The World of Henry Miller

You You You You

You You You You You You

You You You

You You You You You You because one did the day before is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. To paint is to love again, live again, see again. It's only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. My book is the man that I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying diabolically truthful, man, that I am. Lawrence Clark Powell, librarian and writer, whom I first met in Dijon

when I was an instructor in the Lise Karnel, a very dear friend and a very understanding critic of my work. Annie Sninn, author of the now famous diary, an inspiration to and a protector of so many striving artists, including yours truly Henry Miller. Lawrence Darrell, author of the Alexandria Quartet and other well-known books, came to see me in Paris at about the age of 23 or 4 as a young writer and who has remained an everlasting friend. Jill Gray, ex-pog, veteran actor, boon companion. In any great society, there ought to be room for those who disagree with the views of society that they should be able to live on the fringe, these people who don't believe.

If the society is a great one, what does it to fear from a few men who are in disagreement with it? Why don't you let these men refuse to do all the things that you think are necessary and important? Be their own life. What home can that be to a society? Maybe a great deal of good, you know? His first books earned him little more than the title of High Priest of Upsenity and Universal censorship. Now at 77, after years of defiant struggle and ceaseless creative output, Henry Miller works and lives comfortably in Southern California, having one universal acclaim has a great writer, a great liberator. His many books he says are but a history of himself and of his world, the world of a diabolically truthful and most unamerican American.

All of my correspondents, existing manuscripts, notes and memorabilia, I said to you one time when I'd come up, what's that card in there? Why you said that's a bunch of incoming stuff that I'm going to have to burn, get rid of, I'm being swamped, I said let me take it. I remember, I know it, and I just began to come up periodically and take it, now I got it, it's a Colossus of UCLA, it seems to me, oh yes, finally Henry, will you please, finally, oh yes, traffic, let me get out my glasses, I want to see what we have here in jurisdiction, oh God, so sheet of wallpaper, where did you buy these papers Henry, where did you get

these papers, oh this must be the cast of characters for what days, is Capricorn, Capricorn plan, it's a plan for the field of Capricorn, ideas, obsession, descriptive bits, the old neighborhood, Cezanne settings, fathers, styles, style, what's he now, what's he, for Zerksy's society, see you get me, you see what a cunning bastard, and I want you to say a cheat and want to, still I'm thinking what style I can use, not my own, do you understand, not me, Hansen, Holy, Harris, Tagore, Spangler, Anatol Frones, Somerset Mont, those passos, Singer Saul and Tolstoy, Roma Rolong, Kropotkin, Sinclair Lewis for rantings, for rantings, branding you know, Drieser for desertion theme, Sherwood Anderson for the yearnings and

introspection, how do you like that, that hits me, I don't remember all this, Henry Miller, what for what, what was left, yeah, yeah, what a welcome, yeah, I had made one attempt to write in a little broken pencil, what's can you imagine, and I wrote a page and gave it up, I said I never would be able to write, well, but nevertheless it was in there, in me, in stories, in novels, I'm writing as I walk dialogues with characters, and I can remember, I could say, I wrote several books in this period that I worked for my father because I did the same thing at night, I walked back again down to that station, do you know, this meant I walked through the bowlery too, part of the way, do you know, and Union Square and all those Madison Square Garden, which is a beautiful building then, do you remember? And then on that war call, so I stopped at a certain shop, a framing shop where I saw, or where I got interested in painting, because there I saw my first Japanese prince,

it used to stand, and I saw reproductions of Shagal, you know, and your trio, and Matisse and all that, that was my first really beginnings of interest in painting, do you see, no, well it's time, you know, I think that I'll never be a writer, but I was reading all the current writers of the day, don't you know, friends there remember that John Despacos was quite a name, I think, then already, but he was not much older than me, or maybe, same age, and already he had made it, he had been in the war, and he had written a book about the war, do you recall? And I used to read these minutes, say to myself, Jesus, I think I could do as well as that, you know, but never, never do it. And I'm trying to think then how did I really, oh yes, this is a long while then afterwards, let's see, all right,

