TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072291/0722640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 119 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 68

An American Optimist


By Pico Iyer


    All across the world, America is still regarded as the
home of optimism. But nations, no less than individuals, are
often negligent of their blessings. This year marks the
centenary of one of the republic's most bountiful and boundless
founts of optimism; yet the occasion is more likely to be marked
abroad than in the U.S. Henry Miller -- his middle name was
Valentine -- was born the day after Christmas, 100 years ago,
and spent the next 88 years as a professional enthusiast, making
a living out of pleasure and a music out of saying yes. Where
an Old World master, like the peerless Graham Greene, could
write elegant circles around doubt, hedging belief in with a
knot of moral ironies, Miller just went straight to faith. From
the first page of his first book, Tropic of Cancer -- "I have
no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive"
-- through 50-odd books about finding ecstasy in squalor, he
simply sang of life and love as if the two were interchangeable.
His guiding star was Rabelais's "For all your ills I give you
laughter."

    When Miller was growing up, the genteel tradition was in
its prime: so much of America was so captive to European
proprieties that it might have seemed the Revolution had been
fought in vain. A writer like Henry James, for example, in
transporting a nuanced country-house sensibility to England,
was, almost literally, carrying coals to Newcastle; Miller, by
contrast, brought to Europe things it was less accustomed to
seeing: naked appetite, hopeless high spirits, French spoken
with a Brooklyn accent. And what he brought back was something
even richer: the great French passions -- of love and talk and
food -- translated into a rough Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Joie de
vivre made American.

    For however much he tried to school himself in foreign
masters of despair -- Mishima, say, or Celine -- Miller could
not help remaining a fearlessly joyous soul, "100% American,"
as he put it, right down to his repudiation of America. No one
ever embraced life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness more
lustily. An Emersonic boom was his, and Whitmanic energy. Like
Emerson, he saw the Greek roots in enthusiasm -- the word means
divine possession -- and knew that the poet "speaks adequately
only when he speaks somewhat wildly . . . Not with intellect
alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar." And like
Whitman, his fellow rhapsodist of Brooklyn, he sang only of
himself -- in that great American form, the comic-romantic
monologue -- but found in the self everything he needed: "If we
have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find
it without." Celebration, not cerebration, was his thing: even
in old age he was young enough to set about listing all the
books he'd ever enjoyed, to fill his pages with reminiscences
of his friends, to dash off 1,500 letters to a starlet named
Brenda Venus (with whom, just before his death, he enjoyed an
unlikely but passionate friendship). And even when inspiration
failed him, Miller simply kept writing and writing till he broke
into epiphany. No one who ever wrote so badly wrote so well.

    But more than his art it was his life, the only subject of
his art, that served to inspire millions. By now it is easy to
forget how many of our myths of youth were all but patented, or
lived out most wholeheartedly, by Miller. The college dropout
devouring dictionaries while working as a messenger for Western
Union. The would-be writer heading off to Paris with $10 in his
pocket. The self-anointed artist collecting his mail at American
Express, while living off his crooked smile. The underground man
going back to nature and living, in his 50s, without telephone
or electricity. The prophet unhonored in his home whose Tropic
of Cancer was a cult classic in Europe but, true to the
martyr-artist mystique, had to wait 30 years, until 1961, to
make it past the censors of America. Carloads of Europeans still
make the ritual pilgrimage to the Henry Miller Memorial Library
in Big Sur, Calif. There they can find his legacy all over: in
the QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper sticker on the van in which a
wandering Englishman sleeps beside the road; in the HOW TO BE
AN ARTIST poster on sale on the front porch; in the young man
practicing his juggling on a sunlit lawn amid the redwoods.

    Miller was so spendthrift with himself, and so loud in
praise of folly, that he laid himself open to every charge. Yet
to return to his books is to find him much more shaded than the
goatish orgiast of stereotype. Those who would brand him an
irresponsible apostle of hedonism must explain why he grew so
censorious when it came to drugs. Those who would call him a
male chauvinist pig must account for his fervent championing of
Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer. Those who would write him off
as a pornographer must tell us why he spoke out against the
sexual revolution (in which he found more signs of jadedness
than love). Even his ardent worshiper Anais Nin confessed some
disappointment that he kept so clean and "monastic" a home.
Besides, the one person who called him "monstrous" was himself.

    For many Americans, Henry Miller is still a slightly
embarrassing presence, the unruly bumptious country cousin who
makes a display of himself at the dinner table. At the age of
69, he had not yet seen his first book published in his
homeland. And even now, 11 years after his death, he remains a
tireless troublemaker (the movie about his love affair with Nin,
Henry & June, prompted a new kind of X rating). Yet all this is
precisely what endears him to the visitors. It is why he is the
envy of many an Old World sophisticate (George Orwell called him
"the only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who
has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years
past"). And it is also why the perennial schoolboy from the
streets of Brooklyn -- a New World Rabelais -- is still, 100
years on, one of the great American exports, unlikely to be
eclipsed even by the Japanese.