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The Devil At Large. Erica Jong on Henry Miller.
Henry Hero.
Most people are not free. Freedom, in fact, frightens them. They follow patterns set for them by their parents, enforced by society, by their fears of ‘they say’ and ‘what will they think?’ and a constant inner dialogue that weighs duty against desire and pronounces duty the winner.
‘Lives of quiet desperation’ Thoreau called such existence – though today’s version is noisy desperation. Occasionally, a visionary comes along who seems to have conquered the fears in himself (herself) and seems to have conquered the fears in himself (herself) and seems to live with bravado and courage. People are at once terrified of such a creature – and admiring. They are also envious.
One who has conquered human fears is recognized as a hero – or heroine. But such a figure inspires mixed emotions. We are provoked by their example, but we are also inclined to blame ourselves for having lived too timidly. So the hero or heroine is often attacked, even killed, because of the envy of ordinary mortals. But if we could see the hero (heroine) as embodying our own aspirations, we would not need to destroy but could rather emulate and learn.
Henry Miller was such a hero. He did not start out fearless but he learned to overcome his fears. And he wrote a book – Tropic of Cancer – that breathed fresh air into American – and world – literature. The fresh air he breathed was freedom. And it was like pure oxygen to those who would take it in. For the others, the fearful, the envious, those who refused to breathe, Miller had to be discredited as a pervert or a sex maniac because his message was too terrifying. Life is there for the taking, he said. And those who refused to live fully had to blame him for their own failure.
Like Byron, Pushkin, George Sand, and Colette, Miller became more than a writer. He became a protagonist and a prophet – the prophet of a new consciousness.
His writings and his life mingled to create a larger myth, a myth that embodies the human attraction toward freedom. Miller’s writing is full of imperfection, bombast, humbug. Sometimes its very slovenliness makes it hard to defend. But the purity of his example, his heart, his openness, makes him unique among American writers. He will surely, however, draw new generations of readers to him. At present, Miller’s reputation still hangs in the balance and even those who have written about him seem to disapprove of him.
Miller is in many ways a world unto himself. One searches in vain for a contemporary to compare him with. Tropic of Cancer burst forth into the world in the same year, 1934, that gave us F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Edna St Vincent Millay’s Wine from These Grapes and Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks.
Not only is Miller’s characteristic style comparable to none of his contemporaries, but his spirit harks back to Whitman or Rabelais. In an age of cynicism, Miller remains the romantic, exemplifying the possibility of optimism in a fallen world, of happy poverty in a world that worships Lucre, of the sort of gaiety Yeats meant when he wrote of the Chinese sages in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, ‘their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay’.
I only knew Henry Miller in the last decade of his life. In a number of ways, he became my mentor.
I was a very young writer, very green and suddenly famous; he was a very old writer, seasoned in both fame and rejection, when we met – by letter – and became pen pals, then pals. I feel lucky to have known him, but in some sense I only got to know him well after his death.
Miller was the most contradictory of characters: a mystic who was known for his sexual writings, a romantic who pretended to be a rake, an old-fashioned Victorian sexist who could nevertheless be enormously supportive and loving to women, an accused anti-Semite who loved and admired Jews and had no use at all for prejudice or political dogma. He was, above all, a writer of what the poet Karl Shapiro called ‘wisdom literature’. If we have trouble categorizing Miller’s ‘novels’ and consequently underrate them, it is because we judge them according to some unspoken notion of ‘the well-wrought novel.’ And Miller’s novels seem not wrought at all. In fact, they are rants – undisciplined and wild. But they are full of wisdom, and they have that ‘eternal and irrepressible freshness’ Ezra Pound called the mark of the true classic.
In the profound shocks and upheavals of the twentieth century, from the trenches of World War l to Auschwitz to the holes in the ozone layer, we in the West have produced a great body of ‘wisdom literature’, as if we needed all the wisdom we could garner to bear what may be the last century of humans on earth. Solzhenitsyen, Primo Levi, Gunter Grass, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir have all written predominantly wisdom literature. Even among some of our most interesting novelists – Saul Bellow, Natalia Ginzberg, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Christina Stead, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Marguerite Yourcenar – the fictional form is often a cloack for philosophical truths about hte human race and where it is heading. The popularity of writers like Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, M.Scott Peck, and Robert Bly in our time also serves to show the great hunger for wisdom. We are, as Ursula LeGuin says, ‘dancing at the edge of the world,’ and it takes all our philosophy to bear it.
