Into the Night Life
A collaboration with Henry Miller
The purpose of this publication is to give you the salient features of Into the Night Life - How it was made, what it is about, its role in book production - together with a few testimonials from individuals qualified to appraise its merits.
Is a serigraph (silk screen) creation through and through. It took almost two years to produce this unique edition of eight hundred copies, each one signed and numbered.
This book represents a departure in book-making; the first of its kind, so far as we know. Two hundred and forty stencils were made in order to reproduce the contents of the eighty pages which comprise the book. For some of the double pages, which are paintings in themselves, as many as twenty colors were used. The text alone covers fifty-one pages and is in the author's own handwriting. (The sentence from Freud, from which the title derives, as well as his signature, are also in Henry Miller's handwriting, it being impossible to resurrect Freud to do the job himself.)
The book was conceived, designed and organized by Bezalel Schatz, an Israeli artist, who began his career in Paris after years of apprenticeship in the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts established by his father in Jerusalem. All the illustrative matter is by his hand. In order to perfect his skill in the use of the silk screen, the artist worked for a number of months with Louis Ewing of Santa Fe, a recognized master in this field. He did the printing of the book almost single-handed, and in the process made a number of technical discoveries which were utilized in this unique creation.
To make the book accessible to the general public, as well as to the private collector, a number of copies have been reserved for libraries and museums; these copies can either be purchased by the institutions themselves or by interested donors. The book is filled with inventive, sensitive color phantasies which accompany and are woven into the script. Each copy contains seven double-page color compositions which are by no means mere illustrations. Had any other process been used, the price of the book would have soared out of bounds. Moreover, no other process of color reproduction would have yielded the brilliancy, purity and texture which the silk screen affords.
The format of the book is 12 x 14% inches (30 by 37 centimetres); the paper is a heavy water color stock of pre-war manufacture. The book is hand bound and protected by a stout slipcover in linen.
And now a word about the text, taken from Henry Miller's Black Spring, which was published in Paris in 1936 and subsequently reprinted in The Cosmological Eye (New Directions). The text was chosen because of its free imagistic style, because it lent itself to imaginative treatment by the artist. Often described as Surrealistic (what Jolas called "night language"), actually the text derives from a dream book kept by the author for many months while working on the book Black Spring. It is full of archaic symbols and images, as well as childhood souvenirs, all poetically rendered and forming a suite sans fin which the author himself considers highly revelatory.
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-logicai 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 necescary "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 andhowever 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.
The Story of the Making of the Book
It all started towards the end of my days as a ship-yard worker, during the war. It was born of my tremendous interest in the decorative arts, in modern book layouts, in posters, in theatre sets, in interiors, in short, wherever line, form and color enter: all this, like seeds, finally came to the surface as a specific living idea, a need, to make a book which would combine the fantasy and freedom of our art to-day with the written script. Not to "illustrate" a story, that is, to reproduce visually what the words convey, but rather to design and delineate independently—out of the same creative roots, so to say—the spirit, feeling, or point of view which the writer set forth. A parallel creation, that is the best way to express what I mean. The author and the painter moving like two parallel lines, expanding and developing side by side, and sometimes crossing or interweaving. The Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, as well as the medieval monks, created works like these instinctively. In our day this sort of collaboration is conspicuously absent. To be sure, there are ever those marvelous separate drawings, such as Picasso, Matisse and other celebrated artists have made, but they always shadow the written contents of the books they serve.
Realizing that the only way to materialize such a book was through the silk screen medium (it would have cost ten times or more to produce it any other way), I went to Santa Fe to study the technique. I spent four weeks there with my friend Louis Ewing, a master in this field. Later I learned that he thought I was either mad or possessed because during the entire period I remained day and night in his studio going over every possible method or process, experimenting ceaselessly with the thousand and one varieties of expression which this medium offers.
