I HAVE spent a sedative summer reading most of Henry Miller. Sedative? Yes, inevitably, since it’s the fate of all revolutionary writers to encompass their own supersession. How shocking Tropic of Cancer was when I got hold of a smuggled copy in the late thirties; how merely charming it is now, redolent of a Paris in which the coffee and Gauloises were alike more aromatic than they’ve been since the war, a genuine vie de bohème, the physical act of love as fresh as if the French had just invented it. Miller unbuttoned the fly and tore open the placket with a fiercer gust than Lawrence (who was still mother’s boy) or Joyce (who let language get in the way). Today’s naked generation has learned nearly everything from him – everything, that is to say, except his bookishness, his capacity for recapturing innocence, his sense of wonder, his sense of words.
I remember, when first reading Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, feeling that one particular element in the junkie nightmare represented – for me, at least – the limit in the erotically shocking. A man copulates with another man’s skull, but first he has to drill a hole in it. Shocking, but (perhaps appropriately) merely cerebrally shocking. Amusing even, the sort of example of the shocking one might give in a lecture. A lot of the shocks administered by today’s youthful news sheets are of this order: we’re now permitted to shock, so let’s get on with it; what shall we shock with today? This is the consequence of Miller’s opening the door. Needless to say, it was not what he intended.
For all that the Tropics and The Rosy Crucifixion try to do in the erotic arena is to convey the simple gross pleasures of straightforward heterosexual coition. This had never really been done before in direct language. Rabelais makes a joke of it, Boccaccio uses elegant metaphor. Those wearisome Victorian chronicles of prowess possess detail but lack gusto. And, to be honest, if no literary man had tried it before on the Millerian scale and with the Millerian intensity, it was because there was the gnaw of the scruple. Is one telling the truth about copulation if one merely describes its mechanics? Miller has never had any doubt that one is, and unfortunately he shares this view with the pornographers. But Miller himself has never written pornography.
For pornography depersonalises, creating an abstract paradise Steven Marcus called Pornotopia, in which the only emotion is lust and the only event orgasm and the only inhabitants animated phalluses and vulvae. In Miller’s books there are real people, with guns in their handbags, a need for money, a habit of writing poetry on the wall while the act proceeds, an appetite for big meals afterward and very frequently a temporary resistance to love. Is ‘love’ the right word? In French, yes; with Miller, whose origins are German, there are sometimes temptations to submit to Goethean transports which get in the way of pure amour. Miller himself is always present, naked but a thinking man who reads and writes books, capable of prodigious engorgements but never viewing himself as a synecdoche – part for the whole. Heavily erotic, yes, but pornographic, never.
Many women dislike his books, especially the militant Donna Giovannas, like vengeful Brigid Brophy, who goes so far in her essay on Miller as to cast doubt on his basic sexual endowment. They are right, I think, because, though Miller respects ladies like Anaïs Nin, he cannot help making women the sexual instrument come before women the human entity. He is very ingenuous in saying that he has never thought of women as just that: he always looked for something else as well. His autobiographical books – which means all his books – deliver a little too much contempt for women – the classic postcoital tristitia, which the boorish or the puritanical transfer to the object of spent desire, a vestigial Victorian horror that women should actually like sex quite as much as men, if not more. Still, at 80 he goes on loving women; and the number of his wives, though not up to patriarchal standards, compares well with an average film star’s. His present wife is Japanese; and he is very fond of her, as of her Japanese friends, some of whom live with her, them, him.
To call Miller a glorifier of the phallus and a chronicler of phallic events is not enough. There is more to his long autobiography than sex. Black Spring is, I think, one of the finest evocations of low urban life in all American literature. ‘I am a patriot,’ says Miller, ‘of the Fourteenth Ward, Brooklyn, where I was raised. The rest of the United States doesn’t exist for me, except as idea, or history, or literature.’ The patriotism is expressed in an almost myopically close rendering of a world of ‘cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery, mendacity, buggery, incest, paralysis, tapeworms, abortions, triplets, idiots, drunkards, ne’er-do-wells, fanatics, sailors, tailors, watchmakers, scarlet fever, whooping cough, meningitis, running ears, chorea, stutterers, jailbirds, dreamers, storytellers, bartenders – and finally there was Uncle George and Tante Melia.’ Though he disavows either a literary aim or a learned technique, Miller belongs to the logorrheal tradition of Rabelais and Sterne (as does Burroughs). He becomes a wordy bore only when he finds it necessary to prophesy; that great American disease we can call vatism is in him as it is in Dahlberg and even Mailer. When Miller starts talking about Love, not amour, I feel like giving him a few francs to go to a brothel.
