Doing It with the Cosmos: Henry Miller's Big Sur Struggle for Love Beyond Sex

By Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick

DOING IT WITH THE COSMOS: HENRY MILLERS BIG SUR STRUGGLE FOR LOVE BEYOND SEX explores the evolving pantheistic vision and agonizing personal relationships of this rogue elephant of American literature. After years of exclusive conversations with people who knew Miller when he lived in Big Sur, the author concludes that, contrary to a popular mindset, Miller was not an apostle of gratuitous playboy sex. On the contrary, his books detail the mans tortuous efforts to integrate impulsive urges that were wholly beyond control into a higher, more spiritual, form of love that may, or may not, include sex. His message: "We dont have to make [the earth] a paradise. It is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it ... Love is not a game, its a state of being." This book is a unique introduction to one of Americas most controversial literary greats, tracing his spiritual development from its shaky beginnings in Paris through its expansion in Greece to its culmination in Big Sur. The book not only serves as a manual of happiness, it is a caveat for people planning to play house together. Millers ultimtely joyful Nature wisdom, is an antidote for what ails an entire generation of restive, sex and violence-inundated Americans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 31, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462828869

Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick

ELAYNE WAREING FITZPATRICK (BA English, MS Philosophy) was a city desk reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune; promotion director of KUED, Utah’s public television station; and an associate professor at the University of Utah before relocating in California in 1974 to teach Philosophy and Humanities at Monterey Peninsula College on California’s Big Sur-Monterey coast. She is also a freelance journalist who, after raising a family, began travelling to -- and writing about -- some of the world’s most charming places unspoiled by industrial development. Other books by the author include: A Quixotic Companionship: Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ethics for Rascals; Doing It with the Cosmos: Henry Miller’s Big Sur Struggle for Love Beyond Sex; Shepherds of Pan on the Big Sur- Monterey Coast; Nature Wisdom: Mystical Writers of the Big Sur-Monterey Coast, a revision and expansion of Shepherds of Pan in color; and an initial edition of this book in black and white. Her features have appeared in numerous periodicals. Web site: www.capricornbrae.com

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Copyright © 2001 by Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick.

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Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

THE RACONTEUR AND THE POET

THE CIRQUE MEDRANO

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author wishes to thank the following for permission to reprint excerpts from previously published literature:*

CAPRA PRESS: Reflections; The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation

GROVE/ATLANTIC: The World of Sex; Tropic of Cancer

HARCOURT, BRACE, JOVANOVICH: A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller; Henry and June: A Journal of Love from the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin; The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volumes I, II, III, VI, VII

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY: Anais, The Erotic Life of Anais Nin

NEW DIRECTIONS: Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch; Remember To Remember; The Air-conditioned Nightmare

VIKING PRESS: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious; Phoenix, The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence

W W. NORTON: Henry Miller, A Life

*See Bibliography for author and publisher details

Special thanks to Magnus Toren of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur for photo research assistance and to Alex Vardamis of Carmel’s Tor House Foundation for permission to quote lines from Robinson Jeffers.

Eternal gratitude to artist Shell Fisher for the cover portrait of Henry Miller.

THE FOLLOWING FRIENDS OF HENRY MILLER CONTRIBUTED WISDOM FOR THIS BOOK IN PERSONAL INTERVIEWS:

Ephraim Doner

Rosa Doner

Bill Fassett

Holly Fassett

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Virginia Barclay Varda Goldstein

Caryl Hill

Ed Holcomb

Nancy Hopkins

Jane McClure Howell

Bob Nash

Gordon Newell

Maud Oakes

Paul Rink

Harry Dick Ross

Lilli Selvig

Brenda Venus

Rosalind Sharpe Wall

Janina Marta Lepska Miller Warren

Bill Webb

Howard Welch

Emil White

Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine

beauty of the universe. Love that, not man

Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,

or drown in despair when his days darken.

