From the Elephant's Back (22 page)

The Happy Rock

1945

HENRY MILLER
is still more or less unknown to the general public of England and America. It is not entirely his fault in spite of the fact that the proportion of so-called “unprintable” words employed in the construction of his three great books (
Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn
) is fairly high.
[1]
It is, in fact, due entirely to the power and vehemence of his purely descriptive writing that he is as well known as he is. The abashed literary gents of the thirties who turned in horror from brutal descriptions of Parisian brothel life in
Tropic of Cancer
suddenly found themselves impaled upon passages of miraculous prose about subjects dearer to them—Matisse, Proust, the Seine: flights of prose which seemed incontestably the work of a genius. Thus it is that Miller has got two distinct publics—those who deplore his Brooklyn predilections in subject but feel that he cannot be ignored without loss of literary face; and those few who can see him in the round as a figure in American literature who steps straight up beside Whitman and Melville.
[2]
Certainly there is no doubt that this towering, shapeless, sometimes comic figure completely overtops the glazed reflections cast by those waxworks of contemporary American fiction—Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner.
[3]
In Miller you have someone who has crossed the dividing line between art and
kitsch
once and for all.

Tropic of Cancer
first came into my hands in 1938 in the island of Corfu.
[4]
It was not a novel. It was not completely an autobiography. It was a piece of self-evisceration written in the purest romance vein.

Formally the book was a chaos. (“Chaos is the score on which reality is written,”
[5]
says the author somewhere in it). It contained everything, speculations, soliloquies, short stories, strings of images, flights of fancy. It was chaotic in the way that
Leaves of Grass
[6]
is chaotic: it dramatised and ranted; it was cold blooded and terrifying and upsetting. It defied every rule of taste and construction. It completely came off. It rang like a bell in every line.

For over a year I corresponded with Henry Miller.
[7]
His letters were boisterous, friendly, shy, and warming all at once. They were the letters of a man at once self-possessed and timid: they were puzzling. They were not the letters of an Educationed European. He described himself on various occasions as “just a Brooklyn boy,” “Someone who had gone off the gold standard of Literature” and “Something quite other—a Patagonian, say.”
[8]
He was something quite new to me at all events—
genus epileptoid
.
[9]

It is always difficult to imagine a writer writing in English who has no correspondence with English literature. Miller has never read Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Pope, Swift, etc. They do not form, as they do with most writers, a kind of invisible chorus in the subconscious—a stratum of derived experience. Poetry bores Miller: what he reads and enjoys above all things is drama based on the anomalies of human behaviour. His deepest literary influences were always translations of foreigners, Dostoevsky above all, Knut Hamsun, Tchekov, Strindberg.
[10]
And characteristically the form of literature he most cherishes is autobiography.

Born of poor parents in Brooklyn, New York, he began writing late in life: “at the point of madness,” he says in a letter. To be rich in emotion and experience, and to have no centre focus for self-expression, is the common lot of writers when they begin. But to be already a grown man, “exhausted by death of many selves,” and undertake a task of self expression is far more difficult. Miller began to write badly—but so badly that it is impossible to find any trace of the published Miller in his first two manuscripts.
[11]
Side by side with his search for himself, his technical deficiencies sent him in search of models: Melville and Whitman seemed to be the answer—though an incomplete answer. He began reading extensively and along haphazard lines: a course in books on history and comparative religion threw up whole pieces—Atlantean chunks like continents—of new ideas: Buddhism, Nietzsche, Confucius, Nostradamus, Elie Faure, Spengler, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce.
[12]
There was little order and shape to this vegetable accretion of knowledge. He read like a hungry animal. Science promised but bored. Psychology suddenly came in view with Freud, Bleuler, Jung, Rank;
[13]
and then one day in Paris he came across Dadaism and Breton's manifestoes. He was enslaved: Surrealism seemed to him to offer a means of breaking out of this hypnotic autism.
[14]
Yet even here he did not succumb because he realised that this barren mechanistic attitude to the sub-conscious,
[15]
while it gave one a superb critical apparatus, could not teach one to write about the things that mattered—other human beings, death, marriage, sex. He never joined the movement, but admired it, and still admires it, from a distance.
[16]

Then one day life provided the key. A personal
chagrin
of some proportions drove him into a book before he was quite ready for it. Nothing was planned. He walked into
Tropic of Cancer
as a man might walk into a darkened operating theatre. The voice he heard talking was his own personal voice, without overtone or affectation. He began to talk, rapidly and confidently, to himself on paper—he began to talk about his own life and friends with complete candour and naturalness. The result was no self-confession or revelation; the result, strangely enough, was a swollen manuscript in which the world around him was reproduced in a totally unclassical, unromantic, un-European way. It was the voice of one of the Dead End Kids,
[17]
bringing his news of current affairs to the camp-fire. It was the voice of the Patagonian.

To read
Tropic of Cancer
is to understand how shockingly romantic all European writing after Rousseau has become. In Miller's book all the passions are there, stripped of their romantic envelope; it was not a book due to puritanical shock. (The French would say “a great Catholic book.”) It was the book of someone whose fidelity to himself had conquered the narrow confines in which we normally hem the range of subjects permissible to art. It was healthy where Céline and Lawrence were sick.
[18]
It corroded and blistered where Joyce merely divagated and discharged. Into this portmanteau of confused stories, images, and essays Miller poured the better self of a great man. At the time he wrote this book he was all but starving in Paris. Published by the Obelisk Press,
[19]
it at first passed unnoticed—but not for long. It was too urgent a voice not to catch the ears of those who were alert. Critics wrote about it. Writers began to visit the little studio in Villa Seurat where Miller was living.

