SECTION TEN
sm
COLUMN FORTY-EIGHT, AUGUST 1, 1999
(Copyright © 1999 Al Aronowitz)
(Photo by Brenda Saunders )
THE SHAKESPEARE SQUADRON
(PART 3): MILLER
AND CÉLINE
HENRY
MILLER
Cosmos had to climb a steep hill to get to Henry
Miller's cabin. The country was
wild. He expected a javelina to
dart out of the bushes at him.
Miller was chopping firewood with no shirt on.
Short pants and Holy Land sandals. A
small man, but wiry. No fat on him.
A natural welterweight.
A
blivet, in fact: ten pounds of shit
in a five-pound sack.
"The
Plight of the Creative Artist in America---eh? Let
me see that. I bet not much has
changed."
Cosmos
gave him the pamphlet, which he flipped through, moving his lips as he read,
mumbling to himself, like Karl Childers.
"Come
up to the house," he said. "Do
you want a cup of tea?"
"Sure,"
Cosmos said.
* * *
"You
look a little down," Miller said, as he heated water on the stove.
"It's
my truck," Cosmos said. "It's
dying on me. And I need it to get
to work.
"I
owe my mother money, I owe the IRS, I need to get my teeth fixed.
"I
feel snowed under."
"Are
you writing well?" Miller asked.
Cosmos
admitted that he was. "Like a
hay baler," he said.
"Then
don't sweat the small stuff.
"The
death of a parent, divorce, an injury to a child, or terminal illness.
Those are things to fret about. The
rest takes care of itself.
"And
it doesn't do any good to worry about the big ones, either.
What's going to happen will happen anyway."
"I
know," Cosmos said. "It's
just my temperament."
"It's the Norwegian in you. Knut Hamsun was that way. But have you read A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings" A delightful book. It will blow your melancholy away like a gentle tropical breeze."
* * *
Cosmos
talked to Miller for most of the afternoon.
When he got home, he wrote the interview up, in the Q & A format he
felt comfortable with.
The conversation might not be verbatim, but it's pretty damned close.
* * *
Q:
What's happening downtown?
A:
You know what Jean Shepherd said. New
York is a city run entirely by lists.
Writer's Hell is New York City.
You're smart to stay up here, in the hills.
Let the mountain come to Mahomet.
Q: It worked for me. Over the
course of a writing life.
If you have to go to them, you're fucked.
Now, what's this about a job?
Nobody has a job up here. In
heaven.
A:
Down here. In hell.
Q:
It's the same place, my man.
A:
I always had a job. Or was looking
for one.
I couldn't sell my books.
And had a wife and family to support.
Q:
A menial job? Makeshift work?
A:
A responsible position. Professional
work.
Q:
That's bad. Doc Williams asked me
if he should quit writing, and concentrate
on medicine. I told him to quit practicing medicine, and concentrate on
writing.
A:
Ask a barber what you need, he'll say, "A haircut."
People advise you to do what
they are doing. Crad
Kilodney told me to sell self-published pamphlets on the streets of
my native town.
Q: I sold mezzotints, door-to-door.
A:
So did I. Everybody who wanted a
book of mine already had one. I
gave them
away. Hand's bookstore and the B.
Dalton in the mall didn't reorder, because
I was in competition with them.
Q:
So you did have a book published.
A: Screed. Vagabond Press. Forty. Popular
Reality. Common Sense, Full
Plate,
Blue Darter, Lost Writings, Evil Genius and Open Book.
Mixed Breed.
Q:
Jack Saunders wrote those.
A:
I'm Jack Saunders. I have to use
the name I, Cosmos to submit my work to
fiction contests like the Lorian Hemingway Short Story
Competition, in Key West.
Q:
Nice to meet you, Jack. I'm a fan.
I thought you were striking some responsive
chords.
A:
No shit! You're my hero.
Q:
It wasn't all for naught.
That's all we really have, is the people who come after us,
who understood.
Who can carry the ball from where we fell.
The rest is chaff.
A:
That's one of the things you said that meant the most to me.
That you'd have met
the people you needed to meet in your life, for your
spiritual journey, whether
you had published more widely or not.
I'd have met John Bennett and Crowbar, John M. Bennett and
Laurel Speer,
Roger Jackson and Bob
Grumman. David
Cole and Dion Wright.
Em McElderry and Jack Rudloe, in Panacea.
How big can Panacea be?
It's like Joseph Campbell hitchhiking out to
California, broke, and meeting John Steinbeck and Ed
Ricketts, broke. Going on a
collecting trip to the Northwest Coast with Ricketts
and being exposed to the art and myth up there.
