Oct 27, 2024
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Should We Re-Censor Henry Miller?
by Doniphan Blair
Henry Miller, photographed by famous indie photographer and close friend Gilberte Brassai, 1932, Paris. Photo: G. BrassaiEarly version published as “Miller Under Attack” by the Henry Miller Library, February 3, 2019
I WAS HEART WARMED TO READ ELAINE
Blair’s Henry Miller piece in a recent New York Review of Books (2/21/19 issue). Both her review of “On Henry Miller: Or, How to be an Anarchist”, and the book itself, by Scottish author John Burnside, are laudable attempts to decipher Miller, which is critical today.
Indeed, Miller’s survival as a pioneer modern novelist is now in doubt, as Blair quips in her opening line: “Pity John Burnside. It’s not the best time to publish an appreciation and defense of Henry Miller.”
In fact, today’s triggered-warned modernists may "cancel" Miller, as the saying goes, voluntarily reinstating the state censorship imposed on “Tropic of Cancer” (1934), and almost all of his books until 1961. That was when William Burroughs’s legal push to publish his own supposedly-pornographic “Naked Lunch” (1959) also freed “Cancer”, which became an overnight bestseller for Grove Press.
Ironically, young people viewing so much pornography on line, hypocrisy in politics and absence of romance in relationships desperately need an underworld expert to guide them through the contradictory physical plane to a functional understanding of experience and ideas, what could be called full freedom of thought, or Burnside’s anarchist ideal, or “Men’s Lib”, as Blair titles her piece.
Little does Blair realize: it is hardly men only who will be liberated. Indeed, Miller is linguistic LSD. His writing radically expanded literature, a leading edge of consciousness, opening it to the quotidian life, dirty little secrets, acrobatic slaloms through semantics and radical big pictures previously excluded from books.
Sure, some pages of “Tropic of Cancer” scan as misogynist-pig drivel, but “I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt,” on page two, is hardly “something an angry gamer might have tweeted to Brianna Wu, the video game developer who received numerous threats after criticizing the sexist nature of her industry,” as Blair insists.
It was a joke—“After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like,” Miller continues—not to mention great writing and seminal sexting.
This author, Doniphan Blair, presents on Henry Miller's controversial ideas, April 13th, 2019, Big Sur, California. image: D.BlairIndeed, we now know that the “Tania” to whom that passage was penned enjoyed Miller's pronouncements immensely, both in person and in print, given she was none other than the author and feminist icon Anaïs Nin (1903-77), according to reputable sources.
Nin found Miller’s earthy honesty, flights of fancy and overall philosophy so refreshing, brilliant and essential, she gave him her heart as well as her body, her typewriter AND her banker husband's money, first to rent a decent room, where he could finish “Cancer”, and then to publish it. She also wrote the forward and helped edit. Although she did edit their affair out of her own ground-breaking diaries published in1966, which Miller endorsed enthusiastically in his only uncensored early book, “The Cosmological Eye” (1939), and they decided not to marry, they remained life-long friends and collaborators.
As it happened, Nin was also intimate with June Mansfield, Henry's second wife, Antonin Artaud, the theater pioneer, and Otto Rank, the famed psychiatrist (Freud’s right-hand-man), whom she hit up for some of the funds for publishing “Cancer”, which suggests a community symphony of love, elevated vision and advanced cultural activism.
Such cross-gender, -ethnic and -profession cooperation was nothing new to Miller. Indeed, his second wife June, a Jewish American Princess as well as gorgeous genius grifter, since she was estranged from her wealthy family, had already seduced a man to finance an early, unpublished Miller tome. It was called “Moloch” and was about an anti-Semite, a standard theme for Miller, as it happens. Mansfield also pushed him to find his iconoclastic voice.
And break everything he does.
If Miller’s misogyny seems shocking, try his anti-Semitism. Not only are June and Tania Jewish (in the book, the actual Nin wasn’t), so are most of the characters in "Cancer", including the protagonist’s closest friends, who were based on Miller’s best buds Michael Fraenkel and Alfred Perles. “[A]lmost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse,” Miller writes, while he himself is “as ugly as a Jew. And who hates the Jew more than the Jew.” Miller often attacks himself, if not first, then foremost and in the most extreme terms.
