Free Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller

head that day.” He went on to explain thathe was throwing up the
     job at Lucia. He was going back East where he came from.
    “When I leave I’ll put that bundle of manuscript in your mailbox. Take a
     glance at it if you ever have the time, will you?”
    I promised faithfully that I would. Some few days later Harvey picked up and
     moved. But there was no bundle of manuscript in my mailbox. After a few weeks I received a
     letter from him in which he explained that he hadn’t left the manuscript in my mailbox because
     he didn’t think it was worth bothering me about. It was much too long, for one thing. Besides,
     he had given up the idea of becoming a writer. He didn’t say what he was going to do for a
     living but I had the impression that he was going back to the teaching profession. That’s the
     usual way out. When everything else fails, teach!
    I’ve never heard from Harvey since. I’ve no idea what he’s doing today. I’m
     still convinced that he’s a writer; still convinced that one day he’ll go back to it and stick
     to it. Why I speak with such conviction I don’t know.
    The tragic thing today is that, in the case of men like Harvey, even when they
     do break through the “sound barrier” they are killed off almost immediately. Either they write
     too well or not bad enough. Because of their great knowledge and familiarity with good
     literature, because of their innate taste and discrimination, they have difficulty in finding
     the level on which to reach the reading public. They particularly lack that liberating
     instinct so well formulated by the Zen masters:
“Kill the Buddha!”
They want to
     become another Dostoevsky, another Gide, another Melville.
    On sober thought, my advice to Harvey (and to all who find themselves in
     Harvey’s boots) struck me as being sound and sensible. If you can’t give the is-ness of a
     thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound
     off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. It often works.
    Once traction is established, the most important thing—how toreach the public, or better, how to create your own public!—still remains to be faced.
     Without a public it’s suicide. No matter how small, there has to be an audience. I mean, an
     appreciative, enthusiastic audience, a selective audience.
    What few young writers realize, it seems to me, is that they must find—create,
     invent!—the way to reach their readers. It isn’t enough to write a good book, a beautiful
     book, or even a better book than most. It isn’t enough even to write an “original” book! One
     has to establish, or re-establish, a unity which has been broken and which is felt just as
     keenly by the reader, who is a potential artist, as by the writer, who believes himself to be
     an artist. The theme of separation and isolation—“atomization,” it’s now called—has as many
     facets to it as there are unique individuals. And we are all unique. The longing to be
     reunited, with a common purpose and an all-embracing significance, is now universal. The
     writer who wants to communicate with his fellow-man, and thereby establish communion with him,
     has only to speak with sincerity and directness. He has not to think about literary
     standards—he will make them as he goes along—he has not to think about trends, vogues,
     markets, acceptable ideas or unacceptable ideas: he has only to deliver himself, naked and
     vulnerable. All that constricts and restricts him, to use the language of not-ness, his
     fellow-reader, even though he may not be an artist, feels with equal despair and bewilderment.
     The world presses down on all alike. Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature,
     good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to
     become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent, shameful conspiracy (the more
     shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has