George Orwell's most interesting essay -- in the technical sense -- of the puzzle that is Miller's status as an author of "literature" has been posted to the web, along with the rest of Orwell's published works, by the University of Newcastle, Austrailia.

Although "Inside the Whale" and Orwell's other works are still copyrighted in the United States, they've already passed into the public domain in Austrailia, under Austrailia's copyright limitation of 50 years after an author's death. So take advantage of the discrepancy and, if you've never read Orwell on Henry Miller and the other "high art" authors of his day, go down under for it [now] at "Inside the Whale" (1940).

(I won't comment, except in passing, on the Dead Hand effect of the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998," which extends copyright protection for 70 years past an author's death and, additionally, locks up everything published after 1923 until 2019, almost a full century. One should not be deceived that the purpose of this act is to advantage the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren of creative talent, as if anyone ever deserved financial compensation for the accomplishments of a grandparent, let alone a great-great-grandparent. No, this act, which might better have been named the "Disney Mickey Mouse Profits Act of 1998," is designed to advantage the corporate exercisers of these "rights" against the domain of public interest. Why 1923? Must be just coincidental that 1923 was the year Walt Disney arrived in Hollywood with his sketchbook. Yes, I got you, babe with a vengence.)

And there the clash of these two grand "outsiders" could be no more extreme, no more anti-thetical,, no more querulously anti-thetical, nor more grandly comic, than life -- even for the best and the worst of us -- inevitably is. At least, I have a hard time not grinning to myself, every time I imagine these two -- the two, among my favorite authors -- actually meeting, as they did in Paris in 1936:

I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing trrough Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human-a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief that it doesn't matter. The only political declaration which, so far as I know, he has ever made in print is a purely negative one. A year or so ago an American magazine, the Marxist Quarterly, sent out a questionnaire to various American writers asking them to define their attitude on the subject of war. Miller replied in terms of extreme pacifism, an individual refusal to fight, with no apparent wish to convert others to the same opinion-practically, in fact, a declaration of irresponsibility.

It's a great misfortune that, today in America, Orwell is best known for 1984 and Animal Farm, both a bit tedious and "overdone" as political allegories. Far superior, by almost any measure, is Orwell's first-person account of fighting and politics, in the trenches and in the streets, during the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia (1938).

And why is Orwell so little known in America for Homage to Catalonia? Little doubt because the ideological uses to which all points of the political spectrum put the creator and denouncer of "Big Brother" would suffer if it were equally well known that he fought, most sympathetically, for the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) in Spain.

More Henry Miller quotes to follow.....

More Henry Miller quotes to follow.....

My favorites, without a doubt, are the Keimeisha editions of Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn from Tokyo. These are second Keimeisha editions from 1956. The firsts of the same were published in 1953.

Of course, the back -- the Japanese front -- contains the tag, from which I can read nothing but the price.

And certainly not to be missed is the ultimate in phallic publishing house logos:

This particular Obelisk Press Black Spring I've had for a couple decades now and have only dared read -- very carefully -- once. I'm saving the second read for my 90th birthday, should I be fortunate enough to live longer than did Miller. If it falls to pieces then, what do I care?

Rexroth (1905-1982), sometimes called "The Godfather of the Beats," originally wrote this piece as an introduction to Nights of Love and Laughter, a Signet anthology of publishable bits of Miller, whose Paris works were then still banned in the United States. "The Reality of Henry Miller" was reprinted a few years later in a New Directions collection of Rexroth's own essays, Bird in the Bush (1959).

Readers who've come to Miller through his 1960's "sexual liberation" guise or through the proto-New Age wisdom aura of the works of the last decade of his life will find much that is familiar in Rexroth, but also some strikingly different notes. It is, of course, those differences that are most interesting and illuminating.

