Henry Miller came to Big Sur with no money and even less interest in behaving himself. He had already spent years writing books that were banned in America, smuggled into the country and sold under the table, and now he was living in the coastal hills with artists, poets, lovers, eccentrics and other people who had apparently misplaced their alarm clocks. The vast Pacific was there, the mountains were there, the fog came and went through the canyons, and for a while it was possible to imagine that a person might simply walk away from the machinery of modern life and disappear into the California landscape.
Naturally, the San Francisco Examiner could not let that happen. In 1947 the paper sent reporter Clint Mosher south with a mission: find the dirt on Miller and his bohemian companions. What followed was a four-day campaign portraying the Big Sur artists as a cult of anarchists, nihilists and general enemies of decent civilization. There was marijuana, surrealist poetry, barefoot girls, a dismembered mannequin, Central American jungle music and enough sinister laughter to frighten the average subscriber straight back into his chrome-and-bakelite toaster kitchen. Miller himself was less interested in the American Dream than in escaping it, and the Examiner seemed determined to make that escape look like the beginning of the end of Western Civilization.
But there was something wonderful underneath all the newspaper thunder. Miller believed the artist had a duty to go against the crowd, to choose the uncertain road, even poverty, rather than surrender the imagination to convention. Big Sur gave him a place to live that philosophy. The Examiner gave him a villain. And postwar America, busy building suburbs, appliances, conformity and a new industrial future, suddenly found itself staring at a bunch of strange people on a mountain who appeared to be having a pretty good time. This is the story of Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the newspaper crusade that tried to turn bohemia into a public menace.
Welcome to Frisco: The Secret History. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. I have a wonderful episode for you today about author Henry Miller, his compound in the coastal hills above Big Sur and the Examiner’s campaign to paint him and his friends as dangerous and unhappy subversives.
Henry once wrote: “The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
This was a man unwilling to conform to the staid customs of post-war America, even post-war Frisco. As wild and as tolerant as San Francisco was in those last years of the Wild West, libertine Miller and his cohorts occupied a country too far, too enticing, too joyous and free to be let alone by the powers that were.
In Big Sur, he wrote, “Skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet, hills in winter of emerald green and in summer mountain upon mountain of pure gold. There was ever the unfathomable silence of the forest, the blazing immensity of the Pacific, days drenched with sun and nights spangled with stars.”
This was not a man concerned with countertop toasters of gleaming chrome and sturdy bakelite, or with the modern vacuum cleaners of the day, or with two-tone Rayon bowling shirts.
[interemezzo]
Before we get going, I want say thank you to Walter Haas at Graffeo Coffee Roasters at 735 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco.
Graffeo was founded in 1935 and has been selling coffee beans to the public and the best restaurants near and far ever since. I have been drinking Graffeo Coffee since I lived around the corner on Mason Street back in the Seventies. Graffeo offers a dark roast, light roast, and a Swiss-water decaf bean. If you can’t get to North Beach, you can go to Graffeo.com, that is g r a f f e o dot com and order there. They sell whole beans, or will grind to your request. I love starting my day with a huge mug of dark roast. I am really happy to say that Graffeo Coffee is a founding sponsor for the Frisco: The Secret History podcast. I am thrilled to be associated with such an historic and iconic San Francisco brand. Graffeo beans are, as it says on the package, “Simply the finest coffee in the world.” It’s true. Give Graffeo a try. You will thank me.
[intermezzo]
Today we are looking at the Examiner’s campaign to vilify author Henry Miller and his boho friends in the coastal hills of Big Sur in 1947.
As I wrote in the first installment of the Barfly Women series last year,
“The powerful San Francisco Examiner, Monarch of the Dailies, flagship of William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire, launched incendiary crusade after incendiary crusade from the time he had taken over the failing paper at the age of twenty-four. His father had acquired the newspaper in 1880 as a partial payment of a gambling debt and gave the paper to his ambitious son in 1887.
In 1898, William Randolf Hearst, locked in a circulation battle with Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, whipped the public into such a frenzy over the sinking of the Maine, supposedly from an attack by a Spanish armada, that the country went to war with Spain. Eighty years later, the United States Navy completed an investigation of the sinking of the ship and determined that the cause was a fire in a coal bunker adjacent to the ship’s ammunition magazines. Spontaneous combustion of coal was a known issue on ships in that era.
It was a short war, and approximately four hundred Americans died in combat, another 2,000 from disease; another seventeen thousand Spanish and Cuban soldiers died from malaria and dysentery, but it sold newspapers.”
