The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder Read online

  The resolution to begin afresh was so strong that he almost galloped back to the fair grounds. He went at once in search of the boss.

  “It’s decided,” he said breathlessly, “I’m leaving right now. I’m going away, far away, where nobody will possibly know me. I’m going to begin all over again.”

  “But why?” exclaimed the big one. “Why do you have to start afresh when you’ve already established a great reputation?”

  “You won’t understand but I’ll tell you just the same. Because I want to be happy this time.”

  “Happy? I don’t understand. Why happy?”

  “Because usually a clown is happy only when he is somebody else. I don’t want to be anybody but myself.”

  “Don’t understand a word of it…. Listen, Auguste…”

  “Look,” said Auguste, wringing his hands, “what makes people laugh and cry when they watch us?”

  “My dear fellow, what has all that to do with it? Those are academic questions. Let’s talk sense. Let’s get down to reality.”

  “That’s what I’ve just discovered,” said Auguste gravely. “Reality! That’s the very word for it. Now I know who I am, what I am, and what I must do. That’s reality. What you call reality is sawdust; it crumbles away, slips through the fingers.”

  “My dear Auguste,” the other began, as if pleading with a lost one, “you’ve been thinking too much. If I were you I’d go back to town and have a good snort. Don’t try to make a decision now. Come …”

  “No,” said Auguste firmly, “I want no consolation, nor advice. My mind is made up.” And he held out his hand in parting.

  “As you like,” said the big fellow, humping his shoulders. “So it’s good-bye, is it?”

  “Yes,” said Auguste, “it’s good-bye … forever.”

  Once again he started out into the world, into its very bowels this time. Approaching the town, it came over him that he had not more than a few sous in his pocket. In a few hours he would be hungry. Then it would grow cold and then, like the beasts in the field, he would fold up and lie waiting for the first rays of the sun.

  Why he had chosen to walk through the town, pursuing every street to the end, he knew not. He might just as well have conserved his strength.

  “And if I do get to South America one day …?” (He had begun talking aloud to himself.) “It may take years. And what language will I speak? And why will they take me, a stranger and unknown? Who knows if they even have a circus in such places. If they do, they will have their own clowns and their own language.”

  Coming to a little park, he flung himself on a bench. “This has to be thought out more carefully,” he cautioned himself. “One doesn’t rush off to South America just like that. I’m not an albatross, by God! I’m Auguste, a man with tender feet and a stomach that needs to be filled.” One by one he began to specify all the very human attributes which distinguished him, Auguste, from the birds of the air and the creatures of the deep. His ruminations finally tailed off in a prolonged consideration of those two qualities, or faculties, which most markedly separate the world of humans from the animal kingdom—laughter and tears. Queer, he thought to himself, that he who was at home in this realm should be speculating on the subject like a schoolboy.

  “But I’m not an albatross!” This thought, certainly not a brilliant one, kept repeating itself as he revolved his dilemma backwards and forwards. If not original or brilliant, it was nevertheless very comforting, very reassuring to Auguste, this idea that not by any possible stretch of the imagination could he regard himself as an albatross.

  South America—what nonsense! The problem was not where to go or how to get there, the problem was…. He tried to put it to himself very very simply. Wasn’t it just this, that perhaps he was all right just as he was—without diminishing or augmenting himself? The mistake he had made was to go beyond his proper bounds. He had not been content to make people laugh, he had tried to make them joyous. Joy is God-given. Had he not discovered this in abandoning himself—by doing whatever came to hand, as he once put it?

  Auguste felt that he was getting somewhere. His real tragedy, he began to perceive, lay in the fact that he was unable to communicate his knowledge of the existence of another world, a world beyond ignorance and frailty, beyond laughter and tears. It was this barrier which kept him a clown, God’s very own clown, for truly there was no one to whom he could make clear his dilemma.

  And then and there it came to him—how simple it was!—that to be nobody or anybody or everybody did not prevent him from being himself. If he were really a clown, then he should be one through and through, from the time he got up in the morning until he closed his eyes. He should be a clown in season and out, for hire or for the sheer sake of being. So unalterably convinced was he of the wisdom of this that he hungered to begin at once—without make-up, without costume, without even the accompaniment of that squeaky old violin. He would be so absolutely himself that only the truth, which now burned in him like a fire, would be recognizable.

  Once again he closed his eyes, to descend into darkness. He remained thus a long time, breathing quietly and peacefully on the bed of his own being. When he finally opened his eyes he beheld a world from which the veil had been removed. It was the world which had always existed in his heart, ever ready to manifest itself, but which only begins to beat the moment one beats in unison with it.