Henry Miller remains the most disturbing and misunderstood of prophets. Because even the STYLE of writing he discovered has become convention; it is hard today to grasp how electric his voice was in 1934. The feminist critique of the sixties came in to bury Henry under rhetoric-just as simplistic in its way as the simplistic rhetoric of male supremacy. But the feminist critique, valid as it is, neglects to address the main question Henry Miller poses: how does a writer raise a voice? How does a writer take the chaos of life and transform it into art? The raising of a voice is the red threat through chaos. The raising of a voice is the essence of freedom. It is where every writer, every person, must begin.
Can a woman writer learn anything from Henry Miller’s voice? Doesn’t his sexism invalidate his work? Shouldn’t we boycott his work because of its underlying politics?
I don’t think so. Just as Shakespeare’s monarchism does not invalidate the beauty of his verse, Miller’s sexism does not annihilate his contribution to literature. Besides, if we proscribe all literature whose sexual politics we do not agree with, we shall have nothing left to read – not even the Bible, Homer, or the novels of Jane Austen (whose heroines are often happy to make conventional marriages).
In fact, the freedom that Henry Miller discovered in finding his voice can inspire women writers as well as men.
It is the voice of the outsider, the renegade, the underground prophet – and isn’t that, after all, what women still are?
The problem of finding a voice is essential for all writers. It may be more fraught with external difficulties for women writers, because no one agrees what the proper voice of woman is – unless it is to keep silent – but it is still basically the same process of self-discovery. To define the self in a world that is hostile to the very notion of your selfhood is still every woman writer’s challenge. It was Henry Miller’s challenge too – for different reasons. In tracing his self-liberation, we can, by analogy, trace our own.
I do not mean to minimize the differences between the male writer’s odyssey and the female writer’s. The pen, as so many feminist critics have shown, has been treated as analogous to the penis in our literary culture. This accounts for the trouble that feminists, myself included, have with Henry Miller. Henry liberates himself, becomes the vagabond, the clown, poet, but the open road he chooses has never really been open to women. Henry’s picaresque sexual odyssey was, for centuries, a male prerogative. Still, it is useful for writers of both sexes to trace the steps of his liberation. The freedom of Paris plust first-person bravado equals the voice twe have come to know as Herny Miller.
Listen:
'I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I AM. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.....I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing...'
Henry is retracing his steps as an artist here, telling us exactly what happened between his early, unsuccessful efforts at writing fiction, and Tropic of Cancer: he let go of literature. It reminds me of Colette’s advice to the young Georges Simenon: ‘Now go and take out the poetry.’
Good advice. A writer is born at the moment when his (her) true voice of authority merges at white heat with the subject he (she) was born to chronicle. Literature falls away and what remains is life – raw, pulsating life: ‘A gob of spit in the face of Art.’
For the truth is that every generation, every writer, must rediscover nature. Literary conventions tend to ossify over time, and what was once new becomes old. It takes a brave new voice to rediscover real life buried under decades of literary dust. In unburying himself, Henry unburied twentieth-century literature.
What was it about Paris in 1930 that enabled Henry Miller to find his voice? And what was it about New York that prevented it?
The New York Henry left when he settled in Paris in March 1930 was nowhere as fraught as the New York of today, but it still bore certain similarities to it. In New York it was dishonour to be an unknown writer; in Paris one could write ecrivain on one’s passport and hold one’s head high. In Paris it was assumed (it still is) that an author had to have time, leisure, talk, solitude, stimulation. In New York it was, and still is, assumed that unless you fill up your time with appointments, you are a bum. More than that (and more important, particularly for Henry) was the American attitude toward the vagabond artist – an attitude that unfortunately persists to our day. ‘In Europe,’ as his friend the photographer Brassai says in his book on Henry Miller, ‘poverty is only bad luck, a minor unhappiness; in the United States, it represents a moral fault, a dishonour that society cannot pardon.’
To be a poor artist in America is thus doubly unforgivable. To be an artist in America is to be a criminal (its criminality only pardoned by writing bestsellers or selling one’s paintings at outrageous prices to rich collectors and thus feeding the obsolete war machine with tax blood). But to be poor AND an artist: this is un-American.