So the Examiner was no stranger to creating boogeymen for the purpose of terrorizing or titillating, or both, the public to boost circulation.
By the time we get to 1947, I can think, off the top of my head, of a number of Examiner campaigns directed against an imaginary and terrifying existential Other.
In the 1920s, there was the threat of Jazz Babies, which included a horrific and salacious murder of a mother by her teenage daughter who was spending a lot of nights in Jazz (read: black) nightclubs. In the Thirties, Hearst turned his eye on the link between marijuana usage and moral decay (again: read black) as well as campaign about Mothers gambling their household allowances away. In the Forties, there was the moral crusade against barfly women, novelist Gertrude Atherton’s four-part “Women in Saloons — The Shame of My Sex,” which moved from voyeuristic bar-hopping reportage to an explicit argument that the “morons” she’d catalogued would be better off left to “drink themselves to death.” I covered that very strange and ominous story in Frisco episodes number twelve and thirteen. The paper would run that play again, upping the ante, with a series on Barfly Mothers.
I will be doing stories on Jazz Babies, Gambling Moms, and Barfly Mothers. There were other campaigns, of course. Frisco: The Secret History will reveal them in due time.
Before the paper got around to Barfly Mothers in late 1947, Examiner Editor Bill Wren pointed ace reporter Clint Mosher like a guided missile at the notorious and for the most part penniless writer who now called Big Sur his home and told him to find some dirt on Henry and his friends.
I feel compelled to note that Clint, at one time, as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, would occasionally supply Franklin D. Roosevelt with illicit Canadian whiskey during prohibition, when Roosevelt was still Governor of the state of New York. Apparently, Eleanor Roosevelt chased him out of the executive mansion one afternoon, throwing an empty whiskey bottle at him. I also feel compelled to note that Clint was a lifelong Republican.
The result was a four day series, The first article, published on May seventh and dateline Carmel, opened with:
[typewriter]
A group of fugitives from the time clock and the dishpan have established a cult of hate in the Big Sur Mountains forty miles south of this tweedy, tourist town. Their target is the great mass of people who fail to recognize the cultists as custodians of true culture in the postwar world. Their philosophy is the doctrine of doom that characterizes the limp watch, surrealist school of thought. Modern civilization, they contend, is on its death bed and the sooner the mortician is called in the better.
Their leader is Henry Miller, the aging writer whose proud boast is that he was taken to the police station at the age of six for uttering obscenities on the sidewalks of New York.
[end typewriter]
I have to say that Clint could turn a phrase.
About Henry’s novels, Clint wrote: “many of which have not been placed in general circulation because of purple passages, closer in meaning to the more disagreeable things of life than to the art of love making.”
This is as close as Clint got to mentioning the thirteen-year battle wherein Henry’s first book, Tropic of Cancer, and subsequent books, had been proclaimed to be pornography and could not legally be sold in the United States.
[intermezzo]
Henry Miller was born in New York City in 1891. His family moved to Brooklyn in his first year and that is where he grew up. He attended the City College of New York for two months and dropped out, unwilling or unable to adhere to any kind of academic routine.
What followed was a succession of jobs, taxicab driver, librarian, and so on. In 1917, he married Beatrice Wickens and together they had a daughter in 1919. They separated in 1921. Over the course of his life, he worked, here and there, as a post office clerk, a ranch hand, a grave digger, and he managed a speakeasy in New York City.
He eventually landed a job at Wester Union and rose to the position of manager, supervising a squad of messengers. He was thirty years old. He had never written a word before. One day, Western Union First Vice President J.C. Willever called Henry into his office. Why he singled out Henry we will never know, but the subject of writing came up. Henry later wrote in Tropic of Capricorn, “He would like to see someone write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers; he hinted that perhaps I might be the one to do such a job” and that the suggestion had left his head in a whirl.
Horatio Alger was, of course, the writer of all-American rags-to-riches stories very popular in the late 1800s. One of the great propaganda myths ever foisted on this country by the rich.
He had in fact been keeping notes for a long time and V.P. Willever’s suggestion was the fire that lit the fuse.
As a manager at the company Henry certainly met any number of job seekers who were, as he put it, “down and out, begging for work, for cigarettes, for carfare, for a chance, Christ Almighty, just another chance!”
So, a collection of Horatio Alger-type stories was not to be. With a three-week vacation coming in March of 1922, he selected his notes for twelve stories of the desperate men he had encountered and, on the first day, he wrote five thousand words, the amount he had calculated would be necessary to finish the novel before he had to go back to work.
