Suppose Henry Miller had written Wuthering Heights
Correspondent:: Mister Hand
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 19:43:58 -0500

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I am living at Wuthering Heights. There is not a crumb of
dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here
and we are dead.

Last night Mr. Heathcliff discovered that he was lousy. I
had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not
stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this?
But no matter. We might never have known each other so
in­timately, Mr. Heathcliff and I, had it not been for the lice.

Mr. Heathcliff has just given me a summary of his views. He
is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says.
There will be more calamities, more death, more de­spair. Not the
slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time
is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are
killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness.
We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death.
There is no es­cape. The weather will not change.

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here
for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the hap­piest man
alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist.
I no longer think about it, I am. Ev­erything that was literature
has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of
character. This is not a book, in the ordi­nary sense of the word. No,
this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in
the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will. I
am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I
will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.