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Henry Valentine Miller
Born	December 26, 1891(1891-12-26) Yorkville, Manhattan, New York City
Died	June 7, 1980 (aged 88) Pacific Palisades, California, United States
Occupation	Writer, painter
Spouse(s)	Beatrice Sylvas Wickens (1917–1928) June Miller (1928–34) Janina Martha Lepska (1944–52) Eve McClure (1953–1960) Hiroko Tokuda (1967–1977)

Henry Valentine Miller (26 December 1891 – 7 June 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.^[1] His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis. Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring are published in the US by Grove Press.

Biography

Miller was born to tailor Heinrich Miller and Louise Marie Neiting, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City, of German Catholic heritage.^[2] As a child he lived at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known in that time (and referred to frequently in his works) as The Fourteenth Ward. As a young man, he was active with the Socialist Party (his "quondam idol" was the Black Socialist Hubert Harrison).^{[citation needed]} He briefly—for only one semester—attended the City College of New York. Although he was an exceptional scholar, he was willing neither to be anchored nor to submit to the traditional college system of education.

In both 1928 and 1929, he spent several months in Paris with his second wife, June Edith Smith (June Miller) (his first wife was Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, whom he married in 1917). The next year he moved to Paris unaccompanied, and he continued to live there until the outbreak of World War II. He lived an impecunious lifestyle that depended on the benevolence of friends, including Anaïs Nin, who became his lover and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934.^[3]

In the fall of 1931, Miller was employed by the Chicago Tribune (Paris edition) as a proofreader, thanks to his friend Alfred Perlès who worked there. Miller took this opportunity to submit some of his own articles under Perlès name, since only the editorial staff were permitted to publish in the paper in 1934. This period in Paris was highly creative for Miller, and during this time he also established a significant and influential network of authors circulating around the Villa Seurat.^[4] One author who became a lifelong friend was the young British author Lawrence Durrell. Durrell, who lived in Corfu, invited Miller out to Greece, a visit which Miller describes vividly in The Colossus of Maroussi. Miller's correspondence with Durrell was later published. During the Paris period he was also influenced by the French Surrealists.

His works contain detailed accounts of sexual experiences, and his books did much to free the discussion of sexual subjects in American writing from both legal and social restrictions. He continued to write novels that were banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity. Along with Tropic of Cancer, his Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) were smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation. One of the first acknowledgments of Henry Miller as a major modern writer was by George Orwell in his 1940 essay Inside the Whale, where he wrote:

In 1940, he returned to the United States, settling in Big Sur, California, and continued to produce vividly written works that challenged contemporary American cultural values and moral attitudes. He spent the last years of his life at his home in 444 Ocampo Drive, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California.

While Miller was establishing his base in Big Sur, the 'Tropics' books, still banned in the USA, were being published in France by the Obelisk Press and later the Olympia Press. There they were acquiring a slow and steady notoriety among both Europeans and the various enclaves of American cultural exiles. As a result, the books were frequently smuggled into the States, where they would prove to be a major influence on the new Beat generation of American writers (most notably Jack Kerouac) some of whom would adopt stylistic and thematic principles found in Miller's oeuvre.

The publication of Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the United States in 1961 led to a series of obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Grove Press, Inc., v. Gerstein, citing Jacobellis v. Ohio (which was decided the same day in 1964), overruled the state court findings of obscenity and declared the book a work of literature; it was one of the notable events in what has come to be known as the sexual revolution. Elmer Gertz, the lawyer who successfully argued the initial case for the novel's publication in Illinois, became a lifelong friend of Miller's. Volumes of their correspondence have been published.^[6]

In addition to his literary abilities, Miller was a painter and wrote books about his work in that field. He was a close friend of the French painter Grégoire Michonze. He was also an amateur pianist.

Before his death, Miller filmed with Warren Beatty for his film Reds. He spoke of his remembrances of John Reed and Louise Bryant as part of a series of 'witnesses'. The film was released eighteen months after Miller's death.

Miller died in Pacific Palisades. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes scattered off Big Sur.

Miller's papers were donated to the UCLA Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. The Henry Miller Art Museum at Coast Gallery in Big Sur, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and UCLA all hold a selection of Miller's watercolors, as did The Henry Miller Museum of Art in Omachi City in Nagano, Japan, before closing in 2003. A portion of the correspondence between the Grove Press and Henry Miller are currently housed in the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University. Special Collections at the University of Victoria holds a significant collection of Miller's manuscripts and correspondences, including the corrected typescript for Max and Quiet Days in Clichy, as well as Miller's lengthy correspondence with Alfred Perlès.