I'm still working for my father, I married, my first marriage, remember, how to child, and then at night I would come home, I had that big desk, this roll top desk, you know, which is a pigeonhole desk. This was the desk which had been in the old man's telling establishment for the last 50 years, which had given birth to many builds and many groans, which had housed strange souvenirs in its compartments, and which, finally, I had filthstromed him when he was ill and away from the establishment. And now it stood in the middle of the floor, in our huge, legurious pallor on the third floor of a respectable brownstone house in the dead center of the most respectable neighborhood in Brooklyn. And I put all the extra chairs we had around it in a circle, and then I sat down comfort ably, and I put my feet on the desk and dreamed of what I would write if I could write.

All the pigeonholes were empty, and all the drawers were empty. There wasn't a thing on the desk or in it except a sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much as a pot hook. I would sit there then and write at night, you know. There was nothing any good. I don't think I even, I never even tried to sell any of that stuff, you know. But I was, I was married a few years, I guess. When finally I ran into this Mona in my books in the dance hall, and she used to say to me, look, give up that job, start to write, you know, she pushed me into it. And one day I did quit. I quit like that. Just came in the office one morning. There were 40 or 50 applicants for messenger jobs, and I had my assistant. I said, you tell the boss I'm quitting, and I don't want

my salary. There was two weeks, so I don't want anything. I want to get out. And I walked out with a little briefcase with my, I never got, I walked up Broadway feeling like the happiest man, that I'm no longer going to work for anybody. That was my idea. Now I'm going to write, do you see? But that was a beautiful walk, looking at all these poor bastards who are working, struggling, selling things, buying things, you know. But then began my ears, ten years of misery, you know, trying then to sell my work. But as I say, that this desire to write must have been strong in me from way back, you know. But I had no confidence in the ability to write. That was the thing. I had absolutely no confidence. Very strange thing. So I began, you know, by writing, or I thought I would start like exercise, and I'd write about things I was interested in, people, events. I'm a patriot

of the 14th Ward Brooklyn where I was raised. The rest of the United States doesn't exist for me except as ideal or history or literature. At ten years of age I was uprooted from my native soil and removed to a cemetery, a Lutheran cemetery, where the tombstones were always in order, and the wreath never faded. But I was born in the street and raised in the street. The post-mechanical open street, where the most beautiful and hallucinating eye in vegetation, et cetera, born under the sign of aries which gives a fiery, active, energetic and somewhat restless body, with Mars in the ninth house. To be born in the street means to wander all your life, to be free. It means accident and incident, drama, movement. It means above all, dream, a harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your

wandering a metaphysical setitude. In the street you learn what human beings really are. Otherwise or afterwards you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived. That is to say, literature. I go to meet people. I visited the editor of Funk and Wagon Stictionary. Do you see? Rhoda, an article along, beautiful, about words which I sold to Liberty magazine, that five cent magazine. They liked me there. They almost gave me a job as assistant editor. But they paid me and they paid me all. That was fabulous. I think I got $300, which was a big sum in those days, but they never printed it. And I would ask every now and then, it's too good. They said, too good. Finally, I caught on to the idea of, you know, there were magazine like snappy stories and thing. You remember

those that were like our playboy thing in a way today. I wrote one or two, I had no luck. I got on to the idea. I should send my wife who was beautiful, send her in with these things. And of course, then they sold. After I sold to her three, I thought, why should I write the new thing? I'll go to the back files, ten years, twelve years ago, pull out their own story and change the beginning and end and the names of the characters. I'd sell it to them. This is what they love. Who is their own stuff? I like to think that we had every letter written to you, but no. Oh, no. I remember two big burnings. One in big, so when I got married to Lebska. Oh my God, I can't stand it. Yes. And I told her to pick, select the good letters only for the, and you know what? But I meant by good letters, one of the ones from Eddie, it's Chris Watson. Those were the interesting

things. She takes them from the professors. The librarians. Yeah. I said, weren't, did I bring them? I could have killed it. I know, but I got a lot of survived. Oh, yes. They're more coming all the time. But the girl, you never, those survived. You see, the girl. There's a wonderful story, isn't there? Of course, he kept them. Yeah. He kept them and you kept them and all the girl letters. You kept them. You sent her early. Oh, listen, I've often thought, though, Larry, that it would be interesting not to have these letters from famous friends who have become fans, but from nobody. A letter to Larry Dirl from Big Sur about influences in my life. It should have been an eye-opener for you to read that chapter in the books in my life. At various times, you've credited me with a live interest in certain writers and thinkers who to tell the truth were only passing fancies.

