Miller the man

"For me, the book is the man that I am...The confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man I am."

H.Miller, Black Spring


*****


Miller was a happy men ( for this he was and is also hated). He was generous and free of envy. Though he sometimes boasts of idleness in his books ( as he boasts of lechery), he was, in truth, never idle. He was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation--and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.

He was always seeking "life more abundant" as he says at the end of The Colossus of Maroussi. Sex was one path toward abundance. Travel, another. Conversation, letterwriting and painting were still others. He saw the world in terms of abundance rather than scarcity, and it often seems that this distinction is the most critical one of all where writers concerned. Writers tend towards either free flow or toward agonized laconicism--Henry Miller being at one extreme and Samuel Beckett at the other.

"Life is that which flows..." said one of Miller´s Paris roomates, Michael Fraenkel, in an essay about the composition of The Tropic of Cancer. The paradox for every creative artist is that life flows and art must stand still. But it must stand still like a hummingbird, as Miller would say. It must move and yet have form, because without form it is not graspable; without form it cannot be art.
Miller´s art is always bursting the boundaries of form as we know it. It strains beyond the frame of the picture. This is partly its subject, and it also accounts fpr the difficulty a form-ridden commentator has with it.


Postmodernists have already discovered Miller as the artist of the future. But the artist who is ahead of his time never has an easy job making a living in his time. Witness Vincent van Gogh is an artist of similar protean and prophetic gifts. If he has today received little literary consideration, it is because he cannot be formally categorized. But rather than seeing this as a fault--as many of his detractors do--I see it as his very subject matter. Henry´s "message" was the message of all Zen masters and mystics: that there is no stability, only flux.

A large part of the problem Miller presents to the literary critic comes from his perception of the chaos of life and his passionate need to reflect that chaos in his books. Henry Miller is the poet of what Umberto Eco calls the "chaosmos". When he writes, he is in touch with pure desire--the desire to be one with the primal flux of creation, the desire to be as creative as a god.

"I like desire. In desiring things no one is wounded, deranged nor exploited. Creation is pure desire. One posesses nothing, one creates, one lets go. One is beyond what he does. One is no longer a slave. It´s an affair between onself and God. When one is truly rendered naked everything is done without effort. There is no recompense--the effort, the deed itself suffices. Deed is desire and desire is deed. A complete circle."


*****


Miller- a chauvinist?...well, not so much:

In his Paris days, when Henry discovered Anais Nins writing and celebrated that discovery in the essay "Un être etoilique" ( The cosmological eye), he knew at once he was in the presence of something female, revolutionary, and destined to change the world.

"The contrast between this language and that of a man´s is forcible: the whole of man´s art begins to appear like a frozen edelweiss under a glass bell reposing on a mantelpiece in the deserted home of a lunatic."


*****


Why was depicting sex more important to him than anything else? Why did he think it mattered so deeply to human life?

"Sometimes in the recording of a bald sexual incident great significance adheres. Sometimes the sexual becomes a writhing, pulsating facade such as we see on Indian temples. Sometimes it is a fresco hidden in a sacred cave where one may sit and contemplate on things of the spirit. There is nothing I can possibly prohibit myself from doing in this realm of sex. It´s a world unto itself....Its a cold fire which burns in us lik a sun. It is never dead, even though the sun may become a moon. There are no dead things in the universe--it is only our way of thinking which makes death."

"The savage is not a sick man. The savage retains his sense of awe, mistery, his love of action, his right to behave like the animal he is..."

That animal, lacking the self-consciousness which names things, puts no veil between itself and sex, between itself and death. Sex just is---namelessly. So is death.

"Sex is the great Janus-faced symbol of life and death. It is never one or the other, it is always both. The great lie of life here comes to the surface; the contradiction refuses to be resolved."



Erica Jong, The devil at large