Playboy Interview: Henry Miller

Novelist Bernard Wolfe, who conducted this exclusive interview for Playboy, has been a close friend, colleague, drinking companion and brother iconoclast of this month's interviewee for almost 25 years. Fellow literary lights in New York during the Forties, they are now neighbors in the fashionable suburbs of West Los Angeles--where, beside the pool and in the rustic living room of Miller's roomy split-level home, the following conversation was recorded. A long-time Playboy contributor, the 49-year-old Wolfe debuts herein, with hard-hitting authority and familiar expertise, as a Playboy interviewer. Of his subject he writes:

"When the first copies of the first Paris edition of 'Tropic of Cancer' reached our shores in 1934, appetizingly camouflaged in the dust jackets of Escoffier and Brillat-Savarin cookbooks, mine were among the damp hands that reached for them. It was our good luck that the desultory hawkshaws of U. S. Customs never stopped to wonder at this surge of undergraduate passion for l'haute cuisine; for more than a few of us cut our literary eyeteeth on that contraband book. To us it was, as its author fistily proclaimed, a badly needed 'gob of spit in the face of Art,' as well as an incendiary demonstration of the napalm still latent in the English language.

"We campus malcontents worked up a lively image of the berserker who concocted that paper-backed bombshell--and the equally explosive volumes that followed. Such a prancing bull of the prose pampas had to be out-dimensional in every aspect: a brawler in rude denim jeans, defiant locks snapping in the Seine breezes; a debaucher on the grand scale who consumed Gargantuan daily rations of wine, women and songs; an expatriate Johnny Appleseed standing, at a conservative estimate, 12 feet tall. We knew a giant when we read one; the deeper underground a book was driven, the taller grew its author.

"Years passed. World War II drove the wild man out of Europe, and when he showed up one day on the streets of New York, where some of us had settled with our typewriters and our distempers, we gaped. The Rimbaud of Myrtle Avenue, the Villon of the 14th Ward, was nowhere near as big or as loud or as rambunctious as we'd imagined him. He was slight and bone-thin. His voice was soft, mellifluous. The gray hair that fringed his bold bald pate was neatly crew-cut. His jowls were as clean-shaven as his nails were clean and manicured. He wore impeccably tailored Bond Street tweeds and a natty plaid ulster. He was kind, courteous, considerate, mild, modest, gentle, and all but old-worldly in his gallant manners with the womenfolk--the very antithesis of the capering, carousing cutup called Henry Miller in the books of Henry Miller. The rapacious desperado of 'Cancer' had turned out to be everybody's Dutch uncle ...

"But with something added--something not exactly avuncular, some special clear unblinking light in the deceptively mild blue eyes half draped by slanty mandarin lids, some special husky vibrant sound in the misleadingly gentle voice that has never deviated from the flat Brooklyn tones of his birth. You couldn't pin a name on this laxed electricity in him, but you knew when it was turned on. You would stand with the unstagy man at a Third Avenue bar, talking easy about nothing in particular. The barflies would stop mumbling into their boilermakers and perk their ears to Henry's homey sound. They would raise their eyes from the sawdust to study his good-neighborly, ostensibly bland face. They would gather up their beers and drift toward the source of that ingratiating sound and stand in a circle around that good-guy face, asking mutely for something--benediction, warming, the gift of such energy as tightens no muscles, a shot of some unnamable balm. It was impossible to carry on a conversation with Henry in a public place. Too many winos made their mothlike way into the glow that emanated from any bar stool he graced.

"Henry went West. He holed up for a time in the Santa Monica hills. Later he settled in his aerie on the highest rise of the Big Sur mountains in northern California, to stay put for 20 years. Now bestsellingly U. S.-published, duly stamped with the Supreme Court seal of approval, and socially acceptable among all but ladies' auxiliary literary tea societies, he's back in the Los Angeles area, living in Pacific Palisades to be near his two teenage children by his third wife. Our paths cross often, and I am forever amazed at how little he's changed. At 72 he's still lean as an ax handle, with eye undimmed and Brooklyn drawl intact. About the only sign of wear in him is that his appetite for walking is somewhat diminished by a thinning of the cartilage in the socket of his left hip, a memento of all the decades exuberantly spent on foot. But if he doesn't walk up and down the Cathay he makes of Pacific Palisades quite as much as he once walked the Cathay he made of Paris, he certainly rides--on his English racing bike, dressed, of course, in faultlessly tailored Ivy League corduroys. The astonishing low-keyed grace is still there, and the unproving, unpushing energy. And the disciples--barflies and children, aesthetes and novice writers--still flock to that benevolent voice and benign face, begging for the grace without a name."

[Q] Playboy: One critic has described your work as "toilet-wall scribbling." Just to set the record straight: Are you now, or have you ever been, a toilet-wall scribbler?

