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

bound them together as enemies of art and
     artist. They are suffering from the fact that art is not the primary, moving force in their
     lives. They are suffering from the act, repeated daily, of keeping up the pretense that they
     can go their way, lead their lives, without art. They never dream—or they behave as if they
     never realize—that the reason why they feelsterile, frustrated and
     joyless is because art (and with it the artist) has been ruled out of their lives. For every
     artist who has been assassinated thus (unwittingly?) thousands of ordinary citizens, who might
     have known a normal joyous life, are condemned to lead the purgatorial existence of neurotics,
     psychotics, schizophrenics. No, the man who is about to blow his top does not have to fix his
     eye on the
Iliad
, the
Divine Comedy
or any other great model; he has only to
     give us, in his own language, the saga of his woes and tribulations, the saga of his
     non-existentialism. In this mirror of not-ness everyone will recognize himself for what he is
     as well as what he is not. He will no longer be able to hold his head up either before his
     children or before his neighbors; he will have to admit that he—not the other fellow—is that
     terrible person who is contributing, wittingly or unwittingly, to the speedy downfall and
     disintegration of his own people. He will know, when he resumes work in the morning, that
     everything he does, everything he says, everything he touches, pertains to the invisible
     poisonous web which holds us all in its mesh and which is slowly but surely crushing the life
     out of us. It does not matter what high office the reader may hold—he is as much a villain and
     a victim as the outlaw and the outcast.
    Who will print such books, who will publish and disseminate them?
    No one!
    You will have to do it yourself, dear man. Or, do as Homer did: travel the
     highways and byways with a white cane, singing your song as you go. You may have to pay people
     to listen to you, but that isn’t an insuperable feat either. Carry a little “tea” with you and
     you’ll soon have an audience.

2.
    “The pain was unbearable, but I did not want it to end: it had operatic
     grandeur. It lit up Grand Central Station like a Judgment Day.”
    In 1945 Poetry-London brought out a slim book by Elizabeth Smart bearing the
     title:
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
. It is a very unusual little
     book, “a love story,” the jacket says. The romance which inspired the book took place at
     Anderson Creek in the days when Varda ruled the roost. It must have been written about the
     same time as
The Stranger
, by Lillian Bos Ross, which will probably go on selling as
     long as there is a Big Sur.
    Says Elizabeth Smart: “The legends here are all of blood-feuds and suicide,
     uncanny foresight and supernatural knowledge.” She was probably thinking of Robinson Jeffers’
     narative poems. By the time Emil White arrived at Anderson Creek (1944), via the Yukon, there
     wasn’t an artist in sight and all the convict shacks were deserted, even by the rats. There
     were no feuds, no gun fights, no stabbings, no suicides: it was quiet along the Coast. The war
     was drawing to a close, the floaters were drifting in. Soon the longhaired artists would
     appear and broken romances begin all over again. At night, as the creek rushed to the sea, the
     rocks and boulders gave out garbled, hallucinating versions of the calamities which lend spice
     to the place. The “Colony,” made up of transient artists, would rehearse in the space of a few
     short years all but the bloody aspects of the legends.
    Emil White’s shack—it was indeed a shack!—was on the highway, hidden by a
     tall, overgrown hedge invaded by roses and morning-glories. We sat down one noon in the shade
     of this hedge to havea bite. I had been helping him clean out the joint,
     which was gloomy, mildewed, reeking with the smell of rat dirt, garbage and worse.