Rexroth writing in 1955, obviously knowing nothing of what the future would bring, nothing of the later culture of the 1960s and 70s, helps us back to a Miller and a period of American "counter-culture" we almost cannot know otherwise, so steeped are we, without even thinking about it, in those subsequent blinding self-accountings and tsunami of commercializations of the Baby-Boomers' supposed "cultural revolution." Rexroth speaks to us from the distant other side of that - for better or for worse - cultural debacle, pointing to a Miller most of us growing up afterwards now only hazily discern.

Rexroth in 1955 still sees and appreciates Miller through the Beat preoccupation with authenticity, which was at once more political and less personal than that term now typically conveys, today so fallen into disuse.

Miller, the authentic, figures for Rexroth as some kind of cross between a "noble savage," a "modern primitive," and a better sort of "proletarian novelist" for neither being proletarian nor having a "social message." Miller is Rexroth's "religious writer" who is "not especially profound"; his "very unliterary writer" who "is not unsophisticated"; his Paris expatriate whose Paris is not so much Paris as it is still Brooklyn.

Miller, in short, is everywhere betwixt and between for Rexroth, this but not this, that but not that, because for Rexroth betwixt and between is fundamentally how one falls through "the Great Lie, the social hoax in which we live" to get to the Outside, to become authentic, to join the Others, also authentic for having fallen through America's cracks.

Thus Rexroth's most un-Sixties, un-PC, positive celebration of Miller and the politics of non-voting:

Fifty percent of the people in this country don't vote. They simply don't want to be implicated in organized society. With, in most cases, a kind of animal instinct, they know that they cannot really do anything about it, that the participation offered them is a hoax. And even if it weren't, they know that if they don't participate, they aren't implicated, at least not voluntarily. It is for these people, the submerged fifty percent, that Miller speaks. As the newspapers never tire of pointing out, this is a very American attitude. Miller says, "I am a patriot - of the Fourteenth Ward of Brooklyn, where I was raised." For him life has never lost that simplicity and immediacy. Politics is the deal in the saloon back room. Law is the cop on the beat, shaking down whores and helping himself to apples. Religion is Father Maguire and Rabbi Goldstein, and their actual congregations. Civilization is the Telegraph Company in Tropic of Capricorn. All this is a quite different story to the art critics and the literary critics and those strange people the newspapers call "pundits" and "solons."

Odd how tellingly this reads today: how "American," now that America, politically, socially, internationally, has lost its delusory post-1960's lustre; all its universal human promises and isms faded into pc-schoolboy and pc-schoolgirl gender-neutral, inverted-colorist catechisms. Odd how tellingly Rexroth from 1955 reads today, now that America has become once again, as in Rexroth's 1950s, a place, a symbol in which a great many of us with rather not be implicated, at least not voluntarily.

Perhaps, too, Miller answers today in ways he could never answer as an icon of "sexual liberation" or the wise hermit of Big Sur. Perhaps Miller, through his Paris writings, answers today, not from Rexroth's (or Miller's) 1950s, but from Miller's own 1930s, witness to the western world's seemingly unstoppable slide in fascism and war:

Life is just a mess, full of tall children, grown stupider, less alert and resilient, and nobody knows what makes it go - as a whole, or any part of it. But nobody ever tells.

Henry Miller tells.

In searching the web for "news" about Miller, I think I have discovered at least one answer in the bloggers who choose to quote from Henry Miller for their official weblog epigraph. After all, it's ever only readers that keep an author alive.

Here, then, are those I have found thus far: their sites, their epigraphs, and their five most recent blog entries, updated daily via Atom and RSS newsfeed.

If you have a personal blog with a newsfeed that displays a quotation from Henry Miller as the "tagname" (Atom) or channel "description" (RSS) and want to be included here, write to "epigraph" at Henry-Miller.com. I'll try to oblige as many as I can. I found these through their news feeds at feedfinder.Feedster.com

Technical Note: If one of the above seems digital gibberish, consider broadening you computer's horizons a bit by loading the Chinese character sets. It's nice to feel part of the world, even if you can't understand it. Windows XP will oblige with an "East Asian Languages" checkbox at "Regional and Language Options" under "Control Panel." Linux is a bit more work. For example, for Fedora Core 3 you must manually install the appropriate ttfonts files: ttfonts-zh_TW and ttfonts-zh_CN for a start.

