To Remember Is to Live Again
To call up is to live once more
Buddhadeva Bose
Lord's day MAGAZINE
CALCUTTA January 29, 1967
On the occasion of Henry Miller�s seventy-fifth birthday, Buddhadeva Bose recaptures the time he had spent with the American writer at Big Sur, California.
By a happy turn of events, that time came sooner than I expected. The prisoner was freed; he was fifty-fifty enable to brand a coast-to-coast tour. It was during this period of exhilarating freedom that I took the unusual step of visiting Henry Miller at Big Sur. Unusual, considering by nature I am hesitant about making overtures to people whose work or life I find attractive, having a well-nigh-mystical belief that only chance can bring nearly meetings which bear witness actually worthwhile. Only James Laughlin of New Directions had persuaded me to write to Miller, and his reply was so prompt and warm and spontaneous that I no longer felt I was an �outlander� in this country. My visit to Big Sur evolved out of this correspondence.
At that fourth dimension I had only vaguely heard of Big sur and I doubt whether many among the Indian literati know about it even at present, in spite of the �clat conferred on it past writers, artists, scholars and cranks who have been or are residents. My days in California followed a rather conventional pattern - three or four universities, a Vedanta Ashrama, a midnight Easter Mass, a Hollywood studio, a garish striptease, San Francisco. When finally I boarded a plane for Monterey, I did not quite know what to expect, exterior what I had learnt from Miller�southward messages.
Within minutes of getting out at the airport, where I was met past a friend of Miller�s, I saw a strange country existence revealed to me mile after mile at a pace too fast for my voracious eyes. At the water-front right outside the airport I had snatched a couple of minutes to purchase a lobster for my host, simply had no time to mingle in the crowd that inevitably gathers at such places, or have a drink at some fishermen�s bar, or find the varieties of marine creatures they had hauled upwardly. These wayside temptations had to exist resisted, for Miller had advised me to achieve his identify before sunset and my pilot was evidently in a hurry. On i side of us was Balboa�s blue Pacific, and on the other an countless row of hills, each detached from the other, densely forested, with a house on each hilltop. Occasionally, leaning on the parapet of some enclosure, were groups of children watching the seals; occasionally, buzzards wheeling. Bathed in a southern Apr, luminous in the glow of a descending dominicus, a whole wonderful world flashed past the car-window - light-green, gold, undulating, abundant. This, then, was Big Sur. Every bit many hills as families, as many houses as hills. One lone house on each hilltop, each home overlooking the ocean. No street-names or house-numbers, no cafes or drug-stores, no billboards or drive-in cinemas. The but means to identify the houses were, the capacious iron post-boxes which their owners had planted on the highway, with their names prominently displayed. Here was God�s plenty, every homo in God�southward ain acre, every man with his light-green hill and a window on infinity a earth, which had not yet lost its uncomplicated, primeval grandeur only which a modicum of civilization had made rubber for refugees from civilisation. Here it was nonetheless possible to believe that Nature is benevolent. Trees, shrubs, fallen leaves, a rough roadway: the car zigzagged up the hill marked by Miller�s post-box. The ocean of which I had merely caught glimpses from the highway now revealed its total, broad area, with a mild vermilion sun on the horizon. Against this backdrop was the alpine figure of my host, standing in front end of the long wooden building which was his abode. He gave me a handshake which it is a pleasure to remember. This Occidental way of greeting is sometimes reduced to skeletal formality, peculiarly by ladies who offer y'all two common cold fingers, beautifully manicured just scarcely animate, or guarded past a glove in the latest style. Conversely, there are men who stretch toward you lot an entire arm, straight equally a sword, and grip your hand for a couple of seconds while muttering the appropriate polite formula, without any relaxation of their facial muscles. Neither this soldier-like gesture, nor the momentary yielding of mauve finger-tips extends beyond the barest recognition of the existence of the stranger who has just been introduced. But Miller�south handshake was total and firm and strong, as warm and personal as his letters, as the books he had written and pictures he had painted. Inside the next v minutes I became i of his family.
Never, long as I alive, volition I forget the few days I had spent with the Millers, days snatched out of a somewhat hectic lecture-tour, during which my brain had stored more impressions than it knew what to practise with - faces and places which dissolved one into some other, friendships ended when scarcely begun, landscapes whose message I hadn�t notwithstanding deciphered. Serenity I found with the Millers, something more than than pleasance, something humanly shared and alloyed into experience. Henry, turned threescore, slim, straight, grey-haired, his confront kind yet austere; Eve, his wife, full-lipped, fresh-complexioned, a model of mature dazzler; Tony and Val (Henry�south children by an earlier marriage about whom he has written so frequently and joyously), both blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, charming, amiable. Miller gave me the impression of existence loose-limbed, relaxed,capable of hours of inaction, hours of reverie, irksome and gentle in speech communication, careful in the choice of words, a marvelous listener, graceful in the gestures of his hands. I enjoyed the points of dissimilarity between him and Eve. Henry had the �united nations-American� habit of writing his letters in longhand (what was more, with the nearly demoded fountain-pen instead of the �ball-point� which had already started on its triumphal march), whereas Eve never �penned� a line except on a typewriter. Earlier I had known her for one hour, Eve urged on me to call her by her first name (quite a usual procedure in America and one which I since learnt to appreciate), but Henry, while drawing me into the warmth of his friendship and amore, never used whatsoever form of address except �Mr. Bose�, which revealed a certain temperamental affinity between him and us of the Quondam World. No doubt his long expatriation in Europe had left its mark on Miller; he seemed earth-weary, rather reserved, whereas Eve, so far as I could make out, had all the charm, the frankness, the vivacity, and the exuberance of the modern American woman.
