HENRY MILLER

Henry Miller got off to a slow start as a writer, preferring or being obliged to do a variety of, for the most part, menial jobs in his native America. But when he came to Europe in the early 1930's, the American put his past behind him and knuckled down to the task of describing his adventures in Paris and Dijon. The result was Tropic of Cancer, and although it could never have been a best-seller, it had a scandal value not far short of the earlier publications of James Joyce's Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. This scandal value, publicized by George Orwell, seemed to enhance its reputation. For there weren't that many novels to which it could be compared, least of all in the English language, and very few people were sure that it was in fact literature at all. Nevertheless it set Miller on the road to international fame, and justifiably so, as things turned out!

James Joyce had already seriously undermined the foundations of traditional or conventional literature in Ulysses, but Tropic of Cancer completely demolished the old foundations by dispensing with characterization, plot, and background information altogether, giving the reader less a fictional account of illusory characters than a thinly-disguised factual record of Miller's own experiences in France. This factual record was of course mistaken for fiction by some critics, not least of all those who couldn't conceive of literature being other than fictional; but Miller never had any illusions himself about the nature of his work. It wasn't to write literature in any traditional objectively selfless sense that he had embarked on his new career, but to upgrade it along autobiographical, philosophical, factual lines, and thus produce something analogous to an abstract rather than a representational canvas. Tropic of Cancer was a sharp reminder to literary conservatives that evolutionary progress applied as much to literature as to anything else, and although Miller had to pay the price for being in the vanguard of creative endeavour by leading a relatively unaffluent life, nevertheless his book obtained a foothold on the contemporary literary scene and gave him the incentive to continue his career along equally radical lines thereafter. There could be no question of Miller ever writing a conventional novel again, such as he had apparently attempted to do in New York when still influenced by selfless objectivity. Literature from now on meant autobiography alternating with philosophical disquisitions, reminiscent, in a way, of the Marquis de Sade, insofar as the autobiographical parts were often sexual. The old humanistic civilizations of Britain and France were moribund and trapped in their literary conventions. The young transitional civilization to post-humanism of America, however, had something new to offer, and Miller intended to show his European contemporaries just what. The improvement of art along factual lines was precisely what this ex-messenger manager had in mind!

If any writer is bourgeois/proletarian or any novel likewise, then Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer are the best examples - certainly for their time. The novel is certainly a bourgeois art form, but it acquires a proletarian content with Miller, a content not spurning the liberal use of four-letter words or frequent references to low-life scenes of drunkenness, vandalism, prostitution, petty theft, cadging, and so on. A European, particularly when English, would probably have been more reserved in his choice of language and more discriminating in his selection of subjects, both human and situational. Not so in the case of Henry Miller, who lays himself and the world bare for all to see, concealing little or nothing from the reader. If the latter is affronted or disgusted, that's too bad! For the writer won't spare anyone's feelings, as he probes the soft underbelly of modern life in the hope of bringing new literature to the surface, of extending the range of literature in a proletarian direction. Thus he goes forward, and if the reader is left behind it won't cause the writer any loss of sleep. He knows that eventually the world must catch up with him.

Virtually all of Miller's novels are autobiographical, although only a few are autobiographical in a contemporary, done-as-it-happens sense. From Black Spring onwards Miller returns to his New York past in an attempt to unearth his childhood, youth, and early manhood, but he interposes philosophical, surreal, and anecdotal passages between these reminiscences, which help keep the novels afloat. Even so, one could argue that these later autobiographical works signify a marked drop in tempo and temperature from Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy (a somewhat ironic title), his two most Paris-oriented novels with apparently on-the-spot accounts. But, fortunately, the return to earlier memories which Miller makes from his second novel onwards is broken up by more up-to-date autobiography in The Colossus of Maroussi, a metaphorically poetic reference to the Greek poet Katsimbalis, and subsequently in A Devil in Paradise, a reference to the French painter Conrad Moricand, so that the tempo and temperature of his later novels picks up from time to time, thus precluding the monotony of time-lag which would otherwise accrue to his large autobiographical output.

Nevertheless the ageing Miller couldn't manage to match the pace of his best Paris writings, even when dealing with events as they occurred, following his return to America in 1940. Probably the nearest he came to doing so was in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, which focuses on a cross-States trip he made by automobile shortly after returning from Europe. But this work - a kind of cross between a novel and a volume of essays - is more the record of a disillusioned, cynical, tired anti-American American than of an adventurous, happy-go-lucky American elated by his return home.