[A] Miller: No, never. But that reminds me of a story about the French pissoirs which might apply to me. A university professor was just coming out of the pissoir while another professor was entering. As they passed each other, the one entering noticed that the one leaving had a pencil in his hand. "Aha," he snickered. "So you're one of those who writes on toilet walls?" "Oh, no," said the departing gentleman, "I was just correcting grammar."

[Q] Playboy: Your books have been widely branded--and banned--as pornography. What's your reaction to the charge?

[A] Miller: Well, I can be said to have written obscene things, but I don't think of myself as a pornographer. There's a big difference between obscenity and pornography. Pornography is a titillating thing, and the other is cleansing; it gives you a catharsis. It's not done just to tickle your nerve ends--though I would add parenthetically that I don't go along with those judicious-minded critics and intellectuals who try to pretend that when you write erotically, with obscene language and all that, the reader should be impeccably immune, never have a lustful thought. Why the hell shouldn't a reader have lustful thoughts? They're as legitimate as any other kind. I might also add that apparently I'm even capable of arousing other kinds of thoughts. I get many letters from readers who say, "We're not at all interested in your sexual writing; it's your philosophy we find stimulating."

[Q] Playboy: Still, as far as stimulation is concerned, wouldn't you say that most readers prefer your erotica to your philosophy?

[A] Miller: Perhaps so, but the importance of my work lies in my vision of life and of the world, not in the free use of four-letter words. These banned books of mine fit in with the tradition of literature widely known and accepted in Europe for the last thousand years. Unfortunately, for the last three hundred years, English-language literature has been castrated, stifled; it's pallid, lacking integration and totality. Preceding this period, sex communication never had contained this shocking quality. There was a freedom of expression. There was no emphasis put upon sex. It fitted in naturally because it was and is a part of life. But the Anglo-Saxon people, in the past three centuries, have been terribly deprived--starved, literally speaking, for the natural and normal expression of sex which can counteract unnatural feelings of guilt. So now they leap on the sensational, and because they have found in me this missing element, they overemphasize it.

[Q] Playboy: Hasn't it been said that you are the one who overemphasizes it?

[A] Miller: It might just as well be said that I overemphasize the subject of the freedom of the individual. I feel I have simply restored sex to its rightful place in literature, rescued the basic life factor from literary oblivion, as it were. Obscenity, like sex, has its natural, rightful place in literature as it does in life, and it will never be obliterated, no matter what laws are passed to smother it. Let me tell you about an incident that may give an indication of my point of view. My little son and I were walking in one of the great forests of northern California. All alone, not a sound, not a person around for miles. Suddenly he started looking frantically about, holding himself, you know. "What's wrong?" I asked him. "I have to go to the bathroom," he said. "Well, you can't," I replied. "There's no bathroom here. Do you mean you have to take a leak? Come on, do it right here near this big tree. Come on, I'll show you. You can't 'go to the bathroom' on a tree." And so there we stood, father and son in the beautiful forest, pissing on a tree. So you see, in life as in writing, I use common words to express myself because it is the only way for me. I haven't considered, chosen or selected. One might just as well ask why I've written the way I have about people, countries, streets, religion, and so on. I haven't singled out sex for special treatment, but I've given it the full treatment. I had been writing for fifteen years and getting nowhere. Everything I had written was derivative, influenced by others. Then finally I decided to please myself. It was a great gamble, but finally I cut the umbilical cord, and in severing it I became an entity. I became myself, you see? When they speak of tradition in the literary world, they are speaking of men who are individualists, who are entities, who, in becoming themselves, become part of tradition. As for being obsessed with sex, they are the ones who are obsessed: they who make so much over the sexual content of what I have written. When people have been deprived, they make up for lost ground the moment the barriers are down. This is what is happening with the banned books. Other countries accepted them as a basic part of life. All over the world they think of us Americans as a people obsessed with the idea of sex but lacking a full and natural experience of sex. The English-speaking peoples are precisely the ones who understand the least what I've written and why.

[Q] Playboy: Would you care to enlighten them now?

[A] Miller: I can try. I was sick to death of the lack of substance in English literature, with its portrayal of a truncated, partial man. I wanted a more substantial diet, the whole being, the round view you get in the paintings of Picasso, the works of Montaigne and Rabelais and others. So I rebelled, and perhaps over-generously made up for this lack and weakness in the literature of my time.

[Q] Playboy: One critic has alleged that your "overgenerous" depiction of sex--far from fascinating readers--has actually rendered the subject uninteresting as a literary topic. Do you think he may have a point?

[A] Miller: Naturally, anything done to excess becomes uninteresting. But I don't think we need worry about making sex uninteresting. All that was taken care of by the Creator when He created male and female. What is important is whether we have a healthy or a sick attitude toward sex or anything else.