Which of us has not felt this disapproval, this American rejection of the dreamer? ‘Poets have to dream,’ says Saul Bellow, ‘and dreaming in America is no cinch.’
In the last few years we have seen a dramatic replay of these attitudes in the debates over censorship and the National Endowment for the Arts. Our essential mistrust of dreamers leads us to cripple them with restrictions of all sorts. We seem not to understand that the basic riches of our country – wealth and emotional health – come from our creative spirit. Even with Japanese conglomerates buying our movie companies, even with statistics that prove our movies, music, television shows, and inventions are our biggest exports in real dollar terms, we still honour the money counters and money changers over the inventors and dreamers who give them something to count and change.
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This is a deep-seated American obsession, and one whose historical genesis we must explore in retracing Henry Miller’s steps. It comes, of course, out of puritanism’s assumption that the dream life and imagination are suspect. And it results in a love-hate relationship with sexuality – a violent alternation between fascination and disgust which I call sexomania/sexophobia. We must understand how Henry was buffeted by these powerful forces and how he fled to Europe to be reborn.
‘It was the scorn which ultimately Miller could not stand,’ says Brassai. ‘It was the scorn that he wanted to escape. Madness and suicide threatened him.’
‘Nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America,’ Miller writes in Tropic of Capricorn.
Miller’s life as a protagonist, as a mythic hero – or antihero – is intimately related to this struggle between Puritanism and the life of the dreamer. Henry made a religion of art (as did his disciples). In doing this he was following in the footsteps of Whitman, his model of the American writer.
There are at least two Millers in the books and articles that have been written about Henry. One is the real, historical Henry Miller, born in 1891 in New York, died in 1980 in Los Angeles – a character full of contradictions. The other is Miller the mythic hero or antihero, whose hegira is emblematic of the hegira of the American artist.
Constrained by Puritanism, provoked by a society in which dreaming is no cinch, Miller the anti hero creates a way for an American – or anyone – to be an artist, and in doing so makes a path for all of us. One is continually struck by the interplay between these two Millers, but my interest is principally in the Miller who leads the way for a creator – particularly a creator who comes from a culture where creativity itself is suspect. Since I long ago gave up the Ph.D programme for the life of a professional author, I approach Miller with a writer’s rather than a scholar’s point of view. Like many storytellers, Henry was an outrageous self-mythifier and critics have pointed out the disparities between ‘the truth’ of his life and the grandiosity of his fictions. He tells the same story differently on every occasion, they complain.
My point of view is necessarily different. In tracing the steps of another writer, I have empathy for the creative process itself and an understanding of its difficulties. I EXPECT a writer to ‘lie’ in order to get at a deeper truth. I take for granted that imaginative writing exaggerates and rearranges ‘facts’ in the name of a higher fiction. I also understand how hard it is to survive one’s own fame.
Henry’s writing is often misunderstood precisely because of the ways it parallels – yet deviates from – his own life. Since he uses the name ‘Henry Miller’ for his fictive protagonists, readers are thrown even more astray. This is a fate I know well because it has also been my own. Though I have called my heroines by different names, the parallels between my life and the mythic lives I lead in my novels have often had the effect of leading my self-appointed judges to attack me personally. Henry was one of the first to see this parallel between our fates, and as a result was enormously kind to me. Curiously enough, it fell in part to Henry to rescue my first novel from the obscurity that might otherwise have claimed it. And since I believe in the universal law by which circles get completed, I find it not at all odd that it falls in part to me to puzzle out the many contradictions of his posthumous reputation.
A large part of the problem Miller presents to the literary critic comes from his perception of the chaos of life and his passionate need to reflect that chaos in his books. Henry Miller is the poet of what Umberto Eco calls THE CHAOSMOS. When he writes, he is in touch with pure desire – the desire to be one with the primal flux of creation, the desire to be as creative as a god.
“I like desire. In desiring things no one is wounded, deranged nor exploited. Creation is pure desire. One possesses nothing, one creates and lets go. One is beyond what he (she) does. One is no longer a slave. It’s an affair between oneself and God. When one is truly rendered naked everything is done without effort. There is no recompense – the effort, the deed itself suffices. Deed is desire and desire deed. A complete circle.”
