A book
that changed
me
How Henry Miller's anti-establishment rant liberated me from little England
Living in self-imposed exile in 70s Paris, I found the intellectual revolution I'd been searching for in Colossus of Maroussi
John Vidal
Wednesday 28 August 2013
I
t was winter 1973. I was young and living in Paris – back then a wildly romantic but quite dangerous place. I had fallen for a French girl and run away from a dull job in London. After a few months she had left me, and I was stranded alone in the cold grey heart of Europe.
So I shivered in a cold-water flat in Montmartre and spent my time eking out coffee, smoking Gitanes and talking to everyone and anyone in any language we could muster. You could learn bad French or Spanish and live well on just seven hours of teaching English a week.
Paris was bone-grey and lonely, and I hated it. But there was no way back – and even if there had been, to what? This was a new life, beyond the social and intellectual straitjacket of parochial England, its tribal politics, drab cities and smothering politeness. After 15 years' toiling in English educational factories, bunged up with textbooks, manners, literature and theory, I wanted neither work nor authority figures – I was burning for expression, experience, ideas and meaning.
Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi was tinder for the blaze to come. I had found a dog-eared copy and, knowing nothing of the man or his reputation, devoured it. Written in 1939 as all Europe prepared for inevitable war, it was superficially a travelogue and a character study of the great Greek poet George Katsimbalis. In fact it was a celebration of friendship, spirit and life – all that seemed authentic and valuable and which was on the point of being destroyed.
I had no idea if it was fact or fiction, but I saw parallels in our situations. We were both on the road, poor as tramps, living in a foreign country with no possessions, responsibilities or certain future. We both suspected that the man with the fewest needs was the happiest. Miller had gone to Greece to escape the war clouds, and there I was living with Chileans fleeing a military junta and Vietnam draft dodgers. The cold war was raging, Middle East conflict was brewing, the price of oil was quadrupling, and nuclear conflagration seemed entirely possible. Students were rioting, hippies were rampant and there was a sense of social disorder and deep generational divide.
Into this heady political and social mix came Miller's hilarious and breathtaking demolition of the stupidity, greed and hypocrisy of those who had wrought continuing poverty, war and despair on Europe and the world. His emotional investigation of the wild Greek spirit was not just a spit in the eye of the European establishment – who, if they had read Maroussi would have dismissed him as patently dislodged, inflamed, surreal and even mad – but a giant gob in the face of all that was curmudgeonly and mean. There was no hint of objectivity, balance or fairness. This joyful rant expressed the rage and the hopes of mine and every other generation.
His targets were many and random. He swooped on an unsuspecting Frenchwoman for no other reason than she was bourgeoise, and emitted "the stench of the past" ("I repudiate you, your walls, your tempered, hand-laundered climate, I leave you to wither in your own trimmed lard"); he peered through a telescope, saw the rings of Saturn and spent three pages condemning the planet ("a living symbol of gloom, morbidity, disaster, fatality, the single repository of all the despair and defeat to which the human race from time immemorial has succumbed)".
Newspapers got short shrift for spreading lies, hatred, greed, envy and malice; lawyers, technologies, capitalism, communism and Catholicism were all excoriated. He dismissed Christmas as "sour, moth-eaten, bilious, crapulous, worm-eaten and mildewed" and denounced America for its obsessions with wealth and power. His passions burst at the seams, his prose streamed in long paragraphs, words falling over themselves in their haste to be read.
But it was Miller the poet and peacemaker who, I now think, made me reflect most. The fight, he said, was not against disease or poverty or even tyrants. These were just the symptoms of bad thinking.
It was not enough to overthrow governments or masters; total revolution of thought was needed: "Every war is a defeat to the human spirit, as long as we refuse to think in terms of world good … Life demands that we offer spirit, soul, intelligence, goodwill. As long as we refuse to think in terms of world good and world order we shall murder and betray one another … till the crack of doom. Man kills through fear; once we start slaying there is no end of it."
Phew. I read the book and immediately gave it away, not bearing for it to be unshared. I had entered a new realm. I had confirmed that my responsibilities were not just to myself, or to little England, but to the imagination and to something far greater than my present parlous condition. My immediate miserableness and loneliness were as nothing. And so what if I had nothing to show for life, no house or job, money or prospects? I too was a millionaire in spirit. I too had self-belief.
I walked the next day in the Jardin du Luxembourg and passed two middle-aged women wrapped in furs and with lapdogs on leads. One of the women spat at my feet and muttered, "gauchiste!" I could not remember being so pleased. Happy as a kite, I echoed Miller, shouting back: "Je m'enfou de votre civilisation!" I strode on, laughed and never looked back. A few days later, I took the train to Greece.
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