He wrote a friend on that evening of his first day at the typewriter: “Ye Gods! The first day of being a writer has nearly broken my back. But I have done my quota for the day, a good eight-hour day such as no union man keeps. I have finished my 5,000 words and made some slight revisions. Tomorrow, if I am like the Lord God, I shall wake and look upon my work and pronounce it good. Tonight I am in grave doubt, in extreme torment”
Amazingly, Henry had enough energy most evenings to visit a local taxi dance hall, Wilson’s, at Forty-Sixth and Broadway, where he met June Mansfield. He finalized his divorce from Beatrice in 1923 and married June in 1924.
By April tenth he had completed his novel, “Clipped Wings,” much closer to Dostoyevsky than Alger, bitter stories about insulted and injured men suffering through hopeless, dead-end lives, some ending in murder or suicide.
It is unclear as to whether or not he ever showed the manuscript to Vice-President Willever. I doubt it.
He submitted the manuscript to one publisher and was so destroyed by the rejection letter he received, he never submitted it to a publisher again.
He would later write: “I suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written. It was a colossal tome and faulty from start to finish. But it was my first book and I was in love with it.”
You have to love a man with a self-deprecating sense of humor.
He published it himself and sold it door-to-door and nightclub to nightclub. It’s unclear how long he did this. After marrying June, he quit Western Union without notice.
The direct-sales effort lasted a brief period during his initial descent into extreme poverty after leaving his job at Western Union, before moving on to other endeavors like running a speakeasy in 1927. He also briefly sold actual encyclopedias door-to-door at another point in his life. He once remarked, “I was always out of work. I held innumerable positions for a day or less, often.”
There were times when Henry was forced to beg for money on the street.
[intermezzo]
In October of 1926, June brought home oddball, artist and poet Jean Kronski to live with them. June was drawn to Jean, often prioritizing Jean’s affection over Henry’s. Henry felt isolated and suspected that they were lovers. In April 1927, Henry returned home one afternoon to discover that June and Jean had boarded a ship bound for France without telling him.
The European getaway did not turn out to be the romantic, artistic utopia the two women envisioned.
As soon as they arrived in Paris, their relationship devolved into constant and aggressive quarreling.
This lasted two more months before they called it quits.
Defeated and broke, June sailed back to New York in July of 1927 to reconcile with a heartbroken Henry Miller. Jean eventually returned to America died by suicide in an asylum in 1930.
June continued to support Henry and his writing, perhaps as penance, and somehow saved enough to take them both to Paris in 1930.
He was thirty-eight years old, basically unpublished, and their marriage was still in trouble. June hoped to rekindle the romance by escaping the pressures of New York living and introducing Henry to the charm of Europe’s bohemian way of life.
It was there they met Anaia Nin.
And it was there that Henry wrote his first masterpiece, the outrageous and scandalous and autobiographical, “Tropic of Cancer.”
[intermezzo]
In Paris, Henry fell in with a circle that would populate his fiction directly: Alfred Perles, a close and long-running friendship later documented in *Quiet Days in Clichy*; Michael Fraenkel, who sheltered the penniless Henry on arrival and co-authored an epistolary book, *Hamlet*, with him — the two exchanged letters, starting from a discussion of Shakespeare’s plays, until their combined correspondence reached 1,000 pages; and Anaïs Nin, a long-term lover and occasional benefactor, whose diaries — not anything Henry himself wrote — are the primary record of a relationship that also involved Henry’s wife June.
[intermezzo]
Henry’s largely autobiographical “Tropic of Cancer” was first published in Paris in 1934. Immediately declared to be pornography, the book was banned in the United States and Canada.
Upon publication, his aforementioned friend Michael Fraenkal, the one who had sheltered him and had co-written a book with him, declared the book to be “a repugnant and sordid dunghill.”
Subsequent books by Henry were also deemed obscene through many trials in the United States, including “Black Spring” (1936), “Tropic of Capricorn” (1939), “Sexus” (1949), “Plexus” (1953), and “Nexus” (1959), and banned alongside of “Tropic of Cancer.”
“Tropic of Cancer” was barred from being legally imported or published in the U.S. for 30 years, until the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision (Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein) in 1964, which ruled that the book was not obscene. The book was banned in Canada and Great Britain as well.
