BY WAY OF A PREFACEI was stuck. The book was almost finished, and I was trying to make a decent fist of liking it (though only to myself, for I had yet to summon up the chutzpah to show it to anyone else), but I was failing miserably. From beginning to end (though with a great big hole where the sex should be), the book I had privately titled Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist was a perfectly honorable, if rather lopsided, homage to the work I most loved by a writer I mostly admired, but the whole thing was dull as ditch water. At the same time, apart from a grudging admission that Kate Millett’s critique of Sexus in her groundbreaking study of misogyny in literature,1 was more or less fair, most of my “appreciation” of Miller was based, like a house built on sand, on a plucky attempt to pretend that a handful of cringe-worthy passages (though by no means all) about sex were no longer relevant and could be passed over quickly. Or rather, that they were somewhat relevant, but they had already been given enough attention, to the detriment of other, more interesting and, even (in my view), more rewarding books.
Most of all, the book I was almost but not quite finishing was as unlike anything Henry Miller might have written as it was possible to be. There was no fever, no itch, no drunkenness—and what I had wanted from the moment I put pen to paper was to write a book, not about Miller, but after Miller (early on, I had guessed that this project was as much about me as it was about him and, taking his cue, I didn’t want the book I was writing to be an analysis of his works, but a crazy and exhilarating account of how reading Miller had changed me). I wanted a Miller-like book. An anarchic book with its own, emergent order. A book full of digressions and passages that were genuinely surreal (as opposed to the contrived surrealism of the Surrealists, whom Miller took so wittily to task for their programmatic approach in his essay, “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere.”2 A book that somehow got to the heart of Miller’s single greatest achievement, which was to move from Rimbaud’s first critical stage in the remaking of the governed self as artist (“I say that one must be a seer, one must make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses”)3 to the next step in the process, the step (all too often ignored by bohemians) in which, if the artist is disciplined enough, a new order, a new serenity, a new drunkenness, and a new detachment emerge from the chaos. Miller—who had read his Thoreau—knew that dérèglement in any form was only the first step in becoming a complete artist and, unlike most of the Beats and almost all of the Surrealists, he understood the need to add anarchist discipline (a notion that I will come to later) to the visionary imagination.
Instead, what I had written was a kind of hearty apologia for a man whose almost childlike delight in the vagaries, not of sex itself, but of how we pretend not to see and accept ourselves as sexual creatures had led to unjust persecution and censorship, followed by a seemingly justifiable decline (and if Miller had only written, say, The Rosy Crucifixion, that decline in interest would not have seemed quite so unfair). Looking back to the beginning of the project, I now had to wonder at the self-deception I had somehow mobilized when I decided that I wouldn’t write about the sex books at all (not even The Tropics) but concentrate entirely on the work in which Miller’s wisdom, humor, and elastic prose not only echo but elaborate upon the master philosophers of anarchism’s long, if misunderstood, history: The work informed by Daoist thought and a spirit of serious, though never solemn, play. The work that revealed the true extent of the Air-Conditioned Nightmare (first in America and now pretty much everywhere). The work whose only controversial aspect was its being underappreciated for so long, while the notorious “sex stuff” got all the attention.
Clearly, I could never have pulled this off. No matter how insightful and daring this other Miller might be, there was always the “woman-hater” to contend with—and to try to evade this issue, even in a fairly short book—was, quite simply, cowardice. As Jeanette Winterson remarks, in a New York Times review of Frederick Turner’s Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer”: “There is beauty as well as hatred in Cancer, and it deserves its place on the shelf. Yet the central question it poses was stupidly buried under censorship in the 1930s, and gleefully swept aside in the permissiveness of the 1960s. Kate Millett asked the question in the 1970s, but the effort to ignore it is prodigious. A new round of mythmaking is ignoring it once more. The question is not art versus pornography or sexuality versus censorship or any question about achievement. The question is: Why do men revel in the degradation of women?”4 I agreed with this observation wholeheartedly, yet here I was trying to pull off the same old trick, and skip past the most challenging aspect of Miller’s work—and that, inevitably, led to the question: Just whose sins was I trying to ignore? Or rather, why had I chosen to write about Miller in the first place, when I knew that, like so many of my other literary or philosophical “heroes,” he had never apologized for his misogyny but (as Heidegger did, when confronted with his Nazi history after the war) simply brushed the whole issue aside. Typically, while Heidegger and others chose silence, Miller elected to make light of his errors, shrugging off his misogynistic past, or claiming that, in many countries, he wasn’t seen as sexist at all.
