NOTESBY WAY OF A PREFACE
1. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).
2. Henry Miller, “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere,” in The Cosmological Eye (New York: New Directions, 1939).
3. “Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.” Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871, in Rimbaud, Poésies, Une saison en enfer, Illuminations, ed. Louis Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
4. Jeannette Winterson, “The Male Mystique of Henry Miller,” New York Times, January 26, 2012.
5. In this Miller reminds us of Frank Harris and other sexual “adventurers” of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, of whom more later. Because the “sex” being discussed in these works is mostly a matter of conquest, the exercise of power and revenge against a puritanical society, it is hardly surprising that love plays no part in these tales. Henry Miller, interview by Terry Gifford, “Dirty Old Henry Miller at 86,” Chicago Tribune, February 1978.
6. Tokuda quoted in R. J. Hudson, “Letters by Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller,” September 27, 2006, LiveJournal, https://community.livejournal.com/-henrymiller/3939.html.
7. Letter from Miller to Tokuda, 1966, quoted in ibid.
8. This culture, referred to universally by sexual adventurers and bohemians as “puritan,” not only deprived women of self-expression and sexual freedom but, by the same token, forced sexually active men into a kind of trickster role, intent on “stealing” from the puritan world the freedoms that might otherwise have been a matter of negotiation and mutual agreement.
9. Thus, in a real sense, we can see that Hoki, as a person, is irrelevant to the mono no aware process. She could be anyone.
10. Walter Raleigh, “The Silent Lover,” in The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. John Hannah (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892).
11. Marianne Moore, “Poetry,” in New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Heather Cass White (London: Faber, 2017).
12. “Surely everyone realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen.” Henry Miller, On Turning Eighty, Capra Chapbook series, no. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1972).
13. Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins (New York: New Directions, 1962), 5.
14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject” (1792), trans. Craig Holdrege, The Nature Institute, http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic24/ic24_goethe.pdf.
15. Hart Crane, “Chaplinesque,” in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright, 1966).
IN PRAISE OF FLIGHT
1. Henri Laborit, Éloge de la fuite (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1976).
2. André Gide, Les faux-monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1925).
3. Henry Miller, interview by People magazine, August 21, 1978.
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2015).
5. Terence, Heauton Timorumenos, ed. John Carew Rolfe (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010).
6. For example, Éloge de la fuite, an extraordinary work, remains untranslated, for the moment, though non-Francophone readers interested in knowing more about Laborit’s philosophy should see Alain Resnais’s 1980 film, Mon oncle d’Amérique (My American uncle) for a typically unconventional exploration of his ideas. His two works that have been translated are Stress and Cellular Function (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959); and Decoding the Human Message (London: Allison and Busby, 1977).
7. Largactil was marketed as Thorazine in the United States. It should not be forgotten, however, that chlorpromazine-like drugs have more recently been subject to significant abuses, especially in the off-label treatment of children and the elderly and as constituents of the so-called pharmacological lobotomy used to keep mental health patients docile.
8. Éloge de la fuite, Avant-propos (the rough translation of this passage, cited in French on the first page of this chapter, is my own).
9. Jonathan Meades describes this fundamental stage, somewhat differently, as “seeking shelter, food, sex and narcosis.” Jonathan Meades, Museums without Walls (London: Unbound, 2013).
10. Laborit, Éloge de la fuite.
11. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, new ed. (London: Harper Perennial, 2005).
12. George Dibbern, Quest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1941).
13. Letter from Miller to Dibbern, April 17, 1945, quoted in Erika Grundmann, Dark Sun: Te Rapunga and the Quest of George Dibbern (Northland, NZ: David Ling Publishing, 2004), http://georgedibbern.com/DarkSun/DS-Chapter.html.
14. All information on Dibbern comes from George Dibbern’s Quest and Life (http://www.georgedibbern.com/aboutdibbern.html), a website dedicated to Dibbern’s life and work, maintained by Erika Grundmann, author of the Dibbern biography Dark Sun.
15. Dibbern, Quest.
16. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, new ed. (London: Harper Perennial, 2005).
17. Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2012).
18. The review of Quest, by George Dibbern, is collected in Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (New York: New Directions, 1962).