[Q] Playboy: Though willing to concede that you personally may not be obsessed with sex, another detractor has accused you of "using freedom of expression as the high-sounding cover-up for a cynically commercial effort to cash in on the sure-fire sales appeal of sex." Have you?

[A] Miller: I have never knowingly been cynical or insincere. And as for the commercial aspect, that was farthest from my mind. I was merely determined to write as I pleased, as I viewed life, do or die, without thought for the consequences.

[Q] Playboy: Did you anticipate the worldwide storm of public protest, censorship and suppression that followed the publication of Tropic of Cancer?

[A] Miller: I was not concerned with this problem. I had had fifteen years of punishment and rejection before Cancer was published. It was something I had to do, and that was all there was to it.

[Q] Playboy: What was the initial reaction of European critics to the Tropics?

[A] Miller: A very broad question. Shall I say "varied"? Critics are the same all over the world. They judge by what they are--which we won't go into. On the whole, however, I must say that whether for or against, their approach to my work was on a higher level than that of the Anglo-Saxon critics, who, now that these books are being published here, are saying, after condemning them--and reading them under the counter--for nearly thirty years, "It's about time" or "So America is really growing up at last."

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree with them, at least, that popular acceptance of the Tropics in the U. S. means that "America is really growing up at last"?

[A] Miller: Times have changed--but whether in the direction of more freedom or less is difficult to say. There is still a great gap between the accepted behavior of individuals, as regards sex, and the freedom to express this in words. I don't delude myself that the world suddenly sees eye to eye with me on the subject of sex--or any other subject, for that matter. Only the Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Denmark, seem to me to be truly liberated in this sense.

[Q] Playboy: Still, don't you view the American publication of the Tropics, and the Supreme Court decision upholding it, as a kind of personal vindication?

[A] Miller: I had my victory, if you wish to call it that, long before this American success, if you wish to call it that. In the countries where my books circulated freely, I was, if not a popular writer, certainly an accepted writer. I had my reward in being accepted and acknowledged by many of the foremost writers and thinkers in Europe. One is truly accepted or understood only by one's peers.

[Q] Playboy: In addition to literary admirers, you've acquired, along with a controversial reputation, a coterie of disciples so worshipful that it has been called a cult. Are you flattered by this sort of idolatry?

[A] Miller: Of course not! The most devastating thing about achieving any success as a writer is to meet the people who rave about your work. It makes you wonder about yourself.

[Q] Playboy: Though many critics share the admiration of your fans for the vitality of your work, others have used the following adjectives to describe you as a writer: "undisciplined," "chaotic," "confused," "self-contradictory" and "overemotional." What's your reply?

[A] Miller: Isn't it enough to write books without being obliged to answer for them? It's the function of the critic to criticize. He's like the fifth wheel on a wagon. Oh, well--by conventional standards, I suppose I am an undisciplined, chaotic, disorganized writer. But some of us, fortunately, pay no heed to standards. Undoubtedly I'm as muddled as the next man. But look at the great philosophers--are they so clean and clear? Kant--my God, what murky, cloudy thinking that is! Or take Aristotle--I can't read Aristotle, it's a jungle of nonsense to me. I like Plato much better. But I can get lost with Plato, too. I'll tell you, it may be because of my eclecticism that I'm misunderstood. One time I'm talking this way, another time that way. Naturally, I contradict myself now and then. Who doesn't? One would have to be stagnant not to do so. But I contend that I'm always driving at truth. One has to approach reality from all directions--there's no one way to go at it. The more avenues you open up, the clearer the ultimate thing should be. I'm antisystem and antistructure, yes. But that's hardly confusion.

[Q] Playboy: It's also been said that you suffer from "verbal diarrhea," that your "billowing, undisciplined, rough-hewn prose urgently requires the attention of a sharp blue pencil." What do you have to say about this?

[A] Miller: I've never pretended to be a careful, inch-by-inch writer, like Hemingway was--but neither am I one of those careless, sprawling writers who feel that the slag belongs with the ore, that it's all one, part and parcel of the same thing. I must confess there's a great joy, for me, in cutting a thing down, in taking the ax to my words and destroying what I thought was so wonderful in the heat of the first writing. You think when you spew the words out that they're imperishable, and a year later they seem trivial or flat. The ax-wielding is as much a part of the creative process as the first volcanic gush. But this editing, at least for me, is not aimed at achieving flawlessness. I believe that defects in a writer's work, as in a person's character, are no less important than his virtues. You need flaws; that's what I'm trying to say. Otherwise you're a nonentity.

