Context
A Kick in the Pants: Reintroducing Henry Miller
by Jim Knipfel
“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying, and not one man, in these last hundred years or
so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and
set it off.” In 1930, one crazy man wrote those words, and some thirty-five years later, he detonated that bomb—at least in literary terms. In
June of 1965, Henry Miller was the author of the top five bestselling
books in America. There was a reason for it, of course. A tidal wave of
publicity accompanied the 1963 Supreme Court decision lifting the
decades-old ban on Miller’s more controversial works, and now they were
available (legally) for the first time. On the downside, those five
books (Quiet Days in Clichy, The World of Sex, and the three volumes of The Rosy Crucifixion)— even more than Tropic of Cancer,
whose 1961 publication led to the Supreme Court case—solidified the
then-73 year-old Miller’s reputation as The King of Smut. It was a
grossly undeserved reputation. In fact, in one of the many ironies of
Miller’s career, a number of his books had long been available in the
U.S., but those travelogues, essay collections, and character sketches
had generated almost no interest among American readers. No, it was his
notoriety as a pornographer that would stick with him long after his
death in 1980. Henry Valentine Miller was born in Brooklyn to
German immigrants on December 26, 1891, a date which convinced him he
was destined for great things. While he was right about that, it would
take awhile. His first forty years, in fact, were fairly unremarkable. He
grew up in a blue collar neighborhood with a neurotic mother, an
alcoholic father, a disabled sister and an army of young hoodlum
friends. He dropped out of college after two months, and in
1917, married Beatrice Wickens. The couple moved into a respectable
brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope section, and Henry (eventually)
took a job with Western Union (which he thinly disguised in his novels
as the “Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company.”) From childhood,
Miller dreamed of being a writer, but his first efforts were abortive
at best. Mostly, he pretended to be a writer instead of actually
writing. In 1923, Miller met taxi dancer June Smith, whom he married soon after divorcing Beatrice. June,
a lovely, hot-tempered woman who might be described as having strong
opinions and loose morals, insisted that Henry quit his job and devote
himself to writing. She, meanwhile, used her various charms to pay the
rent, unaware what an important role she would play in his most famous
novels. Miller, now in his mid-30s, began writing seriously
and prodigiously, but his earliest serious efforts were, to put it
bluntly, dreadful, filled with crude caricatures and clunky prose
copped from other authors. Still, when these first efforts (Moloch and Crazy Cock) were published a decade after his death, they revealed something about the work to come. On a superficial level, the material in both novels would later be reworked much more elegantly into Tropic of Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion. More
importantly, they revealed that Miller was already recognizing the
comedy and pathos of daily existence, and using it as the foundation
for his art. For much of his career, Miller would be mining the details
of his life—his friends, his childhood, himself—and presenting it
unadorned. Even when he exaggerated (he did that quite a bit), there
was a core of deep honesty at the heart of it all. As he wrote in the early pages of Tropic of Cancer,
“There is only one thing that interests me vitally now, and that is the
recording of all that which is omitted in books.” That’s the key to
Miller. Whereas other writers—even those considered “shocking” —danced
around certain basics of our corporeal being, Miller openly admitted
that we needed to piss, shit, eat, fuck, puke. Life could be sloppy,
and he put it all down on the page. This, of course, would get him into trouble. In
1930, with things at home growing more turbulent, Miller fled to Paris
alone. It was only there that Henry Miller would become “Henry Miller.” “Paris
is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from
the womb and puts it in the incubator,” he wrote. “Paris is the cradle
of artificial births.” Miller found himself surrounded by
artists, philosophers, musicians and poets. The outrageously well-read
Miller was suddenly in the company of others who’d also read Rabelais
and Blake. And of course there were the women, too. Everything he saw
was an inspiration, everything brought the words flowing. He had no money, of course, but that didn’t concern him. As he wrote in Cancer’s most famous passage, “I have no money, no resources, no hopes, I am the happiest man alive.” He
lived much as he did as a youngster in Brooklyn, wandering the streets
with friends and depending upon the generosity of others. He found a
muse in writer Anais Nin, and within a year had started work on his
most infamous novel, Tropic of Cancer. Miller knew
immediately he was writing something new and dangerous, even as he
imitated the styles of a dozen other writers. In the end, the finished
work was his alone. Cancer was a meandering, playful,
episodic tale based on Miller’s early experiences in Paris. The prose
oscillated from the earthy and crude to the grandly poetic, the subject
matter from the base to the ethereal. It was part rant, part
philosophical treatise, part pornography. He wasn’t even sure he’d call it a “book;” he wrote: “No,
this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in
the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . .” It
was, at heart, a portrait of a man living freely, contrary to the rules
and mores of the age; a man who placed more importance on wandering,
talking, laughing and sex than on getting a job and living responsibly.