Perhaps one of the most paradoxical features of this in-many-ways typical American is his anti-Americanism, a consequence in part of his German, old-world ancestry and in part of a conservative strain in his psychological make-up which puts him at loggerheads with various aspects of New World life, including the glaringly materialistic predominance of skyscrapers in the city of his birth. It might be pushing the point to say that Miller was temperamentally conservative, particularly in light of his bohemian wanderings both in America and Europe, not to mention the revolutionary nature of his best writings, amounting to a transvaluation of all literary values along lines designed to stress the importance of the self in a world stranded, bitch-wise, in selflessness. But he certainly possessed a strong conservative, old-world strain that prevented him from becoming wholly proletarianized, and which gave to his writings a bourgeois dimension of social prudery and down-to-earth wisdom. If he became partly proletarianized in New York, Paris, and other large cities, he never completely lost contact with his petty-bourgeois roots, and it is this fact which prevents his work from being merely popular. He may occasionally read like the tale of a bourgeois gone wrong, but the fact that he remains a bourgeois is what grants his writings their appeal to serious taste. The regular references to authors like Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Emerson, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Spengler, etc., which characterize his novels, serve to redeem the more proletarian episodes in his writings and to remind the reader that, for all his iconoclastic rage against traditional or conventional values, Henry Miller intends to be taken seriously as a classic writer, heir to an impressive list of great men. His appeal to tradition and simultaneous rebellion against it ... is but another facet of his paradoxical nature!

As a theorist, Miller pertains more to the transcendental than to the neo-pagan level of decadent bourgeois writing, a fact which marks him out as a positive decadent ... after the fashion of Aldous Huxley, with whom he exchanged an occasional letter while the latter was a near-neighbour of his on the American West Coast. But Miller's interest in Eastern mysticism went less deep than Huxley's, since his temperament was more profane and his intellect comparatively unacademic. It is difficult to imagine Miller denying himself sensual - and in particular sexual - satisfaction in response to an ascetic regimen of regular and sustained periods of transcendental meditation, and we can be sure that his interest in oriental religion was predominantly theoretical - as, indeed, it was for Huxley. This is not to say, however, that the proletarian in Miller prevented him from being more susceptible to certain spiritual insights than the rather more patrician Huxley. For, to be sure, there are many instances of intuitive foresight and wisdom scattered throughout Miller's later writings, such as that comment he made concerning the likelihood that the next civilization would not be just another civilization but the 'final stretch of realization open to the sky', which appeared, I believe, in Sunday After the War - one of his most interesting non-fictional works. A comment like that is certainly superior to any number of speculations Huxley and other more academically-minded people might make concerning the possibility of life after death!

Besides being an essayist of eclectic tendency though unequal value, Miller was also a literary portraitist, providing sketches of his friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, which one might describe as impressionist or even expressionist, depending on the psychology of the person concerned. This enabled him to extend his literary interests into the realm of real life and thus prevented the danger of fiction, to which he was, to say the least, ever allergic. The opposite of autobiography, or subjective fact, is of course biography, or objective fact, and this came no less readily to Miller's pen or typewriter than his self-portraits. Huxley, too, was partial to biography, though on a profounder level than his spiritual lesser-brother.

Another striking parallel between the two authors (as indeed with Hermann Hesse and D.H. Lawrence) is their penchant, at one time or another, for watercolours, which Miller in particular continued to produce well into old age, having the good fortune to be recognized as a watercolourist in his own lifetime and duly reproduced on picture postcards, an engaging example of which, entitled One Fish, he had the kindness to send me from Santa Monica in response to a letter I wrote him in 1975. The artistry could be described as minimalist expressionism, not all that dissimilar in outline from what I imagine Picasso's interpretation of a fish would have been. Of course, Miller knew he was an amateur painter, but it is both significant and interesting that so many writers of his stamp should have taken to watercolours in their spare time, extending their eclecticism into congenial realms of creative endeavour. An exhibition of watercolour art by such writers could well prove well-worth seeing, even if it didn't actually contribute very much to our understanding of their literary work.

Admittedly, one could argue that even in literature Miller remained something of an amateur at heart, never an integral, self-possessed member of the literary establishment, but an outsider who could only marvel, from time to time, that he had actually 'made it' as a creative writer, leaving the humdrum world of petty employment and/or sordid unemployment for the more satisfactory one of literary fame. But he was never worldly in any ostentatious sense, and always retained the mark and character of a man who had known hard times and could never expect to entirely forget or outgrow them. If he was to remain something of a 'bum person', to use a phrase favoured by Robert Graves in his assessment of D.H. Lawrence, he was yet the kind of person who is a 'bum' not because he is beneath the society into which he was born but, on the contrary, because he has the ability to tower above it and because that society, in its dedication to the average philistine level, pushes him to the outside in its preoccupation with making money by whatever means prove most efficacious, irrespective of the moral or social or, indeed, intellectual consequences. A man who knows poverty because he is morally too good for the society in which he has to live is an altogether different proposition from the one who fails to come up to it in the first place. Henry Miller was such a man, and it is for this reason that his closest literary ancestor was neither Whitman nor Emerson, nor even Dostoyevsky, but Baudelaire.