My loyalty and admiration, or adoration rather, have been constant for the same men all throughout my life. Whitman, Emerson, Thorol, Ravele, above all. I still think that no one has ever had a larger, freer, healthier view of man and his universe than Walt Whitman. There was always Lawatse, even before I had read him. He stands there at the back of one's head like the great ancestor. Old Adam Cadmus. What's all the fuss about? Take it easy. Sit down. Don't get quiet or get quiet rather. Don't think. Think. And from him, the line of Zen masters, which I only got wise to, from the Villasurra days on. When you walk, walk, when you sit, sit, but don't wobble. Of all the writers, there's funny thing. There are greater writers in my experience than Cunhamson, but he's the

one who seemed to have touched me the most, and influenced me. I keep talking about him all the time. All the time. His women are wonderful to me, and they're all of a kind, of the same kind, I would say. They are taught to him. They've been loved with him, and yet they don't surrender to him, or maybe momentarily, do you know, and that's all. They're always the unattainable ones that he's got, you know. For his entry in the expatriate directory, Americans abroad, he wrote. Born New York City, 1891, no schooling, hobo, and wanderer. In my spare time, I practiced st. Hood, came to Paris to study vice. Before Avonio Anatole, France, Clichin, April 1932, dear Amel, no, I don't want to return

to America. Nothing but a catastrophe can make me go back. This is my world, and I knew it long, long ago, and I only regret it took so long to make the decision. One a different being I would have been, if at 21 I had gone to the Sorbonne, or to Wild Heidelberg, or to Saville, or Madrid, anywhere but City College. However, it hasn't been too late. I will never become a European, but thank God I am no longer an American. I am one of those things you call an expatriate, a voluntary exile. I have no country, no frontiers, no taxes to pay, no army to fight for, and I adore France. It's getting to the point where I will actually have to earn a living.

Dear Mr. Miller, it is my painful duty to inform you that your services will no longer be required. I tell you frankly that you haven't grasped the job. Perhaps you are temperamentally unfitted for a job, dealing almost entirely in figures. I feel now exactly as all the great vagabond artists must have felt. Absolutely reckless, childish, irresponsible, unscrupulous, and overflowing with carnal vitality, vigor, ginger, etc. Things on the border of insanity, due to worry, hunger, etc., but shoving along day at the day. All during this Paris period, prior to tackling Capricorn, I had been enjoying, if I might put it that way, the effect of other men's writing. I was open to any and all influences, especially from the French. I was writing in my head constantly, as they

might write, I mean. I was a literary man. I might have written books and not the story of my life. But I remember a topic of Capricorn. It began on the Ovarian trolley, and I intended to write two or three volumes under the title Capricorn. Then I forgot. It was an interrom, and I forgot what I was going to do. You didn't forget because you didn't make a list. My God, if I pile all the list, you've made end to end. What is that now? One of those Paris novels. Yeah, Paris. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of thing. I don't know when you ever got time to write because you were all spending your time making a list. Things to do, words to use, pranked, kibosh, shlamazel, plummocks. Books to read, places to go. And yet, listen, I want to remember about that whole Paris existence is I had more

time than I have here in America. I had more time, and I did more things, and I fooled around more too, and wasted time. But it was a wonderful waste of time, you know. And another life of misery begins, but on a different level, and with a different ambience entirely, misery compounded with joy. Here I make the best friends in my life. I had two, especially good boom companions who are still alive, still writing, and we are still writing one another. That's Lawrence Dole and Alfred Pérez, whom I call Alf always. Author of a number of books in French, German, and English. And who saved my life when I was at the point

of returning to America or committing suicide. And of course, there was a third person, perhaps more important than the two of them in my life, and that was Annie's Nin. Annie's had a home at Louisien, an old village, about an hour distant from Paris, by bicycle, beautiful home, on what was formerly the estate of Marie Antoinette, was a charming place. And you gave me great help, I remember, because you used to go over my early scripts, you remember, and say, look, don't put all of that. That isn't necessary. And you used to have to fight with me about it, because I thought it was important. I thought everything was important. Now you know, if I could, if I had the power, I would reduce everything. I would write the smallest books, if I could, if I had, I appreciate them, you know.

