Big Sur
Miller travelled through Europe and the United States (on the trip that would inspire his critique of America, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare) before reaching California and his own personal paradise, Big Sur. Miller was a dedicated Bohemian, scraping together cash here and there, unafraid to bum from others, and work if only accountable to himself—certainly life in wild Big Sur required a lot of manual labor. Miller eked by on very little: looking back from the 1950s on his untouchable royalties in France, for example, he mused, “A hundred a month--regularly—would have solved our problems. (It would have then. Today no sum is large enough to solve anybody’s problems. The bombs eat up everything.)”
He fit in with the developing Bay Area scene well, extending the axis of the Bohemia south to the Monterey Peninsula. His ideas about art were similar to those being developed among the poets and painters of the regions. “And what is the potential of man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words? You think I am searching for God. I am not. God is. The World is. Man is. We are,” he told Conrad Moricand, echoing the Eastern-inflected ideas of the other artists. Every one, every thing was a mixture of good and bad, of white magic and black magic: even the bomb, which could destroy the world but also provide energy.
He fit in with the developing Bay Area scene well, extending the axis of the Bohemia south to the Monterey Peninsula. His ideas about art were similar to those being developed among the poets and painters of the regions. “And what is the potential of man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words? You think I am searching for God. I am not. God is. The World is. Man is. We are,” he told Conrad Moricand, echoing the Eastern-inflected ideas of the other artists. Every one, every thing was a mixture of good and bad, of white magic and black magic: even the bomb, which could destroy the world but also provide energy.
Miller knew Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth. His first home in Big Sur was a shack loaned to him by George Leite, who published some of his (and Nin’s) work in Circle. And like the other artists he saw California as a barren wasteland in which he could be free to develop his art unfettered by the Modernists. He told Nin, ““I admit there is no life—no cultural, intellectual life. But in times like these, when everything is roped off, one has to fall back on oneself.”
At the time, Miller was developing a literary reputation—although an underground one—and he seems to have been enthralled by it, believing the hype. Soldiers smuggled his books in the country from places where they had been legal, and they began to be passed around. Literary scholar Warner Berthoff, for instance, showed that his style not only influenced Nin, but Norman Mailer, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon—and those two icons of mid-1950s Bay Area Bohemia Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
Bern Porter, the Berkeley physicist-cum-publisher, was especially excited by Miller’s writings. He went to see him in Hollywood in 1942, before Miller had made it to Big Sur and while he was contemplating a career writing for movies. Porter punctuated his resignation from the Manhattan Project by putting out Miller’s anti-war screed, “Murder the Murderers.” (This would have certainly enamored him to Tiffany Thayer.) A few years later, Porter put together a festschrift, “The Happy Rock.”
The title played on Miller’s increasing sense of himself as a guru—he was a happy rock, “:Henry Tzu.” The newspapers in San Francisco started to notice this and, with a Harper’s article, cast his home in Big Sur as the center of a “Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” attracting conscientious objectors, artists, and groupies. Publicly, Miller disavowed this, but privately he knew it and did nothing to discourage. He told Nin, for instance, that he knew George Leite and Bern Porter “were making a cult of me” and he encouraged this by publishing a stream of ephemera and half-finished projects—partly, no doubt, derived from his idea of himself as a man of the people, but also from the sense that everything he wrote might be profound. He fancied that Big Sur was an intellectual circle of rebels and off-beats—the cast-off who could renewe America after the big crash. “Nearly every one” of his neighbors, he wrote, “seems to be a specialist in some field, be it art, archeology, linguistics, symbolism, Dianetics, Zen Buddhism or Irish folklore.” He Romanticized all outsiders—American blacks, for example, whom he saw as repositories of soul against the materialism of the day.
Beyond his anti-war stance and general allegiance to Bohemianism, there are other ways of drawing connections between Miller and Forteanism—of suspecting what might have drawn him to the Society.
He saw UFOs, like “twin stars gyrating about an invisible pivot for about twenty minutes, after which the light grew too strong and it faded out.” UFOs were central to Forteanism in the 1940s and 1950s.