[Q] Playboy: Nevertheless, in recent criticism of your work, novelist Lawrence Durrell, a long-time friend of yours, has taken you to task for these very flaws--and for excusing them in yourself. Have his remarks affected the cordiality of your relationship?

[A] Miller: Not at all--as you'd know if you'd read my answer to his criticism of my later books. You'd see that I took it all in good part. He could have said much worse than he did, and it wouldn't have altered my feelings toward him.

[Q] Playboy: Which are?

[A] Miller: As a man, I still like and admire him. As a writer, I could make the same criticism of him that's made of me: that the big passages, the panoramic frescoes, really grip you--his wonderfully descriptive purple passages, majestically done, marvelously elaborate and intricate, which exist in and of themselves--whereas the philosophical sections, presenting his thoughts on art and aesthetics, seem drab by comparison--at least to me. Durrell, you see, is first and foremost a poet. He's in love with language itself. Some people find him too ornate, but I love his excesses--they reveal the artist in him.

[Q] Playboy: Which other contemporary writers do you regard as artists?

[A] Miller: I don't think I really keep up, but let me think. O'Casey and Beckett and Ionesco I admire very much. But some of our better-known American playwrights leave me cold. I don't get any kick, any lift out of them. I can't read Nabokov. He's not for me; he's too literary a man, too engrossed in the art of writing--all that display of virtuosity. I do like Kerouac--I think he has a marvelous natural verbal facility, though it could stand a bit of disciplining. Such a wealth of feeling--and when it comes to nature, superb. Burroughs, whom I recognize as a man of talent, great talent, can turn my stomach. It strikes me, however, that he's faithful to the Emersonian idea of autobiography, that he's concerned with putting down only what he has experienced and felt. He's a literary man whose style is unliterary. As for Saul Bellow, I've read only one of his books, Henderson, the Rain King, and I must say, I was infatuated with it. I wish I could write something in that vein. For a while I was interested in Ray Bradbury; he seemed to have opened a new vein. But I think he's shot his bolt. There are still startling ideas in his books now and then, wonderful flashes; one senses an inventive mind at work. But it's all in an area that doesn't excite me too much. Science fiction just isn't rich enough.

[Q] Playboy: As one whose writing is strongly sexual in flavor, are you as interested in, and influenced by, Freudian psychology as some of the writers you've mentioned?

[A] Miller: When I first read Freud thirty or thirty-five years ago, I found him extremely stimulating. He influenced everybody, myself included. But today, he doesn't interest me at all. I think it's fine for a writer to roam about wherever he wants; anything that's of deep import to an artist must certainly nourish him. But the whole subject of Freudianism and analysis bores me almost as much as talking to analysts, whom I find deadly dull and single-tracked.

[Q] Playboy: What's your objection to analysis itself?

[A] Miller: Let's put it this way--the analyst is sitting there as an intermediary, father-confessor, protector; he's there to awaken his patient and give him greater strength to endure whatever he has to endure. Well, I say that experience itself, whatever it be--brutal, sorrowful or whatever--is the only teacher. We don't need priests and we don't need analysts; we don't need mental crutches of any sort. More than anything, what I criticize is their efforts to restore the maladapted person to a society whose way of lif e caused him to be maladapted in the first place. They want us to accept things as they are. But things as they are are wrong.

[Q] Playboy: But you've often insisted that people are really self-determined, that it's really a dodge to blame society for our troubles. Isn't that a contradiction of what you've just said?

[A] Miller: It seems contradictory, but to me it isn't. Look, when you develop the proper strength, you can live in any society. You can achieve a certain immunity--not a total one, certainly, but enough not to become sick, not to be paralyzed. I say if there's strength to be gotten, where else would you look for it than inside yourself? Now it may be that some of us are doomed, some won't have the strength, and will go down--but that's an inescapable fact of life. Some can rise up to meet it and others can't. But to say that we can catch those who are sick and sinking, and buoy them up through analysis--I don't believe it.

[Q] Playboy: You were quoted recently as saying that the American approach to things sexual, particularly in plays, movies and television, is becoming increasingly "cute." Do you regard this trend as psychologically sick--and how significant do you feel it is?

[A] Miller: Of course it's sick--and it could be significant. Cuteness has its part, like anything else, but playing around with sex on this teasing level, the look-but-don't-touch sort of thing, could make the American male perpetually dissatisfied with his wife or girl. It's another version of this phony misleading drive of Americans to coat everything with glamor--creating a glamorous world of illusion and then trying to live in it. It doesn't work. I think the cute approach to sex is about on a par with a cute approach to the atom bomb. But it is nice for men to be fussed over and titillated; they need that. It's a part of their basic nature, regardless of the fact that they may be in love with their own wives or girls. Take the geisha in Japan: She is an important part of man's life. American women should be educated in school, taught as the Japanese are taught how to treat a husband or lover. There wouldn't be so many marriages that fail. In the Western world, a couple gets married in a romantic mood, but then there's nothing to show them how to go on increasing and nurturing their love. Instead of waiting until they turn out the lights, why not learn how to make a man happy at the dinner table or just sitting about reading? Why don't they wear something flimsy, keep acting out the love role as they did in the beginning? It might make the difference. But it's like churchgoers who run to church on Sundays and then forget religion the rest of the week.

