Henry Miller and The Pull of Gravity

Nothing [sic] here has value or durability, not even the skyscrapers. Sooner or later everything gets scrapped.

“. . .even the skyscrapers”? How bitterly ironic those words in the face of 9/11! Those who flew planes into the Twin Towers also saw skyscrapers as America’s visible symbols. Had Miller been alive to witness the carnage, how might he have reacted? Would he have joined the America-hating vultures who gleefully crowed, “We had it coming!”? Or would he have directed his outrage at the murderers who had snuffed out the lives of some three-thousand sentient human beings? Perhaps unfair questions; I doubt that Miller, notwithstanding his life-long grudge against America, would have justified such an act. Here is another passage from The Cosmological Eye:

Until this colossal, senseless machine which we have made of America is smashed and scrapped there can be no hope.

Since that collection of essays was published in 1939, one might excuse such an outburst. But even after the Holocaust, after Pol Pot’s killing fields, after the murder of millions by Communist China –estimates range between 30,000,000 to 70,000,000 since 1949; 20,000,000 in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s dictatorship-Where is the comparable outrage for those truly worthy of it? In all of my readings of Miller, I have yet to run across the word “genocide.” (The deliberate and systematic extermination of entire national, racial or religious groups). That may be unfair (to Miller), for those histrionics aimed at his country were made before the Nuremberg Trials, before the jurist Raphael Lemkin had coined the word in 1943. But then Miller’s war with America antedated the larger war.     

Like so many on the Left-although in fairness, Miller never identified himself as a member of the left–he suffered from a misplaced compassion. One iconic victim-figure whom Miller saw as deserving his sympathy was Bud Clausen, an ex-convict.
Bud was not a heartless killer. He did his best not to kill, if I am to believe his story [italics added]. He was weak and vain-like most of us. He had done a bit of thieving first, not anything however to compare with the operations of our illustrious industrial magnates, our bankers, politicians, and colonial exploiters.

“He did his best not to kill,” implies that in spite of “his best” efforts (not to kill), he was impelled to kill-or, more precisely, to murder. But like a good defense attorney, Miller mitigates the crime: Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner: Clausen killed in “self-defense,” a tired legal ploy and a perfect example of an inversion of values: the killer kills reluctantly  (“He did his best not to kill.”). Then he is favorably contrasted with a prison guard (unfavorably), who is the embodiment of the evil “soul of anaesthesia:” 

[The guard is] a man, and I say it calmly and soberly, whom I could kill in cold blood. I could shoot him down. . .as if I had just brushed a mosquito off my arm. . . . He was a killer, a man who hunts down human prey-and accepts money for it. . . . I hate him and all that he stands for. I hate him with an undying hatred. . . . Law and order! . . [W]hen you see it staring at you through the barrel of a rifle, you know what it means.”

Is that a harmless blowing off of steam? A murderous fantasy summoned up to assuage some deep-seated frustrations? I suspect this is largely rhetorical overkill (pun unintended); but even when Miller launched such an outburst, he had no personal knowledge of the man he was demonizing. Could he have ever found it in himself to see the guard as a human being doing a thankless job? A man who was a husband and a father with a wife and kids? This is where (leftist?) values already decided the issue: the guard becomes a symbol of the hated system, an early example of moral equivalence we would see more of during the Cold War. i.e., America is as culpable in its aggression as communist Russia. Worse, since Clausen killed “only reluctantly,” whereas the prison guard accepted money for it, the guard becomes the metonymy for all mercenary evil. 

In one prison–[Miller tells us…(Has he been in more than one?} ] –Clausen fell in love with a woman who was also an inmate. They were never able to speak to one another, never able to touch finger-tips even. Now and then a note was smuggled through. For five years it went on. The woman had killed her children with an axe-that was her crime. She was a beautiful woman with a soul. It was not she who slew the children, but the sharp blade of the axe. . . .What a wild, hopeless, tormenting agony love can be under such circumstances.”

The whole passage reads like a macabre, surrealist joke. Be that as it may, let’s extract two short segments:

I thought, as we pulled into the harbor, that the sight of the skyline would have its effect on me. After all, I was born here, right close to the river, and I grew up in this changing skyline. I had a right to expect some little thrill, some pull, some vestige of lost emotions. But no, I saw [that skyline] just as I have always seen [it] in the past-with a sinking heart.  

One can understand such embittered sentiments, given Miller’s memories of the harsh life of his early years. But what a contrast to those millions who saw in that skyline a land filled with hope and freedom! For them, Emma Lazarus’s lines, “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . .” within the Statue of Liberty, were not empty words; they expressed the yearnings of millions who fled persecution and death.

There is a seamlessness between Henry Miller’s antipathy for America and his pacifism, passionately demonstrated in his anti-war screed, “Murder the Murderer-1941, 1944,” later included in Remember to Remember (1947).In going back after so many decades to that “Excursus on War”–I was twenty-six when I first read it–I am amazed how readily I accepted his most hyperbolic charges aimed at America then at war. For some 90 pages of about 35,000 words, the size of a small book, there are scores, if not hundreds, of passages that cry out for responses, but they are so numerous, so reckless, so embarrassing in their exaggeration, that it would take another  90 pages to respond to each. But here are a few, typical examples:

That was more the case in World War II than in World War I and certainly not the Vietnam War. When America entered the First World War in April, 1917, scores of anti-war groups went into action; some were religious pacifists; others like the Socialist Party and the IWW were political. As American casualties mounted, The People’s Council of America held an anti-conscription rally in Madison Square Garden; it drew some 20,000 protesters. (“impossible to dissent”?) In 1918, Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs agitated against the war and was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917. He went to jail in 1919, ran for President while in jail, and received almost one million votes. (He did not serve out his ten-year sentence, but his time was commuted by President Harding in 1921.) 