At first I had the thought of choosing for the narrative some marvelous old tale or legend, Persian, Hindu or Hebraic - perhaps The Song of Songs — but I soon realized that both sources of creation must be living ones, nourishing and creating out of the same ambiance, the same time spirit. While in Santa Fe I had had a number of warm, intimate discussions with Hilaire Hiler; time and again he would say: "You'll get along swell with Henry Miller." Only a few months previously I had read an excerpt from Henry Miller's The Rosy Crucifixion, and I had thought it wonderful, what with its vigor, mood, fantasy, its strange mixture of realism and semi-Surrealist reality, its mad episodes which made my mouth water .... Anyway, Hiler's words plus the remembrance of the foregoing made it clear: Henry Miller.
It was on Miller's birthday, December 26th, 1945, that I drove up the hill to his home in Big Sur, my car loaded with paintings. I brought the paintings along because he had never seen my work. The idea appealed to him immediately. He spent the entire following week going over his writings in order to select a suitable piece. After narrowing down the huge mass of work to three tentative selections, we finally decided on the chapter from Black Spring called "Into the Night Life".
Back in Berkeley I started in to work at once. There were thousands of sketches to be made, in addition to the over-all conception; the text had to be broken down from beginning to end in order to determine how much would be used for each page, and then graphically related to the drawing, or, if no drawing, to the white space in which it floated. I probably never have and never will again work with the same inspired enthusiasm which then filled me night and day. Indeed, these words express but feebly the state of my intoxication.
After six months, when I had practically finished the designing of the book, this preliminary part of it, at least, I went again to Big Sur and together we went over it exhaustively. In the next eight weeks there were many changes made in this preliminary project. We worked in close communion during these weeks, Henry writing the text in long-hand and I arranging and rearranging the lay-outs of the pages. All sorts of experiments were made with the calligraphy which, the reader will observe, varies with the nature of the contents, the mood, the atmosphere evoked. Thin and thick pen points were employed, sometimes plumes and feathers or sticks or twigs. Often a page containing a few lines, sometimes big, full pages, were done over and over again until the right effect was achieved. Henry usually ended by getting joyously angry and throwing the ink around at random - often achieving astonishing results of supreme spontaneity and miraculous fusion with the design. At 774 San Luis Road in Berkeley I converted a small bed-room into an atelier for the silk screening of the book. Incidentally, the final selection of the paper was a veritable find. After sampling a number of excellent stocks, I finally concluded that we had to have ״something better yet״, and so I eventually hit upon a heavy water color paper much much finer and ten times more expensive than the others. Then for six months I worked alone in this room, my entire time consumed in the making and printing of the stencils. I used only five screens, which I made myself. Thanks to my experience in the ship-yards, I decided one day to make a work chart in order to see what progress I was making. I had broken down the work so that the chart revealed the exact number of printings which each page of the book demanded. I discovered that I had only done about 7.5 percent of the job in those hectic six months. Thereupon I promptly engaged my friend Alfred Stoddard to help me with the printing, thereby managing to execute the work in eighteen months. During the last six to eight months I recruited all the friendly hands available to aid me in hanging up the sheets to dry, sorting the pages, etc. Some pages required as many as twenty-four printings for the many colors employed, and there were two sides to each page, remember! Each sheet had to be done 800 times—in fact, 840 or 850 times, for I made extra pages in case of damage. There were fifty-one pages of text alone, not to speak of the seven double pages in full color.
The most difficult thing was to reproduce the hand-writing. I had to learn a commercially used technique of making stencils through the photographic medium, which gives an exact reproduction of the script. There were a number of tricks to be learned if one did not wish to waste time and paper. Many a time I had to keep working the whole night long in order to have the stencil ready for printing when Alfred arrived in the morning. My regular, normal, hours were from eight A.M. to 2.00 A.M. daily. As time went on our tempo developed to such a crescendo that to an on-looker it seemed like a mad whirl.