[Q] Playboy: Who do you feel is responsible for this situation?

[A] Miller: I blame most of this unhappy sexual situation on the men. They don't behave as men, as the boss, the dominant head of the family. They allow the women to jockey with them for equality, to become their rivals. This does not make for the ideal sexual climate. In Europe the man is still the boss. He even slaps his woman around a bit, but the woman is happier in this subordinate role.

[Q] Playboy: In view of what you indicate is their more feminine, less competitive role, do you feel that European women are more exciting sexually than American women?

[A] Miller: Any real woman, European or otherwise, is exciting. Frankly, I know of only one sexual type: Either she has it or she doesn't.

[Q] Playboy: Will you describe "it"?

[A] Miller: Everyone of any sensitivity knows when he is in the presence of a great person or a saint. The same applies to a woman with it. She exudes it. She neither shrinks from sex nor juts forward unnaturally when the subject arises. American women seem to have to prove themselves. They wear sex on the surface of their beings like a patina. But the natural ones feel it, as a part of their very being. Sophia Loren is an example. She is living it. She is all woman. Most of your American sex symbols of the cinema, on the other hand, are just wearing it. It's all on the outside. They feel nothing, really--so neither do you.

[Q] Playboy: Would you be willing to tell us what kind of sexual relationship you've found most gratifying--with whatever nationality of woman?

[A] Miller: I prefer to keep that information to myself. It's nobody's business but my own. Even an author has some rights! But I will say that the atmosphere of hazard, peril or danger of embarrassment is most exciting--the encounter with someone, even a stranger, in an alleyway, a dark hall or doorway, maybe even a telephone booth.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Miller: Well, I suppose it's because it's the opposite of our everyday experience. The element of surprise is what makes it so intriguing--you aren't set, you have no stand one way or the other. I must amplify: I feel that I'm a man to whom things happen. I seldom deliberately set out to bring things about. I'm always sort of open and vulnerable, waiting for something to come about--which actually permits things to happen much more frequently, don't you see? If I set out to have an experience, a sexual or love experience, it would have a totally different tonality to it, it seems to me--probably in a lower key.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that the "hero" of Cancer is a man who initiates nothing, who merely accepts things as they come to him. Isn't that a Buddhist view?

[A] Miller: Perhaps. I make no secret of the fact that I have been much influenced by Taoistic writing and Oriental philosophy in general. I think we all take from others. I don't think there's such a thing as an original artist. We all show influences and derivations. We can't avoid using or being used. When it comes time to express yourself, what you put forth should be done unconsciously, without thought of influences. But all this is in your blood already, in the very stream of your being. I've come to believe that I'm at my best, I express myself best, when I'm following the philosophy of the East, but I wouldn't propose it as the one way. I think each one has to find his own unique route.

[Q] Playboy: Does this imply that you incline toward the role of observer rather than protagonist?

[A] Miller: No. I think the peculiar quality of an artist is that he's both participant and observer at the same time. He's playing a dual role always. I mean, I don't go through life as a writer who's always making notes in a mental diary, though I am aware of making note of things for future use. I can't help it; it's my nature. But I don't enter into things in a spirit of detached research. When I participate, I do so as a human being; I'm simply more aware than most men of what's actually happening.

[Q] Playboy: You just referred autobiographically to the role of the "artist." Yet you've called Tropic of Cancer "a gob of spit in the face of Art." Do you see any contradiction between this scorn for "Art" and your self-identification as an artist?

[A] Miller: No. I think that only a man who has been steeped in art, who is truly inoculated, as it were, with culture, can see the defect in it. This is a double-edged thing. One has to be an artist in order to speak against art. Coming from a layman, it has no validity. Only someone immersed in art could renounce it. I mean that one should lop off all that is stupid, nonsensical, unimportant--all that goes with capital letters when one invokes the words "Culture" and "Art." We have an analogy in what happened to the philosophy of Zen when it was brought from India to China. What did the Chinese do? They took Buddhism as the Hindus had known it and they lopped off the superstructure; they brought it down to earth and made it viable, livable, I would say. My purpose, when referring to art in this denigrating way, is to bring it closer to life. Art has a tendency to detach itself from life. One has to bring it back again, like a gardener taking care of a plant--cut away the overgrowth, give the roots a chance to breathe.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that you've done this in your own writing?

