Free Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" by Frederick Turner Page B

Henry—nothing useful at any rate—because by now it had occurred to him that what he really wanted to do was to become a writer.
    He had, however, absolutely no idea how this ambition could be realized. Already, he’d turned over half a library, reading through the works of the great. And in the tailor shop he had met an honest-to-god living, working writer, Frank Harris. Reading was fine in its way; certainly a writer must be well read. And Harris’s colorful personality was attractive: it was grand indeed to be able to sail into a tailor shop to be fitted out for a yachting costume. Still, neither reading nor Harris’s literary status showed the way into the actual, solitary act of composing. Maybe it was a matter of the right materials. So he bought pens and a notebook, but they were dead things in his hands. Then somehow he got a monstrous desk out of the tailor shop and into his Brooklyn flat where it squatted, squarein the midst of the living room. Yet when he sat down to it with his proper materials nothing happened. He himself was as dead as a crater, sitting there, staring at the unforgiving blankness of the page. He refused to believe he had nothing to say because for some years now he had been composing in his head dialogue, scenes, character sketches, vignettes as he shuttled to and from his menial jobs. What then was the trick, the hidden spring, the magic formula that would release interior invention, turning thought or conversation into words written on a waiting page?

Manhattan Monologist
    Maybe he’d been born in the wrong place—Brooklyn, USA—at the wrong time, this soulless modern age of Progress? He asked his old friend Emil this question many times on his visits to Schnellock’s Fiftieth Street studio. He would come bounding up the stairs to the studio, filled with an electric vigor, clad in his studiously shabby army shirt and battered felt hat, brimming with new stories and observations gleaned from his voracious reading. But then, the question: was it merely his bad luck to be only an American instead of a European? Perhaps to find an answer by way of context, he would pump Emil for reminiscences of his time abroad, using Schnellock’s mounted wall map of the Continent as a constant point of reference. But what really riveted him was a large map of Paris.He studied that as if it were a kind of code he was meant to crack, tracing with his fingers the archaic meander of its streets, the grand arc the river made through the city’s heart.
    All of this of course was when it was just the two of them. In the company of others, men with some artistic or intellectual cachet, Miller would be mostly silent, almost mute. It infuriated his host because, better than anyone, Schnellock knew how Miller could talk when the fit was on him. Yet in the presence of these prestigious strangers his old friend seemed cowed, suddenly and quite literally just a Brooklyn boy. In more comfortable company it could be quite different. Then, maybe, something said—the expression of some bit of vanity, a piety, the mindless repetition of a reigning shibboleth—would set him off on verbal flights that transfixed and transformed his listeners with what Schnellock recalled as Miller’s “magnificent life-giving words, words that seemed to restore to us what life had robbed us of. Truth, lies, fantasy, drama, invention”—and a sidesplitting humor so overwhelming it hurt. And there were a very few occasions when Miller could do this in the presence of those strangers he appeared to regard as his betters. On these occasions it was as if he’d suddenly said to himself, “Fuck everything,” and then would “sweep away all barriers and take the company by storm,” as Schnellock put it.
    In the aftermath of such a performance Schnellock would find himself besieged with requests for Miller’s address or phone number. How could they get hold of this guy? When was Emil going to invite him back, and couldn’t they