As it happens, I don't particularly agree with this writer's interpretation of Miller's life and the "spirit of his art," but don't let that stand in the way of your reading, enjoying, learning, and even being inspired by it. Not just writing but reading literature has ever been an act of fiction, of fabrication, of imagining a lying wholeness, sense, and sequence to the lives of authors as fully as to the truly fictive existences of their characters. All, no doubt, the better to gain leverage in the all-consuming task of deceiving ourselves about ourselves.

The Literary Traveler offers a great deal more that might be of service on that score. The site is the inspiration of Linda and Francis McGovern, a couple who, whatever their fate, at least seem to have had their priorities straight at one point in time: to travel and to write. I envy them to the extent of their success!

And, yes, I like this well-executed site's business model. Poke around the edges and you'll see what I mean. Maybe even take a tour.

"Great literature, like great travel is essentially about experience, one you read, the other you live, both reveal what is true. That's what we are trying to do with Literary Traveler." - Linda McGovern

"We hope that when people read a book, and then visit Literary Traveler to learn about the author, and the places they lived and traveled - they become inspired to read and travel more, and maybe they even start writing themselves. They start exploring their literary imagination - they become part of what they have read and it is always with them." - Francis McGovern

From About Literary Traveler

Located in Big Sur, California, 35 miles south of Carmel-by-the-Sea on Highway One, the Library occupies the former home of long-time Miller friend Emil White, who established it as a fitting permanent memorial to Miller and especially to his years writing and painting in Big Sur (1944-1962).

If you've never driven California's famous winding, two-lane coast highway through the Big Sur region, definitely make plans to do so before you die. Use Miller as an excuse. Stop at The Henry Miller Library and buy a copy of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. And while you're at it, go read it over an "Ambrosia Burger" at the cliff-hanging Nepenthe Restaurant just up and across the road. Whether you drive up the coast past Hearst Castle or down through Monterey Bay, you'll never regret it. Good weather and a convertible highly recommended.

I'll post pictures here when I manage to dig them out. Better yet, I may have to go back just to take some more.

The primary purpose of this site is to provide a permanent, publicly accessible home for my 1989 Yale American Studies PhD dissertation: Narrative Detours: Henry Miller and the Rise of New Critical Modernism.

The debate over Miller's proper place inside or outside our mainstream literary tradition has obscured the more intriguing historical questions posed by the ambiguous position he already occupies and has occupied since the 1930s. Miller has been that most paradoxical of literary creatures, a "minor writer" with "major relevance" (Kingsley Widmer), a writer whose works are critically devalued and politically denounced, but whose influence upon urban American writing from the Beats of the fifties to the New Journalism of the seventies and eighties is as pronounced as Faulkner's upon southern and rural fiction.[5] I propose to explore the phenomenon of Miller's ambiguous status. How has the modern literary tradition been constructed that a manifestly serious and influential novelist can be both "minor" and "major," without and within, at the same time? What is it about Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn that has made them the object of a fifty-year open debate over literary and cultural values--continuing even as literary criticism parted company with that magisterial arbiter of taste, the gentleman scholar, in order to immerse itself in technical, linguistic and philosophic questions of textual hermeneutics?

It is Miller's historically close and antithetical relation to the writers and critics whose work would form the basis of New Critical modernism that, more than his Whitmanesque "barbaric yawp," has made it difficult to "read" Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn as anything other than second-rate Modernism or an "anti-literature" indifferent to aesthetic considerations. Miller's expatriate works are neither. They embody an ambitious writer's calculated response to the debate over the shape of the "New Novel" he joined in 1930--the year the first "guidebook" to the "classical" Ulysses, James Joyce's 'Ulysses': A Study by Stuart Gilbert, ratified and elaborated Eliot's strident declaration in "'Ulysses,' Order, and Myth," "Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method."[9] Discerning the formation of a literary and critical alliance, Miller intuited its transformative power even as he sought to resist it:

Already, almost coincidentally with their appearance, we have, as a result of Ulysses and Work in Progress, nothing but dry analyses, archaeological burrowings, geological surveys, laboratory tests of the Word. The commentators, to be sure, have only begun to chew on Joyce. The Germans will finish him. They will make Joyce palatable, understandable, clear as Shakespeare, better than Joyce, better than Shakespeare. Wait! The mystagogues are coming![10]

Read as one of many expatriate efforts to wrest control of the modern novel's future, Miller's Paris narratives, and especially Tropic of Cancer, reveal a dense weave of "tactical" allusions, engaging not "myth and legend and books and dust of the past" according to Eliotic prescription, but the contemporary positions, literary and critical, of Miller's Modernist rivals. Through such allusions Tropic of Cancer's declaration of intention--"I want to make a detour[....]" (epigraph to this introduction)--specifies the aesthetics around which its narrative seeks a path. As the phrasing of this manifesto suggests, Miller's response to the emerging Modernist consensus involves no broadside denigration of Joyce's achievement in Ulysses and "Work in Progress," but rather a canny challenge to these works as interpreted by Louis Gillet in transition ("'extra-temporal history'"), by Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (where the talking tree and stone, and river puns of Anna Livia Plurabelle were cited to evaluate "Work in Progress"), and by T. S. Eliot in "'Ulysses,' Order, and Myth." The argument uniting these allusions draws upon the "meta-fiction" novelists and their critical partisans have always invoked to legitimate their formal innovations over and against all others: the novel is "the historical genre," distinguished by its protean ability to embody and represent the historical forces that constitute a changing world. Miller turns the rhetoric of the novel's historicity to his own ends, insinuating that the "mystagogues" who read and value in Joyce's novels an "'extra-temporal history,' that absolute of time and space [...] and mere words," are but revealing and canonizing Ulysses and "Work in Progress" as dead ends in the genealogy of the novel: the "true" modern novel must follow Tropic of Cancer's narrative "detour" to return to the proper path of "the historical genre" through "time and space and history." The generic discourse of Miller's dissent points to the vitality of an aesthetic debate broader than any linear, genealogical approach to the novel's history, however "revisionary," can discern--a debate within which New Critical modernism, Miller's narrative modernism, and many other contending "modernisms" were first forged and only subsequently obscured.

Yet in the face of this task, literary history remains in quest of its own grounds. How does one locate the meaning of a text and its relations to other texts when meaning seems no longer a property of the text and every text appears an "intertext" equally related and unrelated to every other text? Where does one place the "canon" and how does one recognize its imaginative power when a vast body of once "marginal" works and literatures are subject to an increasing scrutiny which has had the effect of making the "canon" suddenly appear "marginal" itself, a preoccupation of a few individuals and institutions dwarfed by the onward rush of popular culture and history? This essay explores the possibility of a literary history in the current critical landscape: one capable of asking not what or how texts mean, but what they have meant; one capable of describing the literary and interpretive acts whereby the aesthetic hegemony of New Critical modernism was first forged and then sustained in the face of many alternatives. To find such a capability is to make it possible to ask a new, distinctively historical set of questions concerning the "meaning" and "place" of Miller's expatriate narratives. How must we read Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn in order to understand them in dialogic relation with other modernist "experiments" such as Joyce's Ulysses--more simply, how did Miller's narratives speak to the contemporary struggle to define the nature of modern literature? And, in turn, how must we narrate literary and critical history in order to explain how among many competing modernist "experiments" some, but not Miller's, became Modernist "monuments"? It is through these two questions and their interrelation that I hope to retain for this essay in the history of the modern novel some of the rigor of "close reading" lost to more sweeping accounts, and as well to lend broader and, I intend, unsettling implication to such a local study of a "minor" modernist.

