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

The little
     table at which we were having coffee and sandwiches was only a foot or two from the road. A
     car pulled up, a man and his wife got out. Throwing a half-dollar on the table, the man
     ordered coffee and sandwiches; he took it for granted that we were running a roadside
     café.
    In those days, when Emil managed on seven dollars a week, everything included,
     I used to urge him to make a few pennies by serving coffee and sandwiches. Cafés were few and
     far between; gas stations were fifty miles apart. Many a time Emil was routed out of bed at
     two or three in the morning by a tourist looking for gas or water.
    Then, one after another, the artists happened along: poets, painters, dancers,
     musicians, sculptors, novelists … everything but slack-wire artists. All poor, all trying to
     live on nothing, all struggling to express themselves.
    Up to this time the only writer I had met, aside from Lillian Ross, was Lynda
     Sargent. Lynda had everything that goes to make a writer except that one indispensable
     thing—belief in one’s self. She also suffered from ergophobia, a disease common to writers. A
     novel which she had been working on for years, a formidable one, was unfortunately destroyed
     by fire (and the house with it) shortly after she completed it. During the time I was her
     guest she showed me stories and novelettes, some finished, some unfinished, which were
     altogether remarkable. They were largely about New England characters whom she had known as a
     girl. It was a New England more like the legendary Big Sur: full of violence, horror, incest,
     broken dreams, despair, loneliness, insanity and frustration of every sort. Lynda related
     these stories with a granite-like indifference to the reader’s emotions. Her language was
     rich, heavily brocaded, tumultuous and torrential. She had command of the whole keyboard. In
     some ways she reminded me of that strange woman from East Africa who wrote under the nameof Isak Dinesen. Only Lynda was more real, more earthy, more bloodcurdling.
     She is still writing, I should add. The last word I had from her, written from a lonely
     lookout station in the mountains, was that she was just finishing another book.
    Norman Mini, whom I have already mentioned, was—and still is—“another writer
     of promise,” as publishers love to say. He was much more, indeed. He had in him the makings of
     a von Moltke, a Big Bill Haywood, a Kafka—and a Brillat-Savarin. I first met him at the home
     of Kenneth Rexroth, in San Francisco. He impressed me immediately. I sensed that he had
     suffered deep humiliations. I did not look upon him then as a writer but as a strategist. A
     military strategist. A “failed” strategist, who had now made life his battleground. That was
     Norman to me—a fascinating Norman, whom I could listen to indefinitely, and do still.
    A year or two after this meeting Norman arrived in Big Sur with a wife and
     child, determined to write a book which had been germinating in his crop for years. I no
     longer remember the title of this work, which he finally consummated at Lucia, but I do
     remember the flavor of it. It might well have been entitled—
The Unspeakable Horror of this
     Man-made Universe
. There wasn’t a flaw in it, unless the work itself was a flaw. It
     moved on ruthlessly, relentlessly and inexorably, a chthonian drama mirroring the nightmare of
     our daytime world.
    How we sweated over that book! I say “we” because, along about the middle,
     Norman began to visit me frequently for injections. Moral injections, of course. Now the
     strategist came to the fore sharply. Faced with a stalemate, his military cunning—that is the
     best I can describe it—came into play. His forces were beautifully aligned, his powers had not
     deserted him, victory was within his grasp, but he could not make, or rather bring about, the
     move which would unleash the decisive battle.
    I had not yet read a line of the book, nor in fact