The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller Page A

something sinister and fascinatingly evil about the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre. The first time I walked through it, of an evening, I was literally frightened stiff. There was something in the air which warned one to be on one’s guard. It is by no means the worst street in Paris, as I have hinted, but there is something malignant, foul, menacing, which lingers there like a poisonous gas, corroding even the most innocent face until it resembles the ulcer-bitten physiognomy of the doomed and defeated. It is a street that one comes back to again and again. One gets to know it slowly, foot by foot, like a trench which is taken and retaken so many times that one no longer knows if it is a bad dream or a monomania.
    In a few hours we would be at Nauplia, within striking distance of such breathtaking places as Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae, Epidaurus, and here we are talking of dingy holes, lye-bitten side streets, dilapidated whores, dwarfs, gigolos, clochards of the Faubourg Montmartre. I am trying to visualize my friend Katsimbalis sitting in a certain bistro opposite a theatre at midnight. The last time I stood at that bar my friend Edgar was trying to sell me Rudolf Steiner, rather unsuccessfully I must say, because just as he was getting on to group souls and the exact nature of the difference between a cow and a mineral, from the occult standpoint, a chorus girl from the theatre opposite, who was now on the bum, wedged her way in between us and diverted our minds to things less abstruse. We took a seat in the corner near the doorway where we were joined by a dwarf who ran a string of whorehouses and who seemed to derive an unholy pleasure from using the adverb “ malment .” The story which Katsimbalis was reeling off was one of those stories which begin as a trifling episode and end as an unfinished novel—unfinished because of lack of breath or space or time or because, as happened, he got sleepy and decided to take a nap. This story, which like all his stories I find it impossible to transcribe, lacking the patience and the finesse of a Thomas Mann, haunted me for days. It was not that the subject was so unusual, it was that with a good stretch of sea before us he felt at liberty to make the most extraordinary digressions, to dwell with scrupulous care and attention on the most trivial details. I have always felt that the art of telling a story consists in so stimulating the listener’s imagination that he drowns himself in his own reveries long before the end. The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practiced on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that, with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practiced dreamer slips into like a bone into its socket. Oft en, after one of these suprasensible seances, endeavoring to recapture the thread which had broken, I would work my way back as far as some trifling detail—but between that bespangled point of repair and the mainland there was always an impassible void, a sort of no-man’s-land which the wizardry of the artist had encumbered with shell holes and quagmires and barbed wire.
    In the case of Katsimbalis there was a quality which, as a writer, I feel to be of the utmost importance where the art of storytelling is concerned—the complete disregard of the element of time. He never began in the professional way; he began by fumbling about, sparring for an opening, so to speak. The story usually began when he had come to a knothole, when, in order to really launch himself, he would take a tremendous step backward, figuratively, to be sure, saying as he tweaked his nose—“Look here, did you never notice that…” or “I say, has it ever happened to you that…” and,