Nostalgia

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  A short book, a simple book, profound perhaps, but carrying with it the smile of that old man from Pekin over my doorway. The smile of “above the battle.” Overcoming the world. And thus finding it. For we must not only be in it and above it, but of it too. To love it for what it is—how difficult! And yet it’s the first, the only task. Evade it, and you are lost. Lose yourself in it and you are free. How I love the dying words of St. Thomas Aquinas: “All that I have written now seems so much straw!” Finally he saw. At the very last minute. He knew—and he was wordless. If it takes ninety-nine years to attain such a moment, fine! We are all bound up with the Creator in the process. The ninety-eight years are so much sticks of wood to kindle the fire. It’s the fire that counts. To come back…. The child is alive with this fire, and we, the adults, smother it as best we can. When we cease throwing the wood of ignorance on the fire, it bursts forth again. Experience is an unlearning, an undoing. We must start from the beginning, not on the backs of dinosaurs—culture, that is, in all its guises. “Lime Twigs and Treachery”—that will be the title of a forthcoming book if I can ever get down to it. The title is borrowed from one of Brahms’“Waltz Songs,” so help me God, What matter? And now to close with a passage from Les Provinces de France , which I look at once in a while, nostalgically: “L’herbe n’a jamais repoussé sous les pas du cheval de Simon de Montfort, de sinistre mémoire…. Le talent n’a jamais refleuri, le génie est mort à jamais. II ne reste aux Languedociens, avec leur austere protestantisme, que des graces superficielles. Race à fleur de peau … “En somme, pour qui pense que la Haute Garonne est bien près d’être pyrénéenne, que l’Aude pourrait faire partie du Roussillon, Nïmes apparaït comme la véritable capitale du Languedoc, dans le Gard où tout est sobre et ordonné, où rien n’est plantureux, abondant, insolent, mais où tout… (je cherche le mot qui convient) … où tout est muscat.” Aliez voir Joseph Delteil à Montpellier un de ces jours. Ça vous fera, vous et Claude, du bien. Il peut vous parler des Albigeois—et mille autres choses, comme St. François, par exemple, ou le cimetière à Sète et l’esprit qui y trouve son sommeil tranquille, Paul Valéry. Salut a Frédéric Temple et au Pont du Gard. Je I’ai vu pour la première fois en 1928 quand June et moi ont fait un tour de France avec bicyclettes. Je n’oublierai jamais ma première vau de la Mediterraneé, des oliviers, des vignes, de tout un pays ensoleillé et sec et brillant comme une gemme . Ta-ta! Assez pour une séance .

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Sometimes, skeetering over the thin ice of a dark winter morning, the fierce wind carrying me along like an iceboat, I would be shaking with laughter over the events of the night before—just a few hours before, to be exact. This, the Spartan regime, combined with the feasts and festivities, the one-man study course, the pleasure reading, the argument and discussions, the clowning and buffoonery, the fights and wrestling bouts, the hockey games, the six-day races at the Garden, the low dance halls, the piano-playing and piano teaching, the disastrous love affairs, the perpetual lack of money, the contempt for work, the goings-on in the tailor shop, the solitary promenades to the reservoir, to the cemetery (Chinese), to the duck pond where, if the ice were thick enough, I would try out my racing skates—this unilateral, multilingual, sesquipedalian activity night and day, morning, noon and night, in season and out, drunk or sober, or drunk and sober, always in the crowd, always milling around, always searching, struggling, prying, peeping, hoping, trying, one foot forward, two feet backward, but on, on, on, completely gregarious yet utterly solitary, the good sport and at the same time thoroughly secretive and lonely, the good pal who never had a cent but could always borrow somehow to give to others, a gambler but never gambling for money, a poet at heart and a wastrel on the surface, a mixer and a clinker, a man not above panhandling, the friend of all yet really nobody’s friend, well … there it was, a sort of caricature of Elizabethan times, all gathered up and played out in the shabby purlieus of Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx, the foulest city in the world, this place I sprang from* —a cheese-box of funeral parlors, museums, opera houses, concert halls, armories, churches, saloons, stadiums, carnivals, circuses, arenas, markets Gansevoort and Wallabout, stinking Gowanus canal, Arabian ice cream parlors, ferry houses, dry docks, sugar refineries, Navy Yard, suspension bridges, roller skating rinks, Bowery flophouses, opium dens, gambling joints. Chinatown, Rumanian cabarets, yellow journals, open trolley cars, aquariums, Saengerbunds, turnvereins, newsboys’ homes. Mills’ hotels, Peacock Alley lobbies, the Zoo, the Tombs, the Ziegfeld Follies, the Hippodrome, the Greenwich Village dives, the hot spots of Harlem, the private homes of my friends, of the girls I loved, of the men I revered—in Greenpoint, Williamsburg.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘ Have you any idea what size your friend takes, say in gloves? Is her hand large or small do you think? ’ Stephen answered promptly: ‘It’s a very small hand,’ then immediately looked and felt rather self-conscious. And now the old gentleman was openly staring: “ Excuse me,” he murmured, ‘ an extraordinary likeness. . . . Then more boldly: ‘Do you happen to be related to Sir Philip Gordon of Morton Hall, who died — it must be about two years ago — from some accident? I believe a tree fell —’ “Oh, yes, I’m his daughter,’ said Stephen. He nodded and smiled: ‘ Of course, of course, you couldn’t be anything but his daughter.’ ‘ You knew my father? ’ she inquired, in surprise. ‘Very well, Miss Gordon, when your father was young. In those days Sir Philip was a customer of mine. I sold him his first pearl studs while he was at Oxford, and at least four scarf pins—a bit of a dandy Sir Philip was up at Oxford. But what may interest you is the fact that I made your mother’s engagement ring for him; a large half-hoop of very fine diamonds —’ ‘ Did you make that ring?’ ‘I did, Miss Gordon. I remember quite well his showing me a miniature of Lady Anna—I remember his words. He said: “ She’s so pure that only the purest stones are fit to touch her finger.” You see, he’d known me ever since he was at Eton, that’s why he spoke of your mother to me — I felt deeply honoured. Ah, yes — dear, dear — your father was young then and very much in loye Tokra] She said suddenly: ‘ Is this pearl as pure as those diamonds? ’ And he answered: ‘ It’s without a blemish.’ _ Then she found her cheque book and he gave her his pen with which to write out the very large cheque. THE WELL OF LONELINESS 189 ‘ Wouldn’t you like some reference?’ she inquired, as she glanced at the sum for which he must trust her. But at this he laughed: ‘ Your face is your reference, if I may be allowed to say so, Miss Gordon.’ They shook hands because he had known her father, and she left the shop with the ring in her pocket. As she walked down the street she was lost in thought, so that if people stared she no longer noticed. In her ears kept sounding those words from the past, those words of her father’s when long, long ago he too had been a young lover: ‘ She’s so pure that only the purest stones are fit to touch her finger.’ CHAPTER 22 I HEN they got back to Morton there was Puddle in the hall,

