Book of Souls Read online

  It turned out he wasn't cranky at all. His letters tended to be short and to the point—though most did complain about lack of money. So I tried to dig it up for him.

  I spent the next few months obsessing over his contracts, trying to find some way to break them. I wasn't very successful. I got a small reissue deal from Pocket for Colossus of Maroussi and a few shorter books, a sale to Playboy and various smaller-paying mags and newspapers, and a hardcover deal with Capra Press for what was to be his last full-length work, Book of Friends. The money never came pouring in but I had my modest successes. And I think that sending the checks to him gave me more pleasure than money ever has before or since.

  He had an efficient no-nonsense secretary named Connie Perry who handled all his phone calls so even the bills weren't a problem. In the year and a half I worked for him I never once spoke to Henry on the telephone. He just had no damn use for the things.

  And gradually I realized that handling his business wasn't enough for me. I wanted to talk to him. No, I still wanted to meet him, like I had on that mountain. I wasn't greedy about it. Once would do. But I'd been reading him almost half my life by then and I wanted to take his measure. And I guess, my own against him.

  So that when—despite Henry and the other legit clients on my list—the pressure, frustration, the guilt and self-disgust over the hundreds of desperate hopeful fee people I dealt with every day finally got to me, when I pushed that wonderful unyielding New York lady in the rain and knew that I either had to get out of there or take up a new career as a serial killer, all I thought was first you've got to get your butt to California.

  It was easier than I expected. I offered to fly there out of my own pocket to deliver some Capra contracts personally if my boss would give me time off with pay. I had a thousand dollars in the bank and would be spending half of it for an hour of his time. I didn't care. My boss thought I was crazy but he reluctantly consented, not knowing that as soon as I returned I was out of there. My last little bit of duplicity was going to be directed toward the fount of duplicity itself.

  Nice touch, I thought.

  ~ * ~

  Pacific Palisades is no Big Sur. Neither the Pacific nor any palisades are in evidence. The community's just another attenuation of Los Angeles, its single virtue its modesty and calm. The passion for the spectacular so evident down below disappears into its gentle hills like a wandering disease. You can live here without flexing any overt financial muscle power. It's clean and comfortable. Expensive, sure—what isn't in L.A.?—but determined not to be stupid about it.

  I found Henry living in a white two-story house with black shutters. It could have existed practically anywhere in America, been the home of a doctor or a dentist. The yard was small. The shrubs needed trimming. Neighbors lived close by.

  There was a typed message on the front door, the words of a Chinese sage. Henry was always fond of quotes. He collected them and his books are all peppered with them. One of my favorites was at the bottom of his stationary, a Portuguese proverb

  ~ * ~

  CUANDO MERDA TIVOR POBRE NASCE SEM CU—WHEN SHIT BECOMES VALUABLE THE POOR WILL BE BORN WITHOUT ASSHOLES.

  ~ * ~

  Roughly translated the words on his door were DO NOT DISTURB. LEAVE THE MAN INSIDE IN PEACE. HE IS PREPARING TO DIE.

  Miller had turned eighty-five this year. Just a few years earlier he'd been riding his bike every day and beating his friends at ping pong. Then he developed circulatory problems in his left leg. They sliced him groin to armpit, then down his leg to his foot. A plastic vein was sewn in. His body rejected it. Another operation followed and the result of that was a stroke, leaving him blind in one eye. Miller never had much use for science, medicine—or plastic for that matter. His distrust seemed amply justified.

  So the note on the door said that the man inside was preparing to die.

  I thought about this after our meeting and on my motel stationary wrote the following.

  "If so this is a most active, spirited preparation. Over the past year he has published two new books...he writes every day. Paints, keeps himself fit. He doesn't go out much but his house is always open to friends...few would find this preparatory for death but then I think we've always trod a few steps behind Henry anyway. He sees preparation as an active principle, to be worked at in a calm and creative fashion, like traveling or making love. It's important that the note does not say the man inside is dying, it says he is preparing to die. He will not have it out of his hands, will abdicate nothing.

  "So what is this preparation? A reconciliation, I think, a settling of accounts. Only a great rebel would feel the need to bother. Only a great rebel would succeed as well as he's doing. It's hard to think of any man worth his salt who does not, like Henry, contain some of the Grand Blasphemer, the sexual and moral renegade, the dreamer after other and better lands.

  For most of us there exists the ruin of some former life to which we might be reconciled. In this sense we are all in need of reconciliation."

  I rang the bell and his secretary, Connie Perry, greeted me at the door. If Connie ever needed cash she could easily have posed for a Playboy centerfold. It took me a while to connect her tall blonde beauty to the pleasant voice I was used to hearing on the phone. I'd expected her to be efficient and probably gracious but I wasn't expecting her to be lovely. I probably should have known better. It was Miller after all. All these years and he still had a knack for surrounding himself with beautiful women. At the time the model Twinka Thiebaud—probably best known as the nude behind the tree in the famous Imogen Cunningham self-portrait—was living with him.

  I also hadn't thought I'd be meeting him in his bedroom. But that was where she took me.

  "He's expecting you," she said. "It's just that he's asleep. He naps."

  Seeing him lying in bed I felt a moment of panic, as though maybe I'd made some terrible mistake. Beneath the covers he looked awfully small and fragile—it might have been a six-year-old lying there. If he was just another unhappy sick old man our interview was going to be unbearable. What I wanted was the old Henry, the vigorous Henry. For a moment I felt the urge to tell her for god's sake don't wake him. She touched him gently on the shoulder and announced that I was here and I swear I'd never seen a man desert his sleep so quickly. In an instant he was alert and cooking, not even a blink to betray the effects of sleep, greeting me warmly, moving off the bed to his chair, asking if I wouldn't sit too. I wanted vigor, I got vigor.

  Old age seemed to disappear around him, this sudden energy calling into question the observable frailty of the body, his mind animating flesh so paper-thin that it might almost seem to dematerialize inside his bathrobe. I relaxed immediately; almost ashamed of myself for thinking it would be any other way. He had a wonderful broad-faced smile and long soft hands that touched you often as he spoke—the hands of a painter or a pianist. In his way he was actually beautiful.

  At first we just talked business. He complained about Doubleday's lack of success with INSOMNIA. He'd just been notified that the book was being remaindered.

  "Better luck next time, Doubleday says. Ha! What makes them think there will be a next time for me? This book for instance."

  He pointed to a huge chart on the wall, his outline for the Book of Friends.

  "All these people to write about! Hell, I'll never live long enough to finish it. But I don't suppose that matters much. The pleasure's in the doing it, don't you know. I'm not pressed to write these days. Not the way I was when I was younger. Still, better luck next time. What a thing to say to me!"

  He was in a wry good humor. Complaining about money and Doubleday was more a matter of principle than anything else, of believing that a writer ought to be compensated for a life devoted to art—money being simply the affirmation of art's healing function, its value, a reward from those who benefit by it. He knew he would never again find himself destitute. The watercolors he once traded for shoes now sold for about $1,500 each. The books brought him a stead
y, if not enormous, income. And should all else fail him, he said, he'd bet that by now there were probably hundreds of admirers who would rush to his aid if he ever needed ready cash.

  He was right. I'd probably have been one of them. He felt immune to poverty now. Business interested him, but from a distance.

  "You know, they speak well about your boss," he said, "but in a very terrible way. They tell me he's ruthless, a shark. I suppose that's his function, though. My son says, 'you've got this guy working for you, what, don't you ever tell him to hold out for more money?' I tell him I'm loved, I'm respected, I have thousands of readers. But I've never had money. Were you aware that they recently sold an original Paris edition of Cancer for $150,000? That's more than Hemingway, more than Fitzgerald, more than any of 'em!"

  He laughed. His speaking voice was rough and deep, the laugh light and musical. "I only wish I had a copy," he said.

