Regarding Henry

Henry Miller, Happy Rock

Brassai

Translated from the French

by Jane Marie Todd

University of Chicago Press: 180 pp., $25

*

The Medicine of Memory

A Mexican Clan in California

Alejandro Murguia

University of Texas Press: 296 pp., $50, $22.95 paper

*

Henry Miller is remembered and celebrated for “Tropic of Cancer” and other works of literature condemned as pornography during his lifetime. But he also possessed a genius for cultivating highly literary friendships with fellow artists and writers such as Lawrence Durrell and Anais Nin. Indeed, one of his last books, written and published a few years before his death in 1980, was a memoir titled “Henry Miller’s Book of Friends.”

Among his most enduring friendships was one with the Hungarian-born photographer known as Brassai (born Gyula Halasz, 1899-1984), who attests to both the clamor and the richness of a relationship with Miller in “Henry Miller, Happy Rock,” a unique and wholly fascinating account of their encounters and exchanges of correspondence over the last four decades of Miller’s life.

The two men spent time together in California and France, the two poles of Miller’s life and work, and Brassai allows us to overhear their urgent chatter, which ranged from arts, letters and history to politics, intimate secrets and hot gossip. At one moment, Miller muses on his second puberty and the samurai spirit; at the next, he ponders the irony of Nin’s elevation to iconic status in the women’s movement:

“She gets asked for autographs like Liz Taylor,” Miller told Brassai in 1973. “It’s funny, don’t you think? Do you remember that puny and timid creature?”

Brassai begins the book with the period of self-exile when Miller, who grew up in Brooklyn and flowered as a writer in Paris, found himself without much honor in his own country. Later, when Miller’s work began to earn both recognition and royalties, they spent time together during a series of sentimental journeys around France in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And their friendship continued through Miller’s last years as an aging literary lion in the big white house on Ocampo Drive in Pacific Palisades.

“Everyone comes here to sell his soul,” said Miller about his first sojourn in Los Angeles, where he took up residence during World War II in the futile hope of making his fortune in the movies. He was so broke that he was forced to walk from his place in Beverly Glen to the studios in Hollywood where he was hawking his scripts. “He too would have liked to ‘sell his soul’ to get by, but no one was interested,” Brassai writes of Miller. “All the ... screenplays he proposed were rejected.”

Thus did Miller seek out the isolation of Big Sur, where he tended his garden, killed rattlesnakes with a pickax and raised his two young children. But Brassai shows us that it soon became a kind of pilgrimage site for European writers who knew and admired Miller’s work and trekked into the California coastal wilderness to call on him. Ironically, Miller found himself too distracted to write in precisely the place that seemed to afford an idyllic refuge. “They think I’m the Dalai Lama,” he complained to Brassai. “And I’m too weak to resist.”

Miller and Brassai rambled around Paris together in 1959, when he took his children, Tony and Valentine, to Europe to acquaint them with the world. On a visit to the Eiffel Tower, Miller and Brassai made odds on his chances of winning the Nobel Prize even though “Sexus” had been banned in Sweden because, according to the judges, the book consisted of 15.7% obscenities.

Miller despaired that he was best known for his banned books. “I’m taken for a pornography giant!” he complained. “But I’m the most normal of men. No vices or perversions. By stripping sex of all its hypocrisy, I simply wanted to liberate myself from the puritan mind, and also liberate others.”

But Brassai, who also wrote a critical biography of Miller, insists on delving even deeper into Miller’s inner workings. Thus, for example, Miller is likened to a “happy rock” in the title of Brassai’s memoir because, as he explains, Miller always aspired to “total detachment,” and the best evidence are the sexual relationships with women, each one ending in failure. Miller protests that he is, in fact, “a sentimental man capable of true love,” but Brassai offers a damning calculation: “[A]ll Henry’s love affairs lasted exactly seven years,” he observes, “not a year less or more.”

Miller made no note of protest when he was permitted to read and comment on the manuscript of “Henry Miller, Happy Rock,” and the book is all the more revealing because Brassai reproduces the marginal comments, thus allowing us to hear Miller’s ghostly voice as a kind of invisible commentator on the text. Where, for example, Brassai quotes Miller as saying that one of his wives died young because she “drank whiskey at night,” Miller wrote in the margins: “Not only at night, but all day long.”

Indeed, it is the honesty and intimacy of their friendship that makes the book so pleasurable and so enlightening. “I’m curious to find out how you see me, how you judge me,” says Miller to Brassai in one of the many conversations that are reproduced verbatim in the book. “And now that you know me down deep, what is your dominant impression? Chaos?”

“No, not chaos. Contradiction!” replies Brassai. “Like the pendulum of a clock, you oscillate constantly, between a sense of being a genius, a superhuman man, and that of being a poor devil who made a mess of his life.”

“Memory is history, but history is not always memory,” writes Alejandro Murguia in “The Medicine of Memory,” an audacious but rich and wholly rewarding exercise in the use of history as a tool for self-discovery and self-definition. “My California is different from the histories I had to endure as a young man, the ones that left me out of the picture while rugged white pioneers conquered the West.”

Thus, Moctezuma and Father Junipero Serra figure in Murguia’s book, but so do his first communion and the day he uttered his first words of English. He muses on the fact that, unlike the Americans who came to California during the Gold Rush, the Native Americans valued abalone shell and eagle bird feathers above gold, and he observes that the nugget so famously discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 “looked to me like calcified dog turd that I might hose from my sidewalk on any given morning.” And he explains why, growing up in the 1950s, he valued a Bobby Avila baseball card fully as much as those for Ted Williams and Willie Mays.

“It was good to know one could play second base en las ligas grandes and win the batting title and be Mexican.”

Murguia harks back to 1773, when one of his ancestors trekked into Alta California with Serra. He tracks the family’s fortunes through the era of Mexican sovereignty and the conquest of California by the U.S. He recalls the fact that his more recent forebears were among the first to cultivate the San Fernando Valley, and he honors his older brother’s service in Vietnam. Indeed, the whole point of this impassioned and stirring book is to write back into our history the chapters that have been left out.

“[A]s a reward for two hundred some years of nurturing this land with our sweat and blood, ignorant governors and racist psychopaths shout at us to go back to where we came from, and even the most well intentioned liberal believes we are foreigners here,” Murguia points out. “But as I write this, I am standing where I was born; this is where I am from.”