[A] Miller: I hope so, in my own small way. What I've strived to do is to get away from the fictive and down to the reality about oneself, embrace every aspect of one's being, look at it all clearly, boldly. That's the whole purpose of writing, isn't it, to reveal as many sides of yourself as possible? Though I've done all sorts of short-term things, books of the moment, offshoots without any consistent note running through them, there has also been the long-term job, the record I want to make of my life, no matter how long it takes or how many volumes. That is a planned work: The Rosy Crucifixion is the master title. Though I haven't thought about it every minute, it has always been in the back of my head.

[Q] Playboy: When did you decide to write it?

[A] Miller: I laid it out way back in 1927, in about thirty-five pages of telegraphic notes, and I'm still working from them, from the very last pages. Sexus and Plexus both came out of these notes, and now the concluding volume of Nexus, which I've nearly completed.

[Q] Playboy: Would you read us a sample of those notes?

[A] Miller: Well, if you insist. Here are a couple of pages I used as raw material in writing Plexus and Nexus. They begin like this: "L. decides to make puppets and sell them. Also death masks. At dawn I go out and steal milk bottles and rolls that are left in vestibules. Panhandling along Broadway outside the burlesque shows and movies. Incident at Borough Hall when the guy throws money at me in the gutter. I begin to paint the walls myself and hang up crazy charts. S. arrives and looks on, nodding his approval of the disruption. Reminiscences of childhood. Relations with L. are improving. Sleeping three abed. J. now jealous. Working this to death. More gold digging on a grand scale, only now it's a burlesque. The two of them look like freaks. L. hiring herself out for experiments of all kinds. I get the idea of selling my blood. Begin visiting the hospitals. Must eat better food, drink milk, red wine, and so on. The jujitsu expert at Hubert's Cafeteria bringing the rent to us while we are in bed, slipping it under the door. The German savant--a ticket chopper on the elevated station. The two sailors listening in to scenes from the shed outside of L.'s room and freezing to death. Drunks with B., the Cherokee Indian. The night of S.'s birthday. We go out to celebrate, I in a torn khaki shirt. The night club uptown. Drinking everything in sight. Then the lineup and search by thugs. S., in his crazy way, calmly palming off a bad check on them for $125. The scene in the vestibule of cloakroom when the ex-pugilist beats the piss out of the drunken customers. Returning at dawn to find L. sleeping in my place. Dragging her out of the bed by the scalp. Peeing over her on the floor. Then falling asleep in the bathtub, nearly drowned. Return to Paul & Joe's near 14th Street. Waiting at the Bridge Plaza to see if J. is coming over the bridge in a taxi. Finding her home in bed, paralyzed with drink. Next day vomiting begins. Continues for three or four days, night and morning. The story of rape by jujitsu doctor. J.'s explanation. Go in search of wrestling doctor, murder in heart. Returning silently and listening to their conversation on the stairs. Suddenly the explosion in Jersey City and discovery of L. standing on stairs. Last confrontation. Dragging her along in the snow despite protestations and denials. I leave for the West ..."

[Q] Playboy: You seem to have led a rather violent life in those days.

[A] Miller: I was a pretty turbulent character, all right--and not a very agreeable one, either. Though I never failed to make friends, I was always in hot water, always arguing and disputing. I was an obnoxious sort of chap who had to get his ideas across, who was forever buttonholing people and bludgeoning them with words. I made a pest of myself. I was an idealist and a rebel--but an unpleasant one. As I've grown older, I've become even more rebellious--but also more adapted, at least to myself. Maybe I've become more skillful in the art of dealing with people and circumstances, so that I don't blow my top so easily anymore. But I'm still entirely capable of violence. In fact, one fear I have about myself is that I may lose control one day and do something unthinkable. But of course we're all incipient criminals. Most of us simply lack the courage to act out our criminal urges. I've been fortunate enough to find an escape valve in writing. I've been able to act out my antisocial urges, stir up trouble, deal out my shocks and jolts on paper; and thanks to the release of all this steam, I've slowly become--well, more human, let's say.

[Q] Playboy: Do you find, with your lengthening emotional distance from the early experiences recorded in your notes, that it has become easier to write about them?

[A] Miller: Technically, yes. But with time, of course, everything tends to grow cold. One has to blow on the embers. It's not easy to warm a thing up again, to put yourself back in the old positions, at the emotional pitches you once attained, to recreate the conversations--talk that lasted all night, ten hours, full of fight and struggle, going the whole gamut from personal trivia to literature and history and every damn thing. Today these things are easier to write about, yes, but they're almost impossible to recapture in their pristine fire and substance. You have to fall back on your imagination, to rely on your artistry.

