By Stuart Mitchner

A glorious day, really! So clear, so crisp, so bracing! If only it weren’t Christmas!

—Henry Miller, from Nexus

Henry Valentine Miller’s antipathy to Christmas must have begun in the womb. Somehow the “literary gangster” who wrote Tropic of Cancer convinced his mother to put off delivering him for a day. Born December 26, 1891, in Yorkville on the Upper East side of Manhattan, he grew up in Brooklyn on what he called “the Street of Early Sorrows.”

Humphrey DeForest Bogart, who broke through in films as the gangster Duke Mantee, was born into a wealthy Upper West Side family on December 25, 1899, a birthdate that was subsequently moved into late January 1900 by the Warner’s publicity department. In the fantasy world of Hollywood, no way could an actor famed for playing “villainous” roles carry a Christmas Day birthdate.

Christmas Spirit

Miller’s view of the season is more in tune with the current state of the nation and the world than the supernatural, merry-at-all costs vision created by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, which was published 180 years ago yesterday on December 19, 1843. Writing in Nexus, the third volume in his trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (Grove Press 1965), Miller declares that “since attaining manhood,” he had never known a good Christmas: “No matter how I fought against it, Christmas day always found me in the bosom of the family, the melancholy knight wrapped in his black armor, forced like every other idiot in Christendom to stuff his belly and listen to the utterly empty babble of his kin” — which included “a complete catalogue of all the trees they ever had and how they compared with one another…. At the age of twelve the clock had stopped. No matter what anyone whispered in their ears, I was always that darling little boy who would one day grow up to be a full-fledged merchant tailor.”

Tree of Man

Having never met a family Christmas tree I didn’t like, I’ve been admiring this year’s incarnation, a nice size, smaller than some, larger than others. After 2 a.m. the lights seem to be breathing a mist of blue, gold, green, and rose-pink, a metropolis of ornaments glittering in the surrounding shadows. When Miller looks at the Christmas tree in his parents’ Brooklyn home, he imagines the “tree of man,” which “is nothing but a huge Tannenbaum glistening with ripe, polished maniacs.” Typical full-blown Miller — over the top, yes, but not that far off as America slouches toward November 5, 2024.

Stasia and Mona

Chapter 6 of Nexus is centered on a family Christmas dinner Henry decides to attend as a ménage à trois with his wife Mona (June Mansfield in “real life”) and her gay friend and lover Stasia (artist Jean Kronski), who is portrayed sometimes as “a Slav speaking with a genuine Slavic accent,” other times as a “boy-girl” from Montana.

Around 3 a.m. on Christmas morning Stasia and Mona show up “dead drunk” after a night on the town. Determined to make sure they all arrive at dinner no later than 1 p.m., Henry sobers them up with the usual remedies. Asked not to come in “drag” but to wear a dress or a skirt, Stasia manages to squeeze into a pair of high heels amid a scattered mess of clothes, combs, and hairpins. Mona is busy decorating her with various hats, bracelets, and earrings when Henry says “Stop it! She looks like a Christmas tree.”

Stasia’s limping in the high heels, so they take a cab, and off come the shoes as soon as sits down. By the time they “pile out of the cab” half a block from the Miller family home, she’s in her stocking feet, carrying the heels, which she has to force back on while seated on a large pine display box outside the corner undertakers. Miller sets the scene: “Thus we march three abreast down The Street of Early Sorrows. I can feel the eyes of the neighbors staring at us from behind their stiff, starched curtains. The Millers’ son. That must be his wife. Which one?”

Christmas Dinner

After a heavy, uneventful dinner and several glasses of Moselle, Mona and Stasia can hardly keep their heads up and are invited to have a nap on a nearby couch that proves to be too narrow to hold them. The springs give way, and they find themselves sprawled on the floor, from which they crawl back on to the collapsed couch, a piece of family furniture that had endured for 50 years. Soon they are snoozing spoon fashion, “peaceful as exhausted chipmunks.”

The rest of the day goes well enough, a walk through a nearby cemetery, a spirited discussion of art between Stasia and Henry’s father, but then Henry’s mother begins disparaging his writing (he’s too lazy to take a job, he expects his wife to take care of him, if he earned anything from it I wouldn’t mind. But to go on writing and never get anywhere). Mona responds politely but passionately and at length, ending her spirited defense, “How can you understand him if you don’t know this side of him? What he has to give belongs to the whole world.” The mother responds with a line he’s heard many times before: “I’d rather see him digging ditches.”

The dinner scene had begun with an unspoken Merry Christmas toast from Henry that included horses, mules, and alcoholics, heathen and converted (“Hosanna in the Highest!”) while he thinks, “If only it were the celebration of the birth of a free spirit!”

Fortunately for a writer approaching 40 with virtually nothing to show for it, Paris and the 1930s were just around the corner.

Bogart Does Christmas

In one of his last films, Humphrey Bogart hosts a Christmas dinner, cooks it with all the trimmings, and serves it in style. He and his two pals Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray even provide a beautifully decorated Christmas tree. The only catch is they’re convicted killers freshly escaped from Devil’s Island; they’ve stolen the tree, the dinner, the gifts, and all the trimmings; and they plan to finish off by slaughtering the gentle, bumbling husband, his loving wife, and their pretty, marriageable daughter. The film is We’re No Angels (1955), from a show biz genre that Bogart biographer Stefan Kanfer identifies as “kitchy-koo with an anvil,” meaning the convicts fall for the family and the family falls for the convicts. Bogart has the best line: “I don’t care how nice they are, they’re not going to soften me up. We’re escaping, and this is our only chance. We came here to rob them and that’s what we’re gonna do — beat their heads in, gouge their eyes out, cut their throats — as soon as we wash the dishes.”

Mantee’s Last Bow

Two months later, in May 1955, the Producers’ Showcase production of Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest brought Bogart to the small screen as Duke Mantee hosting an impromptu party of sorts at the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q. As viewed on YouTube, the film is a predictably cloudy kinescope, with Bogart’s wife Lauren Bacall as the girl and Henry Fonda as the poet, whose interaction with the killer seemed more convincing to me than Leslie Howard’s in the 1936 film that put Bogie on the map. Although he may appear a shadow among shadows in the murk, Bogart plays it with the old power. Until then he’d avoided television because “Every pore on my face can be seen in those home screens. And you can imagine what I look like on sets with bad reception,” Of course if any face could have survived bad reception, it was Bogart’s.

Two Guys in a Bar

Somewhere in the great online universe, there must be at least one reference to a meeting between Bogart and Miller, most likely in a bar like Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard. Along with evidence that both men were in Hollywood in 1941-1942, there are letters from Miller telling his pal Lawrence Durrell he should see The Maltese Falcon, but without mentioning Bogart, for whose career that film was as key as Paris was to Miller’s emergence as a writer.

Judging from the familiar circa 1940s photo of Miller in a trench coat and Trilby hat, he may have favored a private eye persona at the time. So imagine two guys in trench coats in a Hollywood bar drinking a toast on the day after Christmas. “Today’s my birthday,” says Henry. “Hey, here’s lookin’ at you kid,” says Bogie. “Mine was yesterday.”