First Encounters:
How I Almost Met Henry  by William Webb

(2nd installment of "California Years by Bill Webb).

In 1946 my wife and I were driving south through Big Sur, an old favorite place with memories going back to my childhood. We stopped over with some friends, living cheaply and communally at Krenkle Corners, a bit north of Anderson Canyon. They had been hired to work on some remodeling of Henry's house on Partington Ridge, while Henry and Lepska were living in the old convict camp on the headland that bordered the mouth of Anderson Canyon. The friends were mostly fellow internees from CO camps and jails only recently released. Among them was Dick Brown, in charge of the project, Banjo Marsh, Hugh O'Neil, and Kerwin Whitnah. During the few days we spent at Krenkle Corner, Joe and Bea Whitnah, Kerwin's parents, came down from Berkeley for a visit, and Joe, an excellent photographer, wanted to meet and photo-graph Henry. This was arranged and Joe and I went down to Anderson Creek. As we approached we met Lepska while she was hanging diapers on the clothesline. I stayed to talk with her while Joe went on to see Henry in his precarious cabin tilting a couple of hundred feet above a pounding sea. I chose to leave Joe alone to get his pictures, and later decided that Henry probably had enough of visitation, so we departed without my having met him. The photograph made a short distance north on the road as we returned to Krenkle Corner shows the point where the Miller family lived, with Henry's writing shack visible near the center. In the years since it was occupied by the Millers the property has been bought and the cabin moved back from the cliff edge. In the meantime a veritable forest of cypress and pines has grown up on the point. I did not actually encounter Henry until 1959. Late that year I had started a small publishing company, Cambria Books, working with Henry Geiger at his print shop in Alhambra. As editor of the weekly Manas , Geiger had carried on correspondence with Henry Miller, and proposed that Cambria Books might persuade Miller to produce a book. Geiger wrote Henry and 'introduced' us, and shortly after I made a trip to Big Sur to discuss doing the book. Long enchanted with Henry Miller's paintings, I had decided the book should probably be about painting. Henry readily accepted the idea, and before long we were both at work on To Paint is to Love Again, Henry to write the text, and I to round up and photograph his paintings. The back wrapper of the book was designed to show a group of photographs of Henry at work, and this series was the first I did of Henry. He was an excellent subject, so engrossed in the painting he paid no attention to my maneuvers. Henry began his paintings seemingly without a subject in mind. He'd stir up some color, dip his brush, squeeze it out, stir some more color, squeeze some more, all accompanied with sighs, groans, chuckles. Finally, he'd swish some paint onto the paper, randomly. This gesture would seem to lead him on, and a face, a townscape, a motto would be suggested. The painting would begin to evolve, creating its own momentum, Henry simply coax-ing it along. If it got balky at any point, it was ripped off the pad and consigned to the waste basket, and the process repeated. He turned out one painting after another, each quickly once it got started. We hit it off well and I spent the better part of the day there on Partington Ridge, in what became the usual: around a table with a bottle of wine, good talk, and a lot of laughter. On this occasion Henry and I were alone; Eve was off running errands, and Tony and Valentine had moved to Pacific Palisades.