For example, in a newspaper interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1978, Miller had this to say about a critic who had, rather astutely, pointed out that the one thing he couldn’t write about was “sex with love”: “Yeah, it seems to be true. I was telling my ‘adventures,’ you might say. It wasn’t the place, therefore, to dwell on love. The sex wasn’t too pretty, either. But I played up the scoundrel in myself, don’t you know, because he was more interesting than the angel” (my italics).5 The interviewer goes on to add that Miller
doesn’t seem too concerned with predictable attacks from Kate Millett and other feminists. “This women’s liberation movement is based on an antagonism toward men. In other countries I’m not called a monster. And if you read me thoroughly—the 50 books—you’ll know they’re not all about sex and that includes the latest, Sextet. Now, they may say, “Well, he’s getting old.” And there’s some truth in that. I don’t think about sex all the time. I’m not a monomaniac. But I do think it’s a very important part of life, and that it’s been mishandled and misunderstood in this country.”
And the article continues:
In his books, sex has been handled and understood quite well, thank you, by his protagonists, who take it often and anywhere—in the back of buses, under trees, in phone booths. The obvious question is, how much is reporting and how much is fantasy?
He grins. “My books are all autobiography. I can’t write about other things. Is it vanity? Maybe, but I don’t think so. It’s just that I think my life was so interesting, why should I go to outside material? Anyway, I would take off—exaggerate—many times. That’s what a writer is. . . . He loves words, the language, and he loves to embroider. So I never feel guilty about any inaccuracies. They were done with a good heart. It’s true that many people have envied my sexual activities.
(Laughter.) Sometimes I think I envy them myself.”
This interview, along with many similarly lighthearted pieces in popular magazines and newspapers, is as far as Miller was prepared to go to justify his sex writings—and, as a response to Jeanette Winterson’s question, it falls very far short of saying enough. However, there are three points that should be gleaned from these later interviews, if we are to understand what I believe Miller was really up to in the “sex stuff.” First, he happily agrees that he cannot, and does not even try to write about “sex with love.” However, he writes often, and sometimes in ways that make the reader very uncomfortable, about love of a certain kind—and this is key. Miller is, in many ways, a romantic (and we do see this side of him more often than he is credited for, see below); it is just that his subject, in The Tropics, The Rosy Crucifixion, and such works, is not romantic love so much as its inevitable corruption in a property-based society that transforms everything, including sex, into fetishized “product.”
Miller’s principal concern, in fact, is with what Leonard Cohen calls “the war between the man and the woman”—and this war has nothing to do with individuals. (Nor is it what we are wont to call “the battle of the sexes.”) It is a result of the enclosure of sexuality by a property-based system (echoing earlier enclosures of land and the means of production) by way of the institution of marriage, on the one hand, and of the artificial standards of “manliness” imposed upon boys—especially on boys growing up in the Teddy Roosevelt years, as Miller did—on the other. In fact, when he does write frankly about sex, it is not what happens between the man and the woman that is important, but how that changes, or heightens, or damages the dynamic between male characters. And, as so often happened in his own day-to-day life, especially during the New York years, when he turned a blind eye to June’s long chain of “patrons,” that dynamic has more to do with money and power than with sexuality. In short, Miller is not writing about sexual love (or any kind of love at all). He is talking about marriage or marriagelike contracts—contracts in which, on a personal level, he appears to have suffered deeply, even while continuing to enter into them. (He was, in fact, married five times, his last wife being a young Japanese singer named Hoki Tokuda, who later said in an interview: “If Henry had been my grandfather, it would have been perfect. He was funny. I laughed all the time, and he liked my sense of humor.”6 She was twenty-nine; he was seventy-six; later, she claimed that throughout the eleven years of their marriage she and Miller never once made love). It is a wonderful irony that, in his old age years, the supposed “cocksman” of legend could write, with apparent sincerity, in a letter to Hoki:
If I gave you a sleepless night, and myself as well, it was because it was one of the very rare times in my life that I had to sleep beside a woman without touching her. When dawn came I was at least able to gaze at your countenance. What a world to study, to explore, in your night face! An entirely different face than Hoki wears in her waking moments. The face of a stranger, carved out of lava, like some oceanic goddess. More mysterious with eyes closed and features sculpted out of ancestral memories. An almost barbaric look, as if you had been resurrected from some ancient city—like Ankor Wat—or the submerged ruins of Atlantis. You were ageless, lost not in sleep but in the myth of time. I shall always remember this face of sleep long after I get to know the hundred and one faces you present the world. It will be the dream face which you yourself have never seen and which I will guard as the sacred link between the ever-changing Hoki and the ever-searching Henry-San. This is my treasure and my solace.7
Historically, we have been taught to be repelled—a little too sanctimoniously, perhaps—by Henry Miller, pornographer and woman hater. He is the one who is supposed to disturb us. Yet when we look at his history (the brutal, joyless mother, constantly undermining both the sad, feckless husband and the unhappy son, the ugly machismo of the Roosevelt years, when “manliness” was all, the puritanical denial of pleasurable sex in the culture he was born into) there is so much material that can be brought to bear, if not to excuse, then at least to understand Miller’s apparent misogyny.8 However, what is more disturbing about Miller is the near-pathological romanticism revealed in this letter—a romanticism so profound that he even wants to know “the dream face which you yourself have never seen.” This is the Miller who haunts me, the Miller who even frightens me a little. Silent, by the side of a sleeping woman who is not his lover, but his Beloved, in a scene reminiscent of Yasunari Kawabata’s great novel of the “beauty-in-sadness” tradition, The House of the Sleeping Beauties, this romantic voyeur wants to know the woman even better than she knows herself—and yet, at the same time, he wants her face to remain “the face of a stranger,” a face that is “ever-changing” in response to his “ever-searching,” a face that will become more and more mysterious, the longer and more closely it is scrutinized.9 In short, what Miller wants, like every good romantic, is the impossible. Like the Walter Raleigh of “The Silent Lover,” he wants to gaze, silently, asking for nothing because nothing could ever be enough:
I rather choose to want relief
Than venture the revealing;
Where glory recommends the grief,
Despair distrusts the healing.
Thus those desires that aim too high
For any mortal lover,
When reason cannot make them die,
Discretion doth them cover.
Yet, when discretion doth bereave
The plaints that they should utter,
Then thy discretion may perceive
That silence is a suitor.
Silence in love bewrays more woe
Than words, though ne’er so witty:
A beggar that is dumb, you know,
May challenge double pity.
Then wrong not, dearest to my heart,
My true, though secret, passion:
He smarteth most that hides his smart,
And sues for no compassion.10
When I received the invitation to contribute to the Writers on Writers series, I was delighted to have an opportunity to say something about the poetry of Marianne Moore, whose work was the single main catalyst in my desire, at fifteen or so, to write poetry of my own. At that time, I took some pride in the fact that I didn’t want to become a poet (perhaps because of my own received working-class standards of manliness, in which miners and steel-millers were king, while poets were effete scribblers in floppy hats and purple corduroy). I simply wanted to write a few decent poems and publish them, possibly under a pseudonym, in a well-regarded literary magazine. This was just one activity among many that I would have liked to pursue; others included learning The Goldberg Variations from beginning to end, keeping goal for the Montreal Canadiens, and finding a hitherto unknown bird species. Needless to say, I am still working on these.
It came as a surprise then that, asked which writer I had chosen, I blurted out the name: Henry Miller. That was unexpected—and yet, at the same time, it was entirely predictable. I had been thinking for some time about what it means, not to write the odd poem or two, but to work as a writer, trapped in a seemingly unending struggle to render unto Caesar just enough to buy an hour or two each day to sit in a narrow room and confess, to a sheet of cold white paper, the inner workings of a botched heart. Growing up, I had not intended to take up writing as a métier. In fact—as my father frequently told me, whenever I expressed an interest in anything other than manual labor or the armed forces—I knew all too well that “people like us” did not presume to “go into” the arts, where only one in a million “made it,” and that one in a million came from an entirely different background from the gray, uninspiring streets of the impoverished coal and steel towns where I was attempting, despite my father’s derision, to grow up as a different kind of man from the specimen he wanted me to be (tough, hard, ready for anything, devoid of trust). I didn’t even try to explain to my father that I had no illusions about “making it”; I just wanted to learn piano well enough to work as an accompanist, say, or a music teacher. Even this modest ambition struck him as unrealistic, however, and in his world, to be unrealistic was not manly.
