"All geniuses are leeches...They feed from the same source—the blood of life."
—Henry Miller, SEXUS.

HENRY VALENTINE MILLER: surrealist poet of TROPIC OF CANCER; American Dadaist of BLACK SPRING; visionary of THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI; pornographer of SEXUS and QUIET DAYS IN CLICHY; metaphysician of BIG SUR AND THE ORANGES OF HIERONYMOUS BOSCH; cosmological man, boy from Brooklyn's 14th Ward...As American writer Miller was sui generis. His work has little affinity with the work of his contemporaries on the American scene. To find a literary precursor to Miller a jump of nearly a century must be made—to Walt Whitman, poet of America's adolescence. Miller adopted the Whitmanic "I" and cultivated as well the yawping facility. Indeed, certain lines of TROPIC OF CANCER read like paraphrases of Whitman's "Song of Myself." Miller looked to Walt and Walt's contemporaries Emerson and Thoreau as literary godfathers, basing literary and aesthetic judgements with these forebears in mind.

Miller's spiritual philosophy, developed in post-TROPICS phase, owes a debt to Emerson's ideas on an "Over-Soul" as well as the eastern religious coloring of Emerson's transcendentalism. Miller's political anarchism is based on Thoreau's example of civil disobedience and disengagement. The transcendentalists' championing of John Brown led Miller to likewise glorify the mad man of Pottawatomie Creek whose belief in egalitarianism was clearly paternalistic and actions vain-glorious rather than idealistic. Nearly devoid of critical sense regarding his own work, Miller seems to have swallowed the transcendentalist line—their brand of arm-chair revolution, anyway—hook and sinker. A gustatory act that adds a taint of the rediculous to Miller's latter-day Saint stance, and makes some of his outre pronouncements seem naive—if not disingenuous—as well as potentially dangerous.

Henry Miller was born in the Yorkville section of Manhattan in 1891; moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn's 14th Ward the following year. His Socialist paternal Grandfather (his "Grosspapa') was originally from Bavaria; his maternal Grandfather, a boss tailor, from Prussia. Miller's father, Heinrich, also a tailor, owned his own shop, like the Grandfather. The Miller's were Protestants and sporadic churchgoers. Miller Frau stayed at home and took care of young Henry and his retarded sister Lauretta, born 1895. Henry Junior, "Hen" to some of his friends, played the piano, and dreamed of becoming a musician or else the pilot of a ship. He was good enough at the piano to give lessons in his adolescence. Meanwhile, he played in the streets and matriculated at P.S. 85.

n 1900 the Millers moved to Bushwick and "the street of early sorrows," as Miller called it (Decateur Avenue). The move made to escape the influx of immigrants, eastern European Jews and Italians into Williamsburg at turn of the century. Miller's anti-Semitism, which he admitted to, is partly a reaction to the influx of Jews which changed the character of the Williamsburg neighborhood, a place Miller cherished, at least in memory, and presented, in his writing, as a sort of enchanted kingdom. Miller's anti-Semitism was an intellectual stance, open to change—not the kind of tribal hatred that inspires the pogrom. Though his mother loathed Jews, Henry was free of her ingained prejudice. Also, the usage, in Miller's work, of "nigger," "darkie," "heinie," "mick," "Wop," and other derogatory terms, does not make him a racist—he was not a racist—but a product of his age, the terms common coin of the era in which Miller came of age.

So attached was Henry to the old neighborhood, he attended Eastern District High School in Williamsburg though a resident of Bushwick. An "A" student, he was offered a scholarship to Cornell but chose not to attend. He did enroll at City College of New York (CCNY) but left after six weeks. 18 years old at the time, he was involved with a 37 year old divorcee named Pauline Couteau (who had a son Henry's age). In BLACK SPRING, the Miller persona, "I" of the book, tells of seeking his mother's permission to marry this older woman. The mother's reaction, the narrator relates, was to go after him with a bread knife.

The affair between Miller and Pauline lasted 3 years. In the midst of those years Miller took a trip out west, working odd jobs until he reached the coast where, he claimed*, to have met and spoken with Emma Goldman. Returning east, Henry went to work in the tailor shop for his father. He also continued to give piano lessons and during one such lesson, met the woman who became his first wife.

