Henry
Miller’s
NEXUS
Digital
electronic transcription by John O’Loughlin
Transcription Copyright © 2023 Centretruths Digital Media
________________
CHAPTER
ONE
WOOF! Woof! woof!
Woof! Woof!
Barking in the night.
Barking, barking. I shriek but no
one answers. I scream but there’s not
even an echo.
“Which do you want – the East of Xerses or
the East of Christ?”
Alone
– with eczema of the brain.
Alone at last. How
marvellous! Only it is not what I
expected it to be. If only I were alone
with God!
Woof! Woof! woof!
Eyes
closed, I summon her image. There it is,
floating in the dark, a mask emerging from the spindrift: the Tilla Durieux bouche, like a bow; white, even teeth;
eyes dark with mascara, the lids a viscous, glistening blue; hair streaming
wild, black as ebony. The
actress from the Carpathians and the roof-tops of
Woof!
Woof woof! Woof! Woof!
I
shout, but it sounds for all the world like a whisper.
My
name is Isaac Dust. I am in Dante’s fifth
heaven. Like Strindberg in his delirium,
I repeat: “What does it matter? Whether
one is the only one, or whether one has a rival, what does it matter?”
Why
do these bizarre names suddenly come to mind?
All classmates from the dear old Alma Mater: Mortin Schnadig, William
Marvin, Israel Siegel, Bernard Pistner, Lousis Schneider, Clarence Donohue,
William Overend, John Kurtz, Pat McCaffrey, William Korb, Arthur Convissar,
Sally Liebowitz, Frances Glanty…. Not one of them has ever raised his head. Stricken from the ledger. Scotched like vipers.
Are you there, comrades?
No answer.
Is
that you, dear August, raising your head in the gloom? Yes, it is Strindberg, the Strindberg with
two horns protruding from his forehead. Le cocu manifique.
In
some happy time – when? how distant? what planet? – I used to move from wall to wall greeting
this one and that, all old friends: Leon Bakst, Whistler, Lovis Corinth,
Breughel the Elder, Botticelli, Bosch, Giotto, Cimabue, Piero della Francesca,
Grunewald, Holbein, Lucas Cranach, Van Gogh, Utrillo, Gaugain, Piranesi,
Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige – and the Wailing Wall, Goya too, and Turner. Each one had something precious to impart.
But particularly Tilla Durieux, she with the eloquent, sensual lips dark as rose
petals.
The
walls are bare now. Even if they were
crowded with masterpieces I would recognize nothing. Darkness has closed in. Like Balzac, I live with imaginary
paintings. Even the frames are
imaginary.
Isaac
Dust, born of the dust and returning to dust.
Dust to dust. Add a codicil for
old times’ sake.
Anastasia,
alias Hegoroboru, alias Bertha Filigree of
The
Imperial Orgy – The Vatican Swindle – A Season in Hell – Death in Venice –
Anathema – A Hero of our Time – The Tragic Sense of Life – The Devil’s Dictionary
– November Boughs – Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Lysistrata – Marius the
Epicurean – The Golden Ass – Jude the Obscure – The Mysterious Stranger – Peter
Whiffle – The Little Flowers – Virginibus Puerisque – Queen Mab – The Great God
Pan – The Travels of Marco Polo – Songs of Bilitis – The Unknown Life of Jesus
– Tristram Shandy – The Crock of Gold – Black Bryony – The Root and the Flower.
Only a single lacuna: Rozanov’s Metaphysics of Sex.
In
her own handwriting (on a slip of butcher’s paper) I find the following, a
quotation obviously, from one of the volumes: “That strange thinker, N.
Federov, a Russian of the Russians, will found his own original form of
anarchism, one hostile to the State.”
Were
I to show this to Kronski he would run immediately to the bug house and offer
it as proof. Proof of
what? Proof that Stasia is in her
right mind.
