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PERSONAL ESSAYS
posted 6/10/2002
On a recent Sunday, I took a trip to the Strand, a used-book store in downtown Manhattan whose shelving system makes locating a specific title roughly equivalent to searching for the Holy Grail. I say this to emphasize that I did not go there looking for porn. Within a few minutes, I was holding an innocuous-looking copy of Henry Miller's Opus Pistorum. A cursory page-flip led to the same rush of damp sensation I got from opening my first dirty book at the age of ten. Soon I was leaning furtively in the corner, trying to memorize any one of the book's dozens of sexy and shame-inducing scenes for use later that night.
Henry Miller has brought great pleasure to many an unsuspecting teenager who assumed Tropic of Cancer was as dully asexual as everything else in the classics section. (The next thing you knew, you were hiding out in the bathroom, reading the sentence with the word "cock" in it with near-obsessive disbelief.) Today, I have mixed feelings when it comes to old Hank, especially when the feminist tendencies kick in. Miller's hero is usually a shiftless, faithless scavenger with holes in his pockets and a perpetual hard-on. In the readers' more mainstream works, readers are swept away to a hedonistic, bohemian world where art reigns supreme and the petty details (rent-paying, etc.) are best left to the fat-cat philistines who perpetually get suckered.
Traditionally, it's been a little harder for women to look past Miller's clear misogyny and his characters' complete inability to appreciate women in a non-sexual way. Most of the female characters in Miller's books are either scheming backstabbers who give the narrator blue balls, or "hot filthy bitches," seemingly inexhaustible sources of acrobatic sex. My college roommate put it best: "Henry Miller is for the boys; Anais Nin is for the girls."
And then there is Opus Pistorum. In the '40s, Miller had relocated to Southern California, where he supported himself by selling his watercolor paintings. (There's even a Henry Miller Art Museum in Japan.) It was there that he became friends with Milton Lubovski, part-owner of the Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood. The shop specialized in tomes about Hollywood and the film industry, but for its more prestigious clientele (including directors Joseph Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder), it was a discreet clearinghouse for porn. In an affidavit filed with the U.S. Embassy in Paris, Lubovski stated that, in 1957, he commissioned Miller to write some purple prose and paid a dollar a page for all the rights to the material. The enterprising Lubovski made five copies of the finished book, titled Opus Pistorum, and made, as Miller suggested, "a few months' rent from it." The book went unpublished in every English-speaking country until 1983. For a while, Miller even denied writing it.
Almost sixty years later, I held it in my hands. The protagonist, Alf, is an exaggerated extrapolation of Miller's usual amoral hero, only more hedonistic, more misogynistic and more violent. The book itself makes no pretense toward plot, careening from one fuck to the next. It's a sex book to end all sex books, filled with depictions of pedophilia, incest, rape, bestiality, gang-bangs, sado-masochism and a exhaustingly thorough satanic orgy complete with dead chickens and gallons of blood.
And then there are the women. The more that Alf and his friends fuck them (often using force), the more subservient they become, and the more Alf despises them. After using his belt to strap one of his dates into an ecstatic sexual frenzy, Alf ruminates on the female personality: " . . . they're crazy, these bitches . . .every fucking one of them . . .No matter what you do to them, it's fine, it's marvelous . . .Do you want them to bring you their sister, or their daughter, or their grandmother? Wonderful! Do you want to beat the ass off them? Ah, they'll rush right out and buy a whip. They're grateful for anything, anything you do to them is fun . . . all cunts are queer in the head."
In Opus Pistorum, there are no women other than willing women, and those who are not willing are made so through force. During a gang rape, Alf and his friends uncomfortably resemble Alex and the Droogs of A Clockwork Orange: "Of course, she's deserving everything that's happening to her tonight . . .every time the hollow voice of conscience gives a burp, I remember the teasing this bitch gave me . . .. A cunt who acts the way she does might as well wear a tag: "Forceful Persuasion Solicited.'." Alf's attitude toward women is that of a male spider, albeit one that suspects the female is going to eat him after sex.