LIKE A FLUID (THE FALSE PORNOGRAPHER)
1. Henri Laborit, Éloge de la fuite (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1976). “To love another is to accept that he or she is free to think, feel, and act in a way that does not conform to my wishes, or to my own gratification, to accept that he or she lives in accordance with his or her system of personal gratification and not in accordance with mine” (my translation).
2. See André Dubus, Voices from the Moon (Boston: David R Godine, 1984).
3. According to Harris, “There are two main traditions of English writing: the one of perfect liberty, that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, completely outspoken, with a certain liking for lascivious details and witty smut, a man’s speech: the other emasculated more and more by puritanism and since the French Revolution, gelded to tamest propriety; for that upheaval brought the illiterate middle-class to power and insured the domination of girl-readers. Under Victoria, English prose literature became half childish, as in stories of ‘Little Mary’ or at best provincial, as anyone may see who cares to compare the influence of Dickens, Thackeray and Reade in the world with the influence of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola.” Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (New York: Grove Press, 1963). So it is that men like Harris even dictate, not only the kind of stories that may be told, but the tone and style of the telling.
4. Anon., The Way of a Man with a Maid (1908), in The Wordsworth Book of Classic Erotica (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2007).
5. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), chap. 1.
6. Frank Harris, My Life and Loves: Five Volumes in One/Complete and Unexpurgated (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
7. Miller learned this as much from D. H. Lawrence as from Harris and the other Georgian pornographers.
8. “While there may still be plenty of ads promoting a ‘Quick and Easy Divorce for $299,’ that price is usually for couples who have already agreed on the terms of their divorce and just need a lawyer to sign off. Bruce Cameron of Cameron Law PLLC in Rochester, Minn. says the generally accepted figure is anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000. ‘Basically it costs as much to get unmarried as it does to get married,’ says Cameron.” Laura Seldon, “How Much Does the Average Divorce Really Cost?,” Huffington Post, May 30, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/galtime/how-much-does-the-average_b_3360433.html.
9. Centers for Disease Control / National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm.
10. Meredith Dank et al., Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major US Cities, Urban Institute, March 12, 2014, http://www.urban.org/research/publication/estimating-size-and-structure-underground-commercial-sex-economy-eight-major-us-cities.
11. Henry Miller, interview by People magazine, August 21, 1978.
12. Henry Miller, Sexus (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2015).
13. Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins (New York: New Directions, 1962), 12.
14. Henry Miller, Sextet (New York: New Directions, 2010).
ON LOVE AND PROPERTY
1. John Stoltenberg, Refusing to Be a Man (Portland, OR: Breitenbush Books, 1989).
2. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2015).
3. Jack Achiezer Guggenheim, “The Evolution of Chutzpah as a Legal Term,” Kentucky Law Journal 87, no. 2 (1998–99).
4. Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2014).
5. Theodore Roosevelt, “Manhood and Statehood,” address at the celebration of statehood, Colorado Springs, CO, August 2, 1901, Almanac of Theodore Roosevelt, http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeches/670.pdf.
HENRY MILLER AS ANARCHIST
1. “The same bourgeois magic / wherever the mail-train drops us off. / The most elementary physicist feels that it is no longer possible / to submit to this personal atmosphere, this fog of physical remorse, / and that even to notice it is already an affliction” (my translation).
2. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002).
4. Henry Miller, “Peace! It’s Wonderful!,” in The Cosmological Eye (New York: New Directions, 1939), 7.
5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique (1844), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/index.htm.
6. Benedict de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The “Ethics” and Other Works, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1994).
7. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (London: Penguin Classics, 2013).
8. Tao Te Ching, trans. Derek Lin, Taoism.net, http://www.Taoism.net; and Tao Te Ching: Annotated and Explained (Nashville, TN: SkyLight Paths, 2006). N.B. Variant spellings.
9. Henry Miller, “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere,” in The Cosmological Eye (New York: New Directions, 1939), 156.
10. Ibid.
11. Wallace Fowlie, Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie, 1943–1972 (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
12. Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998).
13. Henry Miller, Sexus (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2015).
LIKE A FLUID (THE GREAT ROMANTIC)
1. Henry Miller, On Writing (New York: New Directions, 1964), 123.
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2006); my rough translation.
3. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (London: Penguin Classics, 2016), 89.
THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE
1. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (London: Penguin Classics 2016), 47.