Yesterday
was it? Yes, yesterday, about four in
the morning, while walking to the subway station to look for Mona, who should I spy sauntering leisurely through the drifting snow
by Mona and her wrestler friend Jim Driscoll.
You would think, to see them, that they were
looking for violets in a golden meadow.
No thought of snow or ice, no concern for the polar blasts from the
river, no fear of God or man. Just
strolling along, laughing, talking, humming. Free as meadow-larks.
Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate
sings!
I followed them a distance, almost
infected myself by their utter nonchalance.
Suddenly I took an oblique left turn in the direction of Osiecki’s
flat. His “chambers”, I should say. Sure enough, the lights were on and the pianola softly giving out morceaux choisis de Dohnanyi.
“Hail
to you, sweet live,” I thought, and passed on.
A mist was rising over towards
Arriving
home I found her creaming her face.
“Where
in God’s name have you been?” she demands, almost accusingly.
“Are
you back long?” I counter.
“Hours ago.”
“Strange. I could have sworn that I left here only twenty
minutes ago. Maybe I’ve been walking in
my sleep. It’s funny but I had a notion
I saw you and Jim Driscoll walking arm in arm….”
“Val,
you must be ill.”
“No, just inebriated.
I mean … hallucinated.”
She
puts a cold hand on my brow, feels my pulse.
Everything normal, apparently. It baffles her. Why do I invent such stories? Just to torment her? Isn’t there enough to worry about, with
Stasia in the asylum and the rent overdue?
I ought to have more consideration.
I
walk over to the alarm clock and point to the hands.
“I
know,” she says.
“So
it wasn’t you I saw just a few minutes ago.”
She
looks at me as if I were on the verge of dementia.
“Nothing
to worry about, dearie,” I chirp. “I’ve
been drinking champagne all night. I’m
sure now it wasn’t you I saw – it was your astral body.” Pause.
“Anyway, Stasia’s OK. I just had
a long talk with one of the internees….”
“You…?”
“Yes,
for want of anything better to do I thought I’d run over and see how she was
getting along. I brought her some
Charlotte Russe.”
“You
should get to bed, Val, you’re exhausted.”
Pause. “If you want to know why
I’m so late I’ll tell you. I just left
Stasia. I got her out about three hours
ago.” She began to chuckle – or was it
to cackle? “I’ll tell you all about it
tomorrow. It’s a long story.”
To
her amazement I replied: “Don’t bother, I heard all about it a little while
ago.”
We
switched out the lights and crawled into bed.
I could hear her laughing to herself.
As
a good night fillip I whispered: “Bertha Filigree of Lake Titicaca.”
Often, after a session with Spengler or
Elie Faure, I would throw myself on the bed fully clothed and, instead of
musing about ancient cultures, I would find myself
groping through a labyrinthian world of fabrications. Neither of them seems capable of telling the
truth, even about such a simple matter as going to the toilet. Stasia, an essentially truthful soul,
acquired the habit in order to please Mona.
Even in that fanciful tale about being a Romanoff bastard there was a
grain of truth. With her it’s never a
lie out of the whole cloth, as with Mona.
Moreover, should one confront her with the truth, she does not throw an hysterical fit or stalk out of the room on stilts. No, she simply breaks into a broad grin which
gradually softens into the pleasing smile of an angelic child. There are moments when I believe I can get
somewhere with Stasia. But just when I
sense that the time is ripe, like an animal protecting her cub, Mona whisks her
off.
One
of the strangest blanks in our intimate conversations, for now and then we have
the most prolonged, seemingly sincere talk-fests, one of those unaccountable
gaps, I say, has to do with childhood.
