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time when he would actuall y become fearful that he might lose his job,
should that ever become all he had to cling to. No, he had become
unhinged from the desire for job, family, and position by the cruel
treatment he had received at the hands of circumstance. Nothing, he
felt, could be lower than the depths to which he had fallen at
Nanavati 's or the Cinema Vanves. How cou ld he concern himself over
the mere loss of a newspaper job? Everything tha t happened was
exactly what was meant to h appen. To convert defeats into triumphs!
That was as much as he could as k. For the first time, Henry was
thoroughly convinced that he had lived out his fate and had a destiny
to fulfill.
Besides, he was working at such a pace now that the extra four–
and-a-half hours that he had gained by his dismissal from the paper
were put to immedia te and good use. He was so full of energy that he
hardl y seemed to n eed sleep-no more than five hours. He slept, he
claimed , only for the pleasure of dreaming. He dreamed constantly: of
the books he would read (loaned by Anais or filch ed from the American
library ), of the water colors he would make (i nfluenced by Kl ee,
Chagall, and Picasso), and, above all, o f the books he would write.
There was a depression all over the world; litera ry men, like the
economy, had diminished expecta ti ons. Miller was one of the few
American writers who by 1932 still preserved the grandil oq uent hope
of the twenti es: to compose works as great as any that had ever been
written. Many others wanted only to compose something "proletar–
ian ," something superior to Gorky. Henry was ready to take on the
Iliad,
Rabelais, Joyce, Proust-and the Hol y Ghost, if need be. At this
moment he was sure about his destiny. He
had
to write a certai n
number of pages each day, he told Alf, " for the sake of posterity. "
Now he a rranged his life like pieces on a chess board-in littl e
ordered graduated rows, so much space for everything and every thin g
having a place. He lived, as he had wished to live in Remsen Street
(without the disorder introduced by June), a simpl e, bare Japanese life.
Each morning he arose, washed thoroughly and stra ightened up after
himself, raised the curtain s, and, though naked, in spected the doings in
the courtyard, then dressed and made hi s bed. Hi s teutonic habits of
orderliness preva il ed until the matter of work came up-then he would
explode. Sometimes as he began to prepare hi s morning mea l he'd
notice a book he had left unfinished the night before. Then he'd forget
breakfast altogether. Instead of clearing a place for hi s plate, he'd pick
up an enormous tome by Rank, Jung, or Keyserling and start in
reading. This was a promising sign. Soon there'd be a pencil in his
