The
Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur,
by Arthur Hoyle
A Review by Peter Anastas
(Arcade Publishing, 2014, 416 pp., $27.95)
“We are being stifled and smothered
by our creature comforts, by our fear of change, our fear of adventure, but
above all by our fear of ideas….But the struggle of the individual to
emancipate himself, that is to liberate himself from the prison of his own
making—that is for me the supreme subject.” --Henry Miller
Major
biographies of two representative American writers, Henry Miller and John
Updike, recently appeared within a month of each other. The
Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur, by Arthur Hoyle, was published
in March 2014, followed in April by Adam Begley’s Updike. While Begley’s
well-publicized life was widely reviewed in the US and UK within a week of its
publication, Hoyle’s biography has only received a handful of reviews beyond
the usual notices posted by Kirkus and
Library Journal. The most significant appeared in TLS, which commended Miller for his “commitment to a rare aesthetic and
philosophical vision,” and the Santa Barbara Independent, where reviewer Brian Tanguay described
Hoyle’s biography as “the perfect trailhead…for the seeker bold enough to venture beyond the boundaries
of convention.” It’s understandable
that an eagerly anticipated initial biography of Updike would excite interest;
but one would think that the first new approach to the life and work of Henry
Miller to have been published in 23 years would rate more than the cursory notices
it has so far received.
Though
it could be argued that both writers had sex as a central concern and were also
said to have been essentially autobiographical in terms of the sources of their
work; and while it could equally be said that Updike could not have addressed
the question of sexuality as directly and candidly as he did without Miller’s
having first smashed the taboos against explicit sexual representation, as
Lawrence had previously opened the way for Miller, at bottom no two American
writers were as dissimilar. Miller was Whitmanian
in the expansiveness of his language, the freedom of his expression, and the
experimentalism of the structure of his books, just as Jack Kerouac later
was. Attracted to Emma Goldman’s
anarchism at an early age, he spent his life outside of accepted social and
political systems, his formal education as spotty as his reading was wide. Updike, instead, a self-described small town
boy as against Miller’s Brooklyn and Paris-rooted urbanism, favored a highly
controlled and intensely literary approach, gained from studying with Harvard
professors, who were steeped in the mythological, allegorical and symbolistic
imperatives of the New Criticism, their world view—and his by extension— framed
by conservative Cold War politics.
Brian
Tanguay begins his review of Hoyle’s book by agreeing with its author that Henry Miller is “one
of the most neglected American writers — overlooked by the finest universities
in the country, very few of which teach Miller, and excluded from the canon of
American literature.” He also agrees
with Hoyle that that Henry Miller “deserves a place in the pantheon of American
writers, and to be taught in our universities.” It is with this in mind, he writes, that “Hoyle
sets himself the prodigious task of introducing Miller to a new generation
of readers.”
Most of my friends who were reading
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn in the mid-fifties
obtained these banned books from tourists or members of the military, who had
smuggled them into the country from France.
After which they were passed secretly from hand to hand, often losing
their bright red and green paper covers like the discarded pulp novels they
were erroneously accused of being. Instead
of reading Miller’s ground-breaking novels under the table, I was fortunate to
have discovered them in the rare book room of the Bowdoin College Library as
part of a collection that contained copies of most of the major
avant-garde books of 20th century European art and literature, bequeathed
to the College by an alumnus and rare book collector, Robert L. Swasey, who had
been Henry Miller’s friend and patron.
The Swazey collection was of particular importance to me
because it contained not only Miller’s
Tropics, in their original Obelisk Press editions, as published in Paris in
1934 and 1938 by Jack Kahane, but the privately printed Black Spring, The World of
Sex and The Colossus of Maroussi, one of Miller’s greatest books
and of utmost significance to me as a young writer of Greek-American heritage,
planning his first trip to Europe. Exile
and expatriation had emerged as significant themes for me from when I’d first
started to read about the Lost Generation in Malcolm Cowley’s Exiles Return and John Aldridge’s After the Lost Generation. Thereafter, Miller’s own saga of abandoning
New York in 1930, followed by years of penury and artistic struggle in Paris,
culminating in the publication of the Tropics,
his life-affirming stay in Greece just before the war, and his return to travel
in America, as chronicled in The
Air-Conditioned Nightmare, was an enormous inspiration to me, both as a
writer and prospective traveler. Of
equal importance to me was the fact that Miller idolized D. H. Lawrence, about
whom I was writing my senior thesis, having written a major study of Lawrence’s
novels which, except for excerpts, remained unpublished until after his death,
in 1980.
I like
to think that my first response to Miller’s work wasn’t merely prurient. I was twenty years old in 1958, innocent of most
of the sensual experience Miller catalogued in his novels, so I would not be
truthful if I said I hadn’t been drawn into their erotic dimensions. Nevertheless, I saw that Miller was no
pornographer; nor was what he had achieved formally and linguistically in those
ground–breaking novels anything close to the “smut” he had also been labeled as
purveying. It was clear to me that
Miller was a serious American writer in the vein of Whitman, Thoreau, Mark
Twain and Jack Kerouac, whom he had clearly inspired, if not influenced. These were among the writers I most admired,
those who spoke in their own voice, who recounted to you, as if in intimate
conversation, what they were thinking and feeling about what they had seen and
done.