Critics should be interested in him, for there is much to pull to pieces—much bad writing and talking; there is too, a complete lack of imposed form. But there is something else in place of it—the organic form which one finds in all documents of the heart. In Miller's books the author has taken himself as the central character, and he is engaged in rewriting his own life in terms of fiction.
[20]
In every story, in every aside or soliloquy, it is Henry Miller who stands personally responsible for the success or failure of the work.

He revolves on a stage set by himself; and pictures the world as he sees it, through the soft focus of his marvellous gift for creative prose. It is not, in a sense, “art” after all: his books are combed out as if they were written by the Mississippi river, and as if Miller himself had found and preserved these huge weather-beaten rocks of writing among the other treasures of his life, books, water-colours, love letters, train tickets. He reveals himself so completely that he is completely disguised in this giant grape-vine—his life and times. If anywhere the books fail, it is with the failings of Miller the man: the failings, that is, are not those of a work of art as something detached from the author. But they constitute something new in the art of our times: autobiography conceived in terms of fiction, with a living cast, and with the author in the title role. Apart from the three great books in the saga Miller has indulged in endless peripheral activities—letters to friends, comic articles, essays.

Wherein do Miller's books differ from the other great books of the last twenty years? Think of Proust, of Joyce, of Huxley; their art seems to spring out of non-participation. There is, underneath the dead faecal flow, a refusal somehow to surrender to life. Miller is nearer to Lawrence than to anyone else; but in him we find none of the puritan sensitiveness, the recoil, which we find in the uneven author of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
[21]
—surely a most disgusting book
because
it is so painfully romantic. In Miller the process is reversed; he goes out so completely into life that he tends to deform it by his excessive love. He can teach us to see the miraculous in the obscene. (Had I been an Englishman and a critic I should have written “
even
the obscene.”)

He is not a psychologist but a dramatist; what excites him is the gesture, the mood, the ambience of a person or a place. He does not inform. He reveals.

What is the quality which divides the lesser work of art from the greater? Surely the degree of metaphysical anxiety and incertitude: the germ of discontent, the torment. In Miller you have a writer with the equipment of a romantic and the temperament of an early Church Father; side by side with the buffoonery and laughter that is an undertone of this mystical discontent and fear. His malady is an essentially religious one.

His English critics (I have not read the American) have done him a disservice in being impertinent about his lack of high purpose and moral uplift. The most puerile, George Orwell,
[22]
finds him the product of a certain social milieu which is on the point of being swept away. These gas-light reformers, finding no mention in his work of better plumbing for the new world have given him up as socially uninteresting; and in the light of their impertinence you would think that poor Henry Miller was a moribund documentary writer, whose work would date with its epoch—just as Huxley's
Antic Hay
[23]
and the amusing Sitwelliana
[24]
of the twenties has done. I cannot share this opinion. For me,
Tropic of Cancer
stands beside
Moby Dick
.

“Henry Miller's attitude to sex”—what a portentous phrase! How indeed can one write about sex in English today without being (a) repulsive and fishy like Joyce or (b) repulsed and fruity like Lawrence?
[25]
Sex in Miller coruscates and roars; syphilis, tulips, sonnets, warm thighs, lavatories, carpets stiff with blood—the whole gamut is there; and how nice it is for once to dispense both with the puritans and with the pagans.

If Eliot
[26]
has got nearest to God, Miller has got farthest from man. When he strips he teases. And when he digs for water he finds it. Let us thank God for a writer who lacks (a) the common room attitude, (b) an interest in literature. Miller is not interested in obscenity. He is like Nelson.
[27]
He does not know what the word means. He simply refuses to neglect any manifestation of
life
which interests him—not even for Mudie's Circulating Libraries,
[28]
the Writer's Guild,
[29]
or English girls under twelve.

Everyone knows that the English and the Americans don't know how to make love; Miller, in his work, lops away the whole superstructure supporting the great Romantic Lie of the West. He puts this twentieth-century torment properly in its place—so that the lovers in his books are connected purely and directly to each other below the belt. They do not depend on artificial and conventional attitudes of mind when they make love; they do it with real passion and cruelty. A course in him would turn us all from Stopes to Stoats
[30]
—surely an admirable transformation.

There is very little whining in Miller. He has no “Here we go round the prickly pear” complex. He roars like the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, until
Ars Gratia Artis
[31]
appears round his head with a laurel wreath.

If he is against anything it is the world that Andy Hardy
[32]
stands for—the world of the lowest common denominator which is being so brilliantly explored by our trite reformers on both sides of the Atlantic. The world of Nature's Middle Man, where security and inanity link arms. The world which would like to abolish daring and the internal adventure. The world which we live in.

What sort of world does he want? The question is as empty as it is stupid. Like all great artists he wants a world where art would become unnecessary; he wants a New Jerusalem.
[33]
But failing that (and we will go on failing to build our New Jerusalems, unless our technique changes radically) he is determined to like the world as it is—with its terrors, obscenities, murders, and loves: the world which can only be changed when there are a few more Henry Millers to spend their love upon it. If “Know Thyself”
[34]
is a moral injunction, then I think we may call Henry Miller a moralist. Art demands a great degree of cowardice.

Miller is the only contemporary I have met or read who is really enjoying himself—and it seems to us an unpleasant phenomenon. He himself once described History in a letter to me as “an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.”
[35]
I am sure that History itself will have a kinder description of him and his work.