Henry Miller and Beatrice Wickens married in 1917 (so Miller could avoid the draft) and produced a daughter in 1919. The next year Henry landed his first responsible job: office manager for Western Union, the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of TROPIC OF CANCER (elsewhere, Cosmodemaniacal Telegraph Company and Cosmodemonic Cocksucking Corporation).

First of Miller's three known apprentice novels, CLIPPED WINGS, was written in 1922, just before his initial meeting with June Mansfield ("Mona" of Miller's books). The meeting proved momentous for both. Though perhaps a gold-digger and a borderline personality, June made "Henry Miller," the persona of the TROPICS, BLACK SPRING, and THE ROSY CRUCIFIXION, possible. Her belief in Miller's genius came at a crucial time in his life. However, after Miller found another who could make more possible (Anais Nin) he abandoned June as he earlier abandoned Beatrice.

Henry consigned his first marriage to oblivion, and married June in 1924; he was 32, she 21. Three years later, having failed to make a go of it, he was back living with his parents in Bushwick (and calling himself "the ghost"). The 2nd apprentice novel, MOLOCH, was written in 1927. The next year, June and Henry, on money supplied by one of June's admirers, went to Paris. After some weeks in France and elsewhere, the couple returned to the U. S. and Miller finished his 3rd apprentice novel CRAZY COCK (using 3rd person narrative, not the Whitmanic "I").

In 1930 Miller headed to Europe, alone, with 10$ in his pocket. He arrived in London in February, and was in Paris in March when he encountered Alfred Perles (Carl of CANCER), a Chicago Tribune proofreader Miller had met during his '28 trip. Perles made room for Miller in his abode.* Shortly afterward, Miller met an American lawyer, Dick Osborn (Fillmore of CANCER), who invited Miller to stay in his apartment. Osborn knew Anais Nin's husband, banker Hugo Guiler, and it was through Osborn/Guiler that Miller met Nin.

Impressed by Miller and the fragments of CANCER she was shown, Anais took Miller on as cause, and, eventually, as lover. Anais provided goods, financial and physical, to ensure Miller continued with what he called his "Paris book." When June arrived in '31, Nin, a sexual omnivore who slept with her father, and her analyst, took on the bisexual June as well. June, however, was not in top shape—was bordering on the edge of the breakdown that eventually landed her in an asylum—and departed after a stay of some months.

Leaving Osborn's hospitality, Miller returned to Perles room, and when that sit evaporated, moved to the studio of Michael Fraenkel in the Villa Seurat. Fraenkel and the American poet Walter Lowenfels proselytized for a sort of "death school" philosophy—death or awareness of death, as the greatest single life force, a "philosophy" that greatly influenced Miller who became, in his work, a kind of disciple of the "school."

Meanwhile, Miller landed a job, through Perles, as proofreader on the Paris-Chicago Tribune; he also had a story published—"Mlle Claude"—in the Paris magazine "New Review."

CANCER was finished in 1933 and published, in English, by the Obelisk Press, the printing costs (5000 francs) underwritten by Anais Nin. BLACK SPRING followed, published in '36, and CAPRICORN, third of what is considered a trilogy, in 1939.

In Miller's autobiographical fiction, women are "cunts," collectively and singly "cunts" by virtue of their...er, cunt. His use of the word is usually generic rather than specific. In the Land of Fuck, expostulated in CAPRICORN, there are beautiful cunts; cold, rich, old, young, and extraordinary cunts (like Llona, "one cunt out of a million"). Every woman a cunt by virtue of possessing one; and every man, through similar virtue, a "prick."

Some cunts are "bitches." A bitch in the Land of Fuck can be good bitch or bad: a bad bitch, like Henry's first wife Beatrice (Maude of THE ROSY CRUCIFIXION), is a ball-buster because she stifles the male's urges; tries to tie-down, rope-in, and subugate the male. A good bitch, or "wench"—like the whore Marcelle of CANCER—makes no claim on the man; is out for a good time only; is also a woman who likes IT, and admits to liking IT (which a bad bitch never admits). A good bitch doesn't get in the way of the boys' fun either; doesn't intrude, nag, complain, or make a wet blankert of herself because the man runs off with cronies or to another woman. She practices "live and let live" with a vengeance: like a saint she is, but one who fucks.