[Q] Playboy: But it's been said that in Sexus and Plexus you seem to show total recall of both emotions and events.

[A] Miller: I may give that illusion, but if you could compare my reconstructions with tape recordings of the original scenes, you'd find a tremendous disparity. Lately I've been inventing more freely than before, but always in conformity with the remembered feel of the thing. I never invent in the sense of disguising or altering; I always want to recapture, but not in the strictly photographic-phonographic sense. Also, of course, I've left a lot out. One can't put everything in, even if one lives to be a hundred.

[Q] Playboy: You've been working on The Rosy Crucifixion, on and off, for some thirty-seven years now. Why has it taken so long?

[A] Miller: Well, you see, the more one writes about oneself, the less important it all seems. One writes to forget himself, or better said, to forget the self. When I started writing, especially the Tropics, I thought: No one has suffered as much as I. I had to get it out--so many volumes, so many millions and millions of words. And now that it's almost finished, I don't want to write like that anymore, understand? But I find that I'm caught in my own web. Now that the Tropics are socially acceptable, I've suddenly become fashionable, and people are hounding me from every direction to translate these books into plays, films, librettos. I can't do this! I can't change these books into something else. I thought once I'd finished writing them that that was the end. I wanted to forget them. But they're coming back to haunt me.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you take some comfort in the very fact of this social acceptability, however belated, and in the royalties you've been reaping?

[A] Miller: It's sort of amusing, but also it's absurd and a bit of a headache. You see, in a way it's too late. The money should have been there in the beginning. Getting it now doesn't alter my life in the least. I continue to live on very little for myself. My problem now isn't how to get money, but how not to get too much of it. It frightens me. Millions, these movie people talk about! Can you believe it? Already I've given away to my friends and family over half of what I've received from Cancer. It's just too much. Having too much of anything worries me--especially money. It makes me uncomfortable. But I have to think of my children. They have to have their schooling and their living. Nowadays, at least, if they want to go someplace or do something special they dream up, I can give them a hundred dollars and it means nothing. But do you know I'm contributing to three families? Me and my divorces. I think I'll have an aspirin--maybe three. Would you care to join me?

[Q] Playboy: No, thanks. But tell us: With all your extracurricular commitments, how do you find time for writing?

[A] Miller: Good question! The phone calls, the correspondence to answer, propositions to consider, contracts to decide on! Do you know it takes me a good four hours a day at least? I have hardly any time left for writing. I should have a secretary. Well, maybe not, because if I did, naturally I would fall in love with her, and then I wouldn't get any writing done. You see, I couldn't possibly have an ugly old girl for a secretary, could I? She must be beautiful, attractive. And there I'd be--again. I fall in love so easily.

[Q] Playboy: Still?

[A] Miller: It seems normal to me to fall in love over and over. Is it a sign of youth or of wisdom? It seems to me that most of us grow old long before our time. Being in love is the natural condition of the heart. I'm talking about loving someone else, of course, not yourself. But I was talking about work. The demands are never-ending. The moment one starts getting big money, he becomes involved with tax problems, lawyers, people who want money from you for a thousand causes--especially themselves. You have to suffer because of it. It's a challenge to your normal way of life. Time that should be spent working is taken up with all of these unvital, unpleasant things. I feel sometimes as if I may throw in the sponge and quit writing entirely.

[Q] Playboy: Are you serious?

[A] Miller: Probably not--but if I decided tomorrow to take up some other pursuit, I'd certainly have no qualms about it. Sometimes I think it would be lovely to be a gardener or a nurseryman. That way nobody would get hurt, cheated, deceived or disillusioned; authors aren't the loveliest people in the world, you know. But if I don't stop writing, at least I want to start having some fun with it. I'm tired of doing those long, somber, serious things. Why shouldn't I have some fun now with writing?

[Q] Playboy: No reason at all. What sort of thing would you enjoy writing?

[A] Miller: It happens that I wrote a play a couple of years ago--a satirical farce called Just Wild About Harry--because for thirty years I'd been wondering if I could write in that form. It was fun. Now I'm working on another. If I do more plays, they'll continue in the vein of the farcical, the satirical and the burlesque. I would like to write what I call pure nonsense. It wouldn't be unintelligible, but it wouldn't pretend to have any profundity or any relation with actuality; I wouldn't take up "meaty" subjects, social problems and all that. It would be a pure exercise of the imagination and of my skill, whatever that may be, and an enjoyment of the medium itself with no ulterior thought whatsoever--perhaps, finally, with no thought at all. I know I've been called a thoughtless writer, and it doesn't offend me at all. Perhaps that's the state in which I'm happiest.

[Q] Playboy: Will sex be as big a factor in your future writings as it has been?