How they played, where, with whom, remains a complete mystery. From the cradle, apparently, they sprang into
womanhood. Never is there mention of a
childhood friend or of a wonderful lark they enjoyed; never do they talk of a
street they loved or a park they played in or a game they enjoyed. I’ve asked them point blank: “Do you know how
to skate? Can you swim? Did you ever play jacks?” Yes indeed, they can do all these things and
more. Why not? Yet they never permit themselves to slip back
into the past. Never do they suddenly,
as happens in animated conversation, recall some strange or wonderful
experience connected with childhood. Now
and then one or the other will mention that she once broke an arm or sprained
an ankle, but where, when? Again and
again I endeavour to lead them back, gently, coaxingly, as one might lead a
horse to the stable, but in vain.
Details bore them. What matter,
they ask, when it happened or where?
Very well, then, about face! I switch the talk to
What
a charming, what a delightful world it can be, this world of lies and of
falsification, when there is nothing better to do, nothing at stake. Aren’t we wonderful, we jolly, bloody liars? “A pity Dostoievsky himself isn’t with us!”
Mona will sometimes exclaim. As if he invented all those mad people, all those
crazy scenes which flood his novels. I
mean, invented them for his own pleasure, or because he was a natural born fool
and liar. Never once does it dawn on
them that they may be the “mad”
characters in a book which life is writing with invisible ink.
Not
strange therefore that nearly every one, male or female, whom Mona admires is “mad”, or that everyone she detests is a
“fool”. Yet, when she chooses to pay me
a compliment she will always call me a fool.
“You’re such a dear fool, Val.” Meaning that I am great enough, complex enough, in her estimation
at least, to belong to the world of Dostoievsky. At times, when she gets to raving about my
unwritten books, she will even go so far as to say that I am another
Dostoievsky. A pity I can’t throw an
epileptic fit now and then. That would
really give me the necessary standing.
What happens, unfortunately, what breaks the spell, is that I all too
quickly degenerate into a “bourgeois”.
In other words I become too inquisitive, too picayune, too intolerant.
Dostoievsky, according to Mona, never displayed the least interest in
“facts”. (One of those near truths which
make one wince sometimes.) No, to believe her, Dostoievsky was always in
the clouds – or else buried in the depths.
He never bothered to swim on the surface. He took no thought of gloves or muffs or
overcoats. Not did he pry into women’s
purses in search of names and addresses.
He lived only in the imagination.
Stasia,
now, had her own opinion about Dostoievsky, his way of life, his method of
working. Despite her vagaries, she was,
after all, a little closer to reality.
She knew that puppets are made of wood or papier-mâché, not just
“imagination”. And she was not too
certain but that Dostoievsky too might have had his “bourgeois” side. What she relished particularly in Dostoievsky
was the diabolical element. To her the
Devil was real. Evil was real. Mona, on the other hand, seemed unaffected by
the evil in Dostoievsky. To her it was
just another element of his “imagination”.
Nothing in books frightened her.
Almost nothing in life frightened her either, for that matter. Which is why, perhaps, she walked through fire
unharmed. But for Stasia, when visited
by a strange mood, even to partake of breakfast could be an ordeal. She had a nose for evil,
she could detect its presence even in cold cereals. To Stasia the Devil was an omnipresent Being even in wait for his victim. She wore amulets to ward off the evil powers;
she made certain signs on entering a strange house, or repeated incantations in
strange tongues. All of which Mona
smiled on indulgently, thinking it “delicious” of Stasia to be so primitive, so
superstitious. “It’s the Slav in her,”
she would say.
Now that the authorities had placed Stasia
in Mona’s hands it behoved us to view the situation with greater clarity, and
to provide a more certain, a more peaceful mode of life for this complicated
creature. According to Mona’s tearful
story, it was only with the greatest reluctance that Stasia was released from
confinement. What she told them about
her friend – as well as about herself
– only the Devil may hope to know. Over
a period of weeks, and only by the most adroit manoeuvring, did I succeed in
piecing together the jigsaw puzzle which she had constructed of her interview
with the physician in charge. Had I nothing else to go on I would have said
that they both belonged in the asylum.
Fortunately I had received another version of the interview, and that
unexpectedly, from none other than Kronski.