Works

• Moloch or, This Gentile World, written in 1927, not published until 1992 (by the Estate of Henry Miller). ISBN 0-80213372-X
• Crazy Cock, written 1928–1930, not published until 1960. ISBN 0-80211412-1
• Tropic of Cancer, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1934.
• What Are You Going to Do about Alf?, Paris: Printed at author's expense, 1935.
• Aller Retour New York, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1935.
• Black Spring, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1936. ISBN 0-8021-3182-4
• Max and the White Phagocytes, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1938.
• Tropic of Capricorn, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1939. ISBN 0-8021-5182-5
• Henry Miller's Hamlet Letters, Vol. I, with Michael Fraenkel, Santurce, Puerto Rico: Carrefour, 1939. ISBN 0-8095-4058-4
  • Vol. II, with Michael Fraenkel, New York: Carrefour, 1941.
  • Vol. I complete New York: Carrefour, 1943.
• The Cosmological Eye, New York: New Directions, 1939. ISBN 0-8112-0110-4
• The World of Sex, Chicago: Ben Abramson, Argus Book Shop, 1940.
  • Oneworld Classics 2007 ISBN 978-1-84749-035-3
• Under the Roofs of Paris (originally published as Opus Pistorum), New York: Grove Press, 1941.
• The Colossus of Maroussi, San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941. ISBN 0-8112-0109-0
• The Wisdom of the Heart, New York: New Directions, 1941. ISBN 0-8112-0116-3
• Sunday after the War, New York: New Directions, 1944.
• Semblance of a Devoted Past, Berkeley, Calif.: Bern Porter, 1944.
• The Plight of the Creative Artist in the United States of America, Houlton, Me.: Bern Porter, 1944.
• Echolalia, Berkeley, Calif.: Bern Porter, 1945.
• Henry Miller Miscellanea, San Mateo, Calif.: Bern Porter, 1945.
• Why Abstract?, with Hilaire Hiller and William Saroyan, New York: New Directions, 1945. ISBN 0-8383-1837-1
• The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, New York: New Directions, 1945. ISBN 0-8112-0106-6
• Maurizius Forever, San Francisco: Colt Press, 1946.
• Remember to Remember, New York: New Directions, 1947. ISBN 0-8112-0321-2
• Into the Night Life, privately published 1947
• The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948.
• Sexus (Book One of The Rosy Crucifixion), Paris: Obelisk Press, 1949. ISBN 0-87529-173-2
• The Waters Reglitterized, San Jose, Calif.: John Kidis, 1950. ISBN 0-912264-71-3
• The Books in My Life, New York: New Directions, 1952. ISBN 0-8112-0108-2
• Plexus (Book Two of The Rosy Crucifixion), Paris: Olympia Press, 1953. ISBN 0-8021-5179-5
• Quiet Days in Clichy, Paris: Olympia Press, 1956. ISBN 0-8021-3016-X
  London: Oneworld Classics, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84749-036-0
• Recalls and Reflects, New York: Riverside LP RLP 7002/3, 1956
• The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud, New York: New Directions, 1956. ISBN 0-8112-0115-5
• Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, New York: New Directions, 1957. ISBN 0-8112-0107-4
• The Red Notebook, Highlands, N.C.: Jonathan Williams, 1958.
• Reunion in Barcelona, Northwood, England: Scorpion Press, 1959.
• Nexus (Book Three of The Rosy Crucifixion), Paris: Obelisk Press, 1960. ISBN 0-8021-5178-7
• To Paint Is to Love Again, Alhambra, Calif.: Cambria Books, 1960.
• Watercolors, Drawings, and His Essay "The Angel Is My Watermark," Abrams, 1962.
• Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, New York: New Directions, 1962. ISBN 0-8112-0322-0
• Just Wild about Harry, New York: New Directions, 1963. ISBN 0-8112-0724-2
• Greece (with drawings by Anne Poor), New York: Viking Press, 1964.
• Insomnia or The Devil at Large, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1974. ISBN 0-385-9037-4
• Opus Pistorum, New York: Grove Press, 1983. ISBN 0-394-53374-7

Films

Miller was portrayed by Fred Ward in the 1990 movie Henry & June, and by Rip Torn in the 1970 film adaptation of Tropic of Cancer. In the 1970 Jens Jørgen Thorsen adaptation of Quiet Days in Clichy, the Miller-based character of 'Joey' was played by the late Paul Valjean. Claude Chabrol's 1990 adaptation of the same novel saw Andrew McCarthy play the Miller role as "Henry Miller" himself. Miller was also featured in the documentary Henry Miller Is Not Dead that featured music by Laurie Anderson.

Criticism

Feminist activist Kate Millett has criticized Miller for his depiction of female characters. In her 1970 work Sexual Politics,^[7] analyzed Miller alongside D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, finding that each tends to assume a male audience, objectifying female characters in the process. While reasserting Miller's importance as a novelist, Millet cast doubt upon his status as an icon of sexual freedom, concluding, "Miller is a compendium of American sexual neuroses, and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in having had the honesty to express and dramatize them" (p. 295). Norman Mailer came to Miller's defense in The Prisoner of Sex in 1971.^[8] According to Martin B. Duberman, writing for The New Republic on November 27, 1976, Miller ought to be rescued from both Mailer and Millett.^[9]

References

Further reading

• Smith, J. Y. (June 9, 1980). "Author Henry Miller Dies; Famed for Two 'Tropic' Books". The Washington Post, C3.
• Mailer, Norman (1976). "Genius and Lust: a journey through the major writings of Henry Miller"
• Winslow, Kathryn (1986). "Henry Miller: full of life"
• Dearborn, Mary V. (1991). "The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller"
• Jong, Erika (1993). "The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller"
• Brassai, Georges (2002). "Henry Miller, Happy Rock"
• Anderson, Christiann (March 2004). "Henry Miller: Born to be Wild"
• Durrell, Lawrence, editor, The Henry Miller Reader, New Directions Publishing, 1969 ISBN 0811201117