But you turned out to be right, because everybody was more worried about what I left out than what I put in. Oh, that's a good point. That's it, yeah. In the last few years, one sees quite a few, either writings about you or quotations from you, about dreams and the dream life. And I feel that they haven't really understood what you mean about this. I don't think you want people to be living in a dream state while a conscious, do you, I'm walking around or did you be? No. But you mean that the dream has its uses, its effectiveness in life afterwards? Yes. I meant something else. I meant that we could arrive at a state where what we dream at night would be like the blueprint for what we wish to fulfill, to reach. And if we understand the dream, then we know what the secret self is. And this secret self, we can, we can

fulfill. You know, I just finished this book about writing and the writers. And I said that if they would trust, if people could do this, if they trusted the artist to do the dreaming, you see. And then instead of taking drugs, they watched a painting for a long time or watched a mobile for a long time or trusted the artist or looked at a, you know, painting very deeply, that they would be set off on their own, their own dreaming. Instead of what they do now, trying to understand, you mean, with their intellect, the artist, if they just wanted. And I always give the example of dreaming about a houseboat and then getting it and then writing the stories and then living in it and then going on. This is from, from, first of all, a fantasy. Yes. Yes. No, you're right when you say people don't understand what I mean. And then when they say the dream like writing, you know, not in life. And I'm always trying to say it's related

to the life. It nourishes it. Yes. It frees us. I think one thing that they overlook very much in your writing, especially the diary writing is that a who can be more explicit and realistic than you at the same time. Right? You are that mixture of the two things. You're able to take this dream thing and the fantasy and then expose it through the characters and the events that appear in the diary. The diary should never give the impression I imagine that this is something concocted in an opium state, you know what I mean? And some do look at it. They're always asking, did these things really happen? Did she do these things? Do you see what I mean? Isn't that so? I know. Cleashing May 18, 1933. Dear Amel, night before in despair couldn't write doubts, failure, old age. Morning comes, the bulbs move, the earth grows. I don't think about any single

thing, but about all things at once. I want to show the world that not all the great surrealists are dead. I want a classic purity, where dumb is dumb and angels are angels. The Bible, Allah King James, for example, of the glorious death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flour, when a vocabulary of 20,000 words suffice to build a monument for all time. Well, here I am, I can write and I will write and nobody will deny me. I will write what no man dares to say and they can take it or leave it, but I think they will take it. But at any rate, I found my voice there in Paris and I wrote that book which, I guess, started all the trouble and the success of the same time. And that was the tropic of cancer. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There

are no more books to be written. This, then, this is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, man, destiny, time, love, beauty, what you will. I mean, did you have the title before the book? No, I didn't. All titles came later. Yeah, right. From where? From where? From where? Do you know, I spent many a sleepless night thinking of titles. Oh, I had hundreds of titles for books, do you know? And I don't remember how I stumbled on tropic of cancer. I can't think of it. But you were interested in astrology. Astrology, yeah. No. At the time, no. Astrology, then. Because tropic of cancer really means

that the zone from the equator, you know, on the Capricorn underneath it. Oh, yes, I remember. Now it's going back. I was much interested then. This was in Paris. I was very much interested in Chinese philosophy and the numbers. And I had read that great, great book, what Kaiseling called the most great, the famous book in the meditation. No, it's a book by which you, you consult this book and you get an answer. I see. Oh, the changes, yeah. I see. Yeah, right. Yeah. Now then, how does it come? Oh, yes. Then I begin to understand that the crab in China was an important symbol for the reason that it can move in any direction backwards, forwards, sideways. And that idea intrigued me very much. Then also, I thought, all right,

