|
HENRY MILLER – STATELESS GURU
Alexis Lykiard
Prefatory Note
The following essay on Henry Miller dates from a 1962 non-fiction
book commissioned by Victor Gollancz,
The Shrinking Island.
Like several of the thirty or so publishers who turned down my
teenage novel The Summer
Ghosts between 1959 and
1962 – Gollancz praised the writing effusively, while also wanting
to stake some sort of claim on my future fiction. I was 22 and had
only just graduated, so by then even the meagre advance Gollancz
offered (£150, in two £75 instalments) for a book I’d never have
considered writing, proved a modest encouragement, if not
distraction, from work on a second novel.
Fortunately a newer publisher, Anthony Blond, was keen to publish
The Summer Ghosts and
other ‘controversial’ authors, among them Jean Genet. My first novel
with its ‘outspoken’ themes, breakdown and madness, sex, abortion
and suicide, was narrated sometimes in language previously deemed
unprintable. So Blond on legal advice dreamed up a sort of
subscribers’ club, The Minority Book Society, with a view to
challenging or bypassing the strict morality and censorship of the
mealy-mouthed late 1950s and pre-Chatterley Trial days. As it
happened, my novel still kept being cautiously delayed until well
after the D.H. Lawrence court-case, finally appearing only late in
1964 when, under Blond’s own relatively new imprint, it became an
immediate bestseller. Hence the context of the following youthful
piece with its emphasis on breaking down barriers of censorship and
hypocrisy.
A.L. (2021)
***
“There is only one great adventure and that is inward towards the
self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter” wrote
Miller in Tropic of
Capricorn. His work ought to be widely available in England
today [i.e. 1961]. We inhabit a shrinking island whose status as a
world power diminishes daily. With European frontiers and social and
moral barriers disintegrating around us, we must come to terms with
ourselves and each other. Miller has shown that the search for the
true self involves neither false aggrandisement, evasion, nor
further diminution of concern for one’s fellows, but is a quest that
engenders joy, spiritual increase and understanding. The message is
not new, it is not easy; it’s not accepted by the majority.
Steinbeck wins the Nobel Prize, but in California where Miller now
lives there was a recent court case over
Tropic of Cancer. And
another in Chicago. Meanwhile in Miller’s native Brooklyn, when he
failed to answer charges that
Tropic of Cancer (published in France, 1934) was obscene, a
warrant for the author’s arrest was issued. Such is America’s homage
to her greatest living author; in England, with only half a dozen of
his books permitted or in print, and scant critical attention, it
can’t be said that we lavish honours upon him either.
To me the impact of reading his extraordinary first book was
immediate: I felt Miller had liberated the novel in terms of style,
content and intention. I reread
Tropic of Cancer
recently: I’d forgotten how good it was. That frantic, defiant
humour even in the brutal, most basic struggle for survival; the
short sentences interspersed with long unravelling ones, gathering
momentum in a spate of physical imagery, sights and smells, and
especially that gnawing hunger and intensity which resolve
themselves in the lyrical ending with its mystical acceptance, its
sense of release. Miller in
The Books In My Life wrote of Jean Giono: “In their first
‘successful’ work some authors give such a full image of themselves
that no matter what they say later this image endures, dominates,
and often obliterates all succeeding ones.” This has happened to
Miller: the fixed attitude was Orwell’s, whose critical approval
lessened after Cancer,
and with Miller that proved particularly unfortunate, since his work
deserves and demands to be read in its totality. There are so many
different sides to the man, as a reading of
The Happy Rock, a book
about Miller by twenty-five contributors makes evident. And if we
accept Schopenhauer’s affirmation that “genius may be defined as an
eminently clear consciousness of things in general, and therefore,
also of that which is opposed to them, namely one’s own self”, then
Miller the autodidact is a genius of sorts.
How can one explain the strong reactions he arouses in people, the
continual controversy about his literary merit? This last phrase he
would detest: Miller more than any contemporary writer has tried to
do away with Literature as distinct from life (see
Black Spring: “What is
not in the open street is false derived, that is to say
literature”), and this may account for his enormous appeal to so
many different readers of every nationality, class, age and creed.
The liberation of the self that he urges can and should be achieved
by everyone, and the democratic gusto with which he describes his
spiritual odyssey communicates with humour the difficult reality of
life itself. Wordsworth declared that it was “a thing unprecedented
in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself”
and Miller has taken up and justified the statement in practice. “A
quoi bon me documenter/Je m’abandonne/Aux sursauts de ma mémoire”
wrote one of Miller’s favourite writers, Blaise Cendrars, and this
is Miller’s own method, wordy and discursive, gaining impetus
paragraph by paragraph. “By this contrivance the machinery of my
work is of a species by itself: two contrary motions are introduced
into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with
each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive
too, – and at the same time.” Not an explanation by Miller himself,
but by Laurence Sterne. Miller’s style, like Sterne’s, is
conversational, all-inclusive.
