Context N°20
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:
“We take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish—I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.”
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.”