it's a cancerous world I'm dealing with. Do you see? Those things I did into it. Yeah, I remember. But it was a great find. It was a great title, wasn't it? Yeah. It proved to be, yeah. Many people said, all my titles are good, you know, generally speaking, they're all good. It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. 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. After cleashing, I moved into the villa Sarah, where I had a studio and some real comforts. The street itself was famous for hovering many well-known painters, sculptors, musicians. Here, I finished the

third or fourth revision of Tropic of Cancer, wrote Tropic of Capricorn, Max and the White Fagasites, Alayritu and New York, finished Black Spring, and began the Hamlet Letters with Michael Franco. I could always see you as the very young man who knucked up my door at the villa Sarah, you came in, you peaked in, you put your head in the door to crack, I can see you, you know, I grabbed you and hugged you, and you always remained at me like that. If you get to be suddenly years old and I'm 95 or 100% still, I think you're going to be very struck by his greeting, because after hugging me, he said, let me take a look at you. Then he pulls up my trouser leg and says, Christ, you're built like a tree. It's an original way of being greeted by the shadows. I remember that first impression was, he was like a boxer, he was, he wasn't exactly a fan of me, he was

heavier than that, yet he was light, but he had that light-footed quality, agility and everything, and a little bit of prognacity in his, which he still has in the chin. If you have to deal with publicism, yeah, well wonderful, he always struck me as a boxer. I got something rather urgent, I wanted to ask him, I couldn't sleep last night, and I took that book about suicide after bed, and I remembered all our conversations about Nijinsky's madness and so on and so forth, and I wanted his suicide, or the desire for a young man's feeling, or an elderly man, does one feel more and more suicidal or less and less as one goes on? I was more 20 and less now at 50. That's right. How did it work with that? You don't say, say it with me, yeah, except I could say that now and then there are a little interludes, if that's a revient, and it's terrible when it occurs later in my, the desire to commit suicide, but it doesn't last as long. You see when you're younger,

you could have this feeling, it could go on for weeks at a time, months, do you know what I mean? You're desperate and everything is black. Later in life, it comes quick, suddenly for no reason, it seems to me, but it also passes more quickly. Oh, that's my feeling. Did you have destiny? Choose a method? Yes, I had several methods in half, yeah. Drown was one idea, I tried that once, at the beginning. You tried it, yeah, and I tried taking the film, you know, I had a friend, a doctor who gave me the film to commit suicide, and to make sure that it worked, I opened up the windows wide, it was winter, the snow came in, I lay naked on the bed. He must have given me a sleeping pill. I thought he really gave me something to kill me. I took it, I went to the sleeping pill, I woke up, the snow was on me, and I didn't even have a cough. When you were driving,

did you occasionally select a tree? No, that I would never want to. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they said all these plain trees, which you will love and provide so much. Oh, I have such trouble, because sometimes when I'm little drunk and I'm driving, I mentally select one with my eye, and it's so terribly easy, and I have to slow down. I never had that feeling. I've never wanted to do that. I don't want any agony, any, uh, maimed limbs and whatnot. The arena at Neem, a Roman amphitheater, where the Christians of Old were crucified and fed to the lions. Imagine dying in this glorious arena at four in the afternoon in the presence of a hundred thousand crazy Roman sadistic monsters. I never believed people who said that, uh, the obsession of death, you remember that Frankl had and Lorne fells, and that you shared that, and I said,

no, I didn't think so, ever. You played with them in their own terminology, if you want, but you never were very concerned about that. Yes. Well, I tell you about destruction, the destruction of the world. But, well, what they were talking about really on these was death and life, which so many people can see death in life, because you know, I think. But you didn't know anything about that? No, but I become more aware of all the time, though. That there are people who are dead in life. And that's the only death. That's the real death. Not this death when you depart the body, but being dead while you're alive. That's, that's real death, I think. Oh, no, it's rebirth. German, old man. Oh, yes. Yeah. Art is always miraculous. The world of Lorne's a plan. My god, what's this? Oh, and let me tell you a little story about that. I got so involved, and I could not get him off my mind. It was an obsession. I read his books, and I read about him,

