Carmel Pine Cone 1946-12-13
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1946
Henry Miller book review
By Rosalind Sharpe
By no means the best or the most recent of Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, a collection of essays ranging in subject from sex and French prostitutes to D. H. Lawrence, Gutkind and the Collective Whole, gives one unfamiliar with his work a good bird's eye view of the range, style, and, in some instances, the very essence of Millerism. Heterogeneous in sequence, it is in short a kind of teaser, a, capsulized version of Miller, which nevertheless seems as organically whole as anything else he has written, in that everything he writes of proceeds from himself, his own personality, his own reactions, impressions, searching, awareness. "Writing,” as he said in Reflections on Writing, "like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.” The essays are a good spring-board from which to proceed to Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Colossus of tyaroussi, or the Tropic of Cancer (if you can get it), which are arranged in a more definite sequence, centered on the topics of America, Greece and French prostitutes respectively.
Some of the essays in Wisdom of the Heart, particularly Creative Death, Uterine Hunger and Reflections on Writing, make one aware of the brilliance, clarity, ceaseless fertility, richness and creative variation of his reaction to reality; his paradox and never-ending exploration of values and meanings and symbols and sensations—the sort of thing that has made Henry Miller a cult among his admirers.
He has expressed his basic attitude towards writing, life and reality very lucidly in the essay Reflections on Writing where he says, "I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life.... It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that... one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling it in dry-lipped whispers, ...characters and come forth with such books as the Wisdom of the Heart (a collection of essays), The Colossus of Maroussi (about Greece), and Air-Conditioned Nightmare (his impressions of America), all conspicuously devoid of four letter words.
Down the coast, he is writing a sequel to the latter volume, entitled Air-Conditioned Nightmare II.
He goes on to say, ”1 talk now about Reality, but I know there is no getting at it, leastwise by writing. I learn less and realize more. I learn in some different, subterranean way. I acquire more and more the gift of immediacy. ... I haven’t the slightest idea what my future books will be like, even the one immediately to follow. My charts and plans are the slenderest sort of guides; 1 scrap them at will. I invent, distort, deform, lie, inflate, exaggerate, confound and confuse as the mood seizes me. I obey only my own instincts and intuitions. I know nothing in advance.”
It is altogether obvious that comment on Henry Miller and about Henry Miller by other writers is a foolish and superfluous business. Henry Miller has said it all. He is honest and searching. He discovers everything in himself and exposes it to view. His search through reality and sensation is continually given body in his writing, and if one wants to know Miller, all one has to do is to read him. He withholds very little. If he changes, then so be it, life changes, reality changes, the "voyage of discovery” goes on.
In Mademoiselle Claude, wherein he describes a French prostitute who falls in love with him, one gets a taste of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.
"When I began to write this tale,” he starts out, "I set out by saying that Mile. Claude was a whore. She is a whore, of course, and I’m not trying to deny it, but what I say now is—if Mile. Claude is a whore, then what name shall I find for the other women I know? Somehow the word whore isn’t big enough. Mile. Claude is more than a whore. I don’t know what to call her. Maybe just Mile. Claude. Soit.”
Later it developed that Mile. Claude, fell in love with him, wouldn’t take any money. He says, "Living with a whore—even the best whore in the world—isn’t a bed of roses.” Nevertheless, Mile Claude is an angel; he ends by saying, “1 feel that even if I am not an angel, I ought to try to make aman of myself. We ought to lift out this filthy hole and live somewhere in the sunshine, a room with a balcony overlooking a river, birds, flowers, life streaming by, just she and me and nothing else."
Whether this experience never actually happened to Henry Miller when he was living in Paris, or whether it happened just as he described one doesn’t know and it’s beside the point. He always writes in the first person. His purpose is to get at the core of reality, of experiences and people; to make them live as they really are, at least within the dimensions of Henry Miller’s own kind of reality which includes everything from the most tangibly sordid to the most soaringly imaginative, idealistic and fantastic. He absorbs life and strives, to re-create it again.
Thy artist’s struggle he describes in his essay on D. H. Lawrence, Creative Death, based on the theme of the conflict between life and death, and the love of death as well as of life, which to Miller is "To go forward into death. Not backward into the womb. Out of the quicksands, out of the stagnant flux. This is the winter of life and our drama is to secure a foothold so that life may go forward once again. But this foothold can only be gained on the dead bodies of those who are willing to die."
Earlier he says, "Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live and to live means to be aware, Joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."
Altogether, many vital points of Miller’s literary personality are found in the Wisdom of the Heart, including such oddities as the Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium, and Benno, the Wildman from Borneo, which the curious must ferret out for themselves.
