A Dream of a Book
Written By: J.den Haan
Miller’s dream book is “a dream of a book.” Not in the sense that a schoolgirl uses the expression, but literally. Into the Night Life is the most remarkable work that ever came into my hands. It is indeed a dream book, and the result which author and illustrator dreamed remained a dream and did not become a book.
The text of Into the Night Life is not printed in italics nor script letters but is handwritten and reproduced in a very special manner. Besides, it is written in an irregular calligraphy which changes with the contents.
All the strict canons of typography are so many challenges to Miller. He feels compelled to explore and to defy the taboos; fortunately not in the American manner of making sport of such an undertaking, not like a Haliburton who in crossing the Alps by elephant debunked Hannibal. The result of the “sober” analysis of cultural possessions usually is a package of chewing gum; though Miller is sometimes quick-tempered in handling our European heritage, and though in compensation for an obvious shortage of cultural “noblesse” he can only offer an unbelievable and here unknown vitality, the unsparing honesty of this turbulence restores the balance. Just because of this unmistakable honesty Lawrence Durrell could say of Miller that he had forever passed the dividing line between Art and Kitsch. Into the Night Life is taken from Miller’s Black Spring, a book published in 1936 by the Obelisk Press. Fragments of this book were published later on, in The Cosmological Eye. This text of the Night Life has repeatedly been called Surrealistic, but it certainly cannot be orthodox Surrealism. Miller wrote it with the aid of a dream book which he kept while working on Black Spring. It is full of symbols, some Freudian in the pure sense. It has all the bizarre a-logical and untimely intimacy of the dream. It is the same, but in dream-chaotic form, as Black Spring in its entirety, throughout which in clearer sequence shreds of youthful memories alternate with impressions of Paris and New York. Moreover, so dynamic, so violent is this Black Spring that of all Miller’s books it is the most significant, the purest Miller, and at the same time it is the fiercest repudiation of all that figures and calculates. Even more so than in Tropic of Cancer, in which he says “Everything that was literature has fallen from me,” has the motto employed in the first chapter (of Black Spring) become his truth: “What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.” Therein he breaks with all that constitutes tradition, style and composition. According to the Liber Amicorum, The Happy Rock, he goes through a book as he does through life — like a typhoon. The whole thing is perplexing, and whoever refuses to be carried along by his pace will detest the result. But for him who does not find it necessary “to suck literature through a straw” it will prove to be virtually a personal encounter with an unpredictable, turbulent human being fighting with all his wild heart the last battle of his life for liberation and for the destruction of all that is non-essential. “The one and only life is the night life, the life of the mind, the night of night, the life the mind, the night, the night life. This is the Coney Island of the mind, the Toboggan Slide, the Into the Into. This is the without which wherefore and however of the night’s bright mind, the life and mind of night, the mind and night of night, or — Into the Night Life.”
To make a book of this text, a book that had to remain personal, as personal as his water-colors, and at the same time to make a book which would also embody the color of the vision, the askewness and terror of the dream, not by way of independent illustration but by interweaving of color, form and word, whereby even the aspect itself of the word would lose its typographical stiffness, simultaneously moving to a new form — such a book must have been dreamed of first by Miller or Schatz. Here author and illustrator cooperated in a truly unique manner. The cooperation required to unite the painter’s realization of the dream in line and color with Miller’s record of the dream, forced them to choose between either subjection to the inescapable demands of typography, which will not tolerate any deformation or interference without degenerating into nonsensical conundrums, or the creation of a “book” without typography. They chose the latter. Miller wrote it out. The handwriting, notwithstanding irregularities, is easy to read — smooth, flowing, though occasionally interrupted by rigidly perpendicular written parts. His hand moves in the rhythm of the text, now in a quiet, almost persuasive style, steady and thin, suddenly getting thicker, angrier, rougher, with violent words — in red ink — like curses thrown in, heavily underlined. Then the waves rise, rolling over the paper on the swell of horror, grimmer, fiercer, weakening again, and occasionally ending in a desperate ink-blot. Into these movements the painter Schatz, de sa part, wove his lines, drew his parallel view of the essentials of the dream: the sexual symbols, the mother-womb, the embryo, the nightbird of horror. Not Miller’s dreams alone but their assimilated experiences gave birth to a gruesome, cruel, unequalled, colorful and authentic short-hand report of our lives behind the threshold of day. “Out of whalebone and gunnysack this mad thing called sleep that runs like an eight-day clock . . .”