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Proust, the countryside made famous in the Côté de Guermantes . Van Eyck, the famous triptych in the Cathedral at Ghent. But the home of Rabelais, yes! The most idyllic countryside, as I glimpsed it from the window where his cradle once stood, I have ever laid eyes on. Across it had marched Joan of Arc, to meet the king. El Greco, on the other hand—I am thinking of Toledo—inhabited a doll’s house. All miniature rooms, and an alcove, off the dining room, where the musicians played for him as he ate. Around and about his dwelling the strongest, grimmest, severest city I have ever stepped into: Toledo. Rock and torture. Superstition, pomp, cruelty, ignorance, intolerance. And then the cloister in the forest outside Brussels, where Ruysbroeck lived. How serene, how ordered, how noble and silent and grave! A forest entirely of beeches, if I remember right. And then Bruges. The most alive of the dead. Saying to myself—I would get lost every time I took a walk—what a pity I never lived here. Here I could have written such a different book! I forgot Cervantes…. Yes, through his country too we passed. Got off to look at the no longer existing windmills. Think of it, though. Oh yes, and even more important than all these … With Delteil we made a detour coming out of Spain and passed by that mountain where the last of the Albigensians had been walled in. And another name still: Nostradamus. Not only my talks with the French doctor, but my talks with the man and wife who maintained Michel Simon’s home in La Ciotât. They came from Nostradamus’ country. They communed with Petrarch. I’ll reel them off again, and twenty-one salutes to Waremme (of The Maurizius Case): Nostradamus, Cervantes, Ruysbroeck, El Greco, Rabelais, Proust, Da Vinci, Moses Maimonides, Shakespeare—and Old Friar John (Powys). And just a stone’s throw from Glastonbury—and all Arthur’s great realm around us … “the matter of Britain,” as they say…. Joey, I must get back to work. So long. Tootle-oo. Henry From Henry Miller to Alfred Perlés Dear Fred, It’s a strange thing but just a few days before I received your Third Letter to Larry I lay awake early one morning asking myself if all these books I have written (about my life, my suffering, my sins) were really as important, as necessary, as I once thought. I was reading them over from beyond the grave, as it were. I wasn’t thinking of them critically but rather as one does sometimes with his own life—of what use, of what good, to what end, and so on. And here is the strange conclusion I came up with: that God had answered my prayers and suffered me to become a writer, but, as the gods often do when responding to human pleas, my request had been answered only literally. What do I mean? I am not quite sure if I can tell you exactly, but it’s something like this….

• From Vox (1992)

  I think that’s what Miss Manners would say, anyway. She did get over Lee—in fact, maybe Pleasure So Deep was what finally did it. She’s now going out with an academic and seems very happy. I haven’t told her that I’ve rented the movie twice since then on my own and relived that buildup. I was surprised to find that we’d actually only watched about half of it. And I also found, when I watched it through to the end, that it wasn’t as good later on—the movie was only good because she’d seen it, so the parts she hadn’t seen seemed flat. Well, not flat , there was some hot stuff, but I rewound and came to the scene where the woman says, ‘I’m talking about my own needs’ to the two men. Since we’re being truthful with each other, since we’re being truthful, I’ll tell you that that evening with Emily was probably the best sexual experience I’ve had, or at least one of the elite few. The sound, of her breathing while she was biting the inside of her cheeks! God! And the sight of that blanket slowly sliding off her. And when she put her knees together. And it’s not like I haven’t done normal stuff here and there. But I don’t know, you slip inside, and that first moment is paradise, incomparable, but then you’re there working away, and you can’t see the clitoris properly, you can’t really concentrate on what it feels like to hold her breasts, what they look like when they move, you’re distracted, your brain is moving your hips, moving your torso, holding her soft hips—hey, it sounds good! But you know? When I come inside it feels mystical but muffled—it’s as if I don’t feel the perimeter of my cock anymore, because that’s merged with her, it’s melted away and all I feel is the technical interior conduit structure of the thing and the bulb of come swelling, and all that—I lose a sense of outer boundaries. You know? Or do you prefer the physical presence of a cock?” “Well,” she said, “I mean, if one is in there, I’m not going to tell it to go away. But actually, it’s funny, it’s another little bit of clit-trickery. As I’m starting to get close to coming, and I’m with a man, I get this intense wish at a certain point to have him in me, but if I pull him up from what he’s doing and guide him in, that first moment is great, but then my whole area becomes, as you say, distracted—my clitoris is suddenly in close conference with my vagina, and I’m out of the loop. I like to think about cocks in me, though. Also, yeah, I do unfortunately tend to get yeast complications from real sex, inside sex, the friction seems to cause them.” “Exactly! See that? Who cares about my cock?