There was another aspect to the production of the book, equally difficult, maddening sometimes, and that was the raising of funds for the expenses involved. To begin with, both Henry and I sank all our available cash into the enterprise—a negligible sum, to be truthful. To raise the remainder necessitated extreme ingenuity, effort and not a little humiliation. Many a night we sat up together racking our brains as to how to get the little sums required in order to proceed with the work. But we had begun the task with enthusiasm and we continued it in the same vein. Henry made a number of trips to Berkeley, loaded with his manuscripts, water colors, art books, anything and everything which could be converted into cash. We visited all the bookshops in the Bay area, saw every possible individual who might be willing to buy our wares, we organized parties, telephoned like madmen, wrote letters, and walked and walked and talked and talked and talked. Once when visiting a bookseller, in order to sell him a manuscript of Henry's, we found that he had bought one that very morning from a person who bought it in turn of another person who in turn had bought it from a book-dealer to ־whom we had sold it just a few days previously. Another time, after a week of no luck, growing rather desperate I telephoned a friend and, after informing him of our situation, he told me he knew a young fellow who had a thousand dollars to spare and who would be happy to loan it to us without a note and without interest. He said the young man would do it because he believed in us and what we were doing. It would be there, the money, in the morning. Henry, tired and discouraged, had gone upstairs to sleep it off, as he said. I shouted to him, giving him the good news, but he was too weary or too sceptical to give heed. It was only the next morning when the young chap put the thousand dollar check in his hands that he realized it was not a bad dream.
There were many painful set-backs and many pleasant surprises as we proceeded on our way, but the important thing is that the book was finally completed without compromise of any sort. We made it exactly as we had planned it, down to the last detail. It certainly had no sound economic basis behind it, no logic, from the business man's standpoint, but it was a success from our standpoint. That it came to fruition at all is due to the belief, the love, and the enthusiasm which we both maintained throughout. Any other attitude would have resuited in an abortion.
I have been given to understand that by book-publishing standards the price for this book ought to be around $240.00 per copy. (The cost, for materials and labor, our own included, amounts to $73.00 per copy.) Or, looking at this work purely from a serigraphic viewpoint, the same figures apply, since the book contains eighty-one pages for the making of which 250 stencils were made. Incidentally, I should like to point out here that there were no "plates" left, no trace, indeed, of the original work which would permit of another edition being made. Each time a new stencil was made the screen had to be cleaned in order to use it for the next stencil. All that are left, then, are the five empty screens with which I began work.
Another detail. . . Since the completion of the book a number of people have pointed out to us that we made too many copies—800. They say we should have made 250 or 300 at most—for the sake of "collectors". If we had done this, they point out, we could have asked much more money per copy, because the book would then be "rare." Whatever justification there may be in this point of view, I feel that we did right in printing the maximum rather than the minimum. If the book is a beautiful thing, then it means that there are that many more of these beautiful things.
Bezalel Schatz
Our aim in using the silk screen as a medium for a book was to achieve the utmost freedom in the collaboration of writer and painter. We wanted a medium which would not only unite our individual efforts but exalt and liberate them. We did not want a mere physical union of the graphic and the verbal but a spiritual alliance which would make the book a living experience, not only for its creators, but for the reader as well. Each page was worked out by us together, going through many phases, of development before reaching the aesthetic consummation from which a stencil could be made for the eighty pages of script and illustration, for the former photographic stencils and for the latter touche glue stencils. By working together over each detail the process itself gave us inspiration. Unlimited possibilities for further collaboration unfolded. This is but the beginning, a pioneer effort in a direction which may prove to be revolutionary in the making of books. By comparison, the illustrated printed book, however beautiful, appears to lack something. This something might be described as invention, fantasy, the spirit of play. We believe that the graphic and the verbal elements should not only co-exist but inter-marry, fuse, coalesce. This the traditional illustrated printed book does not permit. The text for this book was deliberately chosen; and the calligraphy, which is the author's own, was deliberately varied, deformed, magnified or reduced to satisfy an aesthetic need. There is no story element, but rather a succession of dream sequences whigh permit the eye to rest anywhere and the mind to follow its own reflections. The holographic quality thus heightens the plastic element of the book; it is not only a relief from the hypnotic cold print we are accustomed to, it excites and stimulates the mind of the reader, enabling him to participate in a creative way himself. All these factors combined make this joint creation an art book in the true sense of the word. We have had works of art and books on art, but a book which is itself a work of art is a horse of another color.