But, of course, there is no need to do this. We come sooner rather than later to lechery as juicy as roast pork and Kartoffelklöße. If we require elevation from Miller, then we can best get it in his Hellenic phase. He is curiously German in having found an almost hyperbolic fulfilment in Greece – ‘Real home, real climate,’ he notes – and the best testimony to its moderating, cleansing, unclotting influence is to be found in his The Colossus of Maroussi. But the war sent him back to America and the destiny of sage of Big Sur. Now he appears to be one of America’s glories – fulfilled, with 50 books behind him, his 80th birthday last Sunday, Boxing Day, two of his works filmed (stupidly confused with skinflicks), and the Playboy tribute to this picture book, Miller talking his life instead of writing it (he has written it already).
There are already cynics and admirers who are saying that the book should be called My Life and Hard-on Times. The erotic motif is imposed on some of the photographs – cheaply and irrelevantly. The old man is shown apparently trying to eat the bosom of the Israeli actress Ziva Rodann. He plays ping-pong with a callipygous nude girl. He sits at a table and looks up in a kind of puzzled but gratified wonder as a pair of fine impertinent breasts moon down on him. But there are photographs of Miller serious, with hat and spectacles on, and Lawrence Durrell horsing about with a false moustache, and wives and friends and Paris. There are also reproductions of Miller’s paintings (one of the best things in all his writing is his account, in Black Spring, of learning how to draw), which are endearingly bright and fin de siècle. Finally, there is Miller talking about himself and giving us all hope. A cigarette-smoking, gin-drinking octogenarian, he is a fine advertisement for the longevital virtues of regular sex.
But the book is a mere plaything or playboy thing, in no wise a fitting summation, a glossy toy that might lull the reader into not taking Miller as seriously as he ought. Miller has spent a long industrious life grinding slow and exceeding fine, also coarse. He is a world literary figure, and it is proper to ask where – apart from the long-banned candour – his achievement lies. With whom shall we compare him – Lawrence? Joyce? Beckett? He is not as important as any of these because he has not created a world that is recognizably his own. He has not really created at all. He lacks architectonic skill, a making or shaping drive. He has had only one real subject – himself – and he has not been prepared, or endowed with the ability, to convert himself into a great fictional myth. Called a novelist by some, he has the novelist’s ear and eye but not the novelist’s power to create great separable artefacts. He has done what any man with his endowments and deficiencies is forced to do – produce autobiography that begs at the door of fiction.
Durrell thinks that Miller’s lifework is the best confessional writing since Rousseau. He is probably right; but frank self-exposure was only one small part of Rousseau’s achievement – there were The Social Contract, Emile and The New Héloïse as well. Moreover, the things that Miller confesses are somewhat limited. He is honest, but no subtle thinker; we conceive no joy in engaging a personality so lacking in complexity. The sensibility is somewhat coarse; and there is an ingenuousness which, though often charming, charms less the more often we meet it. I have been rereading Gibbon’s Autobiography as a foil to Miller, and the intellectual excitement of the experience has inevitably shrivelled up the phallic and visceral appeal of the Tropics and those productions with the schoolboy names Sexus, Plexus and Nexus. There is humour as well as physical honesty, but there is not one ounce of wit.
George Orwell paid fine tribute to Miller, asking his readers of the thirties to note in Tropic of Cancer what, even at that late date, could still be done with the English language. Orwell saw in Miller what many of us saw then – a liberating force, a cleanser of the dialect of the tribe. But how much more cleansing and liberating was Orwell himself who, in Down and Out in Paris and London, converted into art the sufferings and low life he shared with Miller, and then, before dying in his early forties, produced genuine prophecy. Industry and longevity are no substitute for genius.
New York Times, 2 January 1972
Review of My Life and Times by Henry Miller
(New York: Gemini Press, 1971)