Having studied art and myth
in Germany, and being
exactly ready to see what he saw, when he saw it.
Q:
The other thing I said was I brought all my troubles down on my own head.
By
not accepting the world on
its own terms. By
trying to change things.
We can't change anything.
We can't even understand. But
we can accept. With faith.
And charity.And
hope.
Why not hope? A
new day always dawns. Things are
the darkest just before the
pitch black.
Q:
How are your significant others doing?
A:
Brenda likes her job. She maintains
the computers in a prison.
She keeps chickens and has a garden.
A mulch pile. I'm helping
her buy the traile
she is living in, The
Empty Nest.
Balder's in a Marine Corps band in New Orleans.
He plays the trumpet in a
marching band, a
concert
band,
a swing band, and a combo. He plays
mandolin and guitar at bluegrass
festivals, on his own time.
He just got orders to go overseas, to Okinawa.
I went there, at that age. Okinawa
was my Paris.
I remember reading Big Sur and The Oranges of
Hieronymous Bosch on Okinawa.
Your major works
were still banned in America.
After Balder gets out, he can go to college on the GI Bill,
if he wants to. Like I did.
Or not.
Owen is playing fiddle with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. He gets paid even when
they don't play.
They're booked at all
the bigger bluegrass festivals, and he has fans, who come to
see him. The
band
appears on the Grand Old Opry, now and then.
Owen's on several of Doyle's CDs
now. A country
music singer offered him a job, but he turned it down.
In a bluegrass band, he gets
to show off his fiddling,
his singing, his repartee, with Doyle, in a way he
wouldn't playing the same lick
night after night behind some
light-show and sequin-costume, big-hat show-business
act.
Everybody's doing fine but me.
I want to sell a book.
Go on tour promoting my book. Be
interviewed. Give
lectures and appear
at writing seminars.
Win a grant, a major prize, or a writer-in-residence position at
a university.
Q:
The father in Christmas Story won a major prize. It was a lamp in the shape of
a woman's leg.
A:
Laughs.
I know.
Alternately, I want to work at my day job for ten more
years, pay off the
trailer, and my debts, retire
to Wewa, and write my memoirs.
Quit kicking at the traces.
Quit wishing I had something I don't have, or coveting what
somebody else has.
That I don't know what she had to do to get it.
Q:
Wish in one hand and shit in the other. See
which hand fills up faster.
A:
There you have it.
Q:
You see what you need to work on?
A:
Damned straight.
Ambition and desire. Competitiveness.
Q:
If you got a BB gun you'd probably shoot your eye out.
A:
One time at Port St. Joe, an old woman in a walker hobbled up and said,
"Stop that---you're digging up the Beasleys."
We were, too.
Chief hightailed it to the Navy base in Panama City the next
day.
He couldn't backfill fast enough.
It was goodbye yellow fever epidemic, hello C. B. Moore.
I've been digging up the Beasleys.
Time to backfill, and start over.
Move on.
Brenda's right. The
Plight of the Creative Artist in America was the same old whining. But
The Shakespeare Squadron has a lighter tone.
Same message, different
angle of attack.
Different
perspective. Different approach.
Q:
Arise, take up thy bed, and walk.
A:
Two-headed doctor, heal thyself.
* * *
LOUIS-FERDINAND
CÉLINE
Céline's apartment was dark, and smelled of cat
piss. Céline smelled of cat piss.
Cosmos only had a few questions for him.
What was there to ask? Read
the books, as Thoreau said.
It's all there in the books.
Wait a minute. Cosmos
is the interviewer (Q), Céline the interviewee (A).
Q:
Were you surprised that you were a character in Charles Bukowski's Pulp"
A:
No, I used to drink at Musso & Frank's, when I hung out in Hollywood.
With
Bill Faulkner and Pep West.
Those boys had serious drinking
problems.
Dashiell
Hammett fucking S. J. Perelman's wife. S.
J. Perelman fucking Lillian Hellman.
It was a regular Days of Our Lives out there.
I shot birds with Clark Gable and John Huston.
Hemingway.
Hemingway wasn't a bad wing shot.
We died the same day, you know.
His death got a bigger play in the press than mine did. The French press.
I rest my case. ##
CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMN FORTY-EIGHT
CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX
OF COLUMNS
The Blacklisted Journalist can be contacted at
P.O.Box 964, Elizabeth, NJ 07208-0964
The Blacklisted Journalist's E-Mail Address:
info@blacklistedjournalist.com
THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST IS A SERVICE MARK OF AL ARONOWITZ