Henry Miller
Bezalel Schatz
Into the Night Life: Black Spring of the sulky era, of the milk-filled breasts of women, of sweet-hearts, and the bad consciences of the high-bred technicians-the lacerations which sprout from the recent battle-fields - the breathless nights of the sadistic formalities on the work benches of the chemists - the fleur du mal after Freud and Einstein, after Stalingrad, after Hiroshima and the academies of athens and Paris - this the world of ideas, of the poesy and art of Henry Miller and Bezalel Schatz.
Herbert Kluger
Author and publisher,
Munich, Germany
Into the Night Life seems to me a successful effort to convey the rythm of the thought in two ways, by preserving the original calligraphy which reveals so directly the personal accent of the writer and by the unbound phantasy of free, creative expression. Breaking away from the rigidity of print and the regularity of format to the spontaneity of the manuscript, the varying wanderings and pressures of the handwriting are a graph of the thought itself and guide the pitch of intensity. Interwoven with this physical immediacy of communication, the vivid abstract drawings of Bezalel Schatz reinforce the language of emotional, interior life with their shifting images, so that the shapes and color of thought and feeling find their visual extension and approximation.
Dr. W. R. Valentiner
Director Los Angeles County Museum.
Schatz was born, raised and trained in Palestine and there may be some resemblance, in its unrestrained chromaticism, between his work and that of such self-counciously Jewish artists as Marc Chagall and Abraham Rattner. But Schatz lacks Rattner's moral preoccupations or the interest in folk lore characteristic of Chagall. He is devoted to his own expressionistic, expansive and monumental light-heartedness, and in that he is altogether unique among painters, Jewish or otherwise.
Alfred Frankenstein
Noted American art and music critic.
We have good news for people who love good books-books that not only thrill the mind but books that in themselves and their union of words and pictures and paper and pigment are beautiful to look at and to touch. Such a volume is the recent edition, Into the Night Life. . . . the entire book was executed in silk screen, a tremendous undertaking and probably the most successful of its kind ever accomplished.... price is $100, a de luxe figure but really a very low one for a book of such high quality.
Judith K. Reed
Art Digest, New York
Calligraphy and pictorial accompaniment of a text are its visual aspects and alike part of the final work of art, in a chinese scroll. It is far too rare for there to be so complete an artistic- collaboration between writer and artist in the production of an illustrated book in the occident. A notable exception is Into the Night Life, written by Henry Miller, the text transcribed by his hand according to the design of Bezalel Schatz, the artist who did also the illustrations. Perhaps illustration is not the word to use, however, for the designs are not literal, but rather an accompaniment in line and color to the text, very sensitively corresponding to the meaning, but also adapted to the design and arrangement of Miller's handwritten characters. The whole, writer's text and artist's visual accompaniment, have been reproduced by silk screen with an autographic directness and a subtlety possible to no other process. Schatz controlled the printing to insure perfection. The result is a book that is a work of art in its own right as a creative production, as well as representing the characteristic contributions of two artists who have won recognition individually.
Dr. Grace L. McCann Morley
Director, San Francisco Museum of Art
I watched Henry Miller working on Into the Night Life with Bezalel Schatz and was fascinated. Never have I seen such smooth working cooperation without any need for collaboration, the curse of most illustrated books. The result is a work in which the roles become interchangeable-Miller the painter, Schatz the poet. It is also a work that might have been made by you and me—it is enough, however, that it was made for you and me.
Man Ray
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?