In the meantime, there was a real market for smuggled copies. Frances Steloff, who’d founded New York’s Gotham Book Mart in 1920, was a known dealer in banned books, Miller’s included. He managed to escape punishment. Not everyone got off as lightly: bookseller Jacob Brussel was imprisoned for three years after a 1940 raid turned up copies of a bootleg “Medusa edition” of the novel — an unauthorized printing that falsely claimed Mexican publication
The ban finally broke in 1961, when Grove Press — led by Barney Rosset — published *Tropic of Cancer* in the US, an event later described as the first “forced acceptance of banned books” in American history. The edition was defended in court by attorney Charles Rembar, who’d previously defended D.H. Lawrence’s *Lady Chatterley’s Lover*. Rembar’s defense is remembered in one line: “Pornography is in the groin of the beholder.”
When the Examiner published these hit pieces in 1947, Henry was worried William Randolph Hearst might sic the police or the FBI on them, something of which Hearst was certainly capable.
For the record, I have not read the whole book. The parents of a school chum in Berkeley had a copy of “Tropic of Cancer” back in 1963 and we would scour the book for the juicy parts, of which there was an abundance.
I can’t read the most salacious parts here: I want to maintain at least a PG rating, but right off the bat, Henry is declaring, “I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he?” It gets graphic after that.
Tania was modeled on either a married friend, Bertha Shrank, wife of Joseph Shrank, Sylvester in the book, or Anais Nin, or both. Henry cheated on his women. Henry slept with this friends’ wives. He once declared that “all women are masochists,” and his relations with them were complex. He was both promiscuous at all times, and dependent on different women for his very survival on and off until his books were allowed to be published..
Today he would surely be labeled a misogynist, perhaps a narcissist. But that would be based on his fictional life. There was a lot of embellishment in his books, though precisely how much is hard to say.
In real life, among his friends, he was known to be a vibrant, iconoclastic, and boisterous figure—often described as a joyous, free-wheeling vagabond who mixed raw humor, philosophical rambling, and an insatiable appetite for life, art, food and sex.
While his literary persona came off as an egocentric, vulgar, and ruthless scoundrel, friends remembered the him as a genuinely warm, generous, and gentle man.
One thing is certain, Henry, as the British would say, could pull the birds.
Anais, whom Henry and June met in Paris, fell in love with both of them. While Henry and Anais carried on a torrid affair, it remains unclear whether or not she and June ever made love. Both were bisexual. Most sources describe the women’s relationship as an infatuation and a mutual obsession, with an occasional kiss or touch here and there.
The 1961 Supreme Court decision that “Tropic of Cancer” was not obscene paved the way for all of Henry’s books to be published in this country.
Obviously, this irrevocably changed his life for the better.
[intermezzo]
In his second article about the threat that the once penniless Henry and his friends posed to the moral decent society, the corruption of innocent young minds and Western Civilization in general, Clint Mosher wrote:
[typewriter]
The fact is that Miller is on his mountain top and his most ardent followers are clustered below him. He is writing and talking in the surrealist manner and an important segment of the youth of the Bay Area is taking his preachings as the full gospel for a better life.
These anarchistic theories are being packaged and shipped to San Francisco and Berkeley and to youths across the country with the hope and intent that they will be put into practice.
The Millerites are grim. Their brittle laughter is heard only when someone mouths a new and more vituperative indictment of the existing social order. Miller, who admits to fifty-six years and appears much older, lives a writing, painting and puttering existence with his youthful wife and baby in a pink stucco bungalow which sits on the mountain top like a fleck of icing on a green cake.
Nor can Miller be held personally responsible for the fact that on occasions, San Francisco youths convene in a basement apartment and pay fifty cents for the right to hear a reading of Miller-inspired poetry and for the chance to puff on a marijuana cigaret.
[end typewriter]
Puffing on a marijuana cigarette and listening to Miller-inspired poetry?
The horror! I would ask, what is Miller-inspired poetry?
Clint goes on:
[typewriter]
Yet the evidence shows those who are cutting these dangerous capers in the wake of the second war are shouting Henry Miller and his doctrines from the housetops as a rallying cry for all disgruntled youths.
Not all who break bread with Miller depart to light bomb fuses.
[end typewriter]
Implicit there is that some people who have broken bread with Henry might have departed to light bomb fuses.
The more I read Clint’s articles, the more I think Henry and his friends knew what he was up to and were largely putting on a show, for which he fell completely.
In the third article of the series, published May sixth, and headlined, “Leftist Varda Against Wealth Except When He Is Making Sale,” Clint wrote:
[typewriter]
Yanko Varda ran a slippered foot along the crack in the wide board floor of his studio barn.