Why he had interested himself in the case I don’t know. Mona had no doubt given the authorities his
name – as that of family physician.
Possibly she had called him up in the middle of the night and, with sobs
in her voice, begged him to do something for her beloved friend. What she omitted telling me, at any rate, was
that it was Kronski who had secured Stasia’s release, that Stasia was in
nobody’s care, and that a word from him (to the authorities) might prove
calamitous. This last was pish-posh, and
I took it as such. The truth probably
was that the wards were full to overflowing.
In the back of my head was the resolution to visit the hospital myself
one fine day and find out precisely what occurred. (Just for the record.) I was in no great hurry. I felt that the present situation was but a
prelude, or a presage, of things to come.
In
the interim I took to dashing over to the Village whenever the impulse seized
me I wandered all over the place, like a stray dog. When I came to a lamp post I lifted my hind
leg and pissed on it. Woof! woof! Woof!
Thus
it was that I would often find myself standing outside the Iron Cauldron, at
the railing which fended off the mangy grass-plot now knee-deep with black
snow, to observe the comings and goings.
The two tables nearest the window were Mona’s. I watched her as she trotted back and forth
in the soft candlelight, passing out the food, a cigarette always glued to her
lips, her face wreathed in smiles as she greeted her clients or accepted their
orders. Now and then Stasia would take a
seat at the table, her back always to the window, elbows on the table, head in hands.
Usually she would continue to sit there after the last client had
left. Mona would then join her. Judging from the expression on the latter’s face, it was always an animated conversation they were
conducting. Sometimes they laughed so
heartily they were doubled up. If, in
such a mood, one of their favourites attempted to join them, he or she would be
brushed off like a bottle fly.
Now
what could these two dear creatures
be talking about that was so very, very absorbing? And so excruciatingly
humorous. Answer me that and I
will write the history of
The
moment I suspected they were making ready to leave I would take to my
heels. Leisurely and wistfully I’d
meander, poking my head into one dive after another, until I came to
Was
it from contact with this atmosphere in which love and mutual understanding
ruled that Stasia evolved the notion that all was not well between Mona and
myself? Or was it due to the
sledgehammer blows I delivered in moments of truth and candour?
“You
shouldn’t be accusing Mona of deceiving you and lying to you,” she says to me
one evening. How we happened to be alone
I can’t imagine. Possibly she was
expecting Mona to appear any moment.
“What would you rather have me accuse her of?” I replied,
wondering what next.
“Mona’s
not a liar, and you know it. She
invents, she distorts, she fabricates … because it’s more interesting. She thinks you like her better when she
complicates things. She has too much
respect for you to really lie to you.”
I
made no effort to reply.
“Don’t
you know that?” she said, her voice rising.
“Frankly,
no!” said I.
“You
mean you swallow all those fantastic tales she hands you?”
“If
you mean that I regard it all as an innocent little game, no.”
“But
why should she want to deceive you when she loves you so dearly? You know you mean everything to her. Yes, everything.”
“Is
that why you’re jealous of me?”
“Jealous?
I’m outraged that you should treat her as you do, that you should be so
blind, so cruel, so …”
I
raised my hand. “Just what are you getting
at?” I demanded. “What’s the game?”
“Game? Game?”
She drew herself up in the manner of an indignant and thoroughly
astounded Czarina. She was utterly
unaware that her fly was unbuttoned and her shirt tail hanging out.
“Sit
down,” I said. “Here, have another
cigarette.”
She
refused to sit down. Insisted
on pacing back and forth, back and forth.
“Now
which do you prefer to believe,” I began.
“That Mona loves me so much that she has to lie to me night and
day? Or that she loves you so much that she hasn’t the courage
to tell me? Or that you love her so much that you can’t stand seeing her unhappy? Or, let
me ask this first – do you know what love
is? Tell me, have you ever been in
love with a man? I know you once had a
dog you loved, or so you told me, and I know you have made love to trees. I
also know that you love more than you hate, but
– do you know what love is? If you met
two people who were madly in love with one another, would your love for one of
them increase that love or destroy it?