J. Den Haan
Into the Night Life
A collaboration with Henry Miller
The purpose of this publication is to give you the salient features of Into the Night Life - How it was made, what it is about, its role in book production - together with a few testimonials from individuals qualified to appraise its merits.
Is a serigraph (silk screen) creation through and through. It took almost two years to produce this unique edition of eight hundred copies, each one signed and numbered.
This book represents a departure in book-making; the first of its kind, so far as we know. Two hundred and forty stencils were made in order to reproduce the contents of the eighty pages which comprise the book. For some of the double pages, which are paintings in themselves, as many as twenty colors were used. The text alone covers fifty-one pages and is in the author's own handwriting. (The sentence from Freud, from which the title derives, as well as his signature, are also in Henry Miller's handwriting, it being impossible to resurrect Freud to do the job himself.)
The book was conceived, designed and organized by Bezalel Schatz, an Israeli artist, who began his career in Paris after years of apprenticeship in the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts established by his father in Jerusalem. All the illustrative matter is by his hand. In order to perfect his skill in the use of the silk screen, the artist worked for a number of months with Louis Ewing of Santa Fe, a recognized master in this field. He did the printing of the book almost single-handed, and in the process made a number of technical discoveries which were utilized in this unique creation.
To make the book accessible to the general public, as well as to the private collector, a number of copies have been reserved for libraries and museums; these copies can either be purchased by the institutions themselves or by interested donors. The book is filled with inventive, sensitive color phantasies which accompany and are woven into the script. Each copy contains seven double-page color compositions which are by no means mere illustrations. Had any other process been used, the price of the book would have soared out of bounds. Moreover, no other process of color reproduction would have yielded the brilliancy, purity and texture which the silk screen affords.
The format of the book is 12 x 14% inches (30 by 37 centimetres); the paper is a heavy water color stock of pre-war manufacture. The book is hand bound and protected by a stout slipcover in linen.
And now a word about the text, taken from Henry Miller's Black Spring, which was published in Paris in 1936 and subsequently reprinted in The Cosmological Eye (New Directions). The text was chosen because of its free imagistic style, because it lent itself to imaginative treatment by the artist. Often described as Surrealistic (what Jolas called "night language"), actually the text derives from a dream book kept by the author for many months while working on the book Black Spring. It is full of archaic symbols and images, as well as childhood souvenirs, all poetically rendered and forming a suite sans fin which the author himself considers highly revelatory.
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-logicai 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 necescary "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 andhowever 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.
The Story of the Making of the Book
It all started towards the end of my days as a ship-yard worker, during the war. It was born of my tremendous interest in the decorative arts, in modern book layouts, in posters, in theatre sets, in interiors, in short, wherever line, form and color enter: all this, like seeds, finally came to the surface as a specific living idea, a need, to make a book which would combine the fantasy and freedom of our art to-day with the written script. Not to "illustrate" a story, that is, to reproduce visually what the words convey, but rather to design and delineate independently—out of the same creative roots, so to say—the spirit, feeling, or point of view which the writer set forth. A parallel creation, that is the best way to express what I mean. The author and the painter moving like two parallel lines, expanding and developing side by side, and sometimes crossing or interweaving. The Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, as well as the medieval monks, created works like these instinctively. In our day this sort of collaboration is conspicuously absent. To be sure, there are ever those marvelous separate drawings, such as Picasso, Matisse and other celebrated artists have made, but they always shadow the written contents of the books they serve.
Realizing that the only way to materialize such a book was through the silk screen medium (it would have cost ten times or more to produce it any other way), I went to Santa Fe to study the technique. I spent four weeks there with my friend Louis Ewing, a master in this field. Later I learned that he thought I was either mad or possessed because during the entire period I remained day and night in his studio going over every possible method or process, experimenting ceaselessly with the thousand and one varieties of expression which this medium offers.