It was also a portrait of a cheat, a mooch, and a raconteur—as well as
a man who had nothing but contempt for the stuffy, sanctimonious world
around him. Yet despite that contempt, what Miller was describing was a
kind of Buddhism—a way of living that focused on the instant, instead
of what might be or had been. No matter how much of the book
was fiction (according to biographer Mary Dearborn, Miller “borrowed”
several sexual escapades from friends), he successfully forged the
free-wheeling, lustful persona he would maintain for the rest of his
life. After finishing the manuscript in 1933, he immediately set to work on Black Spring,
a collection of essays which focused on his early life in Brooklyn, as
well as his inner life—his dreams and his love of painting. The prose
was more mature than it had been in Cancer—more controlled, more
focused, the emotions more deeply felt. It’s remarkable, really, how
quickly his writing coalesced after his arrival in Paris. In
1934, Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press—who published English-language
erotica for tourists who couldn’t buy such books at home—released Cancer.
It caused a sensation in Paris and was, of course, immediately banned
in the States. That same year, Miller and June, who was less than
pleased with the way she was portrayed in Cancer, divorced. Obelisk would go on to publish Black Spring in 1935 and Tropic of Capricorn in 1939. They were banned as well. Meanwhile in the States, New Directions, recognizing Miller’s growing importance, published The Cosmological Eye, a collection of essays (including selections from Black Spring).
Unfortunately, the American reading public was not much interested in
essays about Hamlet, the Brooklyn Bridge, or Surrealism, no matter how
beautifully written. When war erupted in Europe, Miller
returned to New York, where he found himself penniless and mostly
ignored. Through one of Anais Nin’s connections, he began writing porn,
which he sold for a dollar a page to an oil tycoon in Oklahoma. (Some
of those stories would later be rewritten as Quiet Days in Clichy and Opus Pistorum). Quickly
fed up with New York, Miller took to the road, and spent the next four
years searching for a place he could tolerate, finally settling in Big
Sur, California. His disgust with the creeping blandness, the plastic
nothing of the American landscape would become a bitter travelogue
entitled The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. The book was released in 1945, and won him few fans among the patriotic set. He wrote of Americans themselves: With that, of course, Miller came to be regarded as a drug-abusing pornographer who hated America. Nevertheless,
more books were released regularly on both continents. Yet for all his
growing fame (and infamy), his most celebrated works remained
unavailable in his homeland, unless you knew a bookstore willing to
sell smuggled copies under the counter. (Cancer was, in fact, probably the most widely-read forbidden book in history.) Among the other banned works was The Rosy Crucifixion, a massive 3-volume set (Sexus, Nexus and Plexus), written between 1949 and 1960, and quite possibly Miller’s masterpiece. With the inescapable wisdom that comes with age, he returned to the same material he had covered in Tropic of Capricorn and his earliest, failed novels, to re-examine the formative years of
his life. He again confronted his stormy marriage to Beatrice, his
affair with June, his struggles to make money and write. This time,
Miller tried to lay himself bare, repress no detail, no matter how
insignificant. It was life itself, in all its arduous, funny, absurd
complexity that he was attempting to capture, in a relaxed language
that was rich, but hardly impenetrable—wise, but not overly
intellectual. It was a brilliant and exhausting work, and one he would
never quite top. Miller’s quiet life as a literary outlaw
would explode in 1961, when Grove Press—an American publisher willing
to take chances—published Tropic of Cancer knowing full well it
would lead to obscenity trials. They had been through it before when
they published D.H. Lawrence, and they knew they could win. Sure
enough, from state to state, the book was seized, eventually leading
Grove, backed by some of the most important figures in the American
literary community, to the Supreme Court. And in 1963, the Court ruled
that Cancer was not obscene. A slew of once-banned titles hit the bookstores, and Henry Miller became America’s most famous dirty old man. In
a 2002 interview, Grove’s Barney Rosset claims Miller was opposed to
publishing the banned novels. For one thing, he was fond of his outlaw
status, and feared publication would lead to mainstream acceptance. He
was also afraid June would sue him for libel. Neither came to pass. Despite
his age, Miller was still the buoyant, freewheeling “Henry Miller” —a
playful figure, almost electric in his enthusiasms. But now he was more
mystical than salacious, more interested in dreams and astrology than
in orgies. That was evidenced in his writing as well, perhaps most poignantly in the slim and beautiful Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. The
fable, quite unlike anything else he’d written, concerns Auguste, the
most beloved clown in France, who could easily make his audience laugh
for a few minutes, but yearned to impart to them a deep and lasting joy. In
the epilogue, Miller writes, “More even than all the stories I have
based on fact and experience, is this one the truth.” His
identification with Auguste is clear. While Miller’s more notorious
books certainly gave his readers a few bawdy chuckles, there was so
much more to them—something Miller feared was being lost or ignored. Smile was first published in 1948, but became even more truthful following
the Supreme Court ruling—which is why it’s so frustrating that Miller’s
importance is not more fully recognized and appreciated today. Instead,
he’s considered little more than a passing diversion for bright, horny
college students—a stepping stone to serious literature. Yet
Miller was the necessary bridge between the likes of Lawrence and
Rimbaud, and those who followed him—the Beats, Norman Mailer, Charles
Bukowski, and a thousand less significant writers (like myself). Miller
laid the groundwork, proving that you could fearlessly write—and write
exuberantly, eloquently, bluntly—about those fundamentals that we
rarely discuss out of simple propriety. He gave writers and readers
alike a new understanding of “freedom,” not only in what he wrote, but
in how he lived. “Strange as it may seem today to say,” he
wrote in his essay, “Creative Death,” “the aim of life is to live, and
to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely
aware.”