External links

• Grove/Atlantic, Inc. is the US Publisher of Tropic of Cancer (novel) and Tropic of Capricorn (novel)
• Henry Miller A Personal Collection
• Henry Miller collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections
• Works by or about Henry Miller in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog
• Miller Walks: Visiting sites immortalized in Miller's work
• Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal
• Miller Related Links
• An Interview with Henry Miller on Folkways Records
• Miller's interview with The Paris Review
• Henry Miller Memorial Library
• Narrative Detours: Henry Miller and the Rise of New Critical Modernism
• Miller quotes online
• Kenneth Rexroth on Miller
• Dinner with Henry Miller, a video from UBUWEB
• Miller reading excerpts of his books
• Tropic of Cancer, a song
• Henry Miller's Art Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin

From Wikiquote

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

Henry Valentine Miller (26 December 1891 - 7 June 1980) American writer

Sourced

Tropic of Cancer, 1934

• This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.

• I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

• For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.

• I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.

• Still prowling around. Mid-afternoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomb-like from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace facade. They hang there like an idée fixe in the mind of a monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud.

• All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

• I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth.

• Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

• I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy & willing to die.

• For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood.

• Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.

Other works

• Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.
  • Black Spring (1938)

• Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
  • Tropic of Capricorn (1939)

• The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
  • Tropic of Capricorn (1939)

• What an astounding thing is the voice! By what miracle is the hot magma of the earth transformed into that which we call speech? If out of clay such an abstract medium as words can be shaped what is to hinder us from leaving our bodies at will and taking up our abode on other planets or between the planets? What is to prevent us from rearranging all life, atomic, molecular, corporeal, stellar, diving? Who or what is powerful enough to eradicate this miraculous leaven which we bear within us like a seed and which, after we have embraced in our mind all the universe, is nothing more than a seed — since to say universe is as easy as to say seed, and we have yet to say greater things, things beyond saying, things limitless and inconceivable, things which no trick of language can encompass.
  • The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

• If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
  • The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

• To be free, as I then knew myself to be, is to realize that all conquest is vain, even the conquest of self, which is the last act of egotism. To be joyous is to carry the ego to its last summit and to deliver it triumphantly. To know peace is total: it is the moment after, when the surrenderer is complete, when there is no longer even the consciounsness of surrender. Peace is at the centre and when it is attainded the voice issues forth in praise and benediction. Then the voice carries far and wide, to the outermost limits of the universe. Then it heals, because it brings light and the warmth of compassion.
  • The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

• The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.
  • Sunday after the war (1944), pub. New Directions.

• We’re creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.
  • The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949)

• A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in....
  • The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949), Chapter 1. (New York: Grove Press, c1965, p. 17-18)

• The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
  • The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949), Chapter 14. (New York: Grove Press, c1965, p. 339)

• Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete.
  • The Rosy Crucifixion II : Plexus (1953)

• No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.
  • The Wisdom of the Heart (1951)

• In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest.
  • The Books in My Life (1952) Preface (2nd edition. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1969, p. 12)

• If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.
  • The Books in My Life (1952) Chapter 11: The Story of My Heart (2nd edition. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1969, p. 192)

• Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon. Often, when the clouds pile up in the north and the sea is churned with white caps, I say to myself: "This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look."
  • From: Miller, H. (1957). Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, New Directions Books, New York, p. 6.

• One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.
  • From: Miller, H. (1957). Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
  • Often misquoted as "One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things".

• Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
  • Interview, 1961

• Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.
  • From: Miller, H. (1969). “Creation,” The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. p.33.

• She was to me, and still is, the greatest person I have known - one who can truly be called a "devoted" soul. I owe her everything.
  • Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie (1975)

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

• Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

• Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep.

• I blush to think of our origins - our hands are steeped in Blood & Crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and pillage.

• The frantic desire to Live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us , but of the death rhythm.

• To be generous is to say yes before the man even opens his mouth.

• I soon learned that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write write write.

• Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

• The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.

• Writing is Crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain & sorrow to commemorate an event which is intransmissible.

• The Happiest peoples, it is said, are those which have no history. Those who have a history, those who have made history seem only to have emphazied through their acomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content to merely live & enjoy.

• The Battle is endless...we who babble and froth at the mouth have been at it since eternity.

• Perhaps the artist is nothing more than the personification of this universal maladjustment, this universal disequilibrium.

• Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.

• The whole damn universe has to be taken apart, brick by brick, and reconstructed.

• I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status quo.

• I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world.

• Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.

• The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one.

• The trouble with Buddhism ?-- in order to free oneself of all desire, one has to desire to do so.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Henry Miller

• Henry Miller A Personal Collection
• Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog
• Henry Miller Memorial Library
• A Brief Biography
• Miller Related Links
• Narrative Detours: Henry Miller and the Rise of New Critical Modernism