2 Edmund Wilson, "The Twilight of the Expatriates," in A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company-Doubleday Anchor Books, n.d.), 212. This is a collection derived from Classics and Commercials (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1950) and Shores of Light (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1952). "The Twilight of the Expatriates" first appeared in The New Republic (March 9, 1938).

3 Kate Millet opens Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1970; New York: Avon Books, 1971) with an explicit attack upon literary history, narrowly conceived, and "New Criticism":

It has been my conviction that the adventure of literary criticism is not restricted to a dutiful round of adulation, but is capable of seizing upon the larger insights which literature affords into the life it describes, or interprets, or even distorts. [....] I have also found it reasonable to take an author's ideas seriously when, like the novelists covered in this study, they wish to be taken seriously or not at all. Where I have substantive quarrels with some of these ideas, I prefer to argue on those very grounds, rather than to take cover under tricks of the trade and mask disagreement with "sympathetic readings" or the still more dishonest pretense that the artist is "without skill" or a "poor technician." (Sexual Politics, 12)

Protesting the critical marginalization of Miller's work, Millet writes: "The anxiety and contempt which Miller registers toward the female sex is at least as important and generally felt as the more diplomatic or 'respectful' version presented to us in conventional writing," in which Millet includes "not only traditional courtly, romantic and Victorian sentiment, but even that of other moderns [such as] Conrad, Joyce, even Faulkner" (Sexual Politics, 389).

Extending Millet's suspicion that Miller is excluded because his inclusion would reveal the misogyny of the "tradition," Catharine MacKinnon writes: "sometimes I think that the real issue is how male sexuality is presented, so that anything can be done to a woman, but obscenity is sex that makes male sexuality look bad." She gives new sense to the ideology of "protecting innocence": "is it just chance that the first film to be found obscene by a state supreme court depicts male masturbation? [....] Did works like Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer get in trouble because male sexuality is depicted in a way that men think is dangerous for women and children to see?" (Catharine MacKinnon, "Not a Moral Issue" in Feminism Unmodified [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987], 154, 270n.).

4 Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1978; New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 317. Martin quotes George Bernard Shaw, apparently the first to strike this note about Miller: "This fellow can write: but he has failed to give any artistic value to his verbatim reports of bad language." Evidently, iconoclasm is not made of the same stuff from generation to generation. Frank Kermode took up the refrain: "Everybody agrees that Miller can write[....]" (Frank Kermode, "Henry Miller and John Betjeman," Puzzles and Epiphanies, reprinted in part in Edward B. Mitchell, ed., Henry Miller: Three Decades of Criticism [New York: New York University Press, 1971], 94).

5 Kingsley Widmer, Henry Miller (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963), 157.

6 Edmund Wilson, "The Twilight of the Expatriates," A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950, 212.

7 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 24.

8 As editor, advocate, publicist, central author and creator of Obelisk Press's "Villa Seurat Series," Miller tried to gather the adherents necessary to remake a literature during his final years in Paris, but his effort was overtaken by the coming war. He returned to America alone, prepared to pursue new interests.

9 T. S. Eliot, "'Ulysses,' Order, and Myth," in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Farrar, Straus and Giroux--A Harvest/Noonday Book, 1975), 178. Eliot's essay was first published in Dial, November 1923.

10 Henry Miller, "The Universe of Death from The World of Lawrence," in Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye (1939; New York: New Directions Paperbook, 1961), 114. The World of Lawrence was written contemporaneously with the revisions of Tropic of Cancer. Abandoned, it was not published in its entirety until the year of Miller's death. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1980). The Cosmological Eye, the first collection of Miller's Paris work published in America, contains a number of essays originally published in Max and the White Phagocytes (Paris: The Obelisk Press-Seurat Editions, 1938).

11 T. S. Eliot, "'Ulysses,' Order, and Myth," in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 176.

12 Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (Paris: The Obelisk Press-Seurat Editions, 1939; New York: Grove Press, 1961), 170. Miller's direct allusion is to Henri Bergson's discussion of "The Idea of Disorder" in Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911; New York: Random House-The Modern Library, 1944), 240-258.