I’ll put it another way. Perhaps
this will make it clearer. If you
regarded yourself only as an object of pity and someone showed you real
affection, real love, would it make any difference to you whether that person
was a he or a she, married or unmarried?
I mean would you, or could you, be content merely to accept that
love? Or would you want it exclusively
for yourself?”
Pause. Heavy pause.
“And
what,” I continued, “makes you think you’re worthy of love? Or even that you are loved? Or, if you think
you are, that you’re capable of returning it?
Sit down, why don’t you? You know, we could really have an interesting
talk. We might even get somewhere. We might arrive at truth. I’m willing to try.” She gave me a strange, startled look. “You say that Mona thinks I like complicated
beings. To be very honest with you, I
don’t. Take you now, you’re a very
simple sort of being … all of a piece, aren’t you? Integrated, as they say. You’re so securely at one with yourself and
the whole wide world that, just to make sure of it, you deliver yourself up for
observation. Am I too cruel? Go ahead, snicker if you will. Things sound strange when you put them upside
down. Besides, you didn’t go to the
observation ward on your own, did you?
Just another one of Mona’s yarns, what!
Of course, I swallowed it hook, line and sinker – because I didn’t want
to destroy your friendship for one another.
Now that you’re out, thanks to my efforts, you want to show me your
gratitude. Is that it? You don’t want to see me unhappy, especially
when I’m living with someone near and dear to you.”
She
began to giggle despite the fact that she was highly incensed.
“Listen,
if you had asked m if I were jealous of you, much as I hate to admit it, I
would have said yes. I’m not ashamed to
confess that it humiliates me to think someone like you can make me
jealous. You’re hardly the type I would
have chosen for a rival. I don’t like
morphodites any more than I like people with double-jointed thumbs. I’m prejudiced. Bourgeois,
if you like. I never loved a dog, but I
never hated one either. I’ve met fags
who were entertaining, clever, talented, diverting, but I must say I wouldn’t
care to live with them. I’m not talking morals, you understand, I’m
talking likes and dislikes. Certain
things rub me the wrong way. It’s most
unfortunate, to put it mildly, that my wife should feel so keenly drawn to
you. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Almost literary. It’s a god-damned shame, is what I mean to
say, that she couldn’t have chosen a real man, if she had to betray me, even if
he were someone I despised. But you … why, shit! it leaves me absolutely
defenceless. I wince at the mere thought
of someone saying to me – ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Because there must be
something wrong with a man – at least, so the world reasons – when his wife is
violently attracted to another woman.
I’ve tried my damnedest to discover what’s wrong with me, if there is anything wrong, but I can’t lay a
finger on it. Besides, if a woman is able
to love another woman as well as the man she’s tied to, there’s nothing wrong
with that, is there? She’s not to be
blamed if she happens to be endowed with an unusual store of affection, isn’t
that so? Supposing, however, that as the
husband of such an extraordinary creature, one has doubts about one’s wife’s
exceptional ability to love, what then?
Supposing the husband has reason to believe that there is a mixture of
sham and reality connected with this extraordinary gift of love? That to prepare her husband, to condition
him, as it were, she slyly and insidiously struggles to poison his mind,
invents or concocts the most fantastic tales, all innocent, of course, about
experiences with girlfriends prior to her marriage. Never openly admitting that she slept with them, but implying it,
insinuating, always insinuating, that it could have been so. And the moment the husband … me, in other words … registers fear or
alarm, she violently denies anything of the sort, insists that it must be one’s
imagination which invoked the picture…. Do you follow me? Or is it getting too complicated?
