Why we should read Henry Miller

Writing becomes redemption. And redemption is the ultimate
form of self-liberation.
There is only one subject, as Henry says often, "the
supreme subject" - liberation:

But the struggle of the human being to emancipate himself,
that is, to liberate himself from the prison of his own
making, that is for me the supreme subject. That is why
I fail, perhaps, to be completely "the writer."

So even Henry himself proclaims what his critics accuse
him of! Writerliness is far less important to him than
truth.


We live in an age of mannered writing, an age of
writers who forget that their purpose is to tell truths, not
merely to be clever. Perhaps truth-telling makes us uncomfortable
because we no longer have any consensus
about what truth is. We look to our writers to help us find
a consensus, and, book by book, we hope to grope our way
toward it. But we have no cohesive worldview. We do not
really believe in the spirit, yet we are unhappy with sheer
materialism and uncomfortable with the idea of imperishable
realities beyond the self and beyond the flesh.
Henry reminds us that the ancient function of the
writer is to be a truth-teller. He also reminds us that the
only truth is self-redemption. In this, his message is not so
very different from Christ's. It was Thomas Merton, after
all, who praised Henry for his "real basic Christian spirit
which I wish a few Christians shared!" Merton and Miller
were kindred spirits, who exchanged some fascinating letters.
They both were intimate with the divine dictation of
"the Voice." Merton the poet-monk and Miller the eternal
vagabond recognized each other at once as participants in
the same quest-the quest for spirit in a materialistic
world.
The experience of taking dictation from "the Voice" is
riveting and unforgettable. A large part of a writing
teacher's task is to convince students that they, too, can
listen to this inner voice. We all have it to some extent, but
writers cultivate the ability to use it. This may be why they
are so apt to believe in the Voice. When your daily work
is to be a medium, you must believe in the Voice or it may
stop talking to you.
For the most part, the "fictional" novelsweread today
belong to a dead genre, a genre that somnolizes rather than
awakens. People read mysteries, roman ces, and thrillers to
anesthetize themselves, not to alert their souls. Most books
are enslaving rather than liberating. They lull the senses;
they hypnotize the moral imagination.
That we have a whole publishing industry based on the
production of verbal soma (as Aldous Huxley called his
all-purpose opiate in Brave New World) is not surprising.
But Miller is doing something else entirely-and it is necessary
to recognize it. He is using words in the service of
liberation. He cannot be judged only as an entertainer
Like Auguste in The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, Im
ecstasy is our entertainment.
When we consider how long it has been since Joyce.
Woolf, Stein, and other geniuses of the first part of this
century transformed the very nature of prose narrative, it
is astounding that the contemporary novel has been influenced
so little.
Film transformed the novel far more than modern
literature did. Film absorbed the lessons of surrealism
The novel speeded up its scenes to match the dwindling
attention span of the contemporary reader. Fiction writers
learned to cut and edit like filmmakers. But, for the most
part, they ignored the lessons of Miller, Joyce, Woolf, and
Stein, and continued to write nineteenth-century Dickensian
or Dostoyevskian novels in the age of visual media. I
suspect that it is for this reason that so many of them are
being ignored.
Today's younger generation has become totally comfortable
with the sort of antichronological sequencing that
Miller employed. The most banal MTV promotional video
collapses or reverses time, folds reality into fantasy or
fantasy into reality, all with dazzling slickness. Why do we
refuse to trust readers to accept this in novels? Or, better.
why do our novelists refuse to draw inspiration from the
innovations of the great modernists? The reason, of course.
is commercialism and the lust for bestsellers.
The poor old popular novel plods along in the footsteps
of the past, while occasionally Martin Amis or Harold
Pinter makes use of reverse chronology (Time's Arrow,
Betrayal) to jolt his audience. That such a technique is
still jolting only proves how very conventional most contemporary
writing remains.
Of course there are adventurous souls like Thomas
Pynchon, William Gaddis, Cormac McCarthy, T.C. Boyle,
John Hawks, and Robert Coover who do bravely experi-
ment. But most of our published fiction is structured along
nineteenth-century lines.
Henry himself invented spiraltime, structured like the
DNA molecule, time that curves back on itself. His "novels"
constitute an immense Mobius strip. In the end is
their beginning. Is this "the true inner reality" of our
lives? Henry thought so. And it is time our contemporary
fiction writers trusted his lead. They have followed him
into the bedroom, but not into the world of unconscious
time. The writers who can pick up the mantle of Miller and
reinterpret him for a new generation will tap a young
audience that is largely bored with contemporary popular
fiction.
Henry also led the way for contemporary writers in the
manner in which he took fact and made it into parable. He
often predicted that autobiography would be the fiction of
the future and I think he has been proven right both by the
hunger for "docudrama," and by CNN's instant history,
which rivets us far more effectively than television sitcom-land.
Our most disturbing novels blend fiction and fact.
News and novels mingle boundaries everywhere. Even the
words mean the same thing.
The birth of the novel in the eighteenth century-the
same century that gave us the newspaper and consumer
capitalism-owes its impetus to the elevating of the daily
life of the average individual to the level of heroism. Instead
of kings and queens and mythical heroes and heroines,
we have Pamela, Clarissa, and Tom Jones. There is
surely a direct line from the serving-maid scribbler of
Pamela or the orphan Tom Jones to the Paris vagabond
Henry Miller. Miller, with bis elevation of daily life to
myth, with his blurred boundaries between fiction and
autobiography is, in fact, squarely in the central tradition
of the English novel. If this is so, why has he been seen
only as an outcast and renegade?
Part of the problem is sexomania-sexophobia. Henry
stirs outrage because of his lust for life. He also stirs
outrage because of his happiness at being alive and his
truly Christ-like lack of envy. Perlès once called him an
amateur writer-in the literal sense: he loved to write.
Miller also says in Tropic of Capricorn, "Envy was the one
thing I was not a victim of."
This was surely true when I knew him. He was unstinting
in helping me and others. He did not calculate his gifts-
He saw the world as having enough gifts for all. He did not
hold back as if inspiration were finite.
The rarity of his generosity made others hate Henry.
They mocked his openness because they could not emulate
it. All his faults were the faults of excess. But it was out of
excess that all his virtues also flowed.

Erica Jong on Henry Miller in "The Devil at Large"