Fifty-fifty more remarkable was the contrast between Miller�s literary style and his personality: the latter, impressive in a quiet, subdued style, reticent almost, marked with a sure �holding back� of himself, meditative, part-Oriental; and the one-time a torrent of energy, a tide of American vigour, a medley of ideas, quotations, narratives, allusions, reflections, and memories, a gust of enthusiasm which showed no respect for �grade� and dispensed with those undertones, nuances, and convolutions which constitute the French idea of �le manner�. How assuming and direct and straightforward was everything he wrote, and how restrained his conversation!
What did we talk nigh? Books and writers, Henry Miller�s joustings with life, Big Sur, India, America. �You won�t notice a single home in America where some one volition say to you, �This was my granddaddy�due south chair.� We are condign a race of nomads.� Reflecting on my flat on Rashbehari Artery where one room served me every bit bed-living-room-cum-written report, I said that to most people today ancestral piece of furniture might be an embarrassment rather than a valued possession. �There is much to say for the dynamism of American life,� I added. �But i needs some centre, after all,� Miller replied. �Something one can hold on to, some idea of some.� I recalled a passage in The Colossus of Maroussi where Milller says how he taught himself to �feel at home at home.� I asked him if he had read Tagore. No, he had not, but his temple had a niche for Ramkrishna. He wanted to become to India, simply to come across a real saint. �Oh, no,� I protested with some alarm, �saints are rare everywhere. One of the misfortunes of Bharat regarded every bit i who claims to be a saint is transition from Ramkrishana to Rimbaud was easy enough, and Rimbaud led to Blaise Cendrars and his (Miller�southward) life in Paris. When Eve joined us later washing the dishes I asked her what she idea of life at Big Sur. Well it was sort of fun, with the nearest shopping center in Carmel, not even a drug-store anywhere near, and no telephones. (This was in 1954; I do non known well-nigh latter.) One had to bulldoze miles for the smallest necessity, 1 had to stir out in any atmospheric condition to fetch one�s mail service. �This is also the American way, isn�t it?� I suggested. �The spirit of the pioneers.� �That�s true,� Eve nodded, peradventure without much conviction. �Just I do miss the telephone. I�ve never lived without one, and sometimes I can hear it ringing even here.� As the night deepened and we re-filled our spectacles, Miller allow autumn a few words on a topic he has written about so movingly: the time of his youth and hardship. There was a time when he worked with Western Union in New York, a time when he was unemployed and did non want to exist employed, when he went about hungry and traded his topcoat for a taxi-ride at the finish of wintertime, but never a time when he did non want to be a writer. �I became one,� he added with a wry grin, �but fifty-fifty now there may be days when I can�t spare a dims to write a friend abroad.� I realized his situation was like certain eye-aged Bengali authors whose piece of work had brought them fame merely very piddling money - a almost embarrassing combination.
Miller and I parted for the dark at the door of the log-cabin which he had rented for me to sleep in. Nigh information technology was the Pacific Bend famed for its hot sulphur springs. In a glimmering moonlight the ocean was faintly visible. I gave the mural a few minutes earlier turning in. A sparse moon hanging over the ocean and flattened by the sea-fogs; above information technology towering darkness reaching upwardly to the zenith, perforated by stars My cabin lay in the shadow of a huge hill of which I could brand out merely the barest outline. There was a rippling breeze, not a cat in sight, not a whirr of a passing motorcar; merely a faint swish of the body of water and the breathing of the voiceless copse. As I switched off the light, the darkness grew equally blackness as a mother�s womb and in my ears the silence began to buzz like cicadas. I had an intense feeling of the reality of the night - deep, night, mysterious, overwhelming, a flood on which my consciousness was rocked, not to slumber, but back and forth betwixt memories of loves and friendships, from i dream to another, dreams of happiness found and lost, and regained but to be lost again. What I felt was in fact an incipient verse form, faintly tapping at my door, similar a waif left out in the cold. I wanted to allow information technology in; a start line formed itself in my mind, a vague shape, shadowy stanzas, ghostly rhythms, but before I could become whatever farther the night itself was obliterated in sleep. The next affair I remember is the Pacific, sharply curved like a half-moon, clinging as information technology were to the earth with two arms outstretched, seen in the morning light from a window of the restaurant perched on the edge of the ocean. Miller came circular just as I was finishing breakfast.
