Miller welcomes the end of the uncontrolled energy of the utilitarian dream and the coming of men from whom 'the fungus of civilisation is re- moved.' The real defence, says Olsen, is not war but to like yourself enough to need no other people. 'That's why I live in the desert.'

Miller sentimentalises the South, makes dull jokes about mechanics as car-doctors, and exaggerates the horrors of cleanliness. But his real aim is to be at peace with the world. His concluding image is a Chinese Buddha im- prisoned in a glass cage, an Asian religious figure dominating Avery Island in the swamps of Louisiana, silently governing the jungle garden. 'The poise and serenity of the figure evoke the certainty of endless duration.'

herefore the frontier to cross is inside the self now. Miller meditates at Big Sur and issues messages to the world as an American guru. His strength is his refusal of the conventional stoicism of most of us. George Orwell rightly exposed his Jonah-fantasy of return to pre- natal happiness in an adult world, but Miller is not irresponsible. He is, rather, a prophet of a time of destruction searching for the way through the mask of anarchy.

It is no advantage not to choose Marx, Freud, Christianity or Naturalism, but Miller is that kind of exile. He chooses comedy finally; he is, in Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring, one of our finest comic writers, an ironist with a bawdy gusto which expunges pornography. Miller's sophisticated innocence accepts the body and welcomes the possibilities of the spirit yet to come. He is entirely without guilty conscience. He admires Lawrence's protest against intellec- tualising 'the whole man alive,' but he Jacks Lawrence's sense of reconstructing a community through complex private and social love. Miller's love is what Lawrence would loathe—love 'with- out gender and without lysol, incubational love, such as the wolverines practise above the tree- line.' From the beginning he concentrated on survival against prison and desert :

Art [he writes in 19341 consists in going the full length. . . . The task which the artist im- plicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and fer- ment so that by the emotional release those who arc dead may be restored to life.

The recurrent dream in Tropic of Capricorn (1939) is `the dream of passing the boundary line.' In 1957 he finds the price of security and abundance in America too much. The anarchist trusts himself and generally he is right, even if his energy for discriminating intelligence is less than his passion for the completely conscious self. He belongs with Americans like Robinson Jeffers, who wrote of mankind: 'It looks like a botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped.' Dylan Thomas thought Miller was just 'a dear, mad, mild man, bald and fifty, with a great enthusiasm for common- places.' Thomas was deceived in his alliterations. Those commonplaces are part of a resistance movement which is one of the few ways a man of imagination may today retain his ability to function. For which of us knows for certain he does not contribute to the destruction of the world?