At first I had the thought of choosing for the narrative some marvelous old tale or legend, Persian, Hindu or Hebraic - perhaps The Song of Songs — but I soon realized that both sources of creation must be living ones, nourishing and creating out of the same ambiance, the same time spirit. While in Santa Fe I had had a number of warm, intimate discussions with Hilaire Hiler; time and again he would say: "You'll get along swell with Henry Miller." Only a few months previously I had read an excerpt from Henry Miller's The Rosy Crucifixion, and I had thought it wonderful, what with its vigor, mood, fantasy, its strange mixture of realism and semi-Surrealist reality, its mad episodes which made my mouth water .... Anyway, Hiler's words plus the remembrance of the foregoing made it clear: Henry Miller.
It was on Miller's birthday, December 26th, 1945, that I drove up the hill to his home in Big Sur, my car loaded with paintings. I brought the paintings along because he had never seen my work. The idea appealed to him immediately. He spent the entire following week going over his writings in order to select a suitable piece. After narrowing down the huge mass of work to three tentative selections, we finally decided on the chapter from Black Spring called "Into the Night Life".
Back in Berkeley I started in to work at once. There were thousands of sketches to be made, in addition to the over-all conception; the text had to be broken down from beginning to end in order to determine how much would be used for each page, and then graphically related to the drawing, or, if no drawing, to the white space in which it floated. I probably never have and never will again work with the same inspired enthusiasm which then filled me night and day. Indeed, these words express but feebly the state of my intoxication.
After six months, when I had practically finished the designing of the book, this preliminary part of it, at least, I went again to Big Sur and together we went over it exhaustively. In the next eight weeks there were many changes made in this preliminary project. We worked in close communion during these weeks, Henry writing the text in long-hand and I arranging and rearranging the lay-outs of the pages. All sorts of experiments were made with the calligraphy which, the reader will observe, varies with the nature of the contents, the mood, the atmosphere evoked. Thin and thick pen points were employed, sometimes plumes and feathers or sticks or twigs. Often a page containing a few lines, sometimes big, full pages, were done over and over again until the right effect was achieved. Henry usually ended by getting joyously angry and throwing the ink around at random - often achieving astonishing results of supreme spontaneity and miraculous fusion with the design. At 774 San Luis Road in Berkeley I converted a small bed-room into an atelier for the silk screening of the book. Incidentally, the final selection of the paper was a veritable find. After sampling a number of excellent stocks, I finally concluded that we had to have ״something better yet״, and so I eventually hit upon a heavy water color paper much much finer and ten times more expensive than the others. Then for six months I worked alone in this room, my entire time consumed in the making and printing of the stencils. I used only five screens, which I made myself. Thanks to my experience in the ship-yards, I decided one day to make a work chart in order to see what progress I was making. I had broken down the work so that the chart revealed the exact number of printings which each page of the book demanded. I discovered that I had only done about 7.5 percent of the job in those hectic six months. Thereupon I promptly engaged my friend Alfred Stoddard to help me with the printing, thereby managing to execute the work in eighteen months. During the last six to eight months I recruited all the friendly hands available to aid me in hanging up the sheets to dry, sorting the pages, etc. Some pages required as many as twenty-four printings for the many colors employed, and there were two sides to each page, remember! Each sheet had to be done 800 times—in fact, 840 or 850 times, for I made extra pages in case of damage. There were fifty-one pages of text alone, not to speak of the seven double pages in full color.
The most difficult thing was to reproduce the hand-writing. I had to learn a commercially used technique of making stencils through the photographic medium, which gives an exact reproduction of the script. There were a number of tricks to be learned if one did not wish to waste time and paper. Many a time I had to keep working the whole night long in order to have the stencil ready for printing when Alfred arrived in the morning. My regular, normal, hours were from eight A.M. to 2.00 A.M. daily. As time went on our tempo developed to such a crescendo that to an on-looker it seemed like a mad whirl.