Into the Night Life is, as they both call it, “a serigraph (silk screen) creation through and through,” which at first meant nothing at all to me. It was planned and executed by Bezalel Schatz, an artist from Israel. The whole pictural part is his. It has a blue binding of heavy linen on which an abstract design in red felt has been applied. Size about folio. The paper of heavy aquarelle stock. It contains eighty pages and the writing has been reproduced photographically. Schatz sometimes works in very delicate shades, sometimes in one color only, sometimes in fiery red, yellow and green, and now and then in the most daring combination of eighteen colors, a veritable orgy shown to full advantage by this special method of reproduction. Then again with a single firm line he lends genuine depth to the movement of Miller’s words. And so they created the most personal book I ever saw.
Reproductions in black and white fail to give even the slightest idea of Schatz’s illustrations in their really fantastic color riot. According to Miller, the French review Occident has devoted an article to this work, which includes a reproduction in “full color” of a double page spread.
I mentioned the interweaving of color, form and word from which this curious phenomenon sprang, and I wrote that this was the most personal book I ever set eyes on. This, however, is not entirely true. I can hardly bring myself to call it a book, yet I simply cannot find another word for it. It is something in a cloth binding, undoubtedly paper is used, yet it is not a book. All experiments in this realm have always proved that a beautiful book can be created only if the strict laws of the art of printing are fully respected. An illustrated book particularly can only be called a success when a happy balance is attained between the “total” of letters and the “total” of illustration, when typographer and illustrator truly collaborate but each keeping strictly to his own domain and permitting only an occasional “invasion.” These simple but apparently unassailable rules have been broken completely by Miller and Schatz. The result is very extraordinary, thoroughly pioneering, and sometimes — in the most quiet pages — incomparably harmonious. But is a book without typography really a book? Or “only” a dream of a book?
A Dream of a Book
Written By: J.den Haan
Miller’s dream book is “a dream of a book.” Not in the sense that a schoolgirl uses the expression, but literally. Into the Night Life is the most remarkable work that ever came into my hands. It is indeed a dream book, and the result which author and illustrator dreamed remained a dream and did not become a book.
The text of Into the Night Life is not printed in italics nor script letters but is handwritten and reproduced in a very special manner. Besides, it is written in an irregular calligraphy which changes with the contents.
All the strict canons of typography are so many challenges to Miller. He feels compelled to explore and to defy the taboos; fortunately not in the American manner of making sport of such an undertaking, not like a Haliburton who in crossing the Alps by elephant debunked Hannibal. The result of the “sober” analysis of cultural possessions usually is a package of chewing gum; though Miller is sometimes quick-tempered in handling our European heritage, and though in compensation for an obvious shortage of cultural “noblesse” he can only offer an unbelievable and here unknown vitality, the unsparing honesty of this turbulence restores the balance. Just because of this unmistakable honesty Lawrence Durrell could say of Miller that he had forever passed the dividing line between Art and Kitsch. Into the Night Life is taken from Miller’s Black Spring, a book published in 1936 by the Obelisk Press. Fragments of this book were published later on, in The Cosmological Eye. This text of the Night Life has repeatedly been called Surrealistic, but it certainly cannot be orthodox Surrealism. Miller wrote it with the aid of a dream book which he kept while working on Black Spring. It is full of symbols, some Freudian in the pure sense. It has all the bizarre a-logical and untimely intimacy of the dream. It is the same, but in dream-chaotic form, as Black Spring in its entirety, throughout which in clearer sequence shreds of youthful memories alternate with impressions of Paris and New York. Moreover, so dynamic, so violent is this Black Spring that of all Miller’s books it is the most significant, the purest Miller, and at the same time it is the fiercest repudiation of all that figures and calculates. Even more so than in Tropic of Cancer, in which he says “Everything that was literature has fallen from me,” has the motto employed in the first chapter (of Black Spring) become his truth: “What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.” Therein he breaks with all that constitutes tradition, style and composition. According to the Liber Amicorum, The Happy Rock, he goes through a book as he does through life — like a typhoon. The whole thing is perplexing, and whoever refuses to be carried along by his pace will detest the result. But for him who does not find it necessary “to suck literature through a straw” it will prove to be virtually a personal encounter with an unpredictable, turbulent human being fighting with all his wild heart the last battle of his life for liberation and for the destruction of all that is non-essential. “The one and only life is the night life, the life of the mind, the night of night, the life the mind, the night, the night life. This is the Coney Island of the mind, the Toboggan Slide, the Into the Into. This is the without which wherefore and however of the night’s bright mind, the life and mind of night, the mind and night of night, or — Into the Night Life.”