  Auguste was so utterly moved that he could not believe his eyes. He rubbed the back of his hand across them, only to discover that they were still wet with the tears of joy which he had shed unknowingly. Bolt upright he sat, with eyes staring straight ahead, struggling to accustom sight to vision. From the depths of his being there issued an incessant murmur of thanks.

  He rose from the bench just as the sun was suffusing the earth with a last flush of gold. Strength and longing surged through his veins. New-born, he took a few steps forward into the magical world of light. Instinctively, just as a bird takes wing, he threw out his arms in an all-encompassing embrace.

  The earth was swooning now in that deep violet which ushers in the twilight. Auguste reeled in ecstasy. “At last, at last!” he shouted, or thought he shouted, for in reality his cry was but a faint reverberation of the immense joy which rocked him.

  A man was coming towards him. A man in uniform and armed with a club. To Auguste he appeared as the angel of deliverance. Auguste was about to throw himself into the arms of his deliverer when a cloud of darkness felled him like a hammer blow. He crumpled at the officer’s feet without a sound.

  Two bystanders who had witnessed the scene came running up. They knelt down and turned Auguste over on his back. To their amazement he was smiling. It was a broad, seraphic smile from which the blood bubbled and trickled. The eyes were wide open, gazing with a candor unbelievable at the thin sliver of a moon which had just become visible in the heavens.

  EPILOGUE

  EPILOGUE

  OF ALL the stories I’ve written this is perhaps the most singular. It was expressly written for Fernand Léger, to accompany a series of forty illustrations on clowns and circuses.*

  It took me months, after I had accepted Léger’s invitation to do the text, to even begin. Though I was given complete liberty, I felt inhibited. Never before had I written a story to order, as it were.

  Almost obsessively my mind kept revolving about these names: Rouault, Miro, Chagall, Max Jacob, Seurat. I almost wished I had been asked to do the illustrations instead of the text. In the past I had made a few watercolors of clowns, one of them called “Cirque Medrano.” At least one of these clowns resembles strongly Marc Chagall, I am told, though I have never met Chagall nor had I even seen a photograph of him.

  While struggling to get started, there fell into my hands a little book by Wallace Fowlie* in which there is a poignant essay on the clowns of Rouault. Meditating on Rouault’s life and work, which influenced me strongly, I got to thinking of the clown which I am, which I have always been. I thought of my passion fo
r the circus, especially the cirque intime, and how all these experiences as spectator and silent participator must lie buried deep in my consciousness. I remembered how, when I was graduating from High School, they had asked me what I intended to be and I had said—“a clown!” I recalled how many of my old friends were like clowns in their behavior—and they were the ones I loved most. And later on I discovered to my surprise that my most intimate friends looked upon me as a clown.

  And then suddenly I realized what an impact the title of Wallace Fowlie’s book (the first of his I read) had made upon me: Clowns and Angels. Balzac had spoken to me of the angels (in Louis Lambert) and, through Fowlie’s numerous divagations on the clown, I had gained new insight into the role of the clown. Clowns and angels are so divinely suited to one another.

  Moreover, had I not myself written somewhere about August Angst and Guy le Crêvecœur? Who were they, these two anguished, frustrated, desperate souls, if not myself?

  And then another thing … the most successful painting I ever did was the head of a clown to whom I had given two mouths, one for joy and one for sorrow. The joyous mouth was in high vermilion—it was a singing mouth. (Recalling this, I realized that I no longer sang!)

  Between times I received a few maquettes from Léger. One of them featured the head of a horse. I put these away in a drawer, forgot about them, and began to write. I never realized until I had finished the story where I got the horse. The ladder, of course, was a gift from Miro, and the moon too, most likely. (Dog Barking at the Moon was the first Miro I ever saw.)

  I began then with myself, with the firm conviction that I had in me all there was to know about clowns and circuses. I wrote from line to line, blindly, not knowing what would come next. I had myself; the ladder and the horse I had unconsciously filched. Keeping me company were the poets and painters I adored—Rouault, Miro, Chagall, Max Jacob, Seurat. Curiously, all these artists are poet and painter both. With each one of them I had deep associations.

  A clown is a poet in action. He is the story which he enacts. It is the same story over and over—adoration, devotion, crucifixion. “A Rosy Crucifixion,” bien entendu.

  The only part of my narrative which gave me difficulty were the last few pages, which I rewrote several times. “There is a light which kills,” I believe Balzac said somewhere. I wanted my protagonist, Auguste, to go out like a light. But not in death! I wanted his death to illumine the way. I saw it not as an end but as a beginning. When Auguste becomes himself life begins—and not just for Auguste but for all mankind.