Manly. It is a word that, for a long time, was seared into my brain, just as it was for Miller, whose own father, a feckless tailor with a fondness for alcohol, was constantly being derided and humiliated for his unmanliness by the woman he had married. It is clear, now, that fear of unmanliness was what drove Miller to write some of the work for which he has been most criticized (and to conceal the romantic in his soul that kept him up at night, gazing at the face of a woman young enough to be his granddaughter). His great victory, however, a victory that resulted in his finest work, was to overcome that fear, and to reject the idea of manliness that had been ingrained in his psyche almost from birth. What I admire in Miller is that victory, and I continue to find his self-transformation—nothing less, in my view, than a supreme work of alchemical transmutation—both wonderfully surprising and inspiring. In fact, it is what Henry Miller made of himself, through the act of writing, that fascinates me—and when the question arises, as it must, as to what writing is for, other than entertainment, it is his exemplary transmutation that provides the basis for at least a partial justification of writing as métier. Any writer must be careful, of course, for as Miller often remarked, the social world insists on not giving writers their due, and that, sometimes deliberate, neglect can lead us to overvalue, and even aggrandize, the work (or the self) by way of compensation. Yet, as Marianne Moore notes, speaking of poetry,
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are
important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect
contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.11
The genuine was exactly what Henry Miller was after, and, in its pursuit, he excoriated every instance of duplicity and fraudulence he encountered. Before The Beats arrived, before the 1960s generation set about questioning every aspect of The System, Miller was there, mocking the Emperor’s new clothes and denouncing the lies and half-truths told in high places. Yet he was more than a latter-day Jeremiah, because he stayed true to his real quest—a quest born out of unmanly romanticism and an anarchist’s reverence for the natural order. It took him a long time to complete that quest—in fact, it took him a long time to begin—but when he got there, in books like The Colossus of Maroussi, say, or The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, he became more than a writer. He became a sage, in the Daoist sense of the word: not good, not venerable, not saintly, but wise to the world and to himself.
This book is not intended as a literary study of Henry Miller’s work. I have made no attempt to be objective, restrained, or particularly analytical. If anything, I have tried to emulate the Miller I most value—a writer given to digression, non sequitur, rhapsody, occasional surrealism, and, most of all, shameless polemic. I have also allowed myself, in this rewriting, to do as Henry did—to make it all about me. What I mean by that could be encapsulated in the words: “this is personal,” by which I mean personal in a way that is societally inappropriate, like telling the ambassador’s wife what you dreamed last night (but then, what could I do? I have no gift for small talk, and the lady—a Swedish woman—seemed so human. And to be fair, it really was an interesting dream). There may be elements of lit-crit in this book, but I am sure that no one will be deceived by that: I go back to Miller when I need his advice, his example, and his insouciance; and now, at a particular juncture of my own life, I am writing about him out of need. What I want to know, both as reader and writer, is whether books—or even individual sentences—can help us live more rewarding lives.12
In short, I have allowed myself the freedom to adopt a method that my subject himself often employs, which is to talk about another writer or artist mostly as a means to reassess and think about his own condition from a new and unexpected angle—which, at certain times in our lives, we all do. Why shouldn’t we? Do we only go to literature for entertainment, or do we sometimes open a book with the hopes of finding something, however abstract, that might help with some quotidian transition, or ordinary grief? “Rimbaud restored literature to life,” Miller says. “I have endeavored to restore life to literature.”13
This book is also personal in its response to an active (as opposed to theoretical) philosophy that has given me a sense of order throughout my life, just as it seems to have done for Miller. That philosophy is primarily based on an acceptance of the natural order, as it is observed in process. In choosing to write about Miller, I knew immediately that I would want the piece to reflect what I have learned from his writing (and his readings of texts as various as the Dao De Jing and Rabelais); I also wanted to relate his thinking directly to my own life, both as a writer and as an embattled specimen of humankind living in an age when the Air-Conditioned Nightmare went global. This personal approach may be considered suspect by some (a case of smoke and mirrors on the part of one who is not, and does not pretend to be, a Miller scholar), but this choice was inevitable when I came to write about a man who, as contrary and sometimes reprehensible as he was, remains, to my mind, a variety of spiritual alchemist.