Henry Miller book review
By Rosalind Sharpe
By no means the best or the most recent of Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, a collection of essays ranging in subject from sex and French prostitutes to D. H. Lawrence, Gutkind and the Collective Whole, gives one unfamiliar with his work a good bird's eye view of the range, style, and, in some instances, the very essence of Millerism. Heterogeneous in sequence, it is in short a kind of teaser, a, capsulized version of Miller, which nevertheless seems as organically whole as anything else he has written, in that everything he writes of proceeds from himself, his own personality, his own reactions, impressions, searching, awareness. "Writing,” as he said in Reflections on Writing, "like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.” The essays are a good spring-board from which to proceed to Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Colossus of tyaroussi, or the Tropic of Cancer (if you can get it), which are arranged in a more definite sequence, centered on the topics of America, Greece and French prostitutes respectively.
Some of the essays in Wisdom of the Heart, particularly Creative Death, Uterine Hunger and Reflections on Writing, make one aware of the brilliance, clarity, ceaseless fertility, richness and creative variation of his reaction to reality; his paradox and never-ending exploration of values and meanings and symbols and sensations—the sort of thing that has made Henry Miller a cult among his admirers.
He has expressed his basic attitude towards writing, life and reality very lucidly in the essay Reflections on Writing where he says, "I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life.... It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that... one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling it in dry-lipped whispers, ...characters and come forth with such books as the Wisdom of the Heart (a collection of essays), The Colossus of Maroussi (about Greece), and Air-Conditioned Nightmare (his impressions of America), all conspicuously devoid of four letter words.
Down the coast, he is writing a sequel to the latter volume, entitled Air-Conditioned Nightmare II.
He goes on to say, ”1 talk now about Reality, but I know there is no getting at it, leastwise by writing. I learn less and realize more. I learn in some different, subterranean way. I acquire more and more the gift of immediacy. ... I haven’t the slightest idea what my future books will be like, even the one immediately to follow. My charts and plans are the slenderest sort of guides; 1 scrap them at will. I invent, distort, deform, lie, inflate, exaggerate, confound and confuse as the mood seizes me. I obey only my own instincts and intuitions. I know nothing in advance.”
It is altogether obvious that comment on Henry Miller and about Henry Miller by other writers is a foolish and superfluous business. Henry Miller has said it all. He is honest and searching. He discovers everything in himself and exposes it to view. His search through reality and sensation is continually given body in his writing, and if one wants to know Miller, all one has to do is to read him. He withholds very little. If he changes, then so be it, life changes, reality changes, the "voyage of discovery” goes on.
In Mademoiselle Claude, wherein he describes a French prostitute who falls in love with him, one gets a taste of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.
"When I began to write this tale,” he starts out, "I set out by saying that Mile. Claude was a whore. She is a whore, of course, and I’m not trying to deny it, but what I say now is—if Mile. Claude is a whore, then what name shall I find for the other women I know? Somehow the word whore isn’t big enough. Mile. Claude is more than a whore. I don’t know what to call her. Maybe just Mile. Claude. Soit.”
Later it developed that Mile. Claude, fell in love with him, wouldn’t take any money. He says, "Living with a whore—even the best whore in the world—isn’t a bed of roses.” Nevertheless, Mile Claude is an angel; he ends by saying, “1 feel that even if I am not an angel, I ought to try to make aman of myself. We ought to lift out this filthy hole and live somewhere in the sunshine, a room with a balcony overlooking a river, birds, flowers, life streaming by, just she and me and nothing else."
Whether this experience never actually happened to Henry Miller when he was living in Paris, or whether it happened just as he described one doesn’t know and it’s beside the point. He always writes in the first person. His purpose is to get at the core of reality, of experiences and people; to make them live as they really are, at least within the dimensions of Henry Miller’s own kind of reality which includes everything from the most tangibly sordid to the most soaringly imaginative, idealistic and fantastic. He absorbs life and strives, to re-create it again.
Thy artist’s struggle he describes in his essay on D. H. Lawrence, Creative Death, based on the theme of the conflict between life and death, and the love of death as well as of life, which to Miller is "To go forward into death. Not backward into the womb. Out of the quicksands, out of the stagnant flux. This is the winter of life and our drama is to secure a foothold so that life may go forward once again. But this foothold can only be gained on the dead bodies of those who are willing to die."
Earlier he says, "Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live and to live means to be aware, Joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."
Altogether, many vital points of Miller’s literary personality are found in the Wisdom of the Heart, including such oddities as the Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium, and Benno, the Wildman from Borneo, which the curious must ferret out for themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment