Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

I reluctantly laid down the pencil and switched off
     the lights. As I closed my eyes I said to myself: “Now is the time to tell about your life in
     Big Sur.”
    And so I shall tell it, in the same disorderly fashion that it came to me the
     other day as I lay abed….
    I suspect that many who read my books, or talk about my life, believe that I
     am living in an ivory tower. If I am, it is a tower without walls in which fabulous and often
     “anachronistic” things happen. In following this fantasia the reader should bear in mind that
     cause and event, chronology, order of any kind—except the illogical order of life itself—is
     absent.
    Picture a day, for example, an excruciating one, in which I have been
     interrupted at least half a dozen times, and then … well, after an exciting talk with a writer
     who has just come from Paris (or Rome or Athens), after another talk with a bore who wants to
     know every detail about my life, past and present, and whom I discover (too late) has never
     read a single one of my books, after examining the cesspool to see why it doesn’t work, after
     shooing away three students who stand at the door and apologetically explain that all they
     want of me is my opinion of Job—yes, Job, no less!—and they are not joking, only too serious,
     alas! after one thing and another, with intermittent attempts to resume where I left off (the
     middle of a sentence), comes the incomparable Varda with a bouquet of
“jeunes filles en
     fleur.”
Observing that I am unusually quiet, and not realizing that it is a result of
     exhaustion, he exclaims: “Andhere I have been telling these girls what a
     wonderful
raconteur
you are! Come, do tell them something about your ‘anecdotal
     life’!” (A phrase of Zadkine’s.)
    Strangely enough, at one in the morning, the table littered with empty
     glasses, bread crumbs and bits of rind, the guests departed at last, silence once again
     enveloping us, what is it that is singing in my head but a line from one of Cendrars’ books,
     an enigmatic line, in his own inimitable French, which had me electrified a few nights before.
     There is no relation whatsoever between this line of Cendrars’ and the multitudinous events of
     the day. We, Varda and I, had not even mentioned Cendrars’ name, which is unusual because,
     with certain of my friends—Varda, Gerhart Muensch, Giles Healey, Ephraim Doner—we sound off
     with Cendrars and finish with Cendrars. So there I sit with that curious, tantalizing line of
     his, trying to recall what evoked it and wondering how I shall finish the sentence I left on
     the roller hours and hours ago. I ask myself—I’ve asked it over and over—how ever did this
     extraordinary man, Cendrars, turn out so many books in such a short time (I refer to the
     period right after the Occupation) with only one hand, his left hand, and no secretary to aid
     him, no heat, little food, his beloved sons killed in the war, his huge library destroyed by
     the Huns, and so on. I sit there reliving, or trying to relive, his life, his books, his
     thoughts, his emotions. My day, full as it was, only begins there in the ocean of his
     prodigious being….
    It was “one of those days” when a woman with whom I had exchanged some
     correspondence arrived from Holland. My wife had only reecntly left me and I was alone with my
     little girl. She was only in the room a few minutes when I sensed that an instantaneous and
     mutual antipathy had sprung up between the two. I apologized to my visitor for continuing with
     the chores—I had decided to wash the floor and wax it—and felt most grateful when she offered
     to do the dishes for me. Meanwhile Val, my daughter, was making things even more difficult
     than usual; she seemed to take a perverse delight in interrupting our conversation,erratic as it was with all the hopping about I was doing. Then she went to
     the toilet, only to announce a moment later that it wouldn’t flush. At