While many writers of Miller’s day—Joyce, Gide, Orwell, Hemingway, Kafka—addressed the complex Jewish question glancingly, Miller tackles it straight up on page three of "Cancer", using reverse psychology and his patented technique: first shock the squares, then bury the gold, finally sneak in secrets in soaring psychedelic rhetoric.
Only gradually and sparingly does Miller reveal his intense romanticism, universalist mysticism and devout humanism. Ten pages into "Cancer", for example, he tells of a Jew in a lion cage without a gun trying to explain Spinoza to the lions, essentially a parable predicting the Holocaust.
Henry Miller (rt), Anais Nin and her husband, banker/artist/filmmaker Hugh Parker Guiler, circa 1932, Paris. Photo: unknownIn his attempt to take the piss out of all pieties—American, French, Nazism, capitalism, all “isms,” doctors, lawyers, priests—Jews and women were not exempt. Moreover, both Jews and women were coming of age AND under full public scrutiny in the 1920s. Miller's philosophy was that addressing them in a fusillade of irony and overexposure would prove much better for their equal treatment than pandering to them in exaggerated panegyrics, especially given Jews had "The Bible" and women had millennia of rose-tinted romantic verse. Nin and Rank, a Jew as well as a psychiatrist, must have agreed wholeheartedly, given they were essentially Miller's partners in "Cancer".
"Hardly!" would harrumph Kate Millett. In her well-known “Sexual Politics” (1970), Millett examines and excoriates Miller's many seeming or actual misogynist passages, but fails to note or perhaps notice that his first book was edited and published by Nin, whom Millett herself considered the first truly feminist author. She also says nothing about the rather naive view women had of themselves, after their century of prodigious novel writing and reading and even more-elevated-than-normal romanticism. In this light, Miller's swarm of “cunts” and “fuckings” are largely a necessary defrocking of the lily-white, prudish view of women, freeing them up to be as animalistic and base as men—full equality—in a sense paralleling the sentiment behind the use of the word "bitch", now so popular among edgy women.
Upstanding, middle class and extremely straight women were powerful in the home, as Miller well knew from his mother, and in the streets, as the suffragettes proved by pushing through prohibition—their signature legislation to control men—a year before they obtained the actual vote in 1920. Ironically, that fantastic matriarchal achievement brought a wave of female drinkers and radical freethinkers.
But before Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe and Dorothy Parker can-opened modern art and ideas to a female avant-garde and sex positiveness, most establishment women were not prepared to discuss the widespread flapper phenomena, driven by women fleeing the farm to have fun, which often included fucking, at least according to Miller, who was there. My grandmother, the educated sister of an American poet famous in the '20s, probably would not have been able to wrap her head around the flappers and their enthusiasm for drink, dance and sex, let alone write about it.
Miller, meanwhile, wrote that book, which is precisely what endeared him to Nin. Indeed, we visit a completely contemporary Swinging '20s through his "Tropic of Capricorn" (1938) and "The Rosy Crucifixion" (“Nexus”, “Sexus” and “Plexus”, 1949-59), so-called due to the eviscerating wounds inflicted by his proclivity for love.
Nor does Millett mention the feminine idyll Miller suggests in exchange. Aside from the trickster goddess June or gold-hearted Parisian prostitute, there’s the Greek peasant “monster with six toes.”
Henry Miller, circa 1948, New York City. Photo: Gilles Nadeau“That she was ugly I could not deny, but... hers was the sort which instead of repelling attracts. To begin with she was strong, sinewy, vital, an animal endowed with a human soul and with indisputable sexual powers… Her eyes glowed like coals… her lips were blood red… Renoir would have found her beautiful; he would not have noticed the six toes nor the coarseness of her features. He would have followed the rippling flesh, the full globes of her teats, the easy, swaying stance, the superabundant strength of her arms… He would have caught the animal lust, the ardor unquenchable, the fire in the guts, the tenacity of the tigress, the hunger, the rapacity, the all-devouring appetite of the oversexed female who is not wanted because she has an extra toe.” (That was from “The Colossus of Maroussi”, often considered his best book, given its thru story and classical embellishments, about his time in Greece.)
