The other book of Miller's that Merton mentioned he had read in that first letter to Miller besides The Colossus of Maroussi ("a tremendous and important book") was Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. Personally speaking, this is my real entry point and awakening to the parallels and similarities between Thomas Merton (who I had been reading for nearly twenty years) and Henry Miller (of whom I had read only the two Tropics). I began reading Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch on a visit to the Big Sur coast in February 2009 (ontheroad2009.blogspot.com) having previously read Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur recounting a very different experience on that coast. I fell in love with Miller’s book at once, and was pleasantly surprised and profoundly impressed with the deep sense of spirituality that he articulated. Having re-read the Tropics since, I have become more conscious of the spirituality they also contain, but Miller’s Big Sur is of a different order altogether; perhaps not as important as literature as the Tropics but it had a profound impact on me and opened my eyes to another side of Miller. If this was Merton’s first encounter with Miller’s writing (along with Colossus) I am not surprised that he connected with it so readily and identified with Miller’s way of thinking so closely. At the time that Merton and Miller were in correspondence with one another Merton had not read either of the Tropics, and I am not aware that he ever did.
Whereas the Tropics broke new ground as literature, blending autobiographical novel with surrealistic mysticism and social commentary, the literary style of both Colossus and Big Sur was more straightforwardly autobiographical. Colossus recounted Miller’s transformational months in Greece when he experienced something of a re-birth, returning to America at the end of it to begin a new life; a life that was to become profoundly contemplative and increasingly monastic, in a secular sense. He had even spoken of giving up writing altogether in order to make the transition from art to life complete, much as Merton has entered the monastery in 1941 believing that he was leaving his life as a writer behind. As we know, neither ceased to write; instead their writing went through changes and transformations that reflected their growth and development as human beings.
On his return to America, after some unsuccessful attempts to make some money, Miller secured a $750 advance from Doubleday publishers to tour America and write up his impressions. He bought a 1932 Buick, learned to drive, and set out on October 26, 1940. The end result is The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, eventually published by New Directions in 1945. His disenchantment with mid-twentieth century America parallels that of Thomas Merton in The Seven Storey Mountain culminating in his flight from the world and seeking refuge in the monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in December 1941. In 1942 Miller moved to southern California hoping to work as a writer in Hollywood, but did not really have the heart for it and made no real effort to get a job. In 1943 he made some money from his painting; he had taken up watercolor, and for a few months was able to sell as many as he could turn out. In February 1944 he visited Big Sur and stayed in various locations before settling in a rent-free cabin on Partington Ridge, remaining there for the next fifteen years or so.
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch is Miller’s account of his years in Big Sur which he came to regard as a kind of paradise, hence the title of the book: the oranges in a triptych by artist Hieronymus Bosch represent the fruits of paradise. This was a new beginning for Miller continuing the transition begun in Greece, as J.D. Brown writes, “from the civilized to the primitive, from art to life, from the air-conditioned nightmare to a back-country monastery.” It was a new beginning in a new place, but more than this, it was a new and broader vision of finding himself in paradise. Miller writes:
“Seeking intuitively, one’s destination is never in a beyond of time or space but always here and now. If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. Which is to say that there are no limits to vision. Similarly there are no limits to paradise. Any paradise worth the name can sustain all flaws in creation and remain undiminished, untarnished.” (Big Sur, p.25)
Whether it is paradise or not depends on how you see it: “There seems to be an unwritten law here which insists that you accept what you find and like it, profit by it, or you are cast out.” (Big Sur, p.26) Not that anyone, he says, is doing the casting out; it is the place itself. For those who have eyes to see, he seems to say, this is paradise; it is not only about acceptance in a passive sense, but about embracing life and whatever it brings, to “profit by it” and so discover paradise. This echoes what Miller says about finding true peace through acceptance and surrender in The Colossus of Maroussi; it signifies a profound abandonment and trust in providence that is also found in Merton’s monasticism:
“...all prayer, reading, meditation, and all the activities of the monastic life are aimed at purity of heart, an unconditional and totally humble surrender to God, a total acceptance of ourselves and our situation as willed by Him. It means renunciation of all deluded images of ourselves, all exaggerated estimates of our own capacity in order to obey God’s will as it comes to us in the difficult demands of life in its exacting truth. Purity of heart is then correlative to a new spiritual identity – the ‘self’ as recognized in the context of realities willed by God.” (Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, p.83)
Purity of heart, Merton says, is the aim of the monastic life, and equates to surrender to God and acceptance of ourselves and our situation. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matthew 5); so this purity of heart, this surrender and acceptance is about a way of seeing – seeing the Divine at work in our life and situation. This new way of seeing, this purity of heart, leads to a new spiritual identity; one is transformed, becomes new, born again, through this new vision, this new way of seeing that is to do with acceptance and surrender. How we see affects how we are or as Miller says in Big Sur, “To see things whole is to be whole” (p.144).
Later in a striking passage, Miller writes, “I have come to believe that through being receptive, keeping one’s mind and heart open – showing faith and trust, in other words – one’s desires, or prayers, are realized. By prayer I do not mean asking, hoping, begging or bartering for that which one desires but, without formulating it, living the thought – ‘Thy will be done!’ In short, acknowledging wholeheartedly to ourselves that, whatever the situation we find ourselves in, we are to regard it as an opportunity and a privilege as well as a challenge.”
There seems to be a very close parallel here in the thinking of Merton and Miller, so close as to be a convergence in vision: “without formulating it, living the thought – ‘Thy will be done!’” (Miller); “an unconditional and totally humble surrender to God, a total acceptance of ourselves and our situation as willed by Him” (Merton). For both of them, this surrender and acceptance expresses an attitude of faith and trust – in God, in life – a way of seeing and constructing reality that makes them who they are; an outlook on reality in which they find their identity.
The parallels and convergence in Thomas Merton and Henry Miller should not be overplayed; where there is convergence there is also divergence. Whilst they clearly admired each other’s writing and found they could identify with it, and clearly they revelled in the irony of finding so much congruence in their vision of reality, they were living very different lives: Merton as the cloistered monk steeped in the community life and discipline of prayer; Miller living quietly as he pleased in Big Sur, sometimes with wife and children. In a sense, Merton was not so much an ex-con as a convict by choice, living in his cell as if in paradise; though on his journeys beyond the monastery in the last year of his life – to California, New Mexico, Alaska, Asia – he perhaps then experienced the feeling of being an ex-con on parole. Merton’s description of Miller as “a kind of secular monk with sexual mysticism” seems accurate; Miller lived his life with the conviction of a monk, but a monk very much in and of the world, and the “sexual mysticism” perhaps denotes Miller’s reaching for the sublime and eternal rooted in the sensual experience of the world; physical reality as the entry point for spiritual encounter; the recovery of the divine within humanity through human life fully lived.
Sources:
Brown, J.D. Henry Miller. New York: Ungar, 1986.
Merton, Thomas. Contemplative Prayer. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973.
Miller, Henry. The Colossus of Maroussi. New York: New Directions, 1941.
Miller, Henry. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. New York: New Directions, 1957.
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