TROPIC OF BIG SUR
TOM BENTLEY traces author Henry Miller to his spiritual home in California, and to the literary temple dedicated to his memory
TOM BENTLEY pays a visit to the land that inspired revolutionary author Henry Miller
People have been making pilgrimages to Big Sur for decades. Despite the coastal Highway 1 which runs through the whole of its 140-kilometre territory – when it’s not closed by the successive disasters of Californian fire and rain – the place retains a sense of remoteness and mystique. It’s a region where an utterance like ‘Big Sur is a state of mind’ doesn’t seem like a limp cliche but an astute perception.
The dazzling Big Sur landscape has long accommodated and welcomed the bohemians, the starry- eyed, the hermits, the existentialists, the moonhowlers, the wannabe hippies, the actual hippies – and for the most part, the tourists, too.
And amid the ratcheting cliffs, with their thermal- climbing condors, the sparkling sapphire coves and the deep redwood canyons that draw visitors’ awe, there are manmade touchpoints that are quintessential Big Sur: places worthy of the pilgrimage.
Places like the Henry Miller Memorial Library. Part bookstore, part arts centre, part performance venue, part roadside retreat, the library is a warm reflection of the artist it’s named for – and of the beauty that surrounds it.
Henry Miller: the writer, painter, raconteur, libertine, life- enthusiast and staunch defender of artistic freedom made his way from New York roots to nearly a decade in Paris, a stint in Greece and then on to Big Sur in 1944. Though his earlier books had been banned in the US for their sexual frankness, and remained so for years after, an enterprising smuggling network put them in the hands of Beat Generation figures like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who praised their free-flowing language and zest as influences on their own work. (Kerouac wrote a besotted novel titled Big Sur and Ferlinghetti had a cabin there.)
But before he influenced the Beats, Big Sur influenced Henry Miller. The artist’s work from the period he lived there includes the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, his paean to the area’s landscape, his friends and his many fancies.
‘Skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet, hills in winter of emerald green and in summer mountain upon mountain of pure gold,’ Miller wrote. ‘ There was ever the unfathomable silence of the forest, the blazing immensity of the Pacific, days drenched with sun and nights spangled with stars.’
The people of this vicinity are striving to live up to the grandeur and nobility which is such an integral part of the setting. They behave as if it were a privilege to live here… There being nothing to improve on in the surroundings, the tendency is to set about improving oneself Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Miller left Big Sur in 1963 after 18 years, moving down south to Pacific Palisades, where he spent the rest of his lively life. But his friends remembered his time there. After the writer’s death in 1980, the painter Emil White dedicated his own property as a memorial to Miller. That cabin and land were donated after White’s death in 1989 to the Big Sur Land Trust, becoming the home of the Henry Miller Memorial Library: a nonprofit bookstore, archive, arts centre and performance venue.
The library’s grounds are cloaked in Big Sur’s daily cape of redwoods and greenery. Just out the back door is a little creek with a footbridge below the towering trees. Wander around the property and you’ll discover intriguing sculptures and artworks – it’s the same inside, as well. It’s easy to get the feeling that life here is more wide- open than in many places. Miller sensed that and moved with it.
Magnus Toren, executive director of the library, says it has always retained this feeling. ‘It has changed little, which is part of its virtue. Books have increased in number and the depth of archival material has increased, but the essential place that most people see and love has remained much the same.’
The atmosphere seems a microcosm of Big Sur itself. ‘ The library serves as a reminder for visitors that Big Sur is, and hopefully always will be, a place that engenders a sense of awe in the face of natural beauty and grandeur, as well as a sense of needing to care for one’s home, wherever it is’, Toren says.
And with natural disasters like the Californian wildfires, Big Sur has certainly needed that – its remarkable topography both a blessing and a curse. But the place abides. And so does the library. If the Henry Miller Memorial Library is, as its motto states, ‘a place where nothing happens,’ it’s the most flavourful serving of nothing you’ll ever taste.