She
sat down, her face suddenly grave. She
sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me searchingly. Suddenly she broke into a smile, a Satanic sort of smile, and exclaimed: “So this is your
game! Now you want to poison my mind!” With this the tears gushed forth and she took
to sobbing.
As
luck would have it, Mona arrived in the very thick of it.
“What are you doing to her?” Her very first words. Putting an arm around poor Stasia, she
stroked her hair, comforted her with soothing words.
Touching scene. A little too genuine, however, for me to be properly moved.
The
upshot – Stasia must not attempt to go home.
She must stay and get a good night’s rest.
Stasia
looks at me questioningly.
“Of course, of course!” I say. “I wouldn’t turn a dog out on a night like
this.”
The
weirdest part of the scene, as I look back on it, was Stasia’s turn out in a
soft, filmy nightgown. If only she had
had a pipe in her mouth, it would have been perfect.
To get back to Feodor…. They got me itchy sometimes with their
everlasting nonsense about Dostoievsky.
Myself, I have never pretended to understand
Dostoievsky. Not all of him, at any
rate. (I know him, as one knows a kindred
soul.) Nor have I read all of him, even
to this day. It has always been my
thought to leave the last few morsels for deathbed reading. I am not sure, for
instance, whether I read his Dream of the
Ridiculous Man or heard tell
about it. Neither am I at all certain that I know who
Marcion was, or what Marcionism is.
There are many things about Dostoievsky, as about life itself, which I
am content to leave a mystery. I like to
think of Dostoievsky as one surrounded by an impenetrable aura of mystery. For example, I can never picture him wearing a
hat – such as Swedenborg gave his angels to wear. I am, moreover, always fascinated to learn
what others have to say about him, even when their views make no sense to
me. Only the other day I ran across a note
I had jotted down in a notebook. Probably from Berdyaev.
Here it is: “After Dostoievsky man was no longer what he had been
before.” Cheering thought for an ailing
humanity.
As
for the following, certainly no one but Berdyaev could have written this: “In
Dostoievsky there was a complex attitude to evil. To a large extent it may look
as though he was led astray. On the one
hand, evil is evil, and ought to be exposed and must be burned away. On the other hand, evil is a spiritual
experience of man. It is man’s
part. As he goes on his way man may be
enriched by the experience of evil, but it is necessary to understand this in
the right way. It is not the evil itself
that enriches him; he is enriched by that spiritual strength which is aroused
in him for the overcoming of evil. The
man who says ‘I will give myself up to evil for the sake of the enrichment’,
never is enriched; he perishes. But it
is evil that puts man’s freedom to the test….”
And
now one more citation (from Berdyaev again) since it brings us one step nearer
to heaven….
“The
Church is not the
Speaking
for myself, I must say that had I ever had any hopes, eschatological or
otherwise, it was Dostoievsky who annihilated them. Or perhaps I should modify this by saying
that he “rendered nugatory” those cultural aspirations engendered by my Western
upbringing. The Asiatic part, in a word,
the Mongolian in me, has remained intact and will always remain intact. This Mongolian side of me has nothing to do
with culture or personality; it represents the root being whose sap runs back
to some ageless ancestral limb of the genealogical tree. In this unfathomable reservoir all the
chaotic elements of my own nature and of the American heritage have been
swallowed up as the ocean swallows the rivers which empty into it. Oddly enough, I have understood Dostoievsky,
or rather his characters and the problems which tormented them, better, being
American-born, than had I been a European.
The English language, it seems to me, is better suited to render
Dostoievsky (if one has to read him in translation) than French, German,
Italian, or any other non-Slavic tongue.
And American life, from the gangster level to the intellectual level,
has paradoxically tremendous affinities with Dostoievsky’s multilateral
everyday Russian life. What better
proving grounds can one ask for than metropolitan
Though
millions among us have never read Dostoievsky nor would even recognize the name
were it pronounced, they are nevertheless, millions of them, straight out of
Dostoievsky, leading the same weird “lunatical” life here in