So what was I doing with Opus Pistorum? Frankly, it made me horny. Whatever else you can say about Miller, he liked a good fuck. Unlike the stone-faced, plastic-bodied hulks of contemporary porn videos, when Alf talks dirty ("Yes, I'll screw you . . . ass mouth and cunt . . . until you have been marked forever by the passage of my prick . . . I'll fill your body with fucking, and your mind with fucking and your soul with fucking . . . "), you know he means it. In between scrounging free meals from patrons and rhapsodizing about the written word, Alf and his friends have the lustiest, most carnivorous sex I've ever read. They fuck in all shapes and colors: French midgets, butch lesbians, nymphomaniac teenagers, hot-blooded Spanish dancers, Chinese prostitutes, older American women, unnamed girls on the street — you name it. Alf & Co. crave sex with the zeal and enthusiasm of starving gourmets discovering a Roman banquet. "She reaches down to her ass and yanks my balls until I'm beginning to worry about the hinges coming loose . . . She's coming, she howls . . .I suck her teats . . . I've got an erupting volcano on my hands. I haven't really begun to fuck her until that first hurdle is taken. Then I settle down on her, go to it as though I expected to spend a few years there . . . In three minutes I have her gasping . . .In five she's asking for mercy."
Then there's the American-in-Paris angle. Although Henry James and Henry Miller might not have had much to discuss at a cocktail party, they share the innocent American's slow victimization by decadent European society. James presented the theme via subtle jabs at upper-crust society, but Miller cuts through all that, having his characters slowly become seduced and degraded by Paris' rampant sexual corruption. Posturing as an innocent American, Alf provides running commentary on Europe's lack of shame, but it's apparent that he's an all-too-willing participant. When his editor, Sam, complains about France, Alf scoffs, "Let him say anything he pleases . . .just so long as his wife and his daughter are here to fuck [me] and he's around to buy me a drink, he can talk his head off for all I care."
Reading Opus Pistorum, I rediscovered my sense of shame, and how it can be arousing. I was turned on by accounts of situations that, in reality, I found disgusting: mothers screwing their underage children; frenzied and psuedo-Catholic orgies; Alf's friends selling an unconscious woman's body to strangers so they can take pornographic pictures. I don't usually get wet from seeing acts of degradation, but Opus Pistorum tested my limits.
As for Miller himself — well, there didn't seem to be much that he was ashamed of. When he finally draws the line at father-daughter incest — Alf comes upon Sam drunkenly humiliating both his daughter and wife after realizing that they've laid everyone in town — it's sort of a downer. But that's the beauty of Miller. A modern pornographer would have had Alf dive headfirst into the familial orgy, while Miller has him running away, reminding us that even the severest transgressives have their own private sense of shame.
But I plan to hold on to Opus Pistorum; it's rare to find a writer so happy to be seduced, so willing to wallow in his own juices. "At times like this I can't think of anything better . . . to have a fat ass in your hands, a cunt to hide your nose in, and a hot bitch trying to pull your cock off with her tongue . . .that's all a man could ask for in this world or any other . . ."
Or woman, for that matter.
n°
(The next thing you knew, you were hiding out in the bathroom, reading the sentence with the word "cock" in it with near-obsessive disbelief.) Today, I have mixed feelings when it comes to old Hank, especially when the feminist tendencies kick in. Miller's hero is usually a shiftless, faithless scavenger with holes in his pockets and a perpetual hard-on. In the readers' more mainstream works, readers are swept away to a hedonistic, bohemian world where art reigns supreme and the petty details (rent-paying, etc.) are best left to the fat-cat philistines who perpetually get suckered.
some purple prose and paid a dollar a page for all the rights to the material. The enterprising Lubovski made five copies of the finished book, titled Opus Pistorum, and made, as Miller suggested, "a few months' rent from it." The book went unpublished in every English-speaking country until 1983. For a while, Miller even denied writing it.
the teasing this bitch gave me . . .. A cunt who acts the way she does might as well wear a tag: "Forceful Persuasion Solicited.'." Alf's attitude toward women is that of a male spider, albeit one that suspects the female is going to eat him after sex.
that first hurdle is taken. Then I settle down on her, go to it as though I expected to spend a few years there . . . In three minutes I have her gasping . . .In five she's asking for mercy."
they can take pornographic pictures. I don't usually get wet from seeing acts of degradation, but Opus Pistorum tested my limits.