Good bitches in Miller's world can go bad, however; can become possessive, make demands; ask the male to toe the line, live up to responsibilities...When a good bitch goes bad, the best way for the male,so it seems, to deal with her is to "belt the piss out of her," like Timmy does Yvette in the Le Harve episode of CANCER; punch her, knock her down, like Henry the narrator of CAPRICORN admits doing to Beatrice. Odds are bitches in the Land of Fuck will like it, will appreciate, it seems, a good beating. Francis of CAPRICORN, a "regular cunt," admits that "maybe a woman ought to get beaten up once in awhile." A good beating, it seems, turns them on; makes them hot; afterward, they beg for IT, pant like dogs in heat for IT—not more beating but more fucking...And if a clout doesn't work, doesn't render the female more agreable, then the male, as living prick, should throw a good fuck into the female. A good fuck—like Carl gives the disagreeable Eliane in QUIET DAYS IN CLICHY, almost always renders the female compliant and satisfied, thus more malleable to the male's wishes. Gone from the female's mind, post-coitus, are worries about unpaid bills and un-fed children; after IT, she becomes quiescent as a cow out to pasture.

What kind of bitch a cunt is—ball-buster or heathy wench—is not immediately noticeable. Maybe not "bitch" at all: could be a "dame." Not a dame like Dame Edith Hamilton or Dame Agatha Christie, but a dame like Princess, the dethroned Russian aristocrat whom Carl brings to the apartment he shares with the narrator of CANCER. Princess speaks four languages—which Carl thinks wonderful—but she also has the clap—which isn't thought wonderful. Why she is "dame" and not "bitch," good or bad, isn't clear. Perhaps because she has no professional standing as "whore" (she's an amateur). "Whores" (a k a "trollops"—but not "sluts," "tramps," or "tarts"—terms for nonprofessionals) are a special category, bought and paid for, and, unlike, some cunts and bad bitches, always giving in return (more or less, as the case might be). Though indubitably "cunts," whores, in Miller's work, are personality-less automatons, fuck-machines for pricks with francs—ideal companions also, it seems, for pricks in the Land of Fuck—ideal, except for the price tag attached. The money is always a bone (ha ha) of contention. A whore that can be had for nothing—cheated of her wages—is the best deal of all as far as fucking goes, for the prick, and is something to crow about, which Henry of CANCER does after swindling a blonde whore of her money, and so do Carl and the narrator of QUIET DAYS IN CLICHY after robbing a "crazy" whore. Whores are not "bitches" (the term a preserve of nonprofessionals) but there are bitches, like Ida Verlaine of SEXUS (a cunt incarnate), who have the "heart of a whore."

Biggest bitch of all perhaps (in his life if not work)—a "first class bitch"* Miller claimed—was his mother Louise Miller nee Nietling. The mother-cunt who ruled the roost (in Brooklyn where the Millers lived); dominated, lorded it over and browbeat the sottish ineffectual husband; whipped the retarded daughter; and tied the son to apron strings he never completely untied. The narrator of CANCER calls his mother the "pterodactyl"; the narrator of PLEXUS labels his mother intolerant, a "shrew with a caustic tongue."

How much of Miller's rebellion against the status quo is rebellion against the authoritarian mommy? Is his denigration, objectification, of woman as cunt simply a case of displaced anger? Unable to confront the hated mother (not even at 65, when, visiting her, Henry was unable to tell of his 2nd divorce*), he turns his anger on women in general, mother-substitutes. Bondage to the mother was the secret that pulled at Miller's life, a secret he was aware of, writing, in his study of the poet Rimbaud, "all one's rebellion is but a frantic attempt to conceal this bondage (to the mother)." The bondage means a life spent "breaking fetters" he writes, a life of "obsession of fetters" until the individual so afflicted comes to terms with the mommy whose coldness creates in her son a "wound of separation" that can be blocked-out (not, however, healed) by achievement of a "kind of perfection." Miller's identification with Rimbaud seems to be based on the fact of the duplicate bitch-mothers each was saddled with (and could never wholly unsaddle).

Previous to publication of CAPRICORN, Miller took a trip to New York to try and interest publishers in his work. Without the New York publishers, Miller's work was precariously placed. Without his driven promotion of CANCER and praise for the book he garnered from T. S. Eliot, Pound, Orwell, and Lawrence Durell (Miller's first literary champion), the book might well have gone under, dismissed as but a "dirty" book.