2. Ibid., 199.
3. Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945; London, Heinemann, 1962), 11.
4. Harry S. Truman, “Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” 1946, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/tap/11446.htm.
5. Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 8.
6. Ibid., 138.
7. Ibid., 139.
8. Rodney Jones, “The Assault on the Fields,” in Elegy for the Southern Drawl (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
9. Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage Books, 1957).
10. William Cobbett, “Rural Ride from Chilworth in Surrey, to Winchester,” in Rural Rides (London: Penguin Classics, 2001).
11. Text available at Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1882/hopes/chapters/chapter1.htm.
12. Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 208.
13. The four quotations, in the order presented, are from (1) Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 40th anniv. ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 99; (2) Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 155; (3) Ibid., 13; (4) Carson, Silent Spring, 13.
14. Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 15.
15. Ibid., 83.
16. Henry Miller, The Paintings of Henry Miller: Paint as You Like and Die Happy, ed. Noel Young (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1962).
THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS
1. “Life’s own colours deepen, dance, / and become clear again around the Vision under construction” (my translation).
2. “Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.” Charles Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter and Other Essays, Journals, and Letters (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991).
3. Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins (New York: New Directions, 1962), 29.
4. Carl Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Alchemical Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1968).
5. Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins, 48, 49.
6. Ibid.
7. “Geh hinein in dich und baue an deinen Schweren. Dein Schweres soll sein wie ein Haus in dir, wenn du selbst wie ein Land bist, das sich mit den Gezeiten verändert. Gedenke, daß du kein Stern bist: du hast keine Bahn” (Go deep inside yourself and build what’s hard. It should be like a house within you, if you yourself are like a land that changes with the tides. Remember, you are not a star, you have no course to follow). R. M. Rilke, “Eine Morgenandacht,” quoted in Rilke: The Inner Sky, trans. Damion Searls (Boston: David R Godine, 2010).
THE CREATURE WORLD
1. “When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, reissue ed. (London: Penguin Classics, 1995).
2. Nobelprize.org, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates.
3. Durell to Miller, October 16, 1978, quoted at Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog, http://cosmotc.blogspot.com/2006/10/millers-campaign-for-nobel-prize.html.
4. “We may see each other again when I receive the Nobel Prize (what a joke!).” Letter to Brassaï, December 1958, in Brassaï, Henry Miller, Happy Rock, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
5. “The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers. That is why it is rare for the winners of highly coveted and publicized prizes to settle for their titles and retire. Winners, especially celebrated winners, must prove repeatedly they are winners. The script must be played over and over again. Titles must be defended by new contests. No one is ever wealthy enough, honored enough, applauded enough. On the contrary, the visibility of our victories only tightens the grip of the failures in our invisible past.” James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: Free Press, 1986).
6. Henry Miller, On Turning Eighty, Capra Chapbook series, no. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1972).
7. “Oh! nos os sont revêtus d’un nouveau corps amoureux.” (Oh! our bones are clothed in an amorous new body.) Arthur Rimbaud, Poésies, Une saison en enfer, Illuminations, ed. Louis Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
8. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games.
9. Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2012).
10. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (London: Penguin Classics, 2016), 66.
11. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, new ed. (London: Harper Perennial, 2005).
12. Robinson Jeffers, The Collected Poems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
13. Presumably a reference to Rabbi Ben-Ezra, or Abraham ibn Ezra, the twelfth-century poet, scholar, and mathematician, referred to by Fitzgerald in The Rubaiyat.
14. Don DeLillo, Zero K (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 131.
15. Ferlinghetti, online interview by V. Vale, in Real Conversations, 2015, http://www.researchpubs.com/products-page-2/real-conversations-1-excerpt-lawrence-ferlinghetti.
16. DeLillo’s Ben-Ezra speaks of “hundreds of millions of people into the future billions who are struggling to find something to eat not once or twice a day but all day every day. He spoke in detail about food systems, weather systems, the loss of forests, the spread of drought, the massive die-offs of birds and ocean life, the levels of carbon dioxide, the lack of drinking water, the waves of virus . . .”
17. DeLillo, Zero K, 134–35.
18. Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, 68.
19. Ibid., 35.
20. Henry Miller, The Books in My Life (London: Village Press, 1974).
21. Henry Miller, Mother, China, and the World Beyond (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1977).