and I used to beg the powers that be. I'd rather have stopped dictating to me, but I'd made these big charts, and then I got so involved, I got lost in the forest, contradicting myself. I was all mixed up, and I decided to forget it. That was the only great failure that I ever had. See, the only book I never finished, you might say. Of course, I won't tell you another thing about all this. What is this, Michael? A lot of this came about through knowing utter rock. I must tell you that. Jesus, I was filled out reading his works, and the trauma of birth, you know, art and artist, all of the books he had. You were interested in rock, because he was an interested in history, and art, and anthropology, and art, and art. He wanted to sit in him as an analyst, you were interested in his knowledge. Yes, right, right. And in his failure as a human being,

you know, again, it was so tragic. I'll tell you one thing. You were got into this right, I think, through psychoanalysis, and from your talk, Eduardo, everybody's talked about analysis and dreams. I began to dream heavily. And that was those 50 pages. And then I learned how to wake up without losing the dream. This is an art and a discipline, and I discovered that. I've lost it again, but I can do it if I want. You learn how to wake up. You don't wake up. You don't open your eyes wide right away, and you know you've been dreaming when you wake up. You close your eyes slowly again, and you hold on to that last thread, and go back like into the labyrinth, trace it back to yourself. And when you got it all together, I'd get up out of bed, in my pajamas, record it, and not only record that dream, but all the associations that came up with it. And that was what

was more important. That was into the nightlife. And that's what this book is. This is a part of my dream book. Yeah, into the nightlife. You want to show it on the book? Yeah, that's a lovely painting. I walk along the oceanfront, the sand is torn with human clans waiting for someone. Well, that was all that dream. It is neither night nor day. This is a wonderful one. The blank pan is like a hamburger steak in a dreaming window. Let's find the painting. After ten years in Paris, just before a war has declined, I accept Lawrence Dulles' invitation to visit him in Corphew, Greece, where I spend a

few marvellous months again, perhaps the high peak of my life. When I returned from Greece, I immediately sat down and wrote the Colossus of Marousin, which I still think is my best book. In Japan and Greece, and also semi-completely different. But now, cat symbolists, the Colossus is available here. Oh, my God, that was. That was right. Yes, yes, yes. This is my own way of helping out. You can plot it in a way. He complains, but he really has, if you saw him today, he's completely unchanged. And his movements are predictable. 11 o'clock of process, he drinks five stoops of lesbianoso. Then he gets a little meal, a sort of semi meal. Before going on to a very much heavier meal at Zona, I was at two o'clock, and he gets all these literary problems settled quite easily. Tell me, there's one question here.

I was talking to Geekre about it the other night. He had a theory about why you haven't been back, because you know, every time I go back, they say, why the hell are you keeping me a little away? Why isn't he here with you? Why didn't you bring him? How can I bring him? I know, I know. Yes, well, I just... Geekre had a theory. What was it? I think there's unique experience of your head. It was indeed. It was a divine experience. It is the morning of the first day of the great peace, the peace of the heart, which comes with surrender. I never knew the meaning of peace until I arrived at Epidorus. Like everyone, I had used the word all my life without once realizing that I was using a counterfeit. Peace is not the opposite of war, any more than death is the opposite of life. The poverty of language, which is to say the poverty of man's imagination, or the poverty of his inner life, has created an ambivalence, which is absolutely false. No man can really say that

he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace. And without joy, there is no life. All diseases are our attachments. Be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages. Leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to, even if it be hope or faith, can be the disease which carries us off. Surrender is absolute. If you cling to even the tiniest crumb, you nourish the germ which will devour you. I think that you can't go back to a divine experience. That's right. That was a fear also that I had that I will never find against the same setting as it were. Also don't forget that when I did go back to America in the space of a

year or two, I am living in Big Sur, which was an American equivalent of Greece. Wonderful sun, the Pacific, the ocean, everything, forest, and quiet. I was a lone solitude. I had almost pre-cabination in America, which is America. Well now I think you can go back because now it is the past completely, isn't it? Yes. It's a question. Do I go back on my own legs or in a wheelchair? When I got back to America, I had that strange feeling that I ought to see my own country once again and look at it with fresh eyes. I'd been away practically 10 years and I want to see what America looked like and if I could like it because I had left it with no hope of having retained.