  Let no one think that I thought the story out! I have told it only as I felt it, only as it revealed itself to me piece by piece. It is mine and it is not mine. Undoubtedly it is the strangest story I have yet written. It is not a Surrealistic document, not the least. The process of writing it may have been Surrealistic, but that is only to say that the Surrealists recaptured the true method of creation. No, more even than all the stories which I based on fact and experience is this one truth. My whole aim in writing has been to tell the truth, as I know it. Heretofore all my characters have been real, taken from life, my own life. Auguste is unique in that he came from the blue. But what is this blue which surrounds and envelopes us if not reality itself? We invent nothing, truly. We borrow and recreate. We uncover and discover. All has been given, as the mystics say. We have only to open our eyes and hearts, to become one with that which is.

  The clown appeals to me deeply, though I did not always know it, precisely because he is separated from the world by laughter. His is never a Homeric laughter. It is a silent, what we call a mirthless, laughter. The clown teaches us to laugh at ourselves. And this laughter of ours is born of tears.

  Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me that this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real.

  At no time in the history of man has the world been so full of pain and anguish. Here and there, however, we meet with individuals who are untouched, unsullied, by the common grief. They are not heartless individuals, far from it! They are emancipated beings. For them the world is not what it seems to us. They see with other eyes. We say of them that they have died to the world. They live in the moment, fully, and the radiance which emanates from them is a perpetual song of joy.

  The circus is a tiny closed off arena of forgetfulness. For a space it enables us to lose ourselves, to dissolve in wonder and bliss, to be transported by mystery. We come out of it in a daze, saddened and horrified by the everyday face of the world. But the old everyday world, the world with which we imagine ourselves to be only too familiar, is the only world, and it is a world of magic, of magic inexhaustible. Like the clown, we go through the motions, forever simulating, forever postponing the grand event. We die struggling to get born. We never were, never are. We are always in process of becoming, always separate and detached. Forever outside.

  This is the picture of August Angst, alias Guy le Crêvecœur—or the everyday face of the world, with two mouths. Auguste is of another breed. Perhaps I have not limned his portrait too clearly. But he exists, if only for the reason that I imagined him to be. He came from the blue and he returns to the blue. He has not perished, he is not lost. Neither will he be forgotten. Only the other day I was speaking to a painter I know about the figures left us by Seurat. I said that they were rooted there where he gave them being—eternally. How grateful I am to have lived with these figures of Seurat—on the Grande Jatte, at the Medrano, and elsewhere in the mind! There is nothing in the least illusory about these creations of his. Their reality is imperishable. They dwell in sunlight, in a harmony of form and rhythm which is sheer melody. And so with the clowns of Rouault, the angels of Chagall, the ladder and the moon of Miro, his whole menagerie, in fact. So with Max Jacob, who never ceased to be a clown, even after he had found God. In word, in image, in act, all these blessed souls who kept me company have testified to the eternal reality of their vision. Their everyday world will one day become ours. It is ours now, in fact, only we are too impoverished to claim it for our own.

  * * *

  * Léger was obliged to reject my text as unsuitable and subsequently wrote one himself for his handsome book called Le Cirque.

  * Jacob’s Night, by Wallace Fowlie: Sheed & Ward, N.Y. 1947.

  ALSO BY HENRY MILLER

  THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE

  ALLER RETOUR NEW YORK

  BIG SUR AND THE ORANGES OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH

  THE BOOKS IN MY LIFE

  THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI

  THE COSMOLOGICAL EYE

  A DEVIL IN PARADISE

  THE DURRELL-MILLER LETTERS

  FROM YOUR CAPRICORN FRIEND:

  HENRY MILLER & THE STROKER 1978-1980

  HENRY MILLER ON WRITING

  THE HENRY MILLER READER

  INTO THE HEART OF LIFE: HENRY MILLER AT 100

  JUST WILD ABOUT HARRY

  LETTERS TO EMIL

  THE NIGHTMARE NOTEBOOK

  STAND STILL LIKE THE HUMMINGBIRD

  THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS

  THE WISDOM OF THE HEART

  Copyright 1948 by Henry Miller

  This edition first published in 1958

  First issued in paper covers in 1966

  This edition published as ND Paperbook 386 (ISBN: 978-0-8112-0556-6 ; ISBN: 978-0-8112-2438-3 (e-book) ) in 1974

  Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 58 11829

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing; from the Publisher.

  The
author and publisher are grateful to the following owners of Henry Miller paintings who have made them available for reproduction in whole and in part: Willa Percival, Elena Rex, Mrs. David Karr of the Templeton Gallery and Miss Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart.

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

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