Robinson Jeffers, " The Answer ‘

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PROLOGUE

WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

On the deepest level, the question of which age we live in is irrelevant. The basic question is whether the individual—in his own awareness of himself and the period he lives in—is able, through his decisions, to attain inner freedom and to live according to his own inner integrity.

Dr. Rollo May,

Man’s Search for Himself

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "

Self Reliance"

Religion . . . is a man’s total reaction upon life.

William James,

The Varieties of Religious Experience

There was a time when I didn’t include Henry Miller among the friends on my bookshelves. I had dismissed him, after a cursory exploration of Tropic of Cancer, as a lecherous, balding intellectual who routinely dotted insightful prose with raunchy sex.

Now, after rooting myself, as he did, on this spectacular Big Sur-Monterey coast, exploring his post-Tropic works, the diaries of Anais Nin (the only woman he ever considered his match and mentor), and getting to know him though years of conversations with his friends, I’ve come to understand this rogue elephant of American letters in the light of St. Augustine’s waggish cry:

Oh Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!

Contrary to a popular mindset, Miller’s headlong confessions are not about gratuitous playboy sex. They are about personal transformation, born of despair, on a quest for unconditional love, at the expense, unfortunately, of the women in his life.

His books detail his tortuous efforts to integrate impulsive urges that were wholly beyond control into a higher, more spiritual, form of love that may, or may not, include sex.

Yes, Miller was a caution, alternately praised and blamed for the lifting of bans in this country that ushered in the sexual revolution, for better and for worse. But this Brooklyn-raised, Parisbitten expatriate was also a neo-Jonah, a reluctant prophet, who emerged from a dark-and-merry sojourn in the belly of the whale to assume the mantle of a blissful Bodhisattva.

His mission, as I see it, was essentially religious, in the best sense of that word. His message: The earth is a paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don’t have to make it a paradise—it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, the man with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize Paradise even when he is shown it.

Miller, who said he had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans—the poets and seers of our history, had motored across America, after a ten-year sojourn

in Paris and an epiphany in Greece, seeking contemporary men of spirit and vision.

He didn’t find them.

Some other breed of men has won out, he complained in The Air-conditioned Nightmare. ‘This world which is in the making fills me with dread . . . It is not a world I want to live in . . . It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams, or hopes, is debarred."

Then he discovered Big Sur and found what he was looking

for.

It is American in the best sense of the word, he announced, which is what makes it so unlike the rest of the country.

For him, Big Sur was original America, representing Nature’s inexhaustibility—the synergistic struggle of opposites to maintain dynamic balance. His newly found coastal wilderness seemed to nurture humanity’s innate paradoxical spirit of cooperative self-reliance.

He celebrated Big Sur as the face of the world as the Creator intended it to look. It is a place so beautiful, he observed, that people don’t have to spend time improving their surroundings. Consequently, they are free to work on improving themselves and being kind to each other.

Surrounded by a handful of other grateful refugees from America’s consumerist culture, Miller lived in Big Sur for seventeen years, cultivating his incipient transcendental philosophy and sharing his motley wisdom with the rest of us.

Looking back from his pulpit on Partington Ridge, he exorcised old frustrations, offering himself up in The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy and revising The World of Sex. Beyond these, he communicated flashes of pure joyousness in tomes like Big Sur and the Oranges of

Hieronymus Bosch, To Paint Is To Love Again, and The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder.

The man had cast his lot, early on, with God’s ongoing feast of fools. Now, under the sublime influence of Sur country, this onetime self-described king of smut was being dragged like Auguste, his mystic clown, up a spiritual ladder toward sagehood.

If he found freedom in Paris, he found peace in Big Sur. Here he was able to extricate himself from overdoses of Left Bank sex and neurotic women to attain a happy-child relationship with everything that is. It wasn’t long before he was projecting a halo of satisfied sexuality onto the whole universe. He was doing it with the cosmos.

This side of him astonished me.

Like the Confessions of St. Augustine, Miller’s most notorious books had burlesqued his unabashed deviltries as he struggled for wholeness—for love beyond sex—not because of shame but because he hoped to acknowledge and integrate his fractionations, in order to evolve.

He showed others how by doing it himself.

Henry Miller was, indeed, a rascal, but he was a questing, open-hearted one. Once I understood him as a man with a life-affirming eco-mission, serious about allowing and transforming excesses, I made space for him in my library, in the company of some other favorite nonconformists:

Guatama the Buddha, Socrates, St. Francis, Meister Eckhart, Don Quixote, Francois Villon, Benedict Spinoza, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, George Sand, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Louis Stevenson, William James, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, Lou Andreas-Salome, John Steinbeck, and Alexis Zorba.

Because I’m a classroom catalyst, I’m big on lessons. I believe there are important lessons to be learned from the life of this canny old trickster, not only for spiritual explorers, but for people planning to play house together.

Miller liked lessons. That’s why he wrote:

Maybe [my writing] will do you good as well as me, for whatever itches me must itch you too. None of us is exempt. We are all one substance, one problem, one solution.

I share his view. Hence this book.

Maybe reading it will do you good, just as writing it did me good. It’s a book for playful, earth-loving, canny, caring individuals—a type Miller admired—who pause to reflect on our tenuous relationships in this overpopulated, violent, sex and information-inundated technocracy of intimate strangers that we are creating to ask:

Isn’t there something we’re forgetting?

Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick

Carmel Valley, California

Spring, 2001

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely, then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us. Once our great civilized form is broken, and we are at last born into the open sky, we shall have a whole new universe to grow up into, and to find relations with.

D. H. Lawrence, Quoted in Henry Miller’s The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Blaise Pascal,

Pensees

Image536.JPG

Henry Miller at his Partington Ridge studio in 1945.

(Photo from Harry Dick Ross collection)

CHAPTER ONE

OVERVIEW OF A HIGH-MINDED RASCAL

There are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: super celestial thoughts and subterranean conduct. . . Aesop, that great man, saw his master pissing as he walked. What next? he said, Shall we have to shit as we run?

Michel de Montaigne,

Of Experience

Love created the world; and not all its works are beautiful.

A. R. Orage,

On Love

Foolish love makes beasts of us all.

Francois Villon,

The Testament

June 7, 1980, was a big day for 88-year-old Henry Miller. He saw publication of the D. H. Lawrence book he had been working on for half a century, and he died in Los Angeles, looking forward to yet another transformation.

It was a kind of banner day for me, too, because Gary Koeppel, "Big Sur Gazette ‘ publisher, had assigned me to do a series of articles on Miller that would change my attitude toward this man whose very name evokes thoughts about sex.

While routinely tracing, for story purposes, the route that led Miller into the Big Sur coastal wilderness in 1944—and out again nearly two decades later—I uncovered the unexpected: his books weren’t really about sex. They were inherently spiritual, if not religious, in the best sense of that word. His intention, conscious or not, had actually been quite noble: self-transformation through assimilation of the essential good and evil implicit in all deep religious striving. Getting it down in writing had been his way of resolving conflict.

Whether he liked it or not, his calling was to share what he discovered with the rest of us. Banal sex—that primal attention-getter—was merely the bottom rung of a mystic ladder leading toward his «doing it» spiritually with the cosmos. Sex was, as he put it, the «mythological monster from which the world . . . had been whelped.» Like transcendental deity, it pervades everything.

Miller may have been one of those proverbial angry young men who set out to «annihilate the world which had made me its victim.» But he was fated to lose himself in the process and attain paradise through affirmation of hell.

In scanning The World of Sex—a book Miller revised while he purred in Big Sur—I was stunned by the sagacity of this man I had dismissed as a scalawag:

As to whether the sexual and the religious are conflicting and opposed, I would answer thus: every element or aspect of life, however necessitated, however questionable (to us), is susceptible to conversion . . . The effort to eliminate the repulsive aspects of existence, which is the obsession of moralists, is not only absurd but futile. One may succeed in repressing ugly, sinful thoughts and desires, impulses and urges, but the results are patently disastrous. (Between being a saint and being a criminal there is little to choose.)To live out one’s desires and, in so doing, subtly alter their nature, is the aim of every individual who aspires to evolve.

After absorbing this illuminating overview from Miller’s own psyche, I immersed myself in more of his work, completed two articles, then began to focus on impressions of his Big Sur friends for a third.

Before I could finish taping personal interviews, the Gazette folded, having accomplished its Miller-blessed aim of fighting increased Federal involvement in this coastal wilderness where he had experienced such a deep and lasting connection with the cosmos.

But I kept right on taping. Miller’s friends were not only interesting to me for story purposes, they were becoming part of my regular social interaction. I was learning that they, too, had broken out of urban cultural molds to seek a deeper life amidst unspoiled, rugged beauty. Here they, too, had discovered a landscape so perfectly balanced between extremes that there was no need to develop or change it. Instead, they could work on improving themselves and being kind to each other.

As for Miller, these friends came to different conclusions about him, variously describing him as a motor mouth, a jolly monk, an arch bohemian, a beautiful square, a venerable sage, the world’s worst lover and the spirit of Big Sur.

However, no one saw him as guru to any Big Sur cult of sex and anarchy, something writers for popular publications had touted him to be.

Just the opposite. This dark horse of American letters—this Baudelaire from Brooklyn and Paris whose books, along with the writings of his mentor, D. H. Lawrence, were largely responsible for reversals in laws regarding explicit sex in literature—seldom talked about sex while he lived in Big Sur.

Friends agreed that he just "didn’t give a damn for sex and all that business» anymore. To them, he was an entertaining, companionable good neighbor who indulged his children and had trouble keeping women. He was addicted to marriage (there were two legal unions before Big Sur, two in Big Sur, and one after) but failed as a husband.

After settling in Big Sur, he eschewed labels like «writer» and «intellectual»—even «bohemian»—and saw himself, instead, as an «artist.» In The Air-conditioned Nightmare he defined an artist as primarily one who has faith in himself. He does not respond to the normal stimuli: he is neither a drudge nor a parasite. He lives to express himself and in so doing enriches the world.

He perceived the artist as single-minded in his consecration to a task and his work as the prayerful offering he makes each day to the Creator.

In Big Sur, he expanded his definitions to include any person who passionately longs to sing, to dance, to play, to laugh, to create, or, in his case, to simply celebrate life in accord with the deepest wisdom of his heart, recognizing his spiritual linkage with everyone and everything that is.

He felt that a Dostoevskian artist like himself (who positively swarmed with opposing elements) hungers beyond the norm for experience, spiritual as well as carnal. Consequently, he explained, the artist’s relentless thirst for fulfillment, for an isolated union with the universe, emerges with an unusually painful, even discordant clarity. He detected a quintessential element in the artist that seeks a unifying force beyond the yin/yang of sex which no mortal love can completely satisfy.

Viewed in this way, Miller’s writing—beginning with the crass caricatures of his youthful escapades—becomes a paean to our tragicomic earthly life. He believed that any truth, no matter how ugly or banal it may seem, must be accepted as an aspect of Nature’s infinite wisdom and creatively transformed.

His artistic outlook may have boded well for his own self-realization, even for friendship. But it precluded lasting conjugal contentment. Friends revealed that Henry Miller was no sexual agonist while he lived in Big Sur.

As for his being part of a cult of anarchy, they suggested that if anarchists are defined paradoxically as communities of isolated folk who prefer mutual aid and voluntary cooperation to the censoring and dictation of politicians and outsiders—or as cooperative individuals following the laws of their own nature—then Miller was an anarchist.

More importantly, they saw him as a consummate raconteur, a