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  14 “The deep says, ‘It is not in me’; And the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’ 15 “It cannot be obtained for pure gold, Nor can silver be weighed as its price. 16 “It cannot be valued in [terms of] the gold of Ophir, In the precious onyx or beryl, or the sapphire. 17 “Gold and glass cannot equal wisdom, Nor can it be exchanged for articles of fine gold. 18 “No mention of coral and crystal can be made; For the possession of wisdom is even above [that of] rubies or pearls. 19 “The topaz of Ethiopia cannot compare with it, Nor can it be valued in pure gold. 20 “From where then does wisdom come? And where is the place of understanding? 21 “It is hidden from the eyes of all the living And concealed from the birds of the heavens. 22 “Abaddon (the place of destruction) and Death say, ‘We have [only] heard a report of it with our ears.’ 23 “God understands the way [to wisdom] And He knows its place [for wisdom is with God alone]. 24 “For He looks to the ends of the earth And sees everything under the heavens. 25 “When He gave weight and pressure to the wind And allotted the waters by measure, 26 When He made a limit for the rain And a way for the thunderbolt, 27 Then He saw wisdom and declared it; He established it and searched it out. 28 “But to man He said, ‘Behold, the reverential and worshipful fear of the Lord—that is wisdom; And to depart from evil is understanding.’ ” Job 29 Job’s Past Was Glorious 1 A ND JOB again took up his discussion and said, 2 “Oh, that I were as in the months of old, As in the days when God watched over me, [Eccl 7:10 ] 3 When His lamp shone upon my head And by His light I walked through darkness; 4 As I was in the prime of my days, When the friendship and counsel of God were over my tent, 5 When a the Almighty was still with me And my boys were around me, 6 When my steps [through rich pastures] were washed with butter and cream [from my livestock], And the rock poured out for me streams of oil [from my olive groves]. 7 “When I went out to the gate of the city, When I took my seat [as a city father] in the square, 8 The young men saw me and hid themselves, The aged arose and stood [respectfully]; 9 The princes stopped talking And put their hands on their mouths; 10 The voices of the nobles were hushed, And their tongues stuck to the roof of their mouths.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  In this wonderful return you dimly, unconsciously perhaps, realize the significance of that word gamut, that you or “it” (again) are strung along a gamut of being which is not human only but animal, vegetable, mineral. These fantasies which I indulge in occasionally (in the books), are not some of them distinctly mineral, others vegetable, and so on? Of course, I know you and Larry are not objecting to the “fantasies” or even the less valid “excursi,” but rather to a sort of everyday writing or thinking which is supposedly a betrayal of the artist in oneself. Don’t worry about it! Don’t explain it! Think of an adorable “haiku.” (Here a crazy thought intrudes. Not one of the faithful disciples ever spoke of Jesus farting or even blowing his nose. But he must have, what! Would it have been inartistic, sacrilegious, irreverent to introduce such a note? There are many still who can’t excuse him, who refuse to believe, that in his agony on the cross he cried out: “O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me!” A saviour shouldn’t have spoken such words, they will tell you. And yet it is this, just this piece of weakness, of doubt, of complaint, that is the most human thing about Jesus, that keeps him linked to us human-all-too-human trash.) And now a final word about “intentions.” I think you are quite right in thinking that my intentions do not matter much. Or did not. Man proposes, God disposes. How often I think of Rabelais who, while working for the printer, decided that he could write just as lusty and humorous works as those he was printing. And he did. But … then he got caught in his own machinery, as it were. He got terribly serious. He employed his Gargantuan humor to awaken us to greater things. He had intended to do something with his left hand, merely. (“The left hand is the dreamer.”) He got caught. He had stirred the muddy waters of his own being. He awoke the artist in him, the creator, the imaginator. And so, true to his lights, poor devil that he is, he is driven from pillar to post, always trying to save his skin—and tell the truth. And now an “excursus.” … The other day I meant to sit down and tell you lads of the wonderful remembrance which came to me. Suddenly one morning I fell to thinking of that trip abroad in 1953, with Eve. And suddenly it occurred to me how blessed was that trip from one aspect alone: my visits to the homes of certain celebrated men. What a list it is! Rabelais, Da Vinci, Moses Maimonides, El Greco, Ruysbroeck the Admirable, Shakespeare, Proust, van Eyck … And throw in the Cathedral of Chartres and the Mosque of Cordova. Each home, each countryside, each atmosphere was so very different. I say “home.” Not always. Da Vinci, for example—the Château at Amboise, where he died.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  He wanted to talk about Frau Karl Druschki: ‘ She’s a beauty! There’s something so wonderfully cool — as you say, it’s the white- ness —’ Then before he could stop himself: ‘ She reminds me of Angela, somehow.’ The moment the words were out he was frowning, and Stephen stared hard at Frau Karl Druschki. But as they passed from border to border, his brow cleared: “I’ve spent over three hundred,’ he said proudly, “ never saw such a mess as this garden was in when I bought the place — had to dig in fresh soil for the roses just here, these are all new plants; I motored half across England to get them. See that hedge of York and Lancasters there? They didn’t cost much because they’re out of fashion. But I like them, they’re small but rather distinguished I think — there’s something so armorial about them.’ She agreed: ‘ Yes, I’m awfully fond of them too; ’ and she listened quite gravely while he explained that they dated as far back as the Wars of the Roses. ‘ Historical, that’s what I mean,’ he explained. ‘I like every- thing old, you know, except women.’ She thought with an inward smile of his newness. Presently he said in a tone of surprise: “I never imagined that you'd care abont roses.” 178 THE WELL OF LONELINESS “Yes, why not? We’ve got quite a number at Morton. Why don’t you come over to-morrow and see them?’ Wea ‘Do your William Allen Richardsons do well? ’ he inquired. ‘I think so.’ ‘Mine don’t. I can’t make it out. This year, of course, they’ve been damaged by green-fly. Just come here and look at these standards, will you? They’re being devoured alive by the brutes! ’ And then as though he were talking to a friend who would un- derstand him: ‘ Roses seem good to me — you know what I mean, there’s virtue about them — the scent and the feel and the way they grow. I always had some on the desk in my office, they seemed to brighten up the whole place, no end.’ He started to ink in the names on the labels with a gold fountain pen which he took from his pocket. ‘ Yes,’ he mur- mured, as he bent his face over the labels, ‘ yes, I always had three or four on my desk. But Birmingham’s a foul sort of place for roses. And hearing him, Stephen found herself thinking that all men had something simple about them; something that took pleasure in the things that were blameless, that longed, as it were, to contact with Nature. Martin had loved huge, primitive trees; and even this mean little man loved his roses. Angela came strolling across the lawn: ‘ Come, you two,’ she called gaily, ‘ tea’s waiting in the hall! ?