Miller returned to France as war clouds gathered over Europe. Realizing it was time to decamp, Miller left Paris for the Dordogne region and thence to Greece where he was welcomed to Corfu by Durell. The war never touched Miller. He toured Greece, often in company with Greek story-teller Katsimbalis. In 1940, back in New York, Miller wrote an account of his Grecian experience. THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI was published in 1941. The book marks the emergence of Miller's prophetic voice—the voice of sage and visionary rather than raconteur. The work a paean to spirit rather than flesh.

The "great cosmocrator" is one of Miller's names for "God." According to Miller the earth is a paradise and all contained within earth and earth itself is Spirit. Men and women of this paradise become angels when they enter, accept, surrender to spirit as the one incontrovertible fact of existence. "As angels the sexes fuse into the sublime spiritual being which man essentially is" (THE COLOSSUS). Men, women, become gods as part of a general godhood ("our essential being is godlike"—BIG SUR AND THE ORANGES OF HIERONYMOUS BOSCH), but become "worms" if they "cease to believe that they will one day become gods" (THE COLOSSUS). And the "more of God (man) recognizes in himself the freer he becomes" (BIG SUR). However, one's surrender must be absolute—every crumb of one's being, self, turned over, surrendered. Through self-surrender (to Life) men and women become immortal. "Truth comes with surrender," Miller wrote in BIG SUR. "What is truth?" Pilate asked. Miller replies that truth is the knowledge of the "full reality" which is "God—and man, and the world, and all that is, including the unnamable" (BIG SUR). Consciousness of this truth means the end of death for the angelic ones. "Death" is only real, Miller states, because men and women have made it so by living but to die; dying while alive. Ceasing to participate in the spirit, which is Life (which is Love; Life is Love), they lose their crack at immortality, become worms, and die a mortal death.

Also, to Miller, sex and spirit are one, as everything else is essentially One—the one "essence" of the Buddhists (their "suchness"). After finishing THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI, Miller believed it his duty to pass on his spiritual beliefs: his life, his example of living, was more important, he claimed, than the words he wrote. At the end of THE COLOSSUS, he writes that his life would be "dedicated to the recovery of the divinity of man." A transmogrification that changed his work dramatically, but rarely for the better—the latter work lacking the potent and terrible beauty of the earlier.

Returning to the U.S., Miller received, though his agent, a contract from Doubleday to write a travelogue. In a second-hand car, Miller determined he'd cross the continent and record his impressions. The money from Doubleday evaporated like snow in June however, and he had to rely on Nin's largess (she was in the U.S.) and contributions from admirers to make it to the coast. In Hollywood he wrote his account. Published in 1945, THE AIR CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE is a screed on the deficiencies of America, circa 1940. A "great American" himself, Miller rued the lack of other great ones—other individualists in what he viewed as an increasingly regimented society of conformists and dullards who viewed non-conformity as an act of subversion. Being different in a homogenized society like the American—overrun with culturally obtuse Babbits—is an act of courage and accomplishment in itself, Miller suggests. As for the creative artist in America, he or she hasn't a chance, Miller posits. No chance at all. Art being antithetical to the interests of a consumerist/commercial society, the artist is damned, forced to prostitute his or her talent to the business culture or else live a poor and marginalized existence.

The least joyous of Miller's titles, the invective of NIGHTMARE often gets in the way of the story Miller set out to tell. Only in the last quarter, while alone in his cantankerous car, does Miller get on with the story and seem, at last, to enjoy himself and the journey.

In 1942 Miller was back in New York City and at work on volume one of THE ROSY CRUCIFIXION, published in America in 1965. A great sprawling opus, featuring some of Miller's best and worst writing, the work covers the last year of Miller's marriage, 1923, to his leaving for Europe with June in 1928.

