Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Frank Harris
"A
Literate Passion,"
ed. Gunther
Stuhlmann. (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.)
Book
review by Rob Couteau.
Published in:
Arete Magazine.
Aug /Sep
1988.
(San Diego, CA: Alden Mills.)
All
text Copyright © 2006-2007 Rob
Couteau
Letters of Anais Nin and Henry
Miller, 1932-1953, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann.
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Revered as a hero by his fans and disregarded as an egoistic scoundrel by his critics, Henry Miller lingers in American literature as a presence for which no common consensus seems to exist. As with certain other artists who provoke a wide range of opinion, Miller symbolized a force or personified a notion extending beyond his own identity or creation. He belonged to a tradition of literature that was idea- or content oriented rather than one that was self-consciously poetic or simply well crafted. In style and in vision, Miller was unabashedly rapturous, entranced, and ecstatic.
Writing in the first-person, he drew from personal experience to portray symbolic dramas that, when suc-cessful, addressed the larger issues of our times: mystical experience and the question of God; the confrontation of sacred and profane and of meaning and meaninglessness (the latter often portrayed in scenes of exaggerated sexuality, for which he was later labeled a pornographer); the liberating role of the artist; the dehumanizing politics of the modern age; the spiritual value of marginal characters and social misfits (many of them the “homeless” of his time); and meditations on the world-to-come. Miller was a philosopher in the original (and not in the modern) sense: a philosopher who lives his philosophy and whose philosophy emerges from the reality called life.
It’s perhaps this–the philosophical view–that stands at the center of a fierce difference of opinion on Miller. To many “men of letters,” Miller’s worldview is unpalatable. Like follow iconoclast Marcel Duchamp, he offended the traditionalists and the avant-garde (a nifty accomplishment) by refusing to accept a politically correct path, always preferring to go his own way.
Speaking of his own place
in literature, Frank Harris (a client of the senior Miller’s tailor shop)
once wrote:
There are two main traditions of English writing: the one of perfect liberty, that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, completely outspoken, with a certain liking for lascivious details and witty smut, a man’s speech; the other emasculated more and more by Puritanism and since the French Revolution, gelded to the tamest propriety; for that upheaval brought the illiterate middle class to power and insured the domination of girl readers. Under Victoria, English prose literally became half childish, as in stories of “Little Mary,” or at least provincial, as anyone may see who comes to consider the influence of Dickens, Thackeray and Reade in the world with the influence of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola.
All my life I have rebelled against this old maid’s canon of deportment, and my revolt has grown stronger with advancing years….
Although he epitomizes other things as well, Henry Miller clearly belongs to this tradition of “perfect liberty.”
In contrast to Miller’s “perfect liberty,” Anais Nin pursued a style that approached the darker issues only to skirt about them with an abstract, denatured Apollonian resolve. To integrate the “instincts” (as she liked to call them) into consciousness became a lifelong pursuit; one in which she was assisted by none other than Henry Miller.
In examining Miller’s correspondence with his patron, fellow writer, and lover, we are privy to previously unpublished disclosures of intimacy and compassion that occasionally border on the electric. When the commentaries are somewhat less electric, however, the letters often fail to elicit the interest of the general reader or even that of the Miller or Nin aficionado.
It’s possible that the fault lies with the editor Gunther Stuhlmann, who chose to exclude passages of general interest, such as (in his own words): “lengthy discussions of Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence; detailed critiques of one another’s work-in-progress; ruminations on films, books, and so on, often encased in letters of twenty or more typed pages.” Although one can understand the quandary concerning the obvious limitations of space, the decision to “eliminate material peripheral to the personal story” leaves the literary palate teased yet unsatiated.
By focusing on the personal concerns and events of their lives, the book fails to pay tribute to the larger issues that propelled Miller to greatness and that profoundly con-cerned each author. Perhaps, there was a concern that Miller’s superior grasp of such issues and his more imaginative ability to respond to them would have too severely overshadowed Nin’s generally less interesting contributions. Heralded by the emerging Women’s Movement and revered by a generation of introspective journal scribblers, her literary importance remains an inflated one, while Miller still awaits his proper canonization in modern literature.
One hopes that the juicier ruminations on literature, film, and art will one day see the “light of print” and will help to place each author in better perspective. Meanwhile, A Literate Passion occasionally sparks, but never quite ignites, the literary passions of the reader.