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Shelly and I had a long talk, reminiscing about walking together to school every day, going bowling, playing cards and step ball, and saving baseball cards. The following day, he called again: “Irv, yesterday you said you wanted feedback. Well I’ve just remembered one other thing about you: you had a gambling problem. You kept pressing me to play gin rummy with baseball cards as stakes. You wanted to bet on everything: I remember one day you wanted to bet on the color of the next car to drive down the street. And I remember what a kick you got out of playing the numbers.” “Playing the numbers”—I hadn’t thought about that for years. Shelly’s words stirred up an antique memory. When I was about eleven or twelve, my father converted his grocery store to a liquor store, and life became a little easier for my mother and father: no more spoiled goods to throw out, no more 5 a.m. trips to the wholesale produce market, no more sides of beef to be carved up. But things also became more dangerous: robberies were not infrequent, and on Saturday evenings an armed guard hid out of view in the back of our store. During the day the store was frequently filled with larger-than-life characters: among our regular customers were pimps, prostitutes, thieves, both sweet and sour alcoholics, and the bookies and numbers runners. Once I helped my father carry an order of several cases of scotch and bourbon to Duke’s car. Duke was one of our very best customers and I was fascinated by his style: ivory-headed cane, suave blue cashmere double-breasted overcoat, matching blue fedora, and his mile-long gleaming white Cadillac. When we got to the car parked on a side street, half a block away, I asked if I should put my case of scotch in the trunk and my father and Duke both chuckled. “Duke, why don’t we show him the trunk?” my father said. With a flourish, Duke opened the Cadillac trunk and said, “Not much room here, Sonny.” I looked in and my eyes popped. Seventy years later I still see the scene with striking clarity: the trunk was stuffed to the hilt with cash-stacks of bills of all denominations, tied with thick rubber bands, and several large burlap sacks bulging and overflowing with coins. Duke was in the numbers racket—an enterprise endemic in my Washington, DC, neighborhood. Here’s how it worked: every day, bettors in my neighborhood placed wagers (often as small as ten cents) with their “runners” on a three-digit number. If they guessed correctly, they “hit the number, glory be,” and were paid sixty dollars for a ten-cent bet—600 to 1 odds. But, of course, the real odds were 1,000 to 1, so the bookies made a huge profit. The daily number could not be manipulated, since it was derived by a publicly known formula based on the total amount wagered on three designated horse races at a local track.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  I became a lifelong Joan Baez fan, and was thrilled, years later, when I had the chance to dance with her after one of her café performances. Like everyone else, we were devastated by the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It shattered the image that our peaceful lives in Palo Alto would be unaffected by the ills of the outside world, and we bought our first television set to witness the events surrounding Kennedy’s death and memorial services. I eschewed all religious belief and practice, but in this instance, Marilyn, feeling the need for community and ritual, took our two older children—Eve, aged eight, and Reid, aged seven—to a religious service at the Stanford Memorial Church. Having not entirely escaped the pull of ceremony, we always held a Passover Seder at our home with family and friends. Never having learned Hebrew, I always asked a friend to read the ceremonial prayers. F AMILY PORTRAIT, CA. 1975. Despite my unpleasant memories of childhood, I continued to favor the type of food I was raised on: Eastern European Jewish cuisine and no pork. Not Marilyn. Whenever I was out of town, the children knew she would serve them pork chops. I clung to some ceremonial rites. I had my sons circumcised, followed by a ceremonial repast with friends and family. Reid, the eldest of my three sons, chose to have a Bar Mitzvah. In addition to these few Jewish traditions, we had a Christmas tree, filled stockings for the children, and laid out a big Christmas Day feast. I’ve often been asked whether my lack of religious belief has been a problem in my life or my psychiatric practice. My answer is always no. First, I should say that I am “nonreligious” rather than “antireligious.” My stance was by no means unusual: for the overwhelming majority of my Stanford community and my medical and psychiatric colleagues, religion played little or no role in their lives. When I’ve spent time with my few devout friends (for example, Dagfinn Føllesdal, my Catholic Norwegian philosopher friend), I always feel tremendous respect for the depth of their faith, and I’m inclined to say that my secular views almost never influence my therapy practice. But I have to admit that in all my years of practice, only a handful of committed religious individuals have sought me out. My most frequent contact with devout individuals has come in my work with dying patients, and in every instance I welcome and support any religious comfort they can find. T hough I was deeply immersed in my work in the 1960s and largely apolitical, I couldn’t help but notice cultural changes. My medical students and psychiatric residents began to wear sandals instead of “proper” shoes, and year by year their hair got longer and wilder. A couple of students brought me gifts of their home-baked bread. Marijuana infiltrated even faculty parties, and sexual mores were radically changing.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Columbia Heights, Erie Basin—the endless gloomy streets, the gaslights, the fat gas tanks, the throbbing, colorful ghetto, the docks and wharves, the big ocean liners, the banana freighters, the gun boats, the old abandoned forts, the old desolate Dutch streets, Pomander Walk, Patchin Place, United States Street, the curb market, Perry’s drug store (hard by the Brooklyn Bridge—such frothy, milky ice cream sodas!), the open trolley to Sheepshead Bay, the gay Rockaways, the smell of crabs, lobsters, clams, baked bluefish, fried scallops, the schooner of beer for five cents, the free lunch counters, and somewhere, anywhere, every old where, always one of Andrew Carnegie’s “public” libraries, the books you so passionately wanted always “out” or not listed, or labeled, like Hennessy’s whiskies and brandies, with three stars. No, they were not the days of old Athens, nor the days and nights of Rome, nor the murderous, frolicsome days of Elizabethan England, nor were they even the “good ol’ Nineties”—but it was “little ole Manhattan” just the same, and the name of that little old theatre I’m trying so hard to remember is just as familiar to me as the Breslin Bar or Peacock Alley, but it won’t come back, not now. But it was there once , all the theatres were there, all the grand old actors and actresses, including the hams such as Corse Payton, David Warfield, Robert Mantell, as well as the man my father loathed, his namesake, Henry Miller. They still stand, in memory at least, and with them the days long past, the plays long since digested, the books, some of them, still unread, the critics still to be heard from. (“Turn back the universe and give me yesterday! ”) And now, just as I am closing shop for the day, it comes to me, the name of the theatre! Wallack’s! Do you remember it? You see, if you give up struggling (memoria-technica), it always comes back to you. Ah, but I see it again now, just as it once was, the dingy old temple façade of the theatre. And with it I see the poster outside. Shure, and if it wasn’t—The Girl from Rector’s! So naughty! So daring! So risqué! A sentimental note to close, but what matter? I was going to speak of the plays I had read, and I see I have hardly touched on them. They seemed so important to me once, and important they undoubtedly were. But the plays I laughed through, wept through, lived through, are more important still, though they were of lesser caliber. For then I was with others, with my friends, my pals, my buddies. Stand up, O ancient members of the Xerxes Society! Stand up, even if your feet are in the grave! I must give you a parting salute. I must tell you one and all how much I loved you, how often I have thought of you since. May we all be reunited in the beyond! We were all such fine musicians .