There was another aspect to the production of the book, equally difficult, maddening sometimes, and that was the raising of funds for the expenses involved. To begin with, both Henry and I sank all our available cash into the enterprise—a negligible sum, to be truthful. To raise the remainder necessitated extreme ingenuity, effort and not a little humiliation. Many a night we sat up together racking our brains as to how to get the little sums required in order to proceed with the work. But we had begun the task with enthusiasm and we continued it in the same vein. Henry made a number of trips to Berkeley, loaded with his manuscripts, water colors, art books, anything and everything which could be converted into cash. We visited all the bookshops in the Bay area, saw every possible individual who might be willing to buy our wares, we organized parties, telephoned like madmen, wrote letters, and walked and walked and talked and talked and talked. Once when visiting a bookseller, in order to sell him a manuscript of Henry's, we found that he had bought one that very morning from a person who bought it in turn of another person who in turn had bought it from a book-dealer to ־whom we had sold it just a few days previously. Another time, after a week of no luck, growing rather desperate I telephoned a friend and, after informing him of our situation, he told me he knew a young fellow who had a thousand dollars to spare and who would be happy to loan it to us without a note and without interest. He said the young man would do it because he believed in us and what we were doing. It would be there, the money, in the morning. Henry, tired and discouraged, had gone upstairs to sleep it off, as he said. I shouted to him, giving him the good news, but he was too weary or too sceptical to give heed. It was only the next morning when the young chap put the thousand dollar check in his hands that he realized it was not a bad dream.
There were many painful set-backs and many pleasant surprises as we proceeded on our way, but the important thing is that the book was finally completed without compromise of any sort. We made it exactly as we had planned it, down to the last detail. It certainly had no sound economic basis behind it, no logic, from the business man's standpoint, but it was a success from our standpoint. That it came to fruition at all is due to the belief, the love, and the enthusiasm which we both maintained throughout. Any other attitude would have resuited in an abortion.
I have been given to understand that by book-publishing standards the price for this book ought to be around $240.00 per copy. (The cost, for materials and labor, our own included, amounts to $73.00 per copy.) Or, looking at this work purely from a serigraphic viewpoint, the same figures apply, since the book contains eighty-one pages for the making of which 250 stencils were made. Incidentally, I should like to point out here that there were no "plates" left, no trace, indeed, of the original work which would permit of another edition being made. Each time a new stencil was made the screen had to be cleaned in order to use it for the next stencil. All that are left, then, are the five empty screens with which I began work.
Another detail. . . Since the completion of the book a number of people have pointed out to us that we made too many copies—800. They say we should have made 250 or 300 at most—for the sake of "collectors". If we had done this, they point out, we could have asked much more money per copy, because the book would then be "rare." Whatever justification there may be in this point of view, I feel that we did right in printing the maximum rather than the minimum. If the book is a beautiful thing, then it means that there are that many more of these beautiful things.
Bezalel Schatz
Our aim in using the silk screen as a medium for a book was to achieve the utmost freedom in the collaboration of writer and painter. We wanted a medium which would not only unite our individual efforts but exalt and liberate them. We did not want a mere physical union of the graphic and the verbal but a spiritual alliance which would make the book a living experience, not only for its creators, but for the reader as well. Each page was worked out by us together, going through many phases, of development before reaching the aesthetic consummation from which a stencil could be made for the eighty pages of script and illustration, for the former photographic stencils and for the latter touche glue stencils. By working together over each detail the process itself gave us inspiration. Unlimited possibilities for further collaboration unfolded. This is but the beginning, a pioneer effort in a direction which may prove to be revolutionary in the making of books. By comparison, the illustrated printed book, however beautiful, appears to lack something. This something might be described as invention, fantasy, the spirit of play. We believe that the graphic and the verbal elements should not only co-exist but inter-marry, fuse, coalesce. This the traditional illustrated printed book does not permit. The text for this book was deliberately chosen; and the calligraphy, which is the author's own, was deliberately varied, deformed, magnified or reduced to satisfy an aesthetic need. There is no story element, but rather a succession of dream sequences whigh permit the eye to rest anywhere and the mind to follow its own reflections. The holographic quality thus heightens the plastic element of the book; it is not only a relief from the hypnotic cold print we are accustomed to, it excites and stimulates the mind of the reader, enabling him to participate in a creative way himself. All these factors combined make this joint creation an art book in the true sense of the word. We have had works of art and books on art, but a book which is itself a work of art is a horse of another color.