SEXUS is the most sexually explicit of all Miller's major works. Maude, Henry the narrator's first wife, is one of the main characters. Maude is a bitch, the narrator claims: cold, controlling, prudish, and altogether too proper for Henry's taste. After he meets the woman destined to be the love of his life, Mona, Henry dumps Maude. Following the separation, Henry pays Maude and the "child," a daughter, a weekly visit. The visits turn into sexual encounters, pornographic descriptions of the hydralics involved taking precedent over emotional states (as Norman Mailer noted, Miller never wrote well about fucking with love*). Prudish Maude begins to lose prudery, becoming downright lascivious at times, taking the lead on occasion, and joining Henry and Elsie in a threesome (the threesome of one male two females becoming a motif of the novel, and trilogy). Once object of Henry's romanticized "love," Maude becomes, post-separation, object of Henry's lust. Henry justifies, or rationalizes, his objectification of Maude, believing he is liberating her from inhibitions. The rationalization is self-serving. Demeaning and denigrating her is what is happening—the denigration part and parcel of her objectification.

Henry's objectification of women makes them either object of lust, or of romantized love (that is self-serving also, in that it fulfills Henry's view of himself as romancer). Maude, once object of Henry's love, becomes solely sex object as the love fades. Una Gifford, Henry's adolescent infatuation, had always been solely a love object and he wonders, in SEXUS, why it is he never thought to "fuck" her. The anwser to which is that since she was already objectified, as love interest, he had no need to use her as object of lust. The objects of Henry's lust—like unconquerable Ida Verlaine—are cunts, singular, little more than receptacles for the narrator's sperm. The objects of his "love," like Una Gifford and Mona, are goddesses, queens, at whose feet our narrator is prepared to sit.

To Henry, Mona is "vaporous," a chameleon, woman of many faces—also a wench, a good bitch, who likes IT. She is sort of ex officio whore as well, with a string of johns she duns for money and goods. What she gives in exchange is never made clear. The johns are "perfectly harmless" she tells our narrator who decides not to pry too deeply into Mona's extracuricular activities. Mona thus remains a woman of mystery throughout the trilogy; a woman who reinvents herself daily. Henry catches her in so many elaborations he begins to suspect she is crazy. Mona lives entirely in the future, Henry realizes, with the past as but fabulous dream. It doesn't matter, however, as he is gaga over her. She inflames his ego and passion. She tells him he is a "great human being"; he is like a "child" to her, she says, and she wants to "take care" of him—an infantilization of the narrator, and a notion putting Mona into the mother role but as good not bad-bitch mommy.

PLEXUS is nearly without the sexual hi-jinks that figure so prominently in its predecessor. The first two-thirds of PLEXUS is vintage Miller, the work having an affinity with TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, both containing childhood and adolescent memories that Miller turns into art. Though PLEXUS goes somewhat awry in its penultimate stages, the trilogy itself is revived by the Dostoyevskian opening of NEXUS, featuring the menage of Mona, Stasia, and Henry. The book's lower depth scenario is a sort of homage paid by Miller to his Russian masters. It's the basement life for Henry, and a phantom existence as marginalized intellectual desperado—the underground man transposed form Russia to Brooklyn. Unlike volumes 1 and 2, NEXUS excludes most of the friends—the "pestilential cronies" as Henry refers to them—who added color and life, while contributing mayhem, to the peripatetic life of Henry Fyodor Miller. After Stasia departs the menage, it is but Mona and Henry and casual acquaintances. NEXUS leads, in the fictional Millerite chronology, directly to the opening pages of CANCER wherein the Miller persona evolves from "would-be" writer to literary artist.

The Miller persona of the trilogy lives in a magical world among the reality of angels, soothsayers, seers, prophets, mad men and women...Characters larger than life, like Kronski, the maniacal doctor; Stanley the Polish assassin; crazy Sheldon; Ulric, cocksman and illustrator; Lola Jackson the mulatto fuck-machine; Curley the punk; Osiecki the lice-phobic anarchist; MacGregor the disillusioned lawyer; O'Mara the scam-artist; Arthur Raymond the mad piano genius...The narrator is a man shedding "selves" like a snake its skin: A thirty-something "failure" groping his way toward expression—toward the WORD—like a sleepwalker on the prowl; head in a cosmic realm, eye on immortality, living on the plain of daily revelation, and venturing, like a Ulysses, into terrestrial adventure. Forever alone the narrator seems, though surrounded by hosts. Forever the observer of life, he seems; forever detached like a disposable limb from the "body electric" his idol, Walt Whitman—"the only great writer (America) ever had"—wrote of. By NEXUS our narrator is one the verge of becoming pure spirit, inhabiting like a phantom the phenomenal world.