At the
time I was an undergraduate there was an enormous struggle underway in both the
academic and literary worlds, centering on the importance and value of “open”
as against “closed” forms in poetry and prose.
The New Criticism, under which we, like Updike, were principally being
trained to read, viewed the novel or the poem as closed systems of symbols and
myths, which were to be decoded in both literary and religious, especially Christian,
terms. There was also a political
dimension to this system, as I’ve said, not lost on those of us who experienced
the Cold War obsessed times we were living in as equally closed and
repressive. The American publication of
Miller’s Tropics and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by Grove Press,
in the early 1960s, would become a major catalyst of change, moving us further
away from the closed society to a more open and permissive one, literature in
some cases leading the way. The prose
that had helped to precipitate these changes, along with Miller’s, included
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and William
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, both of which
had clearly been inspired by Miller’s novels, while Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Charles Olson’s Projective Verse, helped to liberate
poetry from the sterile formalism of the New Critics and their practitioners.
Naturally,
our teachers excoriated this “New American Writing,” warning us that it would
be our moral and writerly outdoing were we to be unduly influenced by its “formlessness,”
not to speak of its “decadence.” We, as
equally natural rebels, rushed toward Miller, when we could find his books,
while Kerouac’s emerging Beat novels like On
the Road and The Subterraneans,
along with the stories of Michael Rumaker, the novels of Douglas Woolf, and the equally enthralling fiction and
drama of the British Angry Young Men, gripped our imaginations in ways that
American mainstream fiction, like the then popular novels of James Gould
Cozzens, did not, except for books we had discovered on our own like Dos
Passos’ USA or Wright Morris’ The Field of Vision, which were
decidedly not taught in the classroom.
It is
difficult to explain the literary situation I’ve been describing to younger
generations of writers and scholars, who have come of age in a practically
censorship-free age; indeed, a time in which topics like oral sex are
graphically discussed in the national media and pornographic novels like Fifty Shades of Gray are widely read and
have sold many more copies than Miller’s Tropics. Nevertheless, this situation, while
potentially marginalizing pioneers like Lawrence and Miller, could also offer
new readers a greater opportunity to discover these seminal writers in a less
clandestine, heated and compromised atmosphere than the one in which they
originally emerged. In fact, it would
seem to me that there is no better time to encounter Miller as writer in a more
global sense—a Miller who not only used his own experience in fictively
experimental ways, but also wrote some of the finest essays of his time,
touching not only on personal and literary issues, but also describing his
lifelong spiritual quest.
It is
this Henry Miller, the writer and spiritual seeker, that Hoyle gives us in his
gripping and deeply-researched biography, a book which Miller’s own son Tony,
who grew up in Big Sur with his parents, calls “the best book ever written
about my father.” Having read three
previous biographies of Miller by Jay Martin, Robert Ferguson and Mary
Dearborn, each of them worthy in its own way, I tend to agree with Tony. Instead of beginning with Miller’s birth and
upbringing in Brooklyn, as the other books do, Hoyle jumps ahead to the Paris
years, the years in which Miller came into his own as a writer. Though he later, and quite artfully, circles
back to Brooklyn, the site of Miller’s troubled relationship with his parents,
his decision to view Paris and Big Sur as nodal points in the growth of
Miller’s artistry as well as his spirituality, gives the book a more
concentrated and therefore more dramatic focus than the earlier studies, which,
being chronological, tend to gloss over the more epiphanic and therefore more
significant points in Miller’s never unadventurous life.
Miller’s
life may be seen as a continual spiritual quest, not for a deity or a form of
belief but for a way of relating to creation itself, through the discovery of a
way of being in the world “as a vital singing universe, alive in all its
parts,” as Miller describes it. Hoyle
maps this quest through a sensitive examination of Miller’s reading. Like many autodidacts—Eric Hoffer comes to
mind—Miller’s reading was wide, deep and extremely eclectic, running the gamut
from Emerson and Thoreau to Louis-Ferdinand Celine, little known when Miller
began to read him in the 1930s, but now considered to have been one of the
major stylists in French literature. He
wrote an entire book about it, The Books
in My Life, which is as fascinating to read as Miller’s fiction. To become immersed in Miller’s enthusiastic
accounts of how he found a certain book or discovered a particular author is to
understand yet another dimension of how Miller came at life. Of the books that most delighted and
instructed him, he writes, “They were alive and they spoke to me.” The same could be said of the people in his
life, those he met in Brooklyn, Paris, or Athens and has written so animatedly
about, or the places like Big Sur, which he spent much of the latter part of
his life in and made his own in books like Big
Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
There
is much to commend in this fine biography of one of the most misunderstood and
yet most American of our writers. To
rectify that lack of understanding and to have as clear an introduction to
Henry Miller’s mind and art as Arthur Hoyle has given us, I know of no better
place to begin than with this illuminating book.
(This review appeared in Beat Scene, UK, #83, Late Summer 2016)
