On Henry Miller

Or, How to Be an Anarchist

John Burnside

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780691166872
• eBook ISBN: 9781400889228
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Biografías literarias

An engaging invitation to rediscover Henry Miller—and to learn how his anarchist sensibility can help us escape “the air-conditioned nightmare” of the modern world

The American writer Henry Miller's critical reputation—if not his popular readership—has been in eclipse at least since Kate Millett's blistering critique in Sexual Politics, her landmark 1970 study of misogyny in literature and art. Even a Miller fan like the acclaimed Scottish writer John Burnside finds Miller's "sex books"—including The Rosy Crucifixion, Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn—"boring and embarrassing." But Burnside says that Miller's notorious image as a "pornographer and woman hater" has hidden his vital, true importance—his anarchist sensibility and the way it shows us how, by fleeing from conformity of all kinds, we may be able to save ourselves from the "air-conditioned nightmare" of the modern world.

Miller wrote that "there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy," and in this short, engaging, and personal book, Burnside shows how Miller teaches us to become less adapted to the world, to resist a life sentence to the prison of social, intellectual, emotional, and material conditioning. Exploring the full range of Miller's work, and giving special attention to The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and The Colossus of Maroussi, Burnside shows how, with humor and wisdom, Miller illuminates the misunderstood tradition of anarchist thought. Along the way, Burnside reflects on Rimbaud's enormous influence on Miller, as well as on how Rimbaud and Miller have influenced his own writing.

An unconventional and appealing account of an unjustly neglected writer, On Henry Miller restores to us a figure whose searing criticism of the modern world has never been more relevant.

NOTES

BY WAY OF A PREFACE

1. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).

2. Henry Miller, “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere,” in The Cosmological Eye (New York: New Directions, 1939).

3. “Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.” Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871, in Rimbaud, Poésies, Une saison en enfer, Illuminations, ed. Louis Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

4. Jeannette Winterson, “The Male Mystique of Henry Miller,” New York Times, January 26, 2012.

5. In this Miller reminds us of Frank Harris and other sexual “adventurers” of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, of whom more later. Because the “sex” being discussed in these works is mostly a matter of conquest, the exercise of power and revenge against a puritanical society, it is hardly surprising that love plays no part in these tales. Henry Miller, interview by Terry Gifford, “Dirty Old Henry Miller at 86,” Chicago Tribune, February 1978.

6. Tokuda quoted in R. J. Hudson, “Letters by Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller,” September 27, 2006, LiveJournal, https://community.livejournal.com/-henrymiller/3939.html.

7. Letter from Miller to Tokuda, 1966, quoted in ibid.

8. This culture, referred to universally by sexual adventurers and bohemians as “puritan,” not only deprived women of self-expression and sexual freedom but, by the same token, forced sexually active men into a kind of trickster role, intent on “stealing” from the puritan world the freedoms that might otherwise have been a matter of negotiation and mutual agreement.

9. Thus, in a real sense, we can see that Hoki, as a person, is irrelevant to the mono no aware process. She could be anyone.

10. Walter Raleigh, “The Silent Lover,” in The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. John Hannah (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892).

11. Marianne Moore, “Poetry,” in New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Heather Cass White (London: Faber, 2017).

12. “Surely everyone realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen.” Henry Miller, On Turning Eighty, Capra Chapbook series, no. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1972).

13. Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins (New York: New Directions, 1962), 5.

14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject” (1792), trans. Craig Holdrege, The Nature Institute, http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic24/ic24_goethe.pdf.

15. Hart Crane, “Chaplinesque,” in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright, 1966).

IN PRAISE OF FLIGHT

1. Henri Laborit, Éloge de la fuite (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1976).

2. André Gide, Les faux-monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1925).

3. Henry Miller, interview by People magazine, August 21, 1978.

4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2015).

5. Terence, Heauton Timorumenos, ed. John Carew Rolfe (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010).

6. For example, Éloge de la fuite, an extraordinary work, remains untranslated, for the moment, though non-Francophone readers interested in knowing more about Laborit’s philosophy should see Alain Resnais’s 1980 film, Mon oncle d’Amérique (My American uncle) for a typically unconventional exploration of his ideas. His two works that have been translated are Stress and Cellular Function (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959); and Decoding the Human Message (London: Allison and Busby, 1977).

7. Largactil was marketed as Thorazine in the United States. It should not be forgotten, however, that chlorpromazine-like drugs have more recently been subject to significant abuses, especially in the off-label treatment of children and the elderly and as constituents of the so-called pharmacological lobotomy used to keep mental health patients docile.

8. Éloge de la fuite, Avant-propos (the rough translation of this passage, cited in French on the first page of this chapter, is my own).

9. Jonathan Meades describes this fundamental stage, somewhat differently, as “seeking shelter, food, sex and narcosis.” Jonathan Meades, Museums without Walls (London: Unbound, 2013).

10. Laborit, Éloge de la fuite.

11. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, new ed. (London: Harper Perennial, 2005).

12. George Dibbern, Quest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1941).

13. Letter from Miller to Dibbern, April 17, 1945, quoted in Erika Grundmann, Dark Sun: Te Rapunga and the Quest of George Dibbern (Northland, NZ: David Ling Publishing, 2004), http://georgedibbern.com/DarkSun/DS-Chapter.html.

14. All information on Dibbern comes from George Dibbern’s Quest and Life (http://www.georgedibbern.com/aboutdibbern.html), a website dedicated to Dibbern’s life and work, maintained by Erika Grundmann, author of the Dibbern biography Dark Sun.

15. Dibbern, Quest.

16. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, new ed. (London: Harper Perennial, 2005).

17. Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2012).

18. The review of Quest, by George Dibbern, is collected in Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (New York: New Directions, 1962).

LIKE A FLUID (THE FALSE PORNOGRAPHER)

1. Henri Laborit, Éloge de la fuite (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1976). “To love another is to accept that he or she is free to think, feel, and act in a way that does not conform to my wishes, or to my own gratification, to accept that he or she lives in accordance with his or her syst...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• By Way of a Preface
• In Praise of Flight
• Like a Fluid (The False Pornographer)
• On Love and Property
• Henry Miller as Anarchist
• Like a Fluid (The Great Romantic)
• The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
• The Time of the Assassins
• The Creature World
• Notes