“Love and beauty,” he said, “that is culture. To do business is to do a monstrous thing.”
Varda, a short, stocky man in his middle fifties, wears his Millerism like a gaudy gown at a costume ball. His displeasure at wealth he can discard long enough to make change when, as frequently occurs, a rich patron tenders a bill of high denomination for one of his dream-symbol pictures.
Years on the left bank of Paris and among the art centers of the world have taken the violence out of Varda. A fringe of white hair sits quietly like a crown above his round, sun-tanned face.
His work room in what was once the hayloft is a surrealist nightmare. Two, not one, full-length mirrors, their gold-leaf frames painted white, stand against a far wall.
To the new visitor, they provide a startling effect. For after climbing a winding wooden stair, he suddenly sees himself standing in conventional garb and thought among all the impedimenta of the surrealist practitioner.
Until recently a full-sized female doll in mid-Victorian dress, except for an accentuated tin chest, hung by her neck from the high ceiling. Varda went away for a month and loaned his studio to some fishermen.
They cut the lady down and beheaded her. Now the head, topped by a disordered mop of blonde hair, sits on a flat dish. Varda likes to stand before it with a large knife and say, “This is John-the-Baptist in reverse. It is John taking his revenge on Salome.”
There is a long, refectory table in the center of the studio, and on it are wooden decorations shaped like outsized shoemaker’s awls, important to the surrealists because of their symbolism.
At the highest point in the roof, where the dismembered doll once hung, is a conventional loudspeaker through which Varda pipes recordings of Central American jungle chants.
[end typewriter]
I’m sorry, but the “Varda likes to stand before it with a large knife and say, “This is John-the-Baptist in reverse. It is John taking his revenge on Salome.” had to be staged for Clint’s benefit, who reported it as gospel, evidence of the weirdness in the hills of Big Sur.
I am just as certain that Varda had made sure that the Central American jungle chants would be playing on the hi-fi at the appointed hour when Clint arrived.
[intermezzo]
The fourth and final installment of the series, published May 7, was headlined, “Carmel Shuts Its Doors to Miller’s Cult. Artist Community Wants Nothing To Do With Hate Apostles”
Clint wrote:
[typewriter]
This peaceful community of artists who wear $100 tweeds (about $1500 today) on main street is on guard against any invasion by the tub-thumping Henry Millerites from the country to the south.
Fred Godwin, the hearty, sun-browned mayor of Carmel, talked about it as he clipped into an even line the straggling edges of the hedge that borders his ranch in the valley, a few miles inland from the sea.
No prude, and with three Hollywood years tucked into the knapsack of his experience, Godwin said: “I have no love for that radical sort of thing and neither have the people of Carmel.
“We have the American Legion and a lot of good, solid artists who will not permit any foolishness to come here in the Henry Miller manner.”
His wife, “Mim,” an attractive blonde in Levis and a bright cowboy shirt, remembered that recently she had encountered two young things walking barefoot down the main street in the rain. The legs of their Levis were rolled high above their knees.
“I said to them,” she declared, “you’re not from Carmel. You’re from Nob Hill in San Francisco. You ought to know better. We don’t go in for that kind of thing here.”
[end typewriter]
“You’re not from Camel. You’re from Nob Hill in San Francisco.”
Implying they were simply rich girls from Frisco playing at being Bohemians under the spell of Henry Miller and his acolytes, the ones who lived downslope in little huts that rented for $8 to $25 a month.
Despite the few spare quotes from Henry in the first installment, it’s hard to determine whether or not Clint talked to him for the articles. I’m sure Henry would have had a lot more to say. I suspect what Henry would have said would have undermined Clint’s assignment.
Henry wrote: “Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others – priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior – hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd.
“If he is an artist, he will be compelled to make sacrifices which worldly people find absurd and unnecessary. In following the inner light he will inevitably choose … poverty.”
Precepts such as these are antithetical to the selling of chrome and bakelite toasters or the American Dream or the coming military industrial complex, the foundation of which was currently being built in post-war America.
[intermezzo]
Back in the Seventies, I read a magazine interview with Henry. I can’t remember which magazine, probably Playboy or Oui or possibly Esquire. There was a picture of him on his deck in Pacific Palisades, California, just north of Santa Monica. He was in his mid-eighties, smiling, tanned, hale and hearty. Finally financially secure, he had moved into a lovely house on a promintory there in 1963.
In the picture, behind him on the deck, two young women were playing naked ping pong in the bright California sunshine .