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  From Scriabin to Prokofiev, to the night I first heard him, Carnegie Hall probably, high up in the gallery, and so excited that when I stood up to applaud or to yell—we all yelled like madmen in those days—I nearly tumbled out of the gallery. A tall, gaunt figure he was, in a frock coat, like something out of the Dreigroschenoper , like Monsieur les Pompes Funèbres. From Prokofiev to Luke Ralston, now departed, an ascetic also, with a face like the death mask of Monsieur Arouet. A good friend, Luke Ralston, who after visiting the merchant tailors up and down Fifth Avenue with his samples of imported woolens, would go home and practice German lieder while his dear old mother, who had ruined him with her love, would make him pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut and tell him for the ten thousandth time what a dear, good son he was. His thin, cultivated voice too weak, unfortunately, to cope with the freight-laden melodies of his beloved Hugo Wolf with which he always larded his programs. At thirty-three he dies—of pneumonia, they said, but it was probably a broken heart…. And in between come memories of other forgotten figures—minnesinger, flutists, cellists, pianists in skirts, like the homely one who always included Schubert’s Carnaval on her program. (Reminded me so much of Maude: the nun become virtuoso.) There were others too, short-haired and long-haired, all perfectos, like Havana cigars. Some, with chests like bulls, could shatter the chandeliers with their Wagnerian shrieks. Some were like lovely Jessicas, their hair parted in the middle and pasted down: benign madonnas (Jewish mostly) who had not yet taken to rifling the ice-box at all hours of the night. And then the fiddlers, in skirts, left-handed sometimes, often with red hair or dirty orange, and bosoms which got in the way of the bow…. Just looking at a word, as I say. Or a painting, or a book. The title alone, sometimes. Like Heart of Darkness or Under the Autumn Star . How did it begin again, that wonderful tale? Have a look-see. Read a few pages, then throw the book down. Inimitable. And how had I begun? I read it over once again, my imaginary Paul Morphy opening. Weak, wretchedly weak. Something falls off the table. I get down to search for it. There, on hands and knees, a crack in the floor intrigues me. It reminds me of something. What? I stay like that, as if waiting to be “served,” like a ewe. Thoughts whirl through my bean and out through the vent at the top of my skull. I reach for a pad and jot down a few words. More thoughts, plaguey thoughts. (What dropped from the table was a match-box.) How to fit these thoughts into the novel. Always the same dilemma. And then I think of Twelve Men .

