The Happiest Man Alive
A brief look at the life of Henry Miller.
No one came to the funeral. Instead of a fancy coffin there was a cardboard box. Before the body had been placed in the box, it was checked for jewelry. Rings and a wristwatch were removed and set aside. Then the lid was slipped over the top edges of the box. It wasn’t fastened in any manner.
The corrugated cardboard box was placed in a retort of refractory brick, whose color is a ghastly portmanteau of yellow, orange and brown. A switch was flipped and natural gas burners ignited. Inside the retort the temperature quickly rose to 2100 degrees centigrade. Confronted with such furious heat, the cardboard box withered instantly. Skin, fat, muscles, ligaments and tendons turned black and curled up like dry leaves. Then crumbled and fell. The large organs — lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, and stomach — boiled and turned to vapor in minutes. As the heat continued, the organic remnants fused with oxygen, forming a kind of post-human gas, which was sucked out through an exhaust system by the spinning blades of powerful fans.
Super-heated, gaseous particles of the famous man in the cardboard box spewed willy-nilly out of metal pipes into the atmosphere.
After 100 minutes of the hellish heat, the switch was turned off. When the retort cooled, the operator used a whiskbroom to sweep out what’s left: seven pounds of dry bone fragments. The bones were unceremoniously dumped into a grinding machine called a cremulator. The machine was switched on and heavy metal bearings rolled over the bones, pulverizing them until they resembled dry sand.
These granulated leftovers are called the ashes or the cremains.
Inevitably, not all of the leftovers were swept out. A little bit remained and mixed with the leftovers of previous and subsequent cremations. Sort of a human hodgepodge.
The ashes were poured into an urn and handed over to the next of kin.
The process was impersonal, industrial. A system of waste disposal called cremation.
The ashes, driven by car to Big Sur, California, were sprinkled out of the urn by hand, where the coastal breezes caught them and twirled them in a bright pavane for a moment. Then the powdered bones settled onto the surface of the cerulean blue Pacific waves, where they floated for a while, because of surface tension, and ever so slowly sank.
Once upon a time, the strewn ashes formed the skeletal infrastructure of Henry Valentine Miller, who called himself “the happiest man alive.” Raw and robust in physique, he was tall, slender, and gloriously ugly of face in an old-fashioned way. Which means photographers sought him out, as the resulting photos exposed a most decorative piece of work — a delightful, irregular clot of ebullient life.
Born in Manhattan, New York, Miller grew up in Brooklyn. For a short time he attended City College of New York, but dropped out because he found formal academics suffocating. Miller wanted to write, eat, drink, and fornicate. To live life like most people would, if they could only shed the itchy skin of sanctimony.
Miller moved to Paris in 1930, where he lived like a street person, sleeping on the floors of friends’ apartments, begging for food, scavenging and, of course, writing. The literary fruit of this lifestyle was Tropic of Cancer, a ribald, autobiographical novel that reads like an animated, graphic essay. Because of its overt sex scenes, honest language, and innovative style, no publisher in the United States would touch the book.
Published in Paris by Anais Nin, copies of Tropic of Cancer were smuggled into the United States. And Miller became the brilliant bad boy of underground literature. George Orwell called Miller “amoral, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.” Orwell was right, except Miller did not accept evil. Instead, he embraced life according to human appetites.
Miller moved back to America in 1940 and took up residence in Big Sur, California, painting, writing, and living off the European royalties of his books. Then Grove Press took a deep breath, girded up its loins and published Tropic of Cancer in the United States. Instantly banned as lewd, obscene, and lascivious, i.e., as pornography, lawsuits ensued, and the case finally landed on the doorstep of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court decided Tropic of Cancer was literature, not pornography.
Tropic of Cancer became an immediate, sensational bestseller. And Miller’s other books, because of the magnetic effect of success and sex, got caught in the vortex and sold very well. Miller made a lot of money.
While all the legal maneuverings were taking place, Miller, savaged by the media, who called him “the king of smut,” kept writing and living life to its full. Years later, when his talent betrayed him because of old age, vast amounts of alcohol and disinterest, Miller came to resent his designation as the king of smut. But there was little he could do about it.
A literary genius, Miller was also very sexual, chasing after younger women his entire life. Most of his romances failed because Miller needed to feel loved, and he felt loved when he was having sex. Modern psychotherapists would diagnose Miller as addicted to sex, but they see only symptoms, which are then identified as the problem. Henry Miller was not addicted to sex. He was addicted to love, like most of humanity. He simply didn’t know where to find it, how to find it, or how to recognize it when he bumped into it. Like a puppy that wants to play, but doesn’t know how, Henry wanted to love and be loved. That he failed is not unusual — most of us do. The cause for celebration is this: he tried!
Married five times, and almost a sixth, Miller had numerous romantic liaisons during his life, many with super-beautiful women. Anais Nin was one such goddess with whom Miller dallied.
Miller’s writing style was individual and distinctive: flippantly obstinate stream-of-consciousness, hectoring and reckless, reflecting impropriety and bad faith, and shimmering in sensuous colors. Miller despised what he called “literature,” as a kind of disease of the mind. Instead of literature, he wrote his vision, that which he discerned and intuited. The result was a kind of controlled babbling, which, in the end, while pleasant and provocative, turned out to be the highest type of literature. Despite his protestations, Miller composed intense, erudite prose by simply tossing it off, like a series of afterthoughts.
Henry Miller the human being is almost more interesting than his writings. In a sense, then, for Miller life was a pretext for writing, and writing was a pretext for living life. The two were inseparable. And perhaps that’s the way it should be. I know this for sure: like biblical King David, he had a great capacity for life. Which, of course, translates into a great capacity for imperfection, too. When he failed in life, Miller had his writing to return to, and when writing proved too much, he came back enthusiastically to women, painting, booze, and ping-pong.
He was the happiest man alive, for one simple reason: he realized he was a man, not a demi-god attempting to achieve perfection.
