At 72, I don’t remember much of what I heard in college lectures.
But I can still hear one thing an English professor said regarding Hemingway.
“He resigned from politics much as Frederic Henry resigned from the war in Farewell to Arms.
The Sixties was a politically charged decade. Everybody had a cause. Most of them were life or death. The country was on the verge of going communist or fascist or to hell in a hand basket, depending on who was arguing politics.
It hadn’t occurred to my sophomore brain that I could opt out. Walk away from the arguments at the Campus Inn.
I had a minor role in Students for Kennedy in 1968. After Robert Kennedy was killed, I flew to Maui to clear my head and got swallowed by a whale.
I never worked in a political campaign again. I voted for Humphrey in 1968. I voted for McGovern in 1972. Then I didn’t vote again until Clinton in 1992.
I worked for local newspapers covering local issues like where to build restrooms on the beach.
I fancied myself the rarest of journalistic animals, the unbiased reporter.
A saying of former U.S. Senator Trent Lott stuck in my mind: “I don’t have a dog in this fight.”
When I did pay attention to politics it was from my safe place inside the whale.
I was reminded of this reading Inside the Whale, an essay on Henry Miller by George Orwell.
Orwell was on his way to Spain in 1936 to take part in the Civil War there when he first met Miller.
“What most intrigued me about him,” Orwell recalled, “was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney.”
Orwell discovered that Henry Miller had not resigned from war or politics. Like Jonah, he had escaped inside a whale.
As Orwell explained: “... there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted—quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.”
The whale, of course, was a metaphor for Henry Miller’s mystical but not political life view. It was a metaphor in the Jonah story, too.
Orwell plays with the metaphor: “The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of complete indifference, no matter what happens. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo.”
Somehow the metaphor seems incomplete. Henry Miller was not hidden away, safe from life’s storms. He was broke and hungry in Paris and at the end of his life, thanks to the royalties from Tropic of Cancer, he was rich and famous. He waved at the political bandwagons but let them pass him by. He was not trying to reform life, he was just living it.
Because of the repressive censorship in 1940s England, Orwell can’t really quote from Tropic of Cancer in his essay but he is moved by Henry Miller’s epiphany on the last pages of the novel.
”Tropic of Cancer ends ... after the lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the imbecilities. he simply sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical acceptance of thing-as-it-is.”
Zen masters say enlightenment is accepting “things as it is.”
But don’t tell political activists that.