At the same time, I would argue that nothing has misdirected us more, in all our seeking after knowledge, than a mistaken concept of “objectivity,” adopted sometime in the mid-twentieth century by the Humanities from Mainstream (i.e., “hard,” possibly even “manly”) Science, presumably in the hope of attracting more equitable levels of research funding. I also feel that, in an age of environmental crisis, writing that does not work upon us—mind and soul and imagination alike—either by reinforcing the better angels of our nature or demanding that we change our harmful ways, right away, is not much more than another form of entertainment, like a sit-com, or a game show. As we have seen from the clumsy attempts of governments around the world to address climate change (mostly by giving big businesses and landowners astonishing subsidies for the least effective “solutions”), what is needed (and Miller would be the first to say so, quite unequivocally) is radical—alchemical—change in every aspect of our day-to-day lives. This change begins in a systematic unpacking of our conditioning to reveal the raw, contradictory, but ungoverned self encased in each societally engineered carapace and, with it, an inherent sense of order that transcends the industrialized culture that we now endure. There is no guarantee that a society of ungoverned individuals could, at this late stage, solve the major environmental problems we face, but we would, at least, be ready to live as truly human beings in what might well become an increasingly creaturely world. As with other artists, writers make something, and, if that something is to have any external moral value, we have to rely on the elegance, honesty, or even (unfashionable term) beauty of the process of making that is revealed in the finished product (essay, poem, novel, inspired scrawl of graffiti).
At the same time, the morally directed writer can insist on specific values that have an overall impact, in possibly minor but incremental ways. Like Henry Miller, we can demand that language be used to its fullest, and not in the reductive and/or euphemistic ways that the powers-that-be prefer; like Miller, we can demonstrate that a good description of anything has a value in itself; like Miller, we can insist on long, sometimes complex sentences, with their due proportion of sub-clauses and qualifiers, when the narrative situation requires them. We can apply these gifts to appreciation, as well as to critique; we can sing our connection to all other living things, and we can remember that our responsibilities to the world around us overlap precisely with our enjoyment of that world. As Goethe says, in an essay on scientific method, “As soon as we consider a phenomenon in itself and in relation to others, neither desiring nor disliking it, we will in quiet attentiveness be able to form a clear concept of it, its parts, and its relations. The more we expand our considerations and the more we relate phenomena to one another, the more we exercise the gift of observation that lies within us. If we know how to relate this knowledge to ourselves in our actions, we earn the right to be called intelligent” (my italics).14
The right to be called intelligent is not easily won, nor should it be. It is, however, the only worthwhile goal in a society that has been transformed, by the psychotic pursuit of wealth, into a mechanistic nightmare.
In the end, I had to write this book in order to find out why I wanted to write this book. Then, of course, I had to throw it all away and start again. No doubt the old satyr, the “sex maverick,” in one of his several guises will appear in these pages. Certainly, the unhappy son, and the man almost crippled with shame and grief for his father’s lifelong humiliation will take a bow. The pathetic yet strangely dignified old man who wrote extraordinary love letters to women a third his age, in some cases, letters that weren’t even read—well, he cannot be avoided, no matter how unrepresentative he seems. However, if I can catch a glimpse of the merest shadow of the man who transformed himself, alchemically, into a true voyant, cleansed of the worst of his conditioning and allied to the natural principles we find best expressed in Daoist-anarchist thought, I will be contented. But the most interesting aspect of Miller, for me, is that he allows us to pose an old question—Are people innately destructive of what is good, or is their destructive behavior the fault of a “system”?—in a new light. He also reminds us that Rimbaud’s great experiment—dérèglement de tous les sens—is only the first part of a process—that, after the dérèglement has allowed us to strip away at least some of the conditioning that our sometimes kindly elders imposed upon us as we grew, thinking it would be better for us, or just plain easier to bear, if we learned how to conform, there is a farther shore of possibility, a shore that we may only find by running away for a time (literally, or figuratively, on roller skates, drugs, or a thirty-two-foot ketch) in order to set our inner sense of order in accord with the natural order, the way the old explorers would synchronize their chronometers with Greenwich Mean Time.
Today the system has finally become unplayable—and Miller was one of the first to see that. Too much is at stake now: the natural world, the purity of our water, the other animals, our own souls. Nobody saw more clearly than Miller did, in his day, that the great tragedy of the industrial age was that, while the workers might have been pitted against the bosses, Communists against Blackshirts, socialists against neoliberals, both sides were committed to that very industrial system—their argument being about terms and conditions—that was degrading their habitat and their minds Only a few sought to dismantle it altogether. Miller also understood that the system was not run by some Great Dictator; it was a vast, labyrinthine communal edifice composed of millions of individual “adjustments.” As Hart Crane observed,
We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.15
Finally, as a true anarchist, Miller saw that we do not need a glorious leader, or leaders, to save us from the nightmare. What we need, each of us, is to become our own anarchists—which is to say, to unlearn our conditioning and refuse to be led, thus transforming ourselves into free-thinking, self-governing spirits and, if we are fortunate indeed, to become one with the Way.