[A] Miller: I doubt it. Not because I have lost interest in sex, but because I have about come to the end of my autobiographical writing. As I said earlier, it seems to me that people have focused too strongly on this element in my work; they think it's--how shall I say it?--the dominant note of my writing because it has the quality of shock. At least it had for the early readers. Especially in America, many were too taken aback by the forthrightness of the Tropics to see in them, as I do, a quality of lyricism. Though it may sound immodest, I'm forever amazed at the singing passages in them. They're not always pleasant, of course, but even when sordid and nihilistic, they are nevertheless poetic. Critics abroad have always pointed this out. But I think there's a range of thought and feeling that goes far beyond either of the Tropics in some of my later work--in The Books in My Life, for instance, and such collected works as The Wisdom of the Heart and Sunday After the War, in which essays are mingled with stories.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider these your finest works?

[A] Miller: No, The Colossus of Maroussi is my own favorite, and I find it's coming more and more to be accepted by the public. I'd rather be known in the future by The Colossus than by any other effort. It shows me at my best--a man who's enjoying himself and appreciative of everything.

[Q] Playboy: Was this change in style and attitude from the nihilism of the Tropics the result of a change in your life?

[A] Miller: I would rather think so. One might say it was due to the feeling of exultation and exaltation that came over me in Greece. I wrote Colossus just after returning to the U. S. I wrote it hot, as it were.

[Q] Playboy: But then you reverted to a more pessimistic tone in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a grim chronicle of your disenchantment with America. Why?

[A] Miller: It was the disparity between the two countries. I set out on a tour of America with hopes that I might write, maybe not an exalted report, but a book of appreciation of my country after a long absence. But everywhere I went, I was let down. And I would be again, I think, if I took another look today. Perhaps even more so.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you take such a dim view of your homeland?

[A] Miller: I've always felt that I'm in this country and not of it. I feel little connection with the things around me here. I'm not interested in political or social movements. I live my own restricted life, with my friends. What I read about the American way of life, about what goes on here, fills me with horror and dismay. It's become even more of an air-conditioned nightmare than it was when I wrote the book. I'm being corroborated, I feel, by events.

[Q] Playboy: How do you mean?

[A] Miller: Well, it seems to me that in the seventy-two years I've lived, we've advanced--what, half a millimeter? Or have we gone back a few yards? This is how I look back on what we call our "progress." However civilized we seem to be, we're still just as ignorant, stupid, perverse and sadistic as savages. For seventy-two years I've been waiting to see some breakdown of the artificial barriers surrounding our educational system, our national borders, our homes, our inner being--a shattering of the wretched molds in which we're fixed--but it never happens. We have the dynamite but we don't set it off. I get sick of waiting. Despite the rosy dreams of the politicians and the so-called intellectuals of today, we're not going to bring about a better world peaceably and in an evolutionary manner, through piecemeal improvements; we progress, as we regress, in catastrophic jumps. And when I talk about the violent, explosive alteration of things, it's a wish as much as a prediction of future events. To me it means a new chance, a new birth. I'm tired of history. I want to see everything swept away to clear the ground for something new. I want to get beyond civilization to what has been called the posthistoric state and see the new man who will live without all the restrictive, inhibiting barriers that hedge us in.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think this is a realistic hope?

[A] Miller: How can we tell? If we knew what was coming--good or bad--we'd probably give up struggling to achieve it. It's true enough that the evidence of the past gives us little reason to believe that we ever will, for in the unfolding of history, the advances we have made have seemed to me illusory. We relapse time and time again. It can be argued that we always will, that man will always remain basically the same--that he's spiritually incurable. Well, maybe that's true about the majority of mankind, but there have been enough emancipated individuals throughout the course of history--prophets, religious leaders, innovators--to make me believe that we can break the old, suffocating molds, that we can somehow end forever the vicious and futile cycle of aspiration and disenchantment, transcend the age-old and recurring dilemmas, rid ourselves of the appurtenances of so-called civilization--jump clear of the clockwork, as someone put it. If we can, it's just barely possible that someday what's buried in us and longs to come out will find expression. I can't imagine what the form of that ideal future may take--but it will mean giving egress, however belatedly, to the human spirit.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that your own career has made any lasting and meaningful contribution toward that end?

[A] Miller: Who could dare to hope for that much? I'd say, undoubtedly, that I have brought about a tangible revolution which has won for English-language authors a certain degree of freedom from censorship--at least temporarily. I wonder, however, now that you put the question, what sort of effect I would want to have, were I capable of having one--I mean, in an everlasting way. But of course nothing is everlasting, unless it be the endless cycle of creation and destruction on which you and I and each of us, for good or ill, leaves his own unique but infinitesimal mark. We are just men and women, alter all. And the lowest is not so different from the highest. To be human, truly human, that is quite enough for me.