A roll call of famous and infamous Americans, fictional and historical, ends the trilogy. A long goodbye it is from "Hen" all set to board the Ile de France—Hen, the boy from Brooklyn, who grew up to hate his native land with a passion only a jilted lover could summon.

By 1944 Miller was back in California, established at Big Sur, a remote area at the time, in a cabin without running water or electricity. He found a home of sorts among the eccentrics of the area. Groupies and disciples were made use of, if possible, and he brought a wife, 20 year old Jamina Lepska, graduate from Bryn Mawn, to the cabin. Miller called his wife his "Polish girl" and had two children with her: Val and Tony.

With wife, home, and friends, Miller was set but for available cash. His major work was not to be published in America until 1961 and his minor work—collections brought out by New Directions—barely broke even.* Accumulated royalties held in abeyance in France paid his back-debts (the amount lessened by post-war currency devaluation, but at 37,000$ by '48), but lack of income forced Miller to again turn moocher. Believing others should give him money (if he asked), as he so freely gave to those who asked him, Miller sent out a series of begging-letters that brought enough to tide him over until '48 when his French publisher began monthly payments. Meanwhile, Millers' study of Rimbaud, THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS, appeared.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), the flaming meteor of modern poetry, flew like a comet then fizzled, renouncing poetry at age 19. Leaving Charleville, his birthplace, then France, he made his way to the ends of the earth, settling in Abyssinia and amassing a small fortune running guns. Returned to France, aged 37, riddled with cancer, he had his leg amputated and died shortly afterward in a hospital in Marsailles. His was a life both sad and sublime.

To Miller, Rimbaud is a kind of holy man—"a saint in reverse"—one who saw the light then came to knowledge and experience of sin afterward. Rimbaud's renunciation of art was result, Miller posits, of society's indifference to passion and to Rimbaud's vision of, and desire for, paradise on earth—"Christmas on Earth!" The silence of the second half of his life was renunciation of poetry but also a surrender, Miller claims, and affirmation—affirming life and surrendering to silence and darkness.

Unlike the priest who knows God and talks to him, Rimbaud recognized, according to Miller, a "higher communion of spirit with spirit." Refusing to name or define God, he tried to open a "plenary vacuum in which the imagination of god could take root." Rimbaud's youthful defiance was not blasphemy, Miller asserts, but blind faith, and when he saw the gates of paradise on earth close, choose to live in Hell. Like Christ, the poet trod the road to Calvary and became a martyr to the future.

The study ranges far and wide, sometimes leaving Rimbaud in the dust of Miller's expostulation of his theories of creativity and creators—theories attached like riders to the biography. The work has the aura of a fairy tale, more supposition than biography, more theory than criticism—as much a study of Miller's aesthetic and spiritual beliefs as biography of Rimbaud (or of Miller).

Lepska and Miller had irreconcilable differences and went separate ways in 1951 ("hell from the beginning," Miller wrote of the marriage, "nothing but hell and torment."*) Miller soon found a replacement: 25 year old Eve McClure, Mrs. Henry Miller #4. After a trip to Paris in '53, the couple returned to Big Sur and Henry began writing the last major work—in a distinctly minor key—of his career: BIG SUR AND THE ORANGES OF HIERONYMOUS BOSCH.

The "potpourri" (Miller's term) that makes up the bulk of the book is a pastiche of individual portrayals of Miller's neighbors, friends, and family. The style is chatty, conversational, loose in structure and heavily parenthetical. The final quarter of the book consists of the stellar "Paradise Lost," Miller's account of his attempt to help a friend from Paris days, Conrad Moricand.

Invited to live with Miller and wife in the "paradise" of Big Sur, Moricand contaminates paradise with his presence, which is analogous to the presence of the Devil himself. With his "half-smoked" looking flesh—pestilential with the "itch"—high intellect but deficit of wisdom, perverse drawings, tales of child molestation, and imperious manner, Moricand is a veritable stand-in for Satan. "His Satanic majesty," Miller calls his guest, whose niggardly character is the obverse of open-hearted good natured ebullient narrator Henry Miller. A combination of pathos and humor make the novella-length work one of Miller's best.

