solitude is the most envied pleasure of all. “A sort of life” it may be, but vastly preferable to the kind of empty busy-ness that characterizes most people’s lives.
Miller was a happy man (for this he was and is also hated). He was generous and free of envy. Though he sometimes boasts of idleness in his books (as he boasts of lechery), he was, in truth, never idle. He was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation—and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.
So we come to the paradox of biography—especially the biography of a writer who amply chronicled his own life in many forms. (“Biography is one of the new terrors of death,” said Dr. John Arbuthnot, the poet Alexander Pope’s friend. And in 1891, in his The Critic as Artist , Oscar Wilde wrote, “Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the autobiography.”) Who can chart the events in a person’s life with accuracy and without distortion? No one. Not even the person himself. That is why biographies must be rewritten for every age, for every new wrinkle in the Zeitgeist. That is why biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
With a writer who has already mined his own life in letters, in novels, in paintings, and in films, the biographical problem becomes even more vexing. Even the most seemingly autobiographical writer changes, heightens, and rearranges “fact” to make his fictions. It is naive to read his stories literally, but it is equally unsatisfactory to read them as if they had no connection whatsoever to his life.
I hope I can make peace with all these paradoxes by writing about Henry Miller in the same spirit that he first wrote to me in 1974—with complete candor and no hidden agenda. It will not be the last word on Henry Miller, but the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
Chapter 3
Just a Brooklyn Boy
I was meant to be the sort of individual that … [is] born on the 25th day of December … and so was Jesus Christ…. But due to the fact that my mother had a clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out under another configuration…. Even my mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. “Always dragging behind like a cow’s tail”—that’s how she characterized me. But is it my fault that she held me inside her until the hour had passed?
— HENRY MILLER, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
A SSUMING THAT YOU KNOW as little about Henry Miller as I did when I first heard from him in 1974, I am going to give you the crash course in Miller that I wish someone had given me. This will not be a true biography, for several voluminous biographies of Miller have appeared in the last few years (and new information is constantly emerging as Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries are released), but a writer’s take on another writer, with just enough detail to prepare you to read (or reread) Miller with greater understanding.
Perhaps you are like me when I first heard from Henry: you’ve read only Tropic of Cancer , and maybe not even the whole book. It’s possible you only flipped through for the “good parts.” In Henry’s case, this can be totally misleading. I want to give you an overview of Henry’s life so that you can read his books with pleasure and grapple with the issues they raise.
Notwithstanding Henry’s protestations about not wanting a biography or a biographer, he seems always to have been documenting his own life, leaving the most minutely detailed histories in letters. This antlike attention to detail belies his feigned
Miller was a happy man (for this he was and is also hated). He was generous and free of envy. Though he sometimes boasts of idleness in his books (as he boasts of lechery), he was, in truth, never idle. He was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation—and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.
So we come to the paradox of biography—especially the biography of a writer who amply chronicled his own life in many forms. (“Biography is one of the new terrors of death,” said Dr. John Arbuthnot, the poet Alexander Pope’s friend. And in 1891, in his The Critic as Artist , Oscar Wilde wrote, “Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the autobiography.”) Who can chart the events in a person’s life with accuracy and without distortion? No one. Not even the person himself. That is why biographies must be rewritten for every age, for every new wrinkle in the Zeitgeist. That is why biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
With a writer who has already mined his own life in letters, in novels, in paintings, and in films, the biographical problem becomes even more vexing. Even the most seemingly autobiographical writer changes, heightens, and rearranges “fact” to make his fictions. It is naive to read his stories literally, but it is equally unsatisfactory to read them as if they had no connection whatsoever to his life.
I hope I can make peace with all these paradoxes by writing about Henry Miller in the same spirit that he first wrote to me in 1974—with complete candor and no hidden agenda. It will not be the last word on Henry Miller, but the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
Chapter 3
Just a Brooklyn Boy
I was meant to be the sort of individual that … [is] born on the 25th day of December … and so was Jesus Christ…. But due to the fact that my mother had a clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out under another configuration…. Even my mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. “Always dragging behind like a cow’s tail”—that’s how she characterized me. But is it my fault that she held me inside her until the hour had passed?
— HENRY MILLER, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
A SSUMING THAT YOU KNOW as little about Henry Miller as I did when I first heard from him in 1974, I am going to give you the crash course in Miller that I wish someone had given me. This will not be a true biography, for several voluminous biographies of Miller have appeared in the last few years (and new information is constantly emerging as Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries are released), but a writer’s take on another writer, with just enough detail to prepare you to read (or reread) Miller with greater understanding.
Perhaps you are like me when I first heard from Henry: you’ve read only Tropic of Cancer , and maybe not even the whole book. It’s possible you only flipped through for the “good parts.” In Henry’s case, this can be totally misleading. I want to give you an overview of Henry’s life so that you can read his books with pleasure and grapple with the issues they raise.
Notwithstanding Henry’s protestations about not wanting a biography or a biographer, he seems always to have been documenting his own life, leaving the most minutely detailed histories in letters. This antlike attention to detail belies his feigned
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