Emma Goldman and Charles Schenk were also convicted under the same Act–in Goldman’s case for founding the No Conscription League whose aim was to hamstring the application of the Selective Service Act of 1917 (the draft). Charles Schenk, like Goldman, was arrested under the provisions of the Espionage Act and charged with distributing flyers to draft-age men; these bore detailed instructions on how to avoid the draft. While Goldman, Schenk, and Debs were high-profile cases that drew attention, it needs to be conceded that there was an over-zealousness to prosecute anti-war activists whose convictions would not have passed legal muster today. Miller’s claim that, once war is declared, dissent “is impossible” is belied by the many anti-war groups and individuals who spoke out against the war. Had the government attempted to prosecute every single protester, there would not have been enough jails to accommodate them. And, besides, cases like Schenk’s and Goldman’s were (unsuccessfully) appealed, all the way up to the Supreme Court.            
Miller again:

We know from previous experience that all [sic] the nations now engaged in this [Second World] [W]ar will emerge from it defeated.

However much we may detest the German way of life, as exemplified by the Nazi regime, [italics added] we cannot in all honesty pretend that ours is the only true way of civilization.

People often say. . . what would you do if you were obliged to live under Nazi rule? Frankly, I don’t know at this moment. . . . I don’t believe in crossing bridges beforehand. But there is one thing I do know. . .and that is I am not terrified of the idea. Some say. . .that you would never be allowed to write as you do if you were living under a Nazi regime. No doubt I wouldn’t. But then neither am I allowed to write such books in England and America.

But of course he would have been able to write such books: he just couldn’t publish them. O tempora! O mores! With time, attitudes change, That is not to say that the court battles Miller fought-as did James Joyce-were not necessary and not without merit. But the banned novels were eventually unbanned, to the advantage of Miller’s fame and fortune. And further, the claim that his fate under the Nazis would have been no different from how his life turned out to be in America begs a question that answers itself. Had he been a Jew, then having his work banned in Nazi Germany would have been the least of his problems.
We refused for years to recognize the one government which had taken the lesson of the [First World War] to heart and was endeavoring to bring about a more intelligent and equitable order of human society.

This, about a regime that had never been free of repression and terror. Even Miller’s idol, Emma Goldman, in her two years in Russia (1919-1921), came to see the Bolshevik state as worse than the hated Tsarist order it had come to replace. And when her high hopes for a free society had not come to pass, she and her companion, Alexander Berkman, left Russia, seriously disillusioned.

As a rebel and a free spirit, one would have thought that he might have supported such courageous Russian dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyovsky, Yuli Daniel, Natan Sharansky, and Andrei Sakharov to name a few. But after thousands of dissidents were exiled, shot, and starved in slave labor camps, their identities turned into non-persons-all of which Henry Miller had witnessed in his own lifetime!–there was not one word of outrage, no murmur of protest. If there was, it remained muted, drowned out by the greater decibel level of his anti-American rage. It would be voices like those of Whittaker Chambers, Milovan Djilas, Arthur Koestler, Walter Krivitsky, and George Orwell early on in Spain, to reveal to the world the nature of that “intelligent and equitable order of human society.”

The surest way to defeat Hitler would, in my opinion, be for Europe to surrender willingly. I go farther-I say let him have the whole world. Can you see what would happen to his grandiose ideas [sic] if there were no resistance? Hitler, or anyone who seeks power, is only a force as long as he is opposed. Imagine laying out the problems of the world before him [and expecting him] to solve them. The man would die of brain fever overnight.” [?]

What Miller assumes in this highly fantastic scenario was that Hitler was a rational being who would set out to solve “the problems of the world”-a pretty tall order, for any single mortal! But given what we now know about him, he would not have acted in any way other than what his “destiny” demanded of him. The end result would have been the same: many more Jews beyond the six million would have perished, as would hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs, and so forth.

I am for a complete fanatical and religious revolution. I don’t care how much blood is spilled, nor how many people are exterminated. I wouldn’t mind if half the earth were depopulated, if there sprang up a plague that strewed the earth with cadavers so that the very heavens stank. I think it would be a relief to have a genuine stench, a putrescent stench and not just the stench of SHIT [Miller’s capitalization]. . . .

Does this sound like a man who abhors violence? Or was that a harmless blowing off of steam? A gory fantasy summoned up to assuage some deep-seated frustrations? Personally, I have my doubts. If memory serves, from my two short visits with him in 1947 and in 1955, discussed in slightly greater detail in James Joyce Quarterly, Spring, 1999, he appeared to be a gentle person. But if he was just sounding off for effect, then one would think that enough time had passed since those words were written for him to have corrected for error. What is revealing is that, as late as 1980, pending the publication of The World of Lawrence, he allowed the passage to stand. By then, he had witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and Pol Pot’s killing fields, yet there is not even a footnote disclaimer to such an outburst. But if it was vintage Miller out to shock, that would not only be a bad joke but an assault on conscience, his own as well as ours.

One doesn’t need to gainsay the truism that war is not a good thing. But to deny the reality that there are times when a nation, like a person, has the right-indeed the moral duty–to defend itself, renders Miller’s pacifism not only immoral but dangerous.

Sam Bluefarb is Prof. Emeritus, Los Angeles Harbor College.

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