Miller's marriage went on the rocks after six years. During a trip to Paris in 1959—in time for French publication of NEXUS—Miller became attached to a translator for his German publisher. While Miller pursued a long distance romance, Grove Press brought out TROPIC OF CANCER in America, Miller signing a contract for 50,000$ and the book selling 68,000 copies in the first week.* American publication of CANCER indelibly stamped Miller as a "dirty book author," and, because he was now 70, as "dirty old man." The spiritual seeker and visionary of the later books was relegated to avatar of sex and sexuality, the literary value of his work (immense, both work and value) ignored in the interest engendered by the "smut."

During the dissolution of his marriage (the affair with the translator did not last), Miller bought and moved into a house in Pacific Palisades. Without a wife to see to his needs (and wants)—for the first time since 1944—he was unhappy, and sought to rectify the situation with the ardent pursuit of a 28 year old night club singer named Hiroko "Hoki" Tokuda, whom he married in 1967. The marriage of convenience lasted until 1970 when Hoki moved-out (divorce granted 1977). Other women, wooed by Henry the old romancer appeared, but he did not remarry.

Henry V. Miller died aged 88, on June 7, 1980, of cardiovascular failure.

Though a titanic figure of American literature—"a writer with the individuality of a giant"*—Miller is a crippled giant in a sense, but bigger, more complicated, more challenging, and ultimately more interesting than most of his contemporaries (Wolfe, Dos Passos, Farrell, Lewis, Steinbeck,etc.).

Miller includes in his work all that was excluded from mainstream literature of the 19th century. Modern literature since has more than covered what Miller left out, which is primarily the stink of existence. Despite his hard-boiled attitudes and pose as a tough guy, Miller was of a fastidious nature. None of Joyce's odoriferous considerations in the Miller canon; in fact, nobody in a Miller novel, except the Hindu boy of CANCER, ever takes a shit. The lavatory is verboten, the bathroom an unmentionable, the near-absense of feces a curious anomaly of Miller's work, and the mark of an overly delicate sensibility—one belied by the brutality and hardness of the Miller creed found in CANCER and other works.

To dismiss Miller and his work, as some have, because of his misogyny or pornography or the streak of Puritanism that discolors his sexuality, is like rejecting the sky because of a cloud. There is much much more to Miller's rebellion than unbridled sexuality and lust. Unlike his friend Frank Harris (a customer of Henry's father), Miller was not only libertine but a liberator. His work has given people courage and inspiration to be themselves (even if it meant ostracism or alienation). Miller walked to the beat of a different drummer all his life. The voice of the seer that speaks in Miller's later work, advises others to serve man not Moloch; to seek more life not more things; to live more intensely not more cautiously; to dare to fail; to learn through living not thinking about life; to distrust authorities and pedants in favor of one's own intuitions; to accept life and surrender to it instead of reject and fight; to become wiser rather than smarter; to give freely and just as freely receive; and to change one's heart not only one's mind.

Miller viewed revolution as an inward striving; as something possible only through a change of heart. For as long as people used their brain exclusive of their heart, nothing would ever change, Miller cautioned. He did not believe in revolution through war or politics; was not hopeful that social change would make any real difference to anyone. He was a revolutionary but one without a program or any use for governments or systems; a change of heart would determine a revolution, not politics or social philosophies. The revolution, when it came, would be in humankind's outlook—an outlook that would herald a new "being"—beings who would make "Christmas on Earth" a distinct possibility.

Notes.

1.THE DEVIL AT LARGE, Erica Jong on Henry Miller, 1993, Grove Press, N.Y., NY. pg. 57
2. HENRY MILLER, The Paris Years, Brassai, pg. 10.
3. THE HAPPIEST MAN ALIVE: Henry Miller, A Biography, by Mary Dearborn, Simon & Schuster, N. Y., NY, pg. 206.
4. GENIUS AND LUST, A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller, by Norman Mailer, Grove Press, N.Y., NY, 1976, preface.
5. claim disputed by Jong.
6. Dearborn, pg. 240.
7. BIG SUR, pg. 355.
8. Dearborn, pg. 277.
9. THE PRISONER OF SEX, by Norman Mailer, Signet, N.Y.,NY, 1971, pg. 91.

This essay is chapter 4 of Wayne F. Burke's unpublished study, WRITERS LEFT OF CENTER.