It happened then that my friend Abraham Ratner, the painter, and I would bought a cheap car and we decided to make the tour of America and all this is recorded in the book called The Air Condition Nightmare. The publisher's dummy of leaves of grass served as his notebook on the trip. Wherever I went, I saw nothing of interest that would hold me, make me want to settle there, seemed that everything was done the wrong way. It was a wrong attitude. Of course it's gotten more that way in my mind. The country really is going to hell in my opinion, don't you know? It's going rapidly. I think many people now see that. Even in the early days in the midst of relative calm and prosperity, I saw the worm in the apple like in this country. The wrong

slant toward life, I think. That's all materialism, the scientific trend, the importance of the business world, the domination of that world over everything, the lack of aesthetics, you see. Henry, I'll never forget the time. After the letter to the middle of public and the stuff began to come in the clothes. An artist who is non-commercial has about as much chance for survival as a sewer rat. I would be grateful for old clothes, shorts, socks, etc. I am five foot eight inches tall, weigh 150 pounds, love quarter-wise. And I went after you and he said, look my god, they sent me a tuxedo. God, you walked up and down, you were holding the garments like this, what am I doing with it? I said, where had I had some time? There'll be some of you. Be ready

when you're called, have your tuxedo on. You make it the call anytime. You said, no, I'll make a scarecrow of it. You'll dig it out, Brad, you'll hold it on the picket fence. I don't know. It was there for a generation. I don't know. Is that right? Yeah, there it was. The tuxedo scarecrow of Beverly Glen. But I'll tell you another thing about us tuxedo when I was in Paris with Fred Pérez. He had a tuxedo that he never wore, you see, 25 years. It was in good condition. And one night we were drunk, getting time for the men to collect the garbage. I said, let's put it in the garbage bay and see what happens. Wait and see, and sure enough, they came. Oh, I need to go. Oh, look, it's for me, Tom. Henry, do you suppose it was that tuxedo they sent to you? No, I don't. Well, who would send you a tuxedo? Was this it? Yes, I can imagine. I can. Well, they sent me canes and umbrellas, things like canes. All right, it makes sense. They sent every can, you know.

Henry, you used to say, look, now here's the list. I would stop by going to work. And you'd be out front. It was kind of like one of those pickups of the mail on the fast express, the sacks hung out on a hook. And the mail, the train goes by and the little hook from the train reaches out and snags it in. Well, I'd go by the on the way to work. And there you'd be holding the list out. And I wouldn't stop because I didn't want to be late for work. And so I'd snatch the list from you, go tearing down to work. And there would be this list of books. Bring me a book on on Exima. Bring me a book on the windows of Shaan. Bring me a book on the construction of wheelbarrows. Yeah. Oh, my God. Bring me a book on nitrogen as a secondary element. Bring me a book on the Plaspy God. Listen, you're a fiction writer. You're a you guy that's small as the way you talk about a tenth of this or a hundred is true. You know, I know I gave you a list. No, Henry, I'll tell you a funny thing. Henry, now wait a minute. Let me interrupt you.

You think I'm making fictions? I've kept all those lists. Oh, really? They're in the safe deposit box in the Westwood. Yes, all of this, you ever made it. It was at Powell's insistence that he wrote his book on books. On the cover, on the jacket of books in my life, I'll mention some of my favorite authors, Rambo, Emerson, Rider Haggad, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, A. Lee IV, Krishna Morting, Thorough, Strindberg, Walt Whitman, Emman Hesse, Lawson, Selene, Blessed Sandra, Jean-Giano, Marcel Proust, and so on. You are one of the few people I know, Joe, who buys books every week. You're showing me one, two or three books you have bought. You have a great collection. So I find a lot of inspiration and authors, certain authors, that have this quality too. I use the word heel or metaphysics,

