A Visit to Big Sur

Highway 1 threads its improbable way down the California coast from San Francisco to Tijuana. Some hundred miles south of the Golden Gate is Big Sur, California (population negligible), noted for its green pines, redwood resort motels, and Henry Miller, the balding astrologist who writes.

In the Big Sur resturant, paper-bound editions of Nights of Love and Laughter were displayed in a lunch counter wire-stand. "Do you know Henry Miller?" I asked the girl behind the counter.

"Sure," she replied without much emotion. "Used to live next door to him."

"Does he come out often? I mean, do you see him around the town?"

She laughed in a small, superior way. "What do you think--he's a hermit or something?"

At this point, a figure arose from the other end of the counter. Corduroy trousers, a surplus Army combat jacket (over a crew neck sweater), and upon his face the stubby bristle of a cultivated beard.

Wordless, he sat down next to me and deposited a great, ink-stained ledger book before him. Meditating quietly for a moment, he suddenly looked up and said, "Do you like Mr. Miller?"

I had no chance to reply. "My name is Ellston Barnes," my visitor said. "Of course, that's not my real name. It's merely the pseudonym which I sign to my poetry. I'm a poet."

"Actually," he went on, "I'm a student. Stanford. But only for one more year. Notice my Palo Alto pallor." He tapped nervously on the ledger. "In here I've got over 200 original poems."

He noticed that I was not saying much. "What have you read by Henry Miller?" he asked. And he plunged into a discussion of the English language's most banned author. Of course, he said, he hadn't read Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn. "The Erotica shelf was locked," he explained.

"Takes guts to write the stuff he does," said Barnes. "I think a straight line can be drawn right down the spinal cord of literary history. From Thomas Hardy to D. H. Lawrence to Henry Miller. Same thing's happened to all of them--ridicule, persecution. Fifty years from now he'll be revered. Miller, I mean."

He paused for breath. "Personally, I live on North Beach. Have you ever been to North Beach?" I admitted I hadn't.

"North Beach," he confided, "has become what Greenwich Village never was. North Beach is an American Left Bank. Small, maybe, but in spirit a cultural frontispiece extending from San Francisco to San Simeon." With a flourish of the hand, he proceeded to reel off a list of names--poets of the technological age, bar-room bohemians and prophets of the "beat, sad-brown and breathless generation."

Ellston Barnes took me by my tweed lapel. "The real writers are coming West," he said. There was Rexroth, and a fellow named Kerouac (who hitch-hikes), and Robinson Jeffers, who roams up and down the beach screaming in the night. Henry Miller's America.

"In ten years there won't be one significant creative work from east of the Mississippi. The whole cultural map of America is changing." He pointed to the paper-back I held. "He made it possible. He showed that a man with something to say, a voice of significance, a rare talent, can make itself heard no matter the din of garbage disposals and IBM machines." Even from the back streets and brothels of a hungry Paris.

I had finished my sandwich and turned to go. He grabbed my arm and flung open his ledger.

"Listen to this," he said.

Spit at the altar,

Wait for the mortar shell;

Pencil-seller and suicide,

Child in the arms of a wrought-iron apple tree:

I do not know the face of God.

Totem poles and pews of silent men,

Fingers not meant to entwine sequaciously;

Exploding suns

Like amusement park balloons:

Light the way to Paradise.

"It's mine," he said. "Of course, it's only a fragment. It's an elegy to Henry Miller." I said I had to go. "Of course," he replied. "Come back any time. I'm always here, on the beach. If I'm not at school."

The major works of Henry Miller, I reflected much later, would always be locked up on rare book Erotica shelves and the keys bestowed to a spinster librarian. "Pornography and anarchism," I exclaimed bitterly, and longed for the bosom of Mother Advocate.