In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

196 16 Sitting Shiva for Henry Miller Krim has enough pride in the designation of Jew to bestow the label upon Henry Miller, who Krim feels would agree that it can be a compliment. Like the “Menahem Begin” piece in the last chapter, this essay argues for a Jewish tent big enough to include every Jew and every friend of the Jews. And again like the “Begin” article, Krim here establishes a litmus test of Jewish authenticity that snubs the uptown Jews in favor of the downtown Jews, gritty and plain. This tension over the nature of Jewish-American identity is a theme of the American Jewish novel. In Bellow’s Herzog, the character Shapiro condemns himself by exclaiming, “How delightful!” which is seen as inauthentic for the son of an immigrant apple peddler (1976a, 90). In Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, the hero Neil Klugman has a momentary lapse into spiritual solemnity while resting his feet in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, asking God “Which prize is You?” Once back on Fifth Avenue, the world gives him a Jewish rebuke that he interprets as “Which prize do you think, schmuck?” (Roth 1982, 71). Krim’s generation of Jewish writers rejected polite refinement as bad medicine. Krim also has little use for it, and in Miller’s disdain for it Krim finds a Jewish soul mate. I am writing this four days after we got the news that Henry Miller finally cashed it in out in Santa Monica, at the Old Testament age of 88, and the ghetto is sad. That was Henry’s name for his favorite part of Manhattan, from Astor Place over to the East River and south to around Broome Street. “The ghetto is the only part of New York which is dear to me,” he once wrote. “The rest of the city is an abstraction, cold, geometrical , rigid as rigor mortis, and, I may as well add, insane.” This notion of insanity outside the ghetto walls strikes a particularly apt note right now, even in the midst of the solemn handshakes that some Sitting Shiva for Henry Miller . 197 of us are giving each other on our own “Little Broadway,” Second Avenue. We stop and shake hands almost as if an older brother or a father has died. Last night Joseph Resnick, who runs the National Book Store at 20 Astor Place, shook my hand with more quiet eloquence than he ever has in the 15 years we’ve known each other. “What a marvelous man,” he said. I nodded, no words necessary between us. “Even if he was a little mystical, that was his right.” I nodded again. We Jews who drank in reason like devoted alcoholics to try and figure out this wild world that sometimes exploded in our faces could forgive Henry almost anything. Even his mystiques, his astrologies, his long-shot gambler’s taste for magic. The only person who has been missing, of course, is Irving Stettner, who must be in hiding. It was Irv who published everything Henry wrote these last two or three years in his magazine, Stroker (“Every word like a Crackerjack box—with a surprise!”), it was Irv whose own life was transformed by becoming the last great friend of Henry’s final days. Henry chanted Irving’s poems 3000 miles away and bought his watercolors. Henry gave him the faith we all need, just as Stettner has passed that faith on to the ex-convict Tommy Trantino, and the Arab hash blower Mohammed Mrabet, and even to the now bifocaled Nearsighted Cannoneer, Seymour Krim, by printing them in the pages of his magazine. But Irving is nowhere to be seen, and I don’t blame him. It was he, the poorest of us all, who made those recent trips out to the coast to see Henry and to spur him on. It was he who brought back the news of Henry’s going functionally blind in one eye, of how he couldn’t read anymore (this “barbarian ” who had read more books than any member of his generation), but also how he kept painting like a whistling kid right to the very end. It’s right that Irv Stettner shouldn’t be around On the 2nd Avenue Patrol, the title of his book of poems, to stick out a hand to console or be consoled . Henry’s death was much more inexpressibly personal for him than it could ever be for us. But let’s get...

Share