  I wasn't doing much talking. He clearly loved to speak and he was good at it. Initially I'd felt intimidated. The urge was to try to turn a phrase nicely yourself, to make some sort of impression. The problem was that even the simplest phrases seemed to elude me.

  But Henry had a way of loosening you up. Whatever you said, however you said it, he was interested. I gave up on making an impression—it wasn't necessary. I could stumble. He seemed to like honest effort far more than easy successes and finally, much more at ease, I began to say some of the things I'd come to say.

  I told him about stealing his books when I was a kid. About my plea to him from the mountain. I told him about all the writers and artists I'd found through him and thanked him for that—and characteristically, though he'd heard this sort of thing many times before, my confession still delighted him. Also characteristically, it brought to mind not his own achievements but someone else's.

  "I once met a woman," he said, "who told me that not only had she read every book of mine but she'd read every fucking book I ever mentioned in my books! Can you imagine that? I think that's wonderful."

  That was how it continued. If I admired his work on Book of Friends he asked if I'd read Erica Jong. If I admired his thinking on a subject, somebody else had said it better. I told him I liked his watercolors very much and he asked if I knew the work of his good friend Emil White. It turned out I did, again because he'd mentioned him so many times in his books. More than anything else I was able to say to him this seemed to please him enormously.

  "Emil will be delighted to know he has a fan in New York City!"

  Here was a man, I thought, grown thoroughly geotropic and phototropic, turning ever outward. I had never expected to meet someone who so spontaneously embodied the principle of humility. One learns—especially as an agent—not to hope that a writer will live the philosophy of his books. But Miller seemed every inch his books, obscene, gentle, gracious, raucous, funny. Seemingly discordant words escaped him. If he was free with the word fuck at meeting me for the first time he would also speak freely to a stranger about the eye of god, of love and matters of the heart. I was struck by the sense that anything could be expressed here. No restrictions.

  Besides writing and painting his chief enthusiasm had always been his friends. By his own definition a friend was something "as close to you as your skin." His own included the long dead—like Lawrence, Rimbaud and Whitman—as well as those "living books" he was honoring in Book of Friends. The time available to him for meeting new people was limited but he was not interested in living in a world circumscribed by old relationships either. I found that it was not possible, for instance, to meet him on a purely professional basis even had I wanted to. He wanted to know all about me. I felt let in.

  I suppose most people did, that this was part of his gift. Not long ago, he told me, he'd fallen in the bathroom and badly bruised his head. He was terrified the fall would affect the vision in his good eye—indeed that it had affected it already. Unconvinced when his ophthalmologist gave him a clean bill of health he mentioned the matter to Noel Young, his publisher at Capra. Noel knew an ophthalmologist in Santa Barbara who was an admirer of Henry's and thought he might be willing to drive up to L.A. on the weekend for a second opinion.

  The examination determined that the eye hadn't been damaged at all. That in fact it was an extraordinary eye for a man of Miller's age. Much relieved, Henry fancied that he was seeing a whole lot better already and took the doctor for a tour of his watercolors. What followed was a discussion of mind-over-matter, art and various esoteric psychologies which lasted most of the day.

  Noel himself is a good example of how easily Miller's friendships could be born. They'd met in 1946 during Henry's impoverished days at Big Sur. Henry had already written and sold all the Paris books but Noel was still unpublished, a runaway from a wife and three kids. They discovered they shared the same birthday. Evidently Henry thought that was enough to explore things further. Together they built a stone retaining wall around the house at Partington Ridge, which was perched on the edge of a high cliff over-looking the Pacific, to keep Miller's two-year-old daughter Val from crawling to her death on the rocks below.

  "He conceived this house as a Japanese paradise up above the fog," Noel told me, "with a pond and a weeping willow tree. We'd go down to the dunes and get sand and mix it with mortar, hauling up in an old Jeep station wagon. He was working hard shoveling the sand and mixing it with cement with me, though he didn't really know what the hell to do with it."