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  CHAPTER NINE THE RED TABLE M y office is a studio about 150 feet from my house, but the two structures are surrounded with so much foliage that one is barely visible from the other. I spend most of my day in the office, writing all morning and seeing patients in the afternoons. When I feel restless, I step outside and putter over the bonsai, pruning, watering, and admiring their graceful shapes and thinking of questions I should pose to Christine, a bonsai master and my daughter’s close friend, who lives only a block away. After my evening bike ride, or a walk with Marilyn, we spend the rest of the evening in our library, reading, talking, or watching a film. The room has large corner windows and opens up to a rustic redwood patio with lawn furniture and a large redwood hot tub surrounded by California live oak trees. The walls are lined with hundreds of books, and it’s furnished in a casual, California style, with a leather “back rest” chair and a sofa with a loose-fitting red and white cover. Standing in one corner, in stark contrast to everything else, is my mother’s garish, faux-baroque table, with a red leather top, four curved black and gold legs, and four matching chairs with red leather seats. I play chess and other board games with my children on that table just as seventy years ago I played chess on Sunday mornings with my father. Marilyn dislikes the table—it matches nothing else in our home—and she’d love to get it out of the house, but she gave up that campaign long ago. She knows it means a great deal to me, and has agreed to keep the table in the room, but in permanent exile in the far corner of the room. That table is tied to one of the most significant events in my life, and whenever I look at it I am flooded with feelings of nostalgia, of horror, and of emancipation. M y early life is divided into two parts: before and after my fourteenth birthday. Until I was fourteen, I lived with my mother, father, and sister in our small, shoddy flat over the grocery store. The flat was directly above the store, but the entrance was outside the store, just around the corner. There was a vestibule where the coal man regularly delivered coal, and therefore the door was unlocked. In cold weather, it was not uncommon to find one or two alcoholics sleeping on the floor. T HE ENTRANCE TO THE FAMILY FLAT OVER THE GROCERY STORE, CA. 1943. Up the stairs were the doors to two flats—ours was the one overlooking First Street. We had two bedrooms—one for my parents and one for my sister. I slept in the small dining room on a davenport sofa that could be turned into a bed. When I was ten my sister went to college and I took over her bedroom.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Yes, it was beautiful coming away from Town Hall of a snowy night, after hearing the Little Symphony perform. So civilized in there, such discreet applause, such knowing comments. And now the light touch of snow, cabs pulling up and darting away, the lights sparkling, splintering like icicles, and Monsieur Barrère and his little group sneaking out the back entrance to give a private recital at the home of some wealthy denizen of Park Avenue. A thousand paths leading away from the concert hall and in each one a tragic figure silently pursues his destiny. Paths criss-crossing everywhere: the low and the mighty, the meek and the tyrannical, the haves and the have nots. Yes, many’s the night I attended a recital in one of these hallowed musical morgues and each time I walked out I thought not of the music I had heard but of one of my foundlings, one of the bleeding cosmococcic crew I had hired or fired that day and the memory of whom neither Haydn, Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Beelzebub, Schubert, Paganini or any of the wind, string, horn or cymbal clan of musikers could dispel. I could see him, poor devil, leaving the office with his messenger suit wrapped in a brown parcel, heading for the elevated line at the Brooklyn Bridge, where he would board a train for Fresh Pond Road or Pitkin Avenue, or maybe Kosciusko Street, there to descend into the swarm, grab a sour pickle, dodge a kick in the ass, peel the potatoes, clean the lice out of the bedding and say a prayer for his great grandfather who had died at the hand of a drunken Pole because the sight of a beard floating in the wind was anathema to him. I could also see myself walking along Pitkin Avenue, or Kosciusko Street, searching for a certain hovel, or was it a kennel, and thinking to myself how lucky to be born a Gentile and speak English so well. (Is this still Brooklyn? Where am I?) Sometimes I could smell the clams in the bay, or perhaps it was the sewer water. And wherever I went, searching for the lost and the damned, there were always fire escapes loaded with bedding, and from the bedding there fell like wounded cherubim an assortment of lice, bedbugs, brown beetles, cockroaches and the scaly rinds of yesterday’s salami. Now and then I would treat myself to a succulent sour pickle or a smoked herring wrapped in newspaper. Those big fat pretzels, how good they were! The women all had red hands and blue fingers—from the cold, from scrubbing and washing and rinsing. (But the son, a genius already, would have long, tapering fingers with calloused tips. Soon he would be playing in Carnegie Hall.) Nowhere in the upholstered Gentile world I hailed from had I ever run into a genius, or even a near genius.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The man nodded. She had not told him their destination, but he knew it already; it was Morton. Then the great clumsy fellow must pretend to be busy with a truss of fresh straw for the horse’s bedding, because his face had turned a deep crimson, because his coarse lips were actually trembling — and this was not really so very strange, for those who served Raftery loved him. 250 THE WELL OF LONELINESS 2 Rarrery stepped quietly into his horse-box and Jim with great deftness secured the halter, then he touched his cap and hurried away to his third-class compartment, for Stephen herself would travel with Raftery on this last journey back to the fields of Mor- ton. Sitting down on the seat reserved for a groom she opened the little wooden window into the box, whereupon Raftery’s muzzle came up and his face looked out of the window. She fondled the soft, grey plush of his muzzle. Presently she took a carrot from her pocket, but the carrot was rather hard now for his teeth, so she bit off small pieces and these she gave him in the palm of her hand; then she watched him eat them uncomfortably, slowly, because he was old, and this seemed so strange, for old age and Raftery went very ill together. Her mind slipped back and back over the years until it re- captured the coming of Raftery — grey-coated and slender, and his eyes as soft as an Irish morning, and his courage as bright as an Irish sunrise, and his heart as young as the wild, eternally young heart of Ireland. She remembered what they had said to each other. Raftery had said: ‘I will carry you bravely, I will serve you all the days of my life.’ She had answered: ‘I will care for you night and day, Raftery — all the days of. your life.’ She remembered their first run with hounds together — she a young- ster of twelve, he a youngster of five. Great deeds they had done on that day together, at least they had seemed like great deeds to them — she had had a kind of fire in her heart as she galloped astride of Raftery. She remembered her father, his protective back, so broad, so kind, so patiently protective; and towards the end it had stooped a little as though out of kindness it carried a burden. Now she knew whose burden that back had been bearing so that it stooped a little. He had been very proud of the fine Irish horse, very proud of his small and courageous rider: ‘ Steady, Stephen!’ but his eyes had been bright like Raftery’s. ‘ Steady on, Stephen, we’re coming to a stiff one!’ but once they were over he had turned round and smiled. as he had done in the days THE WELL OF LONELINESS 251

• From American Swing (2008)