To make a book of this text, a book that had to remain personal, as personal as his water-colors, and at the same time to make a book which would also embody the color of the vision, the askewness and terror of the dream, not by way of independent illustration but by interweaving of color, form and word, whereby even the aspect itself of the word would lose its typographical stiffness, simultaneously moving to a new form — such a book must have been dreamed of first by Miller or Schatz. Here author and illustrator cooperated in a truly unique manner. The cooperation required to unite the painter’s realization of the dream in line and color with Miller’s record of the dream, forced them to choose between either subjection to the inescapable demands of typography, which will not tolerate any deformation or interference without degenerating into nonsensical conundrums, or the creation of a “book” without typography. They chose the latter. Miller wrote it out. The handwriting, notwithstanding irregularities, is easy to read — smooth, flowing, though occasionally interrupted by rigidly perpendicular written parts. His hand moves in the rhythm of the text, now in a quiet, almost persuasive style, steady and thin, suddenly getting thicker, angrier, rougher, with violent words — in red ink — like curses thrown in, heavily underlined. Then the waves rise, rolling over the paper on the swell of horror, grimmer, fiercer, weakening again, and occasionally ending in a desperate ink-blot. Into these movements the painter Schatz, de sa part, wove his lines, drew his parallel view of the essentials of the dream: the sexual symbols, the mother-womb, the embryo, the nightbird of horror. Not Miller’s dreams alone but their assimilated experiences gave birth to a gruesome, cruel, unequalled, colorful and authentic short-hand report of our lives behind the threshold of day. “Out of whalebone and gunnysack this mad thing called sleep that runs like an eight-day clock . . .”
Into the Night Life is, as they both call it, “a serigraph (silk screen) creation through and through,” which at first meant nothing at all to me. It was planned and executed by Bezalel Schatz, an artist from Israel. The whole pictural part is his. It has a blue binding of heavy linen on which an abstract design in red felt has been applied. Size about folio. The paper of heavy aquarelle stock. It contains eighty pages and the writing has been reproduced photographically. Schatz sometimes works in very delicate shades, sometimes in one color only, sometimes in fiery red, yellow and green, and now and then in the most daring combination of eighteen colors, a veritable orgy shown to full advantage by this special method of reproduction. Then again with a single firm line he lends genuine depth to the movement of Miller’s words. And so they created the most personal book I ever saw.
Reproductions in black and white fail to give even the slightest idea of Schatz’s illustrations in their really fantastic color riot. According to Miller, the French review Occident has devoted an article to this work, which includes a reproduction in “full color” of a double page spread.
I mentioned the interweaving of color, form and word from which this curious phenomenon sprang, and I wrote that this was the most personal book I ever set eyes on. This, however, is not entirely true. I can hardly bring myself to call it a book, yet I simply cannot find another word for it. It is something in a cloth binding, undoubtedly paper is used, yet it is not a book. All experiments in this realm have always proved that a beautiful book can be created only if the strict laws of the art of printing are fully respected. An illustrated book particularly can only be called a success when a happy balance is attained between the “total” of letters and the “total” of illustration, when typographer and illustrator truly collaborate but each keeping strictly to his own domain and permitting only an occasional “invasion.” These simple but apparently unassailable rules have been broken completely by Miller and Schatz. The result is very extraordinary, thoroughly pioneering, and sometimes — in the most quiet pages — incomparably harmonious. But is a book without typography really a book? Or “only” a dream of a book?