He was interested in the discarded—discarded people, discarded facts. “Strange, how people suddenly develop an appreciation for that which is tossed away!” This was Forteanism’s main task, to recover that which had been forgotten. Only by recovering such things, Miller thought, could reality be fully understood. He told Moricand, “The full reality, that’s God—and man, and the world, and all that is, including the unnameable. I’m for reality. More and more reality. I’m a fantaic about it, if you like.”
Indeed, he in some ways he seems to have fancied himself another Fort: a good third of his paean to life in California, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, was spent lamenting the number of letters he received from all around the world—on the Ascended Masters of the Himalayas, Dianetics, Zen, Buddha, and Jesus—as well as celebrating them, and their access to reality. The latter-day guru bragged from his Shangri-La, his own Tibet, a place where Ascended Masters passed on necessary knowledge, “People are constantly supplying me with startling facts, amazing events, incredible experiences—as if I were another Charles Fort. They struggle, they rebel, they experiment they get glimpses of truth, they are raised up by spasmodic gusts of self-confidence—and yet they are hopelessly enmeshed.”
At the time, Miller was developing a literary reputation—although an underground one—and he seems to have been enthralled by it, believing the hype. Soldiers smuggled his books in the country from places where they had been legal, and they began to be passed around. Literary scholar Warner Berthoff, for instance, showed that his style not only influenced Nin, but Norman Mailer, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon—and those two icons of mid-1950s Bay Area Bohemia Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
Bern Porter, the Berkeley physicist-cum-publisher, was especially excited by Miller’s writings. He went to see him in Hollywood in 1942, before Miller had made it to Big Sur and while he was contemplating a career writing for movies. Porter punctuated his resignation from the Manhattan Project by putting out Miller’s anti-war screed, “Murder the Murderers.” (This would have certainly enamored him to Tiffany Thayer.) A few years later, Porter put together a festschrift, “The Happy Rock.”
The title played on Miller’s increasing sense of himself as a guru—he was a happy rock, “:Henry Tzu.” The newspapers in San Francisco started to notice this and, with a Harper’s article, cast his home in Big Sur as the center of a “Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” attracting conscientious objectors, artists, and groupies. Publicly, Miller disavowed this, but privately he knew it and did nothing to discourage. He told Nin, for instance, that he knew George Leite and Bern Porter “were making a cult of me” and he encouraged this by publishing a stream of ephemera and half-finished projects—partly, no doubt, derived from his idea of himself as a man of the people, but also from the sense that everything he wrote might be profound. He fancied that Big Sur was an intellectual circle of rebels and off-beats—the cast-off who could renewe America after the big crash. “Nearly every one” of his neighbors, he wrote, “seems to be a specialist in some field, be it art, archeology, linguistics, symbolism, Dianetics, Zen Buddhism or Irish folklore.” He Romanticized all outsiders—American blacks, for example, whom he saw as repositories of soul against the materialism of the day.
Beyond his anti-war stance and general allegiance to Bohemianism, there are other ways of drawing connections between Miller and Forteanism—of suspecting what might have drawn him to the Society.
He saw UFOs, like “twin stars gyrating about an invisible pivot for about twenty minutes, after which the light grew too strong and it faded out.” UFOs were central to Forteanism in the 1940s and 1950s.
He was interested in the discarded—discarded people, discarded facts. “Strange, how people suddenly develop an appreciation for that which is tossed away!” This was Forteanism’s main task, to recover that which had been forgotten. Only by recovering such things, Miller thought, could reality be fully understood. He told Moricand, “The full reality, that’s God—and man, and the world, and all that is, including the unnameable. I’m for reality. More and more reality. I’m a fantaic about it, if you like.”
Indeed, he in some ways he seems to have fancied himself another Fort: a good third of his paean to life in California, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, was spent lamenting the number of letters he received from all around the world—on the Ascended Masters of the Himalayas, Dianetics, Zen, Buddha, and Jesus—as well as celebrating them, and their access to reality. The latter-day guru bragged from his Shangri-La, his own Tibet, a place where Ascended Masters passed on necessary knowledge, “People are constantly supplying me with startling facts, amazing events, incredible experiences—as if I were another Charles Fort. They struggle, they rebel, they experiment they get glimpses of truth, they are raised up by spasmodic gusts of self-confidence—and yet they are hopelessly enmeshed.”