Henry Miller
Bezalel Schatz
Into the Night Life: Black Spring of the sulky era, of the milk-filled breasts of women, of sweet-hearts, and the bad consciences of the high-bred technicians-the lacerations which sprout from the recent battle-fields - the breathless nights of the sadistic formalities on the work benches of the chemists - the fleur du mal after Freud and Einstein, after Stalingrad, after Hiroshima and the academies of athens and Paris - this the world of ideas, of the poesy and art of Henry Miller and Bezalel Schatz.
Herbert Kluger
Author and publisher,
Munich, Germany
Into the Night Life seems to me a successful effort to convey the rythm of the thought in two ways, by preserving the original calligraphy which reveals so directly the personal accent of the writer and by the unbound phantasy of free, creative expression. Breaking away from the rigidity of print and the regularity of format to the spontaneity of the manuscript, the varying wanderings and pressures of the handwriting are a graph of the thought itself and guide the pitch of intensity. Interwoven with this physical immediacy of communication, the vivid abstract drawings of Bezalel Schatz reinforce the language of emotional, interior life with their shifting images, so that the shapes and color of thought and feeling find their visual extension and approximation.
Dr. W. R. Valentiner
Director Los Angeles County Museum.
Schatz was born, raised and trained in Palestine and there may be some resemblance, in its unrestrained chromaticism, between his work and that of such self-counciously Jewish artists as Marc Chagall and Abraham Rattner. But Schatz lacks Rattner's moral preoccupations or the interest in folk lore characteristic of Chagall. He is devoted to his own expressionistic, expansive and monumental light-heartedness, and in that he is altogether unique among painters, Jewish or otherwise.
Alfred Frankenstein
Noted American art and music critic.
We have good news for people who love good books-books that not only thrill the mind but books that in themselves and their union of words and pictures and paper and pigment are beautiful to look at and to touch. Such a volume is the recent edition, Into the Night Life. . . . the entire book was executed in silk screen, a tremendous undertaking and probably the most successful of its kind ever accomplished.... price is $100, a de luxe figure but really a very low one for a book of such high quality.
Judith K. Reed
Art Digest, New York
Calligraphy and pictorial accompaniment of a text are its visual aspects and alike part of the final work of art, in a chinese scroll. It is far too rare for there to be so complete an artistic- collaboration between writer and artist in the production of an illustrated book in the occident. A notable exception is Into the Night Life, written by Henry Miller, the text transcribed by his hand according to the design of Bezalel Schatz, the artist who did also the illustrations. Perhaps illustration is not the word to use, however, for the designs are not literal, but rather an accompaniment in line and color to the text, very sensitively corresponding to the meaning, but also adapted to the design and arrangement of Miller's handwritten characters. The whole, writer's text and artist's visual accompaniment, have been reproduced by silk screen with an autographic directness and a subtlety possible to no other process. Schatz controlled the printing to insure perfection. The result is a book that is a work of art in its own right as a creative production, as well as representing the characteristic contributions of two artists who have won recognition individually.
Dr. Grace L. McCann Morley
Director, San Francisco Museum of Art
I watched Henry Miller working on Into the Night Life with Bezalel Schatz and was fascinated. Never have I seen such smooth working cooperation without any need for collaboration, the curse of most illustrated books. The result is a work in which the roles become interchangeable-Miller the painter, Schatz the poet. It is also a work that might have been made by you and me—it is enough, however, that it was made for you and me.
Man Ray
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?
J. Den Haan