Three other elephantine issues appear to go unnoticed by Elaine Blair (no relation to this author). Obviously, the genders are identical in every aspect EXCEPT sex, where they have alternative, sometimes opposing, perspectives as well as equipment. Hence, one is an outie, the other an innie. One carries the child and may legitimately worry where the milk money will come from; the other may be pregnant with a novel they think is going to change the world—AUTOMATICALLY causing tension, regardless of misogyny.
Secondly, Miller is a no-holds barred satirist, surrealist and revolutionary, as befits a sophisticated soul suffering through severe depressions, wars and societal dislocation. But he is also an irrepressible optimist, providing the basis for his uniquely American outlook. "Ever merry and bright," was Miller's impoverished, Paris-days' motto, even as his French friends ran home to lunch with mama or to descend into a suicidal funk.
Thirdly, while there is plenty of porn and insult to go around, Miller uses it to accentuate his massive mental leaps, from crotch-level to our most advanced aspirations, which he often makes in a single sentence, sometimes turning an attack redemptive in the final clause with a back-handed compliment. Challenging them to decode the push from the pull, Miller enfranchises his readers to think for themselves, not only as literate citizens, who are also fully sensuous, but self-made autodidacts, now entitled to critique all of civilization!
As is well known, for civilization and its classical canon to remain relevant, if not vibrant, let alone cutting edge, it must be reinterpreted and updated.
Miller dropped out of City College of New York after one semester because it interrupted his voracious inhaling of Western civilization, eastern philosophy, fine art, literature and extensive esoteria, in what was then becoming the center of the West, Manhattan. Almost everything that interested him, Miller jammed into his books, making his oeuvre of over two dozen texts essentially Enlightened Civ 101, albeit as viewed by the person in the street, not a pompous, over-educated asshole.
Miller and Nin, at the Villa Borghes which Nin rented so Miller could finish 'Cancer in the Tropics', circa 1933. Photo: unknownIndeed, his “Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere”, also from “The Cosmological Eye”, published just before European civilization was butchered by Uncle Adolf’s minions, provides a prophetic warning to the myopic artists as well as politicians and PhDs.
“Now, my dear fellows, my dear Belgian, Swedish, Japanese, Dutch, British, French, American, Rhodesian, Arthurian, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthalian Surrealists, now is the time to grab hold of that most wonderful prehensile tail, which has been dragging in the mud for countless centuries. Get hold of it, if you can, and swing for your lives! It’s one chance out of a million, and I wish you luck, you poor bleeding bastards.”
Famously friendly with average folk, Miller stood in fierce opposition to all authority, an artistic necessity he learned while being ground down on the streets of New York, where he rode his bike everywhere, supported the black socialist leader Hubert Harrison, played piano at parties and honed to a razor’s edge his notorious gift of gab. After graduating from Grifting 101 with June, he perfected the art in Paris and Greece, to which he escaped just months before Germany invaded Poland.
He landed in Big Sur, California, where he lived off his watercolors, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, in a cabin gifted by a female fan. Even in California, Miller was known for taking down liberal sacred cows, from Norman Mailer, who wrote a worshipful Miller biography, to Jerry Brown, who was immediately told off for being a politician, when he dropped by Miller's fancy new digs in an upper-crust neighborhood of Los Angeles.
He acquired that bourgeois palace, and transitioned to it seamlessly at 70, shortly after "Cancer"'s liberation from censorship earned him his first real royalty check: hundreds of thousands of dollars! At dinners there, his favorite hobby was identifying someone with a strong, sacrosanct position and working the conversation around to contradict it.
If Blair took the time to close read Miller, she would have found a master of the mellifluous flow, a weaver of multidimensional, sometimes contradictory, worldviews, ranging from radically-open autobiography to insightful critiques or fantastically freewheeling ruminations on love, art, death, writer difficulties, politics and, last but not least, the sex obsession shared by all classes and races as well as genders—but barely illuminated by literature until Miller and Joyce.
Isn’t Miller merely reporting the facts, since men do think and talk just as he writes? Don’t women want to know what men actually think, instead of you’re-a-goddess whitewashes, to understand them better? And don't we—women as well as men, middle class as well as bohemian artists and liberated feminists—have to accept that many women thoroughly enjoy sex in all its aspects, including talk? In point of fact, dirty talk facilitates our ability to repurpose prudish, Protestant, patriarchal gender views to female fetish, fantasy and perversion.