  Much later Miller launched Capra Press with his chapbook On Turning Eighty, its success allowing Young to go on to publish people like Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Ray Bradbury, Thomas Sanchez, Leonora Carrington and many more. The two men remained friends until the day Henry died.

  Norman Mailer must have sensed this openness too. A few days before I met Henry, Mailer had come to visit him for the first time. He was in the process of editing an anthology of Miller's works and writing a series of long critical essays on the material, later to be published as Genius and Lust. Whether both words referred to Henry or one was Genius and the other Lust only Norman can say. But they'd obviously had a good time together.

  "I think he's a charming man," Henry said. "The man's got a marvelous sense of humor. I have to confess I can't read Mailer. I think it's terrible to say that because he's always been my advocate, my defender. But he's wordy, he's unclear sometimes, I think sometimes he loses the track. My son Tony came in though, and asked him for an autograph. He had one of Norman's books with him. And you know what he wrote? 'From Norman Mailer, at the foot of the master.' How do you like that? Oh, I tell you, the man has charm!"

  It tickled him that Mailer, who'd just landed a million-dollar contract that year, should be paying him homage.

  "You know, people often make the strangest, most wonderful confessions to me. I remember James Loughlin came to visit me in Big Sur. He'd just published Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch but I hadn't yet released it to him, he hadn't my permission. He sure hadn't paid me. And I hadn't a penny then so I was angry. He came to visit and apologized, saying that he thought we'd gotten off on the wrong foot together. You know why? Because I reminded him of his father. Isn't that the damnedest thing?"

  Henry never did live by the clock but I was aware that I was getting more than double the agreed-upon hour of his time. At last he said, "you'll pardon me, but I'm tired now," and I got ready to leave. I'd brought along three books with me, New Directions' limited edition of The Nightmare Notebook and a rare two-volume British edition of selected prose. I asked if he wouldn't mind signing one of them, whichever he liked. He went to his desk.

  "Hell, I'll sign them all," he said. "My desk's a flicking mess though. I get up in the middle of the night to write ideas down. My head's buzzing with ideas. In the morning Connie comes in to see what I've written. There's always something."

  He signed them and in The Nightmare Notebook wrote, "To Dallas/on his first visit to 'The Master'/Henry Miller" and then, embarrassed by himself I think, added, "(Just a Brooklyn Boy)."
He dug around in his drawers and handed me two sets of postcards—Emil White's watercolors. Then two more sets, his own. Finally he signed a print of his painting Three Heads from the collection of the astrologer Sydney Oman.

  "Is there anything else I can do for you?" he asked.

  I suspected he'd give me his nightshirt and bathrobe if I asked for them.

  I thought, as in his writing, so in his life. Take with both hands and give everything you've got. I felt he'd given me quite enough.

  I'd brought two small presents of my own, though. I'd just finished reading Sisters of the Road by Boxcar Bertha and Ben L. Reitman and thought if he hadn't come across it, the book might have some special appeal for him. He reminded me that reading was hard now.

  Then he looked at the cover and said, "Wait a minute! Ben L. Reitman. I knew this man! He was a great anarchist, an amazing fellow. They tarred and feathered him once. He almost died. Hell, I'll give it a try."

  I'd also brought a pair of Sotheby Park Bernet catalogs, well-thumbed, which contained works by artists I knew to be among his favorites—Leger, Grosz, Utrillo and others—minor works mostly which I thought he might not be familiar with. One Picasso in particular caught his eye.

  "You know," he said, "you think you know a man's work but he'll always surprise you. There's always some corner of his soul which has eluded you, that you've not looked into. This is a marvelous gift. Thank you."

  He was plainly exhausted. We shook hands and I said goodbye.

  "Stop by again, won't you?" he said.

  I told him I was flying back to New York the following day.

  "That's a shame. Well, say hello to the goddamn town for me. It spawned me and I survived it, so there's a bond there, don't you know."

  Connie took me for a tour of the house. The graffiti wall, the watercolors.

  "It must be good to work for him," I said.

  "Good? It's wonderful. He's the gentlest man in the world," she said. And suddenly turned away from me.