I don’t believe his writing is in any way obscene, because its
function is to include, to reveal a personality devoid of
moralising. As the Zen poem puts it:
“If you want to get the plain truth,
Thus sex in Miller’s books is harsh, comical, tender or frankly raw:
he is a less squeamish, truer and more natural writer on the subject
than the D.H. Lawrence he admires. Miller’s work, as the American
critic Karl Shapiro has written, is “no aphrodisiac at all because
religious or so-called moral tension does not exist for him. When
one of Miller’s characters lusts, he lusts out loud, and then
proceeds to the business at hand.” Simple acceptance. Acceptance and
celebration – two key words in Miller’s books. “Without shame the
man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,/Without
shame the woman I like knows and avows hers” wrote Whitman, and if
Miller is as Orwell described him, “a sort of Whitman among the
corpses”, he recognises the charnel-house of our human existence,
which most of us refuse, or don’t dare, to do. As Miller states in
The World Of Sex, the
‘metaphysical’ passages and the ‘sexual’ ones cannot be read
separately, for they are one and the same: the work is the man.
Some over-simplifying critics maintain that Miller glorifies
irresponsible ‘Bohemianism’, but Miller would certainly agree with
Lawrence’s hatred of money and soul-destroying routine jobs: “You’ve
got to smash money and this beastly
possessive spirit. I get more revolutionary every minute, but
for life’s sake. The dead
materialism of Marx socialism and Soviets seem to me no better than
what we’ve got. What we want is life and
trust; men trusting men
and making living a free thing, not a thing to be
earned. But if men
trusted men, we would soon have a new world and send this one to the
devil.” The nine-to-fiver, the bourgeois salesman, trapped within a
job he doesn’t believe in, doing it only for the money and security,
is a kind of schizophrenic. Life should not be built on a lie, and
in opposing all such compromises, Miller (who wrote a whole book
about Lawrence) preferred the ‘Bohemian’ alternative, because he
thus had, in his own words, “the privilege to starve”. Even when
most vulnerable, starving or begging, you are yourself, a whole
person, your own failure, if you like. Miller realises both extremes
are ugly, but also that the latter route is self-preservative,
self-respecting. Miller’s books then are unromantic holocausts of
love and hunger, pessimistic or optimistic as the mood takes him,
but always he emerges as the idealistic survivor. Listening to the
double album he made in conversation with Ben Grauer of Riverside
Records, one appreciates the fact that the present-tense immediacy,
the continuing vital sincerity of Miller’s books is all part of the
man. Miller has no
pretensions, yet he knows with Nietzsche that “one must pay dearly
for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive”,
and he is the chronicler of these deaths and spiritual rebirths.
“The goal” D.H. Lawrence wrote in a passage on childrens’ education,
“is not ideal. The aim is
not mental consciousness.
We want effectual human
beings, not conscious ones. The final aim is not to
know, but to
be. There never was a
more risky motto than that:
Know thyself. You’ve got to know yourself as far as possible.
But not just for the sake of knowing. You’ve got to know yourself so
that you can at least be
yourself. ‘Be yourself’ is the last motto.” And Miller wants to
restore us to that child’s vision of wonder that his paintings in
their colourful simplicity express – the naïf’s originality of that
tender fable The Smile At The
Foot Of The Ladder.
Miller himself has always possessed this vision: he is an amateur, a
primitive, and that’s his greatness. William Carlos Williams closes
his poem To The Dean:
“…I think we should
And Miller is indeed a good influence, refreshing as the food and
drink he has so enthusiastically celebrated – both as inspiration
and intoxicant. But Miller cautioned in a
Paris Review interview
that the author as author is nothing: “Does he know his own work as
well as he imagines? I rather think not. I rather think he’s like a
medium who, when he comes out of his trance, is amazed at what he’s
said and done.” The work appears because it
has to, it makes its own form, and as he says in
Art And Outrage: “What I
can never write enough about are the ‘influences’ – both men,
haphazard meetings, books, places. Places have affected me as much
or more than people, I think.”
Yet locations and chronology seem meaningless beside those of the
spirit. Miller is a proletarian rover and a kind of Dionysian
phoenix: “Saying Yes to
life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to live
rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice
of its highest types – that
is what I call Dionysian.
That is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the
tragic poet.
Not in order to be
liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a
dangerous affect by its vehement discharge – Aristotle understood it
that way – but in order to be
oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity
– that joy which excludes even joy in destroying.” (Nietzsche:
Twilight Of The Idols)
Miller understood that “… an
autobiography can only survive in ashes,/ persistence is
extinction’ (Montale: Piccolo
Testamento, tr. Robert Lowell), but he nonetheless proclaims the
compensations: every crucifixion is, in a sense Rosy, like the title
of his huge late trilogy.
Intermittently I can appreciate, as a fellow-Capricornian, the
obstinacy and deep despair of some of his writings. As a Greek I
consider The Colossus Of
Maroussi one of his masterworks. Miller holds that “the
Colossus was written from
some other level of my being. What I like about it is that it’s a
joyous book. It expresses joy, it gives joy.” True enough, for
although idealised, The
Colossus Of Maroussi has immense enthusiasm, verve; it’s the one
book that ever made me want to hasten back to Greece. And as a
writer trying to find his own voice I value Miller’s achievement –
not because I think it can or should be imitated, but because his
writing should be read and accepted as the bold, massive experiment,
the uneven, various and above all
enjoyable body of work it
is.
I’ve neither the space nor the freedom to quote from Miller’s work
as I should like, and this short piece can’t contain a tenth of what
I’d like to write about him: Miller’s a generous, energising,
democratic spirit, and the free circulation of his books in England
should begin at once. His readers await him here and he has much to
tell them.
|