Miller at his work desk, in a cabin in the California wilderness, Partington Ridge, Big Sur, circa 1955. Photo: unknownBy the same token, Miller had issues with women. Each of his five marriages only lasted around eight years. His other-gender understanding was tainted by being born in the 19th century to an overbearing mother, who once doused him in his bed with a bucket of water for laziness. Then there was the youthful homosexuality and truly Swinging '20s, not to forget the artist's obligation to break with society, or his extensive whoring, as well as his dream of reinventing a romanticism wild enough to inspire a new, very jaded and injured generation, powered solely by abstract exploration, without resorting to drugs, drink or mystical balderdash.
“Cancer in the Tropics” is over-the-top satire, cubism come to printed life, a multi-front attack on pretension and fake morality in iambic pentameter so tight it translates perfectly to punk, as this author proved in his song “The Happiest Man Alive”. A punk-folk rendition of the first two pages “Cancer”, it was debuted by The Doilies at Big Sur’s Henry Miller Library in 2001, three weeks before 9/11.
In fact, Blair's review quotes almost half of “Cancer”’s revolutionary opener and almost nothing else of Miller’s many books, suggesting that she, too, recognizes—along with Nin, Rank, Eliot, Orwell and many others in the ‘30s, as well as today, like John Burnside—it was a critical call to arms and consciousness, arguably one of the most important books in the evolution of writing, a modern, democratic “Bible”, bursting with actual reality and daily life.
Sure Gertrude Stein, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Joyce had begun dismantling the novel by the time "Cancer" came out. But she’s archaic and hard to read; he’s a fascist misanthrope; and Joyce, while wild, funny and profound, as well as sexual, feels 19th century.
One need only glance at “A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller” (1987), or “Nexus”, when June and her girlfriend sneak out of the house to board a ship to France—breaking his heart—or when Miller sneaks up a fire escape, peaks through a window and sees them shooting up coke, probably—which dismembers his worldview—to realize Miller is not a simplistic, female-fearing hater.
He adored women, if perhaps too much.
I wonder about the pleasure experienced by women, Miller remarks somewhere in the "Cancer"s or "The Trilogy". Is it keener, different, in what way? This suggests a concern, if not for her full, every-wrinkle-in-your-cunt-reamed-out satisfaction, but at least the more intense aspects of her feelings.
In point of fact, “[s]ex is a drop in the bucket when you consider the whole of a relationship," Miller told Hoki Tokuda, the Japanese-born singer-musician 45 years his junior, who became his fifth wife (see interview with her). "Some of the greatest love affairs in history were completely devoid of sex. I’ve found that my relationships with women that didn’t include sex were just as gratifying as the ones where sex was the main course."
Miller and his fifth wife, musician Hoki Tokuda, when he was about 80 and she 35. Photo: unknownUnfortunately, Blair doesn’t mention Tokuda or Nin, except to admit she financed “Cancer” (perhaps because the NY Review of Books also recently panned her); nor Erica Jong’s immense Miller inheritance in “Fear of Flying” (1973); or the adoration of many other authors, from Kerouac and Ferlinghetti (whose book title “Coney Island of the Mind” is a Miller quote) to Philip Roth and Mailer; and, of course, astounded readers worldwide, like John Burnside.
It’s a complex intellectual dialectic, one well worth teasing out. While Blair adds some insight, she fails to recognize the massive structural columns, built almost entirely by Miller, holding up the modern novel.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Mar 26, 2019 - 10:36 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Henry Miller, photographed by famous indie photographer and close friend Gilberte Brassai, 1932, Paris. Photo: G. BrassaiI WAS HEART WARMED TO READ ELAINE
Blair’s Henry Miller piece in a recent New York Review of Books (2/21/19 issue). Both her review of “On Henry Miller: Or, How to be an Anarchist”, and the book itself, by Scottish author John Burnside, are laudable attempts to decipher Miller, which is critical today.
Indeed, Miller’s survival as a pioneer modern novelist is now in doubt, as Blair quips in her opening line: “Pity John Burnside. It’s not the best time to publish an appreciation and defense of Henry Miller.”
In fact, today’s triggered-warned modernists may "cancel" Miller, as the saying goes, voluntarily reinstating the state censorship imposed on “Tropic of Cancer” (1934), and almost all of his books until 1961. That was when William Burroughs’s legal push to publish his own supposedly-pornographic “Naked Lunch” (1959) also freed “Cancer”, which became an overnight bestseller for Grove Press.
Ironically, young people viewing so much pornography on line, hypocrisy in politics and absence of romance in relationships desperately need an underworld expert to guide them through the contradictory physical plane to a functional understanding of experience and ideas, what could be called full freedom of thought, or Burnside’s anarchist ideal, or “Men’s Lib”, as Blair titles her piece.
Little does Blair realize: it is hardly men only who will be liberated. Indeed, Miller is linguistic LSD. His writing radically expanded literature, a leading edge of consciousness, opening it to the quotidian life, dirty little secrets, acrobatic slaloms through semantics and radical big pictures previously excluded from books.
Sure, some pages of “Tropic of Cancer” scan as misogynist-pig drivel, but “I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt,” on page two, is hardly “something an angry gamer might have tweeted to Brianna Wu, the video game developer who received numerous threats after criticizing the sexist nature of her industry,” as Blair insists.
It was a joke—“After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like,” Miller continues—not to mention great writing and seminal sexting.
This author, Doniphan Blair, presents on Henry Miller's controversial ideas, April 13th, 2019, Big Sur, California. image: D.BlairNin found Miller’s earthy honesty, flights of fancy and overall philosophy so refreshing, brilliant and essential, she gave him her heart as well as her body, her typewriter AND her banker husband's money, first to rent a decent room, where he could finish “Cancer”, and then to publish it. She also wrote the forward and helped edit. Although she did edit their affair out of her own ground-breaking diaries published in1966, which Miller endorsed enthusiastically in his only uncensored early book, “The Cosmological Eye” (1939), and they decided not to marry, they remained life-long friends and collaborators.
As it happened, Nin was also intimate with June Mansfield, Henry's second wife, Antonin Artaud, the theater pioneer, and Otto Rank, the famed psychiatrist (Freud’s right-hand-man), whom she hit up for some of the funds for publishing “Cancer”, which suggests a community symphony of love, elevated vision and advanced cultural activism.
Such cross-gender, -ethnic and -profession cooperation was nothing new to Miller. Indeed, his second wife June, a Jewish American Princess as well as gorgeous genius grifter, since she was estranged from her wealthy family, had already seduced a man to finance an early, unpublished Miller tome. It was called “Moloch” and was about an anti-Semite, a standard theme for Miller, as it happens. Mansfield also pushed him to find his iconoclastic voice.
And break everything he does.
If Miller’s misogyny seems shocking, try his anti-Semitism. Not only are June and Tania Jewish (in the book, the actual Nin wasn’t), so are most of the characters in "Cancer", including the protagonist’s closest friends, who were based on Miller’s best buds Michael Fraenkel and Alfred Perles. “[A]lmost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse,” Miller writes, while he himself is “as ugly as a Jew. And who hates the Jew more than the Jew.” Miller often attacks himself, if not first, then foremost and in the most extreme terms.
While many writers of Miller’s day—Joyce, Gide, Orwell, Hemingway, Kafka—addressed the complex Jewish question glancingly, Miller tackles it straight up on page three of "Cancer", using reverse psychology and his patented technique: first shock the squares, then bury the gold, finally sneak in secrets in soaring psychedelic rhetoric.
Only gradually and sparingly does Miller reveal his intense romanticism, universalist mysticism and devout humanism. Ten pages into "Cancer", for example, he tells of a Jew in a lion cage without a gun trying to explain Spinoza to the lions, essentially a parable predicting the Holocaust.
Henry Miller (rt), Anais Nin and her husband, banker/artist/filmmaker Hugh Parker Guiler, circa 1932, Paris. Photo: unknown"Hardly!" would harrumph Kate Millett. In her well-known “Sexual Politics” (1970), Millett examines and excoriates Miller's many seeming or actual misogynist passages, but fails to note or perhaps notice that his first book was edited and published by Nin, whom Millett herself considered the first truly feminist author. She also says nothing about the rather naive view women had of themselves, after their century of prodigious novel writing and reading and even more-elevated-than-normal romanticism. In this light, Miller's swarm of “cunts” and “fuckings” are largely a necessary defrocking of the lily-white, prudish view of women, freeing them up to be as animalistic and base as men—full equality—in a sense paralleling the sentiment behind the use of the word "bitch", now so popular among edgy women.
Upstanding, middle class and extremely straight women were powerful in the home, as Miller well knew from his mother, and in the streets, as the suffragettes proved by pushing through prohibition—their signature legislation to control men—a year before they obtained the actual vote in 1920. Ironically, that fantastic matriarchal achievement brought a wave of female drinkers and radical freethinkers.
But before Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe and Dorothy Parker can-opened modern art and ideas to a female avant-garde and sex positiveness, most establishment women were not prepared to discuss the widespread flapper phenomena, driven by women fleeing the farm to have fun, which often included fucking, at least according to Miller, who was there. My grandmother, the educated sister of an American poet famous in the '20s, probably would not have been able to wrap her head around the flappers and their enthusiasm for drink, dance and sex, let alone write about it.
Miller, meanwhile, wrote that book, which is precisely what endeared him to Nin. Indeed, we visit a completely contemporary Swinging '20s through his "Tropic of Capricorn" (1938) and "The Rosy Crucifixion" (“Nexus”, “Sexus” and “Plexus”, 1949-59), so-called due to the eviscerating wounds inflicted by his proclivity for love.
Nor does Millett mention the feminine idyll Miller suggests in exchange. Aside from the trickster goddess June or gold-hearted Parisian prostitute, there’s the Greek peasant “monster with six toes.”
Henry Miller, circa 1948, New York City. Photo: Gilles NadeauThree other elephantine issues appear to go unnoticed by Elaine Blair (no relation to this author). Obviously, the genders are identical in every aspect EXCEPT sex, where they have alternative, sometimes opposing, perspectives as well as equipment. Hence, one is an outie, the other an innie. One carries the child and may legitimately worry where the milk money will come from; the other may be pregnant with a novel they think is going to change the world—AUTOMATICALLY causing tension, regardless of misogyny.
Secondly, Miller is a no-holds barred satirist, surrealist and revolutionary, as befits a sophisticated soul suffering through severe depressions, wars and societal dislocation. But he is also an irrepressible optimist, providing the basis for his uniquely American outlook. "Ever merry and bright," was Miller's impoverished, Paris-days' motto, even as his French friends ran home to lunch with mama or to descend into a suicidal funk.
Thirdly, while there is plenty of porn and insult to go around, Miller uses it to accentuate his massive mental leaps, from crotch-level to our most advanced aspirations, which he often makes in a single sentence, sometimes turning an attack redemptive in the final clause with a back-handed compliment. Challenging them to decode the push from the pull, Miller enfranchises his readers to think for themselves, not only as literate citizens, who are also fully sensuous, but self-made autodidacts, now entitled to critique all of civilization!
As is well known, for civilization and its classical canon to remain relevant, if not vibrant, let alone cutting edge, it must be reinterpreted and updated.
Miller dropped out of City College of New York after one semester because it interrupted his voracious inhaling of Western civilization, eastern philosophy, fine art, literature and extensive esoteria, in what was then becoming the center of the West, Manhattan. Almost everything that interested him, Miller jammed into his books, making his oeuvre of over two dozen texts essentially Enlightened Civ 101, albeit as viewed by the person in the street, not a pompous, over-educated asshole.
Miller and Nin, at the Villa Borghes which Nin rented so Miller could finish 'Cancer in the Tropics', circa 1933. Photo: unknown“Now, my dear fellows, my dear Belgian, Swedish, Japanese, Dutch, British, French, American, Rhodesian, Arthurian, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthalian Surrealists, now is the time to grab hold of that most wonderful prehensile tail, which has been dragging in the mud for countless centuries. Get hold of it, if you can, and swing for your lives! It’s one chance out of a million, and I wish you luck, you poor bleeding bastards.”
Famously friendly with average folk, Miller stood in fierce opposition to all authority, an artistic necessity he learned while being ground down on the streets of New York, where he rode his bike everywhere, supported the black socialist leader Hubert Harrison, played piano at parties and honed to a razor’s edge his notorious gift of gab. After graduating from Grifting 101 with June, he perfected the art in Paris and Greece, to which he escaped just months before Germany invaded Poland.
He landed in Big Sur, California, where he lived off his watercolors, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, in a cabin gifted by a female fan. Even in California, Miller was known for taking down liberal sacred cows, from Norman Mailer, who wrote a worshipful Miller biography, to Jerry Brown, who was immediately told off for being a politician, when he dropped by Miller's fancy new digs in an upper-crust neighborhood of Los Angeles.
He acquired that bourgeois palace, and transitioned to it seamlessly at 70, shortly after "Cancer"'s liberation from censorship earned him his first real royalty check: hundreds of thousands of dollars! At dinners there, his favorite hobby was identifying someone with a strong, sacrosanct position and working the conversation around to contradict it.
If Blair took the time to close read Miller, she would have found a master of the mellifluous flow, a weaver of multidimensional, sometimes contradictory, worldviews, ranging from radically-open autobiography to insightful critiques or fantastically freewheeling ruminations on love, art, death, writer difficulties, politics and, last but not least, the sex obsession shared by all classes and races as well as genders—but barely illuminated by literature until Miller and Joyce.
Isn’t Miller merely reporting the facts, since men do think and talk just as he writes? Don’t women want to know what men actually think, instead of you’re-a-goddess whitewashes, to understand them better? And don't we—women as well as men, middle class as well as bohemian artists and liberated feminists—have to accept that many women thoroughly enjoy sex in all its aspects, including talk? In point of fact, dirty talk facilitates our ability to repurpose prudish, Protestant, patriarchal gender views to female fetish, fantasy and perversion.
Miller at his work desk, in a cabin in the California wilderness, Partington Ridge, Big Sur, circa 1955. Photo: unknown“Cancer in the Tropics” is over-the-top satire, cubism come to printed life, a multi-front attack on pretension and fake morality in iambic pentameter so tight it translates perfectly to punk, as this author proved in his song “The Happiest Man Alive”. A punk-folk rendition of the first two pages “Cancer”, it was debuted by The Doilies at Big Sur’s Henry Miller Library in 2001, three weeks before 9/11.
In fact, Blair's review quotes almost half of “Cancer”’s revolutionary opener and almost nothing else of Miller’s many books, suggesting that she, too, recognizes—along with Nin, Rank, Eliot, Orwell and many others in the ‘30s, as well as today, like John Burnside—it was a critical call to arms and consciousness, arguably one of the most important books in the evolution of writing, a modern, democratic “Bible”, bursting with actual reality and daily life.
Sure Gertrude Stein, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Joyce had begun dismantling the novel by the time "Cancer" came out. But she’s archaic and hard to read; he’s a fascist misanthrope; and Joyce, while wild, funny and profound, as well as sexual, feels 19th century.
One need only glance at “A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller” (1987), or “Nexus”, when June and her girlfriend sneak out of the house to board a ship to France—breaking his heart—or when Miller sneaks up a fire escape, peaks through a window and sees them shooting up coke, probably—which dismembers his worldview—to realize Miller is not a simplistic, female-fearing hater.
He adored women, if perhaps too much.
I wonder about the pleasure experienced by women, Miller remarks somewhere in the "Cancer"s or "The Trilogy". Is it keener, different, in what way? This suggests a concern, if not for her full, every-wrinkle-in-your-cunt-reamed-out satisfaction, but at least the more intense aspects of her feelings.
In point of fact, “[s]ex is a drop in the bucket when you consider the whole of a relationship," Miller told Hoki Tokuda, the Japanese-born singer-musician 45 years his junior, who became his fifth wife (see interview with her). "Some of the greatest love affairs in history were completely devoid of sex. I’ve found that my relationships with women that didn’t include sex were just as gratifying as the ones where sex was the main course."
Miller and his fifth wife, musician Hoki Tokuda, when he was about 80 and she 35. Photo: unknownIt’s a complex intellectual dialectic, one well worth teasing out. While Blair adds some insight, she fails to recognize the massive structural columns, built almost entirely by Miller, holding up the modern novel.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Mar 26, 2019 - 10:36 PM