  1489 01:13:56,432 --> 01:13:58,392 IS THAT YOU DON'T WANT TO LOOK BACK AND SAY 1490 01:13:58,392 --> 01:14:01,103 "WOW, REALLY I'M SORRY I DIDN'T DO THAT. 1491 01:14:01,103 --> 01:14:03,147 I REALLY AM SORRY I MISSED THAT. 1492 01:14:03,147 --> 01:14:05,566 I REALLY AM SORRY I DIDN'T TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THAT." 1493 01:14:05,566 --> 01:14:08,569 I'M AN OLD LADY WITH NO REGRETS, 1494 01:14:08,569 --> 01:14:09,903 BECAUSE I'LL TELL YOU: 1495 01:14:09,903 --> 01:14:12,698 THOSE-- THAT PERIOD WAS VERY SPECIAL. 1496 01:14:14,408 --> 01:14:17,953 IT WAS THE SAME ROUTINE EVERY NIGHT BUT DIFFERENT BODIES. 1497 01:14:17,953 --> 01:14:19,788 DIFFERENT SIZES. 1498 01:14:21,915 --> 01:14:23,959 TALL, SHORT-- 1499 01:14:25,252 --> 01:14:27,254 IT WAS, YOU KNOW, A SIGHT TO SEE... 1500 01:14:27,254 --> 01:14:29,089 EVERY NIGHT. 1501 01:14:29,089 --> 01:14:31,967 - ( camera clicks ) - Breitbart: SOMEHOW WHENEVER ANYBODY 1502 01:14:31,967 --> 01:14:35,387 DISCUSSES PLATO'S RETREAT, THEY DO IT WITH A SMILE ON THEIR FACE. 1503 01:14:35,387 --> 01:14:37,306 IF ANYBODY WAS THERE, THEY'RE HAPPY. 1504 01:14:37,306 --> 01:14:40,100 IF ANYBODY WASN'T THERE, THEY'RE ONLY SORRY 1505 01:14:40,100 --> 01:14:43,604 THAT THEY DIDN'T GET AN OPPORTUNITY TO GO THERE AND SEE IT. 1506 01:14:43,604 --> 01:14:45,314 ( camera clicks ) 1507 01:14:45,314 --> 01:14:47,774 Karen: IT WAS VERY EXCITING TO A LOT OF PEOPLE. 1508 01:14:47,774 --> 01:14:50,444 AND WHEN WE FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH IT, 1509 01:14:50,444 --> 01:14:53,030 WE WERE AMUSED BY IT AS WELL. 1510 01:14:55,782 --> 01:14:57,993 I'M-- I'M REALLY GLAD I WENT. 1511 01:14:57,993 --> 01:15:00,746 I'M GLAD TO HAVE THE EXPERIENCE OF HAVING GONE. 1512 01:15:00,746 --> 01:15:03,624 JUST AS I'M GLAD THAT I GOT TO THE TOP 1513 01:15:03,624 --> 01:15:05,834 OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ONCE. 1514 01:15:08,837 --> 01:15:12,132 EVEN TO TODAY PEOPLE SAY THINGS TO ME: 1515 01:15:12,132 --> 01:15:14,968 "I KNEW YOUR FATHER. I REMEMBER YOUR FATHER." 1516 01:15:17,471 --> 01:15:20,516 OKAY, SOME PEOPLE, THEY HAVE NO MEMORIES. 1517 01:15:20,516 --> 01:15:22,392 THEY HAD A BORING NORMAL... 1518 01:15:22,392 --> 01:15:26,021 LET'S SAY EVERYDAY-STRAIGHT KIND OF LIFE. 1519 01:15:26,021 --> 01:15:29,733 I'VE LED A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIFE. I'VE HAD THAT LIFE 1520 01:15:29,733 --> 01:15:31,235 AND MY LIFE CHANGED... 1521 01:15:32,986 --> 01:15:35,447 BY GOING TO PLATO'S... 1522 01:15:37,199 --> 01:15:39,493 BY GETTING INTO OPEN SEX. 1523 01:15:39,493 --> 01:15:42,746 THESE ARE THINGS THAT YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU WOULD EVER DO IN LIFE. 1524 01:15:42,746 --> 01:15:44,665 YOU DIDN'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. 1525 01:15:44,665 --> 01:15:47,501 SO A LOT OF PEOPLE, THEY DON'T HAVE THOSE MEMORIES. 1526 01:15:47,501 --> 01:15:51,338 I HAVE THOSE MEMORIES. I CAN SEE THE FACES IN FRONT OF ME NOW. 1527 01:16:29,918 --> 01:16:32,546 Nina: IT WAS GOOD FOR ME. 1528 01:16:32,546 --> 01:16:34,590 IT WAS GOOD FOR ME. 1529 01:16:34,590 --> 01:16:37,426 IT WAS GREAT FOR ME. 1530 01:16:37,426 --> 01:16:39,386 IS LARRY STILL AROUND, BY THE WAY? 1531 01:16:39,386 --> 01:16:43,807 - ARE YOU GUYS TALKING TO LARRY? - Man: HE PASSED AWAY IN '99.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Columbia Heights, Erie Basin—the endless gloomy streets, the gaslights, the fat gas tanks, the throbbing, colorful ghetto, the docks and wharves, the big ocean liners, the banana freighters, the gun boats, the old abandoned forts, the old desolate Dutch streets, Pomander Walk, Patchin Place, United States Street, the curb market, Perry’s drug store (hard by the Brooklyn Bridge—such frothy, milky ice cream sodas!), the open trolley to Sheepshead Bay, the gay Rockaways, the smell of crabs, lobsters, clams, baked bluefish, fried scallops, the schooner of beer for five cents, the free lunch counters, and somewhere, anywhere, every old where, always one of Andrew Carnegie’s “public” libraries, the books you so passionately wanted always “out” or not listed, or labeled, like Hennessy’s whiskies and brandies, with three stars. No, they were not the days of old Athens, nor the days and nights of Rome, nor the murderous, frolicsome days of Elizabethan England, nor were they even the “good ol’ Nineties”—but it was “little ole Manhattan” just the same, and the name of that little old theatre I’m trying so hard to remember is just as familiar to me as the Breslin Bar or Peacock Alley, but it won’t come back, not now. But it was there once , all the theatres were there, all the grand old actors and actresses, including the hams such as Corse Payton, David Warfield, Robert Mantell, as well as the man my father loathed, his namesake, Henry Miller. They still stand, in memory at least, and with them the days long past, the plays long since digested, the books, some of them, still unread, the critics still to be heard from. (“Turn back the universe and give me yesterday! ”) And now, just as I am closing shop for the day, it comes to me, the name of the theatre! Wallack’s! Do you remember it? You see, if you give up struggling (memoria-technica), it always comes back to you. Ah, but I see it again now, just as it once was, the dingy old temple façade of the theatre. And with it I see the poster outside. Shure, and if it wasn’t—The Girl from Rector’s! So naughty! So daring! So risqué! A sentimental note to close, but what matter? I was going to speak of the plays I had read, and I see I have hardly touched on them. They seemed so important to me once, and important they undoubtedly were. But the plays I laughed through, wept through, lived through, are more important still, though they were of lesser caliber. For then I was with others, with my friends, my pals, my buddies. Stand up, O ancient members of the Xerxes Society! Stand up, even if your feet are in the grave! I must give you a parting salute. I must tell you one and all how much I loved you, how often I have thought of you since. May we all be reunited in the beyond!