Big Sur evokes in my mind vivid splashes of colour, emanating from the redwood woods where green and royal shadows darkened the hour of noon; from the Big Sur river, moss-dark-green and translucent, slowly gliding amidst boulders, overhung with vegetation more lush and green than I had ever seen alongside the creeks in East Bengal; from 1 or two oceanic sunsets which seemed to have come out of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I visited that curve of the Pacific where the water was steaming hot and one could odor the sulphur from a mile away; I went through the ritual of the sulphur bath; I saw an open-air exhibition of local paintings. Merely of people I saw no one except the Miller family, and I saw them all the time, eating my meals with them and going about in their station-wagon, merely not going out much. It was this circumstance, I remember, which gave a pecullar quality to this visit, a roundness which the years have non blurred, a savour which I notwithstanding distinctly recall.
From the moment of my arrival to that of my taking off for Portland, there was never an hour when Miller made himself unavailable, although I am sure he had lots to do. Nor did he allow me spend a single dollar; he paid for the log-cabin and even my breakfasts, frustrating all my efforts to forbid him. All his time he gave me, all his attention. And yet he had known me only through a few letters and very brief presence; he did not know my language and had no idea of the books I had written and wanted to write; that office of me which I cannot but regard as my real cocky was completely hidden from his view. Only I had read some of his works and was familiar with his background and ideas; even before meeting him I had known him in a way in which in that location was no possibility of his knowing me. And this I thought was the nigh touching aspect of his friendship - that he had accepted me on trust, as though he had discerned the worth which exists, if at all, not in me, properly speaking, but in what I write in Bengali.
For quite some time Miller remained 1 of my strongest links with America; his letters reached me in Paris and Rome, and so in Calcutta, followed by parcels of his books with touching inscriptions. A 2d meeting did not have identify, despite my subsequent travels in the Occident; the correspondence naturally flagged. Even so, I occasionally heard from him, at intervals of months or years, through some magazine or clipping he had mailed, or a telephone call from 1 of his friends passing through Calcutta. And I heard near him, too, from mutual friends in New York, who told me he was separated from Eve, had abandoned Big Sur, returned to Europe but had an culling habitation in Pacific Palisades, California. I rejoiced over his soaring sales and his legal and moral triumph with Tropic of Cancer. In one way and another I have felt close to him despite distance and silence, ever, since the fourth dimension of our meeting at Large Sur. It no longer seems very probable that I shall see him again, but I know I shall recall him equally a friend, every bit a adept, wonderful, big hearted homo, and a writer of significance.
Equally I finish writing these words, Henry Miller arrives at the age of seventy-five. Comes the time for an �appraisal� of his works, for the tiger to exist put into an academic cage. The American zeal for enquiry did not leave him alone fifty-fifty during his proper name mentioned in hushful tones by Harvard undergraduates. Soon the professors will have their hooks on him in correct missed, atomized. Some will say (mayhap this has been said already) that he represents that phase of twentieth century literature which was nihilistic, perverted, anti-art, that in his novels the concepts of graphic symbol and situation are demolished, that his novels are non novels at all, but long, rambling monologues of a non-professional philosopher, that his essays could be anthologized to make a Henry Miller novel. Others, because of his explorations into the mysteries of sexual practice and his flouting of formal conventions, will make him a precursor of Robbe-Grillet and the �new novel�. Perhaps he will be described every bit an American D.H. Lawrence, and a writer whose mania was confession. There will be some truth in all this. True, he is one of the least �objective� of writers, i of the almost autobiographical, one who breaks through the distinction between reality and fiction, the �true� and the �invented� story. In a sense everything he was written is about himself; his Rimbaud is another incarnation of Henry Miller, his Big Sur is an overflow of Henry Miller, even his Hellenic republic is an extension of his eccentricities. It is as well true that this is one of the reasons why his books give us such a delicious sense of freedom, of release from our oppressive analytical intellect. Just I hope the American tone of his writings volition likewise be noted, despite his avowed �anti-Americanism�. He has a sense of wonder, a receptivity, a sponge-similar quality of mind, and a love of Nature, which link him with classical American writers, particularly Whitman and Thoreau. (I think a very profitable comparison may be made between Walden and Miller�s Large Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch; they belong to the same indefinite genre and have a like philosophy.) Information technology seems to me that Miller retains the essence of the Brooklyn male child who ran away from dwelling house and finally made expert; I perceive in him a certain innocence, reflected in his wide-eyed, open-armed attitude to life and the verve with which he plunges into it, which distinguishes him from his European contemporaries, such equally Aldous Huxley and Jean-Paul Sartre. What Miller said of Whitman may as well exist said of him, that he liked a great many things and disliked very few. His books make us feel that information technology is even so possible to be happy - in Brooklyn, Large Sur, Paris, Greece, Tibet - anywhere. And just considering this feeling comes to me very seldom, I value Henry Miller and his books, as I admire the Brahmanical fastidiousness with which he has abjured all temptations - money, drugs, politics and suchlike - that are likely to be devil a writer in our fourth dimension.
This article has been get-go published in the Sun Magazine, Hindusthan Standard, Calcutta, January 29, 1967. Published in Parabaas June xv, 2004
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