How to write a coherent book about such a primal force? It is not easy, as all Miller’s biographers attest. Clearly Henry Miller did not WANT to be the subject of a biography and he spread confusion even as he scattered clues. He knew he had told many tales that were not true and he was nervous that someone might catch him in his lies. A good example of Henry’s ambivalent relations to the truth is the way he hated his pal Brassai’s rather accurate portrayal of him in Grandeur Nature, a book not yet translated into English, perhaps because Henry despised it so. He felt he had adequately chronicled his own life in his books, and wherever there was some fictionalisation that did not correspond to the ‘facts’ (in which, anyway, he did not believe), he was more than happy to provide chronologies, interviews, conversations that elucidated the truth, HIS truth, for his rapt listeners. (Some of these ‘documents’ also contain plenty of fiction.) he was an artesian writer, so overflowing with stories and ideas that to this day he still defeats bibliographers and biographers. Whenever you think you have read all the essential Miller, another pamphlet, brochure, treasure trove of letters, watercolour or print turns up with more Henry, ever more Henry. He embodied in both his writing and his life the paradigm of the writer as the giver of gifts, the voyager into the underworld who comes back with a boon for humankind.
Ironically, Henry Miller is best known for his worst writing – the boastful graphic sexual scenes in the Tropics, Quiet Days in Clichy, and Sexus. These finally interest me less than the transcendentalism of The Colussus of Maroussi, his spiritual travel book about Greece. For me Maroussi is his central work and it stands squarely in the American transcendental tradition. It has a kind of perfection and purity that you can find in books like Walden. And yet, paradoxically, without the scandal surrounding the ‘sexual’ writings, Miller would perhaps not be known at all.
That Miller was a transcendentalist in the indigenous American tradition of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, and Whitman he himself apparently knew. He referred to Whitman as an ancestor and influence. (He also regarded Maroussi as his best book). He was a mystic in the way of Thomas Merton and Lao-tzu, seeing in ordinary life the way into the extraordinary. Like many liberators who seek first to liberate themselves, he saw in sex one path of self-liberation-a way out of the body through the body. In this, he is not so different from Whitman or from Colette.
He was always seeking ‘life more abundant’ as he says at the end of Colussus of Maroussi. Sex was one path toward abundance. Travel, another. Conversation, letter-writing, and painting were still others. He saw the world in terms of abundance rather than scarcity, and it often seems that this distinction is the most critical one of all where writers are concerned. Writers tend toward either free flow or toward agonised laconicism – Henry Miller being at one extreme and Samuel Beckett at the other.
Henry Miller was as great a conversationalist as he was a writer. He was the primeval author, in the primeval cave, telling stories to keep the tribe awake and alive, safe from the sabre-toothed tigers outside. Like any shaman, he worked in a variety of forms: voice, watercolour, the photographs he posed for, the documentaries he conspired in. In many ways, he anticipates Cindy Sherman, Art Spiegel-man, and other postmodernist artists, using his own photographic or painted persona to create his own oeuvre. In other ways he is like Picasso, inventing and reinventing his wives and his muses in many of the different characters that appear in his books. All of them are Woman or Muse, just as Henry himself, the autobiographical protagonist who bears his name, is Everyman. To speak of him as the real historical Henry Miller is a mistake, for had he not elevated his life above mere autobiography and made it emblematic nobody would be interested in it but himself and perhaps a few enemies, relatives, friends.
Because Henry Miller became his own protagonist, the appreciation of his work is further confused. Always, when a writer is transformed this way, it makes the assessment of the work more problematic, for some will inevitably see him as a villain and in reaction others will plump for him as hero. We have seen both these responses to Miller in recent years and it is doubtful that either view has been accurate.
This transformation is what all artists seek: to become like mythic heroes (heroines) – Prometheus, Achilles, Odysseus, Alcestis, Athena – so that we mortals can see our fates reflected in their journeys as we do in the journeys described in ancient myths.
But Henry is not a hero to all. Many see him as a villain. His fate has not been so different from de Sade’s: either canonized by cultists or burned at the stake by puritans, either hailed by hippies seeing a hip father figure or dismissed by literary Anglophiles who would prefer that American literature consisted only of Henry James.
Things are not so simple. Our apprehension of Miller, as of de Sade, implicates our entire apprehension of sexuality, our notions of sexual politics, as well as our notions of what constitutes literature. That is why he is such a pivotal and important figure.
‘Life is that which flows..’ said one of Miller’s Paris roommates, Michael Fraenkel, in an essay about the composition of The Tropic of Cancer. The paradox for every creative artist is that life flows and art must stand still. But it must stand still like the hummingbird, as Miller would say. It must move and yet have form, because without form it is not graspable; without form it cannot be art.