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Because I know you ain’t intending to be home before four in the morning,” said Mrs. Scott, smiling. “Well, he ain’t going to be home by then,” said Ida, “and you know it well as I do.” A girl came toward them now, narrow-hipped, swift, and rough-looking. She, too, was bareheaded, with short, dirty, broken-off hair. She wore a man’s suede jacket, too large for her, and she held it at the neck with her hand. Vivaldo watched Ida watching the girl approach. “Here come Willa Mae,” said Mrs. Scott, “Poor little thing.” Then the girl stood before them, and she smiled. When she smiled her face was very different. She was very young. “How you-all today?” she asked. “Rufus, I ain’t seen you for the longest time.” “Just fine,” Rufus said. “How you making it?” He held his head very high and his eyes were expressionless. Ida looked down at the ground and held on to her mother. “Oh”—she laughed—“I can’t complain. Wouldn’t do no good nohow.” “You still at the same place?” “Sure. Where you think I’m going to move to?” There was a pause. The girl looked at Vivaldo, looked away. “Well, I got to be going,” she said. “Nice running into you.” She was no longer smiling. “Nice seeing you,” said Rufus. After the girl had gone, Ida, said disapprovingly, “She used to be your girl friend, too.” Rufus ignored this. He said to Vivaldo, “She used to be a nice girl. Some cat turned her on, and then he split.” He spat on the sidewalk. “Man, what a scene.” Mrs. Scott halted before steps leading up into a tenement. Ida took Rufus by the arm. “I got to leave you children here,” said Mrs. Scott. She looked at Rufus. “What time you going to bring this girl home?” “Oh, I don’t know. It won’t be late. I know she want to go out night-clubbing but I ain’t going to let her get too drunk.” Mrs. Scott smiled and held out her hand to Vivaldo. “Nice meeting you, son,” she said. “You make Rufus bring you by again, you hear? Don’t you be a stranger.” “No ma’am. Thank you, I’ll come up again real soon.” But he never did see her again, not until Rufus was dead. Rufus had never invited him home again. “I’ll be seeing you later, young lady,” she said. She started up the steps. “You children have a good time.” She had been fourteen or fifteen that day. She would be twenty-one or twenty-two now. She had told him that she remembered that day; but he wondered how she remembered it. He had not seen her again until she had become a woman and at that time he had not remembered their first meeting. But he remembered it now. He remembered delight and discomfort. What did she remember?

• From Another Country (1962)

  He entered their building, stepped into the elevator, and told the elevator man where he was going. He had forgotten the style of American elevator men, but now it came back to him. The elevator man, without a surly word, slammed the elevator gates shut and drove the car upward. The nature of his silence conveyed his disapproval of the Silenskis and all their friends and his vivid sense of being as good as they. He rang the bell. Cass opened the door at once, looking as bright as the bright day. “Eric!” She looked him over with the affectionate mockery he now remembered. “How nice you look with your hair so short!” “How nice,” he returned, smiling, “you look with yours so long. Or was it always long. It’s that kind of thing a long absence makes you forget.” “Let me look at you.” She pulled him into the apartment and closed the door. “You really look wonderful. Welcome home.” She leaned forward suddenly and kissed him on the cheek. “Is that the way they do it in Paris?” “You have to kiss me on both cheeks,” he said, gravely. “Oh.” She seemed slightly embarrassed but kissed him again. “Is that better?” “Much,” he said. Then, “Where is everybody?” For the large living room was empty, and filled with the sound of the blues. It was the voice of a colored woman, the voice of Bessie Smith, and it hurled him, with violence, into the hot center of his past: It’s raining and it’s storming on the sea. I feel like somebody has shipwrecked poor me. For a moment Cass looked as though she were sardonically echoing his question. She crossed the room and lowered the volume of the music slightly. “The children are over in the park with some friends of theirs. Richard’s in his study, working. But they should all be appearing almost any moment now.” “Oh,” he said, “then I’m early. I’m sorry.” “You aren’t early, you’re on time. And I’m glad. I was hoping to have a chance to talk to you alone before we go down to this jam session.” “You’ve got a pretty agreeable jam session going on right now,” he said. Cass went over to the bar, and he threw himself down on the sofa. “It’s mighty nice and cool in here. It’s awful outside. I’d forgotten how hot New York could be.” The large windows were open and the water stretched beyond the windows, very bright and peaceful, but murkier than the Mediterranean. The breeze that filled the room came directly from the water; seemed, almost, to bring with it the spice and stink of Europe and the murmur of Yves’ voice. Eric leaned back, held in a kind of peaceful melancholy, comforted by the beat of Bessie’s song, and looked over at Cass.

• From Another Country (1962)

  It made him remember days and nights, days and nights, when he had been inside, on the stand or in the crowd, sharp, beloved, making it with any chick he wanted, making it to parties and getting high and getting drunk and fooling around with the musicians, who were his friends, who respected him. Then, going home to his own pad, locking his door and taking off his shoes, maybe making himself a drink, maybe listening to some records, stretching out on the bed, maybe calling up some girl. And changing his underwear and his socks and his shirt, shaving, and taking a shower, and making it to Harlem to the barber shop, then seeing his mother and his father and teasing his sister, Ida, and eating: spareribs or pork chops or chicken or greens or cornbread or yams or biscuits. For a moment he thought he would faint with hunger and he moved to a wall of the building and leaned there. His forehead was freezing with sweat. He thought: this is got to stop, Rufus. This shit is got to stop. Then, in weariness and recklessness, seeing no one on the streets and hoping that no one would come through the doors, leaning with one hand against the wall he sent his urine splashing against the stone-cold pavement, watching the faint steam rise. He remembered Leona. Or a sudden, cold, familiar sickness filled him and he knew he was remembering Leona. And he began to walk, very slowly now, away from the music, with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He no longer felt the cold.