or call it what you want. It takes the blows. You know that Jesus never wrote a line, so what they say, where we have only what is reported to have said. It's great because last forever everything he said. But you notice that so many people are reading books in the hope of getting it truth and getting inspiration and all that. I admire your ability to sit down in your pad alone there with your dog, Byron, and you can pick up a book and read it. Or you can sit and just sort of dream, going to a reverie. You don't have to have the television on or the radio or whatnot. And this is a great quality in you. One of the great books in my life is the second volume of Vossamon's Maurizius case. I bought a Dr. Cat Corbin. And this is my ideal analyst. And I found

out later in life that he's a composite of three men. One of them is young. And the second one is a Dutchman in New York. His name I forget. The third I don't remember. But they were based on three real individuals. Right. All analysts. And this was the great supreme analyst for me. Perhaps because he knew what service really was to mankind. And also because he was crucified. He was crucified by his patients. And this man was so wonderful, so great that they could not leave him alone. And they really destroyed his life. And this is the story of every great savior, I feel. Do you remember, too, that Ronc used to say, after a while, analysis will be like vaccinated against it. When so many people have had analysis, there won't be any demand for

it anymore, right? And our friend, you remember David Edgar, always said that the neurotic of today is the man of the future, at least the germ of that man of the future. This neurosis is a healthy thing. I don't know. That's paradoxical, too. What made me feel that the neurotic was like the romantic in the old days. He has a vision. He's only unhappy because he can't fulfill this vision. And you know, and he gets self-destructive. He destroys himself if he can't have what he wants. Yes. So it's the same as the romantic. Well, don't you think, too? The most important thing about it is that he cannot adapt to this world. And he should not adapt to it. Since it's a bad world, there are two ways of looking at that. Either you destroy this world, lock stock and barrel,

or you adjust to it in a way that you are detached from it. You're living it. That's how the orientals do it, if I don't read right, rightly. Or you transform it. Or you transform it, something with it. But you transform it only by your behavior, I would think. You don't transform by battling against the powers that be. That's a waste of energy. And you're putting yourself on the same level. No, I believe that. No. But I think you have to do all the metamorphoses that you can with as you did. Each one in himself, you mean? Someone wrote me a very amusing letter from Australia and said that you had rearranged his molecules. You had changed the direction of the molecules, which was a wonderful expression. No, that's why. That's being effective. You see, that is a chain.

I know. Now, this is the difference between the artists who doesn't want to analyze and make, you know, analytical relations. But I was interested in that. In analyzing. Not only analyzing, but in finding the same. In finding the same. You might say, wouldn't you, it's curative powers, you have problems. These are coming up in your dream. Like a bridge constantly to life. Right. And that I would always, in every novel, go back to what was the original dream? Yeah. And that's what fascinates you about analysis, which I didn't find so much in the oriental religions. They have in their legends stories of the seven rounds that you make on earth, you know, or any planet. And then the deadwood, I'm well, I'm not a phraser. I forget it now. Like it's like the deadwood remains and rots on this planet. And those who are alive, what is that thing from the Bible, the livens? The quick and the dead, the quick are transported

by, you know, spaceships to another planet. In other words, it's a matter of vision. It's a matter of awareness opening your eyes, seeing the world differently. After all, the only difference in lives is, is your point of view, how you look at the world. The world does not change. You change. And how do you change by your different attitude, whether you see it from downhill, like the frog, as Spengler said, all up above like the eagle, or still higher like the gods, do you know what I mean? That's the only difference there is to me. Because otherwise, everything is the same, yeah. No matter what you touch and you wish to know about, you end up in a sea of mystery. See, there's no beginning or end. You can go back as far as you want, forward as far as you want. But

you never get to it, the it, like it, the essence. Isn't that right? It remains. This is the greatest damn thing about the young right, that we can know somewhere, recognize someone, dissect, analyze, do everything and think, and we can't grasp it. And it's meant to be that way, don't you know? And there's where our reverence should come in before everything. The littlest thing as well as the greatest, the tiniest, the harshest, as well as the angels. Do you know what I mean? It's all mystery, all impenetrable, as it were, right?