Miller’s art is always bursting the boundaries of form as we know it. It strains beyond the frame of the picture. This is partly its subject, and it also accounts for the difficulty a form-ridden commentator has with it.
Postmodernists have already discovered Miller as the artist of the future. But the artist who is ahead of his (her) time never has an easy job making a living IN his (her) time. Witness Vincent van Gogh. And Emily Dickinson. And Walt Whitman. Miller is an artist of similar protean and prophetic gifts. If he has to date received little literary consideration, it is because he cannot be formally categorized. But rather than seeing this as a fault – as many of his detractors do – I see it as his very subject matter. Henry’s ‘message’ was the message of all the Zen masters and mystics: that there is no stability, only flux. ‘The angel is my watermark!’ he writes in Black Spring.
Henry Miller’s recent biographers try, willy-nilly, to fit him into pre-existing patterns; and when they fail, they blame HIM. But Henry’s very message is that life is formless, and that creativity partakes of the divine chaos. He struggles with this paradox in every book.
Ironically, we live in an age when literary biography is more read than literature. Writers’ lives tend to have more commercial viability than their own books. In his most fertile time, Henry Miller could never have been published by a mainstream New York publisher, yet in his centennial year several vied to bring out books ABOUT him. I suspect that if Tropic of Cancer came upon us today, it would still have trouble finding a publisher despite our much vaunted (but essentially fake) ‘sexual revolution’. Yet Miller the protagonist continues to inspire books and films.
What is it that we find in the lives of writers – particularly nonconformist writers – that thrills us, makes us identify? The story of a person inventing himself (herself)? The story of a person finding personal freedom in an age of corporate and totalitarian conformity? Has the myth of the nonconformist writer hitting the open road become a substitute for the initiatory ritual Robert Bly and others claim our society lacks? Why else do so many novels and movies about writers strike a resonant chord in readers who are not writers?
Surely there is no more toilsome, self-flagellating profession than that of author. Ingrown toenails, Henry called us. Voltaire said, ‘The only reward to be expected for the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.’ But the average nonwriter seems to see in authorship a relaxing, hedonistic profession, affording ample time for travel, dalliance, and debauchery, an aristocratic profession carried out in dreamily scenic places, with lovely members of the opposite sex in attendance. The average nonwriter sees the writer as someone who has made ordinary life heroic.
Contrary to popular myth, authors lead ‘a sort of life’ (the phrase is Graham Greene’s), imprisoned behind a desk. Painful solitude is required for the cultivation of literature, and even a bad book requires that one be good at cutting oneself off from other human beings in order to write it. A writer’s most ecstatic hours occur alone, yet the myth of hedonism persists. And the fact is that many writers ruin themselves trying to live up to it. Or maybe it is true that in a world where busy-ness and business drown out every spiritual pursuit, the writer’s solitude is the most envied pleasure of all. ‘A sort of life’ it may be, but vastly preferable to the kind of empty busy-ness that characterises most people’s lives.
Miller was a happy man (for this he was and is also hated). He was generous and free of envy. Though he sometimes boasts of idleness in his books (as he boasts of lechery), he was in truth, never idle. He was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation-and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.
So we come to the paradox of biography – especially the biography of a writer who amply chronicled his own life in many forms. (Biography is one of the new terrors of death’, said Dr. John Arbuthnot, the poet Alexander Pope’s friend. And in 1891, in his The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the autobiography.’) Who can chart the events in a person’s life with accuracy and without distortion? No one. Not even the person himself (herself). That is why biographies must be rewritten for every age, for every new wrinkle in the zeitgeist. That is why biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
With a writer who has already mined his (her) own life in letters, in novels, in paintings, and in films, the biographical problem becomes even more vexing. Even the most seemingly autobiographical writer changes, heightens, and rearranges ‘fact’ to make his (her) fictions. It is naive to read his (her) stories literally, but it is equally unsatisfactory to read them as if they had no connection to his (her) life.
I hope I can make peace with all these paradoxes by writing about Henry Miller in the same spirit that he first wrote to me in 1974 – with complete candour and no hidden agenda. It will not be the last word on Henry Miller, but the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
ERICA JONG. 1993
The Devil at Large. Erica Jong on Henry Miller
