Arts and Letters

Henry Miller was a cranky man, a normal genius American who deserves cranky tribute as personal as he was personal in his literary demeanor.

Though he was already international world-hero in letters from Paris to Tokyo, his major work was excluded from U.S. 20th Century Novel Course reading lists at Columbia College in the 1940s. His books were illegal in America! Books illegal in America! Shame! Maybe the Professors thought that since he was illegal, he probably wasn't a Man of Distinction. But the cranky librarians did put that prophetic New Directions title The Air Conditioned Nightmare (which turned out to be an amazing description of USA) in the Browsing Room for students to find by accident.

His academic reputation wasn't "serious." What was he supposed to be—démodé, demimonde?—not in real literary society, out of it with Lord Rochester, De Sade, Jean Genet, D. H. Lawrence at his frankest, Catullus, Petronius, Frank Harris, and later Burroughs among others. New generations of students have not all been told that for over half this century these writers' writings were illegal in America, like marijuana and certain forms of sexual tenderness.

Henry Miller had to do his art creation alone. That's why he's a Hero of letters. And a smart hero: he innovated a special personal Frankness of self, a return to the data of subjective observation, the only objective data we actually know, for his art. In certain respects every one of his contemporaries was faking a prose style; by faking I mean here avoiding direct presentation of the object, the self that is speaking: everyone else was "copping an attitude" as present saying goes. Henry Miller did express the American Person with Whitmanic frankness. "I find no fat sweeter than that which sticks to my own bones." So we have Frankness as his subject, not Sex, not America, not pantagruelesque Humor, but straightforward and desperate frankness. What else can a poor man do?

His heroic solitary intelligence helped open up the entire closed proud fake consciousness of the nation, the official consciousness of Time Magazine, the Central Intelligence Agency, frightened fairy professors, Boosters, Wowsers, moral Egoists, Nationalistic Solipsists, Presidential Candidates, hypocrite Virgins, average good Joes dumb with stoic inexpressiveness.

With such frankness his readers experience the grandeur of the open mind, projected in magnificent periods, long Miltonic democratic sentences: "At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy." (Tropic of Capricorn)

He innovated in the courageous mode of spontaneous prose—prose which depends on the energy of mind moving and the fearless recollection of that energy at time of composition. His recognition of mind's unchecked inquisitiveness led him to understand Buddhist non-theistic awareness practice and equanimity in the face of Sunyatā, Empty Universe. This inquisitiveness led to complete healthy disillusionment with false Love, Divinity, Patriotism, Good, Evil, Life, Death, Art, and Sex. He worked hard. He gave vernacular transmission to hermetic insight, he spoke and wrote in illuminated Brooklynese.

1956, Mill Valley, California, a party in a carpenter's house, farewell to poet Gary Snyder going off to the First Zen Institute in Japan on a scholarship to study with Zen master Miura Roshi in Kyoto: Kenneth Rexroth was there, poets Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Peter Orlovsky, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac—amid some naked dancing and happy tearful wine-drinking, our host put on a phonograph record of Henry Miller's voice—He was telling anecdotes, natural Brooklyn voiced, he had no script and needed none, he had his own idiomatic mind, his own mouth memory and humor, improvising, he was fearless, he wasn't afraid of succeeding or failing at merely being his own voluble Bodhisattva self, valuable in itself by being self-born—This first hearing of his voice left a lasting impression, that the Immortals are human, more human than anyone else.