Henry Miller and How He Got That Way [1 ed.] 9780748645466, 9780748641185

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experience rather than ideas or influences. Katy Masuga's study of Miller is a brave endeavour to noticed before, giving him a sophistication buried underneath the surface of his work, that might have surprised even the author himself. Anybody looking for the depths in Henry Miller's novels that he sought in his reading will find it here.’ John Calder, publisher and bookseller ‘Books may be, as Miller said, “as much a part of life as trees, stars or dung,” but he also said 90% of them “could be thrown on the junk heap.” As for the 10% which contributed to the often overlooked intelligence of his seemingly pornographic, idiosyncratic prose, Katy Masuga’s much-needed study discretely shows why, and how, with suggestive attention to the writer writing about writing itself.’ Herbert Blau, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities University of Washington

Identifying six significant writers – Whitman, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Lewis Carroll, Proust and D. H. Lawrence – Katy Masuga explores their influence on Miller's work as well as Miller's retroactive impact on their writing. She explores four forms of intertextuality in relation to each 'ancestral' author: direct allusions; unconscious style; reverse influence; and participation of the ancestral author as part of the story within the text. The study is informed by the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Kristeva on polyvocity and of Blanchot, Wittgenstein and Deleuze on language games and the indefatigability of writing. By presenting Miller in intertextual context, he emerges as a noteworthy modernist writer

AND HOW HE GOT THAT WAY

bind him to his reading, and she finds surprising and original sides to his work that have not been

whose contributions to literature include the struggle to find a distinctive voice alongside a distinguished lineage of literary figures. Katy Masuga earned a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle in Comparative Literature and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her other publications include various journal articles and anthology chapters focusing on modernist writers and themes, as well as The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (2011).

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Edinburgh

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Katy Masuga

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instinctive writer, whose novels as well as his other writings were based on observation and personal

HENRY MILLER

‘Henry Miller, although he read widely, selectively and in some ways eccentrically, was a totally

HENRY MILLER AND HOW HE GOT THAT WAY

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

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– To correspondences, which keep us alive.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

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Katy Masuga

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© Katy Masuga, 2011 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4118 5 (hardback)

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The right of Katy Masuga to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

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Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction 1 Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman 2 The Dream of a Ridiculous Writer – Fyodor Dostoevsky 3 Through the Jabber – Lewis Carroll 4 The Drunken Inkwell – Arthur Rimbaud 5 In Search of Lost Allusion – Marcel Proust 6 Writers and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence Conclusion

1 19 42 71 97 123 156 179

Works Cited

189

Index

195

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Acknowledgements

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Part of Chapter 1 ‘Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman’ was first printed in Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, Vol. 7, 2010, as an article entitled ‘Crossing Brooklyn Bridge: an ekphrastic correspondence between Walt Whitman, Hart Crane and Henry Miller’. My deepest gratitude to Amy and Jason Merwin, Ed Masuga, Kate Grindlay, Tina Kendall, Jamie Andrews, Brett Shell, Lucy TraversO’Neill, Helen Grainger, Louise Mousseau and especially Jim Haynes for generously giving me a home in which to write. My very humble appreciation to my family, especially my many sisters and brothers and my dad, as well as my friends, especially those mentioned above but also Capria and Paul Jaussen, Leroy and Annie Searle, Jane Mortell, Jeremy Reed, Janice Deary, Amy Wright and David Horn, and of course Homer, for their presence and unequivocal support.

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In memory of my two dear moms –

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Lois Mildred Hollis and Shirley Jane Temple

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Introduction

I suspect that Henry Miller’s final place will be among those towering anomalies of authorship like Whitman or Blake who have left us, not simply works of art, but a corpus of ideas which motivate and influence a whole cultural pattern. – Lawrence Durrell1

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Henry Miller is likely to outlast a great many writers who at the moment seem more important. Fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, he will remain a significant figure of our time. The future will remember him for a variety of reasons, not all of them literary. For Henry Miller is not only a writer, he is a phenomenon. – George Wickes2

Henry Miller occupies a curious position in the world of fiction. He is well-known and highly regarded in countercultural circles, where he is seen as a proto-Beat and occasionally regarded as an experimental prose writer, continuing the pioneering experiments in form of Joyce, Proust and Céline. His freewheeling work prefigures various contemporary genre transgressions and the rise in literary non-fiction and life writing, yet he has been written about by academics sparingly. The predominant reason is likely his lingering reputation for writing pornography instead of literature, and perhaps his tendency to blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, often mixing autobiography, travel writing and literary criticism. The book at hand seeks to provide access to an unfamiliar but ambitious, challenging but rewarding, late modernist, set in relation to a significant handful of ancestral writers who arguably affected his work most profoundly. Despite the endless self-deprecating references to his lack of formal education, Miller was a serious reader and a genuine book lover. Not only did he himself write prolifically, producing nearly fifty books over the course of his lifetime of eight-eight years (not to mention numerous articles, essays and an extensive body of correspondence), but he was Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

also a very well read, self-educated bibliophile. In The Books in My Life (1952), a non-fiction account of Miller’s literary interests, he writes:

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I read – for me, at least – the most difficult books, not the easiest ones. I never read to kill time. [. . .] As I look back it seems to me I was always reading in an uncomfortable position. (Which is the way most writers write and painters paint, I find.) But what I read soaked through. The point is, if I must stress it, that when I read I read with undivided attention and with all the faculties I possessed.3

At the same time, in the same book’s preface, Miller concludes: ‘I have not read nearly as much as the scholar, the bookworm, or even the “well-educated” man – yet I have undoubtedly read a hundred times more than I should have read for my own good.’4 Miller’s position on the value, purpose and use of books is deliberately contradictory. Because it is ‘direct experience of life’ that is essential,5 Miller advises his readers to ‘read as little as possible, not as much as possible!’6 Specifically, he claims: ‘All that is set forth in books, all that seems so terribly vital and significant, is but an iota of that from which it stems and which it is within everyone’s power to tap’,7 namely real-life experience. Nevertheless, Miller identifies his very personality with being a reader. Indeed, the very purpose of the book that he is writing, specifically in this instance The Books in My Life, is to set down his thoughts on all the books that he has found to have influenced him, as a person and as a writer. Thus Miller himself also cannot cease writing. He is aware that writing, as far removed from real life as it may be, is a necessary and quite essential activity in life. Miller considers his experience of writing to be similar, as Miller says, to ‘encounters with other phenomena of life or thought. All encounters are configurate, not isolate. In this sense, and in this sense only, books are as much a part of life as trees, stars or dung.’8 Consequently, Miller’s encounter with writing is an encounter with life, albeit a mere ‘iota’ of life, but it is an activity that engages him, as he sees it, in ‘the creation of new and better things’, as opposed to an endeavour to render some kind of access to a fullness of life in the past, which ‘would be a vain and futile’ task.9 Miller sets to work in The Books in My Life detailing his thoughts on his own influences, while never forgetting to remind his reader that it would be impossible not only ever to complete the task, but even to say ‘all that [he] means to say’ on any particular writer of interest to him.10 Among many others, to be sure, Miller is referring here to Faure, Cendrars, Céline, Emerson, Dostoevsky, Maeterlinck and Powys, who, as a ‘rather a kind of Spenglerian actor’, is ‘bewitching’ as ‘the master’ and hence ‘put a spell’ on Miller.11 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Introduction

3

Under such a spell, Miller’s focus as a writer is to write about writing itself. As a result, his work is replete with endless references and allusions to, as well as styles and techniques from, various writers whom Miller himself read and usually admired in some form. The following analysis considers Miller’s relation to a handful of his precursors: both those whom he directly references as influences and muses over concerning this very anxiety and indebtedness, and those who are present in the very fibre of his texts but remain unacknowledged and often unnamed but whose style is clearly present, sometimes only thinly disguised. The writers about whom Miller writes are manifest in his works in many ways, like in The Books in My Life as straightforwardly articulated sources of influence and as figures of his own personal readerly interest. They are also acutely present in his fiction, which is the predominant concern here and which raises an important distinction between Miller-the-author and Miller the figure in the text, that is to say Miller-the-persona. In terms of influence and intertextuality, not only can Miller’s style, form and language as a writer be analysed, but his writing can also be analysed intertextually in relation to Miller-the-persona in the text, insofar as this character of Miller often deliberately speaks the language of other writers or refers to them and discusses them. Writers occasionally live in Miller’s fiction. In many ways, as characters themselves, such writers can take on larger-than-life qualities or, alternatively, be referred to just in passing, or perhaps in a book being read by a character or as the writer of a book being discussed. Writers populate Miller’s work in the following ways: troubling Miller-the-persona in the text with their philosophies like Nietzsche and Spengler, fraternising with him like Van Gogh and Mann, intimidating him at his own attempt at writing like Dostoevsky and Proust, passionately inspiring him like Balzac and Cendrars, who ‘give us the French equivalent of Dostoievsky’s outpourings’,12 or simply occupying his back pocket, like Hemingway or Joyce. Aside from the allusions and direct references, however, writers are also present in an entirely non-present way, as embedded sources of influence in Miller and directly intertextually in the language of the text itself. These are the same writers (those figures who made up Miller’s reading hours beyond his actual book-writing), but their influence comes through in the writing necessarily in the form, style and language of the text. Writers are present in Miller in a Bakhtinian ‘heteroglossia’, such as in the Kafkaesque sequence in the last chapter of Sexus (1949), where Miller writes: ‘If I could become an animal I would be getting somewhere.’13 Mysteriously opaque yet flatly literal, this passage exemplifies Miller’s fascination with existential incertitude and the symbolic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

potential of literature, as well as demonstrating his playful insistence on the words standing for themselves. As the passage advances, Miller becomes a dog much in the same way Kafka’s figures become animal, pointing to his likely readership and subsequent affinity. Writers are also present, completely and significantly distinctly, in direct character discussions, such as that on Dostoevsky between Millerthe-persona and his friend Stymer in Nexus (1960), where Miller claims, ‘That doesn’t sound exactly like the Dostoievsky I know,’ discounting Stymer’s exposition, because ‘it has a hopeless ring to it’.14 Again, influential writers also become characters themselves, such as the imagined vision of Thomas Mann in Nexus ‘writing his Novellen in the back of a delicatessen store, with a yard of linked sausages wrapped around his neck’,15 or, finally, in any combination of both Miller’s conscious and unconscious efforts in his writing that must include the forms, styles, language and other qualities of figures of influence. In their essay ‘Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality’ from Influence and Intertextuality in Literary Theory (1991), Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein distinguish influence from intertextuality most clearly by suggesting that ‘influence has to do with agency, whereas intertextuality has to do with a much more impersonal field of crossing texts’.16 Both concepts are relevant in this book, although it is not always possible to be entirely clear-cut between the two. For example, the term ‘influence’ is also used here simply as a term in the generic sense of something having an effect upon something else. Without restating Clayton and Rothstein’s entire argument and introduction to intertextuality, the study at hand focuses upon such contemporary interpretations of intertextuality, including its foundational presentation by Julia Kristeva and subsequent views by Roland Barthes, both of whom provide theories on the possibility of diverse forms of influence and cross connections between texts that are not simply restricted to the concept of an ancestral author affecting the method of a later one. Although an old-fashioned sense of influence is crucial here as well, insofar as the development of Henry Miller’s authorship is the central concern, the approach taken locates that concern within an intertextual understanding of the terms. The key distinction is to note that influence here does not imply an inherent authority of the ancestral author in contrast to the unoriginality or humility of the later author. It also regards components otherwise considered incidental facts of biography as active and crucial to a work, such as ‘allusion, originality and expression’, as Kristeva suggests.17 In her reading of Bakhtin, she makes plain the notion that any utterance is already imbued with a variety of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Introduction

5

intertextual components, none being favoured over any other. In this way, Kristeva brings the issue of influence into semiotics by demonstrating that all language is ‘dialogic’, that is to say words are always already in dialogue in the moment of their utterance. Borrowing from Bakhtin, Kristeva calls this a ‘translinguistic procedure’.18 However, Kristeva takes this a step further than Bakhtin, employing Derrida’s notion of différance to her theory, which adds the possibility (and necessity) of endless dissemination within a text. On this note, Roland Barthes’ theory of intertextuality comes into play from ‘Death of the Author’ (‘La mort de l’auteur’, 1968), which asserts: ‘A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’19 Barthes is concerned not simply with authorial intention, or even authorial presence, but with the effects of authorship on the text, on the reader and on the author. In this approach, Miller himself is considered the reader, thus turning traditional influence on its head. Under examination in this study are four overlapping forms of intertextuality in Miller in relation to a significant selection of ancestral authors – the first two forms being the most crucial. Supported by Barthes’ theory above and as explained by the art historian Michael Baxandall, the first form is a ‘reverse [of] the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account’.20 Baxandall’s explanation is useful here because it suggests that influence works counter to conventional thinking, such that it is not the ‘historical actor’ (the ancestral author) who impacts upon the later author; rather, influence is present in the reader’s understanding and adoptive understanding of the ancestral writing. Miller is the central figure dictating that influence directly, whether it be conscious or unconscious. The key point to this approach is that Miller is aware of, and in some ways responsible for, the exchange between himself, his interest as a writer and his sources of inspiration. This form can be divided into two interrelated forms, which serve as the two most important forms addressed in this study. The first form accounts for conscious portrayals and the second for unconscious. The first is present (allusion and reference), whereas the second is non-present in the text, pointing to sources of influence unknown to Miller (in the sense of intertextuality as a perpetual interfusing and overlapping of texts). The first form, specific to the purposes of this study, includes Miller’s direct allusions to his influences, whereas this second form looks more to styles that are unconsciously borrowed (taking cross-textual connections as its basis for this assumption), such as the Kafkaesque passage mentioned previously. This unconscious form, although it appears to come from a more conventional or old-fashioned sense of influence, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

actually takes as its impetus contemporary intertextual theories rooted in Bakhtin’s dialogism and heteroglossia, including Baxandall and Barthes’ approaches, which suggest that it is ‘the agency of the author being influenced’, according to Clayton and Rothstein.21 In S/Z (1974) Barthes writes, ‘This “I” which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost.’22 The reader sees that Miller, as the reader, comes to his sources of inspiration already as a complex arrangement of interests, codes and desires. Not only is it impossible and irrelevant to extract one such element, but also to attempt as much would be for the literary critic to misunderstand that Miller-the-author, a man who wrote works of literature, can be equated fluidly and seamlessly with the personas that his literature creates. The third form is a reverse influence, which is concerned with the manner in which the manifestation of the writer of influence in Miller’s work has perhaps affected a new reception of that figure of influence in subsequent criticism, again speaking to contemporary intertextuality that understands the flow and intersections of texts to be a-temporal. In The Books in My Life, Miller himself makes the following claim: ‘The man who spreads the good word augments not only the life of the book in question but the act of creation itself.’23 Baxandall uses a clear visual analogy of a snooker or billiard table to demonstrate the dynamic of this form of ‘reverse influence’: each time the ball symbolising Picasso hits upon any other ball (Cézanne, in this instance), not only is Picasso’s billiard ball affected and repositioned but so too is Cézanne’s, and likely many others.24 One instance explored here is first discussed by Maria Bloshteyn in The Making of a Counter-culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (2007), persuasively explaining how contemporary readings of Dostoevsky are coloured by the work of his literary inheritors. This form is taken up most strongly, however, in the chapter on Proust in relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In particular, Miller’s hand in creating a certain image of the writers here discussed has been significant and instrumental in how they are consequently perceived. This form of intertextuality is of the least concern, since the study at hand focuses upon Miller’s writing roots and not upon contemporary writers influenced by him. However, it is still a significant enough form to make it worth addressing in this study, in a backward-looking sense, as in the context of several of the writers addressed here, such as Dostoevsky (again, as Bloshteyn well demonstrates), Lawrence (whose reputation is now intimately tied with Miller’s, particularly in consideration of the law suits that ultimately liberated sexually explicit prose) and Proust, again taking into account Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Introduction

7

the importance of figures like Deleuze and Guattari whose work has had a tremendous impact on contemporary literary and cultural studies and who used their insights on Miller in their work on Proust and who also worked on both simultaneously, allowing one to merge with the other.25 Finally, the last form of intertextuality is also acutely present in Miller’s work, but even more overtly, with Miller presenting the writer of influence as a figure in the text, occasionally even as a character. These may hardly be considered moments of influence, but rather Miller’s cheeky tactic of highlighting his interest in blurring the line between fiction and reality in writing, drawing attention to the issue of distinguishing between ‘the writer’ and ‘the person who has written’. Derrida makes it his task in The Ear of the Other (L’Oreille de l’autre, 1982; in English, 1985) to unravel this issue in regard to Nietzsche. He writes: ‘And if life returns, it will return to the name but not to the living, in the name of the living as the name of a dead man.’26 Not only does Miller play with the complicated distinction between ancestral figures as writers and as actual people, he does the same with his own persona: existing in his own works as a character who is a writer called Henry Miller, while also recognising his own necessary (and automatic) removal of himself from the text as the author Henry Miller but also as the person called Henry Miller who lived 1891–1980. Although the cameo appearance of ancestral authors is somewhat widespread throughout Miller’s oeuvre, it curiously does not really apply to the ancestral authors who had the greatest import to his work. For this reason, the passages that reflect this form of intertextuality are elaborated upon in the Conclusion. More than as sources of influence, they instead exemplify Miller’s clever writing style and are used for this study of the presence of ancestral authors in his work. Miller creates characters (or even caricatures) of Mann, Hamsun, Duchamp and Balzac; more generally, he also refers to Abelard and Héloïse, Petrarch, Rabelais, Goethe, Swedenborg, Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Villon, Petronius, Nietzsche, Pascal, Boccaccio, Hugo, Spengler, Machen, Valéry, Strindberg, Faure, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, as well as his contemporaries Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, Cendrars, Anderson, Crane, Céline and Pound, and a handful of painters including Bosch, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Miró, Gauguin, Man Ray and Matisse, as being noteworthy to his writing. The six figures examined in this study are Walt Whitman, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust and D. H. Lawrence. Adding to Miller’s contemporary importance, and one of the strongest factors that have been momentous to Miller’s reputation as a writer Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

of significance and influence in his own right, is the role of his ten-year Parisian residence upon his work and upon his cultish reputation subsequently. Place is very significant to Miller and in his work, despite his ridicule of America as the origin to which he felt he never belonged. In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), the non-fiction travel narrative resulting from Miller’s roughly year-long automobile trek across America after his return from Paris, he writes: ‘I felt the need to effect reconciliation with my native land. [. . .] I didn’t want to run away from it as I originally had.’27 Miller does not paint a fond picture of America while in Paris or before. In Tropic of Cancer (1934), Miller’s first book, written within the first two years of his arrival in Paris, the narrator (Miller-the-persona) recounts his detachment:

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And the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even further lost than a lost continent, because with the lost continents I felt some mysterious attachment, whereas with America I felt nothing at all.28

This passage demonstrates, however, that Miller’s work itself is decidedly impacted by his self-exile in greater ways than even he could have imagined. Miller’s identification with other such writers in his work (and distinctly not with his contemporaries, such as Joyce, Hemingway and Stein, also Anglophones residing in Paris around the same time) indicates the rather dramatic importance that he places not only on his own living and writing in a place different from his place of origin, but the insistence on completely rejecting that origin – implying the need to accept it as a force behind his very identity. It is akin to the way in which Miller perceives Kafka with his tortured writing, alienated from the Germanic-Czechoslovakian culture in which he lived; or Rilke abandoning his family in Austria to sacrifice himself to his writing, working for Rodin in Paris, suffering war in Russia, Germany and elsewhere, finally succumbing to leukaemia and dying in Switzerland; or Dostoevsky exiled to Siberia, enduring profound suffering for his writing, ostracised by his Mother Russia. Miller compares himself directly with his influences, to their sufferings and their tragic, often short-lived lives, writing in a letter to Emil Schnellock in 1933: I am not going to live very long. I know it. I feel it in my bones. [. . .] Maybe I want to immortalize myself. I don’t care what it is. I am pushing myself on, driving with all the steam that’s in me, to say what I have to say, before the curtain falls. And when I have said it all, I will fall over. I know it as sure as Fate. I am built along those lines. It is a classical fate for such as myself.

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Introduction

9

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(Vide – Gauguin, Van Gogh, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Proust, Dostoievski.)29

As if instinctively, yet quite deliberately, Miller associates himself not just with ‘the greats’, but with those greats who endured alienation, displacement and often a form of homelessness or of not-belonging. In American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment (1996) Donald Pizer writes, ‘Miller heightens to an almost unremitting presence the principle metaphoric analogues provided by the Paris scene for the expression of these themes’, which are ‘the essential expatriate subject matter of Paris as a crucible for the refining of the creative spirit into gold or dross.’30 For Pizer, Miller’s work expresses the epitome of ‘the creative imagination of feasting and mobility within the Paris moment’,31 which other expatriate writers only used as tropes. Although the philosophical and intertextual dimension of this work moves away from discussions of place and cultural geography, it is still very important to ‘place’ Miller, particularly to identify how this capacity of ‘feasting and mobility’ is present in Miller and how it not only distinguishes him from his contemporaries but how it aligns him with his ancestral writers of influence. Generally speaking, it is also necessary in order better to explain the relationship that Miller has with (and the role he plays in) both European and American writing. In another letter to Emil Schnellock in 1933, Miller writes: ‘France is where I belong. Or somewhere here in Europe. I am no longer an American. I can swear to that.’32 Miller is constantly writing such things in his notes and letters, aggressively and definitely, letting this conviction make its way into every word of his prose as well. In Americans in Paris (1969) George Wickes also highlights Miller’s singular import on the early twentieth-century image, and imagining, of Paris. He writes, ‘Miller penetrated far deeper into Paris than any other American writer and projected a vision of the city that was altogether different. He succeeded only as Céline had done in making its ugliness symbolic of private and universal anguish, a sordid modern-day inferno, a labyrinth of cancer and despair.’33 Considered an expatriate writer, Miller’s physical placement in Paris gave him a sharper perspective as a writer on his homeland than he would otherwise have had, had he stayed in Brooklyn. In Transatlantic Modernism: Moral Dilemmas in Modernist Fiction (2006), Martin Halliwell writes, ‘The view of “homeland” as an anchor for personal identity and moral orientation is a perspective American expatriate writers treated with extreme suspicion: for Miller, New York was “a whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness” . . .’34 Despite his self-proclaimed affinity with culturally Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

displaced and exiled writers (including Kafka, Rilke, Dostoevsky and Beckett, as well as the writers around him including those who were to make up his writing circle known as the ‘Villa Seurat’, such as CubanCatalan-Spanish, France-residing Anaïs Nin or the Indian-British, France and Greece-residing Lawrence Durrell), Miller never really wanted to identify himself as an expatriate writer in the vein of his contemporaries Joyce, Hemingway or Stein. These latter writers weren’t at all as impressive as the public took them for, in Miller’s contention, derisively calling Hemingway a ‘craftsman’ and ‘not the great writer they make him out to be’.35 The comparisons between Hemingway and Miller in particular are more prevalent than one might expect, and for this reason perhaps Miller desired to distinguish himself as much as possible. Joyce, Hemingway, Stein and others also did not necessarily consider themselves ‘expats’ either, which was considered rather derogatory. In The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway explains that it refers to foreigners who have ‘lost touch with the soil’ and live according to ‘fake European standards’, who ‘spend all [their] time talking, not working’ and who ‘hang around cafés’.36 Living in Paris a decade later, Miller was able to distance himself even from the conventionally adapted ‘expat’ moniker that came to represent Stein’s ‘Lost Generation’ – these figures who fled America, fought on French First World War battlefronts, wrote modern prose and poetry in Parisian cafes and generally lived so-called avant-garde or bohemian lifestyles during the 1920s. In his non-fiction essay ‘The Universe of Death’ (1938) on Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, Miller writes: ‘Joyce, though still alive, seems even more dead than Proust ever was.’37 In Plexus (1953), he refers to Stein’s poetry as ‘coldblooded nonsense’,38 and in From Your Capricorn Friend (1978), a collection of letters and essays, Miller writes, ‘For each person it will be another different set of baggage he wants or needs to carry through life. [. . .] One can forget Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Thurber, and their likes.’39 His reference concerns significant figures and experiences that are worthy of posterity, such as a first romantic crush and the poetry of Walt Whitman, and those that are not worthy, such as the writers mentioned in the passage above. In his comparative critique of Hemingway and Miller in Americans in Paris, George Wickes writes that Tropic of Cancer ‘is sometimes compared to The Sun Also Rises, not for the similarities but for the differences between them. The comparison is absurd yet apt, for it shows how much the world had changed between the mid-twenties and the early thirties.’40 Such writers as Joyce, Stein and Hemingway (these being several of the most prominent Anglo writers living in Paris during the first third of the twentieth century) enjoyed far more success and thus Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Introduction

11

may have been viewed as a challenge to Miller, who disguised his intimidation as distaste and disdain and so ridiculed their work, claiming, on the whole, to be unimpressed.41 Bloshteyn agrees and recognises the obvious mechanism at work here when she writes that ‘at least part of the Villa Seurat writers’ dissatisfaction with and ultimate rejection of the work of their contemporaries . . . had to do with their desire to be major literary figures in their own right . . .’42 Miller’s lack of popular success is directly related to his interest in the vision of himself as a self-exiled, peripheral writer, necessarily an underdog. Undeniably contradictory at times, Miller demands an exploding of traditional canonicity, while maintaining an image of himself as a kind of self-flagellating, life-affirming martyr. Miller desired fame and popular success on some level, but not at the expense of his ‘bad boy’ reputation and his vision of greatness by way of hardship, isolation and singularity. Comparing Miller and Joyce, George Orwell writes in ‘Inside the Whale’ (1945):

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As a novel, Tropic of Cancer is far inferior to Ulysses. Joyce is an artist, in a sense in which Miller is not and probably would not wish to be, and in any case he is attempting much more. He is exploring different states of consciousness, dream, reverie (the ‘bronze-by-gold’ chapter), drunkenness, etc., and dovetailing them all into a huge complex pattern, almost like a Victorian ‘plot’.43

Miller’s contemporaneous critics were, on some level, aware of what Miller was attempting in his works. Orwell’s early critique provides his understanding, explaining that such are books ‘of the sort to leave a flavour behind them – books that “create a world of their own,” as the saying goes. The books that do this are not necessarily good books, they may be good bad books . . .’44 This topic of ‘good bad books’ surfaces again in Chapters 2 and 4 on Dostoevsky and Rimbaud, in terms of bad writing being equated with mythic, legendary writing. For these reasons, Miller can be seen not just as a modernist but also as a strong influence on postmodern writing, being conceptually grounded in tools of contradiction, radical exploitation of conventional forms, as well as manipulative usage of techniques that open up fissures in how literature is read and received. It is not quite as simple as calling Miller a misogynist, for example, when a postmodernist understanding just as easily – and solidly – regards so-called sexist or pornographic passages as ironic, deliberately elusive, absurd and fragmented. Such writing calls attention to itself as a new form and not simply as a medium of specific (or even significant) content.45 In The Work of Fire (La part du feu, 1945; in English, 1995) Maurice Blanchot writes of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

this particular quality of Miller’s work when he says: ‘Language seeks thus to separate itself from man and even from language; it penetrates underground, it becomes water, air, night. It enters into the way of metamorphoses.’46 Miller is constantly directing his work out of itself, into life but life that is always necessarily contained in the creativity of the work itself. When Blanchot talks of these ‘metamorphoses’ in relation to Miller, he is also directly talking about Miller’s ‘obscene’ language. As with postmodern works, the point is not to stagnate over the literal content of the work but to transform what the reader is able to make of that content in terms of language under the pressures of literature. This kind of writing evokes an otherness that demands attention from the reader on the level of moving beyond the obvious but with the need for the obvious precisely in order for it to be undermined. Such writing has meaning (and not-meaning) as language play. Blanchot writes of Miller’s style: ‘Humor here is the threat of a complete metamorphosis of language that would change the meaning not into an absence of meaning but into a thing, a mirage in face of which any correct reading is soon transformed into stupor.’47 From here, one sees Miller’s flight forward into the postmodern, as well as backward into a Carrollian universe, addressed in Chapter 3. In The Books in My Life, Miller laments, ‘I believe they are woefully mistaken who assert that the foundations of knowledge or culture, or any foundations whatsoever, are necessarily those classics which are found in every list of “best” books.’48 He follows up with his solution: ‘It is my opinion that each man has to dig his own foundations. If one is an individual at all it is by reason of his uniqueness.’49 The reader may wonder how it is that Miller’s list of ‘The Hundred Books That Influence Me Most’ includes, on the whole, such usual classics such as Conrad, Balzac, Emerson, Hugo, Dumas, Cooper, James, Twain, Mann, Plutarch, Swift and others. These are listed alongside other seemingly surprising selections including Sade, Nostradamus, Lao-tse, Breton and Gutkind. There are several on Miller’s list as well who would have not been considered classics at his time but whose presence is more familiar on today’s lists of ‘great books’, such as E. Brontë, Huysmans and Joyce. Miller addends his claim when he writes, ‘The good reader will gravitate to the good books.’50 Without opening a complex argument on the validity of this statement, it may simply be a segue for supporting the choices taken for this study: six of what appear the most prominent writers in Miller’s work, through both direct and indirect reference. For a neutral presentation of these writers of intertextual significance in Miller’s work, they are included in this study by chronological Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Introduction

13

order of birth. Chapter 1 is devoted to Whitman, followed by chapters on Dostoevsky, Carroll, Rimbaud, Proust and finally Lawrence. Dostoevsky and Proust may be seen as probably the most prominent figures in all of Miller’s work of those included here: the first Miller worshipped, the second was his alter ego. Rimbaud and Lawrence come as no surprise to Miller’s readers. They are the two influences from whose grasp Miller struggled to escape while simultaneously serving as the writers after whom Miller verily fashioned himself, by the end of his life having written a study on each. Whitman and Carroll may be the least obvious on first glance, but their carefree, life-affirming styles deeply affected Miller in his personal spiritual pursuits and hence affected his own take on infusing Nietzschean affirmation and whimsical humour into his texts. In several instances, these last two influences are the least named by Miller-the-persona but are two with whom he often seems to be engaging or to whom he seems to be responding. It is almost as if a correspondence or actual dialogue were taking place between the writers within Miller’s work, or if a dialogue could take place through the words themselves – outside of the time and space that, monumentally, separates the writers’ own existences. This sense of correspondence is specifically addressed in Chapter 1 on Whitman but should be considered to pervade the entire study, summing up with an essence of Miller as developing a literary camaraderie with all of his ancestral writers, transcending time and place. Particularly in light of Miller’s popular reputation as a ‘bad boy’,51 this elucidation will hopefully bring about a reconceptualisation of Miller as a notable writer, not just for his assistance in exploding writerly conventions on certain taboos, but also in terms of his position among other writers of major stature, both in terms of form and quality. As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus (Mille plateaux, 1975; in English, 1987), ‘It is undoubtedly Miller who has taken the modern figure of the writer as cosmic artisan the farthest, particularly in Sexus.’52 The book at hand has two specific endeavours that highlight Miller’s play with language while grappling with the notions of influence and writing. The first is to uncover the exact references in Miller’s texts that refer to influence and influences and to extract the nature of those references (purpose and effect, if possible). For example, Whitman is included not simply to address how Miller’s style is similar, but because Miller directly responds to Whitman’s poetry. In ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1856) Whitman declares: Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters! Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset;

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses; Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are.53

Miller seems directly to respond to him in Black Spring (1936):

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Thus when the fleet maneuvers in the Pacific it is the whole saga of youth flashing before your eyes, the dream of the open street and the sound of gulls wheeling and diving with garbage in their beaks; or it’s the sound of the trumpet and flags flying and all the unknown parts of the earth sailing before your eyes without dates or meaning, wheeling like the tabletop in an iridescent sheen of power and glory.54

The connection is not simply the allusion to Whitman but the nature of that allusion. Miller not only calls upon Whitman but also engages with him in his work. The second endeavour in this book is to reveal how Miller enacts a progressive take on Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ of not overcoming ancestral authors (that is, not by comfortably re-creating the new, as Bloom discourages as a possibility), but remaining necessarily unfulfilled through misreading, which includes Miller parodying, emulating and bringing to life his ancestral authors. The fact that Miller writes about writing serves as the impetus in dissecting Miller’s influences, partly because he is a good example of a writer who remains perpetually in pursuit of the pursuit itself. In comparing Miller with Lautréamont in this vein, Blanchot writes that Miller’s work expresses the same ‘fundamental conflict in which violence and slowness associate, acceleration of acts and unified control of rhythm, explosion of metamorphoses and arrest of all duration’ because of ‘the extreme intrepidity of his movement, this rapidity of existence, this multiplicity of presents that the language expresses seem like the returning shock of a consciousness that lacks a future and that seeks only to live again in the past’.55 The anxiety of influence is somehow even more problematic and compelling, such that Miller is not just calling out to the past (while trying to manage his anxiety of ‘priority’ and ‘authority’, in Bloom’s sense of the terms), but he is relentlessly paying attention to the push and pull of this tradition of influence (the history and necessary chronology of influence) by writing about this very undeniable and impossible task of writing. The kind of analysis found here is in distinction to critics like Kingsley Widmer and William Gordon, who, in their critiques Henry Miller (1990) and The Mind and Art of Henry Miller (1967), respectively, discuss how they consider Miller to be a product of the American Romantic tradition. They both read directly into Miller’s philosophical Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Introduction

15

interests as a human being (as divulged in his writing without regard to the distinction between the author and the persona, much as critics also continue to read Whitman), instead of regarding the form of Miller’s prose on its own, and subsequently in relation to the prose and poetry of those very American Romantics such as Whitman. Another critical text on Miller and influence is John Parkin’s Henry Miller, the Modern Rabelais (1990), which aligns Miller with Rabelais. Parkin considers Miller to be a ‘picaresque hero’, analysing Miller’s experiences in New York, Paris and Greece. A significant work on Miller in relation to Rimbaud is Bertrand Mathieu’s Orpheus in Brooklyn: Orphism, Rimbaud and Henry Miller (1976). A substantial and thorough analysis, Orpheus in Brooklyn discusses Miller’s parallels first with Orphism, then with the Symbolistes and finally directly with Rimbaud. As Mathieu himself explains, previous critical works on Miller’s influences have paid more attention to ‘matters of ideology and attitude’ and not to ‘Miller’s devotion to Rimbaud the craftsman’ as does he.56 Chapter 4’s treatment of Rimbaud as an intertextual reference includes a notable acknowledgement and explication of Mathieu’s work. For Miller, writing is the paradoxical mode for getting at the world. Awkwardly, through writing, however, life is immediately suspended. Miller declares, ‘I wanted to describe the world I knew and be in it at the same time.’57 Miller spends his entire literary corpus trying to write through the very dilemma that is literature. The reader sees how writers such as Proust and, in this instance, even Lewis Carroll made their way, in both conscious and unconscious ways, to the top of Miller’s list of influences. Miller’s concern is writing itself and the capacity of language as a tool to create new and incredible universes, while also peculiarly reflecting, distorting and imitating reality. On the one hand, writing is seen necessarily to pale in comparison to reality, if one considers the duty of writing to concretise life, while on the other hand, writing moves beyond life, often through flamboyant or humorous efforts. Miller explains: It took me ages to understand why, after having made exhaustive efforts to induce these moments of exaltation and release, I should be so incapable of recording them. I never dreamed that it was an end in itself, that to experience a moment of pure bliss, of pure awareness, was the end all and be all.58

This passage is a significant point of departure for an examination of intertextuality in Miller’s work, because it highlights the problem that will plague Miller throughout his oeuvre, which is how he can both be part of the tradition of great writers like Dostoevsky and Whitman while also trying to live in the world that they create and to write that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

world down in his living of it. This conundrum (the problem of priority and authority) preoccupies Miller in all of his work. The first upcoming analysis is on Miller’s relationship with Whitman and this sense of a transcendent literary correspondence.

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Notes 1. The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1969, p. ix. 2. Henry Miller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966, p. 5. 3. Books, 264–5. 4. Ibid., 11. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 23. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 15. 11. Ibid., 135–6. 12. Ibid., 73. 13. Sexus, 451. 14. Nexus, 32. 15. Ibid., 309. 16. Clayton and Rothstein, 40. 17. Ibid., 15. 18. Desire in Language, 37; ‘Une démarche translinguistique’, Séméiotiké, 146. 19. Image-Music-Text, 148; ‘L’unité d’un texte n’est pas dans son origine, mais dans sa destination’, Le bruissement de la langue, 66. 20. Baxandall, 58. In ‘Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality’ Clayton and Rothstein acknowledge that others have made this claim before Baxandall including D. W. Robertson’s study on Chaucer and Earl Wasserman’s on Pope. 21. Clayton and Rothstein, 6. 22. S/Z, 10; ‘Ce «moi» qui s’approche du texte est déjà lui-même une pluralité d’autres textes, de codes infinies, ou plus exactement: perdues (dont l’origine se perd)’, S/Z, 16. 23. Books, 28. 24. Clayton and Rothstein, 60. 25. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; Mille plateaux, vol. 2: capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980. 26. Ear, 9; ‘Et si la vie revient elle reviendra au nom et non au vivant, au nom du vivant comme nom du mort’, L’Oreille, 21. 27. Nightmare, 10. 28. Cancer, 177. 29. Emil, 121–2.

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Introduction 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

17

Pizer, 123. Ibid. Emil, 113. Wickes, 261. Halliwell, 113. Conversations, 220. Sun Also Rises, 120. ‘Universe’, 109. Plexus, 234. Capricorn Friend, 73. Wickes, 261. There are instances, however, where Miller refers to Joyce’s work, specifically the Molly Bloom soliloquy of Ulysses, with a certain complimentary regard, even if it is unclear as to whether the final judgement of that regard is admiration. In ‘The Universe of Death’, Miller refers to this piece as a ‘timeless reverie’, also calling the preceding chapter ‘the work of a learned desperado’, about which Miller gives Joyce credit for ‘dynamiting the dam’ in order to destroy ‘the last barrier of tradition and culture which must give way if man is to come into his own’ (132). Bloshteyn, 94. Orwell, 38. Orwell, 34. For more on this particular topic of misogyny and Blanchotian theory, see my work The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (Camden House, 2011). Fire, 169–70; ‘Le langage cherche donc à se séparer de l’homme et même du langage, il pénètre sous terre, il devient eau, air, nuit. Il s’engage dans la voie des métamorphoses’, Feu, 173–4. Fire, 174; ‘L’humour ici est la menace d’une complète métamorphose du langage, qui changerait le sens non pas en une absence de sens, mais en une chose, mirage en face duquel toute lecture correcte se transforme bientôt en stupeur’, Feu, 178. Books, 32. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 32. Miller is perhaps rather, as Kingsley Widmer dubs him in Henry Miller (1963), ‘a rebel-buffoon’ (vii). Plateaus, 551; ‘Miller a sans doute poussé le plus loin la figure moderne de l’écrivain comme artisan cosmique, surtout dans Sexus’, Plateaux, 427. Whitman, §§128–30. Spring, 12. Fire, 168; ‘D’une discordance fondamentale où s’associent violence et lenteur, accélération des actes et tenue unie du rythme, explosion de métamorphoses et arrêt de toute durée’ [. . .] ‘l’intrépidité extrême de son mouvement, cette rapidité d’existence, cette multiplicité de présents qu’exprime le langage apparaissent comme le choc en retour d’une conscience à qui l’avenir fait défaut et qui ne cherche qu’à revivre au passé’, Feu, 172. Mathieu, 7. Plexus, 39. Ibid., 40.

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Chapter 1

Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman

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I have never understood why he should be called ‘the good gray poet.’ The color of his language, his temperament, his whole being is electric blue. I hardly think of him as poet. Bard, yes. Bard of the future. – Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (1962)1

In Henry Miller (1963) Kingsley Widmer calls Miller a ‘compatriot of Emerson and Whitman’ and ‘a twentieth-century urban Thoreau’.2 It is also here that he coins the now famous moniker for Miller, the ‘rebelbuffoon’.3 However, as mentioned in the Introduction, this type of labelling only takes intertextuality in Miller’s work as far as any biographical analysis can. Widmer’s focus is Miller’s personal affinities, as seemingly manifest in his texts, with these ancestral authors, without really addressing the complexity of form in Miller’s work. In ‘The Legacy of Henry Miller’ (1963) from Three Decades of Criticism (1971), Widmer sums up his critique as follows: ‘In short, Miller’s American ordinariness does qualify him from the extreme explorers of sensibility; he is a buffoonish version of the great tradition.’4 Widmer does not paint a very positive picture of Miller’s talents, because he bases his judgement on Miller’s ability (or lack thereof) to partake in an unspoken tradition. Yet, Miller’s complexity of form is also at the heart of this network of Romantic affinities, and any critique of it demands moving beyond basic tradition-oriented comparisons. Another fundamental problem with Widmer’s argument is his consideration of influence in the Bloomian sense, such that Miller fails in originality and quality. Calling one of his sections in Henry Miller ‘Inverted Romanticism’, Widmer appears to mock Miller, citing him for having an inadequate ‘stance of answering – in analogous metaphoric, wry, and iconoclastic terms – the problem of where and how the poet is to live; he, too, is fully prepared to confessionally publish to the world that meanness of life, if such he finds.’5 Part of Widmer’s misunderstanding Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

is in failing to see what Northrop Frye calls a ‘conception of literature as . . . containing life and reality in a system of verbal relationships’.6 For Frye, the relationship between the ancestral authors and the later author has at its core a nature or natural development in which each literary work occupies a necessary and formal role, which is, most importantly, mediated by a collective exchange of writing – it is a process in writing. In terms of this verbal relationship, no author can be judged by a critic’s subjective value or primacy of one author over another. Evaluating Miller merely through such lenses as ‘originality’ and ‘tradition’ does not, according to Frye’s theory, make for useful literary criticism. In fact, an argument in favour of Miller’s role in Frye’s literary anatomy may very well be his self-appointed writerly task of exploding conventional modes of literary representation, thus defying the critics who are eager to demote his literary skills. In the same vein, to add Miller to a lineage of American Romantics also suggests that this mode or type of writing (this writing itself) is a natural progression, in Frye’s theory. One way or another, Miller is of an American Romantic heritage, but the question as to whether or not he ‘validly’ fulfils the certain role that he is thought to occupy in that heritage is itself not really a valid line of reasoning. In opposition to Frye’s seemingly neutral and scientific approach to understanding literature and its history, Widmer concludes that Miller’s ‘most ambitious work of art and quest for identity [The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy] reveals pathetic buffoonery’.7 Widmer continues to evaluate Miller not for his form or even for the very innovation that his work does produce, but rather consistently for his apparent shortcomings, in terms of conventional narrative expectations. If Miller is already implicated (that is to say, indicted, from Widmer’s final standpoint) for being of a presupposed valuable American Romantic tradition, then his inability to achieve Whitmanesque saintliness produces a guilty verdict before any trial has even begun. Interestingly, Widmer himself cites the very passages to convict Miller of ‘an immense amount of bad writing’ that would also acquit him.8 In one instance, Widmer berates Miller’s ‘admissions’ of ‘tough-guy manners masking weakness and outrageous sentimentality; the compulsive “dirty story” telling that indicates a “limited horizon”’.9 Widmer accuses Miller of false self-deprecation. However, in the referenced passage, Miller is writing about the sexual escapades of the character MacGregor in Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Widmer cites Miller’s concluding remarks on MacGregor’s behaviour in support of his own argument. Miller’s claim is to declare the promiscuous and meaningless behaviour of MacGregor’s to be ‘his way of saying futility’.10 Yet, by adopting this line for Miller instead of MacGregor, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman

21

Widmer overlooks the very profundity of this claim of ‘futility’. These kinds of passages occur repeatedly in Miller’s work, where characters seek out frantic excess and debauchery in order to alleviate existential malaise. The escapades always ‘fail’ (as actions, not as passages), but the greatest revelation in the text is the effort Miller makes in using such language to show not the ‘failure’ or even ‘futility’ of such debauchery, but the ‘failure’ and ‘futility’ of words to capture the essence of life that they seek. It is all too easy for the critic to dismiss Miller as ‘spokesman for the MacGregor world’11 instead of acknowledging the following three vital pieces of information concerning the text: (1) Miller-the-author is not present in the text; (2) Miller-the-persona is not condoning MacGregor’s behaviour (less relevant but also evident); and (3) Miller-the-author is attempting to alert the reader to the subtlety – and yet enormous significance – of this term ‘futility’. Miller’s language is not merely ‘buffoonish self-dramatizations’12 but an articulate, brazen attempt to expose and push the limits of writing in some of the same ways as Walt Whitman had done nearly one hundred years earlier. This claim is not to deny that Miller does write some (or even a lot) of embarrassing, obscene or just plain bad prose. At the same time, he also writes incredibly good, highly nuanced, elegant and far-reaching prose that compels its own future readers to question connections, to make new connections, to question those connections and to lay bear conventions of writing, canonicity, form and influence. To sum up Miller as a writer whose ‘major obsession . . . is the life that led up to his identification as an “artist”’, as many critics do, is to overlook the simple yet monumental fact that, first and foremost, a writer is writing literature.13 Gordon takes this same stance as Widmer in The Mind and Art of Henry Miller (1967). Of Whitman, Gordon writes, ‘As a result, Whitman’s process of self-realization, the source of his poetic creation, did not stop until his death.’14 This statement seems straightforward and harmless enough. It may be true that Whitman wrote up until his death, as did Miller, but to begin to equate Whitman’s personal ‘self-realization’ with the writing of his poetry is committing the error about which Derrida writes in The Ear of the Other (1985), which is to mistake the name of a literary corpus with that of a dead man.15 Later on, Gordon claims that it has been his ‘purpose to show that Henry Miller belongs to this new romantic tradition, and that his art is characterised by a different concept of the role of the artist than that which formal criticism has elaborated since World War I’.16 This assertion sounds promising, as it suggests a change in the expectations of the new romantic. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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However, Gordon then announces what he perceives to be Miller’s exclusive goal for his entire literary output: ‘The overall theme is based on the idea of growth toward fulfilment, of the conversion of vital energy into form, which enhances the individual’s sense of identity and completion.’17 In this claim, it is not a question simply of mistaking the writer for the persona. At work here is the failure to distinguish the writer from the person. Again, however, like Widmer, Gordon has the evidence to support this unnoticed, yet pertinent, claim in his own writing:

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Such a close relation of art and life led to the paradox that a poem ostensibly about life could be read as a poem about the artist and his art, and that its theme could be understood as having pertinence to the life of every man.18

The mistake is not accounting for the fact that ‘every man’ also includes the men Miller and Whitman themselves. The reader cannot take elements out of literature and apply them to reality as though they were some kind of transparent truths in a transferable medium. In Henry Miller (1986) J. D. Brown also draws a direct parallel between Miller and Whitman out of their work and into their personal lives: ‘No writer since Whitman has expressed as fully as Miller the essential experiences of the individual artist in autobiographical form.’19 It may be true that, with Miller, after Whitman, ‘the artist has no choice but to make his life the material of his art’.20 However, assuming that ‘the material of his art’ is no longer literature and is not only a design for living but a glimpse into the ‘real life’ of the writer, is to mistake one thing (a text) for another (a human being). Embarking on the intertextual relations between Miller and Whitman, the reader must look closely at the text itself and separate the men from the writing. Naturally, all four forms of intertextuality mentioned in the Introduction come out of the writer’s own concerns for developing his or her writing, but this fact does not mean that by looking at the literature for those references and allusions, the reader is able to make claims (or should make claims) about them directly in relation to the writer’s life. What appears to be a grey area in literary criticism is really a matter of recognising that learning about a writer’s life through his or her texts is possible but must be done with the understanding that ultimately whatever readings are imposed on the text must remain within the confines of a reading and whatever references and allusions to figures outside the text should be understood as coming from the writer of the text. The reader embarks on the multi-levelled discovery of Whitman in Miller’s texts: within conscious, present allusions and through an unconscious style. The third form, reverse influence, is implied in this very study itself, which contributes to the view of Whitman as a sort Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of godfather of American Romanticism and Miller as an inheritor. The fourth form, as explained in the Introduction, is not indicated here, as Whitman does not appear in Miller’s oeuvre as a character as other writers do. This form is addressed at length in the Conclusion, as it is not a technique Miller uses for his most significant ancestral writers (those six addressed in this study). Several passages that include Whitman, beginning with one from Tropic of Cancer, demonstrate the first form of intertextuality. The second form, virtually impossible to decode in any entirely explicit way, can easily be seen as permeating into, and even completely underwriting, the first. Two passages from Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn will serve to elucidate this second, unconscious (or ‘non-present’) form, in which Miller seems to enact a correspondence with Whitman by ‘answering’ to his poem ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1856). Finally, concerning the third form, it is necessary to refer back to Miller’s critics in order to address how the concept of a tradition of American Romanticism includes Whitman as an ancestral author whose poetry now includes Miller as one of its significant inheritors. As to the first form, in Tropic of Cancer the narrator is explaining the coming of the harsh winter during his second year in Paris. He is relaxing in his newly warmed studio (a sudden and unexpected luxury), while speaking with his flatmate Fillmore about ‘life back there in the States’, and doing it in a manner as if they ‘never expected to go back there again’.21 Talk of America always leads the narrator into a Whitman reverie. Indeed, he says: And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.22

Without directly saying as much, Miller (as the narrator, who is a writer) sees himself as part of this literary heritage, even though he unflinchingly claims that America can produce nothing more. For Miller, his Whitmanesque prose cannot rightfully be something produced in America. After all, ‘she’ is ‘dead’ and ‘there is nothing more to be said’ of value in America. Therefore the reader must infer that Miller’s Whitmanesque prose is intimately tied with Miller’s displacement in Europe. At the same time, he writes, ‘There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized.’23 However, when Miller makes this claim, it becomes evident that such a Whitmanesque ‘spirit’ can be unleashed only by an American, subsequently, in Europe. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Miller subtly sets himself up as this next writer. He continues, ‘Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN.’24 Shamelessly, Miller (to be sure, the narrator) cleverly announces his illustrious fate: having American roots, migrating to Paris and, finally, exhibiting real manhood make him Whitman’s literary inheritor. After all, in opposition to Goethe, Whitman ‘is a beginning’, writes Miller.25 This claim carries the inference further, suggesting that the creative torch, is being passed to Miller, and, as the agent of this transference of spirit and literary style, Miller actively takes the torch. This example can immediately be joined with the third form of intertextuality addressed in this study, namely that of reverse influence. Through Miller’s deliberate attachment to a literary heritage identified with Whitman, he adds to the actual creating of that very heritage and thus adds to the future reader’s image of Whitman. One of the first to draw out this parallel, Orwell writes in Inside the Whale:

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Miller’s outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and nearly everyone who has read him has remarked on this. Tropic of Cancer ends with an especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the imbecilities, he simply sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical acceptance of the thingas-it-is.26

By making this parallel, Orwell carries out a critique of Miller as insufficiently Whitmanesque, based on the premise that Miller writes during the twentieth century in a style that is appropriate only to the nineteenth century. Orwell is wary of this affect: ‘But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the nineteen-thirties.’ Orwell criticises Miller’s writing through a sort of inverted comparison, holding Miller up to a specific, analogous standard: ‘It is not certain that if Whitman himself were alive at the moment he would write anything in the least degree resembling Leaves of Grass.’27 According to Orwell, Miller’s philosophy, ‘Let’s swallow it whole’,28 is the same claim of Whitman one hundred years prior. Inappropriately, in Orwell’s estimation, Miller asks his reader to ‘say I accept’ to a slew of atrocities that Whitman’s acceptance does not include (such as the First World War).29 Thus a strain of American Romanticism is born in a retroactive fashion that looks for characteristics in the writing as well as the causes that validate such a style. Most critics of Miller are dissatisfied with his ‘barbaric yawp’, claiming it to be indecent for the sign of the times. To consider this trajectory appropriate, or even true, in terms of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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how this heritage should play out, begs the question of its own validity. What is important is that in the very existence of this trajectory of heritage, the reader is able to dissect how Miller is assessed and valued in relation to Whitman and how Whitman, in return, marks that heritage that carries on as if with an a priori status, despite having itself been retroactively influenced (and, of course, even established) by later writers like Miller. In another passage including direct reference to Whitman, towards the end of Tropic of Cancer, Miller is on his way to take up an undesired post as English teacher for a boarding school in Dijon, and he reflects upon a miserable time he spent, starving and cold, in Florida trying to beg his way through such desperation. He considers how America forces everyone to ‘get in lock step’ for a crust of bread and sarcastically quotes Whitman:

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‘I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out,’ said Walt. That was a time when you could still get a hat to fit your head. But time passes. To get a hat that fits now you have to walk to the electric chair. They give you a skull cap. A tight fit, what? But no matter! It fits.30

Disenchanted with America, Miller also appears too disenchanted with Whitman and his optimism. In a peculiar way, he almost confirms Orwell’s argument that different times demand different measures. However, by confirming this claim, Miller sets out to write a Whitmanesque prose for his times. He concludes, ‘You have to be in a strange country like France, walking the meridian that separates the hemispheres of life and death, to know which incalculable vistas yawn ahead. The body electric! The democratic soul! Flood tide! Holy Mother of God, what does this crap mean?’31 This passage is followed by a description of a decaying, vulture-ridden nightmare of a world with war, disease and a cold, unemotional humanity. In this instance, Miller claims not only not to understand Whitman’s poetic but to reject it completely precisely because of the horrors of the twentieth century: both as a literary device and as a philosophy for living. Of course, Miller is also being sly and rebellious. He is not necessarily disappointed in Whitman but in the history that separates the two writers. These are precisely the two foci in Miller’s own writing that get him most into trouble: obscure or ‘misused’ literary devices and a radical philosophy for living. In terms of the first, Miller is often said to be using the wrong devices (such as quasi-autobiographical prose with no consistent distinction between writer and narrator), or using them at the wrong time (such as subversive escapades during moments of crisis), or using those devices incorrectly (such as ‘empty’ symbols for novelistic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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technique), and, in terms of the second (which is produced through the first by critics), Miller ultimately appears to be condoning a lifestyle that is critically unacceptable. As Raoul Ibarguen argues in his e-book Narrative Detours: Henry Miller and the Rise of New Critical Modernism (1989), the reason that Miller’s writing fails to live up to modern criticism is because it does not meet the criteria that this arbitrary system of criticism uses for evaluating narrative works. Ibarguen cites the three components of New Criticism where Miller is considered to fail: symbolism, point of view and mythic structure. However, Miller’s defiance of conventional use of these techniques, again, cannot be regarded a failure in good faith, as Ibarguen also argues. It is the case, rather, that Miller’s techniques are deliberate efforts to create something entirely different from the tradition of the literary narrative, regardless of any social offences they produce. As confounding or personally distasteful as a given reader may find him, Miller generates writing that is able to extract the vitality of Whitman’s verse, tie it with the force of Dostoevsky’s prose, the language play of Carroll’s, the passion of Rimbaud’s, the introspection of Proust’s and the subversion of Lawrence’s, and develop a style that exceeds canonical expectations by insisting on remaining on the fringe, ultimately inassimilable. Extracting the components of this style requires acknowledging that the unconscious form of intertextuality naturally permeates all of the later writer’s work. In Narrative Detours, Ibarguen gives a reading of a passage from The World of Sex (1957) that directly echoes Whitman, succinctly displaying this unconscious form. Where Whitman writes, ‘Writing and talk do not prove me, / I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face, / With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic’,32 with the same confidence Miller repeats, ‘[. . .] I find that, no matter how violently disagreeable a reader’s reaction may be to the written work, when we meet face to face he usually ends by accepting me whole-heartedly.’33 Ibarguen argues, however, ‘there the parallel between poet and novelist ceases.’34 Despite this assessment, the influence is evident, even if Miller takes the opposite stance to Whitman, according to Ibarguen, such that ultimately Whitman finds ‘the symbolic union’ of ‘life, self and writing’ in sexuality, whereas Miller does not find this union but instead is left ‘high and dry’ finding ‘nothing’.35 The reason for this lack of unification and presence of ‘nothing’ is not due to a misunderstanding or a failure in any respect, but is rather Miller’s use of sexuality as a metaphor for the limits of writing. A more in-depth analysis of this unconscious form comes from a close reading of Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1856) along with Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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two passages of Miller’s from Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn. Because the unconscious form necessarily implies more subtle characteristics, it demands a detailed reading, and the connection to Brooklyn serves as a ready example. Miller writes often about Brooklyn, where he was raised, and about the Brooklyn Bridge, and in so doing he echoes Whitman, as well as his contemporary Hart Crane (1899–1932). The presence of these allusions is profound in that their content, and the content of the corresponding poetry, opens up a relation between the writers, which moves outside the nature of the writing itself. Whitman speaks a poetic language that consciously demands attention from the ‘future reader’ or ‘the reader yet to come’,36 borrowing from Blanchot in The Space of Literature (L’Espace littéraire, 1955; in English, 1982), to engage with the poetry on a level that is aware of itself as, paradoxically, coming from the future. Ultimately, the language of Whitman’s poems resists spatial and temporal components and instead creates a sort of ekphrastic spatiality and temporality that Miller identifies in his own work and expands upon. Miller uses Whitman as an inspiration but also as a correspondent, and it is the multitude of writers including Crane and Miller who continue to enliven and expand the role of Whitman in the American poetic tradition. In ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ Whitman writes: ‘the sun half an hour high’ and ‘the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide’.37 Miller responds in Tropic of Capricorn: ‘Going over the bridge the sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the remembrance of the past set in . . .’38 and: ‘Maybe being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic, above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself . . .’39 Miller attempts to create, or recreate, specifically the time-and-place-ness in Whitman’s poem ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, in order both to render a verbal representation of a visual object (the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, which now replaces the Brooklyn Ferry from Whitman’s day), and to represent the precise space and time of a moment in order to declare both its representational impossibility and also its necessity. Miller becomes Whitman and becomes Crane, as Whitman and Crane ask Miller to do so. Because of the spatial and temporal significance, this exchange seems to invert Bloom’s traditional theory of influence, as Baxandall asserts, in that it suggests that the influential ancestral poet, specifically Whitman, wants to be ‘overcome’ by his future readers, Miller and Crane. In a letter to Pierre Lesdain dated 3 May 1950, from The Books in My Life, Miller relays the content of a letter from Sherwood Anderson to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Theodore Dreiser from 1936, in which Anderson expresses concern for the necessity of writers and artists ‘to build up a kind of network of relationships’.40 Miller mentions Crane, in light of his suicide, in his letter to Lesdain, drawing on Anderson’s idea that such terrible fates could be avoided through closer, namely literary, companionships. Anderson’s suggestion to Dreiser is that if writers like Crane had been involved in such a network, they could have found solace from their painful solitude and depression through such letter-writing in a community of writers exchanging support through correspondence. Anderson’s concept of literary support and influence, in a literal sense in the form of the deliberate psychological reliance upon one another, is excitedly appropriated by Miller, such that he writes: ‘We the older ones have more to learn from the young than they from us.’41 Indeed, letter-writing becomes an activity in Miller even more prolific than his enormous fiction output. Miller and Anderson are of course referring to actual letter-writing – a practical exercise for a writer’s psychological well-being and sense of camaraderie and, secondarily, perhaps for assisting in the development of a writer’s métier, even if ‘by this effort, [they] produce less as writers’, as Anderson reflects.42 At the same time, there are fantastic echoes of the theory of intertextuality presented here and its reversal of traditional influence. Miller seems to intuit the support that occurs, often on an unconscious level, between readers and their writers of interest. Namely, the closeness of thought and expression between the reader and his or her writer of interest motivates the reader (now becoming writer) to engage in a deliberate act of literary exchange. The undercurrent read in this analysis is applicable in a sense to this correspondence that can be understood as taking place between Miller (and Crane) and his literary precursor, Walt Whitman. Considering the relation between these writers as a series of correspondences, established through a certain selection of poems and prose passages, the reader observes how each writer answers both backwards and forwards, out of space and time. This intertextuality is enacted through a call and response, whereby Miller responds to Crane, and both Crane and Miller respond to Whitman, who has already called out to them and has premeditated his counter-response to their replies. This timeless, spaceless correspondence is compounded by an ekphrastic component, that of the absence and future presence of the Brooklyn Bridge in the literary text. As Murray Krieger explains in his seminal essay ‘The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited’ (1967), ‘The object of imitation, as spatial work, becomes the metaphor for the temporal work which seeks to capture it in that temporality.’43 It is in the very real lack and the simultaneous Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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textual creation of this structure that the correspondence between Whitman, Crane and Miller spans nearly 100 years to the future and back again to the past. This profound interest in Whitman is clear enough throughout both Crane and Miller’s oeuvres, and it is no hidden fact that Miller adored him. Not only did Miller directly account for the strong influence, but the connections abound in subsequent criticism. Widmer’s comparison of Miller as a ‘compatriot of Emerson and Whitman’44 is mentioned above, and Gordon, in The Mind and Art of Henry Miller, claims that Miller is ‘in the best romantic tradition, a nonconformist’,45 aligning him with Whitman and other Romantics, as do Brown and others. Miller himself frequently makes his everlasting homage to Whitman known, including citing Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in his list of ‘The Hundred Books That Influenced Me Most’ from The Books in My Life. The combination of Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, Crane’s ‘Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge’ (1930) and poetic passages from Miller’s Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn reveal a Bakhtinian dialogism at work in Miller’s text, such that it points to a multiplicity of intertextual voices, which overtly include Whitman and Crane. The manner by which this course, from Miller back to Crane back to Whitman, also uses ekphrasis occurs in how the ekphrastic objects that are created in the text engage with one another in a peculiar timeless, spaceless manner (again, particularly the Brooklyn Bridge itself but also elements of the New York harbour in general, specifically in Whitman’s case). In other words, Miller answers Whitman and Crane, Crane answers Whitman, and Whitman somehow answers both Miller and Crane, despite having lived nearly 100 years prior. This call and response occurs through the writers’ declaration both of the presence of the Brooklyn Bridge and of their own presence in space and time in the text. Yet, because Whitman’s poem has already insisted on both the permanence and impermanence of crossing the East River, Miller’s prose and Crane’s poem necessarily create a Brooklyn Bridge that depends both upon its own absence (in the past: temporally in Whitman’s time, and in the present: spatially in the space of the poem) and its presence (in the past: spatially in Whitman’s declaration to the future reader, and in the present: temporally in the ekphrastic space of the poem and spatially in the real world). Miller engages a Whitmanesque ekphrasis in his writing, in a rather unconscious style, as seen in this example on the Brooklyn Bridge. This sense of correspondence as evident to Miller is manifest through an ekphrastic picturing of Brooklyn that speaks directly to Whitman’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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ekphrastic picturing. This type of intertextual referencing is also conscious on Miller’s part, insofar as he does act the correspondent to Whitman. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish between the two forms, but what is essential is that the allusions are present, both as affected by Miller but also as an undercurrent running beneath the surface of the form. In Picture Theory (1994) W. J. T. Mitchell discusses three ways in which ekphrasis affects the reader, of which the first two are indifference and hope. The third is ekphrastic fear, which is ‘the moment of resistance or counter-desire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realised literally and actually’.46 Ekphrastic fear is bred by confusion concerning the relationship, and possible relationships, between the verbal and visual. It is a fear both of the stilling of the text and the speaking of the image, a collapsing of the ‘sister arts’ into a mangled, impure perversion. The presence of this literary form in Whitman appeals to Miller such that he too explores the illusory boundaries between the so-called sister arts in his work, revealing that no such inherent divisions exist and that various modes freely intersect and overlap. This concept of an impure artform is overrun and succeeded by new artistic approaches that play with and mix forms. Not only are Whitman and Miller (Crane as well) employing what can be called referential ekphrasis in writing about real and specific art objects (such as the Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Ferry and New York harbour), but the ‘correspondence effect’ that is deliberately begun by Whitman and in which Crane and Miller join, manipulates the ekphrastic objects even further, insofar as those objects go in and out of existence.47 This imperative element (of the objects’ relative existence) creates the mood of timelessness and spacelessness that is essential to the supreme joy and discomfort found in the poetry and prose that comprises this ‘literary exchange’. The language in Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ resists spatial and temporal components and instead creates a sort of ekphrastic spatiality and temporality. Whitman is portraying time-and-place-ness – an aura, which paradoxically is a specific moment in time and place that he is capturing verbally. It is in this moment. Of Whitman’s influential style, Keith Sagar writes in D. H. Lawrence: Poet (2007), ‘The interrogative, freewheeling, spontaneous, repetitive, directionless, open style Lawrence now so admires in Whitman is precisely a technique to enable the object or experience to escape from the conceptualizing, abstracting, humanizing tyranny of self-conscious artifice and closed poems.’48 Whitman’s mode of ekphrasis not only renders verbal representation of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a visual object (such as the East River, the Brooklyn ferry, the New York harbour), but it also seeks to represent the precise space and time of a moment in order to declare both its representational impossibility and also its necessity. This literary capturing of space and time brings to mind William Carlos Williams’ concept of ‘the universality of the local’, such that whatever defines the particular is necessarily and immediately applicable to the general, even in terms of historical particularity – temporally and spatially. In his essay ‘Against the Weather’ (1939), with which Miller would have been familiar, Williams writes: ‘From me where I stand to them where they stand in their here and now – where I cannot be – I do in spite of that arrive!’49 Williams indicates how the literary text permits the reader to transcend both time and place by transmitting a message, personal to him, that is decipherable to an other, elsewhere in time and/or place – similar in some ways to Baxandall’s (1985) sense of the reversal of agency of influence in his version of intertextual criticism. It is the reader who moves through time, bringing new life to past writers. Williams’ phrase ‘their here and now’ is reminiscent of Whitman’s call out to the future reader, himself an anonymous human being in the throngs of New York but also in the space of history. Whitman, in the same way as Miller, wants his reader to see what he sees, knowing that he really (in actuality) cannot, but also that this text serves as a vehicle so that he ultimately can. The text furthers Whitman’s experience of feeling himself as an individual and as one of many, in that his experience as such transcends the moment. Thus, it is not on the banks of the East River or on the Brooklyn Ferry itself that one experiences this feeling of the universality of the local (nor, more obviously, only in 1856). It is in the verbal description of those visual markers – this ekphrastic attempt – that permits the link between Whitman and Miller to become even more extraordinary. The visual arts are a metaphor, Mitchell writes in Picture Theory, that shape ‘language into formal patterns that “still” the movement of linguistic temporality into a spatial, formal array. Not just vision, but stasis, shape, closure, and silent presence (“still” in the other sense) are the aims of this more general form of ekphrasis.’50 Whitman knows, and in some capacity imagines, that the Brooklyn Bridge is hovering on the horizon.51 His poem ‘stills’ the experience of crossing the East River as something that, in its poetic portrayal, is frozen there and made permanent as a universal experience, while the poem simultaneously frees up the experience in its universality by giving it both ekphrastic motion (for example: ‘the current rushing so swiftly’,52 ‘the run of the flood-tide’53) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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and textual motion (as a text that reads across the page, is read through time and has Miller and others as its future reader). By looking back to the past, as he does also to the future (‘I project myself – also I return – I am with you, and know how it is’54), Whitman alludes to the changes to come (which are already present to him) in the form of steamships and the New York skyline: objects in existence specific to his time. ‘Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east.’55 Miller reacts to this cityscape in Whitman not only by engaging in a direct, allusive dialogue but by adopting a Whitmanesque spirit in that writing. A point of significance concerning Miller’s correspondence on the subject of the Brooklyn Bridge is that he responds to both Whitman and Crane, firstly in Black Spring and then again in Tropic of Capricorn. Black Spring was published three years after Hart Crane plunged to his death in the swirling dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and reference both to the Brooklyn Bridge and ‘a man standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him’56 comes only a few pages into the beginning of Black Spring. The second subsequent sentence in this passage is the following: ‘The dream lives on after the body is buried.’57 This too is an eerie reference, as Miller seems to allude to the fact that Crane’s body was never recovered, leaving a tombstone over the bodiless grave that reads ‘LOST AT SEA’. Miller’s apparent pessimism may be to suggest that the dream, which began with Whitman’s poem of universal experience, ends with Crane’s poignantly isolated death in an overwrought twentieth century – a sharp contrast, according to Miller, to the apparent universal harmony of Whitman’s beaming nineteenth-century America. Miller typically flaunts his life-affirming Whitmanesque disposition, but, occasionally, like here in light of Crane’s suicide, Miller’s tone is sombre, and he is perhaps vexed at Whitman’s misleadingly enthusiastic verse. As Crane wrote critically in ‘Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge’ of Whitman’s ‘film’ that ‘envelopes all’,58 so too does Miller woefully refer to Crane’s same twentieth-century sense of fragmentation and alienation: ‘We are never whole again, but living in fragments, and all our parts separated by thinnest membrane.’59 To some degree Miller begins to mock Whitman’s carefree reverie. As mentioned in the Introduction, Whitman’s poem has the passionate call: ‘Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air’60 and ‘Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!’61 To which Miller has the sardonic response: ‘Thus when the fleet maneuvers in the Pacific it is the whole saga of youth flashing before Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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your eyes, the dream of the open street and the sound of gulls wheeling and diving with garbage in their beaks.’62 Next, Whitman declares: Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset; / Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses; / Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are.63 Miller continues his retort: ‘. . . or it’s the sound of the trumpet and flags flying and all the unknown parts of the earth sailing before your eyes without dates or meaning, wheeling like the tabletop in an iridescent sheen of power and glory.’64 Miller presents the same ekphrastic images as Whitman (such as birds, ships, flags), establishing the timelessness both of the texts that they write but also the objects that the reader visualises. Whitman’s message is confirmed in Miller; however, Miller undermines this message to the extent that, even in its sameness, the New York harbour is radically different, as is the writer’s state of mind. Miller writes: ‘What little I have learned about writing amounts to this: it is not what people think it is. It is an absolutely new thing each time with each individual.’65 With each encounter, the text is rendered anew, attesting both to its impermanence as a thing, as one thing, and its permanence as a thing that repeats. Shortly after the critique of Whitman with the same imagery (including the birds, ships and flags), Miller calls directly out to Crane, as though to invite him into the conversation: ‘One walks the street at night with the bridge against the sky like a harp and the festered eyes of sleep burn into the shanties . . .’66 Clearly, Miller is alluding here to Crane’s symbolic description of the Brooklyn Bridge: ‘O harp and altar, of the fury fused, / (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) / Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge.’67 Miller’s response is followed by the description of ‘glad, murderous ghosts’ shrieking and cursing with ‘grief-spit drooling’ down their bodies.68 The passage is very macabre and has a tone not of despair but of the raw futility found when confronted with the nonsensical world – a world that, in Miller, is laden with disturbing ekphrastic descriptions. Later, in Tropic of Capricorn, Miller writes: ‘But going over the bridge the sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the remembrance of the past set in . . .’69 Calling back to Whitman (quietly to Proust as well),70 Miller delivers more unsettling ekphrastic images, joining Crane in a sense of hopelessness. The entire city is one giant tomb. The bridge itself is a tomb, and the city is full of glowing zombies. This passage continues, as Miller describes the experience of riding an elevated train across Brooklyn Bridge. As if yelling out to save the dangerously despondent Crane, he writes: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

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New skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in and die in, the boats passing below, the Fall River line, the Albany Day Line . . . don’t die yet, waiting another day, a stroke of luck, river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud, legs free, fish will come and bite, to-morrow a new life, where, anywhere, why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death in the solution, but don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new friend, millions of chances, you’re too young yet, you’re melancholy, you don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants, crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts crawling out the same way . . .71

This passage certainly recalls Crane leaping to his untimely death, but more insistently, akin to Whitman, it calls out to everyman – a figure that Miller draws lovingly out of Nietzsche and Whitman and into his own prose, where he is always sure to deliver the ecstatic and actual reality that he faces. In this instance, Miller’s call does not have the same message as Whitman. Indeed, Miller’s description is more of a suffering plea, urging himself and Crane to hold on. The message suggests that this sameness is not what Whitman had promised. It is just prior to this passage that Miller begins his response to Whitman in Tropic of Capricorn. ‘Maybe being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic, above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself . . .’72 This Whitmanesque description, also echoing Crane’s death, provides an image of Brooklyn Bridge before Miller’s eyes as he writes, which subsequently comes before the eyes of the reader – having first gone through the verbal transformation: from visual to verbal back to visual. Mitchell calls this kind of description the ménage à trois of ekphrasis.73 He writes, ‘The ekphrastic poet typically stands in a middle position between the object described or addressed and a listening subject who (if ekphrastic hope is fulfilled) will be made to “see” the object through the medium of the poet’s voice.’74 What is curious about Miller’s ekphrasis, however, is that the reader is hard-pressed to envision a meaningful assemblage from the descriptions. At the same time, the reader can sense the ekphrastic objects in the text. It is this fragmented, allusive style that makes Miller’s writing compelling and makes the correspondence between the three writers that much more significant in terms of the way that their overlap relies on this play between the visible and invisible, the present and the absent, the permanent and impermanent. The reader identifies with the writer, picturing – beginning with Whitman – the scene that transforms (and doesn’t transform) through Miller. Whitman paints a sharp picture: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman

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Receive the summer sky, you water! and faithfully hold it, till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you; / Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sun-lit water; / Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!75

Whitman gives this image to the future reader that Miller ‘sees’ and subsequently changes, adds to and distorts. Whitman asserts that ‘any one’s head’ will be lifted by these same ‘fine spokes of light’ into ‘the summer sky’, but Miller does not paint the same, vivid picture as Whitman. In Whitman, the imagery during the ferry ride and the intensity of presence and being-in-the-world becomes a poem of universal human experience (of every man being the same, beyond and out of time and place but so far enmeshed in it that that spatial-temporal moment dictates its own insignificance). The spatial-temporal moment for Whitman of this passage is the ekphrastic experience that he portrays, and through that portrayal he stills its universal applicability. That description becomes an image of riding across the East River in the mind of the reader. Even though the bridge was not present for Whitman when writing the poem, what is being portrayed is the sense that Whitman had, which is the same sense that Miller has in the presence of the bridge. The ekphrastic trajectory between these writers is not about the objects themselves but about this possible presence in words. The bridge is a construct of the text, an ekphrastic object: it opens the black hole between the space of the text and the bridge itself, but it also reconfirms Williams’ universality of the local. By being specific to a time and a place (for Miller, the place is the bridge itself), Miller defers back to Whitman’s assessment that time and place are incidental as well as quintessential. Miller creates the bridge for the effect of echoing Whitman’s twofold ‘stilling’ of the image: the literary text stills the image by making the visual verbal, thereby deadening it in the leaves of the book. The text is stilled in its applicability to all readers and is hence paradoxically awakened by the imagination of the reader through the experience that Whitman describes for him or her. With the motion of the text imitating the motion of the tide and of the rising sun and of the crossing of the East River, Whitman’s text calls out to the future reader declaring the permanence of experience due to its likeness – that is to say, due to the universality of its specificity. In Tropic of Capricorn Miller provides another allusion to Whitman with this double-stilling image (still as a textual reference and still as a recurring, universal experience), in an example of notional ekphrasis, when he refers to the writing of his ‘book of the hours’ while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The book of the hours that Miller is writing is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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made particularly complicated through the fact that he is writing this palimpsest without writing anything at all. Miller’s book of the hours confirms the experience of the bridge as a textual, ekphrastic one, bringing it back to Whitman’s message of the universality of the human experience manifest. Miller writes: What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, usually when walking to my father’s shop, a performance which was repeated day in and day out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours, of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious activity.76

Miller refers to the mind-numbing repetition of everyday life, once again using his passage over the Brooklyn Bridge as the not-insignificant backdrop. However, Miller then adds how the passage across the bridge compels him to think more of his life and to embrace a larger existence. He writes:

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Maybe each time I passed up there [on the Brooklyn Bridge], something was tugging away at me, urging me to take it in, to announce myself; anyway each time I passed on high I was truly alone, and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself.77

Peculiarly, the Brooklyn Bridge stimulates Miller to the documentation of his experience by producing – only mentally – a palimpsest, drawing the reader’s attention even more so to the necessary doubly textual presence of the bridge. If the text itself is a sort of ekphrastic object within the passage by Miller, then the experience of being on Brooklyn Bridge (and of being alone in that experience) is also nothing more than a textual reference. Which book is Miller writing? Could it be the one that the reader is reading or somehow an imaginary one within the text that itself contains the Brooklyn Bridge? Where is the Brooklyn Bridge in this instance? It is in the margins of a book of the hours. Miller writes of the experience of being alone in his book of the hours, perhaps once again, in rebellion to Whitman’s universal inclusion. Miller alludes to his being alone and to a description that is morose, dirty and decrepit. Not only is it a book that is being written in solitude and without being written at all, it is being written on the space – the Brooklyn Bridge – that is a non-space, because it is in the text and because it is also the space that Whitman, oddly, does not know because of his temporal handicap. In Wittgenstein, Language and Information: ‘Back to the Rough Ground!’ (2006) David Blair writes, ‘Like medieval monks illuminating manuscripts, we create the images in our consciousness to accompany our understanding, not represent it.’78 Central to this Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman

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idea is that what the mind’s eye ‘sees’ is not meant to replace or even to construct something that is otherwise being read. It is no coincidence that Miller is writing a book of the hours on the Brooklyn Bridge then. He is well aware of the implications for the reader. It is as if he is creating an illuminated manuscript – one that requires from the reader an ability to see without seeing, in the sense of recognising that the text is not giving an image for completely illuminating the meaning of the text, but that it is participating in the curious effort of depicting a series of images in order to ‘accompany our understanding’. When Whitman wrote ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ he may not specifically have known that Miller would be his future literary correspondent, but he knew he had correspondents on the horizon. Despite Miller’s own negative tone in his ‘correspondence’ with Whitman here, he was highly influenced, in quite a positive manner, by Whitman – perhaps more able to endure the hardships he did with the support of his historical correspondent. In fact, Miller’s capacity to write harsh words about Brooklyn and about the human condition seem to come with the pretext that Whitman is listening, that a dialogue exists between the writers in which thoughts are exchanged. Miller knows that the strength and joy that Whitman expresses and shares is able to withstand – and even engage in – his critique, and also sustain him, in the future. With Whitman’s poem, Miller is aware that in his own reply, he confirms Whitman’s message to each human being: ‘we plant you permanently within us; / We fathom you not – we love you – there is perfection in you also; / You furnish your parts toward eternity; / Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.’79 And even if it could not possibly have saved Crane’s life, this ‘correspondence’ on the Brooklyn Bridge is testament to the verbal exchange that exists between ancestral authors and later authors and how intertextual agency is in the hands of both. A literary correspondence that can transcend space and time is like the string of words that transcend their textual presence and in some way become the object they signify, like the Brooklyn Bridge. Conversely, this object also transcends its physical form and becomes a timeless text, available no longer just to a viewer for years to come, but to a future reader for eternity upon the page. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot sets the groundwork for this sense of intertextuality that takes hold with Kristeva, Barthes and others in the 1960s and later, when he makes the observation, ‘Writing assumes the characteristics of reading’s demand, and the writer becomes the nascent intimacy of the still infinitely future reader.’80 The meaning of the ancestral author’s work depends upon the later author, and the two merge and play upon one another, interacting as if outside of time, in the transcendence of this intimacy, which creates Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Henry Miller and How He Got That Way

a new temporal sense. Just as Whitman writes of the Brooklyn Bridge as an absent presence, his writing itself is a gaze into the future, as it speaks to an absent present future reader, while also being a return from the future, as it is always already aware of itself as a future presence but also as present to itself in its being written. Whitman, decidedly now more of a correspondent for Miller than an abstract source of influence, in some ways bridges an impossible spatial and temporal gap, because Miller, as one of his literary inheritors, uses Whitman to develop a style that confirms Whitman’s spaceless, timeless message. Miller could not be the writer he became without Whitman, but equally Whitman obviously would not have the same significance without such literary inheritors. In the obvious dynamic of creating celebrity, Miller’s reverence of Whitman contributes to the establishment of Whitman’s legacy while also reinforcing it as pre-existent. Of course Miller is not single-handedly responsible (not by a long stretch even) for Whitman’s legacy, but he is part of its endurance. As this dynamic is relatively banal, having also been explained at length in the Introduction, what is worth focusing upon is the effect Miller creates in his writing that is not only related to Whitman’s writing but that dramatically alters how contemporary readers understand either and both writers. This element is Miller’s focus upon writing itself, especially in terms of his relationship to his ancestral authors. As demonstrated here, Miller’s concern is not simply to ‘borrow’ or even to allude to his ancestral writer Whitman, but somehow to become his writing correspondent. As facile as this interest seems, it has profound implications for the shaping of twentieth-century literature, in that it completely impacts how literary conventions are regarded, both concerning the writing itself and the writers themselves. Miller, subtly, maintains this sense of remaining unfulfilled as a writer (which Bloom would explain as a result of the necessary misreading of the ancestral authors but which clearly has potentially more interesting roots that, in this analysis, are directed toward a Blanchotian, or poststructural, approach). Thus, the contention is that this technique is precisely Miller’s greatest: his sense of a necessary lack of fulfilment is a result of Miller’s interest in exploiting the nature of writing and the limits of language. In this way, Miller partakes in the development of twentiethcentury literary theory by attributing to the radical reconceptualisation of what writing does and does not do. He also reaches out to Whitman, who, in Miller’s mind, also partook of this radical reconceptualisation during his own time. All of the figures of inspiration used in this study engage with Miller on the level of this radical reconceptualisation of the written word as Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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he establishes it. This study now turns to Dostoevsky, who, along with Whitman, is a larger-than-life figure looming in Miller’s real and literary world as inescapable but also impenetrable.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Hummingbird, 107. Widmer, Miller, 3. Ibid., vii. Widmer, ‘Legacy’, 117–18. Widmer, Miller, 3. Frye, Anatomy, 122. Widmer, Miller, 52. Widmer, ‘Legacy’, 117. Widmer, Miller, 53. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 42. Gordon, 206. Ear, 7; L’Oreille, 19. Gordon, 210. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 207–8. Brown, Miller, 3. Gordon, 210. Cancer, 239. Ibid., 239–40. Ibid., 240. Ibid., 240. Ibid., 240. Orwell, 13. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Cancer, 266. Ibid., 266–7. Whitman, §47. World of Sex, 91. Ibarguen, online. Ibid. Space, 199; ‘Lecteur . . . futur’, ‘. . . le lecteur encore futur’, L’Espace, 265. Whitman, §2. Capricorn, 46. Ibid., 47. Books (Miller quoting Anderson), 217. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 217.

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40 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way Krieger, 107. Widmer, Miller, 3. Gordon, xxiii. Picture Theory, 154. In my article ‘Henry Miller’s Painterly Eye’ (2008) I develop concepts for three types of ekphrasis, which I call notional, referential and active. The first has similarities with John Hollander’s concept of notional ekphrasis, which he defines in ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’ (1988) as a type of ekphrasis where the art object, usually a painting, exists only in the imagination of the poet or writer. I expand on this definition in my book The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (Camden House, 2011), to include in it the poet or writer’s descriptions of actual scenes in the text as resembling non-existent paintings. Thus the two forms of notional ekphrasis include descriptions of paintings that do not exist and descriptions of settings in the real world of the text that are described by the writer as having a ‘painterly’ quality such that they could or should make up the composition of a work of art. This is in opposition to ekphrastic descriptions that refer back to actual art objects in the real world, for example, which is what I call referential ekphrasis. In the above-mentioned article and in The Secret Violence of Henry Miller, I then elaborate on my definitions of these different ekphrastic forms while applying them to such manifestations in Miller’s work. Sagar, 44. Williams, 198. Picture Theory, 153–4. As an aside, first public mention of the Brooklyn Bridge was made as early as 1867, when an article concerning its first being built was printed in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. This implies that Whitman would have known about the bridge well before it was built, though not before ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ was originally written (1856). Construction on the Brooklyn Bridge was begun in 1870, and it opened on 24 May 1883 – exactly one week before Whitman’s sixty-fourth birthday. (He died 26 March 1892.) Whitman, §10. Ibid., §14. Ibid. §22. Ibid., §15. Spring, 11–12. Ibid., 12. Crane, 100. Spring, 12. Whitman, §124. Ibid., §127. Spring, 12. Whitman, §§128–30. Spring, 12. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 13. Crane, 8. Spring, 13. Capricorn, 46.

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Leaves of Letters – Walt Whitman

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70. Miller would have been familiar with the 1922–30 C. K. Scott Montcrieff translations entitled In Remembrance of Things Past, having initially read Proust before arriving in Paris in 1930. He subsequently read Proust in the original French in 1932. 71. Capricorn. 47. 72. Ibid., 46. 73. Picture Theory, 164. 74. Ibid., 164. 75. Whitman, §§125–7. 76. Capricorn, 46. 77. Ibid., 47. 78. Blair, 60. 79. Whitman, §§143–6. 80. Space, 199; ‘Écrire assume alors les caractères de l’exigence de lire, et l’écrivain devient l’intimité naissante du lecteur encore infiniment futur’, L’Espace, 265.

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Chapter 2

The Dream of a Ridiculous Writer – Fyodor Dostoevsky

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In the beginning I had dreams of rivaling Dostoievski. I hoped to give to the world huge, labyrinthian soul struggles which would devastate the world. But before very far along I realized that we had evolved to a point far beyond that of Dostoievski – beyond in the sense of degeneration. With us the soul problem has disappeared, or rather presents itself in some strangely distorted chemical guise. We are dealing with crystalline elements of the dispersed and shattered soul. – Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart (1960)1

It should not come as a surprise even to the casual reader of Henry Miller that he idolised the nineteenth-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and was tremendously influenced by him in his own work. More than any other presence of influence in the work of Miller, Dostoevsky serves as a foil for the paradox of simultaneous living and creative expression in writing. Miller not only both admired Dostoevsky’s writing, and subsequently revered the man who wrote it, but Miller also takes this very dual nature of idolising to the core of the creation of his own literature. In his direct musings over Dostoevsky, Miller constantly attempts to extricate the person from the persona and to combine them again in a convoluted image of philosopher-poetcompatriot. Yet Miller declares that his knowledge of Dostoevsky may not have necessarily come to him from reading his books. ‘I am not sure, for instance, whether I read his Dream of a Ridiculous Man or heard tell about it.’2 This admission suggests that Miller’s knowledge of Dostoevsky is not about reading and recalling literature but about life experiences themselves – the gateway to the introduction of his own literary style. The dilemma of the nature of influence in Bloom’s sense of the ‘anxiety of influence’, such that the ancestral author creates anxiety in the later author leading to a ‘misreading’ in order to ‘overcome’ or surpass the ancestral author, becomes the very material for Miller’s writing. As Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Frank Marra suggests in ‘The Dostoevsky/Miller Project: Investigations in Human Consciousness and Doubt’ (2007), ‘Each writer pursues similar ends (the achievement of a small amount of freedom and independence in restricted circumstances) with parallel struggles (de-centring the conscious centre).’3 It is not only a metaphysical misunderstanding of mystifying the writer with the person that Miller carries out but also (perhaps resulting from that activity) the possibility of the anxiety of influence. How to become Dostoevsky? How to overcome Dostoevsky? In Nexus Miller admits, ‘Myself, I have never pretended to understand Dostoievsky. Not all of him, at any rate. (I know him, as one knows a kindred soul.)’4 Miller permits himself consideration of Dostoevsky as always in the grey area between person and persona. Dostoevsky, as both writer and person, is manifest in Miller’s work in a manner making him emblematic of the hair-tearing puzzle of writing itself that plagues and compels Miller throughout his work. Not insignificantly, to repeat an important point made in the Introduction and previous chapter, ‘Dostoevsky’ is a marker that refers to a dead person, as Derrida explains using ‘Nietzsche’ as his example in The Ear of the Other. Derrida writes, ‘Only the name can inherit, and this is why the name, to be distinguished from the bearer, is always and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death. What returns to the name never returns to the living.’5 In order to understand Miller’s relation to Dostoevsky it is important firstly to consider the issue raised here by Derrida, which in fact is predated by Kristeva in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ in Desire in Language (Séméiotiké, 1969; in English, 1980), as she describes this ‘zero where the author is situated’ and hence where ‘the he/she character is born’, and ‘at a later stage, it will become a proper name (N)’.6 Kristeva explains that this is where the subject becomes the other (‘subject of enunciation’, ‘subject of utterance’) and vanishes from the work, or, more accurately, becomes ‘structured as a signifier’.7 Barthes follows this up in ‘The Death of the Author’, where he encourages this composite production, namely the image that is created from a person, signified through a name, in conjunction with the body of work he or she produces. Barthes writes, ‘The voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death. Writing begins.’8 The production of the work permits the creator to fall away into the work itself. Subsequently, the name that represents the creator moves from the person that it used to signify to the writer that it now signifies – a rather secret and blurry transference. Kristeva and Barthes’ works on this subject are highly complex and are not expanded upon here (particularly Barthes’, in this instance, with its additional thesis on the ‘death of the author’ in terms the monumental Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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shift away from the modern cultural import placed on the value of the author itself). The issue addressed here, rather, examines how a figure represents both a body of thought and a human being who has become larger than life and whose name comes to mean something beyond that of being merely the name of a dead man. The second task is then paying attention to what Miller does with this issue: how Miller deliberately mistakes, for example, a picture of Dostoevsky for the complex nature of his image. The manner by which Miller understands this complex relation between a writer, a representation of the writer and the writer’s material is both precisely his innovation and the Dostoevskian influence in his work. This issue of ‘the name of a dead man’ is unavoidable for the reader, in the sense that reading a text automatically compels the reader to identify the writing with the person, the life (who is the author) with the writer (who is the producer of the work). In The Ear of the Other, Derrida’s focus is Nietzsche and philosophers in general, because they are the writers most problematically confused by the reader in this relation of the person with the work’s authorship.9 Such writers, Derrida laments, are casually treated in biographies (‘biographical novels’, he writes) that claim to reveal the ‘genesis of the philosophical system’ as if it were empirically and straightforwardly available as such.10 The problem is that this casual explication of the ‘genesis of the philosophical system’ is in no way available to such a biographer, because no such thing can be ‘summed up in a self’.11 Hence, such ‘biographical novels’ end up producing the unanticipated fictional account of a real person whom the biographer is attempting to put into words but who obviously cannot be put into words in toto (not simply on account of the impossibility of summing anything up completely in writing, but because a person is necessarily and perpetually incomplete, or is, rather, fundamentally an unclosed form). This genesis cannot possibly be understood as a closed and hence accessible object that is viewable through dissecting the also closed and accessible components of the writer’s life. Derrida’s argument is applicable here precisely because Miller, in his work and particularly in his treatment of Dostoevsky, actively questions this sense of closedness of a name (contrary to such ‘biographers’). The examined area, the ‘edge’ so to speak, is what Derrida calls the ‘dynamis’: ‘that borderline between the “work” and the “life”’,12 on which resides the complex relation between a writer and his or her work. Derrida insists that what is called ‘life’ cannot be summed up as ‘an object of science’.13 Hence, to speak of an author’s writing does not mean one can also speak of that author’s life as though it were transparently available, or ever available in any Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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closed way, in the same way that a text can be considered to be available. Such an activity also poses problems of meaning, the generation of which becomes precisely what one does in reading a text: create an understanding; develop an interpretation that is always variable and open. This dynamis marks a distinct separation between ‘the enclosure’ of the system of thought and ‘the life of the author already identifiable behind the name’.14 Yet this dynamis is also blurry in its very presence, influencing the manner in which a reader understands both the text that is written and the figure who has written it. This issue becomes overwhelmingly present in Miller’s treatment of Dostoevsky, as he uses it deliberately to stump himself and to consume himself as a writer in his efforts to place, or to sum up, Dostoevsky. In The Books in My Life, Miller writes, ‘Dostoievsky was human in that “all too human” sense of Nietzsche. He wrings our withers when he unrolls his scroll of life.’15 Cleverly, this issue of Dostoevsky as a text and a figure, as ‘infinitely more than a novelist’16 while simultaneously as human ‘all too human’, also troubles Miller as a figure in the world of the text and as the writer of that text who is confounding his reader with both an understanding of this issue and a perpetual re-enacting of it. Miller’s reader is made clearly to come away with two Millers: the body of work and the life behind it (now the name of a dead man), in the same way that Miller comes away with the two modes of perception that are created through his reading of Dostoevsky. On the one hand, Miller has his idol worship of Dostoevsky as a great writer impossible to emulate, and, on the other, consequently as a great man (a dead man), an enigma behind whose face is hidden the incredible ‘artist’.17 Miller is aware of the greatness of his predecessor and is troubled by his determination to overcome him through his own writing. Fantastically, this emulation, coupled with necessary and sometimes knowing misinterpretation, comes through as an even deeper version of the name of a dead man. That is to say, Miller makes it his task to deliberately confuse the name of a dead man with the dead man’s writerly output. In Plexus, describing imaginary ‘colloquies’ that he conducts with Dostoevsky, Miller writes that he dialogues with ‘“the complete Dostoievsky”: that is to say, the man who wrote the novels, diaries and letters we know, plus the man we also know by what he left unsaid, unwritten’.18 Appearing as misguided and impossible, this task actually succeeds in Miller to the extent that it demonstrates precisely the dilemma to which it appears to succumb. By toying with this twofold use of the name, Miller ironically lays claim in his own work to a complexity usually missed by his readers. It is not just a matter of a production of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the obvious: Miller-the-author and Miller-the-persona. It is recognising that even Miller-the-author is not subsequently a name for a closed body of accessible knowledge, who is or is not Miller-the-persona. ‘Miller’ is simply the name of a dead man, without boundaries on his identity, while also being the name of a body of work, which does have boundaries insofar as it is contained in words, but even that containment expands through its very existence in words. Additionally, ‘Miller’ is also the name of a character in the text; and, further still, this character muses endlessly over this dilemma in his very own existence through resurrecting Dostoevsky as a man and as a great writer (after all, it is the Miller-the-persona who does these things, not Miller-the-author). Dostoevsky, the person, is elevated in order to become the image of him that is projected back on the man, as impossible as it is, in order to make him identical with his own legacy. Miller writes, ‘I like to think of Dostoievsky as one surrounded by an impenetrable aura of mystery. For example, I can never picture him wearing a hat – such as Swedenborg gave his angels to wear.’19 This folding one sense of Dostoevsky (the person) upon the other (the persona) is how Miller becomes deliberately troubled by his inability ‘to penetrate the mystery of the being lurking behind the doughy mass of features’.20 Additionally, however, this use of Dostoevsky, in terms of the problem of author and persona (and the sophisticated irony of it), is the key to revealing the innovative quality of Miller’s own work. This complexity of the name of Dostoevsky colours all of the various forms of manifestations of Dostoevsky in Miller’s work. The first form of intertextuality concerning Dostoevsky surfaces through Miller’s presentation of him from a portrait that Miller fetishises. Here is the full passage: I plunked myself in front of Dostoevsky’s portrait, as I had done before many a time, to study his familiar physiognomy anew . . . I stood there, as always, trying to penetrate the mystery of the being lurking behind the doughy mass of features . . . Finally I saw only the artist, the tragic, unprecedented artist who had created a veritable pantheon of characters . . . each one of them more real . . . more inscrutable than all the mad Czars and all the cruel, wicked Popes put together.21

Right away, Miller embarks on a metaphysical impossibility with Dostoevsky’s image in the sense that he wants to reconcile Dostoevsky’s greatness, his body of work, with the appearance of him as a man in a picture. Projecting this impasse onto his own writing, Miller produces the dilemma as a writer of how to understand his own creation of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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characters, who are meant to be real (including, most importantly, the one who is him), who are simultaneously not real and yet more real than real. What does it mean to suggest they are more real than real? In this example of the image of Dostoevsky, again as Derrida explains, ‘everything a name involves . . . cannot be summed up in a self.’22 The creation of Dostoevsky in Miller is automatically more real because it is present in all that it can be: it is in the words that are it (that are ‘him’). The image is as real as it could ever be as what it is said to be. Dostoevsky (the dead man himself and/or the body of work) will always be much more than his name could ever suggest and yet always only what his name suggests. Thus the literary manifestation of him (already a misnomer to call it a manifestation of ‘him’, that is to say of ‘Dostoevsky’) will always be more real than whatever could ever be real of him in the world. A text as a book, for example, necessarily provides more closure through its very creation of something as a signification (in the precise way that it does as a ‘book’) than a text, as a single name, can provide in its effort to re-present something, precisely because of its nature as a name. This troubling figure of Dostoevsky, as Miller’s literary compatriot and influence, is beyond Miller’s grasp, in the same way in which Miller’s own writing is. Miller’s expectations from the portrait of Dostoevsky reveal this twofold imaging that occurs with a name, in that he treats the portrait both as the image of a man (the life) and as the image of a figure of greatness (the work). Specifically, every time Miller passes this portrait of a man with ‘such a plain, homely face . . . the face of a man who might go unnoticed in a crowd’,23 as he deliberately frequently does, Miller performs ‘something more than a bow or a salute . . . more like a prayer, a prayer that [Dostoevsky] would unlock the secret of revelation’.24 Miller both expects the image to be knowable to him as he is knowable to himself (and as other human beings are knowable to him in the world) but also as a figure much more than being human, one that is mysterious, not knowable and also with a superhuman power able to reveal this ‘secret of revelation’ from one writer to another – and, yet, from one superhuman writer, paradoxically, to another ordinary writer. Miller is required to overlook, so to speak, Dostoevsky’s very humanness in order to expect from him precisely what he, Dostoevsky, embodies: a writer elevated to superhuman stature, and whose ordinary writerliness and superhumanness are both present and, subsequently, absent in the portrait, insofar as they can only each be present in alternating and fleeting moments. The portrait is like a hologram: revealing a complete figure and, with a slight change of perspective on the part of the viewer, suddenly revealing another, creating a blurring effect where Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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one reflection seems to permeate the other, resulting in a certain level of indistinguishability. The first two chapters of Nexus blow the image of Dostoevsky up even larger. Chapter One begins with an uneasy scene between Millerthe-persona and his wife Mona, who is overtly unfaithful to him with her female lover Stasia. The nature of this ménage à trois is such that not only is Miller aware of his wife’s escapades, but Stasia actually lives with the couple, and the three continually engage in reciprocally degrading behaviour, constantly upping the ante of lie-telling and insults. Miller explains that Stasia lies in order to please Mona, whereas Mona lies in the attempt to reinvent herself. Miller himself lies to partake in the perversity of the game. To demonstrate Stasia’s style of lying, Miller cites a curious example: ‘She may take it into her head, for example, to relate some spurious incident out of Dostoievsky,’25 which he suggests could be a lie, that is to say could be deliberately inaccurate, simply in order to test Miller’s knowledge on the subject. Interestingly, he questions the nature of the example, such that he knows it may be possible that it is not at a lie at all, but may rather be Stasia citing something Miller simply may not remember of ‘the thousands of incidents which crowd Dostoievsky’s voluminous works’.26 More importantly, he directly adds, ‘And how can I myself be certain that she is not giving me the genuine Dostoievsky?’27 Miller concludes by insisting that because of his great memory ‘for the aura of things read’, it is ‘impossible’ for him ‘not to recognize a false Dostoievskian touch’.28 Incidentally, he chooses to ‘draw her out’ and engage the potential lie, by not acknowledging that he knows ‘she is falsifying’.29 Miller will even argue in Stasia’s favour, he explains, on points that are clearly inaccurate in her story, while Mona watches on ‘aware neither of truth nor falsity, but happy as a bird because [they] are talking about her idol, her god, Dostoievsky’.30 Dostoevsky’s presence as the subject matter for Miller’s anecdote on lie telling is not incidental. Part of the significance rests in Miller’s fetishising of Dostoevsky, particularly during this phase of his life when he is living in squalor with and maltreated by Mona and Stasia, subsequently romanticising his real-life role as akin to a character in a Dostoevsky novel. Dostoevsky’s presence here is also significant precisely because this episode is about lie-telling and the role Miller ascribes to Dostoevsky as truth-teller. In Sexus Miller writes: Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognise them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every

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man, when he gets quiet, when he gets desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.31

Imagining himself not only as a Dostoevsky character but also as equal to Dostoevsky himself, Miller ruminates over the possibility of truth in the words of the everyman. What continues to make this example with Stasia from Nexus so clever is that it carries on into a completely different episode directly following this hypothetical ‘argument’, but not before first invoking the two names of Dostoevsky in one sentence immediately following:

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‘A pity Dostoievsky himself isn’t with us!’ Mona will sometimes exclaim. As if he invented all those mad people, all those crazy scenes which flood his novels. I mean, invented them for his own pleasure, or because he was a natural born fool and liar. Never once does it dawn on them that they may be the ‘mad’ characters in a book which life is writing with invisible ink.32

Once again, Dostoevsky is presented here first as the body of work who is invoked in the discussion between Stasia and Miller (which, not incidentally, is used in the frame narrative to reveal a game of lying), and then suddenly Dostoevsky is called upon as a real person, who should be included (but cannot be, because he’s dead) in a conversation about the body of work by an author called ‘Dostoievsky’ (sic). Additionally, adding to this clever tactic of Miller’s, it then becomes ironic, and even meta-textual, that Stasia and Mona are so foolish as not to question if their own ‘real’ lives may actually only be literary characterisations in a book of another sort. Miller alludes to the oddly meta-fictive quality of his own work in this passage, forcing the reader to acknowledge that not only are Stasia and Mona fools of the sort Dostoevsky and Miller describe, but Miller himself is (both Miller-thepersona in the text but also Miller-the-body-of-work that comes after the book is written). Furthermore, the reader is also made to acknowledge a very awkward truth in literature: how, after all, could a character, here Stasia and Mona (and, strangely, Miller himself), like James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, admit to being a character?33 The Dostoevsky scene does not end here. Miller continues by explaining how Mona considers Miller to be ‘great enough, complex enough, in her estimation at least, to belong to the world of Dostoievsky’.34 Yet what keeps him from being ‘another Dostoievsky’ is the fact that ‘Dostoievsky, according to Mona, never displayed the least interest in “facts”.’35 Mona believes that Dostoevsky ‘lived only in the imagination’,36 Miller writes, and hence Miller-the-persona (who, as the reader knows, is a writer) is not able to measure up to such greatness, because Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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he is too ‘inquisitive, too “bourgeois”’.37 Once again, the peculiarity of this exchange is immediately evident. How can Miller-the-persona live in facts and not, as Dostoevsky does, ‘only in the imagination’ if he is, after all, possibly only a character in a book? Miller-the-author is obviously not toying with meta-fiction at this particular moment, nor is it entirely absurd for characters to talk about concepts like truth and fiction, despite themselves being the latter. This issue notwithstanding, the presence of meta-fiction in Miller is always an undercurrent, precisely because the questions like ‘What is truth?’ ‘What is fiction?’ and, more curiously, ‘What distinguishes imagination from facts (particularly in writing)?’ are always present. Even if the possibility of Millerthe-persona merely being a character is not in question at this point, Miller-the-author is still drawing out the issue of confusing a persona, a figure and a name with a body of work. Poignantly, there is nothing that makes Miller, in this instance during a discussion on imagination versus facts, any different from Dostoevsky. Miller-the-author raises the question as to how one distinguishes between imagination and facts in writing after all. It is an issue that Miller-the-author is deliberately raising in his text not for the sake of whimsy, but to address the frustrating yet intriguing issue of authorship and the problem of writing. In The Work of Fire, Blanchot writes:

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It seems that literature consists of trying to speak at the moment when speaking becomes most difficult, turning toward those moments when confusion excludes all language and consequently necessitates a recourse to a language that is the most precise, the most aware, the furthest removed from vagueness and confusion – to literary language. In this case, the writer can believe that he is creating ‘his spiritual possibility for living’; he feels his creation linked, word by word, to his life, he re-creates and regenerates himself.38

Miller-the-author wills himself, as a new creation (as Miller-the-persona) into the text through writing, but it is precisely that he is willing something new that necessarily creates the vast gulf between the writer and his words. Using Dostoevsky as his model, Miller extends, and wallows in, this disparity between imagination and facts, crossing boundaries between trying to write life and write imagination – the latter being the only true outcome, but one that always also results in creating the former. The text is based on life, but it is life that is produced from the imagination and ultimately stays in the imagination as it becomes the facts on the page of the book. This scene comes to an end after Miller explains that Stasia – the great liar – is, in contradistinction to the fanciful Mona, ‘after all, a little closer to reality. She knew that puppets are made of wood or papier-mâché, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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not just “imagination”’, and therefore, ‘nothing in books frightened her’.39 Here too, Miller alludes to the close connection between reality and imagination. If Stasia is ‘a little closer to reality’ and that means she is unafraid of books, then she is aware of the absolute fiction of books, regardless of their direction or content. Even if books contain facts, they are still in and of the imagination. After all, books cannot contain facts, precisely because they are words. Indeed, a book cannot contain anything in any complete sense. It is impossible to close the meaning of a word, no matter how many times it is written on a page or how precise its definition or explanation may be. As Deleuze and Guattari explain in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, 1972; in English, 1980), using Miller as their guiding example, ‘the schizo continuously detaches [signifying chains of words], continually works them loose and carries them off in every direction in order to create a new polyvocity.’40 The word – the fact – remains open, elusive and suggestive of infinite realities and possibilities. There is nothing to fear in books, because they are only real unto themselves. Wittgenstein reminds the reader: ‘Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not used in the language-game of giving information.’41 As much as a text feigns reality, it remains a text. As Stasia rightly knows, one need not fear books; one must not mistake them for reality. In Plexus Miller adds another twist to his understanding of Dostoevsky by acknowledging that he ‘never existed except in imagination’.42 Miller refers to Dostoevsky in this instance by calling him one of the ‘kindred, ghostly spirits’ whom he is able ‘to give [himself] to completely’.43 This particular passage nearly becomes representative of the fourth form of intertextuality mentioned in the Introduction, as Miller does refer to the ‘dialogues’ he conducts with Dostoevsky as though he were a present character. However, what is interesting in this episode is not so much that Dostoevsky seems present as a character (which, ultimately, he is not) but that Miller alludes, again, to these ‘colloquies’ as being conducted in ‘a language that does not exist, a language so simple, so direct, so transparent, that words were useless [. . .] a language which could emanate only from Dostoievsky’.44 Such a dialogue is possible, because, as stated above, the language of ‘the complete Dostoievsky’ is, Miller writes, ‘always full, resonant, veridical; always the unimpeachable sort of music which one credits him with, whether audible or inaudible, whether recorded or unrecorded’.45 Miller again draws out this dual nature of the image of ‘Dostoevsky’; he is not only what is written but also what is unwritten. Dostoevsky is a figure that speaks outside of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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pages of his work, that confounds his reader through the blending of fact and imagination, of identity in and beyond his work, as the enigma ‘behind the doughy mass of features’ that is the person.46 In his first claim on his own style, Miller writes at the beginning of Tropic of Cancer that what he is writing is not literature and ‘is not a book’.47 It is rather, he says, ‘libel, slander, defamation of character’.48 Insistent on pointing to a distinction between what he is writing and what others have written, Miller consciously falls prey to his own disclaimer by, of course, writing a book – a book that is not a book. In his effort to capture imagination as Dostoevsky does, Miller succeeds by not necessarily mistaking books for reality, clearly, but by drawing attention to this common error in reading literature. By disclaiming his book, Miller produces the effect of alerting his reader to the fact that the book, however full of ‘facts’ it may be, is always a product of imagination and that this difficult relationship is irresolvable and is the paradoxical nature of writing – something that is usually overlooked, ignored or regarded as objectionable. Miller also aims to create, after Dostoevsky’s example, ‘a veritable pantheon of characters’ where each one is ‘more real’ and ‘more inscrutable than all the mad Czars and all the cruel, wicked Popes put together’.49 For a character to be ‘more inscrutable’ than a real person might suggest that the character is somehow more vivid and transparent, more present or more accessible than a real person. However, this conception is not at all the case and is certainly not what Miller attempts to put forward. It is the case, rather, that a character is ‘more real’ both because it is thoroughly complete and hermetically contained precisely because it is necessarily restricted to a closed text and because, taking Bakhtin’s concept of ‘unfinalisability’, it is impossible ever to outdo the possibility of the character as a completed figure. Thus the character can be nothing more than this perfection of itself, so to speak, as a literary manifestation, which perpetually remains incomplete. The dilemma that arises from this claim is that this primary sense of completeness is also what demarcates the character’s perpetual incompleteness. As a word can only ever be a word and as a word always disseminates its meaning through deferral within a system of endless meanings, then a character – made of words – can never (and will never) challenge the person that it re-presents. The character cannot compete with what really is real. It is absurd to speak in this way, yet this is the way in which literature is often spoken about and why Dostoevsky and Miller’s works are so provocative, in their evocation of this conundrum. In ‘The Dostoevsky/Miller Project’ Marra writes, ‘In short, by episodically integrating schizophrenization Miller safeguards his hero Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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from finalization, allowing him the possibility of developing in surprising ways.’50 In the way that Bakhtin refers to Dostoevsky’s writing as polyphonic, Miller enacts something similar through a schizophrenic, yet seemingly monological, voice. At the beginning of Nexus, during a lengthy episode on Dostoevsky, Miller writes: Though millions among us have never read Dostoievsky nor would even recognise the name were it pronounced, they are nevertheless, millions of them, straight out of Dostoievsky, leading the same weird ‘lunatical’ life here in America which Dostoeivsky’s creatures lived in the Russia of his imagining.51

The nature of literature is such that it presents unto itself a world that is somehow both a reflection of the world while also being a world of infinite possibilities. In The Devil at Large (1993), Erica Jong claims that the creative artist faces the paradox that ‘life flows and art must stand still. But it must stand still like the hummingbird, as Miller would say. It must move and yet have form, because without form it is not graspable; without form it cannot be art.’52 Miller takes from Dostoevsky the desire to write a literature that is more than life while putting real life in the literature at the same time. Perhaps unlike Dostoevsky, Miller was amused by the convoluted legacy he was leaving to his biographers. Jong writes:

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[Miller] felt he had adequately chronicled his own life in his books, and wherever there was some fictionalization that did not correspond to the ‘facts’ (in which, anyway, he did not believe), he was more than happy to provide chronologies, interviews, conversations that elucidated the truth, his truth, for his rapt listeners. (Some of these ‘documents’ also contain plenty of fiction.)53

Jong only touches here on the profundity of Miller’s style, particularly in relation to Dostoevsky’s. Miller himself laughed at his own misleading efforts and told Jong, herself an admiring Miller biographer, ‘When you write about me, make it all up!’54 Struggling with his desire to write the truth in literature, in Nexus Miller explains the difference between literature and that which he is writing and declares: ‘Then to hell with literature! The book of life, that’s what I would write.’55 This uneasy distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘the book of life’ is akin to Miller’s similarly uneasy distinction between ‘imagination’ and ‘facts’. Subsequently, Miller would attempt to write the ‘facts’, but in a manner that is wholly dependent upon ‘imagination’, thus producing his quasi-autobiographical, anti-literature in the style of Dostoevsky. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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In The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon Bloshteyn discusses in depth this second form of intertextuality, a sort of unconscious influence (in the sense of the influence not being verbally referenced by Miller, where the source is ‘non-present’). She writes, ‘According to Miller, Dostoevsky enabled new writers to discard literature, with all its staid conventions and formalities, and to create a different kind of writing, more intimately entwined with life itself.’56 This ‘different kind of writing’ that is ‘intimately entwined with life itself’ is explicitly evident throughout Miller’s oeuvre. Although Bloshteyn’s analysis of Miller’s interest in Dostoevsky is largely historical and biographical, she raises important points useful to this study. On the whole, Bloshteyn discusses Dostoevsky’s significance in America and for writers like Miller, Durrell and Nin, using her extensive knowledge of Russian literature to establish a grounded account of influence. Although Bloshteyn’s is not an analysis of the text (but one of the cultural and personal relationships between Dostoevsky and his modernist inheritors), many of her findings are relevant to a close study of the text. Bloshteyn suggests that Miller considers Dostoevsky’s bad writing as itself innovative, deliberately poorly written for the sake of form – a style that Miller subsequently seeks to imitate and, here argued, in his own way overcome. Bloshteyn writes: ‘With Notes from the Dead House Dostoevsky entered the American consciousness as an autobiographical writer whose literary value resided in the authenticity of his observations and certainly not in his powers of composition.’57 If the perception of Dostoevsky was already one of being a bad writer but that ‘the authenticity of his observations’ made his work appealing, then Miller, whose interest was in the destruction of conventional form, would elevate that bad writing into a purposeful style that exemplified such ‘authenticity of [. . .] observation’. Thus this perception of Dostoevsky is one that Miller gratefully accepts and utilises in mastering such a craft of bad writing in his own voice. (In a letter to Anaïs Nin in 1932 Miller elaborates on this struggle of Dostoevsky having ‘neither time nor money’ and thus ‘it is nothing short of a miracle that he accomplished.’58) However, Bloshteyn argues, this reading of Dostoevsky is plainly misguided based on basic historical information. Her first point is to explain that complications with translation, deliberate distortion of material and its mode of accessibility in America created a completely different Dostoevsky from the one known in his homeland, applicable both to the writer as a person and to the body of work. Bloshteyn writes: Dostoevsky remains one of Russia’s most successful literary exports; yet it appears that in traversing linguistic, cultural, and temporal boundaries the cluster of concepts that together form the total construct of ‘Dostoevsky’ (a

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corpus of information about Dostoevsky’s life, belief system, and canon of writings) has been radically transformed.59

Bloshteyn also writes that Dostoevsky himself acknowledged his poor, hasty writing, stating it was not done by volition but due to lack of time and resources.60 Much of this information was either unknown or ignored by the time his work reached America. Bloshteyn explains that pieces like the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ from Brothers Karamazov were often taken out of context, creating the reputation of their author as a radical, godless philosopher-poet, when Dostoevsky himself repeatedly espoused the opposite. She confirms: ‘He makes it very clear that he sees his writings (fictional and nonfictional) as carefully orchestrated arguments advancing his philosophical position and not as open-ended, free-spirited explorations of religious and philosophical issues.’61 Brothers Karamazov, for example, ‘is nothing less than “a destruction of anarchism”’, Bloshteyn states, citing Dostoevsky’s letters, and ‘he is “preaching God and Nationhood”’.62 Madame Blavatsky, for one, excised the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ chapter and published it in her own English-language journal The Theosophist with the clear intention of presenting Dostoevsky as an atheist.63 Emma Goldman also took liberally from Dostoevsky’s oeuvre for similar ends, going so far as to fabricate facts about Dostoevsky’s life as well.64 This latter case is especially significant, as Miller cites Goldman as the monumental presence that prompted the turning point in his life, radicalising his own religious and political views as a young man. Despite the obvious negative ramifications of these deliberately distorting literary exploits against Dostoevsky’s actual disposition as a writer and a person, Bloshteyn acknowledges, ‘Dostoevsky’s ideas seem to invite distortions so excessive as to suggest the existence of issues beyond those ordinarily expected in the cases of interliterary or intercultural contact.’65 That Dostoevsky’s work lends itself to being misunderstood immediately raises eyebrows for the Miller reader. Bloshteyn defends this claim by stating: ‘It was because Dostoevsky achieved the very peak of what could be done in literature that he had to be studied so closely: he was the gateway for the next stage, which was none other than a revolution in prose narrative.’66 It is this quality of Dostoevsky’s work that appeals to Miller in his efforts to emulate, recreate and finally move beyond into his own style in the grey area of experimental and fictionalised autobiography. Bloshteyn notes that Americans were prone to misreading Dostoevsky for a variety of reasons. ‘American readers, encouraged by the novel’s publishers, were never sure which parts were fact and which fiction, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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and consistently confused the persona of the narrator with that of the author.’67 This confusion is evident to Miller, who then deliberately adopts this tool of uncertainty into his own work. In the same episode early on in Nexus in which Stasia challenges Miller’s knowledge of Dostoevsky with her lie-telling, and Mona concedes that Miller lives in ‘facts’, Miller elaborates on this elusive dual nature of his idol. He writes: ‘No, to believe [Mona], Dostoievsky was always in the clouds – or else buried in the depths. He never bothered to swim on the surface. He took no thought of gloves or muffs or overcoats. Nor did he pry into women’s purses in search of names and addresses. He lived only in the imagination.’68 Not only is it irrelevant that Dostoevsky’s presence in twentieth-century Greenwich Village Bohemian culture may not reflect Dostoevsky’s own worldview, but it is this ambiguity, this possibility of misreading that encourages Miller to revere Dostoevsky. Bloshteyn suggests that Miller saw himself as a ‘post-Dostoevskian writer who had to invent writing anew, and that it was the radical vision of Dostoevsky as the last rather than the first prophet of the novel, the last writer of literature, that Miller expounded during his Paris years’.69 Regardless of his misreadings, Miller uses Dostoevsky as a marker for understanding that capitulation of literature as it was known, giving him licence to explore new forms of writing. Without summarising the entirety of Bloshteyn’s findings, it is important to note that she painstakingly sets up the very specific reasons why Dostoevsky was influential in New York in the 1920s and how that influence was a distortion of the real Dostoevsky. However, in contrast to Bloshteyn’s assessment that ‘Miller was fully plugged into the established American stereotype of Dostoevsky, perhaps without fully realising it himself,’70 the argument here suggests rather that this misreading is precisely what makes Dostoevsky interesting to a writer like Miller. Although this point may not be of central importance in her work, Bloshteyn does admit that the scholar of comparative literature, for example, would consider Miller’s misreadings irrelevant. Of the Villa Seurat writers she writes that ‘they were never concerned with the accuracy of their interpretations. What interested them was the creative potential inherent in their wrestling with their version of Dostoevsky’s legacy.’71 The important point is to acknowledge that Miller’s misreading is in many ways deliberate, in his effort to extrapolate the issues at stake in Dostoevsky as a writer, as opposed simply to coming to the same conclusions in his personal life. At stake is not this dichotomy between God and atheism or the political left and right. What Dostoevsky provokes in his readers is the sense that the values he or she holds true require examination. It may have been his hope – as a writer and a living person – that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the outcome would reflect his own sense of the right, but Dostoevsky’s personal desire is not the appeal for the reader, in Miller’s estimation. This twentieth-century assessment of Dostoevsky is obviously relevant to the third form of intertextuality introduced in the Introduction, which is reverse influence. Through contemporary readings, the reception of Dostoevsky changes from what it originally may have been (specifically in the Russian and in the nineteenth century), which is the work of a God-loving nationalist, to the anarchic, godless rants of an underground man in the twentieth century, specifically in America. The appeal of Dostoevsky for Miller, and again in relation to this reversal of influence, is that he gives his reader the means and method to unflinchingly stare at and question systems of value. Contrary to Bloshteyn’s position, who suggests Miller, like Dostoevsky, is of the ‘searchers of apocalyptic realities’,72 the argument here asserts that Miller’s interest has nothing to do with ‘apocalyptic realities’ but with apocalyptic writing. Miller is not establishing a polemic for living based on Dostoevsky’s (whether or not it’s been misread). It is a question of writing and not of a person called Henry Miller worshipping a writer/ leader/philosopher/imaginary force, as a schoolboy worships a comic book hero. It is not a case of emulating Dostoevsky and failing, firstly, by not getting Dostoevsky right and, secondly, by Miller fashioning his whole (and actual) life after a cultural icon. What is taking place is an activity of writing in Miller – a form of writing that he is undertaking in his own way but that necessarily follows out of his influence from Dostoevsky. This link is hardly disputable and, even if his is a misreading, it is still not about Miller-the-writer falling short in his efforts to be something in his real and actual life. Bloshteyn accounts for references by Miller to the following Dostoevsky works: The Devils, The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, The Eternal Husband, The Double, Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground. Although Bloshteyn does not state if she is noting direct or indirect allusions, it is clear that indirect (‘non-present’) references obviously run deepest and widest in Miller. As addressed earlier in this chapter, Miller does make many references to Dostoevsky, but some of them are quite offhand and seemingly random, as one addressed here, found toward the end of Nexus. Living in New York, Miller-thepersona is recounting how life is now passing smoothly: he has paid his debts; he and his wife Mona are getting along splendidly; they are going to the theatre and to the cinema; he is making friends with the neighbours, pleasing the landlady, borrowing books and records, learning to drive and so on. During a dinner with the Essens, a Jewish family who run a delicatessen on the corner, Reb Essen, the father and shopkeeper, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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proceeds to get drunk, and while he is taking a walk, the inquisitive Jewish neighbour Mr Elfenbein arrives and proceeds to have a haphazard conversation with Miller in which a reference to a Dostoevsky novel is casually dropped. The episode is almost nonsensical, in a playfully sloppy manner, giving the scene an authentic feel for the jovial, yet peculiar, environment where endless glasses of Kümmel liqueur are being ‘drained . . . in one gulp’.73 Mr Elfenbein, the ‘Yiddish King Lear’,74 suggests that Reb’s son will make a ‘fine young gangster’ because ‘already he knows nothing from nothing. A malamed he should be – if he had his wits. Do you remember in Tried and Punished . . .?’75 Reb’s son interjects, ‘You mean Crime and Punishment.’76 Mr Elfenbein then corrects Reb’s son, explaining, ‘In Russian it’s called The Crime and Its Punishment. Now take a back seat and don’t make faces behind my back. I know I’m meshuggah . . .’77 The Dostoevsky stops there, as Mr Elfenbein continues his farcical ramblings interjected with Yiddish words, following various tangents on the theatre, mysticism, singing and voice control, Irish poetry, the Bible, Jewish history and other subjects. At the other extreme from overt and senseless references to Dostoevsky, there are particularly elusive, yet clearly Dostoevskian, non-present allusions throughout Miller’s oeuvre, such as at the end of Sexus. Here the analysis returns to the second form of intertextuality, which is the nonpresent, unconscious form, where, again, it is the ‘agency of the author being influenced’, according to Clayton and Rothstein in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary Theory.78 The extensive episode at the end of Sexus seems to draw certain, yet indirect, elements from The Double: A Petersburg Poem (1846; in English, 1917) and, in a rather inverted manner, A Gentle Creature (1876; in English, 1917). Highlighting Dostoevsky’s own indebtedness to the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) and his short story The Nose (1835), The Double is the disturbing tale of the eventual complete breakdown of a minor civil servant after encountering, and being mentally destroyed by, his double. This figure invades the protagonist’s life, ruining his career and personal relations, but more importantly diminishing the protagonist’s hold on his life, on his social image and on his entire psychological well-being. A Gentle Creature tells the story of a pawnshop keeper who marries a timid and desperate young girl, ultimately provoking, and self-centredly suffering from, her unexpected suicide. The story begins with his young wife having already died, her body lain upon the table. In his confusion and guilt, he tries to retell the story, as if to an invisible jury that might release him from his feelings of responsibility for her untimely death. He begins relaying the story frenetically in fragments, but eventually Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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weaving coherency, he finally extricates himself, producing a narrative that gives it logical sense in his own mind. Finding Dostoevsky in Miller’s texts encourages Kristeva’s explanation that ‘every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an intertextuality)’, as she claims in Revolution in Poetic Language (La Révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du xixe siècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé, 1974; in English, 1984).79 In Desire in Language, Kristeva concludes, ‘The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.’80 It is here that Kristeva borrows from Bakhtin to insist that any text is the transformation of any other, and thus the focus of intertextuality is not directed by Bloom’s subjective, ancestral authority but by words themselves and their transference. This notion of the ‘double’, evidently, is also doubly interesting in this example. Although the allusion is subtle and arguably present only to a reader looking for such specific connections, Miller’s language evokes the Dostoevsky’s stories named above in an extended version of the passage from the end of Sexus, quoted in the Introduction as an example of Miller being ‘Kafkaesque’. Chapter Twenty-three of Sexus tells of the narrator’s experience living in a cellar with his wife Mona and her lover Stasia and their seeming ill-treatment of him. He revels somewhat in the grime and misery of his pathetic existence but eventually decides to run away. ‘I have lost the power to feel. To conceal this defect I simulate every passion. [. . .] They say I have the makings of a clown. [. . .] I am learning all the tricks of the zoo.’81 A short time later he writes, ‘A night on the floor, the three of us tossing like burning corks. Taunts and gibes passing back and forth.’82 Until finally, he says, ‘In the morning I leave stealthily while they slumber blissfully.’83 One could actually choose to see all kinds of tones from various Dostoevsky stories such as The Dream of a Ridiculous Man or Notes from Underground; however, only the two mentioned above will be read closely in relation to this passage for the purposes of establishing the point. Miller is an unhappy, rather disturbed man in this episode and describes his predicament in the harsh, dark manner Dostoevsky uses when setting up his disquieting tales. Miller writes, ‘Through months of shame and humiliation I have come to hug my solitude. I no longer seek help from the outside world.’84 Interestingly, in this episode, Miller no longer simply muses about his characters resembling Dostoevsky’s (himself being one); rather they now actually are. That is to say, his characters no longer talk about Dostoevsky; instead they explicitly behave like Dostoevsky characters. Identifying with both the young wife in A Gentle Creature, who is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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unwillingly bound to a destructive marriage, and with the pawnshop keeper, who finds her in an extramarital love affair, Miller’s narrator also struggles with his conscience and his instinct to make the right choice, whether to return to his ‘kennel . . . ridiculous and pathetic . . . like a dog’85 or flee the shameful situation for good. Where Dostoevsky writes, ‘And a woman who loves – oh, a woman who loves – will worship even vice, the crimes even of the man she loves,’86 Miller acerbically prods at the gendered roles in opposition: ‘I would be grateful for any crumbs that were handed me. If she wanted to bring her lovers in and make love to them in my presence it would be all right too. One doesn’t bite the hand that feeds one.’87 Like the pawnshop keeper’s wife, Miller is submissive, yet resentful. Like the pawnshop keeper, Miller accepts marital disgrace but continues ‘to worship her’88 and finally succumbs to the impending internal destruction. Walking the streets, fluctuating back and forth, searching the dark recesses of his mind for the answer, Miller ultimately encounters his double. ‘Finally I made to go through an archway . . . Then a panic seized me and I ran back to the street. On the other side of the street, close to the wall, a man was standing.’89 This man both pursues and eludes Miller. Just like Golyadkin, Miller is petrified with fear of this encounter. Dostoevsky writes, ‘Suddenly, as though struck by a thunderbolt, he stopped dead in his tracks, and spun round like a weathercock in the wind to stare after the man who had passed and was disappearing rapidly into the whirl of snow.’90 Miller in his fear says: ‘I stood stockstill, undecided which way to turn, hoping that this silent figure would move first,’ then admits, ‘I knew I couldn’t elude him now.’91 Despite this fear, just like Golyadkin, Miller ultimately violently confronts his double, and, in Miller’s case, tackles him to the ground. He declares, ‘I kicked out and caught him square in the stomach’, after which Miller flees.92 However, again like Golyadkin’s encounter with his double, Miller is unexpectedly caught again, this time with the double enacting a similar but worse violence back on Miller. Suddenly, Miller is frightened into immobility and attacked. His double announces: ‘I’m givin’ it to you in the guts, you dirty dog!’93 The novel ends with Miller returning to his wife and her female lover, where he proceeds to collapse into disturbing, sexual nightmares of himself as a dog begging for his wife’s love. Projecting himself into such conflicted roles that blur distinction and direction, Miller exposes for the reader conventional literary limits, and these are the limits, Marra writes, ‘that both Dostoevsky and Miller attempt to stretch by infusing their work with plurality’.94 Marra provides an original analysis of the significance of Miller’s firstperson account in contradistinction to Dostoevsky’s third-person (as in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the example given above), significantly noting the latter’s exception in Notes from Underground. Without treading on Marra’s argument that well establishes Miller’s schizophrenic, hence polyphonic, voice in his first-person narratives, it can also be said that Miller, by writing in the first person and by setting himself directly in the role of the protagonist – namesake and all – suggests, once again, that the division between life, writing and the imaginary world inhabited by writers is perpetually blurred and crossed. As Marra puts it in ‘The Dostoevsky/Miller Project’, ‘Dostoevsky and Miller both depict men circling round and round in psychological mazes of their own creation, seemingly helpless to find their way out.’95 In this mode of writing, Miller becomes his own double. In the context of this first-person narrative, Dostoevsky peculiarly addresses his reader in the preface to A Gentle Creature, where he provides a disclaimer for the reason why this story requires the special form that it does. This special form, explained momentarily, is necessary in order to incorporate the narrator’s confusion and hence fragmented narrative – a special form that Miller employs through the first person. In his disclaimer, Dostoevsky first gives the plot of the story as support for this special form, followed by an analysis of the narrator’s troubled mind (his reasoning, his behaviour and so on). Finally, Dostoevsky explains that, even though a real person in the state that the narrator is in would not be able to provide an explanation such as this at that moment and in this form (that is, in printed words), this method is best for transmitting how it would be if ‘a stenographer could have overheard him’.96 Dostoevsky’s disclaimer is what he calls a ‘fantastic’ element, because it detracts from the story’s possible ‘realness’. With Miller too it is no longer a question of reading but an actual manifestation of behaviour. Once again, the line is blurred. In Miller’s case, the reader understands that Miller-the-author is recounting events of his own life and putting them into words in order, in one sense, to assimilate Dostoevsky, but it is also the case that Miller’s real life, of Miller-the-person, is itself being lived out, oddly, to resemble a Dostoevsky character and subsequently reflected in literature. In her diaries, Anaïs Nin once asked, ‘The more I read Dostoevsky the more I wonder about June and Henry and whether they are imitations. I recognise the same phrases, the same heightened language, almost the same actions. Are they literary ghosts? Do they have souls of their own?’97 Without jumping out of the text too far, one sees here how Miller enters books just as books enter him. The questions that arise in this study of the unconscious form of intertextuality include asking what this figure ‘Dostoevsky’ does in Miller’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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works, in terms of language and literary technique – how Dostoevsky affects Miller’s language; what his function may be and how the reader understands it. When Dostoevsky is a presence, who is he – this figure, this writer – surfacing in Miller’s work? And, more strangely, why is the writer a ‘some one’? How is the writer some one? In his work, Miller fashioned for himself a similar self-enigma. Who is ‘Miller’? How does the reader distinguish him from his writing? How does the reader understand and misunderstand? It’s not a question if Dostoevsky was as important to Miller-the-author as he is to be to Miller-the-persona. It is rather an issue of Dostoevsky’s existence itself in Miller’s works and how this presence encourages Miller’s style. Whereas Bloshteyn explains how Miller liked Dostoevsky, this analysis attempts to address where Miller used Dostoevsky, how he came out in Miller, and how the reader can understand the signification for Miller’s writing. A prime example of Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony and heteroglossia in the novel, one of Dostoevsky’s signature techniques, is the presence of both voices of a moral argument from multiple, equally developed characters, producing the effect of a ‘plurality of consciousness-centres not reduced to a single ideological common denominator’.98 However, it can also be said that this polyphony is also manifest within the same character, such as Golyadkin of The Double and the pawnshop owner of A Gentle Creature. This technique of Dostoevsky’s to create a true polyphony, such that no voice can be isolated as superior (including the one professing Dostoevsky’s own moral disposition, which has subsequently often been missed by future readers), is indeed evident in Miller as well. Marra argues, ‘One can safely speculate either writer would be amenable to theories such as pragmatism or pluralism which produce answers that are descriptive and contextualising rather than absolute and definitive.’99 Yet Miller, in his attempt to grasp Dostoevsky within the context of his own metaphysics, seeks not just to pull his stories toward his own personal slant while developing this radical polyphony, but to draw attention to this functioning of language itself by disturbing conventional expectations, such as highlighting his own presence in the text as a character and blurring the line between the two figures. Bloshteyn, whose analysis is indeed very detailed and thorough but, again, has more of a biographical quality to it, seems occasionally to blur the distinction between Miller-the-author and Miller-the-persona. This blurry distinction is precisely what makes Dostoevsky interesting to Miller in the first place, as well as Miller to his readers. It is not a matter of extracting the real Miller out of the work, looking for how he understood Dostoevsky and locating where he incorporated Dostoevsky into his life. It is an issue of looking at the writing and regarding what it Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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does – not in the same way that Dostoevsky’s writing operated but in the way that Miller’s writing (in the sense of his innovative literary devices) is garnered from his reading of Dostoevsky. Incidentally, Bloshteyn blurs the author with the persona in a reference that presupposes Miller’s evident, life-long radical philosophy. She writes: ‘When Miller was sixty-six, he writes that the whole world “must be razed . . . Nothing less will satisfy”.’100 Bloshteyn uses this reference to claim that Miller held the same views throughout his life, the views that are evident in his misreadings of Dostoevsky. It cannot be overlooked that this assertion is clearly metaphorical; yet, even despite that presumably being understood by Bloshteyn, she seems to ignore how this statement does not refer to a person’s desire in the world but rather to a character’s dramatic claim in a text. She states Miller’s age as if this adds support to the image of him as a true rebel, even in old age, whereas the Miller who is sixty-six is not the same Miller who wrote the statement – not because he is now so many years older, but because the Miller of the novels is a character whereas this Miller is speaking in an interview. Bloshteyn’s next point is to say that the artist destroys the world through destroying old forms.101 However, she does not make any allusion to understanding this destruction as a necessarily incomplete process. The artist (the writer) creates throughout a lifetime. It is not as though old forms come down, and new ones are erected in the course of an author’s work. Moreover, such creation is simply not about failure or success (as if ‘razing the world’ is really and truly something that Miller is condoning). Writing, this act of creation, is simply something in which the writer engages, and the content of it is in many ways incidental. If Miller talks about ‘the world going smash’ for his entire oeuvre, not only does that not mean that this person called Henry Miller literally wants to smash the world, but it means that this person Miller produced a form in his writing to convey a force, that this force is precisely what he writes about – the act of writing. This criticism may appear too literal, but the point is that this literalising of the words is imperative for recognising the significance of Miller’s style and the impact of writers like Dostoevsky in his work. In writing about the portrait of Dostoevsky that he would often regard, on Second Avenue in New York Miller writes in The Books in My Life: ‘That will always be for me the real Dostoievsky. [. . .] One does not care to know whether this man was a writer, a saint, a criminal or a prophet. One is struck by his universality.’102 When Dostoevsky surfaces as an impenetrable presence in Miller’s work, it is not enough to consider this merely a matter of sublime awe and idol worship. Miller always sees both the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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man and the oeuvre and is unforgiving in his interest in both constantly dividing the two and rejoining them to produce a complex web of effects upon the impenetrable mythic figure. In a chapter devoted to Miller in conjunction with Lautréamont in The Work of Fire, Blanchot quotes from Tropic of Cancer:

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And thus he comes to cast his universe ‘above human boundaries . . . because to be only human seems to be too poor, so mediocre, such a wretched business, limited by meaning, restrained by moral systems and codes, defined by platitudes and isms’. Language seeks thus to separate itself from man and even from language; it penetrates underground, it becomes water, air, night.103

Because Miller’s language invites a pursuit towards its limits, the reader often mistakes the word for the world. It seems Bloshteyn is writing about Miller as a person learning how to become a writer by emulating Dostoevsky, whereas such a search for the genesis is, as Derrida writes, impossible, because, again, such a self cannot be summed up.104 It is the case rather that Miller-the-author is writing about his own complicated relationship with ‘Dostoevsky’ and how Dostoevsky’s writing (and persona) influenced him, as this impossible, mythic figure. This problem of interpretation of Dostoevsky is obviously a result of Dostoevsky’s style, insofar as he writes in a manner that makes it difficult to know what the text means. Dostoevsky the person, apparently, had a faith so strong in his own beliefs and a faith in the reader him or herself that he assumed the reader would be able to grasp his beliefs from the text as if immediate and evident. Not only did this not happen with the introduction of Dostoevsky in America at the turn of the twentieth century, but his message, as Bloshteyn elaborately discusses, was taken as the opposite. In The Books in My Life, Miller writes: ‘Dostoievsky is chaos and fecundity. Humanity, with him, is but a vortex in the bubbling maelstrom. He had it in him to give birth to many orders of humanity.’105 Regardless of the fact that subsequent writers may hold opposing political and religious viewpoints from Dostoevsky, the key here is recognising that this adoption of Dostoevsky as a left-wing, free-thinking radical spawned many writers who indulged in this very style of the ambiguous text that both implies the writer’s perspective while deliberately playing with the impossibility of such an approach to reading. For example, Bloshteyn writes that footnotes by Dostoevsky himself indicate that he ‘wanted to ensure that readers perceive Notes from Underground as a fictional text and his narrator as an incarnated social phenomenon separate from its creator’.106 However, Notes from Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Underground itself is written as a collection of notes by a writer, the narrator, ‘who gleefully acknowledges his own unreliability and contradictions’.107 Furthermore, this writer/narrator ‘still imagines a readership whom he loathes and taunts, but whose responses he anticipates and counters through the text’.108 Whether or not Dostoevsky has reign over the impact of this meta-author is irrelevant, as it is the reader who will always pass the judgement upon the text based on his or her own world of circumstances. It is precisely this literary technique that Miller enjoyed enough in Dostoevsky to adopt it directly into his own work. Whether or not Dostoevsky was aware, many of his readers are, to be sure, his underground man, a figure who, peculiarly, does not necessarily ascribe to the same views as Dostoevsky himself – as demonstrated in the case of Miller and other writers in the forlorn and fragmented, early twentieth century. Bloshteyn writes: ‘The Villa Seurat writers’ effective appropriation of Dostoevsky as a writer of counterculture . . . demonstrates the ease with which the set of associations connected to a particular writer or text can be stripped and substituted to suit the needs of their new readers and the ease with which they themselves can subsequently be appropriated.’109 It is not really that Dostoevsky influenced such writers in any overtly conventional fashion but rather that these writers found themselves in the world and discovered the work of Dostoevsky, which spoke to their convictions already in place. Bloshteyn argues that this was the case due to the compelling evidence supporting a parallel between America and Russia as being international outsiders. According to Bloshteyn, it was the French ambassador to St Petersburg and authority on Russian literature and culture EugèneMelchoir Vogüé who introduced Dostoevsky into the early twentiethcentury American consciousness, as his work Le roman russe (1886) was translated into English (The Russian Novel, 1912) alongside the works of Dostoevsky almost simultaneously.110 Vogüé, as a nobleman, encountered Dostoevsky in common social circles and thus related tales of the bumbling lower-class man in his account. Such an image of Dostoevsky appealed to an American sense of being an outsider in relation to the young nation’s historical European ancestors, and also reinforced the notion that Dostoevsky’s work was autobiographical and passionately driven from personal experience of hardship.111 Bloshteyn writes: ‘If Russian writers after Dostoevsky had no need to slavishly imitate the European novel, then neither did the new American authors.’112 According to Bloshteyn, ‘A sense of awed recognition accompanied American readings of Dostoevsky’s novels. Dostoevsky remained a writer of darkness, gloom, and extreme Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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states, but now he also presaged, penetrated, and depicted contemporary American reality for American men and women.’113 Dostoevsky, quickly adopted by the American public as himself somehow embodying the essence of being American, comes to exemplify for Miller his own feelings of exile, displacement and homelessness both during his time abroad, in Paris from 1930 to 1939, and his time in America, which he vehemently disparaged. The appeal for Miller’s reader is very much the same as Dostoevsky’s appeal for Miller as his imported Russian émigré. Miller is not writing to be a good writer or a writer with a message. He is provoking conventional assumptions as to the nature of literature itself. Marra sums up well: ‘In broad terms both men’s inquiries into the social world and human phenomenon are directed at de-centring the reader’s conscious centre.’114 For example, in Nexus Miller holds a conversation with a friend called Stymer, who is excitedly espousing his radical beliefs on Dostoevsky. Miller listens listlessly but attentively and is ‘fascinated’ by Stymer’s philosophy on the possibility that ‘all was mind’ and of ‘the idea of going underground, of taking refuge in the mind’.115 However, some months later, Miller learns that Stymer dies of a brain haemorrhage, which doesn’t surprise him and about which he concludes: ‘With that I stopped worrying about the mind as a refuge. Mind is all. God is all. So what?’116 Suddenly, Miller confronts his reader with this overwhelming presentation of the utter meaninglessness of all the intellectual onanism that takes place both in his own works, in Dostoevsky’s and, ultimately, in writing itself.117 It is not a question as to whether or not the literary output is worthy or of an appropriate quality, as this idea just raises the issue again of the foundation of judgement upon which a work is praised and evaluated. Miller’s writing – in its overcoming of Dostoevsky – raises the question as to how a text is read. The undercurrent suggests that a text must be read without its meaning being assigned entirely to a message that relates to the agenda of the reader or to the popular and conventional appreciation (that is valuation) of the content of the material. Writing for Miller, as derived from Dostoevsky, is directed toward a process, not an outcome. Additionally, making the distinction between the writer and the persona is also tremendously significant here, directly in a study of Miller and his influences, because it becomes evident that when Dostoevsky is spoken of, it must be made clear if this reference is to the writer or the persona – and/or a deliberate hazing of the two. Miller’s work draws this issue of the figure writing the text to the fore, not just in reference to Dostoevsky but also to the ambiguous distinction between a person and persona, including in terms of his own identity in the text. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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The next chapter considers Miller’s relation to Carroll, the least obvious connection in his study and yet, in many ways, perhaps the most fruitful in terms of examining Miller’s original and playful writing. Identified as a writer of tremendous significance by Miller, Carroll provides him not only with a profound interest in wordplay but, linguistically, in language games and the potentially humorous limits of writing.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Widsom, 28. Nexus, 18. Marra, 125. Nexus, 18. Ear, 7; ‘Ceci . . . ne revient plus . . . seulement au nom, en quoi le nom, qui n’est pas le porteur, est toujours et a priori un nom de mort’, L’Oreille, 18. Desire in Language, 75; ‘Ce zéro, où se situe l’auteur . . . le il du personnage va naître . . . à un stade plus tardif, il deviendra le nom propre (N)’, Séméiotiké, 156. Ibid., 75; ‘L’auteur, le sujet de l’énonciation’, ‘le personnage, sujet de l’énoncé’. . . ‘structure comme signifiant’, Séméiotiké, 156. Image-Music-Text, 142; ‘La voix perd son origine, l’auteur entre dans sa propre mort, l’écriture commence’, Le bruissement de la langue, 61. Derrida draws from Nietzsche’s claim in Ecce Homo, ‘I am one thing, my works are another’ (‘Das Eine bin ich, das Andre sind meine Schriften’). Ear, 30; ‘Une chose ce que je suis, une autre ce que sont mes écrits’, L’Oreille, 33. Ear, 7; ‘Des romans biographiques’, ‘la genèse du système’, L’Oreille, 16. Ibid., 7; ‘Des romans biographiques’, ‘la genèse du système’, L’Oreille, 18. Ibid., 5; ‘dynamis de cette bordure entre l’ «œuvre» et la «vie»’, L’Oreille, 16. Ibid., 6; ‘objet d’une science’, L’Oreille, 17. Ibid., 5; ‘La vie d’un auteur déjà identifiable sous son nom’, L’Oreille, 17. Books, 221. Ibid. Plexus, 16. Ibid., 110. Nexus, 18. Plexus, 16. Ibid., 16–17. Ear, 7; ‘Tout ce qui s’y engage . . . ne se résume pas à un moi’, L’Oreille, 18. Plexus, 16. Ibid., 16. Nexus, 11. Ibid. Ibid.

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68 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sexus, 25–6. Nexus, 12. This reflection on characters musing over being characters in a story pre-empts the discussion of Lewis Carroll in the next chapter, where, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Alice exclaims: ‘There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!’ (46). In The Philosopher’s Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1974), Peter Heath explains Alice’s ‘idle proposal’, cleverly writing: ‘If she had not already found a chronicler, she would not be around to demand one’ (40). Nexus, 12. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Fire, 17–18; ‘Il semble que la littérature consiste à essayer de parler à l’instant où parler devient le plus difficile, en s’orientant vers les moments où la confusion exclut tout langage et par conséquent rend nécessaire le recours au langage le plus précis, le plus conscient, le plus éloigné du vague et de la confusion, le langage littéraire. Dans ce cas, l’écrivain peut croire qu’il crée «sa possibilité spirituelle de vivre»; il sent sa création liée mot à mot à sa vie, il se recrée lui-même et se reconstitue’, Feu, 25. Nexus, 12. Anti-Oedipus, 40; ‘Toujours le schizo les détache, les descelle, les emporte en tous sens pour retrouver une nouvelle polyvocité’, L’AntiOedipe, 48. Zettel, 160; ‘Vergiß nicht, daß ein Gedicht, wenn auch in der Sprache der Mittelung abgefaßt, nicht im Sprachspiel der Mitteilung verwendet wird’, Zettel, 28. Plexus, 110. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 16. Cancer, 2. Ibid. Plexus, 16–17. Marra, 140. Nexus, 19–20. Jong, 49. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 6. Nexus, 217. Bloshteyn, 65. Ibid., 29. Letters to Nin, 24. Bloshteyn, 5–6.

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The Dream of a Ridiculous Writer – Fyodor Dostoevsky 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

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80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

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Ibid., 88. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 29. Nexus, 12. The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon, 66. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 128. Nexus, 230. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 231. Ibid. Ibid. Clayton and Rothstein, 6. Revolution, 111; ‘toute pratique signifiante est un champ de transpositions de divers systèmes signifiants (une inter-textualité)’, La Révolution, 60. Desire in Language, 37; ‘À la place de la notion d’intersubjectivité s’installe celle d’intertextualité, et le langage poétique se lit, au moins, comme double’, Séméiotiké, 146. Sexus, 448. Ibid., 449. Ibid., 450. Ibid., 448. Ibid., 452. ‘A Gentle Creature’, 685. Sexus, 452. ‘A Gentle Creature’, 708. Sexus, 458. ‘The Double’, 41. Sexus, 458. Ibid., 458–9. Ibid., 459. Marra, 134. Ibid., 129. Dostoevsky, 670. Nin, 212. Bakhtin, 17. Marra, 122. Bloshteyn, 129. Ibid., 129. Books, 224. Fire, 169–70; ‘Et ainsi en arrive-t-il jeter son univers «par-dessus les frontières humaines», piètre, une si misérable affaire, limitée par les sens,

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104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way restreinte par les systèmes moraux et les codes, définie par les platitudes et les ismes». Le langage cherche donc à se séparer de l’homme et même du langage, il pénètre sous terre, il devient eau, air, nuit’, Feu, 173–4. Ear, 7; L’Oreille, 19. Books, 223. Bloshteyn, 142. Ibid., 143. Ibid. Ibid.,185. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 38. Mara, 123. Nexus, 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid.

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Chapter 3

Through the Jabber – Lewis Carroll

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I hope to go off the deep end, and by that I mean that I am going to write, if I wish, absolute nonsense, you know. I love a man like Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland – what a delightful thing and how great it was! I believe that when you write freely and easily and joyously, even if it doesn’t make sense, that you do more good than when you write seriously with all your heart and soul and are trying to convince people. We have underestimated humor as a leavening, as something to loosen people and make them think. – Interview in Saturday Review, Conversations with Henry Miller (1956)1

Lewis Carroll may not be the first, or even last, writer who comes to mind when thinking of Henry Miller. Yet Miller, for one, counts Carroll as one of the writers who affected him the greatest, with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland occupying a position on Miller’s list of ‘The Hundred Books That Influenced Me Most’ from The Books in My Life. Miller was incredibly fond of Carroll, stating in an interview in his later life, ‘I would give my right arm to have written his books, or to be able to come anywhere near doing what he did.’2 At the same time, regardless of Miller’s own real-life references to and personal interest in Carroll, it is important to note the direct and strong presence of Carroll in Miller’s writing style and the ways in which that presence surfaces throughout Miller’s oeuvre. Miller’s allusions to Carroll directly in the text are, on one level, very limited, but the indirect allusions and style adaptations are quite widespread. Black Spring is the first location to look for indirect as well as overt elements of Carroll in Miller. Not only is Black Spring Miller’s most surreal and playful text, but the chapter ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ contains, as George Wickes notes in 1963 in Henry Miller, many direct allusions to Carroll – the title itself being a clear reference to ‘Jabberwocky’, Carroll’s nonsense poem, first found in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Wickes writes that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in Miller’s ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’, indeed throughout the whole of Black Spring, ‘Miller is a poet of reckless abandon, his language exuberant and prodigal, often used for sound rather than meaning.’3 Miller’s language play is more than evident in Black Spring and is manifest throughout the music-like and poetic quality that the wordplay takes on. The importance of this claim cannot be overestimated. By focusing on ‘sound rather than meaning’, Miller creates the space where his prose can develop unexpected, indeed unanticipated, significance. Like Carroll, Miller subsequently draws attention directly to the words and not to their potential cultural import. Ironically, however, it is this focus away from the cultural import of the meaning of the text (from the conventional manner in which such playful, experimental writing is regarded) that such texts become significant precisely for their cultural import. Miller’s writing, like Carroll’s in some ways, lends itself to subversive readings that initially rely on the wordplay itself in order to detract from it, and finally focus on interpretations restricted by cultural parameters, often leading to its judgement as morally corrupt. Suggesting that Miller’s language is used ‘for sound rather than meaning’ is a claim that automatically challenges negative assertions levied against Miller as misogynistic, such as those of Kate Millett,4 or as a poor writer, such as the later critiques of George Orwell or Isadore Traschen.5 In ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ in Desire in Language, Kristeva writes, ‘We see the problems of death, birth and sex appear when literature touches upon this strategic point that writing becomes when it exteriorises linguistic systems through narrative structure (genres).’6 When Miller’s texts are read for their sound or for the poetic quality of the strings of words, this approach not only undermines conventional readings of meaning but also conventional purposes of literature as a social tool, as somehow inherently representative of the beliefs of either, or both, the author and the lifestyles of the characters. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye aligns such writing with Menippean satire, where ‘the opinions and ideas and cultural interests expressed are as important as love-making’.7 Frye cites the Alice books as ‘perfect Menippean satires’,8 specifically defining such prose as developing ‘a single intellectual pattern’ that is ‘built up from the story’ and which thus ‘makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative’.9 At the same time, Frye criticises the perception of this kind of writing as ‘careless’, explaining that ‘the appearance of carelessness that results reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centred conception of fiction’.10 The ‘intellectual structure’ requires the reader to suspend judgement and encounter the text in all its ‘free play of intellectual fancy’ and caricature formation.11 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Such prose becomes carnivalesque, as defined by Bakhtin and taken up by Kristeva: ‘Within the carnival, the subject is reduced to nothingness, while the structure of the author emerges as anonymity that creates and sees itself created as self and other, as man and mask.’12 In referring to the ‘carnival’ here, Kristeva specifically means that language which includes ‘repetition, “inconsequent” statements [. . .] and non-exclusive opposition’.13 Black Spring serves as a prime example of this form of writing, which as a ‘more flagrant dialogism than any other discourse’,14 disobeys conventional expectations by residing in the space where subjective and authorial identity are blotted out and replaced by the rhythmic and humorous structures of the words themselves. In ‘Burlesque Dreams: American Amusement, Autobiography, and Henry Miller’ (2001), William Solomon writes of Miller:

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His rapid, discontinuous stringing together of a collection of heterogeneous selections that feature the use of an assortment of genres and expressive styles and in which the moods shift repeatedly derives from the succession of acts presented in the kinds of American entertainment he greatly admired.15

For Solomon, Miller’s dialogism reflects motifs of entertainment, thrill, shock and pleasure found in carnival and burlesque culture such as freak shows, peepshows, roller coasters, carnival rides, belly and erotic dances and other amusements located in places like Coney Island during Miller’s youth in the early part of the century. Solomon’s analysis is useful in relation to a cultural study of commodity and mechanisation, but there is also more at stake in Miller than his surreal attempts at recreating a variety show in words. In his emulation of Carroll, Miller invests his entire vision of exploring the limits of language in literature through this type of wordplay. Kristeva states the quality of this literary pursuit: ‘Disputing the laws of language based on the 0–1 interval, the carnival challenges God, authority and social law; in so far as it is dialogical, it is rebellious.’16 The ‘0–1 interval’ refers to Kristeva’s theory that ‘in a literary text, 0 does not exist; emptiness is quickly replaced by a “one” (a he/she, or a proper name) that is really twofold, since it is subject and addressee’.17 As explained in the previous chapter on Dostoevsky, as subject becomes author, neutrality fades out leaving a specific name directing the words. The text is not anonymous; it is not empty, as it always has a subject turned author, according to Kristeva. The writer who invests his or her style into drawing attention to this dynamic is the writer who produces the highly ‘dialogic’ and hence ‘carnivalesque’ and ‘rebellious’ prose, such as Carroll and, in the same vein, Miller. In ‘Carrollian Nonsense Prose in Henry Miller’s “Jabberwhorl Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Cronstadt”’ (2003), Jeff Bursey conducts a very thorough close reading of the seemingly flamboyant word usage in ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstradt’. Bursey also notes: ‘It might be unnecessary, or unwise, to root around in literature, encyclopedias, and other source works in order to give meaning to every word Miller uses in the piece, as in some cases their selection depends more upon his love of sounds than anything else.’18 Bursey’s reading is as admirable as it is accurate, as he proceeds to parse dense and lengthy passages literally word by word. ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ is full of seeming nonsense and appears completely abstruse if not categorically meaningless. However, it is this reading that Bursey challenges, suggesting that ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ is also not simply a playful, surreal literary gesture to depict the peculiar character Jabberwhorl Cronstadt as a fictionalised Walter Lowenfels, because ‘the emphasis plainly is on words and wordplay, not on character, or caricature’.19 The language play cannot simply be regarded, and that is to say dismissed, as surreal and nonsense. Rather, as Bursey says, the reader is made to recognise that ‘Cronstadt is resident within the language of Miller/Carroll’.20 In this way, Cronstadt never becomes a person or even a character that the reader can construct out of a narrative. Instead, the reader must admit him or herself into the language play that, as Kristeva suggests, ‘provokes laughter but remains incapable of detaching itself from representation.’21 In his article Bursey plucks out every last definition of all the obscure, Carrollian-esque words used by Miller. It is almost as if he is undertaking an inversion of what Miller himself must have done when he chose those precise, Carrollian words as he wrote. (In one heavily tuned close reading Bursey writes, ‘These notes appear to be random, unrelated jottings, but the marmink and minkfrog may be a nod to Carroll’s Jabberwock, Jubjub bird, and Bandersnatch, while a denotative scrutiny of the other words reveals two deliberate sequences.’22) Thinking of this process in terms of the author’s intent, one might fathom that Miller is employing a Carrollian technique perhaps in order to overlay a story that Miller had in his mind. As such, each word replaces some element to an otherwise potentially coherent narrative concerning Jabberwhorl Cronstadt. Bursey writes, ‘Cronstadt exists in a Carrollian landscape made up of language far more than discreet words and images.’23 The word choices are not simply surreal, nor are they simply vacuous nonsense, insofar as a meaningful, coherent reading can still be extracted from them, even if that reading has nothing to do with a cogent narrative. Bursey locates herein the source of contention for Miller’s critics: ‘Because surrealism and dream prose are utilised by Miller to get across a character’s sensibilities or philosophy, Miller and his writings are Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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judged and found criminally negligent.’24 Conventionally, such wordplay becomes inexcusable as a mode for literary development. It is for this reason (namely, the basic evidence pointing towards Carroll in Miller’s text) that the reader must consider the Carrollian influence itself as far more insightful rather than purely meaningless. It is far more nonsense than that. By beginning his article literally with what Miller’s words mean, Bursey consciously and unconsciously promotes the need for fundamental critical attention to the detailed inner-workings of Miller’s texts which is still radically lacking. Bursey’s in-depth, close reading of ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ highlights, to a very fine degree, Miller’s informed technique, demonstrating that the allusions to Carroll are not just well embedded but that, to the perceptive reader, they are sharp, accessible and significant. Bursey acknowledges the lack:

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There is much to be done in uncovering and exploring the many levels of Miller’s fiction and nonfiction, and all theories and models are welcome in this process. His concerns anticipate by some years much of today’s vigorous debate among literary critics and theorists: the abolishing of divisions between fiction and autobiography, the use of language in the definition of self, the restraints on and freedoms of the shape of the novel, and the place of the author in the text.25

There is no question of Miller’s influence on the work of writers and literary theorists of the twentieth century; it is simply a matter of recognising this fact and uncovering the connections. Unfortunately, some of the worst criticism on Miller appears under the guise of support, such as that of Erica Jong and Norman Mailer who encourage highly romanticised readings of Miller’s work, highlighting the author’s so-called personal philosophies and on the whole bypassing its radical literary contributions, while also disdaining more scholarly close readings, in the vein of Miller’s apparent, bohemian aversion to academia. Jong writes: Where have high ideals ever led humanity, anyway? To the trenches of World War I? To the apple sellers on the streets of New York? To the mad pseudoscientific racial theories of the Nazis that promoted genocide? Henry thinks humanity has less to lose by embracing the depths than by pretending to the heights.26

Jong’s argument succumbs to the slippery slope fallacy, equating ‘high ideals’ inevitably with mass destruction. Furthermore, trying to identify Miller with the power of ‘strip[ping] down to his essential nature’ and becoming ‘a mass of instincts’, Jong creates a caricature extracted from Miller’s books. Her analysis may produce an image of a noble, liberated Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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man, in his ability to ‘reduce the world to its basest elements’ in order to ‘make fire’,27 but what it says for his literary importance remains mostly understated. As for Miller’s infamous support from Mailer, in an essay in The New Republic from 1976, Martin Duberman comments on the misogyny debate between Millett and Mailer, writing: ‘I prefer the way Miller confines himself to describing an act to the way Mailer and Millett attempt to categorise it.’28 Indeed, ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ serves as a bold example of the line in analysis that demands to be drawn between Miller-the-free-wheeling-spirit and the work produced by the person called Henry Miller, poetic experimenter. Reflecting on ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’, Bursey concludes, ‘Here is one example of where a thorough criticism of Miller’s writing – not the philosophy behind it, or its “outrageousness” – is long overdue.’29 Mailer championing Miller’s ‘cause’ unfortunately does not really give much estimable weight to Miller’s literary reputation. Including positive criticism on Miller that regards the philosophy of his words instead of the words themselves is important in this chapter on Carroll precisely because Miller’s interest in and influence from Carroll is one of the most easily misunderstood areas of Miller’s writing. It appears as the most easily understandable, in the sense that Miller’s Carrollian style does not appear to overtly raise the uncomfortable issues of misogyny and obscenity, but rather of surrealism and playful nonsense. Thus, in order best to engage with the deeper possibilities of this component of Miller’s writing, it is important to investigate the text with a sharper eye toward these kinds of allusions. For Bursey, ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ is Miller’s use of Carroll in order ‘to fashion a bridge leading from mid-nineteenth century prose to modernist writing’.30 The reader sees how Miller forges a connection, as previously discussed with Whitman (though, in this instance, not between two people), between words and the unexplored possibilities of literary language. Miller produces a series of unexpected and often overlooked effects that are calculated and meticulous, even as they appear humorous or even trite. In The Books in My Life Miller writes that certain figures in literature like Alice are ‘spacebinders’,31 in the sense that they ‘seem to possess the faculty of dominating time and space’, as they are ‘sustained or fortified by miraculous powers which they wrested from the gods or developed through the cultivation of native ingenuity, cunning or faith’.32 Other examples of ‘spellbinders’ that Miller includes here who are also ‘spacebinders’ are the ‘vivid personages’ Jason, Theseus, Ulysses, Sinbad and Aladdin, the ‘historical figures’ King David, Joseph in Egypt and Daniel, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the ‘lesser figures’ Robin Hood, Daniel Boone and Pocahontas, and, finally, the ‘purely literary creations’ Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver.33 Alice, the sole female of this list, is included here, because she ‘too, was in quest of reality and proved her courage poetically by stepping through the looking glass’.34 Miller’s point is that the ‘moral’ underlying a story like Alice’s is that ‘man is really free’,35 which can only be actualised when it is fully believed. Such a claim raises the question: is language in writing free? What confines language, in part, are conventional interpretations of its use and value. With himself as a manifestation of Alice, Miller embarks on a journey in his writing to explore and experiment with the possibilities of expectations in the world of language. Though he never writes in verse, Miller’s Carrollian techniques are skilful and inventive, and manifest in a wide variety of poetic devices such as alliteration, imagery, rhyme, metaphor and double entendre. The first three lines of ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ from Black Spring read:

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He lives in the back of a sunken garden, a sort of bosky glade shaded by whiffletrees and spinozas, by deodars and baobabs, a sort of queasy Buxtehude diapered with elytras and feluccas. You pass through a sentry box where the concierge twirls his mustache con furioso like in the last act of Ouida. They live on the third floor behind a mullioned belvedere filigreed with snaffled spaniels and sebaceous wens, with debentures and megrims hanging out to dry.36

Miller seems to hide Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’s location with real yet obscure terminology, producing an effect that forces the reader to consider the sounds of words and their peculiarity instead of their meaning outright or the possible structure of the narrative. It no longer matters where Jabberwhorl Cronstadt actually is, but rather the poetic barrage of the new words themselves becomes the focus. Once this mode of reading is accepted, however, Jabberwhorl Cronstadt can still be found, but his location seems everywhere and nowhere, in the sense that it must be both extracted from the terms but also necessarily permitted to reside in those elusive, opaque terms – insofar as the text which creates his existence is the very place wherein he resides, and in no other. Deleuze’s assessment of Carroll could be likewise applied to Miller: ‘This is the domain of the action and passion of bodies: things and words are scattered in every direction, or on the contrary are welded together into nondecomposable blocks.’37 Like Carroll’s description of the Jabberwock, Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’s location can be revealed with a dictionary alongside an imagination for neologisms, but, as the text that it is, Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’s location Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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remains hidden through the ‘welded’ opacity within the ‘nondecomposable blocks’ of which it is composed. Later in the chapter, Miller gives an exact description of Jocatha ‘the famished cat’,38 but, again, in true Carrollean form, it is not entirely possible to visualise the creature completely, insofar as the individual components of the description do not create a complete picture of a figure that can be envisioned. Carroll begins Jabberwocky with an inveigling, cavorting description: ‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.’39 Without a working knowledge of the vocabulary, the reader can still take hold of the rhythm and the darkly playful presence of the creature. With the second stanza, the description, paradoxically, grows both vaguer and clearer: ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! / Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun / The fruminous Bandersnatch!’40 The description is clearer here, in that the reader is now certain that the creature poses a physical threat, and the narrator is warning his son as much. However, exactly what that creature looks like is never fully revealed – at least not in any common language. Carroll’s creature ultimately eludes any complete mental picture. Miller attempts a similar feat in his description of Jocatha: The beast is bounding and yowling and thrashing and caterwauling: he has a few grains of cayenne pepper on the soft lilypad of his nose, the butt of his nose soft as a dum-dum bullet. He thrashes about in large Siamese wrath and the bones in his tail are finer than the finest sardines. He claws the carpet and chews the wallpaper, he rolls into a spiral and unrolls like a corolla, he whisks the knots out of his tail, shakes the fungus out of his whiskers. He bites clean through the floor to the bone of the poem. He’s in the key of C and mad clean through. He has magenta eyes, like old-fashioned vest buttons; he’s mowsy and glaubrous, brown like arnica and then green as the Nile; he’s quaky and qualmy and queasy and teasey; he chews chasubles and ripples rasubly.41

In describing Jocatha’s behaviour, Miller uses a style and vocabulary that reflect Carroll’s. In this instance he employs the poetic devices of assonance, alliteration and rhyme, respectively with ‘mowsy and glaubrous’, ‘quaky and qualmy’, ‘chews chasubles’, ‘ripples rasubly’ and ‘queasy and teasey’. There is also a poetic rhythm and assonance between several, parallel word pairs that refer back to one another, including ‘chasubles’ and ‘rasubly’. In describing the actions of Jocatha in this passage, Miller uses a more commonly understandable language, although it similarly is adopted from Carroll. The ‘beast’ ‘has a few grains of cayenne pepper on the soft lilypad of his nose’ makes sense grammatically, to be sure, but it has Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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no actual sense that can be understood from the passage collectively. It is possible to interpret this line metaphorically, but this literary leap leaves the beauty of the words themselves behind. Such wordplay is particularly reminiscent of Carroll’s found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where commonplace language is often used in a manner that evokes Wittgenstein’s philosophy on language games and nonsense in the Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1953; in English, 1953). In ‘Wittgenstein, Lewis Carroll and Nonsense’ (1965) George Pitcher provides multiple useful and very humorous examples of Wittgenstein’s theories in action in Carroll. Carroll deliberately makes the mistakes that Wittgenstein warns philosophers against, informing them to distinguish between ‘empirical’ (sayable) knowledge and ‘logical’ (restrictively showable) knowledge. To be able to explain that something is true is to know in one sense only, and does not define knowing in any metaphysical way, which can only be indicated through showing or demonstration.42 Pointing out this commonly misunderstood distinction between empirical and logical knowledge, Wittgenstein writes, ‘Imagine someone saying: “But I know how tall I am!” and laying his hand on top of his head to prove it.’43 Carroll, evidently himself recognising the distinction, indulges in the humour of the resultant absurdity: ‘She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing.’44 As Pitcher explains, Alice’s nonsensical gesture absurdly demonstrates, in Wittgenstein’s words, merely that ‘a thing is identical with itself’, such that Alice can ‘put a thing’ (herself) ‘into its own shape and [see] that it fitted’.45 Wittgenstein declares that for such an action to be more than a ridiculous and meaningless gesture, it would require ‘a certain play of the imagination’,46 which, indeed, it does for both Carroll and Miller. Miller uses this technique to the same comic effect in ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ when he has Jabberwhorl Cronstadt declare (referred to as ‘Jab’): ‘Define your terms and you’ll never use words like time, death, world, soul. In every statement there’s a little error and the error grows bigger and bigger until the snake is scotched. The poem is the only flawless thing, provided you know what time it is.’47 The irony is that poetry can only be flawless once it has been defined by an indefinable concept – an evident impossibility. It is as Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): ‘Anyone who understands me eventually recognizes [my propositions] as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)’48 It is similar to Miller’s ‘poem’ (or, rather, Jab’s definition of ‘the poem’) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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that requires a metaphysical concept in order to exist and, once it exists, it denounces the possibility of the concept that created it. The concept of ‘time’ becomes understandable once it has been defined, and thus its understandability is that it cannot be understood. The poem, however, is without this flaw of conscious understanding, but only through the understanding of the not-understanding of time. Wittgenstein’s best warning against this kind of philosophical tail-chasing, also mentioned in Chapter 2, is the following: ‘Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not used in the languagegame of giving information.’49 What is expected from the poem cannot be the same as that which is expected from everyday language – a rule comically, and purposefully, violated by both Miller and Carroll. As Miller describes the scene of Jabberwhorl Cronstadt, it is evident that part of the image being created is of Carroll himself. Miller writes that Jocatha is ‘in the key of C and mad clean through’, suggesting homage to Carroll that is reinforced by the initial usage of the phrase ‘clean through’ in the previous sentence cited above, where Miller alludes to Jocatha biting ‘clean through’ into the ‘poem’.50 This description is, in a peculiar way, a literalisation of an abstract vision of Carroll’s writing, if the reader takes it firstly to be a description of Carroll and secondly the case of biting ‘clean through’ into the ‘poem’ as Carroll’s literary endeavours. In other words, Carroll himself is ‘mad clean through’, inasmuch as his characters, like the mysterious, disappearing Cheshire cat (Miller’s Jocatha), are able to penetrate the very poem of which he is a part. Miller embeds, in his own nonsense writing, his analysis of Carroll as the poetic genius who uses Wittgenstein’s ladder of metaphysics (the poem exists) and throws it away after the poem is written (the poem is violated by its own existence). Later on, Jab plays ‘a fast one’ on the piano finally hitting ‘the white key C in the middle of the board and the chess pieces and the manicure sets and the unpaid bills rattle like drunken tiddelywinks’.51 It is ‘the white key C in the middle of the board’ that recalls not just ‘C’ for Carroll himself but also the white rabbit, as well as recalling the recurring chessboard in both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Even the allusion to ‘tiddelywinks’ recalls Carroll’s Tweedledee and Tweedledum, themselves appearing possibly ‘drunken’ and ‘rattl[ing]’ in their bumbling encounters with Alice. Just before this passage is another direct reference to Carroll, where Miller writes: And now the poet himself appears saying what time is it though time is a word he has stricken from his list, time, sib to death. Death’s the surd and

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time’s the sib and now there is a little time between the acts, an oleo in which the straight man mixes a drink to get his stomach muscles twitching.52

Obscure but not Miller’s own neologism, ‘sib’ is a blood relation, as in ‘sibling’. ‘Surd’ means ‘voiceless’ or ‘unvoiced consonant’ and, in mathematics, means ‘irrational’. Thus ‘the poet’ has removed time, which is directly related to death, although what he speaks about depends upon the existence of (or at least belief in) time, insofar as he ‘appears saying what time is it’. Meanwhile, death is said to be unsayable, and time, like death, is now referred to as a blood relation, but to what or whom it is related is not directly expressed. It is likely to refer at least back to ‘death’ and perhaps as well to all of humanity, as the passage ends with Jab contemplating time and pointing out that ‘a copy of Humanité’ is in the bathroom. If time is related to all of humanity, then Miller seems to be speaking back to his Carrollian argument of time being both necessary and impossible to the structure of language. Several passages later, Jab provides another monologue directed towards Miller-the-persona, his guest, who, the reader infers, has at some point declared himself a writer in the unspoken conversation between himself and Jabberwhorl Cronstadt. Speaking of the ‘refugees’ he must feed and intertwining their conversation on literature and time, Jab says:

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You want to know what the present is? Look at that window over there. No, not there . . . the one above. There! Every day they sit there at that table playing cards – just the two of them. She’s always got on a red dress. And he’s always shuffling the cards. That’s the present. And if you add another word it becomes subjunctive . . .53

These ‘refugees’ are suddenly none other than Alice and Lewis Carroll themselves playing cards. More accurately, Carroll is ‘always shuffling the cards’ while Alice waits patiently at the table, in a red dress.54 This state between them, Jab emphatically declares, ‘is the present’, alluding to the timelessness of literature. As ‘refugees’, however, they have been forcefully removed from their home – the world of imagination – and are stuck in reality, by the writer and reader’s doing. With this scene, Miller suggests that Carroll’s poetry, his ‘nonsense’, suspends time, and the more that is added to it, the more it continues, paradoxically, to remain suspended as it slides conditionally right into the future. Like the Red Queen running as fast as she can with Alice struggling alongside, literary language speeds past, though doesn’t actually move at all as much as it seems to be moving. In Hamlet, a correspondence with Michael Fraenkel (1939), Miller calls attention to the futility of writing directly in relation to Carroll (in this instance, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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referring to Hamlet’s speech): ‘The best speeches are always made the moment before death. But none of these speeches advance us anywhere. It’s like Lewis Carroll’s checkerboard.’55 If the present is the aboutto-be-playing cards, and literature is the playing-of-the-cards, then literature is not only indefatigable but is revealed to be impossible yet, paradoxically, only through its coming-into-existence. Towards the end of ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’, Jab’s speech becomes progressively more nonsensical until he is announcing such things ‘about what’s inside of you . . . the vertiginous vertebration . . . zoospores and the leucocytes . . . the wamroths and the holenlindens . . . every one’s a poem. The jellyfish is a poem too – the finest kind of poem’, Jab continues.56 Finally, Jab’s wife Jill says, ‘He’s losing his mind’, to which the response is the following:

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‘Wrong again,’ says Jabber. ‘I’ve just found my mind, only it’s a different sort of mind than you imagined. You think a poem must have covers around it. The moment you write a thing the poem ceases. The poem is the present which you can’t define. You live it. Anything is a poem if it has time in it. You don’t have to take a ferryboat or go to China to write a poem. The finest poem I ever lived was a kitchen sink. Did I ever tell you about it? There were two faucets, one called Froid and the other Chaud.’57

Bringing several issues together at once, Jab once again aligns the existence of the poem with its placement in time and its disappearance in reality immediately upon its presence. Jab also refers for the first time to this ‘kitchen sink’ being ‘the finest poem’ of all, which will surface again throughout the rest of the chapter among a lengthy, complicated and likely utterly nonsensical series of word-strings that end with Jab’s singing and his demand for others to sing: ‘Sing while the world sinks . . .’ until he is put to bed.58 Rhyming ‘sing’ with ‘sink’ and also creating a nonsensical exchangeability between them, Miller again echoes Carroll’s numerous rhyming word reversals or exchanges that usually involve one figure’s misunderstanding of another, as well as his toying with languages, invoking in particular the French language as somehow a preferred means for better articulating intellectual concepts. Jab claiming he ‘just found [his] mind’ also recalls Alice’s encounter with the caterpillar, who demands ‘Who are you?’,59 whereupon she responds that she does not know, having just undergone an array of unexpected physical transformations. Jab having ‘just found [his] mind’ suggests he didn’t have it before, in the same way that Alice appears to have lost her mind – a sense of herself – by way of the various involuntary transformations. Alice says: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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‘At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar, sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’ ‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sire,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’60

The double connection to this passage comes with Alice’s attempt to explain her confusion by suggesting that the caterpillar too may feel the same way, as he transforms first into a chrysalis and then a butterfly. If the self constantly changes physically, curiously no stability or fixed self exists upon which to rely. Alice’s transformations, causing her existential mystification (soon also to happen to the caterpillar, as Alice explains) can be linked to Miller’s allusion from Jab’s speech to endless ‘soul-worms’ that grow in everyone (‘Jill’s got one inside her too’,61), which will eventually ‘all come whirring out . . . imagine it . . . a great cloud of soul-worms . . . millions of them . . . and so thick the swarm that we wouldn’t be able to see each other . . . A fact! No need to write about China. Write about that! About what’s inside of you . . .’62 To extract the nonsense from this passage might be to suggest the following: these ‘soul-worms’ that mark identity (‘what’s inside you’) not only are meant to become the subject of poetry, hence of life, but also obscure the sight of one person from another, hence implying that language is both necessary and obstructive. The transformative quality of poetry is somehow essential but also convoluted. Reminiscent of the poems in Carroll’s work, Miller’s descriptions of poems (in this instance Jab’s poems, specifically) provide equally endless nonsense (although no one actually ever recites a ‘poem’ in Miller), least of which is the manner by which, in this case in ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’, ‘fish [are] washed clean and away’ by it.63 The first reference to fish in Carroll is the Fish-Footman in Alice’s Adventures64 followed by the Mock Turtle’s remark: ‘No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.’65 However, there are more relevant connections to be found in Through the Looking-Glass, which begin with Alice preparing Tweedledum and Tweedledee for battle. ‘There he lay, opening and shutting his mouth and his large eyes – “looking more like a fish than anything else,” Alice thought.’66 Later, Humpty-Dumpty sings of ‘the little fishes of the sea’,67 and much later in Chapter IX, as the White Queen explains to Alice and the Red Queen that Humpty-Dumpty came to the door during a thunderstorm with a corkscrew in his hand (incidentally, an event that is also part of his ‘fish’ song), Alice excitedly tells them that she knows why Humpty-Dumpty ‘wanted to punish the fish’ but is cut off as the White Queen continues her story.68 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Finally, as Alice arrives at her own party that is spilling over with curious guests, she is told she has missed ‘the soup and the fish’,69 which later is understood to be that she has missed ‘being introduced’ to the soup and the fish (as she is subsequently introduced to the living leg of mutton and the plum-pudding).70 After this introduction (with an exasperated plum-pudding, indignant about being eaten), Alice explains that she has had ‘such a quandary of poetry’ repeated to her today and that ‘every poem was about fishes in some way’, she then asks, ‘Do you know why they’re so fond of fishes all around here?’71 The response – which is of course no response at all – is another poem about fishes, recited by the Red Queen, which includes a request to ‘take the dish-cover up!’ from the fish.72 The barrage of fish finally ends with a play on words in the form of a question: ‘Un-dish-cover the fish, or dish-cover the riddle?’73 If, as Alice says, ‘every poem [is] about fishes in some way’, and, to return to Miller, poetry is just a brief flash that immediately ceases in its moment of creation and becomes life, then looking for the meaning of ‘fish’ is precisely the most nonsensical endeavour that the reader of either Carroll or Miller could undertake, while simultaneously being the only gesture that gives the works their meaning – which is, of course, meaninglessness, or, rather, nonsense. This last remark on fish by the Red Queen (the question that itself appears to be a riddle: ‘Un-dish-cover the fish, or dish-cover the riddle?’) joins up with Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’s comment: ‘You think a poem must have covers around it.’74 Beyond the fact that there are a handful of instances where Alice ponders the meaning of all the poems being about fish, it is simply not the case that ‘every poem’ in Through the LookingGlass is ‘about fishes in some way’ (unless to be ‘about fishes’ means something other than to be about common fish). The conclusions are as follows: every poem really is about fish, in part suggesting that what fish means can never be known, resulting in a perpetual state in which the question will always be asked (similar to the state constantly faced by Alice, where her questions are ‘answered’ with new riddles). After his comment that a poem needn’t have ‘covers around it’, Jab continues by answering, essentially, both Alice’s question and the Red Queen’s riddle: to ‘dish-cover’ the riddle, that is to say, to be rid of the riddle, is to permit the poem to come to life by ceasing to attempt to contain it, but rather to ‘un-dish-cover’ it and give over to it in the present moment. Paradoxically, once the dish is ‘un-dish-covered’, one finds, yet again, fish on the platter. Taking hold of Carroll’s deceiving simplicity, Miller too toys with the imaginary depths of writing by writing about the impossibility of writing and the overlap between living and writing. The nature of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the language plays an enormous role, such that, like William Carlos Williams, Miller prefers the style of the ‘American idiom’, which gives him access to a poetic cadence found in common speech. As a music lover himself and an amateur pianist, Miller also uses music to colour his rhythm in prose, which, subsequently, takes on a poetic quality. Bursey notes Miller’s immediate reference to music already in the epigraph to the ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ chapter and explains it thus: ‘The “music” means the “sounds” the reader is about to “hear”. It is not Cronstadt’s voice that is the music, but the entire play of language.’75 As stated earlier, the wordplay not only has an overtly musical quality, but the allusions to Carroll and to Carrollian musical wordplay are clearly extensive and quite skilful. Bursey quotes these terms ‘music’, ‘sounds’ and ‘hear’, because it is an unusual quality yet characteristic of Miller to engage in ekphrastic and synaesthetic modes of writing, whereby the words produce both images, not through descriptions but through a form of poetic Imagism, and sounds, not through their literally being spoken aloud but through poetic devices like alliteration, assonance and meter. Miller’s prose gives a sense of musical movement that is not random word collections but is well articulated and, upon closer inspection, highly referential and deliberate in allusion. One of the most interesting qualities in Miller is this ability to both evoke the reader’s desire to attempt a close reading and to frustrate his or her attempt with what appears to be a superficial lack of cohesion or depth in the work, taking for example this close analysis ‘about fishes’.76 Whether deliberately or not, Miller makes his reader question how and why a close reading is done in the first place – a tool Carroll already exploits to very humorous ends. Miller’s style forces the reader to reflect upon what exactly a close reading can produce as it approaches a text with harsh, direct lighting, determined to reveal elements of meaning that are allegedly undeniably present in the text. Certainly, Miller’s work does not shirk the possible validity of a close reading – on the contrary. Miller’s style demonstrates that it is precisely that the reader must force a close reading to reveal far more of itself (far more of the language) than what is typically admitted in a close reading. Critics tend to find what they are looking for, in the sense that they assume a text necessarily always lends itself to the tools and questions of the close reading, giving up its ‘true’ meaning through all the usual avenues. However, because of the way in which it both offers and withholds these kinds of possibilities, Miller’s work challenges his reader not to underestimate what is otherwise present on the surface of the text (again, in the literal language). Like Carroll’s work and its subversive, mischievous wordplay, Miller’s work demands new approaches to a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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close reading that do not make assumptions on meaning and result in conventional assessments based on an inability to make (or locate) a greater sense of the text. To consider Miller’s work as surreal ravings or as pornographic, for example, is ultimately a fundamental shortcoming of the reader as opposed to of the text. Another clear allusion to Carroll occurs in reference to a specific encounter in Through the Looking-Glass where the White Queen offers Alice employment as a ‘lady’s maid’. The Queen apparently needs help ‘a-dressing’ herself (fixing her hair, making her toilet and so on), as she is in constant disarray. Alice finds this offer humorous, as she seems to consider such a position below her station, and when the Queen tells her that her payment would be ‘twopence a week, and jam every other day’,77 Alice laughs outright and tells the Queen, besides not wanting the position, she does not really fancy jam anyhow: ‘I don’t want any to-day, at any rate.’78 The Queen, however, corrects Alice’s misunderstanding and explains: ‘You couldn’t have it if you did want it’, for ‘the rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day’.79 Confused, Alice replies: ‘It must come sometimes to “jam to-day”’, but again she is corrected: ‘“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day; to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”’80 Miller takes this wordplay directly into Jabberwhorl Cronstadt, where Jab, after being accused of being drunk says:

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The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today . . . Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you people sat here just like you are and I began to grow smaller and smaller . . . until I got to be just a tiny, weeny little speck . . . so that you had to have a magnifying glass to see me? I’d be a little spot on the tablecloth and I’d be saying – Timoor . . . Ti-moor! And you’d say where is he? And I’d be saying – Timoor, logodaedaly, glycophosphates, Billancourt, Ti-moor . . . O timbus twaddle down the brawkish brake . . . and you’d say . . .81

Jab’s rants in this instance also refer to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice consumes the contents of a bottle with the label ‘Drink Me’, in order to shrink down to a size to fit through a door that is ‘about fifteen inches high’.82 Why, though, when Jab imagines himself of this shrunken, Wonderland size, he is saying ‘Timoor’ is unclear. However, the next word gives the reader an indication as to the impossible meaning of this passage with ‘logodaedaly’, which is a neologism meaning verbal legerdemain. This word is followed by a seemingly meaningless reference: ‘glycophosphates’, which are potent poisons used for killing weeds; Billancourt is a suburb in Paris; ‘timbus’ and ‘brawkish’ are meaningless neologisms but perhaps link back, again, in assonance and alliteration to ‘Timoor’ and ‘Billancourt’; and ‘twaddle’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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is, to round out the characteristically pointless and humorous gist of the passage, trivial or meaningless speaking or writing. In effect, the text itself always holds far more potential than the reader is able to credit it, inasmuch as innovation in a text is often compromised or misunderstood by conventionalised approaches. Specifically, a good close reading, such as Bursey’s, focuses on detail in the language, considering allusion and form, typically overlooked in Miller’s work because of the offences it makes against canonical and cultural literary expectations. In Narrative Detours, Ibarguen writes, ‘Without a thorough, historical understanding of the rise and continued power of canonical modernism, any attempt to “value” competing texts tends either to erase their difference through aesthetic assimilation, or to relegate their study to sociology, where they become documents of dubious empirical value.’83 The critic tends to focus on elements in Miller unrelated to a direct textual analysis, becoming preoccupied instead with its sociological ‘empirical value’, as Ibarguen writes, due to his work’s tendency toward the anomalous. In reflecting on how Miller’s reputation became established, in Henry Miller J. D. Brown writes: ‘Miller’s pioneering treatment of human experience would obscure an appreciation of his more lasting, innovative literary achievements.’84 The observant reader of Miller is provoked to ask what new tools might be required when confronting texts that challenge the usual methodology. Kristeva makes this need clear, for example, when she writes, ‘The way in which European thought transgresses its constituent characteristics appears clearly in the words and narrative structures of the twentieth-century novel. Identity, substance, causality and definition are transgressed so that others may be adopted: analogy, relation, opposition, and therefore dialogism and Menippean ambivalence.’85 It is incredibly relevant, indeed pertinent, to a good close reading to move precisely beyond the boundaries of what came before. A simple example from ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ highlights this need for a new and eclectic combination of analytical skills for undertaking a more rewarding reading of a cleverly demanding text. Shortly after the passage in which Jab identifies a poem as ‘the only flawless thing’,86 he answers the telephone and proceeds to have a peculiar conversation with some one about three apartments he is renting and selling. The conversation, as it stands on the page, leaves out the correspondent’s portion of the dialogue. The reader has only Jab’s comments and, thus, there is much to be assumed and inferred as to what the correspondent may be asking or saying. ‘Yes, there’s a bath with a regular toilet. No, not in the hall – in the apartment. One you sit down on. Would you like it in silver or in gold leaf? What? No, the toilet!’87 The reader Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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can only imagine what the correspondent is asking, but part of the text’s novelty is the fact that this portion of the text is not only left out but that the reader’s search to fill in the blanks can only yield more absurdity and meaningless assumptions. At the end of the phone call, Jab says, ‘There’s a billiard room on the top floor . . . What? No . . . no . . . no. Don’t have such things over here. Mr. Bimberg, you’ve got to realize that you’re in France now. Yeah, that’s it . . . When in Rome . . .’88 Again, whatever the correspondent, Mr Bimberg evidently, has said is completely unknown but, more peculiarly, is precisely not irrelevant. The text, naturally, with its ‘missing’ passages, is the only reliable source for understanding, but it is what is missing that makes the passage a complete text. It is as though Miller is drawing attention to the nature of writing as something which necessarily not only leaves its point out of the discourse but leaves the reader to a perpetual wondering as to what the text might mean with its meaning being always a gaping hole in the text itself. By including such an atypical conversation, Miller engages his reader in the frustrated desire to know the missing half of the exchange. At the same time, the text that is present reminds the reader that it is not incomplete, since it is exactly, and only, what the reader is reading and what the text is, insofar as a text is a string of words on the page and nothing more. Similarly, the change that has taken place in the way in which Carroll’s texts are read is directly related to how the reader understands the function of literature in a cultural context. When Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, it was readily understood that these works were ‘children’s tales’. It has only been in the latter half of the twentieth century that new areas of discussion have arisen concerning Carroll’s Alice in the context of ‘adult’ scholarship.89 Over the course of the development of literary theory in the twentieth century, critics have begun asking questions about potential, ‘hidden’ meanings – Freudian or otherwise – of Carroll’s works, and looking at it through the lenses of other forms of criticism. Suddenly it became significant to ask if Carroll’s language play, his psychological and metaphorical episodes, could mean something else, something more sinister or something more importantly related to the biography of the author. Notwithstanding the potential use for these kinds of readings, that Carroll or Miller’s texts provoke such criticism and attention towards their ambiguity underscores the very fact that they do not permit clarity of meaning as it is evoked and pursued in their texts. Such texts hardly have a meaning that they can reveal. Rather, the text is precisely about its own inability to reveal its meaninglessness. Once again, the reader Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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must climb Wittgenstein’s ladder and throw it out when the top is reached. In his short-lived journal Critique (1946) Georges Bataille has two articles on Miller. In the first, entitled ‘La morale de Miller’, Bataille argues in favour of Miller’s imaginative and original writing style that embodies a form of ‘puerile language’. Bataille contends that subversive childhood incidents, as found in Tropic of Capricorn (where Miller describes the semi-accidental death of a boy during a rock-throwing game), leave Miller-the-child unmoved and instead more indulgent in exploiting his childhood innocence, because ‘a vagabond child is not immoral, on the contrary’.90 Miller engages in a form of writing, according to Bataille, that reveals and promotes nonsense and escapes from adult rules that are also not violations from them. Quoting from Miller, Bataille writes: ‘So generous and loyal, as children are, this type of “experience of intense immediacy” cannot be suppressed in the world where they play.’91 Like Alice, Miller-the-child’s experiences are entirely innocent, but in their flight away from normal adult strictures they manage to provoke a sinister, sometimes nightmarish quality in their capacity to violate adult boundaries while still remaining within them. An episode in Plexus highlights Miller’s interest in language play and serves as a significant example for demonstrating the manner in which literary language in particular proves capable of moving, seemingly paradoxically, beyond its own boundaries and beyond conventional expectations of representation while also invoking this puerile quality, even in content. It is also a more discreet, indirect allusion than ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ to Carroll in Miller, which is a combination of the first and second forms of intertextuality – with Carroll appearing to be partially present and non-present, partially consciously and unconsciously evoked. Specifically, in this episode, Miller-the-persona ‘promised to tell [a young boy and girl] the story of the three bears’.92 All the right markers are there for the story to begin, but it is precisely this conscious presentation that begins Miller’s preliminary attack on the reader’s expectations of literature and literary adaptation. The peculiarity of the story, as Miller begins to make it up as he goes along, is both reminiscent of Carroll’s Alice adventures and, in a sense, a parodying of it, or, more accurately, an imitation of it, as a satire of literary language and literary storytelling in general. Where Carroll begins his tale with a poem evoking the children’s interest in hearing the story (‘“The rest next time – ” “It is next time!” / The happy voices cry’93), Miller’s children are sceptical, and everyone is agitated (‘“All right!” I groaned. “Get me some black coffee and I’ll begin.” [. . .] “I want you to listen carefully. Now shut up!” [. . .] Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“That’s not how it begins,” piped the little girl. [. . .] “He’s making it up,” said the boy. [. . .] “That’s not the way it goes, Mommy!” screamed the little girl.” [. . .] “No more interruptions, eh?”’94) Carroll muses over Alice’s hesitation to drinking from the bottle marked ‘Drink Me’, having her weigh the consequences: ‘if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison”, it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.’95 Miller’s Goldilocks, however, encounters a variety of unknown substances that she unhesitatingly uses in various ways: having already been injured numerous times (later even to be beaten), Goldilocks ‘dabbed her ankle with arnica’, ‘applied [Sloan’s Liniment] to her wrist’, and ‘drinking [iodine] straight, she began to sing’.96 Similar to Carroll, the way in which Miller eventually tells his story indeed seems backwards, if not even more backwards than Carroll. Miller’s story is, to say the least, unconventional and satirical and, finally, the end of Miller’s version of the story brings it back to the beginning in a cyclical manner with Goldilocks’ father beating her and beginning the tale of the three bears to soothe her afterwards. Miller’s story includes a polar bear, a grizzly bear and a Teddy bear, a bottle of ‘Blue Label Ketchup’,97 a ‘little man with a bow and arrow, whose name, by the way, was Pinocchio’,98 ‘a lion with a tail “twisted into forty knots”’,99 ‘a little man with the dunce cap’,100 an atlas, an unabridged dictionary, a cow bell, a house with all kinds of peculiar rooms that transform in size and shape, hidden, unimaginable spaces, strange objects such as ‘heaps and heaps of bottles, and heaps and heaps of jars’,101 snails, frogs and a magical bottle of schnapps. After exploring the peculiar house, Goldilocks encounters the bears, who proceed to cook and eat her, but not without first undressing her and looking for ‘which part was the tenderest’.102 They then inspect her picnic basket and proceed to eat her acorn pie and drink her magical bottle of schnapps, which suddenly brings Goldilocks back to life, where she is found ‘doing a jig on the polar bear’s stomach’.103 She begins to sing again, which, as the reader is informed earlier, is ‘in French because her mother had taught her never to sing in any other language’.104 Miller’s story hints towards perversity but only enough for the reader to acknowledge the impossibility of perversity in a child’s tale. Miller uses irony as a dismissal of the potential sexual undertones found in Carroll’s work. In ‘Lewis Carroll and the Child in Victorian Fiction’ (1994) Robert M. Polhemus writes: ‘The focus in Carroll is on the child itself, as in a portrait or photograph of a young girl, not on the state of childhood as a prelude to something else. His writing is for fun – the fun of Alice – but it also calls attention to a sense of life’s alienation and to both the continuing presence and otherness of childhood for Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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grown-ups.’105 Polhemus does not deny that Carroll, in his real life role as Charles Dodgson, was in love with little girls, and particularly with Alice Liddel, the real-life inspiration for the character of Alice. However, Polhemus concludes that Dodgson, ‘a witty, repressed, curious intellectual with a brilliantly intuitive imagination’ became Carroll due to his ‘obvious need to express safely the contents and fantasies of his complexly fissured mind’.106 Carroll creates a literature similar to what Bataille contends that Miller creates: an avenue of escape but also of innocence, the contrary of immorality in the safety of unexpected and sometimes dark, yet precious and humorous, tales of children or in a kind of language of children. The actions of Miller’s Goldilocks parody those of Carroll’s Alice as well as those of the Goldilocks in the traditional tale. However, there are clues that point directly towards Carroll, such as the two references to French in Through the Looking-Glass. In the first instance, Alice is instructed by the Red Queen to ‘speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing’.107 The second occurs when the White and Red Queens are testing Alice’s knowledge and the Red Queen asks her, ‘What’s the French for fiddle-de-dee?’108 to which Alice responds ‘Fiddle-de-dee’s not English’. The Red Queen retorts, ‘Who ever said it was?’ prompting Alice to reply equally cleverly, beginning to learn how to beat Carroll’s absurd characters at their own games of nonsense: ‘If you’ll tell me what language “fiddle-de-dee” is, I’ll tell you the French for it!’109 Whereas Miller’s Goldilocks sings only in French because she is told to do so by her mother, Carroll’s Alice is ‘trained’ to speak in French by the authoritative Queens when her native English words fail her. Humorously, however, ‘fiddle-de-dee’ is in fact an English word, according to Heath’s The Philosopher’s Alice.110 Not surprisingly, this fact makes the passage even more significant in that it demonstrates the nonsense between the characters (in both stories) such that not even a simple question can be answered. The words used between the two communicating parties are not understood, despite both being in their native English – a repeated, ironic shortcoming in both texts that reveals both authors’ interest in the uses and limits of language. In his Carrollian passages, Miller universally calls into question any kind of conventional storytelling, a clear reflection of Carroll’s influence. However, storytelling is in no sense threatened, only taunted. Miller does not wish to do away with storytelling (that is to say, writing) but rather to push and pull at its limits, another homage to Carroll and to ‘literary nonsense’. Carroll’s influence on Miller also serves perhaps as an unexpectedly valid example of Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of influence’, insofar as Miller misreads Carroll, quite deliberately in this Goldilocks instance, but also in a manner that both recreates and means the same as Carroll’s story. This Goldilocks’ story is an attempt by Miller to see what he can do that is Carrollesque. If the question is whether or not he succeeds, the immediate follow-up question is not simply whether or not that matters at all, but if it is even possible to assess a work in such a manner. Miller piques the reader’s interest as to how and why a text is judged in this way (in relation to other ancestral texts and literary forms). He asks his reader to recognise the arbitrariness of this mode of reading, where influence and literary value are concerned. Miller’s work may be imitative, but it is equally experimental for its sheer attempt at discovering the consequences of such an approach to writing. More precisely, Miller raises the question as to what this imitative style produces in the process of writing itself. In his ‘bad’ imitation, Miller provokes the reader to ask what this kind of literature is doing and to ask what is occurring in a text that undertakes such an exercise and, furthermore, what this specific Goldilocks tale as a bedtime story in the middle of a ranting, experimental novel is doing. Ironically, these questions lead back to the beginning, as Goldilocks’ tale itself does, and back to ‘logodaedaly’ and ‘timbus twaddle down the brawkish brake . . .’111 The next chapter focuses upon Rimbaud, who is a figure in Miller’s work akin to that of Dostoevsky, particularly in light of Rimbaud’s renunciation of poetry in order to become a ‘normal’ person outside of literature (in the sense that Miller is attracted to an image of both Dostoevsky and Rimbaud as such ‘normal’, downtrodden men). As one of his greatest acknowledged influences, Miller parallels himself with Rimbaud but does so as two figures, as two sides of the same coin: Rimbaud gave up writing early in life; Miller found writing late in life. At the same time, Rimbaud’s significance for Miller goes beyond the superficial biographical matches and into their deeply personal and profound views on literature, as with all of the writers in this study.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Conversations, 6. Ibid., 52–3. Wickes, 26. See Millett’s Sexual Politics. New York: Avon Books, 1970. See the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968, where Orwell reviews Black Spring relatively unfavourably. Also

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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see Traschen’s ‘Henry Miller: The Ego and I’ for similar criticism (South Atlantic Quarterly, 65 (1966): 345–54). Desire in Language, 75; ‘Aussi verrons-nous apparaître les problèmes de la mort, de la naissance et du sexe, lorsque la littérature touché au point névralgique qu’est l’écriture extériorisant les systèmes linguistiques par la structure de la narration (les genres)’, Séméiotiké, 156. Anatomy, 310–11. Ibid., 310. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Desire in Language, 78; ‘Dans le carnaval le sujet est anéanti : là s’accomplit la structure de l’auteur comme anonymat qui crée et se voit créer, comme moi et comme autre, comme homme et comme masque’, Séméiotiké, 160. Desire in Language, 79; ‘Les répétitions, les propos dits “sans suite” . . . les oppositions non-exclusives’, Séméiotiké, 161. Desire in Language, 79; ‘dialogisme qu’aucun autre discours ne connaît d’une manière aussi flagrante’, Séméiotiké, 161. Solomon, 685. Desire in Language, 79; ‘Contestant les lois du langage qui évolue dans l’intervalle 0–1, le carnaval conteste Dieu, autorité et loi sociale; il est rebelle dans la mesure où il est dialogique’, Séméiotiké, 161. Desire in Language, 75; ‘Dans le texte littéraire, le 0 n’existe pas, le vide est subitement remplacé par “un” (il, nom propre) qui est deux (sujet et destinataire)’, Séméiotiké, 156. Bursey, 32. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 29–30. Desire in Language, 79; ‘(ce qui provoque le rire), sans arriver pourtant à s’en dégager’, Séméiotiké, 161. Bursey, 33. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 28. Jong, 11. Jong, 113. Duberman, 265. Bursey, 34. Ibid., 39. Books, 167. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Spring, 131. Essays, 21; ‘C’est le domaine de l’action et de la passion des corps : choses et mots se dispersent dans tous les sens, ou au contraire se soudent en blocs indécomposables’, Critique et clinique, 34.

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way Spring, 133. Adventures, 179. Ibid., 179. Spring, 133–4. An example on this very topic quickly demonstrates. Humpty Dumpty begins to recite a poem to Alice, ‘written entirely for [her] amusement’: ‘“In winter, when the fields are white, / I sing this song for your delight – only I don’t sing it,” he added, as an explanation. “I see you don’t,” said Alice. “If you can see whether I’m singing or not, you’ve sharper eyes than most,” Humpty Dumpty remarked, severely. Alice was silent’ (123). Investigations, §279; ‘Denke dir Einen, der sagte: “Ich weiß doch, wie hoch ich bin!” und dabei die Hand als Zeichen auf seinen Scheitel legt!’ Untersuchungen, §279. Adventures, 13. Investigations, §216; ‘Ein Ding ist mit sich selbst identisch’, ‘Es ist, als legten wir das Ding, in der. Vorstellung, in seine eigene Form hinein, und sähen, daß es paßt’, Untersuchungen, §216. Investigations, §216; ‘Spiel der Vorstellung’, Untersuchungen, §216. Spring, 137. Tractatus, §6.54; ‘Welcher mich versteht am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie – auf ihnen – über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist)’, Tractatus, §6.54. Zettel, §160; ‘Vergiß nicht, daß ein Gedicht, wenn auch in der Sprache der Mittelung abgefaßt, nicht im Sprachspiel der Mitteilung verwendet wird’, Zettel, §160. Spring, 133. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 138. Carroll never indicates a colour for Alice’s dress in the story; however, it has often been depicted in illustrations as being yellow or red. The original drawings by Tenniel were black-and-white, but in the first colour editions Tenniel subsequently illustrated the dress as blue with a red-lined pinafore. It is not of tremendous importance, but perhaps Miller read an illustrated version in which the dress was coloured red. The red dress in Miller’s passage may also subtly refer to the rose-tree that Two, Five and Seven are secretly, painstakingly and perpetually painting red to correct their error of having planted a white rose-tree instead of a red one at the behest of the Queen of Hearts. To that end, it is equally plausible that Miller is referring here not at all to Alice but to the Queen of Hearts, who surely would be wearing a red dress (or the Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, who is undeniably in a sort of red dress). The same analysis given above applies, such that Carroll is shuffling the cards, and his character who sits with him at the table – whether it be Alice, the Queen of Hearts or the Red Queen – is patiently waiting for the unfolding of the game. (Two points worth repeating: Miller has Alice in Wonderland on ‘The Hundred Books That Influenced Me Most’ list in Books in My Life. Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’ originally appears

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55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89.

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in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.) In the instance of Miller’s figure in the red dress being the Queen of Hearts, this unfolding involves the dealing out, literally, of the figures of her court. Hamlet, 22. Spring, 145. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 147. Adventures, 60. Ibid. Spring, 144. Ibid., 144–5. Ibid., 146. Adventures, 76. Ibid., 155. Looking-Glass, 79. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 199. Spring, 145. Bursey, 28. Through the Looking-Glass, 197. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 87. Ibid. Ibid. Spring, 142–3. Adventures, 8. Ibarguen, online. Brown, Miller, 2. Desire in Language, 86; ‘On pourrait démontrer à travers le mot et la structure narrative romanesque du xxe siècle comment la pensée européenne transgresse ses caractéristiques constituantes: l’identité, la substance, la causalité, la définition pour en adopter d’autres: l’analogie, la relation, l’opposition, donc le dialogisme et l’ambivalence ménippéenne’, Séméiotiké, 69. Spring, 135. Ibid., 136. Ibid. In his article ‘Lewis Carroll and the Child in Victorian Fiction’ (1994), Robert M. Polhemus writes, ‘Lewis Carroll’s two books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), regarded when they were first published as amusing pieces in the developing subgenre of “children’s books,” turned out to be major works of nineteenth-century literature and part of the history of serious imaginative writing’ (578).

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90. Bataille (my translation); ‘Un enfant vagabond n’est pas immoral, au contraire’, Critique, 44. 91. Bataille (my translation); ‘Si généreux et loyaux que soient des enfants, ce «sentiment intense» ne peut être étouffé dans le monde où ils jouent’, Critique, 44. 92. Plexus, 306. 93. Adventures, 14. 94. Plexus, 307. 95. Adventures, 22. 96. Plexus, 309. 97. Ibid., 308. 98. Ibid., 310. 99. Ibid., 309. 100. Ibid., 308. 101. Ibid., 310. 102. Ibid., 311. 103. Ibid., 312. 104. Ibid., 309. 105. Polhemus, 585. 106. Ibid., 585. 107. Looking-Glass, 41. 108. Ibid., 183. 109. Ibid. 110. Heath, 227. 111. Spring, 143.

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Chapter 4

The Drunken Inkwell – Arthur Rimbaud

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Rimbaud was doomed at birth – he hadn’t the ghost of a chance. Yet no one had noticed, prior to his coming, that the sun was burned out. Now, do you hear it plainly? – piteous moans smothered in sea wrack. Frabjous caterwauls, since the snails (shorn of their temples) are out in force. Oh yes, there will be more delightful little works of fantasy – that man all in black, Lewis Carroll, for instance – but the horse has been definitely disembowelled. Look no more for drunken boats, or Armageddons where dragon and eagle fight it out. Don’t look for doubt’s duck with the vermilion lips because we are all out of that flavor. – Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (1962)1

Miller’s critical study on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins, was first published in 1946 and 1949 in two parts by New Directions as ‘When Do Angels Cease to Resemble Themselves?’ It came after Miller’s return to America in 1940 after ten years in Paris and six months in Greece, followed by a regrettable year-long road trip that became the material for the personal and minor commercial failure, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). During the interim, Miller spent a few years in southern California trying to sell his watercolours and aspiring to write Hollywood screenplays, followed by a move to the rustic and woodsy Big Sur, California. It is here where Miller finally found an agreeable, if still difficult, lifestyle, married for a third time and looking forward to raising his new daughter and son, though he was well into his fifties.2 In Big Sur, Miller settled permanently back in America, but not without the usual, endless financial hardships and haphazard circumstances that would always dictate the path of his life. These elements are perhaps a few of the reasons that lead Miller to say, in the beginning of his work on Rimbaud, that it is only after being aware of the poet for eighteen years that he has finally begun to appreciate him fully, to ‘read him like a clairvoyant’.3 Miller writes: ‘Now I understand the significance of his life and work – as much, that is, as one Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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can say he understands the life and work of another.’4 Over the age of fifty at this point and still looking for handouts and concocting schemes to ease the unrelentingly difficult, self-chosen path, Miller is finally able to recognise the significance of a writer existing as a human being who is separate from the work produced and, simultaneously, the significance of a writer who is a result of the work produced (hence, a ‘persona’). Miller is able to see himself in Rimbaud in a new light, such that he is painfully aware of the division between Rimbaud’s writerly craft and his personal, impoverished life. Miller’s claim that he now finally understands the significance of Rimbaud’s life and work as far as ‘one can say he understands the life and work of another’ draws attention to a prominent theme raised in the Introduction and discussed most thoroughly in Chapter 2 on Dostoevsky. It comes with reference to Derrida’s The Ear of the Other, in consideration of the third form of intertextuality: namely, the impact of a later author on an ancestral one. Yet, unlike his treatment of Dostoevsky in this regard, Miller’s interest in Rimbaud takes a somewhat different approach. Again, after the life experiences that compel Miller to make the above claim on understanding Rimbaud, he is more prepared to accept Rimbaud as a human being in ways of which he simply would never be capable with Dostoevsky. Miller identifies with Rimbaud’s struggle to remain the person who has, somewhat tragically, become the writer, whose ‘person’ is then paradoxically invisible and yet simultaneously excruciatingly visible in the text.5 In ‘Night in Hell’ (‘Nuit de l’Enfer’) from A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer, 1873) Rimbaud himself writes ‘– I am hidden and I am not hidden.’6 Notwithstanding the mythical overtones of Rimbaud’s message from Hell, referring to himself as being simultaneously hidden from view and painfully in full view, Rimbaud also announces here the very ‘hell’ that is literature: he is both eternally present in the prose poem and yet completely absent from it, in that eternal presence. He is the creator of the work, hidden in that very creation but also brutally exposed by it. It is this status of being transformed into the text, as opposed to by the text, that suddenly strikes Miller as evident in Rimbaud, as he sees him now with eyes that have also witnessed his own transformation into the text and not by the text. Commenting on Derrida’s Otobiographies, Jason E. Powell writes in Jacques Derrida: A Biography (2006) that even though a text ‘is simply writing and does not include anything of its author’, the reader includes the author’s fate in any subsequent understanding of the text.7 Furthermore, the manner in which the reader knows the author (particularly in autobiographies) only comes through this created fate that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the reader establishes for (and from) the absent author in the text. In Assassins, Miller claims his affinity with Rimbaud based on this knowledge of Rimbaud’s fate as a poet: ‘Why do I permit myself to speak of this unfinished part of his life with such certitude? Because once again I see analogies to my own life, my own development.’8 Miller’s projected likeness with Rimbaud is coloured by this legacy that has been created by Rimbaud’s absence specifically from any complete literary legacy. It is almost as though Miller is placing himself in Rimbaud’s stead and, in many ways, finishing his story, finishing this legacy for him. Without disrespecting the brief, yet substantial, accomplishments of the prematurely deceased poet, Miller declares Rimbaud ‘surrenders his treasure – as if it were the burden’.9 Interestingly, Miller also announces that even though ‘his failure seems stupendous’, ‘it brought him through to victory’10 – yet the key is Miller’s acknowledgement that this ‘victory’ belongs not to Rimbaud but to his legacy. Immediately following, Miller quotes Hugo: ‘Angel is the only word in the language that cannot be worn out.’11 Here Miller begins to pinpoint the distinction not only between the man and the name, but the man (and, separately, the name) and the legacy (both literary and actual). These four modes delineating Miller’s pursuit of Rimbaud, in terms of his identification and interpretation of him, require further examination. In 1871 when Rimbaud declares in a letter to his former schoolteacher Georges Izambard ‘je est un autre’ (‘I is an other’),12 he too, like Miller, acknowledges the impossible, yet necessary, division between oneself as a person and subsequently as a writer. Additionally, this division also corrupts how one is knowable to oneself, or simply knowable to the world, insofar as the declaration of oneself immediately kills that self by constructing a text in its place. In writing himself in the text, Rimbaud simultaneously erases himself, establishing this otherness to the ‘I’ that he both is and is not. What Derrida writes in reference to Nietzsche can here be applied to Rimbaud (and Miller): ‘He has taken out a loan with himself and has implicated us in this transaction through what, on the force of a signature, remains of his text.’13 As Derrida explains, the admission of the self as an other, in distinction from the one who creates the text (in distinction from the moment of writing oneself), establishes the identity of the self but only as something that can never be one with itself as the creator of the work, thus creating ‘a dead man’s name’ (‘un nom de mort’) as separate from the name of a body of work. Similar to Rimbaud, Nietzsche, as cited by Derrida, writes: ‘ich bin der und der’14 (‘I am he and he’). Embodying the essence of this statement, Miller, an ‘autobiographer’ in the same sense as Nietzsche or Rimbaud, has, at this stage Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in his writing on Rimbaud, grown much older than his initial writerly self and reads the French poet now through a lens that enables him to see himself as separated from his own body of work and from himself as a quasi-identifiable yet an impossibly and incompletely summed-up human being. As much as Miller is intrigued and confounded by ‘a dead man’s name’ he does seek to investigate in his own writing, reductio ad absurdum, the revealing of the hidden name, person and writer, mentioned above as the fourfold pursuit of his identification. Thus, not only does Miller search for the writer behind the name and the person behind the writer, but also the writer behind the person and even the name behind the person. (This last task is evinced in his meditations on Dostoevsky.) Miller seems to have a claim on the ‘real’ Rimbaud in Assassins, which he writes in a frenetic and passionate yet calm tone revealing more of himself in its gushes of admiration and superlatives: ‘We marvel at the sounds of this strange tongue. We know nothing of the joy and the certitude which sustained this inhuman confabulation.’15 As Caroline Blinder points out in A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller (2000), Miller uses Assassins more for his own metaphysical ends: one, as ‘a convenient way for Miller to vent some of the anger he felt towards his own mother’;16 and two, as ‘the attempt to define his own creative processes’.17 A reference by Miller in Assassins to D. H. Lawrence and Rimbaud equally reflects Miller and Rimbaud (or Lawrence): ‘These men have their roots in that very future which disturbs us so profoundly. They have two rhythms, two faces, two interpretations. They are integrated to transition, to flux. Wise in a new way, their language seems cryptic to us, if not foolish or contradictory.’18 It becomes plain that Miller’s identification with Rimbaud is so tightly woven that he himself is not able, or does not wish, to separate the two in his writing. Miller’s literary blurring between himself and Rimbaud may help elucidate the claim that Miller’s search for Rimbaud is of this subtle fourfold pursuit: (1) the writer behind the name; (2) the person behind the writer (as a physical body, not a name); (3) the person behind the name (easily confused with the first case but distinct in that, in this instance, a ‘real’ person is now being considered); and (4) the name behind the person (or the writer related to the first case in that it elicits the question, ‘Who stands there?’ but which is distinct from the first case precisely because the name ‘stands in’ both for a writer and for a person who is no longer a writer). In the first case, Miller encounters the name in the way that the reader encounters the name of the writer, such as the name ‘Dostoevsky’ or Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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‘Nietzsche’. Already the writer is inescapably bound to the name, but in this particular instance the writer is actually completely removed, because he, Rimbaud, has ‘an affliction which poisoned him both at the zenith and the nadir of his being’,19 and thus he has ‘failed’ ‘in his life’ as the poet,20 having been the ‘victim of a grave misunderstanding as to the nature of his role’.21 Rimbaud has vanished. (He is ‘hidden and not hidden’.) He is simply not present on the page; he has ceased writing, and being written, on the page. The second case is more conventional, more akin to the Dostoevsky relationship, such that the person is ‘hiding’ behind the writer and cannot, nor could not ever, be extracted from the work, because it is through this writing that both the writer and the person (which is now really a ‘persona’) are known. The third case has a subtle distinction from the first. It is wholly unlike the case of Dostoevsky in that there really is a person present, who is finally the non-poet, Rimbaud the ‘adventurer’,22 wholly distinct from the writer (significantly, postwriter). This effect becomes the case precisely because he, Rimbaud, gave up writing. He occupies a void in literature by his presence in life, yet he still occupies the name with his legacy. Lastly, in the fourth case, Miller seeks to re-place this absence of Rimbaud from literature by reinstating his name in that absence, but, this is impossible. There is no name behind the person, because the name demands first and foremost its being written or spoken, neither of which is possible once Rimbaud ceases his literary endeavours. The word Rimbaud can no longer ‘stand for’ the same thing. These four subtle distinctions overlap and are constantly engaged, and, because they cannot produce a conclusive system of divisions for understanding, they profoundly affect how Miller himself engages in his own writing. Miller desperately wants to enact a closeness with figures in literature that is altogether impossible precisely because he cannot separate the various modes by which he understands them. It is the nature of language for this to be so. Miller cannot write for himself in the manner he seems to wish, because the act of writing is already a giving over of the text to the future reader, to an imaginary audience. Yet, Miller imagines this manner is how Rimbaud writes: to himself, a metaphysics for himself – particularly in light of Rimbaud’s dramatic renunciation of poetry. Miller writes: ‘That he could only remain intact by renouncing his calling is a tribute to his purity but also a condemnation of the age.’23 Miller attributes Rimbaud’s ‘sacrifice’ as a shortcoming not of the poet but of the nature of ‘the age’. Yet if there could be a culprit, it must be language itself. Through his reading of Rimbaud, Miller asks himself if writing Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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can actually be personal, as he chooses and as he seems to learn from Rimbaud. Miller asks what the transformations are that can take place for the writer in the literary pursuit or if writing is at all transformative and, consequently, what the role of the reader is. In Orpheus in Brooklyn, Mathieu seems to suggest that both Rimbaud and Miller are writing for themselves, in their quests for self-fulfilment. In his chapter ‘The Theory of “Correspondences”’ Mathieu writes about ‘the manner in which Symbolisme assumed fixed relationships (or “correspondences”) between the material and spiritual worlds’.24 Writers like Rimbaud and Miller, in imitation of the Symbolistes, write in a style that expresses their personal pursuit of union or enlightenment. However, Miller is acutely self-aware, through his reading of Rimbaud, of this distinction as a literary issue, regardless of his own personal metaphysics, and it is precisely this issue – the mysterious capacity of the literary form – that makes Miller consider Rimbaud as an influence upon his own writing. It is not a superficial issue of self-fulfilment. If it were, after all, neither man would have been a writer. Rimbaud is clearly writing himself into the text but is also, as Miller attempts as well, simultaneously writing himself out of the text. Again, Rimbaud: ‘Je est un autre’; and Miller, in Plexus, ironically lamenting his inability to ‘get [his life] down on paper’, asks himself if it’s because ‘I hadn’t yet become the “I of my I”’.25 This statement in Plexus is a reprisal from the end of a chapter in Sexus, written four years earlier, where Miller claims that ‘the artist’s game is to move over into reality’ and to cease seeing the world as ‘anything but a hideous battleground of lost causes’. This ‘picture’ will not change, Miller writes, until the artist ‘takes up the task of becoming the “I of his I”’.26 As a goal, Miller seems to imply the possible attainment of this state of becoming the ‘I’ of one’s ‘I’. Similar to Rimbaud, Miller attempts to become himself by writing himself out of the text. This pursuit can be interpreted as Miller’s attempt, like Rimbaud’s, at an effort toward metaphysical self-fulfilment. The deeper implication in its being written is that the task is not only impossible, but its rendering in literature forces it to become an issue of words and language and no longer only of the personal issue of a man called Henry Miller or Arthur Rimbaud. In The Time of the Assassins Miller draws on this issue again of the impossibility, yet everlasting attempt, of writing oneself and one’s transformation into poetry, when he says, ‘To speak of the real Lawrence or the real Rimbaud is to make cognizant the fact that there is an unknown Lawrence, an unknown Rimbaud.’27 This ‘unknown’ touches upon Miller’s radical search for Rimbaud in the four subtle distinctions above (particularly (2) and (3) in the sense that Miller is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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seeking to locate the ‘rest’ of Rimbaud, who is eternally a writer but also an elusive, ‘runaway’ person). Rimbaud’s presence for Miller can also be understood as existing on ‘borrowed credit’, to use Powell’s phrase in reference to Nietzsche. The poet naturally develops a role for him or herself that cannot be touched during life but is only revealed in death by the future reader. It is this projected sense of the self that the poet uses to create and embody his or her self-image in the text. At the same time that Miller makes his awareness of the discrepancy of literature evident, he declares the importance of writing only for himself. In Nexus, as the narrator, he announces his writerly project: ‘I want to kill off books, writers, publishers, readers. To write for the public doesn’t mean a thing to me.’28 Regardless of this declaration, Miller still looks for an audience in the next line: ‘What I’d like is to write for madmen – or for the angels.’29 At the same time, not insignificantly even if ironically, Miller declares his interest in writing for angels. It is an absurd announcement but one that indicates Miller’s pull towards writing but his confusion as to its purpose or target, seeking something otherworldly in order to make evident the personal nature of the writer’s task. At the start of his chapter on ‘The Poet as Angel’ Mathieu makes evident the significance in Rimbaud and Miller of the etymology of ‘angel’ in Ancient Greek: ‘messenger’ and eventually ‘spiritual messenger’. If both writers see writing as a spiritual engagement with the world, they both too recognise its shortcomings and the impossibility of its undertaking. The angelic pursuit is both at the basis of writing but also at its endpoint: the messenger is carried as far as the limit of words. Before his awareness of Rimbaud, Miller writes of Proust in a passage from Tropic of Cancer which he might later in life apply to Rimbaud: ‘. . . Only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art.’30 As Miller makes evident, it is through the processes of art and of writing, that this spiritual endeavour can at all be undertaken but which also become a perpetual pursuit. Thus, in Miller and Rimbaud, it is not a question of regarding their works literally as personal attempts for spiritual fulfilment but as artistic creations in an already spiritualised universe. Subsequently, Miller’s study of Rimbaud takes a personal and meditative approach. When The Time of the Assassins was published in 1946 and 1949 it was well regarded and indeed still receives praise,31 even though, as Karl Shapiro writes in his 1961 introduction to the first legalised printing of Tropic of Cancer in the United States, ‘Miller’s book on Rimbaud is one of the best books on Rimbaud ever written, although it Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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is mostly about Henry Miller.’32 Most often when Miller writes about his influences, both by name or indirectly, he attempts to incorporate them in his work to the extent that he, in some way, desires to become them. He exclaims: ‘Like Rimbaud, I too began at an early age to cry: “Death to God!” It was death to everything which the parents endorsed or approved of.’33 The reason why Miller’s influences are ultimately the most wretched, passionate, disillusioned and ill-fated lot that they are is because Miller identifies, insofar as he is able (not only knowing of the impossibility of this endeavour but using it as the basis for his writing), with their spiritual poeticism and their worldly misfortunes. Rimbaud is no different for Miller, at least in this regard. Miller’s ‘embodiment’ of Rimbaud in several of his works is well evidenced in Mathieu’s Orpheus in Brooklyn, in which Mathieu builds a convincing argument forging a ‘bridge that connects Miller “as” Orpheus with Miller “as” Rimbaud’.34 Mathieu’s work attempts to extricate the links that Miller himself creates with Rimbaud through his writing. Wallace Fowlie begins his preface to Mathieu’s Orpheus in Brooklyn by claiming that Orpheus and Rimbaud are ‘the true ancestors of the American writer from a borough of New York City’, namely Henry Miller, in as much as Miller ‘inherited from them the will to break with the world in order to recreate it’.35 This compliment of Miller is generous, and it alludes to Fowlie’s appreciation of Mathieu, who ‘has found, more accurately than others, the clue to the magnetism in Miller’s writings’.36 In this work, Mathieu takes Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi (1941) as his central focus, and from it he draws out qualities of the French Symboliste in Miller. In Fowlie’s words, moving beyond ‘Rimbaud as a mere literary influence’,37 Mathieu feels that Miller considers himself ‘an avatar of Rimbaud’,38 particularly in light of his own monograph on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins. Mathieu’s work focuses on both an interpretation of the Orphic myth in Miller and an unwavering paralleling of him with Rimbaud. Of The Colossus of Maroussi Mathieu writes: It contains some of Miller’s most dazzling monologues, but it is also a veritable gallery of portraits of great spellbinding ‘singers’ in the Orphic tradition. From the opening paragraphs to Lawrence Durrell’s glowing anecdote on the midnight cocks of Attica in the concluding coda, Miller treats his readers to a procession of human types who share his unique gift for casting a spell with words.39

Subsequently laying out all the figures whom Miller references that have an Orphic quality, Mathieu goes on to provide an explanation of the Orphic myth itself followed by the evidence (in correspondence and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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otherwise) indicating Miller’s determination to include overt Symboliste imagery and the Orphic myth directly in his work. The first third of Mathieu’s text is given over to the painstaking alignment of Miller with the Orphic tradition, not only in Colossus but also the trilogies, such as Miller’s perceived katabasis into dark underworlds, his metamorphoses into various figures including Orpheus and Hermes/Elijah and his palingeneses, or rebirths, in his works.40 Mathieu suggests that the female figures throughout Miller also enact metamorphoses into Eurydice because the ‘many-faceted nature of the EternalFeminine is a topic Miller never tires of’.41 While compelling, Mathieu’s approach to Miller wholly in relation of the Orphic myth is, at the same time, slightly forced. Immediately at the outset, Mathieu boldly declares, ‘Miller’s entire output as a writer can be regarded as “Orphic/ Symboliste” rather than merely Dadaist or pornographic.’42 Such a claim is heavy-handed despite the possible appeal of its approach. The very first line of Orpheus in Brooklyn itself begins with a self-evident claim that is used to reinforce Mathieu’s perceived need for this kind of insistence in his work: ‘Writers’ ancestries are obscure.’43 In spite of the validity of this statement, Mathieu makes various connections, in light of his forceful insistence on Orphism, that stretch his argument unnecessarily. An example of Mathieu’s forceful reading is his mentioning of Miller’s initial interest in visiting Greece as having developed due to stories of his friend Betty Ryan in Paris, whose name, Mathieu claims, ‘faintly resembles that of Beatrice, Dante’s irresistible guide to a Paradise that can only be reached after descending into the bowels of the Inferno’, and who ‘may be regarded as the prototype of a number of other beguiling Eurydices in the book’.44 The peculiarity, and surfeit, of this tenet slightly undermines Mathieu’s argument, yet Mathieu’s general force is predicated upon the fact that previous scholarship has certainly not pressed upon the profound presence of Rimbaud in Miller’s work in any satisfactory way. Mathieu’s work of criticism is strong and convincingly details Rimbaud and Orphism in Miller’s work, but his insistence that ‘it is no exaggeration to call Henry Miller’s whole literary output the logbook of a loquacious latter-day Argonaut in his quest for the “golden fleece” of the Absolute of joy’45 seems excessive and reductive. Comparatively, Fowlie writes in his study Rimbaud (1965) that the variety of critics’ approaches to Rimbaud’s works ‘confirm their inexhaustibleness, their resistance to any one exegesis. A great poem is clear in the words it employs, and it is ambiguous in the meaning it suggests’.46 Fowlie adds, ‘The great mark of the genius is to reveal to each critic what he is looking for.’47 The most striking similarity or path of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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influence for Miller from Rimbaud, may be this focus on variability and resistance – a theme not to be lost sight of. Mathieu develops the idea that ‘the image of Orpheus is the mythopoeic backbone and support of Miller’s entire output as a writer’,48 proceeding to explain not just the Orphic myth, but myth itself as ‘a way of seeing reality and of transcribing, clearly, the results of what one has seen’.49 Mathieu connects Miller to Rimbaud under the mutual belief that ‘the true poet is a “seer”’,50 with Miller himself being considered a poet in Mathieu’s analysis. From here, Mathieu’s extension to Orpheus is quite straightforward, such that Symbolisme evidently draws much of its own substance from Orphism, and Miller clearly draws from both. Using James L. Kugel’s The Techniques of Strangeness in Symbolist Poetry (1971) Mathieu outlines the ‘most quintessential . . . articles of faith’ in Symbolisme: ‘the rejection of the quotidian; the preference for the miraculous; the belief in a universal language, in evocativeness, in musicality, and in the theory of “correspondences;” and, ultimately its most important concern, the quest for the Absolute’.51 Mathieu then locates in Miller each of these ‘articles of faith’, focusing on The Colossus of Maroussi but also looking at the Tropics trilogy, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948) and essays from Wisdom of the Heart and The Cosmological Eye (1939). Mathieu spends the middle section of Orpheus in Brooklyn drawing links between the Orphic tradition itself and Symbolisme, and includes Miller in both of these already-overlapping writing forms to focus upon ‘two major Symboliste concerns: the dissatisfaction with everyday reality and the preference for the Absolute [sic]’.52 In the last section, called ‘The Rimbaud Factor’, Mathieu delineates Miller’s ‘sheer idolatry’ of Rimbaud.53 He breaks down his analysis of Miller in conjunction with Rimbaud by developing five ‘metamorphoses which the two men most characteristically adopt’: ‘the poet as Demon, as Angel, as Dromomaniac, as Alchemist, and as Voyant’.54 Each of these metamorphoses individually depicts Miller’s attempts, like Rimbaud’s, at ‘possible new self-metamorphosis’ that is staged directly in the literature.55 Referring to Miller using the same symbolic material as Rimbaud (such as water, fire, light, darkness, blood, gold, angels, heaven, hell), Mathieu calls The Colossus of Maroussi a ‘grab-bag of prose poems which record a journey of discover (like Rimbaud’s Illuminations)’, adopting ‘most of the major poses of Rimbaud’s “opéra fabuleux” to achieve the desired end of “changing life”’.56 Mathieu’s reading is thorough and useful. However, bearing in mind Fowlie’s thoughts on ‘the great mark of genius’, it is important to note here that Miller’s usage of the same symbols and themes as Rimbaud does not make it conclusive that either one or the other’s writing is entirely reducible to such a sense of the mystical. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Mathieu’s reading parallels Miller with Rimbaud in a way that moves far beyond their writerly similarities and into their personal metaphysics. A problematic endeavour, this approach is still important precisely because Rimbaud’s cultural presence is bound up with the reader’s knowledge of Rimbaud’s early abandonment of poetry and his subsequent, tormented and seemingly uncharacteristic life path. In his biography of Derrida, Powell plainly states: ‘The poet’s life and death are in the poem when we interpret it.’57 Thus the reader takes from Rimbaud’s poetry the entire story of Rimbaud the person regardless of his (and ‘its’) absence from the work. Instead of drawing the comparison between Rimbaud and Miller in terms of their metaphysical interpretations of the world, as though they can be derived from the text as opposed actually to being the text, the interest here is in the fascination each writer has with the very prospect of both imbuing the text with an artificial (that is, literary) sense of this self-transformation and illuminating the significance of writing about the figure of the self as something that is never in the text while simultaneously and paradoxically only in the text. In Rimbaud, Fowlie agrees that A Season in Hell focuses upon metaphysics, but this focus is bound to ‘where the meaning of evil is constantly being converted into the meaning of action and the meaning of words’.58 As obvious or mundane as it seems, the reader must not forget that it is through words alone that Rimbaud enacts his transmutations, and thus it is the words themselves that are the material of both heaven and hell. It is ultimately meaningless to extract a metaphysics from the work of either Rimbaud or Miller (as critics are wont to do), to say the least without applying sufficient weight to how ‘the physical rhythm and breath of a phrase are merged with the meaning of the words in the phrase’.59 In Assassins Miller writes: ‘What Rimbaud the poet desired was to see the old forms go, in life as well as in literature.’60 How Rimbaud chose to enact that in his literature was through a metaphysics of evil that is expressed through transformation in text, imagination and sound. Miller laments: ‘The poet today is obliged to surrender his calling because he has already evinced his despair, because he has already acknowledged his inability to communicate.’61 This ‘poet today’ begins with Rimbaud, who acknowledges at the opening of A Season in Hell his disillusionment with his craft, that is to say his lack of faith (or, one might call it, his discovery of the limits in words to transmit the divine. In Part II of the prose poem ‘Delirium’ (‘Délires’) from A Season in Hell, entitled ‘The Alchemy of the Word’ (‘Alchimie du verbe’), Rimbaud expresses his new disillusionment with poetry’s ability to render Beauty. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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He laments his own loss of power as the poet, calling his attempt to create a ‘hallucination of words!’62 Prior to these prose poems, however, already at the beginning of A Season in Hell, in its first poem, also a prose poem, ‘Night in Hell’, Rimbaud writes halfway through ‘– There is no one here and there is someone.’63 This entire prose poem presents Rimbaud’s visceral presence as the disenchanted raconteur still claiming: ‘I intend to unveil all mysteries: religious mysteries or those of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, the void. I am a master of hallucinations. / Listen! . . .’64 His confidence and comprehension waxes and wanes. Prior to this bold claim, in ‘Bad Blood’ (‘Mauvais sang’) the poet questions himself: ‘Do I know nature yet? Do I know myself?’65 This self-inquiry is followed immediately by a silencing of the doubt: ‘No more words.’66 Yet this phrase promptly provokes another fit of anxiety in a sudden and painful interrogation: ‘Quick! Are there other lives?’67 Rimbaud mistrusts himself as the poet to provide an acceptable understanding of ‘all mysteries’ and of this division of self. The words always fall short but are themselves reflections of the inner poet who grapples with the crisis of purpose. This crisis becomes for the reader Rimbaud’s actual struggle with poetry as a satisfactory pursuit, one which the reader knows he abandons and which subsequently colours all interpretations of the twofold image: the poet and the man. This dual between the two roles encourages a reading of Rimbaud as a voyant, or mystic of sorts, precisely because of his renunciation of poetry. It is as though Rimbaud is providing the reader with a message without providing anything at all. This reading is problematic in the manner in which it moves far away from the actual text. However, this problem generates new modes of discourse and encourages Miller in his own efforts to tread on the border of personal reflection and literary creation in his work. Mathieu accedes that ‘as literary mystagogues, both Rimbaud and Miller fiercely resist analytical exegesis in the usual sense’, but he also writes that both ‘adhere fixedly to the hermeticist’s code: the ultimate Mystery (both in life and in literature) must remain ungraspable and intact’.68 While the first point seems evident and while it can be conceded that ‘the ultimate Mystery’ is ‘ungraspable’, it appears that the real distinction between Mathieu’s understanding and the argument at hand may simply be a matter of language. It is not the case, then, that Rimbaud and Miller are ‘protecting’ or ‘hiding’ the ‘Mystery’ from their reader or even that it is hidden from the two writers themselves. It is rather that they, as writers, recognise the impossibility of this kind of transference into a text. Miller’s adoption of Rimbaud as a literary guide Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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highlights Miller’s acute awareness of the impossibility of literature of ever reaching its goal of transforming the self or the world. At the end of A Season in Hell, Rimbaud demands: ‘We must be absolutely modern.’69 Miller echoes Rimbaud by calling him in Assassins ‘absolutely “modern”’ precisely because ‘his language is the language of the spirit, not of weights, measures and abstract relations’.70 It is exactly this awareness in Miller of Rimbaud, and in Rimbaud, that ‘the signs and symbols which [Rimbaud] employs are one of the surest proofs that language is a means of dealing with the unutterable and the inscrutable. As soon as the symbols become communicable on every level they lose their validity and effectiveness.’71 If this statement promotes Mathieu’s analysis in dubbing Miller and Rimbaud ‘literary mystagogues’, that is satisfactory, but more strongly it also points to both writers’ insistence and dependence on language and on the metaphysical awareness of language’s inability to penetrate its own mysteries. A text is stilled upon the page in the moment of its expression, and the concepts that it puts forth appear as promising vessels of meaning but ultimately reveal themselves to be completely empty by their very presence on the page. Both writers express an awareness of this problem, and its presence in Miller is derived from his understanding of its presence in Rimbaud. The Colossus of Maroussi, Miller’s most thoroughly Rimbaudian text according to Mathieu, was written immediately after the experiences in Greece that it depicts. Due to the imminence of the Second World War, Miller spent roughly five months in Greece visiting Lawrence Durrell upon being forced, as an American national, to leave Paris in 1939 where he had lived for nearly ten years. (This indefinite move away from Paris ended up being permanent.) Greece had a very calming effect on Miller, which, in Colossus, he attributes to its ancient and rich history full of ‘heroic deeds’, ‘stubbornness, courage, recklessness [and] daring’,72 the ‘Attic landscape’, its ‘clear fading light’ and ‘brilliance’,73 its ‘blinding, joyous illumination’74 and its ‘spirit of eternality’,75 as well as its inherent friendliness and openness. Miller writes, ‘the Greeks are an enthusiastic, curious-minded, passionate people. Passion – it was something I had long missed in France. Not only passion, but contradictoriness, confusion, chaos . . . And generosity.’76 These qualities are in contradistinction to his perceived cultural loftiness of America, England and the West in general. It is analogous to Rimbaud’s dichotomous struggle between his own homeland and the exotic, sunburnt East, where, in ‘Bad Blood’, announcing his departure he writes, ‘I loathe my country.’77 This admission is followed by a description of the new Rimbaud in foreign lands where ‘lost climates will tan’ his skin, and he ‘will come back with limbs of iron and dark Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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skin and a furious look’.78 In rendering all existence equal and foreshadowing his shift away from poetry, Rimbaud also announces, ‘A writer’s hand is no better than a ploughman’s.’79 Even more eerily he writes, ‘I will never possess my hand.’80 As such, Rimbaud not only reconfirms his separation from his homeland but also both his own separation from himself in any whole sense through writing, and the separation from himself as a writer. Miller, also beginning to reject France despite his otherwise deep love for it, suddenly observes in Greece that, in retrospect, Parisian culture made him feel ‘as if children were missing from the world, as if they were not being born anymore’.81 In retrospect he decides that in France he knew ‘another order of human beings, a type whom [he] admired and respected but whom [he] never felt close to’.82 On a parallel theme, in ‘Childhood’ (‘Enfance’) from Illuminations, Rimbaud writes, ‘I might be the child abandoned on the wharf setting out for the high seas, or the farmhand following the path whose top reaches the sky.’83 For Rimbaud, too, there is a melancholy in children, either abandoned or dreaming of escape. Finally, Miller writes, ‘Greece is the home of the gods’ whereas ‘in France, as elsewhere in the Western world, this link between the human and the divine is broken’.84 This claim resembles Rimbaud’s in ‘Bad Blood’, where, just after ‘No more words’, he writes: ‘Yells drum, dance, dance, dance, dance! I can’t even see the time when the whites will land and I will fall into the void.’85 Rimbaud is ecstatic, beyond language, free of the West, dancing, perhaps an Orphic dance. Miller enacts a similar freedom in Colossus when he engages in an incomprehensible language encounter with a Greek where he simply begins ‘doing my own cracked song and dance for him’.86 It is possible, as Mathieu encourages, to interpret Colossus in light of the Orphic myth coupled with Rimbaud’s Orphism of the pursuit of the spiritual and an interest in death, birth and rebirth manifested in Miller’s new Symboliste style. Despite the connection between Miller and Rimbaud perhaps being relatively obvious, as these comparisons suggest and simply via Miller’s admissions, Mathieu justifies his need to insist upon it by explaining, for example, how Miller’s legacy has preferred his Obelisk ‘trilogy’ (Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn) and The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, Nexus) over his other works, including, most specifically, The Colossus of Maroussi, Mathieu’s key text for analysis. This claim is still true and is also somewhat unfortunate, in terms of the negative reception that Miller often times still receives. However, the significant implication here is how this admission reinforces the validity of the unpredictable track of influence. The Rimbaudian connection is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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overlooked in favour of those extracted from the two trilogies that have instead drawn attention to Miller’s controversial writerly qualities. That readers are currently predominately interested in Miller’s trilogies highlights, in a certain fashion, Miller’s affinity, for example, with Dostoevsky, as explained in Chapter 2, in the sense that it is precisely Dostoevsky’s ‘bad’ writing that comes to characterise one of the most memorable and revered qualities of his work. Dostoevsky is read, interpreted and analysed in light of his bad writing. The ‘badness’ itself is an emphasised feature providing the most profound meanings, not only for the text but also for understanding the writer himself. Similarly, although it may be the case that Colossus is masterfully written and, as Mathieu states, has ‘obvious affinities, both in its deployment of “illuminist” doctrine and in its artistic methods, with the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s masterpiece, Illuminations (1886)’,87 Colossus does not represent the preferred ‘bad boy’ image of Henry Miller that is adopted from the Obelisk and Rosy Crucifixion trilogies. This curiosity of legacy is immediately significant to Miller’s interest in Rimbaud, who, like Dostoevsky, attains his own mythical status in Miller’s mind, figuring not as his fellow man but as an untouchable idol whose work not only depicts writing at its genius, but whose life embodies tragedy, extremes of passion and a philosophy to live by, imbued with superhuman qualities. For this reason, Miller was compelled to write The Time of the Assassins not merely as an homage to Rimbaud but as an attempt to bring Rimbaud into his sight as a figure with qualities that he could now perceive as comparable to his own. Miller states that he has written Assassins because ‘America needs to become acquainted with this legendary figure now more than ever’.88 He goes on to explain: ‘What we obviously lack in this country, what we are not even aware that we lack, is the dreamer, the inspired madman.’89 Miller aligns himself with Rimbaud as ‘the dreamer, the inspired madman’ who speaks to the future and the joining of poetry with life. Miller laments that ‘the poets of today are withdrawing, embalming themselves in a cryptic language which grows ever more and more unintelligible’.90 He proposes, in the vein of Rimbaud, a manner of writing that will awaken man to the need for ‘a new life’ that ‘becomes a living conviction for each and every one of us’.91 The paradox for Miller is that writing is the mode for achieving this ‘living conviction’, but it is, suspiciously, the mode that Rimbaud abandoned by the age of eighteen. However, Miller writes, ‘Rimbaud turned from literature to life; I did the reverse.’92 Rimbaud is Miller’s foil or reflection: by allowing himself to gaze upon Rimbaud as his opposite, Miller is able to identify himself with everything that the poet seems to represent. Curiously, if taken Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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too far, the comparison destroys the projects of both: it is impossible for Miller to surrender to literature if he rests his faith upon Rimbaud’s approach. Literature, as Rimbaud has proven, will disappoint. Similarly, though, in an interesting twist on the third form of intertextuality, reverse influence upon the reception of the ancestral author, Rimbaud’s turn away from literature reinforces his reputation as, in Miller’s words, a ‘sage’ who ‘refuses to revolt’, instead ‘he renounces’.93 Rimbaud is thus inescapably linked to the power of poetry to enlighten and perhaps even release the poet from its curse, through the reader’s unavoidable interpretation of the material from the rest of Rimbaud’s life. In citing Hugh Kenner’s concept ‘homeomorph’ in relation to Miller, Mathieu writes: ‘By recognizing the personal traits and outlook of the hero of a myth in his own personality, a writer acquires the power to instruct us in the urgencies and triumphs of that myth simply by telling us his own story.’94 Miller becomes the autobiographer whose story is both consciously and unconsciously stylised to reflect that of Rimbaud. It cannot be forgotten, however, that Miller came to Rimbaud late in life and that he himself highlights this very fact repeatedly. Critics of Miller, including Brown in Henry Miller (1986), found the comparison appropriate to the extent that both writers see art as ‘an expression of revolt’.95 Miller, as the mature writer, ‘hopes to take his writing in another direction’ than just revolt, ‘towards metaphysical illumination’ as in Colossus.96 However, Brown also notes that this ‘metaphysical illumination’ remains within the realm of the literary pursuit: ‘For Miller, fiction, literary criticism, and philosophy were all of a piece, part of the fabric of the self.’97 Thus even Assassins is autobiographical. Moreover, Miller’s so-called metaphysical pursuits are indeed pursuits in language. Blinder raises some interesting issues in her work A Self-Made Surrealist on this issue, citing that part of Miller’s interest in Rimbaud is ‘the exorcism of his own demons’ but also an engagement with his ‘national and cultural alienation’ upon his return to America.98 Blinder also suggests that with Miller’s turn to Rimbaud at this stage in his life, he ‘creates a perspective on Rimbaud more in tune with an American transcendentalism vision of human existence’ insofar as ‘Miller finally loses [sic] the puerile voice in favor of an adult one’.99 Problematically, she writes Miller combines his own struggle as newly in America in the twentieth century with those of Rimbaud in France and Africa in the nineteenth century. The comparison that Miller draws between himself and Rimbaud is not exactly apt. With his deep belief in his affinity with Rimbaud in mind, however, it is no coincidence that The Time of the Assassins follows somewhat on the heels of The Colossus of Maroussi, which is within several years of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Miller’s return to America. The deliberate skill at emulating Rimbaud in Colossus, of which Mathieu writes in Orpheus in Brooklyn, is very particularly attributable to Miller’s direct interest in Rimbaud and his newly found seriousness in undertaking the task of producing a work somehow reminiscent of him. This kind of influence is the most overt rendering in Miller’s work of the first form of intertextuality addressed, namely present and conscious. Not only does Miller deliberately take up an engagement with Rimbaud as his ancestral influence in Colossus, but he also does so slightly imitatively, similar in some ways to his allusive recognition of Lewis Carroll in Black Spring’s ‘Jabberwhorl Cronstadt’ and the Goldilocks episode of Plexus. In this case, Miller’s style is ‘in accord with the Symboliste view of the aims of literature’,100 according to Mathieu, employing Symboliste techniques such as ‘incompatibleunion phrases’, ‘name-allusions without gloss (biographical or otherwise specifying information withheld on purpose)’ and ‘apparent references to an unknown story’, which alienate the reader.101 Miller is acutely aware of the significance of ‘strangeness’, Mathieu explains, of the Symboliste project, and makes use of various ‘literary tricks’ in order to produce this effect.102 In Colossus, these Symboliste techniques are well evident. Mathieu provides numerous examples, but several previously uncited include: ‘exhausted and dazzled by the unprecedented and divine-like flowering, relapsed into a dark and bloody intestinal conflict which lasted for centuries’;103 ‘The moon was scudding through the clouds’;104 ‘I was a little nearer to the stars and the ether was charged with their nearness’;105 ‘In the belly of emptiness there throbbed a rich pulse of blood which was drained off in black furrowed veins. Through the thick pores of the earth the dreams of men long dead still bubbled and burst, their diaphanous filament carried skyward by flocks of startled birds’;106 ‘The doors of the restaurant were opened wide to suck in the sun-lit air’;107 ‘a green which grows between the stars in the twinkling of an eye’;108 and ‘The sun was setting in violent splendour.’109 These passages highlight Miller’s interest, like the Symbolistes, in synaesthesia, the joining of two sensory experiences into one (‘sun-lit air’, ‘green which grows between the stars’, ‘pulse of blood’), as well as the inversion of expectation in imagery (‘belly of emptiness’, ‘exhausted and dazzled’, ‘dreams . . . bubbled and burst’). In reference to these ‘incompatible-union phrases’, it is important to return to the division between the text as a personal exercise in spiritual fulfilment and as an artistic creation, which is its own end. It is through these artistic creations that Miller constantly builds his future self-image into the text like Rimbaud, but in a reverse manner, such that, as Miller Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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writes, ‘Rimbaud restored literature to life; I have endeavoured to restore life to literature.’110 Where Rimbaud goes from angel to person, or poet to persona (notwithstanding the complexity, once again, in accepting Rimbaud as a whole person beyond his textual presence, highlighting the significance of Miller’s original title of The Time of the Assassins: ‘When Do Angels Cease to Resemble Themselves?’), Miller attempts to go from the world into the realm of angels – through writing. In Nexus Miller writes:

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Such exquisite torture this writing humbuggery! Bughouse reveries mixed with choking fits and what the Swedes call mardrömmen. Squat images roped with diamond tiaras. Baroque architecture. Cabalistic logarithms. Mezuzahs and prayer-wheels. Portentous phrases . . . Skies of blue-green copper, filigreed with lacy striata; umbrella ribs, obscene graffiti.111

The ‘incompatible-union phrases’ demand that the reader see past any spiritualism and directly into the heart, that is to say the sound and poetic effect, of the language. This episode carries on with Miller describing how his writing makes him feel as though he is ‘examining an old print: a room in a medieval dwelling, the old woman sitting on the pot, the doctor standing by with red-hot tongs, a mouse creeping toward a piece of cheese in the corner near the crucifix’.112 Miller fleshes out the text in a manner that forces the reader to see beyond its possibility as anything reflecting life but also as nothing less than a complete creation of Miller’s own spiritual inner life – complete with paintings, portraits, ‘tiaras’, ‘architecture’, ‘logarithms’, ‘skies’ and ‘nonsense’. These types of passages highlight Miller’s interest, like Rimbaud’s, not only in the symbolic potential of the words but in their sounds, and in their sounds as a reflection, or as a component, of their symbolic value. As Mathieu writes, critics like himself and Bursey (in relation to Carroll) are intrigued by ‘the rhythmic and incantatory uses of sounds and such’ that occur ‘in short, through poetry’ and that cause ‘the “walls” between people [to] be broken down’.113 Mathieu even calls this writing style ‘a particularly American solution to the problem of “musicality,” which has provided such diverse figures as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov, with a sustaining faith’.114 Mathieu writes that this style comes from the capacity of ‘the worksday voice-rhythms of the American milieu’ to overcome the ‘solo voice’ by creating a style utilising ‘inner rhythmic resources’ that ‘call out to the silences of its attentive counterparts’.115 Miller’s poetic monologues parallel the use by the Symbolistes of ‘pure sound’ poetry that releases ‘nonobjective thinking’. Mathieu draws upon this concept from Anna Balakian, which she describes as a mode Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of Symbolist thinking that can trigger the mind to ‘suggest rather than to dictate concepts and visions’.116 The reader does not visualise the text in any coherent form but is made to let the words enter the consciousness through their sonic qualities and not their meaning. Miller imitates this aural effect of Symbolist poetry through techniques that overcome the ‘restrictive denotations’ of words.117 This effect is seen in Miller in later works, including Colossus and Assassins, as his style moves toward becoming somewhat more focused on exploring the perimeters of language from an approach that has an element of calm and is more reflective. This effect is achieved through Symbolist-influenced writing that is based on precision and on the sonority of words. In referring to himself and Rimbaud, Miller himself claims: ‘In both of us the confessional quality is strong, the moral and spiritual preoccupation uppermost. The flair for language, for music rather than literature, is another trait in common.’118 This shift is particularly noticeable in Colossus, which is far more refined and less ‘shocking’ than any of his previous works. It is at this time that Miller also begins writing overtly non-fictional texts like The Air-Conditioned Nightmare in 1945, The Time of the Assassins in 1944 and 1949 and The Books in My Life in 1952. In A Self-Made Surrealist, Blinder writes, ‘With his life as an expatriate and bachelor effectively over, Time of the Assassins was to be something different; a study in growing up as opposed to the “infantile revolution” of the Tropics.’119 Miller’s strong turn toward non-fiction at this time perhaps suggests his interest in becoming a more mature writer – shedding the rebellious life of youth for literary maturity, in contradistinction to, yet in direct influence from and as a result of, Rimbaud’s turn from literary youth to unbridled and frenetic adulthood. The theory is interesting and noteworthy, but incomplete. Despite this being the case in Miller’s non-fiction, it certainly is not the case in his fiction, which remains as confrontational and challenging as ever, if not more so. Miller’s fictional voice, such as the language of The Rosy Crucifixion, remains alarmingly shocking and, in some cases, rather disappointingly so. Even his closest friends, such as Durrell and Nin, express their consternation towards Miller’s descent into an even more base display of four-letter words. At the same time, in a sort of perverted blending of his contemporaries Joyce, Beckett and Stein, in The Rosy Crucifixion Miller extends issues of the obscene and the meaningless into his own display of musically literary absurdism. Moreover, not only does The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy sustain this shift towards sound and music in Miller seen in his non-fiction, it is also far more spiritual and philosophical than any of his prior works. Ultimately, in reaching Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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for a new kind of articulation, in The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy Miller produces many of the best passages of anything in his entire oeuvre. Musicality in Miller was first raised in Chapter 3 on Lewis Carroll in relation to both writers’ interest in the sound of words over their meaning. To repeat a key passage, Bursey writes, ‘The “music” means the “sounds” the reader is about to “hear”.’120 Compelling the reader to encounter the text at its acoustic level, Miller removes the possibility of conventional meaning from the words by completely stripping them down to their aural quality only. Comparatively, Mathieu points out that Rimbaud takes synaesthesia to a more significant level than ‘the common practitioner’ such that he ‘is prepared to run the risk of assigning arbitrary meanings to words in his desire to create bizarre and mysterious effects. The confusion of the senses and the deliberate refusal to accept commonplace lexical connotations of words are intricately and inextricably bound together in Rimbaud’s audacious “alchimie du verbe”’.121 Miller runs the same risk, and his words contort and bend their meaning under the strain of this focus on sound with uncertain definition. In Sexus, this musicality is coupled with Mathieu’s ‘incompatibleunion phrases’. Miller’s first sexual encounter with Mara as his new wife is an entire episode of this kind of language. Too lengthy to cite in toto, multiple excerpts have been extracted. Firstly, Miller writes of the anticipation of his own climax followed by Mara’s: his is ‘that incredibly aborted explosion of wet stars which drop back to the floor of the womb like dead snails’, and hers is ‘that frozen condensed-milk expression about that jaw’ with ‘the eyes and nostrils smoking like toasted acorns in a slightly wrinkled lake of pale skin’.122 As they are by the sea, Miller writes: From the ocean front came the boom of surf followed by a frying pan symphony of exasperated sheet metal cooling off in a drizzle at a hundred and thirty-nine degrees centigrade. The hotel was droning and purring like a fat and moribund swamp fly in the solitude of a pine forest.123

Describing the setting around the two, Miller adds: ‘Underfoot it was slimy and slippery, as if an army of zippered seals had been weaving it back and forth to the washroom all day long,’ while visible through open doors were ‘grotesquely plastic water nymphs’ with ‘mammiferous trundles of avoirdupois . . . of spun glass and ribbons of wet clay’.124 As the two repose, Miller provides an aural picture ‘spoken’ in a deadpan voice, as ‘night would fall poetically over the scene, like a shot of ptomaine poison wrapped in a rotten tomato’.125 In this particular episode, Miller also builds another notional ekphrastic image referred Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to as having a Renaissance quality.126 The words make the setting feel rich and dark, slow and sensual, like the sexual encounter to which it alludes. The language produces an atmosphere that feels thickly surreal and musical, heavily charged while tremendously slowing the passage of time. Language of this nature carries on in this episode until Miller finishes the description of their encounter by the sea, next by calling attention to aromas ‘from the factories and hospitals nearby’, which are of ‘exhausted chemicals’, ‘hair soaked in peepee’ and ‘useless organs’ that are ‘left to rot slowly through an eternity in sealed vessels labelled with great care and veneration’.127 The final statement overwhelms the entire passage with its evocation of an unexpected beauty, its musical predilection and its mystifying lexis: the rotting organs inside vessels experience ‘a brief twilight sleep in the arms of Morpheus the Danubian dachshund’.128 Before performing a reading of this passage, it must first be noted that obviously no reading could adequately suffice, simply due to the seemingly random peculiarity, but also the overwhelming and clearly deliberate abstruseness, of the language. However, this unfinalisability is precisely why such a passage must be regarded for its aural poetic expression, specifically its musical tonality and allusions. Part of what makes such a passage so innovating is its ability to elicit such a response while also permitting a reading that provides, in many ways, the very same response. The reading itself evokes a synaesthetic response in relation to sound and music. Suddenly, Morpheus, the mythological Greek god of dreams, is transformed into a Germanic dog of the Danube. The Danube recalls the Strauss waltz, while Morpheus becomes the comforting figure providing a sort of lullaby, and, finally, the dachshund reinforces several, very different, yet all sound or music-based, components: being a dachshund, the dog is not only already Germanic, but it is doubly Germanic in that it is ‘Danubian’, which then doubly recalls the waltz quality of the ‘twilight sleep’; the alliteration itself of the two words ‘Danubian’ and ‘dachshund’; and, finally, the prevalence of the dog theme that permeates Sexus, representing Miller as both free from the tyranny and madness of his life spiralling downward with Mara, while also keeping him cared for and controlled by it. Indeed, the entire novel ends with Miller, dreaming himself as a dog, barking ‘Woof! Woof , woof, woof!’129 That the dachshund is bred for its heightened sense of smell for badgerhunting also reflects Miller’s interest in drawing attention to sensory qualities and synaesthesia. Similarly, Mathieu notes that Rimbaud prided himself for having invented ‘the color of vowels’.130 ‘Vowels’ (‘Voyelles’) is Rimbaud’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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supreme example of synaesthesia, crossing language and letters with colour, sound, odour and tactility. Rimbaud gives each vowel a colour to which it corresponds. He then proceeds to expand on each one, saying, for example, ‘A, black hairy corset of shining flies / Which buzz around cruel stench, / Gulfs of darkness’, and ‘I, purples, spit blood, laughter of beautiful lips / In anger or penitent drunkenness; / U, cycles, divine vibrations of green seas, / Peace of pastures scattered with animals, peace of the wrinkles / Which alchemy prints on heavy studious brows’.131 In a similar manner to Miller’s episode in Sexus, the interpretation of Rimbaud’s poem yields the same result as does the focus upon its directly sonorous and generally sensory (even sensual) qualities. Whether metaphoric, symbolic or literal, each letter’s sensory associations are elicited through the way the poem sounds and is itself structured (each vowel being given specific points with which to identify it). In her article ‘On Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”’ Françoise Meltzer argues that ‘Vowels’ ironically discounts any hidden meaning in the way that, being directly reminiscent of fourteenth-century énigmes and the devinalhs of William IX, it precisely contains such hidden meanings as decipherable riddles that are ‘inside’ a language that denounces such evident meaning. Meltzer’s point is to suggest that Rimbaud was aware of this latent structure and through it evokes in the poem not just his interest in universal and spiritual mysteries as riddles of an endless nature, but his language is ‘brazen and mocking’132 in its double meaning or, perhaps, its self-denouncing meaning. Rimbaud utilises arbitrary signs in a systematic, very non-arbitrary structure. Miller adopts similar constructions in his work that appear haphazard and frenetic but that, upon closer inspection and refined attention, elicit an awareness of the link between self-effacing, openly ‘meaningless’ language and the self-same language that establishes the very depth and intensity of its structure. Miller learns from Rimbaud how appealing to one’s personal story and metaphysics draws attention back to the language and to the language’s simultaneous capacity and incapacity ultimately to pin down, in any complete sense, that singular experience of the universe. A mature writer by the time he was exposed to Rimbaud’s work, Miller was suddenly able to appreciate the overlapping fabric of the French poet’s legacy as a writer and as a persona. Most significant is how Miller’s maturity finally made him able to understand that he never could or would fully understand a writer like Rimbaud (or any writer), precisely because it is the enigmatic space between a writer and his or her work that creates the gap in the comprehension of a writer as anything but a persona with a name that stands for many things yet never at all for the person whom it marks. It took Miller eighteen years to reach Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Rimbaud, but even what he was able to reach Miller understood to be enormously insufficient ever to say that it was ‘Rimbaud’, either as a poet or as a person. It is difficult not to sum up Rimbaud based upon his renunciation of poetry and his final tragic death. Perhaps fittingly, the reader surrenders to the legacy and regards the poet as the persona he can only ever be in his death. In Rimbaud’s final letter (to his sister just before he died, yet without knowing he was going to die but thinking only of the impending recovery from the surgery of his newly amputated leg) he eerily foreshadows the empty doom that awaits each one, writing in his final lines: ‘Yes, our life is a misery, an endless misery! Why do we exist?’133 It is impossible for the reader to separate Rimbaud’s letter from the metaphysics it imparts, and it is precisely this impossibility that makes his legacy the haunting enigma that it still remains and that influenced Miller in his own grasp at a somewhat incidental writerly posterity. Engrossed in the French literary tradition, Miller was also deeply affected in his life and work by another enigmatic French writer: Marcel Proust, the subject of the coming chapter. From very different backgrounds and ultimately through very different approaches, Miller and Proust seem unlikely bedfellows. However, the astute reader finds Proust deeply embedded in Miller’s style, particularly in his interest in moving into the descriptive sensory possibilities at the fringes of conventional literary forms.

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Notes 1. Hummingbird, 171. 2. With his first wife, Beatrice Wickens (married 1917–28), Miller had a daughter, Barbara, about whom he has expressed his regrets in not being part of her upbringing. Miller was married to Janine Lepska from 1944 to 1952, with whom he had a second daughter and a son. Prior to Janine Lepska, Miller was married to the infamous June Mansfield, the Mara and Mona of the Obelisk and Rosy Crucifixion trilogies (married 1928–34). After Janine Lepska, Miller was married to Eve McClure from 1953 until 1960, and from 1967 until 1977 he was married to the young Japanese dancer, Hiroko Tokuda. Miller died in 1980. 3. Assassins, 4. 4. Ibid., 4–5. 5. As discussed in Chapter 2, Dostoevsky, in contrast, is problematised in a sense by which Miller elevates him to an abstracted, idealised image: an image of a writer that the man Dostoevsky has become, which is coupled with the curious status of being superhuman, as man-turned-writer. 6. ‘Hell’, 187; ‘– Je suis caché et je ne le suis pas’, ‘L’enfer’, 186. 7. Powell, 141.

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120 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way Assassins, 47. Ibid., 97. Ibid. Ibid. Rimbaud, Letters, 304. Ear, 8; ‘Il la reçoit du contrat inouï qu’il a passé avec lui-même. Il s’est endetté auprès de lui-même et nous y a impliqués par ce qui reste de son texte à force de signature’, L’Oreille, 20. Ibid., 10. Assassins, 95. Blinder, 143. Ibid., 146. Assassins, 46. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 111. Mathieu, 91. Plexus, 431. Sexus, 197. Assassins, 45. Nexus, 192. Ibid. Cancer, 163. Wallace Fowlie dedicates his 1965 study Rimbaud to Miller, which is a combining and rewriting of his Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood (1946) and his Rimbaud: Illuminations (1953). Shapiro, vi. Assassins, 12. Mathieu, 74. Fowlie, Orpheus, xi. Ibid., xi. Ibid. Mathieu, 8. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 35. Fowlie, Rimbaud, 127. Ibid., 127. Mathieu, 11. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Kugel, 75. Mathieu, 75.

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The Drunken Inkwell – Arthur Rimbaud 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

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Ibid., 135. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 137. Powell, 141. Fowlie, Rimbaud, 87. Ibid., 87–8. Assassins, 27. Ibid., 37. ‘Alchemy’, 195; ‘L’hallucination des mots!’ ‘Alchimie’, Une Saison un enfer, 194. ‘Hell’, 185; ‘Il n’y a personne ici et il y a quelqu’un’, ‘L’Enfer’, 184. Ibid., 185; ‘Je vais dévoiler tous les mystères: mystères religieux ou naturels, mort, naissance, avenir, passé, cosmogonie, néant. Je suis maître en fantasmagories. Écoutez! . . .’, ‘L’Enfer’, 184. ‘Blood’, 181; ‘Me connais-je?’, ‘Sang’, 180. Ibid., 181; ‘– Plus de mots’, ‘Sang’, 180. Ibid., 181; ‘Vite! est-il d’autres vies?’, ‘Sang’, 180. Mathieu, 140. Season, 209; ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’, Saison, 208. Assassins, 57. Ibid., 55–6. Colossus, 39–40. Ibid., 42–3. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 7–8. ‘Blood’, 177; ‘J’ai horreur de la patrie’, ‘Sang’, 176. Ibid., 177; ‘Reviendrai avec des membres de fer, la peau sombre, l’œil furieux’, ‘Sang’, 176. Ibid., 175; ‘La main à plume vaut la main à charrue’, ‘Sang’, 174. Ibid., 175; ‘– Je n’aurai jamais ma main’, ‘Sang’, 174. Colossus, 14. Ibid., 212–13. ‘Childhood’, 219; ‘Je serais bien l’enfant abandonné sur la jetée partie à la haute mer, le petit valet suivant l’allée dont le front touche le ciel’, ‘Enfance’, 218. Colossus, 239. ‘Childhood’, 181; ‘Cris, tambour, danse, danse, danse, danse! Je ne vois même pas l’heure où, les blancs débarquant, je tomberai au néant’, ‘Enfance’, 180. Colossus, 21. Mathieu, 4. Assassins, vii. Ibid., viii. Ibid., ix. Ibid. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 125.

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122

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94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way Mathieu, 12–13. Brown, Miller, 72. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73. Blinder, 144. Ibid., 148. Mathieu, 76. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 77–8. Colossus, 90. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 211. Assassins, 5. Nexus, 196. Ibid., 197. Mathieu, 104. Mathieu, 111. Ibid. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 110. Assassins, 5–6. Blinder, 138. Bursey, 28. Mathieu, 180. Sexus, 132. Ibid., 132. Ibid. Ibid., 133. For more on Miller and ekphrasis, again see The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (Camden House, 2011). Sexus, 133. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 463. Mathieu, 192. ‘Vowels’, 121; ‘A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes / Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles, / Golfes d’ombre’ . . . ‘I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles / Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes; / U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides, / Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides / Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux’, ‘Voyelles’, 120. Meltzer, 334. Rimbaud, Letters, 363; ‘Enfin, notre vie est une misère, une misère sans fin! Pourquoi donc existons-nous?’, Letters, 362.

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Chapter 5

In Search of Lost Allusion – Marcel Proust

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Proust, having totally divorced himself from his body, except as a sensory instrument for reviving the past, gave to the human individuality thereby an entirely irreligious quality. His religion was ART – i.e., the process. For Proust the personality was fixed: it could come unglued, so to speak, be peeled off layer by layer, but the thought that lay behind this process was of something solid, already determined, imperishable, and altogether unique. – Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart (1960)1

On first glance, Proust and Miller could not appear to be more different – as writers but also as human beings. The former was a delicate, bourgeois recluse from the wealthy outskirts of Paris; the latter a gregarious, hardboiled scavenger from blue-collar Brooklyn. Yet these two writers meet profoundly in the space of literature. They both explore and tread upon similar issues in their work, in the world of the everyday. Yet they move through very different styles as they aim toward the ordinary, as it is stretched and prodded to reveal intangible truths. One might say it is actually the tone and not the style that distinguishes these two writers most strongly. After all, Miller emulates Proust in many ways, including the manipulation of his longwinded, intricate style that manages to address time, mortality, memory, existence and other phenomenological concepts embedded within common subject matter. Generally speaking, Proust heavily impacted Miller’s life and writing by drawing out from him what was already present. To return to Baxandall’s concept of intertextuality as a reversal of ‘the active/ passive relation’ between the historical author and the later author,2 Miller is attracted to Proust because of his own compulsion to write in a similarly peripheral vein. In a letter to Emil Schnellock dated April 1932, Miller writes: ‘I’ve gotten over the idea of writing literature, if you can understand what I mean by that.’3 Moving to Paris in 1930 and immersing himself wholly in French literature and culture, Miller sought to become the writer that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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he felt himself innately to be, as finally revealed to him after reading Proust shortly before leaving America. In the same letter to Schnellock, he continues: ‘This means, in a word, that coincident with my leaving America I chucked overboard all my preconceived notions about literature.’4 What Miller is about to produce at this point is by no standards conventional literature, and this development is in direct relation both to his interest in his ancestral authors (particularly the French, like Proust, Rabelais and Rimbaud), and to his leaving America for Paris to fulfil his self-declared writerly destiny. Consequently, the intertextual references to Proust surface in a variety of ways in Miller’s oeuvre. There are direct references to him, and there are also adaptations of style and form, such as Miller’s use of a markedly Proustian ekphrasis, as in Sexus. Beyond the direct references, Proust obviously also enters Miller unconsciously, such as in Black Spring, according to the critic George Wickes, in its ‘view of coexistent time and place stimulated by memory and the senses’.5 Miller’s work is replete with Proustian themes and detailed descriptions. In terms of reverse influence, the impact of Miller upon Proust studies is far more significant than one might first think: much of Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Proust in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) is coupled with their reading of Miller. Thus reading Proust with any tendency towards Deleuze – a very central figure in Proust studies – automatically includes a substantial, and yet heavily concealed, component from Miller. Beginning with direct allusions, the reader finds Miller frequently referring to Proust in his criticism, such as in the collection of essays The Cosmological Eye or, in small part, The Books in My Life and, in large part, his correspondences with Michael Fraenkel, Anaïs Nin and Emil Schnellock. More so than even Dostoevsky, Proust is probably the most sacred of writers for Miller, revealed in the individual manner in which he includes him in his work. Consequently, direct references to Proust are never playful as with Mann, Carroll, Dostoevsky and others. Proust is also never a character as several others are. This reverence obviously does not discount Miller from criticising Proust. In his critical works, Miller draws attention to his admiration of Proust, but more significantly to his admonishment of what he perceives to be Proust’s morose disposition. In ‘The Universe of Death’ from The Cosmological Eye Miller writes: ‘Whatever has happened in literature since Dostoievski has happened on the other side of death.’6 With this comment, Miller is particularly referencing both Joyce and Proust and how, instead of challenging stagnancy in art and ‘establishing a new relationship with the world’, they simply ‘reflect the times’.7 For Miller this means that they Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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do not struggle against the imaginary yet debilitating division of art and life but instead enable it. Distinct from all the writers discussed thus far, Miller considers himself more akin to Proust as a writer and thus regards him to a far lesser degree as an idol. In effect Proust was Miller’s contemporary, and, whether consciously on principle or not, Miller did not revere any author who lived during his own lifetime in the same way that he worshipped those ancestral authors mentioned in previous chapters (such as those writers mentioned in the Introduction: Stein, Hemingway and Joyce). Certainly Miller did not consider himself an equal with Proust in terms of literary quality, but he does see himself as fulfilling a similar writerly legacy. Miller identifies profoundly with Proust’s vision of the artist and of the impossible task of literary writing. In The Books in My Life Miller writes, Proust ‘walled himself in to expose the absurdity and the emptiness of our feverish activity’.8 Highly critical of Proust’s style as well, Miller finds him to be paralysed by his own detailed descriptions. Miller aligns Proust with James Joyce in The Cosmological Eye, suggesting both are obsessed with death and decay. Such a style, Miller writes, is equal to ‘surrender, suicide, and the more poignant since it springs from creative sources’.9 Ultimately, Proust is an alter ego for Miller and his impossible quest for vitality through writing: Proust inspires him but also drives him down a seemingly radically divergent path. In Proust Miller sees ‘art a substitute for life’.10 He calls Proust and Joyce ‘defeatists’, declaring how they ‘escape from a cruel, hideous, loathsome reality into ART’.11 Proust, incapable of ‘seizing anew the sense of death on which all art is founded, and reacting creatively to it’, instead enacts a ‘worship of art for its own sake – not for man’.12 At the same time, Miller is all the more impressed by this mode of Proust’s, because he produces a ‘literature of flight, of escape, of a neurosis so brilliant that it almost makes one doubt the efficacy of health’.13 Extraordinarily convincing and successful in the act of writing as aided by his neurosis, Proust creates ‘the tomb of art’, and Joyce follows by producing its ‘decomposition’.14 Ultimately less forgiving of Joyce’s approach, Miller suggests that Proust’s ‘escape’ into a neurosis-driven literature that is completely removed from life is so beautiful and persuasive that perhaps it altogether overpowers and outweighs ‘health’, in terms of healthy writing or a healthy outlook. Such a strong statement alerts Miller’s reader to be aware of the effects of such a personal investment in Proust in his work. That is to say, Miller too removes his writing from life. In contradistinction to Proust, Miller does so on the side of entrenching his writing so deeply in life that it produces a similar effect Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to Proust’s extraction from life: it calls attention to the act of writing itself and to the very possibility or distinction of such a division between art and life. In Hamlet, Miller encourages his correspondent (Michael Fraenkel, but also his reader in general) to ‘think of life as a symphony of color’15 and to imagine different epochs under the influence of one colour more than another. Miller provides a system for deciphering the colours, in terms of their metaphysical value and social significance (for example: ‘a vernal green would be characteristic of the springtime of a great culture’).16 Subsequently, Miller warns: ‘The artist who works exclusively in the key of blue is doomed, however great his ability . . . Such are the works of Proust and Joyce – monumental edifices in cold, pale blue.’17 He goes on to say: ‘Rich tones of brown in Joyce, beautiful melancholy grays in Proust – but their compositions set in the fatal key of blue.’18 Despite this seeming attack on Proust and Joyce (with its curiously synaesthetic overtones), what is most noteworthy is the positive role that Proust plays, even in such a morbid analysis, in Miller’s own writing and in his perpetual quest as a writer. Proust is central for Miller, both a foil and a mirror. Even though Miller criticises Proust’s retreat from the real world, Miller knows that he too cannot evade this necessity in writing, and he reveres Proust for the extraordinary literary feats he achieves through it. Proust’s ‘myopia’, as Miller calls it in ‘The Universe of Death’, ‘served to render his work exciting, stimulating’.19 Particularly, Miller declares, Proust’s writing on ‘jealousy and doubt’ in the Albertine episodes from In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu, 1913–27; in English, 1922–30) is so extraordinary that it makes Shakespeare’s work on Hamlet and Othello ‘by comparison, resemble the feeble sketches which later are to assume the dimensions of a great fresco’.20 Shakespeare’s renderings pale precisely because Proust completes the task of which Shakespeare was but one of the first steps. Proust is ‘the sick giant who locks himself up in a cork-lined cell to take his brains apart. He is the incarnation of that last and fatal disease: the disease of the mind.’21 Shakespeare’s work is thus only a mere rough draft of what is to come hundreds of years later in the work of Proust. If Shakespeare produces ‘swashbuckling oratory and pasteboard sets’, Proust depicts a ‘formidable picture of the world-as-disease’.22 Proust provides ‘the deterioration of the heroic’ and ‘the ruins of a world in collapse’.23 Miller goes on to say that Proust’s ‘microscopic study’ of everyday reality is so tremendous and accurate that, to the reader, it inadvertently appears to magnify reality by its precision and detail.24 Once again, adapting a similar quality himself, Miller magnifies reality Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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by saturating his descriptions often with images impossible to imagine or, alternatively, incomplete and unimaginable images that constantly, yet impossibly, try to reach out from the page with vivid colour, sound and other sensory allusions. The beginning of Tropic of Cancer provides a poignant example: Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès. The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular mélange of all the cities of Europe and Central America.25

The reader is invited to visualise the scene, with colour, texture, sight, even sound. However, not only can no such image come to mind, but Miller announces the absence of place altogether, leaving only the intangible, yet fully realisable, sensory perceptions themselves before the mind’s eye, suspended without a grounding foothold. At the other extreme, surrendering to the ‘stagnant flux’, according to Miller,26 Proust creates characters that really ‘live’ despite appearing distorted ‘through dissection and analysis’.27 Miller writes:

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Proust, imaging himself to be making of his life a book, of his suffering a poem, exhibits through his microscopic and caustic analysis of man and society the plight of the modern artist for whom there is no faith, no meaning, no life. His work is the most triumphant monument to disillusionment that has ever been erected.28

For this reason, Miller calls Proust a realist and ‘a man of the 19th century, with all the tastes, the ideology, and the respect for the powers of the conscious mind’.29 Developing a ‘new analytic psychology’,30 Proust reinvents traditional realism by examining life at the level of art while remaining in art and never himself entering life or allowing life to enter his work. When Miller analyses Proust in relation to Impressionism, Miller reveals more directly his own stylistic affinities with Proust. Miller calls Proust’s literary method the ‘counterpart’ to Impressionism, which is ‘the process of examining the medium itself, of subjecting the external world to microscopic analysis, thereby creating a new perspective and hence the illusion of a new world’.31 Miller enacts this process in his own work, creating a new world wholly separate from the external world in its articulation of that world from a perspective that is imaginable precisely through its awareness of itself as the writerly medium. In Plexus, describing a dream, Miller writes: The street has no beginning nor end: it is a detached segment swimming in a fuzzy aura and complete in itself. A vibrant portion of the infinite whole . . .

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[The street] is alive with memories, like an arcane grove which pullulates with its swarms of invisible hosts. I can’t say that I walk down this street, nor can I say either that I glide through it. The street invests me. I am devoured by it. Perhaps only in the insect world are there sensations to match this harrowing form of bliss. To eat is wonderful, but to be eaten is a treat beyond description. Perhaps it is another, more extravagant, kind of union with the external world. An inverted sort of communion.32

Also evoking Kafka with reference to ‘the insect world’ of The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915; in English, 1937) and the incongruous bliss of the ‘harrow’ from In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie, 1914; in English, 1948) that writes its message of judgement upon the flesh of the prisoner, Miller presents an intangible universe that appears tangible by creating a text that is infested with his language of self-conscious awareness. He also employs this Proustian approach of exploiting detail to the point of distortion, conflating sensory experiences that overlap and intermingle, resulting in a sensory experience itself that is ‘beyond description’. In Proust this kind of writing amounts to him discovering, as Miller writes, ‘that frontier between dream and reality’, which, henceforth, becomes the ‘domain of the truly creative artists’.33 Consequently, to fulfil his destiny as a writer, Miller takes from Proust this impulse to write between dream and reality, while leaving behind the nineteenth-century realist. Incidentally, in a letter to Schnellock in 1933, Miller alludes to the significance of Proust and the nineteenth century directly in his own life. In this letter, Miller begins by demonstrating his technique of thought sequences pieced and strung together leading him to arrive, as if randomly yet ever so calculatedly, at a particular literary destination. In this instance, the resulting destination is the embedded link between himself and Proust and the assertion: ‘I am proud that I was born in the 19th century.’34 Miller arrives at this revelation having first begun relaying to Schnellock his interest in writing a book on film. Miller begins by describing the ‘delicate’ and ‘lovely’ effect of watching a Lubitsch film in French with Lubitsch’s ‘pursuit of fragile surface contours’ which ‘lends to every movement, every object, a musical value’. During his reflections on Lubitsch, ‘who not only retards time, not only arrests it, but he imprisons it in a mirror whose lies have the perfection of their own’,35 Miller is spied by a whore watching him take money from his wallet. That they both know Miller holds a fifty-franc note causes ‘a mutual smile’, both coy and irreverent, ‘based on a profound misunderstanding’, both aware of the note’s ‘full value’, which Miller finds charming and very ‘18th century’.36 Next, Miller has thoughts ‘of horses and buggies’ and ‘of the tempo of before the turn of the century, of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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period which marks us as men of another generation’,37 which leads him to announce: ‘And I am proud that I was born in the 19th century and not in the 18th or the 20th.’38 The statement which immediately follows and which reveals his next thought contains the most significant connection: ‘I think of the spires of Martinville which Proust glimpsed from an open carriage, and I think to myself – that is how one must always remember the spires of Martinville – from an open carriage.’39 Having reached its peak, the thought sequence then begins to wind down, with the Proustian reference in turn connecting Miller back to an experience in an open carriage along the Delaware River, apparently many years before in America. Finally, the passage ends as far removed as possible from the beginning, as Miller muses over ‘the horses farting’ and how such things were not offensive or embarrassing in such a past. Miller’s stylistic foothold is in the twentieth century. The end of this passage in Miller’s letter to Schnellock, even with its sense of the past as holding ‘full value’, has a momentum and tone that does not particularly impart nostalgia. The references to the past, rather, sustain Miller’s aura of vitality in the present. Even as the image of Proust in an open carriage dominates the essence of the scene, it is a present and vibrant image, forward rushing toward Martinville with the cool, fresh air in his face. It seems that Miller might use Proust here to reinforce the ‘profound misunderstanding’ occurring between him, the whore and the fifty-franc note – which is to say that Proust is used to reflect vitality, to resurrect him in brightness and vigour, qualities Miller does not attribute to Proust as a writer but as a man of the nineteenth century riding in a carriage with a glimpse of the spires of Martinville. The connection to the past and to the importance of the past is never lost in Miller even though his technique is radically forward-looking. Yet this forward-looking itself contains a moving past. The image of Proust riding in an open carriage is itself almost comic, considering not only Miller’s analysis of Proust’s work as morbid and stagnant, but also in light of the biographical knowledge indicating Proust’s general poor health and reclusive, nocturnal behaviour. In The Books in My Life Miller furthers this view of Proust, quoting Arnaud Dandieu, who writes that Proust was ‘the most living of the dead’.40 From Dandieu’s claim, Miller develops his belief that Proust has succeeded in producing a form of writing that destroys itself through its own self-awareness – a task Miller also seems to undertake but instead with an effort toward vitality. In the Hamlet correspondence with Fraenkel, Miller writes: People speak of the great beauty of Proust’s descriptions, his marvellous delineation of natural phenomena – but it seems overlooked that they are

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marvellous intellectual descriptions. His landscapes, his flowers, his sky, his ocean are all in the head, all interior paintings, all done blindfolded. They are reminiscent studies, reminiscent portraits, reminiscent paintings. All woven out of regret, out of melancholy and yearning. Proust has given us the most wonderful mausoleum of Nature; all the objects which his vision had once cherished are preserved in wax under a glass bell. Never is there a careless, an insouciant touch. No flower is allowed to perish, no sky permitted to fade. Everything is preserved with infinite care, infinite pains – so as to live on in death forever.41

It is a caustic yet still approving assessment of Proust. Miller does not disdain this reminiscent quality but indeed uses his awareness of it to elevate Proust, as he writes to Anaïs Nin in 1932, for ‘seeing with the naked eye, accepting, subjugating by reason and intellect’.42 Miller also uses this analysis to draw a sharp division between himself and Proust and then consciously to create a style of his own that is parallel but also in contradistinction. In these instances of Miller’s correspondence with his literary compatriots, Miller makes quick allusions to an element or two of Proust’s style or a short reference, which are then always included in his general appraisal of Proust. As Miller’s self-appointed alter ego, Proust clearly occupies a central position in Miller’s work. Proust is simultaneously the thief and the source of Miller’s greatest literary revelations. In another letter to Nin from 1932, at which time Miller was reading Proust for the first time in French, he writes, ‘The man seems to take the words out of my mouth, to rob me of my very own experiences, sensations, reflections, introspections, suspicions, sadness, torture, etc. etc. etc.’43 Miller recognises that Proust’s descriptions are realistic and persuasive precisely due to their ‘distortion’, setting him apart from traditional literary realism. Miller’s despair is not resultant merely from a case of discovering himself already revealed in Proust but from the effects that Proust produces in his writing as a whole and how his reader is able to personalise them, almost unconsciously. In ‘The Universe of Death’ Miller writes how the social class from which Joyce, Lawrence and Proust came ‘determined the choice of the protagonist as well as the nature of the disease against which they fought’.44 Charlus from In Search of Lost Time is Proust’s ‘king figure’ and thus becomes ‘a bitter object of ridicule’.45 Significantly, Miller writes then that these three writers have ‘idealized in the person of the hero those qualities which they felt themselves to lack supremely.’46 Charlus represents, according to Miller, a ‘symbol of the dying world of caste, ideals, manners, etc.’47 Miller describes how Proust ultimately was always on the fringe or outside of the world that he depicted and thus uses Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Charlus as a character for ridicule based on his own personal disdain. In the attempt to conquer his ‘perpetual effort to become part of this hostile world’ that is forever thwarted by an ‘inability to become assimilated’, Proust ends by ‘rejecting it or destroying it’.48 The two elements that keep Proust on the outside of this closed, gentile and bourgeois world are, according to Miller, his Jewish heritage and his homosexuality. For these reasons, Miller speculates, Proust uses Charlus as the image that he himself would become in his later life ‘in his unnatural effort to become assimilated’ as a homosexual Jew.49 Similarly, Miller creates his own protagonist ‘Henry Miller’ as an image of himself who, at the outset, is nothing of the kind. He is an exaggerated avatar, like Proust’s Charlus, whom Miller calls a ‘sort of cultivated Chaplin’.50 ‘Henry Miller’ is everything that Miller himself might wish to be. Miller also produces a text that permits the reader to identify both with the author and the character as one and the same and be convinced of their slippery interchangeability. Reading Proust now in French, Miller writes to Anaïs Nin in 1932 that he feels as though Proust’s massive work has been written for him exclusively because of the very personal feelings it evokes in him. Miller mistakenly attributes this response to his own familiarity with the material, not recognising this power, on the whole, of Proust’s technique. Identifying with the simultaneous pleasure and pain of reading his work and comparing Proust’s Albertine with his beloved June, Miller writes: ‘That is why reading Proust is a form of ecstatic suffering.’51 Both when writing this letter to Nin and in the ‘The Universe of Death’, Miller alludes to this familiar material as ‘doubt and jealousy’ such that Proust and Miller collectively are ‘thrown out of their normal axes’ and hence ‘play diabolical roles’.52 Writing to Nin, Miller says: Proust is going to my head . . . Truly, this symphonic treatment of jealousy is so immense, so thoroly annotated and documented, that it exhausts the subject . . . I am less aware – much less – of the beauty of his language, his nuances etc. It is the content which grips me, the feeling . . . Instead of being fed up by the excessive massing of detail, by the repetitions with variations which he employs so skilfully, I am fascinated and dread the inevitable end. There is no end, truly, to such a treatment as he uses. It is as limitless as the universe itself.53

The ‘excessive massing of detail’ speaks to Miller not simply because he has experienced the weight of jealousy but because Proust uses this ‘distortion’ (as Miller calls it later in ‘The Universe of Death’) to heighten and exemplify the sensory experience. Proust’s ability to capture timelessness (that is, the perpetual movement of time) in the static, frozen time of literature moves Miller to attempt similar techniques in his own work. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Proust is wholly persuasive in form and style in such a manner that the reader intimately feels, in a realistic, accurate sense, what Proust writes, despite – or, rather, due to – its unnaturalness and excessiveness. The style itself does not portray reality, but the sensation that it produces convinces the reader that what is being written is truer to life than anything. In The Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes, 1920–21; in English, 1927) Proust writes:

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We should never succeed in identifying objects if we did not bring some process of reasoning to bear on them. How often, when driving, do we not come upon a bright street beginning a few feet away from us, when what we have actually before our eyes is merely a patch of wall glaringly lit which has given us the mirage of depth! In view of which is it not logical, not by any artifice of symbolism but by a sincere return to the very root of the impression, to represent one thing by that other for which, in the flash of a first illusion, we mistook it? Surfaces and volumes are in reality independent of the names of objects which our memory imposes on them after we have recognised them.54

This illusion constitutes the reader’s apprehension of reality in Proust’s work. The illusion then itself, of extensive, exaggerated description, is more real than the real, because it articulates the sensation of actual recognition. Using the metaphor of driving to explain the sensation of the experience of painting as more evocative of reality than reality itself, Proust indicates that it is the impression which matters and not the reality behind it. The mixing of sensory experiences in Proust is acutely connected to memory. Proust’s infamous use of ‘involuntary memory’ has profound significance for Miller. In The Books in My Life, Miller proclaims: ‘The only kind of memory I wish to preserve is the Proustian sort.’55 He makes this assertion while admitting to a poor memory but also to his ability to recall something if necessary, ‘though it may take considerable time and effort’.56 ‘Nothing is lost,’ Miller writes.57 What is important is that a well of experience exists, whether or not it can be recalled in precise detail at all times. Of his memory, Miller says, ‘The flavor, savor, the aroma, the ambiance, as well as the value or non-value of a thing, I never forget.’58 All of the sensations of memory are forever present or can be made present through some evocation, through the involuntary summoning of memory via experience. The Proustian memory is the intangible, unanticipated recollection grounded in the existence of the permanent well of experience. ‘To know that there is this infallible, total, exact memory is sufficient for me.’59 As Miller sees it, a ‘Proustian memory’ is the result of Proust’s ability to produce in writing an array of multiple sensory experiences, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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connected and collective, that evokes for the character at hand an acute mixing of the senses, revealed through memory. It is as though the character’s sensory encounter permits an extracting of memory from a well that is then presented before the mind’s eye. Surprised by Proust’s accessibility in being read, as he begins In Search of Lost Time in French, and after hearing so much to the contrary, Miller writes to Nin, ‘Whatever caused the stir? Aside from the excrescence of language, there was nothing here to frighten anyone.’60 He continues by calling Proust ‘absolutely conventional, classic. But oh what a treat. That perpetual sundering of veils, those terrible glimpses into reality, into a fate more cruel because it is so entirely different’.61 Despite being ‘absolutely conventional’, Proust’s ‘sundering of veils’ appeals to Miller’s Nietzschean compulsion to expose himself and his reader to an unexplored rawness of life, unprotected by otherwise false pretence in traditional literary forms. What Proust reveals that is ‘so entirely different’ is this perspective on reality that appears as a ‘distortion’ of reality, which is manifest in these ‘terrible glimpses into reality’ – Proust’s profound contribution to literature. Miller carries his analysis of Proust’s ‘sundering of veils’ directly into his fiction, specifically in an episode from Tropic of Cancer in which Miller embeds Proust into a highly complex ekphrastic scene. It is made all the more remarkable by the various layers in reference: Miller is standing before a painting of Matisse that evokes for him Proust’s work which evokes Matisse. This circular, ekphrastic linking subsequently compels Miller to remark on Proust’s living ‘pictures’ of Albertine and Balbec as inspired by the ‘poems’ of Matisse,62 further expanding not only the crossing of sensory experiences but of literary techniques, expectations and subsequent evocations. Miller writes: Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created I reexperienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art.63

Reasserting his claims in his critical works concerning Proust to Nin, Fraenkel and Schnellock, Miller here expresses and displays his Proustian reverence in action. Like Miller’s concept of ‘distortion’ from ‘The Universe of Death’ used to describe Proust’s style, here Miller uses ‘deform’ to indicate how Proust affects ‘the picture of life’. This deforming then actively ‘transforms’ that which Miller refers to as ‘negative reality’, which then becomes art. It is again Proust’s exaggerative quality Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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that appeals to Miller as that which distinctly produces fleeting instances of art from life. ‘Negative reality’ is, in effect, life in its unreasoned, unassessed form. Miller contends that Proust transforms this not into art itself, so to speak, but into ‘the substantial and significant outlines of art’. As Miller makes evident in his own work, art, specifically literature, is itself always an incomplete process. Because art is this perpetual process, it necessarily requires the endless labour of the writer to undertake the task of its creation. The writer constantly moves from ‘negative reality’ into the space of writing, altering the former by bringing it to the latter. This task of the writer demands the ability to transcend and move in both realms. Looking at a Matisse and having just described a living scene with Albertine ‘gliding through the surf’,64 Miller writes:

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The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into hungry seeing mouths. By whatever vision one passes there is the odor and the sound of voyage.65

Speaking here of Matisse – and of Matisse as a ‘poet’ of painting – Miller also extrapolates the significance of translating sensory experiences across mediums. Miller obviously also attributes a crossing of the senses to Proust, as Miller conscientiously illustrates the heightening effects for the reader that it produces by Proust’s writing. As the alchemist turns one medium into another, Proust – and Miller through his understanding of Proust – does the same by transforming life into ‘the outlines of art’ by being ‘sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense’. Putting life into words, as Proust does, requires this ability to understand the fluidity and saturation between the senses. The manner in which Miller portrays this effect in his own work is by re-infusing his own interpenetrating senses of life into the work of Proust, as itself a living picture. During the Matisse viewing, which recalls Proust, he writes: Vividly now I recall how the glint and sparkle of light caroming from the massive chandeliers splintered and ran blood, flecking the tips of the waves that beat monotonously on the dull gold outside the windows. On the beach, masts and chimneys interlaced, and like a fuliginous shadow the figure of Albertine gliding through the surf, fusing into the mysterious quick and prism of a protoplasmic realm, uniting her shadow to the dream and harbinger of death. With the close of day, pain rising like a mist from the earth, sorrow closing in shuttering the endless vista of sea and sky.66

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another in a way that allows the writing to successfully inject life, ‘negative reality’ into words (even if it is ‘reminiscent’ life, as Miller claims). Miller recreates that but, in his way, sustains the vigour of life, partly by describing a literary image of Proust’s back into his own text as though it were an image of the world but maintaining the very evident fact that it is not. Not only is the reader aware that Miller is standing in front of a Matisse painting merely thinking of Proust, but the reader hence also registers that all of this is itself the back-story to a very static literary description in a book called Tropic of Cancer. Not only is there no Albertine on the surf, there is no Proust, no Matisse and even no Miller. Proust’s descriptions are as far removed from reality as ever, not simply because they are borne in literature but because Proust’s work is precisely never written in a straightforward, factual style. Instead, Proust writes in a manner in which things are truthfully sensed in real life (tasted, touched, heard and so on), whereas the descriptions in language that depict those sensations must then be enormously exaggerated and magnified beyond any possible, actual experience in order to transmit the essence of the sensation. The ‘Combray’ section of Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), depicting the psychological torment experienced by the narrator who longs for his mother’s good night kiss, serves as an eminent example.

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My remorse was quieted, I gave in to the sweetness of that night in which I had my mother close to me. I knew that such a night could not be repeated; that the greatest desire I had in the world, to keep my mother in my room during those sad hours of darkness, was too contrary to the necessities of life and the wishes of others for its fulfilment, granted this night, to be anything other than artificial and exceptional.67

In reality, a child, though he or she may have such sensations and emotions, does not articulate despair to him or herself in this manner. Proust demonstrates with this technique how writing becomes something truly real, original and creative only when it distances itself from life and yet also pushes closer toward an intimacy with life that is curiously impossible in life itself. Miller uses Proust’s technique of ‘excessive massing of detail’ and ‘distortion’, as he writes in the letters to Nin, not in order to establish for the reader an affinity directly with the sensory experience depicted, in the manner that Proust lengthens a sensory experience in order to highlight its effect, but to draw attention to the technique itself as evocative. In the chapter entitled ‘A Saturday Afternoon’ in Black Spring, Miller offers advice to his writer friends who seem to ‘never get beyond the opening’ of their novels. He writes, ‘Begin! That’s the principal thing. Supposing Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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her nose is not aquiline? Supposing it’s a celestial nose? What difference? When a portrait commences badly it’s because you’re not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you.’68 Miller claims to write not for the reader but for the sensation of the experience, for the technique itself of connecting life with and through the act of writing. In Miller, the sensory experience is still evoked but through an inverted distortion of the sensory experience, such that the content of the passage does not directly correspond to the resulting effect in the reader as it does in Proust. For instance, even this passage evokes a nonexistent portrait of a woman in the process of being created through writing but who, the reader assumes from Miller’s cheeky reference, is ‘sitting’ for the writer – as would a model for a painter. When Proust’s narrator writes of his longing for his mother, the reader feels the longing while also engaging in an awareness of the ‘distortion’ of the writing. To evoke a similar sense of longing, Miller, however, writes not through an exaggerated sense of the longing but through a meta-textual display of the tool of writing that permits that longing. In one of his clearly Proustian moments, if unconscious or at least unacknowledged, Miller recalls with firm clarity in Tropic of Capricorn a vivid summer of childhood spent at his cousin’s place that in some ways resembles Marcel’s at Combray. The episode is significant for several reasons: Miller relays the tale of himself and his cousin accidentally killing a child,69 their angelic innocence nevertheless, the intense savouring of sensory experiences, the subsequent recollection of memory in adulthood and the destruction of the self through loss of memory. This last component may be the most important, because it demonstrates for Miller the resonance of memory upon one’s sense of self – as a collection of items over the course of life that constitute the individual. If they should be tarnished, the individual itself loses meaning and permanence. The episode begins with Cousin Gene and Miller-the-child engaged in a rock fight, during which they accidentally knock down a boy who later dies. They return home taking their ‘usual two big slices of sour rye with fresh butter and a little sugar over it’, while appearing very well behaved, ‘with an angelic smile’.70 They carry on with a child’s typical summer day, playing marbles and being privileged with a glimpse of ‘what was underneath’ the dress of a neighbour girl. Twenty years later, Miller encounters his cousin Gene for the first time, now ‘working in a factory making fancy pipe cases’,71 who doesn’t remember the incident at all in such vivid detail. This state of Gene’s adult memory affects Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Miller profoundly, renders him ‘terribly despondent’, such that he felt Gene ‘had attempted to eradicate a precious part of [Miller’s] life, and himself with it’.72 For Miller, not only is such a lucid, bright memory essential to his well-being, but he recounts how the sensory experiences of his memories can outweigh corresponding actual moments, drawing a direct link with Proust’s involuntary memory and the infamous madeleine episode at the beginning of ‘Combray’. Defying contemporaneous assessments of Miller’s affinity with Céline, in Americans in Paris Wickes supports the above analysis, as he writes: ‘He is closer to Proust in his vivid recollections of childhood.’73 Looking at Miller’s deliberate yet natural descriptions of childhood as linked with memory and charged with unspoken significance, the reader immediately detects the presence of Proust. Miller writes: ‘There are times, in fact, when the taste of that big slice of sour rye which his mother handed me that afternoon is stronger in my mouth than the food I am actually tasting.’74 As a somewhat inverted depiction of Proust’s madeleine episode, Miller is describing not the recalling of memory through the savouring of the actual food in his mouth, but the invasion of the recollected flavour overpowering the present moment. Less an inversion than a distinctly different approach (or even the ‘next step’ to Proust’s involuntary memory), Miller’s memory is depicted as even more mnemonically powerful than Proust’s, such that the actual food in Miller’s mouth is already only incidental (if it, in fact, was at all responsible for conjuring the memory and the recollected rye flavour). This idea of superseding Proust in his involuntary memory can be connected to Steven G. Kellerman’s analysis in The Self-Begetting Novel (1980), where he posits a theory vaguely similar to Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’. However, Kellerman’s theory applies directly to the narrator – in this instance, in Miller’s text – rather than to the author himself. Kellerman writes: The narrator is intent on incorporating and surpassing his predecessors. And so a network of internal cross-reference among their fiction results: Murdoch evokes Sartre, Durrell evokes Proust, [Doris] Lessing evokes Miller, etc. The epic of ‘Proust’s great poem,’ ‘the great academy of time-consciousness,’ haunts Durrell’s tetralogy, and it is concurrence rather than coincidence that Miller’s Henry resurrects his Brooklyn childhood among Aunt Caroline and Cousin Gene by biting into a thick slice of rye bread.75

‘Concurrence’ evokes Proustian ‘involuntary memory’ and Bergsonian durée. Kellerman also witnesses Miller’s control of memory as an identifying tool and not as an external marker by which to measure the passage of time. Miller’s memories are as present as the actual present moment. Using this tool in his work also demonstrates how writing itself Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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is a medium of ‘concurrence’ and not at all of ‘coincidence’ in the sense that the deliberate words are static but moving, simultaneous but read in succession. Because Miller writes about writing, his story is always simply about the narrator becoming a writer, struggling to write, attempting to produce anything meaningful or significant and speaking of fear and reverence for his influences. Incessantly writing about the act of writing, he expresses his anxiety, for example, in Nexus: Think, for just a moment, of such willing victims as Blake, Boehme, Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, Sade, Nerval, of Villon, Rimbaud, Strindberg, of Cervantes or Dante, or even of Heine or Oscar Wilde! And I, was I to add my name to this host of illustrious martyrs?’76

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As Kellerman implies, Miller’s anxiety is somewhat ironic, since he has already given himself over to being a successful writer, nearly thirty years before Nexus was even written. Not only does this message of the self-begetting novelist not change, Miller’s doubt as to the profession of writing (and of writing oneself) seems to grow the more books he writes (both in his personal letters and as expressed through the language of the narrator). Uncertain of the conventional forms of the writerly craft, Miller writes in a letter to Schnellock after finishing the first draft of his novel expressing his diffidence: ‘Perhaps a few fine passages, descriptive, moonlight and flowers, but for the rest, perhaps a flop.’77 However, Miller rationalises his insecurity, which actually develops over the course of his writing into his strongest quality. In the same letter, he postulates: So near the end that I tremble. It is hard for me to sign off . . . Finis. But when I am through, I think I will be through also with realistic literature. I don’t think it is the highest plane. I think it is perhaps all too egoistic, too vain, too presumptuous. Who am I, after all, that I should think to my literature of my life?78

The published novel described in this letter as being just finished, Tropic of Cancer, begins with an affirmation of Miller’s former questioning remarks, asserting the narrator’s confident and determined efforts, namely to ‘record all that which is omitted in books’.79 Even Miller is doubtful of his creation of a new form of writing. Miller wants to produce something more, than something different from, his ancestral writers, stating in Hamlet: ‘I hope never to be a good thinker, like Kant, for example. I hope to be something more than just a good story teller, like Sherwood Anderson, for example. Nor would I be satisfied to be just a Rainer Maria Rilke.’80 It is not that Miller Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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thinks himself better than these writers but that he knows his fate is wholly different. Later in Hamlet, he announces: ‘Writing is not a game played according to rules. Writing is a compulsive, and delectable thing. Writing is its own reward. The men of 2500 A.D. will enjoy reading this little passage, I am sure.’81 Enmeshing in, but also distancing himself from, the history of literature, Miller sees himself becoming a ‘master’ and developing his craft over a long life. In a letter to Schnellock, he writes: ‘I am classifying myself with the big boys . . . I’m there. I know what I’m worth. I say it quite humbly . . . the way is marked out . . . I have a direction.’82 Finally ready to take on the history of literature, Miller declares his legitimacy: ‘It is a classical fate for such as myself. (Vide – Gauguin, Van Gogh, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Proust, Dostoeivski.) Just enough strength to convey what they wanted – and then finis! Well, that’s me. Life hasn’t been too kind to me, as an artist.’83 Aligning himself with the romanticised reputations of his ancestral authors, Miller declares his own tragic fate (which, incidentally, proves to be entirely false).84 On the whole Miller perceives the writerly craft as overwrought, painful and destructive and uses the untimely ends of his ancestral writers as evidence, like Proust who ‘walled himself in’ to uncover the dark, hidden untruths of writing or Rimbaud ‘who renounced [his] role of artist midway’ and ‘surrendered’.85 Throughout his oeuvre, Miller progressively overcomes the sentimentality of hoping to achieve the same important fate of those before him, as he simultaneously develops his ‘living’ approach, which rejects the possibility of certainty or fulfilment in writing. In Sexus he writes: ‘In ten years of sporadic efforts I had managed to write a million words or so. You might as well say – a million blades of grass.’86 Like Proust, for Miller writing is an impossibly incomplete activity but one which requires not only continuous commitment but also engrossment of the self to the point of saturation – not worship and not success. Kellerman iterates the same message: ‘As Proust emphasizes, in order to create the Book, an author must consciously absorb and transcend all previous books.’87 Miller also announces it himself in Plexus: The heroic work of our forerunners seems now like the work of sacrificial victims. It is not necessary for us to repeat their sacrifices. It is for us to enjoy the fruits. The past lies in ruins, the future yawns invitingly. Take this everyday world and embrace it!88

This passage continues to explain that this feeling is the message that Miller gets whenever he ‘reads the life of van Gogh’.89 Only through the awareness and assimilation of his ancestral authors can Miller declare Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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his next step in overcoming. This next step is of course always perpetual and is what drives all of Miller’s works. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari find Miller a very compelling writer to include in the two volumes of their colossal postmodern analysis Capitalism and Schizophrenia. As representative of the third form of intertextuality addressed in the Introduction, Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Proust, which is heavily filtered through, and in exchange with, their reading of Miller, affects contemporary receptions of Proust at large. Most notably in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari extract components of Miller that in turn apply to their analysis of Proust, which are then applied in future analyses of Proust beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s, without any direct attribution to Miller. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Miller and Proust nearly equally throughout these works, and although Proust predates Miller, Deleuze and Guattari evaluate them simultaneously and engage their literary work on the same plain and in the same vein, allowing their reading of Miller to heavily affect theirs of Proust. Deleuze’s ground-breaking Proust and Signs (Proust et les signes, 1964; in English, 1973) proposes a theory of Proust’s writerly project as an examination of signs and not as an assessment of memory. Consequently, many of the ideas carry over into the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, reintroducing the relevance of Deleuze’s primary text on Proust, not only to his and Guattari’s reading of Miller, but to the impact of their subsequent reading on future readings of Proust on the whole. Under consideration is obviously not the question of Miller’s influence upon Proust in any traditional sense. Of course, Proust knew nothing of Miller. Notwithstanding this, as Clayton and Rothstein write in their essay ‘Figures in the Corpus’ in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, in any case, the concept of influence has fallen out of favour in general for reasons that include its privileging of ‘the author as agent’ and as ‘authoritative’, which ‘brush[es] aside the activity of readers, let alone their freedom of interpretation and response’ and disregards the fact that ‘behind an idea of influence lie dubious normative judgments about originality’.90 The relationship of intertextuality that is established between Miller and Proust is more complex than any basic analysis of influence can provide. Instead, the two points at stake in this final section of this chapter on Proust are the following: (1) the key role that Miller plays in Deleuze and Guattari’s overall project in Capitalism and Schizophrenia includes an infusing of that reading into their reading and use of Proust, who also plays a key role in that same project; and (2) This infused reading of Proust with Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Miller in Capitalism and Schizophrenia subsequently plays a major role in the continued reception of Proust. The most thorough analysis to establish this argument would probably be to summarise the entirety of Proust scholarship before Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses, and then again after their analyses, and subsequently draw a comparison between them, identifying the diverging elements; next, highlight which components correspond to similar components in Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Miller; and finally draw conclusions as to how Miller ‘reverse influences’ Proust – not only an impossible undertaking for the current book but an absurd task that would probably miss the point of the fluidity of the exchange of intertextuality and influence, particularly in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s project of exploring new avenues of ‘multiplied’ literary expression. The second point above is particularly expansive, belonging to the realm of Proust studies, therefore it is an articulate elaboration on the first point that will be used to identify and establish the basis for the second point, for which a fuller analysis must then be left up to the reader’s own discretion. Specifically, this section of the chapter on Miller and Proust examines the overlap that exists between the two writers in Capitalism and Schizophrenia and emphasises the qualities that the reader hitherto is able to identify with Miller while considering their function in Deleuze and Guattari, leaving a further examination of contemporary readings of Proust through the Deleuze and Guattari lens to the reader. Part of what makes Deleuze and Guattari’s work so compelling and original, if also counterintuitive and even paradoxical in traditional literary theory and criticism, is the way in which they choose to articulate ideas that are already found in various writers including Miller and Proust but that are, at the hands of such literary writers, in a fictional form. These ideas are then expressed through Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘literary’ philosophy, but in a manner that does not attempt to concretise or stabilise those ideas, but rather bind with these ‘fragmentary wholes’ on ‘the plane of immanence’.91 Deleuze and Guattari describe the plane of immanence in What Is Philosophy? (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 1991; in English, 1994) as that space where ideas (concepts, percepts and affects) exist apart from their authors or creators and instead reside in their own possible and multiple manifestations and understandings, perpetually ungrounded and non-referential. Deleuze and Guattari develop their notion of immanence to counteract traditional philosophical systems that inadvertently rely upon transcendence, which demands the impossible grounding of concepts in something always beyond their own expression. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration is the philosophical presentation of ideas already manifest in literary presentations by other authors. Their work is almost like an exposing of, and engaging with, the mechanisms of those writers, using one writer’s work to illuminate another’s. They can be seen as a bridge for the transfer of ideas from one writer, such as Miller, to the analytical reception of another, such as Proust.92 Of the specific critiques of Proust from Capitalism and Schizophrenia that interact with, and are affected by, their reading of Miller, the following three are most prominent: (1) literary fragmentation; (2) desire as connected to geography, voyaging and ‘lines of flight’;93 and (3) the relation of being a writer to time and memory. Deleuze and Guattari’s technique of elucidating one writer by means of another can itself be seen as coming from, among other locations of influence and intertextuality, the work of Proust and Miller. The attraction for them to such writers is due to Proust and Miller’s own focus on decentring philosophical concepts and systems in their writing. Proust and Miller excel at breaking out of traditional modes of writing, in both parallel and incredibly diverging ways. Fragmented writing, as a mode for moving away from the notion of a concrete, immutable concept and toward the percept is something that both Proust and Miller enact in their work. ‘Percept’, as Deleuze explains in the documentary The ABC’s of Gilles Deleuze (L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, 1989), is ‘an ensemble of perceptions and sensations that outlive that which feels them’,94 reflecting the open, expressive and living quality of language as detached from its speaker or writer. Proust and Miller both use their narration as a means for fragmenting the possibility of the text as a transparent body by employing a narrator who is at once the author and yet completely separate and distinct from him – thus presenting a narrative that deceptively appears whole but is only whole in its fragmentation, in its incompletion as coming from a figure who is collectively an authoritative author, a subjective, rambling voice and, ultimately, an unreal literary creation. What this narration produces is a bundle of sensations, affects and perceptions that move way from the figure of the text and toward an impossible end. In The Work of Fire Blanchot emphasises this impossibility, saying of Miller: ‘His very language is this inexhaustible flux, this momentum forward, the most ardent, the most vertiginous, and yet it evokes only an endless return to a life already past, a monotonous standstill, an unrelenting search for the beginning.’95 Also recalling, for example, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (En Attendant Godot, 1948; in English, 1954), this writing of the impossible end is commented upon in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari define Miller’s literary nomadism: ‘To think is to voyage.’96 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Miller’s texts, generally speaking, fragment by providing deconstructed and partially reconstructed ‘assemblages’ of the world. In Sexus he writes:

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In studying her morsel by morsel, feet, hands, hair, lips, ears, breasts, traveling from navel to mouth and from mouth to eyes, the woman . . . who had been and would be other names, other persons, other assemblages of appendages, was no more accessible, penetrable, than a cool statue in a forgotten garden of a lost continent . . .97

This passage is immediately followed by the reconstruction of the same body: ‘The eyes becoming eyes again, burning like lignite, then glowing like embers, then soft like flowers; then nose, mouth, cheeks, ears looming out of chaos, heavy as the moon, a mask unrolling, flesh taking form, face, feature.’98 The reader attempts to see what Miller sees but, even like him, discovers only this chopped and reassembled Cubist collage. From Chapter 5 in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze quotes from Miller’s Sexus: ‘A pair of eyes set far apart, a head hewn of quartz, a haunch that seemed to live its own life . . . Whenever the beauty of the female becomes irresistible, it is traceable to a single quality.’99 Miller links writing with the human form, where everything becomes ‘wordclots’ and fragmented body parts in the pursuit of meaning lost in ‘some mysterious trait’ which overpowers language: ‘Names – names fade out.’100 Only sensations – percepts, ‘word-clots’, ‘assemblages of appendages’ – remain. Such fragmented ‘word-clots’ alongside bodies are found in Proust as well, singled out in the same way by Deleuze and Guattari, such as when Proust’s narrator in Swann’s Way, upon hearing his beloved utter for the first time his first name, says: ‘And remembering later what I had felt then, I could distinguish within it the impression that I had been held for a moment in her mouth, I myself, naked . . .’101 In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari use this passage to highlight how ‘the proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity’.102 They, however, misquote Proust, interestingly, inverting the narrator with Gilberte, writing: ‘What Proust said about the first name: when I said Gilberte’s name, I had the impression that I was holding her entire body naked in my mouth.’103 While this mistake does not change the sentiment on the issue of multiplicity and fragmentation, it interestingly raises issues of subjectification, agency and sexuality. Contrary to the above example from Miller, Proust’s narrator is subsequently himself objectified by his beloved, yet indirectly through his own self-perception as the vulnerable object of Gilberte’s language. At the same time, numerous passages in Miller do themselves make this inversion as well, particularly in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Sexus where the narrator often feels himself at the mercy of his domineering wife Mona. Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari’s error can be used simply to point out the non-gendered ‘instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity’ in both Miller and Proust. The recognition of this kind of writing by Miller and Proust is pervasive in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Taking into account the ‘plane of immanence’ or ‘pure immanence’ in Deleuze and Guattari, one sees how they flesh out their own language through the very present, full manifestations in Proust and Miller, who articulate a style that neither hides nor reveals mysterious concepts but instead indulges in the continuous, flowing movement of language that is perpetually in pursuit of nothing more than its own expression. At the beginning of Anti-Oedipus, in presenting ‘desiring-machines’ and their ‘continuous flows’ which are ‘by nature fragmentary and fragmented’,104 Deleuze and Guattari quote Miller from Tropic of Cancer: ‘I love everything flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund.’105 Miller and Proust’s work presents itself wholly evident in its very presence, expressing this fragmented wholeness immediately – this expression solely being its primary purpose (‘unfecund’). In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made.’106 Deliberately not relying on a pre-existent system to support it, identify it or otherwise give it meaning, the work of Proust and Miller highlights the immanence and the immediacy of language as present, digestible and as a direct articulation of itself, precisely in its incompleteness and fragmentation. In the way that Proust and Miller’s works are active productions in themselves, they engage in multiple ways with other representations, concepts and whatever other ‘bodies’ are raised in their texts. The second point of contact between Proust and Miller in Deleuze and Guattari is that of desire as connected to this fragmentation or a ‘dismantling’ (particularly of the face, specifically the face of the beloved) that occurs in their work, moving onto ‘lines of flight’. Miller writes of Proust directly, saying that his is ‘a literature of flight, of escape’.107 In the chapter entitled ‘Year Zero: Faciality’ of A Thousand Plateaus (‘Année zéro – visagéité’) Deleuze and Guattari call the face ‘the white wall/black hole system’,108 as it is that which significance writes upon (the white wall) as well as that in which subjectification ‘lodges its consciousness’ (a black hole).109 Deleuze and Guattari refer to Proust’s ability ‘to make the face, landscape, painting, music, etc. resonate together’110 in Swann’s Way in three forms through the face, particularly that of Odette: (1) by it always referring back to something else (painting, music, etc.); (2) through it ‘hurtling toward a single black hole, that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of Swann’s Passion’ in his jealousy;111 and (3) through the faces of the servants and guests as they fall away and become ‘autonomous aesthetic traits’.112 Deleuze and Guattari then explain how this attempt at ‘salvation through art’ unfortunately does not seem to ‘save’ either Swann or Proust.113 Proust ‘dismantles the face’ through art in order to take his line of flight,114 yet, they suggest, it does not redeem or aid him – or at least Proust’s usual commentators do not think so. Generalising on the topic, Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘The French novel is profoundly pessimistic and idealistic’, whereas ‘The AngloAmerican novel is totally different.’115 Deleuze and Guattari seem to polarise Miller and Proust in this instance by suggesting that Miller is able to ‘go across, get out, break through, make a beeline’,116 because such Anglo-American writers ‘know how difficult it is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of consciousness and memory, of the couple and conjugality’.117 Referring to his ability to ‘dismantle the face’,118 Deleuze and Guattari cite, in condensed form, a lengthy passage from Tropic of Capricorn, where Miller writes: I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever, just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at all. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager . . . I must shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I know longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of vision . . . I have broken the wall . . . My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling . . . Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.119

Ultimately, however, applying this Millerian escape through fragmentation to Proust, Deleuze and Guattari imply that Proust and Miller are similar in this regard of escaping, taking flight through their literary techniques. Like Miller, Proust ‘knows . . . quite well’ this need to get out of ‘redundancy, the black hole of involuntary memory . . . even if his commentators do not’.120 The reader sees immediately the reverse influence, the connection from Miller to Proust through Deleuze and Guattari. After all, Proust’s commentators now know. The plane of immanence, the assemblage, the rhizome, the nomad – these are also ideas (and sometimes even the terms themselves) found Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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initially in Miller, as early as his works from the 1930s. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari directly use Miller’s extensive references to China and ‘the East’ to build their ‘schizoanalysis’ of the rhizome and their nomadology, to say nothing of the very concept of ‘a thousand plateaus’ itself. In the first chapter, they quote him from Hamlet: ‘China is the weed in the human cabbage patch,’121 which is one of the starting points for their development of the nomad, the plateau and ‘the American rhizome’ or ‘the rhizomatic West’122 in contradistinction to bureaucracy, warfare and the hierarchy of the tree. Near the end of A Thousand Plateaus, in Chapter 14, they write: ‘A stroll taken by Henry Miller in Clichy or Brooklyn is a nomadic transit in smooth space; he makes the city disgorge a patchwork, differentials of speed, delays and accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations . . .’123 This nomadic voyaging, Deleuze and Guattari posture, does not require movement, yet it also is not solely in the mind. It is ‘the mode of spatialization, the manner of space in being, of being for space’.124 It is a matter of how one exists in the world through a reconceptualisation of space, which occurs in writing. These concepts feed into the overall structure (or, perhaps, anti-structure) of Deleuze and Guattari’s work and into their analyses on Proust, demonstrated previously in terms of fragmentation and desire and now briefly here in music, as it relates to this sense of nomadology and space. Referring to Proust as being ‘among the first to underscore this life of the Wagnerian motif’, Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘The discovery of the properly melodic landscape and the properly rhythmic character marks the moment of art when it ceases to be a silent painting on a signboard.’125 Proust’s ‘landscapes’ are fluid and interactive, not representational or interpretational, such that their presence is a reflection or a depiction. It is rather the case that the ‘painting’ not only is not silent but its ‘landscape’ is not ‘glued to the canvas’ (‘collée au fond de la toile’), as Balzac writes in ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ (‘Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu’, 1831; in English, 1845). Deleuze and Guattari use their theory of deterritorialisation and of the rhizome to describe Proust’s writerly pursuit in In Search of Lost Time as analogous to Vinteuil’s own ‘little phrases’ in music, which ‘do not refer to a landscape; they carry and develop within themselves landscapes that do not exist on the outside . . .’126 Crossing sensory experiences of their own, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that Proust, like Miller, does not bind the components of his work to a structure by which they can readily be explained. Proust instead makes his own writerly project the same as that of the characters and components of his work: namely, a mode of becoming and of creating the perpetually unknown ‘landscape’ in the text. Proust’s texts, generally speaking, fragment and flow by expressing Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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percepts that are often so incredibly finely tuned and yet ungrounded and expansive that they spill over the edges of the image, completely consuming the field of the reader’s eye. Deleuze and Guattari propose that for Proust it too is a matter of a ‘procedure of continuous variation’,127 and, as with other figures including Kafka and Beckett, it is the ‘mad production of speeds and intervals’.128 Deleuze and Guattari suggest that literary style must be a complex ‘assemblage of enunciation’129 that cannot be extracted from, or divided into, the so-called linguistic and non-linguistic components of a work. Instead, they write that this ‘variation’ permits a shifting and blending of the linguistic and nonlinguistic, as opposed to a separation between them or an application of one upon the other. They write:

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There has always been a struggle in language between the verb être (to be) and the conjunction et (and) between est and et . . . Writers in British or American English have been more conscious than the French of this struggle and the stakes involved, and of the valence of the ‘and.’ It was Proust who said that ‘masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language.’130

Proust’s style too engages with his own language as if from a foreign disposition by sustaining this sense of ‘variation’. One sees here again the connection between Deleuze and Guattari’s extensive theory, its derivation in part from Miller and its application to Proust. Although Deleuze and Guattari do not reference Miller too specifically on time and memory, their theories on these concepts, particularly in relation to Proust, are, once again, affected by their discoveries in Miller. Deleuze and Guattari declare, ‘It is undoubtedly Miller who has taken the modern figure of the writer as cosmic artisan the farthest, particularly in Sexus.’131 Miller is one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most important referents, providing the basis from which to consider similar affects in other writers, most notably Proust. One such reference from Sexus that indirectly aligns Miller with Proust in terms of memory continues from a previously noted reference. After the Miller passage cited by Deleuze and Guattari and quoted above on fragmentation and ‘assemblages of appendages’, Miller continues on this strain of a Deleuzean reterritorialisation, yet now extending it through memory. Miller writes: ‘But the body lives on, and the eyes, and the fingers of the eyes, remember. They come and go, the unknown, unnamed, mingling as freely with the others as if they were an integral part of one’s life.’132 Miller’s linking of memory with ‘the unknown’ and ‘unnamed’ plays out in the way that Deleuze and Guattari indirectly reassess Proust and his tropes in music and painting concerning time and memory and the fragmentation of faces and bodies. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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The body, the vessel itself, holds its sensory experiences perpetually present via a sort of somatic memory. For Miller’s narrator, the division between the self and the world exists only in words and thus falls away through this mnemonic ‘mingling’ with the now ‘unknown, unnamed’. Similarly, Proust’s involuntary memory through music and painting and other sensory experiences brings past sensations to the present but does so in a manner that transcends the otherwise ‘thin spiritual border’ that separates the narrator from the world.133 The narrator is joined with the world through his memory-evoking (and memory-evoked) sensory experiences, as the experiences themselves then merge in time and space with the narrator. Using Miller as an establishing point through connecting the human desire to ‘memorise’ and solidify ‘the Face’ through language and writing, Deleuze and Guattari write the following:

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It is a question of speed, even if the movement is in place. Is this also to dismantle the face, or as Miller says, no longer to look at or into the eyes but to swim through them, to close your own eyes and make your body a beam of light moving at ever-increasing speed? Of course, this requires all the resources of art, and art of the highest kind. It requires a whole line of writing, picturality, musicality . . . For it is through writing that you become animal, it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal and imperceptible: in love. But art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are not produced only in art, and all of those active escapes that do no consist in fleeing into art, taking refuge in art, and all of those positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless.134

This passage reads as a summary of the impact of Miller indirectly on Proust. Deleuze and Guattari join the two here: first Miller directly speeding, swimming, fragmenting, then Proust through ‘picturality, musicality’. Miller does not use art to escape (as he sometimes accuses Proust of doing), rather ‘the best thing’, he says, ‘is not to try to escape, but instead to use art “to stick it out.”’135 Moreover, in a letter to Schnellock Miller writes: We face the crisis of the orphic language . . . Words treated instinctively as a fluid medium of a vision . . . The poet is not interested in changing the world. He only wants to change himself. His form is in movement. He struggles against nothingness. He composes the vision he suffers.136

The key point here is, least of all, to acknowledge that Miller’s presence is very strong in Deleuze and Guattari, certainly as strong as Proust’s and yet hardly, if at all, critically regarded, as much as it runs as an Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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undercurrent in subsequent criticism on Proust specifically, as indirectly derived through Deleuze and Guattari. Bringing their analysis full circle to the final ‘breaking away from’ and ‘crossing through’,137 Deleuze and Guattari finish this particular chapter on ‘the abstract machine’ of faciality with a reconstruction of Proust’s fragmented tropes:

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There is no more face to be in redundancy with a landscape, painting or little phrase of music, each perpetually bringing the other to mind, on the unified surface of the wall or the central swirl of the black hole. Each freed faciality trait forms a rhizome with a freed trait of landscapity, picturality, or musicality.138

It is a reconstruction, however, that is embraced through deterritorialisation, in the sense that the various references, such as Miller, Lawrence and Melville, are used to indicate how this kind of fragmentation and ‘defacialization’139 ‘breaks through the walls of significance’,140 which is indicated and legitimised in part through Miller’s style that then bleeds into Deleuze and Guattari’s visions of Proust. For Miller, as for Proust, the past is perpetually present, which Deleuze and Guattari articulate through the nuances of the endless cycle of deand reterritorialisation. This sense of balance among Proust’s gestures, as he uses the present to conjure a past, but a past that is as much present as the present itself, are most evident in Proust’s famous moments of the tea-dunked madeleine, the ringing doorbell and the uneven cobblestone. Deleuze and Guattari point out how these moments indicate not individual events of ‘time regained’ but of the simultaneity of event and of Proust’s escape from ‘redundancy’.141 This effect can be likened to Miller’s advice ‘not to try to escape’ (life, suffering, misery, restlessness and so on, through art, writing, revolution, religion and so on) but ‘to stick it out’. One escapes redundancy in time (between memory and the present) into simultaneity which is part of Deleuze’s general argument in Proust and Signs, suggesting that Proust is not actually after memory but after the explication of symbols for meaning. The impact of Proust upon Miller is tremendous and obvious. The impact of Miller via Deleuze and Guattari upon Proust is less evident yet equally significant. Describing his eventually forthcoming third novel Tropic of Capricorn (in 1939), Miller tells Schnellock in 1932: ‘My “Proustian” memory is excellent, even if I must say so myself.’142 This claim means to suggest, as Miller himself explains, that ‘discrepancies in the narrative, lies, distortions, etc.’ are not the result of ‘bad memory’, but are an ‘extending of the sphere of the real, carrying out the implicit truth in situations that life sometimes, and art most of the time, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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conceals’.143 Several years later, in the published Tropic of Capricorn Miller writes: I relate these incidents briefly and hurriedly as they flash through my mind; my memory is packed with thousands of such details, with a myriad faces, gestures, tales, confessions all entwined and interlaced like the stupendous reeling façade of some Hindu temple made not of stone but of the experience of human flesh, a monstrous dream edifice built entirely of reality and yet not reality itself but merely the vessel in which the mystery of the human being is contained.144

As with Proust, writing for Miller is not a retelling of a story, event or sensory experience but is itself the creation in and of simultaneity. Of Proust’s attempt, Deleuze and Guattari cheekily write: ‘The narrator munches his madeleine’,145 but they quickly indicate Proust is also making his escape – even if his commentators won’t know it until they’ve read Deleuze and Guattari or, for that matter, Henry Miller. The next and final chapter is concerned with Miller’s relation to D. H. Lawrence, who is also referenced by Deleuze and Guattari in the same vein. A similar writer in terms of content, Lawrence also makes his escape through a style of writing that demands far more from the reader than a literal appreciation in order to be understood for its often unacknowledged significance in terms of language play and the breaking of limits of literary form – not in terms of explicit content but in terms of the questioning of the boundaries of words and the infusion of motion and becoming into writing.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Wisdom, 167. Baxandall, 58. Emil, 94. Ibid. Wickes, 270 ‘Universe’, 107. Ibid., 109. Books, 99. ‘Universe’, 109. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 110. Ibid. Hamlet, 67. Ibid., 67.

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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Ibid., 68. Ibid., 69. ‘Universe’, 114. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 120. Ibid. Ibid., 121. Cancer, 4. ‘Universe’, 123. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 127. Ibid. Plexus, 229. ‘Universe’, 127. Emil, 139. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Books, 99. This passage is likely Miller’s own off-hand translation in English from Dandieu’s Marcel Proust: sa révélation psychologique (1930). Hamlet, 52. Letters to Nin, 13. Ibid., 18. ‘Universe’, 115. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 116–17. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 116. Letters to Nin, 113. ‘Universe’, 118. Letters to Nin, 18. Search, 2:435; ‘. . . nous prouvent que nous n’identifierions pas les objets si nous ne faisions pas intervenir le raisonnement. Que de fois en voiture ne découvrons-nous pas une longue rue claire qui commence à quelques mètres de nous, alors que nous n’avons devant nous qu’un pan de mur violemment éclairé qui nous a donné le mirage de la profondeur. Dès lors n’est-il pas logique, non par artifice de symbolisme mais par retour sincère à la racine même de l’impression, de représenter une chose par cette autre que dans l’éclair d’une illusion première nous avons prise pour elle? Les surfaces et les volumes sont en réalité indépendants des noms d’objets que notre mémoire leur impose quand nous les avons reconnus’, Recherche, 6:50.

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152 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way Books, 27. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Letters to Nin, 12 Ibid., 18. Cancer, 163. For a more thorough investigation into Miller’s ekphrasis, including this particular episode with Proust, see my article ‘Henry Miller’s Painterly Eye’ (2008), as well as The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (2011). Ibid., 163. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Search, 1:43; ‘Mes remords étaient calmés, je me laissais aller à la douceur de cette nuit où j’avais ma mère auprès de moi. Je savais qu’une telle nuit ne pourrait se renouveler; que le plus grand désir que j’eusse au monde, garder ma mère dans ma chambre pendant ces tristes heures nocturnes, était trop en opposition avec les nécessités de la vie et le vœu de tous, pour que l’accomplissement qu’on lui avait accordé ce soir pût être autre chose que factice et exceptionnel’, Recherche, 1:35. Spring, 38. Georges Bataille uses this incident to write about the transgressive significance of Miller’s ‘puerile’ language in his article ‘La Morale de Miller’ in Critique (1940). For more on Bataille, Miller’s involuntary murderous act and his language of children, see my book The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (2011). Capricorn, 113. Ibid., 114. Ibid. Wickes, 270. Capricorn, 114. Kellerman, 7. Nexus, 132. Emil, 52. Ibid. Cancer, 11. Hamlet, 99. Ibid., 152. Emil, 94. Ibid., 122. Incidentally, Miller lived to the age of eighty-eight (1891–1980). Hamlet, 182. Sexus, 21. Kellerman, 127. Plexus, 64. Ibid. Clayton and Rothstein, 12.

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91. What Is Philosophy? (my translation); ‘. . . des touts fragmentaires’ . . . ‘le plan d’immanence’, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 38. 92. This acknowledgement of style is not a new revelation on Deleuze’s technique but is widely recognised and discussed by other critics on Deleuze, including Patrick ffrench in ‘“Time in the Pure State”: Deleuze, Proust and the Image of Time’. ffrench writes that, in the instance of Deleuze’s works on Leibniz and on Bergson and cinema, ‘the return of fragments of the Proustian corpus’ . . . ‘are not signalled as coming from “somewhere else” but are part of the texture of the writing’ that Deleuze undertakes when writing about the topic or figure at hand (Gill, Time and the Image, 161). ffrench asks how these ‘fragments of the Proustian corpus’ are used to affect in Deleuze’s analyses of other writers. 93. Plateaus, 5; ‘. . . lignes de fuit’, Plateaux, 11. 94. ABC’s (film); ‘. . . un ensemble de perceptions et de sensations qui survit à ceux qui les éprouvent’, L’Abécédaire (film). 95. Fire, 168; ‘Son langage même est ce flux intarissable, cet élan en avant, le plus ardent, le plus vertigineux qui soit, et qui pourtant n’évoque qu’un retour sans fin sur une vie déjà passée, un piétinement monotone, une recherche opiniâtre du commencement’, Feu, 173. 96. Plateaus, 482; ‘Penser, c’est voyager’, Plateaux, 602. 97. Sexus, 192. 98. Ibid., 193. 99. Plateaus, 129. 100. Sexus, 229. 101. Search, 1:420; ‘Et me souvenant plus tard de ce que j’avais senti alors, j’y ai démêlé l’impression d’avoir été tenu un instant dans sa bouche, moimême, nu . . .’, Recherche, 1:452. 102. Plateaus, 37; ‘Le nom propre est l’appréhension instantanée d’une multiplicité’, Plateaux, 51. 103. Plateaus, 37; ‘en prononçant Gilberte, j’avais l’impression de la tenir nue tout entière dans ma bouche . . .’, Plateaux, 51. 104. Anti-Oedipus, 5; ‘Les machines désirantes’ . . . ‘de flux continus’ . . . ‘essentiellement fragmentaires et fragmentés’, Anti-Oedipe, 11. 105. Cancer, 258. 106. Plateaus, 4; ‘Il n’y a pas de différence entre ce dont un parle et la manière dont il est fait’, Plateaux, 10. 107. ‘Universe’, 110. 108. Plateaus, 167; ‘. . . système mur blanc-trou noir’, Plateaux, 205. 109. Ibid., 167; ‘. . . loge sa consciences’, Plateaux, 205. 110. Ibid., 185; ‘Proust a su faire résonner visage, paysage, peinture, musique, etc.’, Plateaux, 227. 111. Ibid., 185; ‘. . . se précipite vers un seul trou noir, celui de la Passion de Swann’, Plateaux, 227. 112. Ibid., 186; ‘. . . traits esthétiques autonomes’, Plateaux, 288. 113. Ibid., 186; ‘Fallait-il ce salut par l’art, puisque Swann, pas plus que Proust, ne sera sauvé ?’, Plateaux, 228. 114. Ibid., 186; ‘. . . défaire le visage’, Plateaux, 228. 115. Ibid., 186; ‘Le roman français est profondément pessimiste, idéaliste’. . . ‘Tout autre est le roman anglo-américain’, Plateaux, 228.

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116. Ibid., 186; ‘traverser, sortir, percer, faire la ligne’, Plateaux, 228. 117. Ibid., 187; ‘Ils savent à quel point c’est difficile de sortir du trou noir de la subjectivité, de la conscience et de la mémoire, du couple et de la conjugalité’, Plateaux, 229. 118. Ibid., 187; ‘. . . défaire le visage’, Plateaux, 228. 119. Capricorn, 110–11. 120. Plateaus, 186; ‘. . . redondance, trou noir du souvenir involontaire’ . . . ‘Proust le sait bien, quoique ses commentateurs ne le sachent plus’, Plateaux, 228. 121. Hamlet, 54. 122. Plateaus, 19; ‘. . . rhizome américaine’ . . . ‘l’Ouest rhizomatique’, Plateaux, 29. 123. Ibid., 482; ‘. . . une promenade de Miller, à Clichy ou à Brooklin, est un parcours nomade en espace lisse, il fait en sorte que la ville dégorge un patchwork, des différentielles de vitesse, des retards et des accélérations, des changements d’orientation, des variations continues . . .’, Plateaux, 602. 124. Ibid., 482; ‘. . . le mode de spatialisation, la manière d’être dans l’espace, d’être a l’espace’, Plateaux, 602. 125. Ibid., 319; ‘. . . parmi les premiers à souligner cette vie du motif wagnérien’ . . . ‘La découverte du paysage proprement mélodique et du personnage proprement rythmique marque ce moment de l’art en tant qu’il cesse d’être une peinture muette sur un panonceau’, Plateaux, 392. 126. Ibid., 319; ‘. . . des petites phrases’ . . . ‘découverte analogue à propos des petites phrases de Vinteuil: elles ne renvoient pas à un paysage, mais emportent et développent en elles des paysages qui n’existent plus en dehors’, Plateaux, 393. 127. Ibid., 97; ‘. . . le procédé d’une variation continue’, Plateaux, 123. 128. Ibid., 98; ‘. . . sa folle production de vitesses et d’intervalles’, Plateaux, 124. 129. Ibid., 97; ‘. . . un agencement énonciation’, Plateaux, 123. 130. Ibid., 98; ‘Il y a toujours eu une lutte dans le langage entre le verbe «être» et la conjonction «et», entre est et et. Plus que nous, ceux qui écrivent en anglais ou en américain furent conscients de cette lutte et de son enjeu, et de la valence du «et». Proust disait: «les chefs-d’œuvre sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère»’, Plateaux, 124. 131. Ibid., 551; ‘Miller a sans doute poussé le plus loin la figure moderne de l’écrivain comme artisan cosmique, surtout dans Sexus’, Plateaux, 427. 132. Sexus, 229. 133. Search, 1:85; ‘. . . un mince liséré spirituel’, Recherche, 1:83. 134. Plateaus, 187; ‘C’est une question de vitesse, même sur place. Est-cela aussi, défaire le visage, ou, comme disait Miller, ne plus regarder les yeux ni dans les yeux, mais les traverser à la nage, fermer ses propres yeux, et faire de son corps un rayon de lumière qui se meut à une vitesse toujours plus grande ? Bien sûr, il y faut toutes les ressources de l’art, et de l’art le plus haut. Il y faut toute une ligne d’écriture, toute une ligne de picturalité, toute une ligne de musicalité . . . Car c’est par l’écriture qu’on devient animal, c’est par la couleur qu’on devient imperceptible, c’est par la musique qu’on devient dur et sans souvenir, à la fois animal

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135. 136. 137. 138.

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139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

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et imperceptible: amoureux. Mais l’art n’est jamais une fin, il n’est qu’un instrument pour tracer les lignes de vie, c’est-à-dire tous ces devenirs réels, qui ne se produisent pas simplement dans l’art, toutes ces fuites actives, qui ne consistent pas à fuir dans l’art, à se réfugier dans l’art, ces déterritorialisations positives, qui ne vont pas se territorialiser sur l’art, mais bien plutôt l’emporter avec elles, vers les régions de l’asignifiant, de l’asubjectif et du sans-visage’, Plateaux, 228–9. Hamlet, 55. Emil, 96. Plateaus, 189; ‘Sa propre échappée, sa traversée’, Plateaux, 232. Ibid., 190; ‘Il n’y a plus un visage qui fait redondance avec un paysage, un tableau, une petite phrase musicale, et où perpétuellement l’un fait penser à l’autre, sur la surface unifiée du mur ou dans le tournoiement central du trou noir. Mais chaque trait libéré de visagéíté fait rhizome avec un trait libéré de paysagéité, de picturalité, de musicalité’, Plateaux, 233. Ibid., 190; ‘. . . dévisagéification’, Plateaux, 232. Ibid., 190; ‘. . . percent les murs de signifiance’, Plateaux, 233. Ibid., 186; ‘. . . redondance’, Plateaux, 228. Emil, 106. Ibid. Capricorn, 37. Plateaus, 186; ‘Le narrateur mâchouille sa madeleine’, Plateaux, 228.

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Chapter 6

Writers and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence

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Yes, Lawrence like other men of genius had his Chaplinesque moments – especially when he was surrounded by the women . . . Lawrence the artist almost succeeded in becoming God. Lawrence the man gets plates smashed over his head by an irate spouse. (And he deserved it, too, from all accounts.) Lawrence the philosopher talks almost as well as Socrates, better sometimes, in my humble opinion. – Henry Miller, ‘Shadowy Monomania’, Sunday after the War (1944)1

Apart from the potential lines of intertextuality and influence that exist between Lawrence and Miller, the two writers share a very significant and outright connection in terms of the publication of their work. Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were two of the three very high-profile books that were part of a breakthrough in 1959 on an obscenity ban on literature in the United Kingdom and the United States. (John Cleland’s 1748 novel Fanny Hill is the third.) Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first published in Italy in 1928 but was banned in its native England until 1960, by which time Lawrence had been deceased for nearly twenty years.2 Nevertheless, this breakthrough in the ruling on obscenity caused Lawrence and Miller to become emblems for the great sexual revolution of the mid-twentieth century, perhaps despite their own literary intentions. This ruling ultimately fuelled a massive wave of causes in the name of freedom of speech, literary expression and sexual liberation, bombarding media outlets throughout the 1960s and decidedly redefining the boundaries of sexuality in popular and public culture. Nevertheless, Miller’s affinities with Lawrence run far deeper than their mutual and unanticipated influence on groups such as the Beats and on counter-culture in general.3 As with Rimbaud, Lawrence surfaces in Miller’s texts most obviously in the entire critical study given over to him, The World of Lawrence Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(1980), as well as in the essay from The Cosmological Eye concerning Lawrence, Proust and Joyce, entitled ‘The Universe of Death’. This essay was originally written as part of The World of Lawrence, which indeed includes it, but which was first published on its own along with excerpts from Black Spring and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938). Apart from these essays, there are many other references to Lawrence throughout Miller’s oeuvre – he is referred to directly quite frequently, especially in Miller’s letters – thus the first form of intertextuality is quite present. In terms of the second form, Miller’s unconscious style can be seen to reflect a very evident and strong Lawrentian spirit. Lawrence may be the most obvious writer able to be extracted from Miller’s unconscious style, at least on a transparent level, particularly due to Miller’s interest, like Lawrence, in sexually explicit material. For the third form, similar to the reverse influence described in the Proust chapter, the impact of Miller backwards upon Lawrence studies is more significant than perhaps first considered. At the same time, much unlike Proust, a surface inquiry easily reveals Lawrence to be a sort of counter-culture prophet that includes Miller in his wake, despite the unfortunate misreadings both of Lawrence and Miller that have been produced from this mid-twentieth-century approach. Finally, as with the other major writers for the most part in this study, Lawrence does not show up as a character – which can be attributed to the theory, once again, that on the whole Miller does not parody those writers whom he most respects. As has been shown throughout this study, Miller often does himself enter into the texts of his ancestral authors, such as his walks along Whitman’s path in Leaves of Grass: ‘I am alone walking, singing, commanding the earth. I do not have to look in my vest pocket to find my soul; it is there all the time, bumping against my ribs, swelling, inflated with song.’4 Most decadently, Miller also seems to occupy a permanent place in Dostoevsky’s world, writing in ‘Part I’ of The Time of the Assassins that living with his wife June and her lover Thelma in New York in the 1920s ‘was like an episode in one of Dostoievsky’s tales’,5 which he describes elaborately and at length throughout The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy. Miller also appears to enter Rimbaud’s work. In one instance in particular, he evokes the essence of Illuminations, specifically in ‘Democracy’ (‘Démocratie’), and its positive direction towards the future, but not without anti-capitalist irony: ‘En avant, route!’ (‘Forward, men!’)6 In response, Miller, likely alluding to a newfound camaraderie with Rimbaud, claims in Plexus to make ‘one of those haphazard encounters which will alter the course of [his] life’, namely meeting a stranger ‘fresh from the other world’ but who ‘greets [him] like an old friend’.7 Simultaneously facing his solitude Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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‘in the midst of other solitaries’, hence beginning ‘the new cycle of consciousness’, Miller announces: ‘En avant, je me dis. Allons-y! Nous sommes là.’8 Speaking first to himself but immediately to an ‘us’, Miller implies Rimbaud both as his companion and as part of himself. Miller also roams a sometime Carrollian wonderland of his own: In my sleep I heard the maniacal laugh of a loon. It was echoed by the rusty door knobs, the green vegetables, the wild geese, the slanting stars, the wet clothes flapping on the line . . . It came from far away, deliciously off-key, absurd and unreasonable. It was the laugh of aching muscles, of food passing through the midriff, of time foolishly squandered, of millions of nothings all harmoniously fitting together in the great jig-saw puzzle and making extraordinary sense, extraordinary beauty, extraordinary well-being.9

Lastly, he also enters Proust’s In Search of Lost Time having encounters with various settings and figures, such as the one with Albertine cited in Chapter 5:

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Vividly now I recall how the glint and sparkle of light caroming from the massive chandeliers splintered and ran blood, flecking the tips of the waves that beat monotonously on the dull gold outside the windows. On the beach, masts and chimneys interlaced, and like a fuliginous shadow the figure of Albertine gliding through the surf fusing into the mysterious quick and prism of a protoplasmic realm, uniting her shadow to the dream and harbinger of death.10

Lawrence is no exception to this form of inclusion, which is both ‘unconscious’ on a certain level and deliberately infiltrating of those literary universes. The very quality of Miller’s sexual escapades could be directly attributed to him entering Lawrence’s texts. Lawrence is the only writer in this study who does not occupy a place on Miller’s list of ‘The Hundred Books That Influenced Me Most’, yet his impact on Miller cannot be underestimated. Similar in ways to Miller’s connection to Rimbaud, Lawrence occupies a very direct, long-lasting and deceivingly calm strain of influence in Miller. At the same time, Miller was tormented by his relationship with Lawrence: perpetually overwrought by both a strong connection and a repulsion toward Lawrence’s intimate and symbolic writing, which seemed to echo Miller’s own attempts at becoming an equally noteworthy writer. In 1933 he writes to Emil Schnellock: If then I dreamed some day of writing, it was never to rival a man like Lawrence. When I would think of Sons and Lovers I would think of it as occupying some eternal place, classed with other perfect works of one time or another. To criticize him – far from my mind was that.11

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In his reverence of Lawrence, Miller also felt intimidated for a number of reasons, not least of which was the contemporaneity between the writers. Miller continues: ‘Yet here was a man almost my age, older than me by only a few years. And I hadn’t even begun to bud.’12 Lawrence was not only a challenger to Miller but eventually a stepping stone toward finding his own voice. Miller spent his entire life coming to terms with Lawrence, both as his contemporary and as an incredibly significant ancestral writer. By paralleling himself with Lawrence, Miller could find a way to overcome his intimidation. In 1933 he writes to Schnellock, ‘I have a feeling that I am plumbing him deeper than anyone has – and why should I not, since there is so much in common between us, even to the obscurity.’13 However, he immediately adds: ‘But I have been terribly slow in maturing – that I see.’14 At the same time, as with Joyce, Pound and others, Miller regards Lawrence as a fellow writer with whom he has deep affinities including obvious connections to similar ancestral writers, noting in The Wisdom of the Heart: ‘Lawrence was tremendously influenced by Dostoevski.’15 Even beyond writing, however, Miller connects to Lawrence with his strong interest in painting. In 1931 he writes to Schnellock that he just read how Lawrence ‘stumbled on painting at the age of forty. Water colors . . . trying to “make pictures.” Gave me a tremendous kick. Saw myself all over again. Water colors . . . still lifes . . . turning out pictures . . . I understand Lawrence perfectly, perfectly. He did exactly what I feel I want to do.’16 Miller respects Lawrence in ways he does not do with other contemporaries, because Lawrence for Miller is not ‘modern’ as are Joyce, Eliot, Pound and others, in the sense that Lawrence is not concerned with form or with artificiality or lofty experimentation in terms of structure. Miller lauds Lawrence’s raw, inhibited and autobiographical approach. Prior to Miller’s first publication, Tropic of Cancer in 1934, Miller was asked by his publisher Jack Kahane to produce a brief, critical study of D. H. Lawrence in order to soften the blow of the anticipated scandalous Tropic of Cancer.17 At Nin’s encouragement, who herself had just published her D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932), Miller began this project with a strong interest in developing a serious but relatively short critique of Lawrence, which he called the ‘Brochure’.18 However, Miller found himself becoming more and more personally entangled by his personal interest in the massive and complex work of the symbol-heavy and seemingly subversive English writer. Excited and very encouraged at first, Miller writes to Nin in 1933, ‘The book must be good now because I am good.’19 Subsequently drowning under endless notes, however, as the project grew larger and larger, Miller Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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ultimately did not finish the work on Lawrence before publication of Tropic of Cancer as planned. In fact, the work was never completed entirely in any traditional or projected sense, and the revised, massive collection of notes was only published as Miller literally lay dying; The World of Lawrence was set in print just days after his death in 1980. Miller’s torturous love affair with Lawrence continued his life long and, consequently, Lawrence remained a profound source of influence on virtually everything Miller wrote. It was not really until 1932, though, when Miller read Lawrence’s collection of essays Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925) that he truly began to respect Lawrence as a monumental, singular writer. In a letter dated 7 May 1933 to Nin, Miller writes: ‘He is far greater than I ever dreamt . . . He stands out like a rock.’20 Miller’s Lawrence project, the ‘Brochure’ which became The World of Lawrence, was to include such a vast array of themes and ideas that Nin expressed her fear that the incredible ‘arch’ that Miller was fashioning would be impossible to conquer. This foresight ultimately proved true. Miller wanted to cover absolutely every element of Lawrence, similar in some ways to how Lawrence wanted to cover every element of Thomas Hardy in his own critical study, begun in 1914 and left incomplete during Lawrence’s lifetime. Nearly as with Miller, Lawrence’s study of Hardy represented a massive and impossible undertaking, never to be officially completed by the end of his lifetime and ultimately depicting an image more of the author himself than of the subject being studied.21 Disillusioned by the First World War and frustrated with the philosophical climate around him, Lawrence writes in 1914, ‘Out of sheer rage I’ve begun my book about Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid – queer stuff – but not bad.’22 Later, when potentially nearly complete, Lawrence writes to the poet Amy Lowell, ‘I am just finishing a book, supposed to be on Thomas Hardy, but in reality a sort of Confessions of my Heart.’23 For Miller as well, writing a book on one of his most significant ancestral writers became a task of enormous and personal proportions. Eventually, Miller redirected this energy into his next book, Black Spring, which is often considered Miller’s most profoundly experimental and interesting work in its exploration of childhood, the unconscious, stream-of-consciousness and automatic-style writing.24 Similarly, during his writing of the Hardy book, Lawrence was simultaneously devoted to rewriting his novel The Rainbow, which was subsequently profoundly affected by the philosophical changes that Lawrence was making in the Hardy book. The parallels between Miller’s and Lawrence’s critical studies are interesting if for no other reason than as evidence of their affinity for Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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writing themselves into their texts, wholly and completely. Lawrence’s struggle both to identify the self through writing and to identify writing through the self is what appeals to Miller in his own writerly efforts. The obvious similarity between the writers is their sexually explicit content, but this quality is superficial, one that points to deeper, unconventional stylistic, as well as metaphysical, interests in both writers. While working on the Hardy book, Lawrence had an intensely growing interest in developing a new mode, not just of writing, but of living. In a letter from 1915, he writes:

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We must create an idea of a new, freer life, where men and women can really meet on natural terms, instead of being barred within so many barriers. And if the money spirit is killed, and eating and sleeping is free, then most of the barriers will collapse. Something must be done, and we must being soon.25

So too with Miller, sexually explicit prose becomes a vehicle not just for delving into stronger, deeper ideas but also to some extent for basic attacks upon social conventions in literature that directly inhibit this kind of expression of human nature. Lawrence imbued this philosophical radicalism in his prose, specifically through the sexual material that represented his attempt to use writing as the forum for developing a balance in what he perceived to constitute the human form: consisting of the animal and the spiritual sides. The perception of this dichotomous nature for Lawrence is manifested in a symbolic, or metaphorical, distinction between the male and female, with the male representing the intellect and the female the body. In his ‘Forward’ to Sons and Lovers (1913), Lawrence directly and deliberately inverts St John’s doctrine, from the Word was made Flesh into: ‘The Father was flesh – and the Son . . . became Word.’26 Lawrence uses woman as the metaphor for ‘flesh’, that which gives life, and man as the metaphor for ‘word’, that which gives knowledge and provides orientation in the world as an intellectualising animal. Miller takes his cue from Lawrence’s philosophical meditations and attempts to experiment with these possibilities in his own work: at once writing similar to Lawrence about relationships between man and woman but also, more importantly – that is to say more deeply – about the writer’s relationship to his or her own words. In The World of Lawrence Miller calls Lawrence one of the ‘artists of the future’ who ‘will work away at the joints of the new forms’,27 which involves going out ‘to the dark, animal side of his being, to the obscene natural sources of life, to re-enthrone the Dionysiac element which has always represented for man the interpenetration of spirit and nature’.28 Miller spends a considerable amount of time in The World of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Lawrence using sweeping, metaphorical allusions to eulogise Lawrence and to build a sense of structure to Lawrence’s work as a whole, which is often excessively laudatory and even ridiculous, particularly Miller’s amateurish philosophising on the distinction between the feminine and the masculine in Lawrence. At the same time, this acknowledgement and referencing of sexuality and of the dichotomy between the feminine and masculine in Lawrence, however facile it may seem, paves the way for Miller himself to come to terms with these concepts in his own work, as components to be investigated in his fictional work, more thoroughly, shamelessly and brashly, despite V. S. Pritchett’s rhetorical assessment in 1947: ‘Has Lawrence had any influence on contemporary writers? Yes, he is responsible for the fact that no living writer has any idea of how to write about sexual love.’29 Yet the results in Miller indicate the opposite of this reduction of Lawrence’s potential influential impact. In 1931 Miller writes to Schnellock:

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The worst thing about Lawrence, as I see it, is his use of the orthodox form. That was especially a great pity in the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There he had hold of such a wonderful idea. And he marred it by using the old schema. All the stuff about the colliers, about the intellectual life of the parlor, about democracy and Communism, etc. Fiddlesticks! If he had just confined himself to warmhearted fucking all the way through, what a book it would have been. But when he describes the forest there, and the forester, when he opens up the whole heart of nature like a vein filled with blood . . . God, then you have the real Lawrence, the mystic, the son of Nature, the phallic worshipper, the dark flower and the Holy Ghost.30

What is most interesting about Miller’s criticism here is how he aligns the lack of explicit sex in the text with ‘phallic worship’ in Lawrence. For Miller, ‘warmhearted fucking’ is precisely what eliminates the divide that Lawrence struggled to identify and sustain in a balanced distinction – namely, the masculine and the feminine. However, Miller sees Lawrence as somewhat missing this balance by engaging in the ‘old schema’ that shies away from this union that would be present through a more explicit prose. Lawrence’s ‘phallic worship’ is an effort to control the scene, eliminating the flow of its natural course that would in fact equally include the masculine and the feminine. Miller forgives Lawrence, however, writing to Schnellock: ‘Yes, I know his limitations. Limitations! What’s that? We are all prone to limitations . . .’31 There is much in Lawrence that Miller admires, including his very capacity for limitations. In The World of Lawrence he declares, ‘God be praised that life can still throw out now and then such an abnormal, diseased, sex-crucified, sex-sodden genius as Lawrence.’32 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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He credits Lawrence with using sex in his literature as a vehicle to become the artist, not as a trite tool for domination, manipulation or even subversion. Miller sees it instead as a literary device for entering into greater questions of form and meaning. He writes, ‘The sex act is not the consummation or the fulfillment – it is the point of departure.’33 Miller follows this doctrine in his own writing, yet his intention is always to take it further than Lawrence, writing to Schnellock in 1931:

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Here in Paris I have done more deep, serious thinking about writing than ever before in my life. Certain things are beginning to clarify in my mind. I think I know the direction I want to take. Unfortunately, it is a direction that will further alienate the reader. It’s almost as though I had made up my mind to prevent people from liking me.34

Taking his cue from Lawrence, Miller begins to actualise what will become his signature style: word play and a dismissal of convention and form, in part through sexual language, extensive and tangent monologues and often absurd depictions of seemingly everyday encounters. Miller writes something similar to Nin in 1933, but more sophisticated, and still perhaps uncertain: ‘. . . I have lost the faculty of writing “literature”. No, this is not a fine flowerpot. I have lost the faculty. Hurrah! I wrote it only as a concession to my blood. It stinks, and I know it. My blood has gone entirely to my head, as Ruskin went to Proust’s head.’35 At this point, Miller is working on Black Spring and on the Lawrence chapter entitled ‘The Universe of Death’, which also concerns Joyce and Proust. Using the language of Lawrence, Miller stakes a claim in this instinctual Lawrentian blood (or ‘blood consciousness’, as Lawrence calls it, identifying the effect of the perception of the world through the side of man that is animal). Linking this effect with Proust’s obsession with Ruskin, Miller draws a parallel to his obsession with Lawrence’s blood consciousness in Miller’s own writing: revealing the physical in words, which must succumb to bad writing, to the loss of ‘literature’. Miller learns from Lawrence to attempt to become more attuned to instincts, not over-insisting on intellect but instead allowing a human sense to guide the way toward this animal ‘blood consciousness’. At the same time, using Lawrence as a springboard, Miller is more interested not in this spiritual quest of a union between the ‘blood’ and ‘mental’ consciousnesses (the masculine and the feminine as delineated by Lawrence) but of the literary possibilities resulting from this direction toward ‘blood consciousness’. In Narrative Detours, Ibarguen writes of Miller: ‘In his narrative, symbolism, that which normally provides the experience of structured textual depth, is exposed as pure surface Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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technique.’36 More interested in words, Miller does not partake of Lawrence’s ‘phallic worship’ and mysticism and hence does not use literature as a means for personal growth per se but as the active process itself of the fundamental expression of imagination. Miller is intrigued by so-called bad and unconventional writing because, like Rimbaud, Lawrence, Dostoevsky and others – each in their own way – Miller too understands that writing is a perpetual process of creation. Uninterested in posterity or in writing as a craft for delivering a social or personal message, Miller writes to Schnellock in 1934:

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And to say one does this for art, or for the world, is foolish. I am the gainer. I fought something out – to a conclusion. Not just tackling a problem, as so many finished writers do but living through a thing, body and soul, till one almost dies of it. That is what I mean by creative effort. That is a surrender which yields a certain eternal sort of triumph – not paid for in fame or money or success . . . I have established myself, for myself at least, as a real artist, one with the best. I mean it! I know my own worth now – the world will catch on slowly, maybe never – but I think it will. What I’ve got is vital and durable – in this rotten age or any age. I don’t fear. I’ve won my battle – the rest is tinsel, whether it be recognition or ignominy. If I die tomorrow it won’t matter. I won’t die.37

At this time, Miller is working on Black Spring and The World of Lawrence. His inspiration strongly derives from Lawrence, not only his belief in his fate as a writer but in the energy and vigour – the very life force – produced in the process of writing itself. This passage is also reminiscent of the analyses of Derrida and the name of a dead man. As anticipated of himself, of his quality of being a writer, ‘Miller’ lives on through his work. For Miller, as for Lawrence, the modern world, and the depicted modern world as presented by their literary contemporaries, does not much amount to a positive construction. It is full of decay and falsity, promotes a distancing of the self from itself and of man from mankind, as well as of man from his ‘blood consciousness’. In ‘The Universe of Death’ Miller writes: ‘Lawrence’s life and works represent a drama which centers about the attempt to escape a living death, a death which, if it were understood, would bring about a revolution in our way of living.’38 Again, Miller dismisses his other contemporaries, Pound, Joyce and Eliot, because they deceptively ‘talk like weather experts who always manage to predict sunshine when it rains’.39 Lawrence, on the other hand, ‘despite all that may be said against him, as an artist, or as a man, he still remains the most alive, the most vitalizing of recent writers’.40 Lawrence, according to Miller, brings back a certain vitality to literature that is annihilated by those writers who, despite their experimentalism, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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favour rigorous form and intellectualise their writing, taking it out of the realm of ‘the world of everyday in which we are swimming’.41 Lawrence maintains ‘a certain rawness’, as David Ellis writes in his introduction to The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (2002), of which his ‘willingness to talk about his sexual frustration, if only in a highly allusive, roundabout way, is characteristic’.42 It is this quality, according to Ellis, that ‘helped to create the sense that he was avantgarde’.43 From Lawrence’s candid struggle with the everyday, Miller forages his own path, writing to Nin in 1933 that he ‘has caught the flame [Lawrence] tried to pass on’.44 Taking Lawrence’s candour to another level, Miller writes to Schnellock also in 1933 the details of his plan for writing, stating that he has the desire to express ‘a lot of street stuff – the physical, sensuous Paris – plus my warped moods, introspection, ghosts, etc. [. . .] Above all, the captivating, motivating idea is “marginal” thoughts. [. . .] The art is a by-product, the incidental. Any and every means to preserve the inner flame – the gusto – the vision.’45 Identifying, to some extent, this ‘inner flame’ with Lawrence, Miller looks to express the ‘real’ and the everyday in a manner which itself is real and everyday – that is to say direct and forthcoming about all facets of existence. Applicable to Miller as well, Ellis writes in his introduction to Lawrence’s poems that Lawrence regards ‘impersonality’ as ‘cowardice’.46 Both writers expose their vulnerable selves in the greater project of absolute expression. In the essay ‘Shadowy Monomania’, extracted from Miller’s 1933–4 notes on Lawrence and published in Sunday after the War, Miller reiterates his claim that Lawrence’s ‘obscenity’ is his strength. Of Lawrence’s work, Miller writes that ‘in its obscenity lies its great purity, its miraculous, its sacred quality. The rest, that padding, that cottonwool in which all his visions were wrapped, is dead weight, the humus of decomposing bodies which he has not successfully sloughed off.’47 Miller defines the importance of obscenity, validating his own usage in his prose, by arguing that ‘it is the expression of the insufficiency of symbol, the explosion which occurs when the tension of antagonistic forces is no longer adequate to preserve the image.’48 Precisely because of the linguistic taboo and not because of the social offence, Miller looks to obscenity, that is to say, to material on the fringes of conventional word use, for new possibilities for fuller expression in literary language. Miller adds that ‘the sexual symbols are the least secure’ to make the universe ‘supportable’, ‘understandable, meaningful’.49 Miller’s insight, not just into the power of sexuality in prose (and in life) but in language as a whole, opens up a vast new avenue for understanding work like his and Lawrence’s. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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By focusing on the fundamental significance of symbol, Miller takes the question of literary quality out of the reductive realm of moral character and into a space of expression for existential purposes: drawing attention to what is otherwise left off-scene (that is, the obscene). In The World of Lawrence, Miller writes: ‘His whole art is the pathetic and heroic effort to deny his human defeat.’50 Once writing becomes an issue of man’s desire to come to terms with the universe, as opposed to an attempt to reveal or indulge in some deliberately unsavoury or immoral side of humanity (that is, the controversial sexual side), the presence of sexual material in prose can be considered a far more interesting project, namely one of language and expression. It is precisely this mode of expression that Miller locates in Lawrence’s work and that he himself takes up in his own writing project. However, whether or not Miller’s (or Lawrence’s) remarks on women can be construed as misogynistic or pornographic is not really the question (or even obscene, for that matter). The concern is rather how literature can be made to shift and bend in its expression of the endless issues, philosophies, beliefs and relations in the world in general. A subsequent concern is how an ongoing crisis of language ensues out of the attempt to reflect such ephemeral facets of the world, insofar as they are necessarily missed entirely through literature’s inadvertent creation of new worlds of its own. It is the writing project itself that separates Miller, in his own way, from Lawrence. For Miller, Lawrence is concerned with ‘primary symbolic value’ and ‘the simple naked truth’ of ‘the sex struggle’.51 If Lawrence ‘glorifies life, in order to slay it through his art’,52 Miller glorifies art by pretending to slay life through literary exploitation. In 1933 Miller pens a letter to Schnellock that he cheekily entitles ‘The Genesis of a Masterpiece’, in which he writes: I look over my last will and testament, over my enthusiastic letters – finally I come to my notebooks on ‘The Novel’ – the novel that has never been written, which I excuse myself for not writing because it will take the rest of my life and I don’t know if I will live that long.53

The reader’s initial response might be one, to say the least, of confusion. Miller’s reader is never sure if he is playing tongue-in-cheek or is in earnest. A quick inspection usually reveals both. In this instance, Miller draws attention to the impossibility of completing his project – not because it will take too long but because it is altogether impossible ever to record one’s life in words. The illogical tautology has a Carrollian ring to it: Miller cannot write his novel, because he may run out of time, risking leaving it incomplete – but the novel of his life itself Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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is a product of his life and thus can only ever completed once his life is complete. Furthermore, the novel will take Miller’s entire life to write and would therefore remain incomplete at the end of his life, since he cannot complete it in death. Miller’s focus on the tool of language is partly derived from Lawrence’s similar desire to express the otherwise inexpressible. Even looking at Miller’s work on Lawrence, particularly The World of Lawrence, one notices immediately that it is not a work of ordinary criticism but an artistic endeavour in itself. The language is firm yet poetic, critical yet caring, articulate yet sweeping, dramatic and daring yet convoluted and amateurish. In the first chapter, Miller writes:

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In struggling to grasp the riddle of personality, the inefficacy of the analytical approach becomes especially glaring when it is an artist who is the ‘object’ of study. The fluid, protean nature of the artist defies the rigid touch of science; the reality of his creation, the artist’s whole raison d’être, is ignored.54

Consequently, Miller’s study of Lawrence is more akin to his study of Rimbaud – which again is, as noted by Shapiro in 1961, ‘one of the best books on Rimbaud ever written, although it is mostly about Henry Miller’.55 Miller spends the majority of The World of Lawrence explaining what he understands to be Lawrence’s dichotomy between the male and the female, which instead comes across as Miller’s idealised and highly symbolic and poetic thoughts on the subject. Miller otherwise writes on Lawrence as an essential, prophetic and world-changing figure. Pairing him with Nietzsche, Miller writes, ‘Lawrence the philosopher-artist [. . .] rescues art from the psychologists through his religious endowment.’56 Both Nietzsche and Lawrence, according to Miller, ‘prepare the ground for a new religious feeling’.57 Miller’s reader detects immediately that this work itself stands more as a philosophical tribute presented often through the metaphorical language of the ‘tree’ of Lawrence than as a serious work of criticism. For this reason, one sees as well its significance as a text already thoroughly permeated by Lawrence’s influence. In ‘Shadowy Monomania’, Miller accuses Lawrence of this same critical yet self-directed writing. He states: ‘Notice again that when Lawrence wishes to pay a man a great tribute, or when he wishes to annihilate him – it makes little difference which – he gives you a picture of himself.’58 In his explanations of Lawrence’s depiction of women, for example, Miller extrapolates his own image of the sexes and does so through a confidence of the psychological dimensions in Lawrence’s work, not only of characters in relation to themselves but of the overall implications of such writing as reflective of Lawrence himself. In summing Lawrence Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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up, Miller concludes: ‘And finally, in the last works, out of inner necessity, he makes God over, as men always do, into an image of himself.’59 Ultimately, then, Miller’s work on Lawrence is more of a biographical and psychological study than a straightforward critique of his literary output. This type of writing is Miller’s own way of getting closer to the problem of expression in language. His analysis of Lawrence focuses on Lawrence’s struggle to reveal himself in his literature. Miller writes: ‘In this way you will make the world recognize you for what you really are. Of course Lawrence did not know what he really was. He wrote his books to discover that.’60 Lawrence’s take on writing, not only as a process of self-discovery but an engagement with language through an autobiographical form, becomes Miller’s mode as well. In Reality Hunger (2010) David Shields writes that ‘autobiography is concerned with the consciousness of its creator in the process of creating himself’.61 Analysis of autobiography is particularly interesting here in light of Miller’s adaptation of the form in nearly all of his work. The autobiographical form amounts to the author choosing a particular slant on real experience, on portraying the realness of events, and presenting components of those facts in such a way that leaves open the possibility of difference in the text; it remains open to ‘alternative scenarios’.62 Whether or not the depiction is sufficiently accurate becomes a negotiation between the reader and his or her relationship with both the text and the presumed psychology of the author. Through his own analysis of Lawrence’s mastery of the literary craft, Miller highlights the obviousness of the infinitely questionable assessment of the author’s ability to portray the real in his own writing to an acute degree. Curiously, Lawrence’s advice from Studies in Classic American Literature (1923): ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale,’63 only reinforces this dual focus in literature. In the first instance, the reader considers the writing that is produced, and, separately, the psychology and impetus of the author – which even the author him or herself, as an instantaneously made reader, also considers. Autobiographically styled work of writers like Lawrence and Miller should not be misconstrued as fundamentally and directly reflective of its author. It is the case, as Blanchot writes in The Work of Fire, that ‘the messenger is not master of his words’.64 The words become a creation that is obviously divided from the creator at the moment of transference to the page, emphasising their limitation to provide ‘truth’. In The World of Lawrence Miller writes: ‘In carving out the artist he reduces his human figure to insignificant proportions.’65 Though they are born of the author, the words instantly produce both the creation of the author’s work and the death Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of the author as a participant of that creation, and yet somehow a critique of the writing involves an assessment of the author’s psychology and philosophy. Lawrence, fascinated with the author’s unconscious as affecting the work of art in the creative process, was also highly critical of flatly identifying a work as a manifestation of the author. In Studies in Classic American Literature he writes, ‘Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth.’66 Literature opens itself to the reader, after it has been opened to existence by the author. In writing himself into his work, Lawrence also emphasises that self-presence, like Proust, through the thinly disguised, so to speak, voice of his narrator. The result is, according to Miller in The World of Lawrence, a work of art through which the author ‘alters life itself’, as he simultaneously ‘reveals his obedience to the life principle’ in that creation.67 This ‘life principle’, Miller continues, can be ‘nourished only by flying away from it, by plunging into the abyss, with eyes closed, in the hope of the miracle’.68 Extolling the virtues of the struggle and singularity of the ‘creative type’, or the ‘individual artist type’, of which Lawrence is the prime example, Miller explains: ‘Life is the process of Becoming. [. . .] The creative type, though also a victim of this law of nature, proves by his living the impossibility, the illogicality of life.’69 Through writing oneself into the work, the writer reveals him or herself in the process, but immediately ‘alters life’ by removing him or herself from that creation while equally fusing with it. The duality of the work on one hand and the author on the other, and indeed the very process of ‘becoming’ for both of these concepts, is always a concern at the forefront for Miller – the intense attraction towards the repeated attempt to reconcile or stabilise the relation of one to the other being the impossible, and life-long, undertaking is what Miller garners, in part, from Lawrence. Calling attention to the slippery slope between fiction and non-fiction and the significance of autobiography as a necessary component of all writing, Shields states in Reality Hunger: ‘It’s about the making of knowledge, which is a much larger and more unstable thing than the marshalling of facts.’70 Literature, like Lawrence’s, that reveals its personal investment, makes itself more vulnerable and hence open to both criticism and innovation. Lawrence’s psychological concern, also becomes Miller’s writerly project: namely, the task of writing out this curious and unavoidable quality of ‘life as becoming’ and writing as a means for stabilising that. It is a project of looking for the end of this literary paradox, knowing in advance that it is unreachable or, as Blanchot states in The Work of Fire, is ‘this Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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movement towards its impossibility’ which is ‘its potential to be this nothingness without actualizing it’.71 Writing is becoming. Engaging with Lawrence’s heavy symbolism, Miller uses the metaphor of the tree in The World of Lawrence (rather to excess), in order to demonstrate Lawrence’s significance as a writer in the literary canon as well as in the development of philosophical and spiritual ideas in Western civilisation in general. In fact, Miller literally creates an extensive drawing of ‘the tree of life’ as the structure of his notes for writing the book on Lawrence.72 In the unpublished preface to The World of Lawrence, Miller explains the tree metaphor as ‘one of the oldest symbols of man’, going on to suggest that ‘the oldest symbols of the race are the embodiment of the oldest truths. They are the product of the oldest way of looking at the universe, which is imaginatively. It is the fictive element in art [. . .] which sustains the whole grandiose structure of life’.73 The key point in this instance is not the tree itself as a meaningful symbol; it is rather the significance of the tree as a symbol in the sense of the role that the symbol – that is to say, language – plays in the development of meaning. All language is symbolic, thus reconfirming Miller’s interest, in conjunction with Lawrence’s, in the role of art and of literature as that mode for enacting perpetual becoming. Life is becoming through art and through language, which is always displacing itself in order to move towards its impossible goal of self-fulfilment. A common symbol, to be sure, the tree also surfaces directly in Lawrence’s work. In a letter to Katherine Mansfield from 1915 Lawrence writes, ‘Let us be easy and impersonal, not for ever fingering over our souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create . . . a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.’74 Miller refers to this letter in The World of Lawrence in order to make evident Lawrence’s interest in downplaying the significance of individual identity. It is the detached, universal spirit that Lawrence seeks to awaken to rid man and himself of this attachment to personal neurosis. Lawrence’s use of the tree obviously points to Miller’s adoption of it as well. Yet, although his usage of the tree as a symbol throughout The World of Lawrence is relatively standard fare and unapologetically aggrandising of Lawrence to an exaggerative degree, when Miller inverts the tree and its roots, the metaphor becomes more interesting. Miller engages in the tree metaphor at length in Chapter 2 of The World of Lawrence entitled ‘Soil and Climate’, writing that all ‘the world is like a forest and so are the hearts of men’.75 The tree in this forest that is specifically emblematic of Lawrence, however, is ‘standing upside down’ and hence is quite singular.76 Its ‘monstrous roots’ ‘dangled in the upper air’ with its branches ‘growing into the ground’, ‘in defiance of the death Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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around it’.77 Finally, Miller expands on the metaphor to suggest that it is not specifically this Lawrentian tree’s singularity but the very ‘endless coming and going’ of all the trees that compose humanity and those few that once in a while sprout up as distinct from the rest. Again, Miller draws attention to the concept of becoming and becoming through language, by imagining existence as a process always in flux and that is recognisable and knowable only through artistic and creative (such as symbolic, literary) explication. This symbol and metaphor of the tree is also taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Yet, it is its inversion that takes precedence and that is used when directly referring back to Miller and Lawrence. In A Thousand Plateaus they write, ‘Lawrence is another of the writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration because they were able to tie their writing to real and unheard-of becomings.’78 As suggested in Chapter 5 on Proust, Deleuze and Guattari use such writers as exemplars of philosophical ideas, which they then explicate. They extract their terminology of the rhizome, the root, the plateau, the nomad and other concepts from writers like Lawrence and Miller, who also used these symbols in their own work. In referring to his massive undertaking on the work on Lawrence, for example, Miller writes to Nin in 1932: ‘The notes pile up around me like weeds.’79 The allusion is not in the least of despair or disappointment. On the contrary, Miller privileges the weed. In A Thousand Plateaus, as they begin their explication of the rhizome in contradistinction to the tree, Deleuze and Guattari cite Miller from Hamlet: ‘China is the weed in the human cabbage patch . . . Of all the imaginary existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most satisfactory life of all.’80 When Miller inverts the tree metaphor to highlight Lawrence’s singularity in a forest of identical bodies, it is this sense of the rhizome, or the root, that is reaching in all directions, not following the customary path of vertical growth. Along with the extensive tree metaphor used to describe Lawrence’s significance and the concept of growth as a moving down into the roots, a parallel also exists between Miller and Lawrence and being ‘Eastern’. The idea of being Eastern, in opposition to Western civilisation most generally, is a repeated trope in Miller as the metaphor for a kind of extra-sensory capacity for being closer to the ‘truth’ or to a natural, purer state of being.81 Deleuze and Guattari also use this metaphor frequently, often citing Miller as a source. In Anti-Oedipus they write: Even those who are best at ‘leaving,’ those who make leaving into something as natural as being born or dying, those who set out in search of

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nonhuman sex – Lawrence, Miller – stake out a far-off territoriality that still forms an anthropomorphic and phallic representation: the Orient, Mexico, or Peru.82

In the case of Lawrence the otherness that being Eastern represents is found in non-Eastern places, literally speaking, like Mexico and, as Miller notes, Egypt. In The World of Lawrence Miller writes of Lawrence: ‘He liked the Egyptians because they had a sharp sense of death and a great symbolic culture.’83 As a concept, however, being Eastern is still embodied in this ‘nomadism’ and ‘deterritorialisation’ that Lawrence enacts through these ‘lines of flight’ to Mexico and Egypt. In essence, Miller uses the symbol of being Eastern, specifically being Chinese, to highlight Lawrence’s emphasis on symbol. Miller writes: ‘He scorns the ordinary alphabet which yields at most only a grammar of thought, and adopts the symbol, the metaphor, the ideograph. He writes Chinese. He creates an impossible world out of an incomprehensible language, a lie that enchants and enslaves men.’84 Miller explains that this style is Lawrence’s way of creating ‘the legend of himself’, as he ‘dies many times in order to live innumerable lives’.85 Lawrence, like Miller, expresses through his work this desire to be other, which is a hopefulness that is expressed through being ‘elsewhere’ in the world, and to be creating a new world through nomadic language and, individually, in real nomadic living. For Lawrence this has meant extensive travelling and residence in Australia, Italy, the USA, Germany, Austria, Sri Lanka, Mexico and the South of France. In the beginning of Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence talks about the importance of place for a sense of freedom. He writes that freedom does not come by ‘escaping to some wild west’, but is rather when men ‘belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose’.86 Lawrence focuses on the importance of listening to the ‘deepest self’ to find true freedom.87 Perhaps Lawrence never truly felt free, as he writes: ‘Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away.’88 On the other hand, it may be the case that Lawrence found himself in a ‘living homeland’ as often as he changed his location. In any case, in this instance, he is speaking of the lack of freedom in America, because it is based on attempting to cast off fatherhood, which is an impossible pursuit. In The World of Lawrence Miller suggests that Lawrence was miserable in his wanderlust and nomadism. Miller too was himself a selfimposed wanderer, seeking the old world of Europe while also travelling on behalf of his ‘deepest self’, as Lawrence writes, to the spiritual, yet Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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anti-intellectual, lands of an imaginary Asia. Lawrence sought and experienced many actual worlds, self-identifying more as an exile than an expatriate. Miller attributes this lifestyle of Lawrence, this need to move away from one’s native land and towards an inner sense of home, as a result of ‘Fate’ (Miller’s italics).89 He writes: ‘The savior type is obliged to retire from life, that is, from the ordeal of experience, in order to incubate, to take root in himself, to discover himself . . .’90 He continues: ‘He goes away to find his own faith in himself, but the going away is not the end. The end is to come back and challenge the world squarely!’91 Such nomadic figures, Miller declares, are not cowards, but are rather ‘productive neurotics’ who challenge the ‘flatness’ of life, not in order not to ‘know the world’ but to discover the ‘inner self’.92 In this instance, Miller mentions Melville, H. James, Gauguin and Lawrence but of course includes others elsewhere in his writing who embody the quality of being the nomadic ‘saviour’, himself included. This process of writing about writers with whom he has an affinity obviously connects Miller directly to Lawrence and the other ancestral authors who affected his work, but it also brings this study full circle back to Whitman – Miller’s original, or originating, inspiration for this transtemporal correspondence and writerly bond. Just as Lawrence writes his book on the American writers Franklin, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Fennimore Cooper, Whitman and the France-born de Crèvecœur, as well as the ill-fated study on Hardy, Miller too writes directly about his influential writers, both in his longer studies on Rimbaud and Lawrence and in his essays on Joyce, Proust and others, but many writers of significance are also peppered throughout his work, including Rilke, Hugo, Balzac, Huysmans, Spengler, Faure, Van Gogh and others – a complete list too lengthy to mention.93 In Bloomian fashion, Miller is desperately drawn to his influences while also agonising over their control of him. To Nin he writes in 1933: ‘I want to rid myself once and for all of this incubus – of all the influences, gods, books, great names, etc. which throttled me before.’94 Interestingly, though, Miller learns through his correspondence-like connection to nomadic writers who are alert to their ‘deeper self’ both the importance of listening to one’s ancestral authors but also of stepping out of their shadow in order to produce one’s own light. Miller often finds himself overwhelmed by the prominence of his ancestral authors in his own imagination and subsequently in his work. One of Miller’s best literary qualities is how these writers enter his work – magnificently at every angle. At the same time, Miller also feels that such writers, as singular ‘trees’ in otherwise dead cultural periods, as he sees it, cannot really hold any significant transformative power Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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over the world around them. In ‘The Universe of Death’, he brashly and somewhat tragically declares: ‘The fact remains, nevertheless, that not even a Lawrence was able to exercise any visible influence upon the world. The times are stronger than the men who are thrown up.’95 This comment must be taken with a grain of salt, as clearly Miller himself – as part of the greater world in some capacity – was not only profoundly influenced by such writers, but he also believes enough in the potential impact (or simply import) of writing as a significant endeavour to keep at it his whole life long. Returning to the beginning of this study, it is the case for Miller that the role of the writer is to sustain an imaginative effort that fundamentally works to transform language through investigating the self from within, regardless of its effects on the social climate. As he repeatedly espouses in his work, writing, after all, is neither of the world nor a reflection of the world: ‘It is not what people think it is. It is an absolutely new thing each time with each individual.’96 In conscious and unconscious conjunction with his ancestral authors, as trans-temporal correspondents, Miller is interested in developing a writerly craft that deliberately refuses literary expectations as much as it inspires the reader to envision ‘which incalculable vistas yawn ahead’, as Miller writes, calling out to Whitman.97 Ultimately, as Lawrence writes in ‘The Uprooted’ (1932), ‘The thing to do is in solitude slowly and painfully put forth new roots / into the unknown, and take root by oneself.’98 Yet, to ‘take root by oneself’ ironically only comes through establishing a familiarity in time and place, as Lawrence explains – precisely the nature of being rooted. Through this connection to the self does connection to all else take effect, which is a unity with a sense of otherness, of what is beyond the self. In ‘Delight of Being Alone’ (1932) Lawrence writes: I know no greater delight than the sheer delight of being alone. It makes me realise the delicious pleasure of the moon That she has in travelling by herself: throughout time, or the splendid growing of an ash tree alone, on a hillside in the north, humming in the wind.99

The symbol of the tree, here again, indicates singularity but also multiplicity; it recalls life as well as death, both solitude and community. For Miller as with his consciously and unconsciously chosen ancestral authors who create an imaginary literary kinship, this connection to what Lawrence calls the ‘deepest self’ begins in writing and progresses toward an endlessly receding horizon, as a mode of literature that necessarily provokes its own unattainable limits. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Notes 1. Sunday, 244. 2. For more on the first publication of Miller after the overturning of the obscenity ban in 1959, see John Calder’s Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder (2001), in which Calder details his path as the first legal publisher of Miller in the UK. 3. For an extensive study on the biographical parallels between Lawrence and Miller, see Karl Orend’s Henry Miller’s Red Phoenix: A Lawrentian Quest (2006). Orend’s text also details Miller’s role in James Cooney’s literary journal The Phoenix (1938–40, 1970–82). 4. Spring, 25. 5. Assassins, 3. 6. ‘Démocratie’, 222. 7. Plexus, 230. 8. Ibid., 230. 9. Ibid., 321. 10. Cancer, 163. 11. Emil, 138. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 117. 14. Ibid. 15. Wisdom, 2. 16. Emil, 73. 17. Jack Kahane, an Englishman in Paris, was a notorious publisher of books of ‘obscenity’ having brought out parts of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (then called Work in Progress) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and had hoped to garner Joyce’s Ulysses from Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Co. Although he never did take it off her hands, Kahane revered Beach for having published the masterpiece, particularly as Beach had little knowledge of literature and even less knowledge of book publishing. For more on Kahane see Hugh Ford’s Published in Paris (1975) and Neil Pearson’s Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press (2007). 18. Lawrence began The Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays in 1914 but anguished over the work and sought to rewrite and reprint it. It wasn’t printed until 1936, after his death. Yet the manuscript published was in no way a version prepared or completed by Lawrence himself but rather an amalgamation of assembled variations. See Bruce Steele’s ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (1985). 19. Letters to Nin, 113. 20. Ibid., 118. 21. Eventually the Hardy book morphed into a very intimate text about Lawrence himself, which he then subsequently renamed ‘Le Gai Savaire’. Undergoing major transformations for the next several years based on his developing philosophy, Lawrence’s original Hardy book was also never published during his lifetime. The original manuscripts were both lost and deliberately destroyed, and what did survive contained extensive typist errors. Variations on it degenerated further in the hands of future

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22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way posthumous publishers in the 1930s, until a definitive version was finally printed, taking into account and weighing the relevance of any surviving materials, in 1985 under the detailed textual guidance of Bruce Steele. See his ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (1985). Lawrence, Letters, 212. Ibid., 235. One might also recognise the distinction here between Miller and his literary inheritors, such as the Beats, who extracted from Miller a somewhat facile Whitmanesque carpe diem, but who ultimately may have missed the boat on the poetry of the language itself. The message of the Beats, as popularly seen to derive from Miller, becomes not of beautiful complexities of literary expression but of a social rebellion against conventional restraints manifest in a kind of poetic expression, not parallel to, but equated with, Miller’s own radical form – however, preceded by a very evident literary radicalism that led to the 1960s movements in freedom of expression, as previously discussed. Although such a tremendous breakthrough cannot be overlooked, the affinities between Miller and his literary inheritors runs more shallow than readers tend to perceive. To this end, a critical study of Miller’s literary inheritors is also overdue. Lawrence, Letters, 292. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 467. Lawrence, 149. Ibid., 154. Pritchett, 1. Emil, 72. Ibid., 72. Lawrence, 55. Ibid., 54. Emil, 73. Letters to Nin, 79. Ibarguen, online. Emil, 146. ‘Universe’, 107–8. Emil, 152. ‘Universe’, 108. Ibid., 121. Ellis, vii. Ibid. Letters to Nin, 143. Emil, 121. Ellis, xvi. Sunday, 235. Ibid. Ibid. Lawrence, 157. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 54. Emil, 128.

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Writers and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

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82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

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Lawrence, 52–3. Shapiro, vi. Lawrence, 217. Ibid., 217. Sunday, 247. Lawrence, 72. Ibid., 73. Shields, §428. Ibid., §389. Lawrence. Studies, 8. Fire, 15; ‘Le messager n’est pas maître de ses paroles’, Feu, 23. Lawrence, 157. Lawrence, Studies, 8. Lawrence, 148. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 147–8. Shields, §393. Fire, 2; ‘. . . ce mouvement vers son impossibilité’, ‘sa possibilité qui est d’être ce néant sans le réaliser’, Feu, 28. A copy of Miller’s ‘tree of life’ explicating Lawrence’s oeuvre is imprinted on the title page of The World of Lawrence. Lawrence, 21. Lawrence, Letters, 473. Lawrence, 57. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 58. Plateaus, 244; ‘Lawrence à son tour fait partie des écrivains qui nous font problème et admiration, parce qu’ils ont su lier leur écriture à des devenirsanimaux réels inouïs’, Plateaux, 299. Letters to Nin, 69. Hamlet, 18. See my article ‘Henry Miller, Deleuze and the Metaphor of China’, in The McNeese Review, 47 (2009): 79–102. Anti-Oedipus, 315; ‘Même ceux qui savent le mieux «partir», qui font du partir quelque chose d’aussi naturel qui naître et mourir, ceux qui plongent à la recherche du sexe non humain, Lawrence, Miller, dressent au loin quelque part une territorialité qui forme encore une représentation anthropomorphique et phallique, l’Orient, le Mexique ou le Pérou’, Anti-Oedipe, 376. Lawrence, 160. Ibid., 140–1. Ibid., 141. Lawrence, Studies, 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 12. Lawrence, 158. Ibid. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 159–60.

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93. Incidentally, Karl Orend writes that Lawrence served as ‘an anonymous collaborator’ on Koteliansky’s translation of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in 1930 (Henry Miller’s Red Phoenix, 23). For more on Lawrence’s relationship to Dostoevsky, see George J. Zytaruk’s D. H. Lawrence’s Response to Russian Literature (1971). 94. Letters to Nin, 67. 95. ‘Universe’, 109. 96. Spring, 30. 97. Cancer, 266. 98. Lawrence, Poems, 503. 99. Ibid., 504.

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Conclusion

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The Classics! Slowly, slowly, I am coming to them – not by reading them, but by making them. Where I join with the ancestors, with my, your, our glorious predecessors, is on the field of the cloth of gold. – Henry Miller, The Books in My Life (1952)1

In the ‘Autobiographical Note’ at the end of The Cosmological Eye, Miller writes: ‘My greatest influences were Dostoievski, Nietzsche and Elie Fauré. Proust and Spengler were tremendously fecundating. Of American writers the only real influences were Whitman and Emerson.’2 Although this study strays slightly from Miller’s self-made list of his influences to some extent, the impetus behind the selection is not meant to reflect exactly what Miller may have thought of himself but rather to present a momentous and stimulating collection of Miller’s ancestral authors. All those discussed here, at the same time, are included on Miller’s list, apart from Lawrence, as previously explained. This study also seeks to raise the issue of the difficulty in making a meaningful and concrete selection of authors of influence, which establishes the more important point of the very absurdity of trying to assess the manner of influence of any given writer in a complete and concrete sense. Importance must instead be placed on intertextuality, such that the focus of this kind of study rests in its ability to reveal and articulate references and citations without attempting to draw conclusions of textual autonomy but instead to open fissures for further exploration into the nature and effects of intertextual relations. Influence naturally remains as obscure and even dubious as ever, which hopefully leaves the critic to look for moments of intertextual reference and thereby draw attention instead to literary effects and also to greater historical and social contexts of a work. In a review of Sons and Lovers from 1935, included in Geoff Dyer’s 1999 introduction to the novel, Jessie Chambers writes: ‘Lawrence possessed the miraculous Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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power of translating the raw material of life into significant form.’3 Focusing on literary effect, this passage is also reminiscent of Miller’s assessment of Proust in Tropic of Cancer where he declares that Proust’s writerly talent permits him ‘to so deform the picture of life’ that he is ‘capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art’.4 The parallel between Chambers’ comment on Lawrence and Miller’s comment on Proust is both in their reverence of these authors’ influence, or perhaps impact, upon the entire nature of their craft as a literary method, and in their positive criticism that attests to these authors’ capacity for creation out of destruction – which, intertextually speaking, can be historicised and socialised in terms of the way in which literary expression was transforming during the early twentieth century, out of certain traditions and into new ones, marked by an expanding conglomeration of literary voices. Wallace Fowlie makes a similar claim upon creation from destruction with reference to Rimbaud and Orpheus, stating that Miller ‘inherited from them the will to break with the world in order to recreate it’.5 Miller inherits this quality not only from all of the ancestral authors in this study obviously but from all of those not mentioned, and those particularly mentioned throughout Miller’s oeuvre. Apart from writers, Miller personally includes philosophers and artists as well, such as Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger, Emerson, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, Buñuel and Eisenstein among others, without restriction to medium. Beyond traditional definitions of influence, Chambers and Miller’s remarks also elicit a sense of the fundamental significance of intertextuality, in Kristeva and Bakhtin’s conceptualisation, of the transference of words and ideas across texts and through time. In every text there is always already a heteroglossia of voices surging and resurging within an array of historical contexts, overlapping and penetrating one another with seen and unseen force and effect. The way in which language is always already influencing and being influenced by the histories of itself is, again, what Kristeva calls ‘dialogic’ language, occurring through a ‘translinguistic procedure’.6 Every new voice includes all those of the past while also annihilating them through their assimilation into something new – but even the ‘new’ holds within it an entirety that is simultaneously without containment. Particularly in light of Miller’s popular reputation as a ‘rebel buffoon’ or ‘bad boy’, these elucidations of the intertextuality in Miller’s work serve to bring about a reconception of him as a notable writer, not just for his part in exploding writerly conventions on certain taboos of his time, but also in terms of his relation among other writers of major stature, both in form and quality. It is not a question of whether Miller Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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is better, more popular or worthy than a Proust or Hemingway. It is rather simply that Miller contributes to a complex literary tradition as a strong, unique writer both directly in relation to traditional figures of influence and also in consideration of their very presence in his work (distinguishing ‘presence’ both as reference and allusion). Furthermore, Miller’s interest as a writer is to write about writing, to investigate its boundaries, it structures, its roots, connections and paths, such that his relevance and significance within a study on intertextuality and the nature of the literary form in general should not be underestimated. Part of Miller’s significance as a writer comes out of his ability to appear casual, nondescript and unassuming, all the while creating a literary style that defers to an infinite series of meta-questions as to the nature of literature itself, using the history of literature both for his examples and for his comrades. Subsequently, a forceful emphasis must be placed on Miller’s interest in, and ability to, write about writing – a craft with an assumed form but with unnamed possibilities within it that are necessarily already beyond that form – and thus to engage in the dilemma of the role of intertextuality in the creation of future writing. Not only does Miller engage, he thrashes, he laments, he is confounded, he struggles. In Sexus he writes:

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No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty and magic that he desires to create, why does he put millions of words between himself and the reality of that world?7

The struggle of writing as a procedure, and as a collection of ideas transmitted to word with the aid and handicap of writers past, becomes the subject of Miller’s literary pursuits. In his interchapter ‘A Manifesto for Antithetical Criticism’, Bloom echoes Miller: ‘If influence were health, who could write a poem? Health is stasis.’8 Miller is the critic of his own intertextual references: rewriting them into existence while searching in vain for the capacity to write them out of existence – to complete the task that they began. Yet every sentence on an ancestral author makes a new image of that author, just as much as it eradicates him or her by taking the author up through new words. Not only is Miller victim, so to speak, to this unavoidable circumstance of writing, he makes it the subject of his writing, but he does so in very curious ways. Chapter 17 of Plexus begins directly with a quotation from Spengler’s Decline of the West, in which his indebtedness to Goethe and Nietzsche is announced. ‘And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Goethe and Nietzsche.’9 The passage only subtly reveals itself as a citation through its quotation marks but could still be taken as the voiced claim of one of Miller’s characters. This statement could just as well have been made by Miller as by Spengler and, in fact, it is being made by Miller despite (or perhaps in addition to) being made by Spengler. The passage continues: ‘Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty.’10 It is only at the end of the paragraph that a location and date are named (‘Blankenburg am Harz, December 1922’), followed in the second paragraph by an acknowledgement of their origin. Such direct references exist in multitude throughout Miller’s work, indicating the importance he places not only on ancestral influence but also on the fluidic nature of writing and on the disembodiment of authorship. Intertextuality is Miller’s subject. Approaching this subject from as many angles as possible, Miller includes writers as characters in his work, finally introducing the fourth form of intertextuality most substantially, as mentioned in the Introduction of this study. Of those writers who enter Miller’s oeuvre as characters, Knut Hamsun and Thomas Mann are the most striking. In Nexus, passing by a German bakery brings Miller to thoughts about Mann. He writes:

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Dear old Thomas Mann. Such a marvelous craftsman. (I should have bought a piece of Streuselkuchen!) Yes, in the photos I’d seen of him he looked a bit like a storekeeper. I could visualize him writing his Novellen in the back of a delicatessen store, with a yard of linked sausages wrapped around his neck.11

Not exactly a character in a traditional sense, Mann manages to enter Miller’s text as a caricature: he is a writer brought back to the realm of being a human, but this presence necessarily morphs him into a curiously puppet-like figure, neither real nor imaginary but somewhere in between and somehow, as mentioned in the chapter on Dostoevsky, ‘more real than real’. Knut Hamsun receives the same treatment. Immediately following the Mann reference, Miller writes: A street car rattled by. I caught a glimpse of the motor-man’s flowing moustache as it rushed by. Presto! The name leaped to mind like a flash. Knut Hamsun. Think of it, the novelist who finally earns the Nobel Prize operating a street car in this god-forsaken land!12

In 1884 Hamsun worked as a bus and cable-car conductor in Chicago while spending several years in the US working odd jobs before returning to Norway to become a writer. Casually and humorously injected into Miller’s text, Hamsun’s presence alerts the reader to the peculiar Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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division between text and reality. Adding to this issue is the potential influence that Hamsun, both as a person and as writer, has on Miller. Somewhat akin to Miller’s desire to penetrate the portrait of Dostoevsky, Miller’s rendition of Mann and Hamsun is an attempt to take the image of the writer and from that create a ‘real’ image of a man. At the same time, Miller only toys with this possibility, which is actually an impossibility, knowing that instead he must create ‘real’ caricatures instead that simply provoke this impossibility itself directly. The creation of himself as ‘Henry Miller’ in the text also produces precisely this effect. Miller raises this issue of the division between a character and its creator in ‘The Universe of Death’, where he remarks on Proust’s innertextual critique of Dostoevsky, found in the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time, The Captive (La Fugitive, 1925; in English, 1927). Miller refers to the debate between Albertine and Marcel concerning Dostoevsky, in which Marcel seems unable to provide Albertine with any satisfactory responses to her questions. Miller writes how Proust’s depiction of Marcel as ‘feebly endeavoring to give a satisfactory response to Albertine’s questions’ is actually cleverly overcome by Proust himself, through his creation of the character of Charlus. Miller makes this claim because Charlus is so different from his creator, according to Miller, that his creation confirms Marcel’s response to Albertine concerning Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with murder. Of Dostoevsky Marcel says: ‘And it is not perhaps necessary that he himself should have been a criminal. I am not a novelist; it is possible that creative writers are tempted by certain forms of life of which they have no personal experience.’13 Miller contends that Proust’s creation of Charlus itself proves Marcel’s point. Miller writes: ‘In both Dostoievski and Proust there existed a Stavrogin, a Charlus, far more real than the actual figures.’14 Suddenly, as with Dostoevsky’s characters being ‘more real, more potent, more mysterious, more inscrutable than all the mad Czars and all the cruel, wicked Popes put together’,15 and Miller and his wife and her lover living like characters in a Dostoevsky story, the lines between textual figures and real people is deliberately blurred nearly beyond recognition. What an author is capable of creating is not a reflection of his or her personal self or personal experience but innately belongs to the realm of art and literary creation. It cannot be reduced to the dominion of the real. In 1932 Miller writes to Nin: Proust points out numerous examples, but . . . how do we know that he knows what he is talking about? It is splendidly convincing because there is no real, tangible Albertine, or Andrée, or Duchesse de Guermantes to jump up and contradict him. It has the verisimilitude of art, and that is all I can concede. Of course, his frequent reiteration that ‘we are absolutely alone,

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isolate, incomprehensible and mysterious’ is the admission of his ineffectuality. But we need to say it over to ourselves again and again, day after day.16

Despite Proust’s persuasive ability at character creation, Miller questions the ‘real’ of Proust’s writing. Perhaps his characters are perfect, but in that way they are too perfect. They are art at its finest; and for this reason, Miller asserts that Proust’s admittance to ultimate incomprehensibility of reality is a testament to the impossibility of writing to produce anything but art. The figures that writing produces cannot be anything more than their appearances, even though it is precisely that appearance that makes them ultimately more real – ‘more potent, more mysterious, more inscrutable . . .’ – than if they actually were real. This effect is similar to Proust’s capacity for creating a stronger sense of the ‘real’ through highly exaggerated description. Thus Miller as a character himself, Knut Hamsun, Thomas Mann and others are given their chance in Miller’s work to live in a grander sense than is possible to live in real life. When Mona recalls the artists she’s met during a short trip to Paris in Nexus, they are presented as ‘real’, and the text itself in which their descriptions are given is understood, then, somehow, to be a document reporting a ‘real’ experience, further complicated by the fact that they are real experiences (of June Mansfield) despite being ‘fictionalised’ by Miller-the-author. After Mona lists her encounters, Miller-the-character reports he does not know but a few from the list: Zadkine, Edgar Varèse, Hans Reichel, Tihanyi, Michonze and Marcel Duchamp. He then asks her what Duchamp was like ‘as a person’, to which Mona responds: ‘The most civilized man I ever met.’17 The reader, in this instance, can either treat the exchange as a fictional conversation about fictional characters – as anyone would do when reading a novel – or the reader can consider the material historical and imagine Henry Miller’s wife encountering these famous artists, sizing up her assessments of them as something that might be done when reading a news report or a biographical study. Either approach delimits the role of the figure, filtered through one conventional form of reading or another. It is no wonder Miller is taken to task for his words, and it is also no wonder that he is misunderstood for the same reason. Instead of permitting the world of the text to retain its curious dualism of form, the reader most often makes a choice. Miller himself is written into the reading and imagined to be of a certain character himself, in the eyes of the reader. For consistency, the reader thus chooses to imagine, for example, Dostoevsky harbouring dark secrets of murder, Proust gazing out of his cork-lined room in the deep hours of the night with profound Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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melancholy, Lawrence sternly, shrewdly working with his hands worn with calluses from hard labour. Such writers who leap beyond the boundaries of falling prey to this categorical syllogistic fallacy themselves often become victims anyway to a rather all-consuming ontological romanticism. The writers represented here tend themselves to read in the awareness of this tendency that confuses the writer with the name of a dead man, and hence to write with the interest of engaging this theme. These writers curiously become part of the very structure of idealisation in language that they write about. They are humans who are also writers who are subsequently personae and caricatures. Texts are also given this chance to exist between the real and imaginary in Miller’s work. Joyce’s Ulysses and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises peculiarly enter Nexus in a playful manner, doing so in the same episode. Miller begins by telling Mona a story in order to demonstrate to her his will ‘to live . . . live at any cost . . .’18 The story that he recounts occurs at a time when Mona was in Paris, and Miller had hopes of getting the money to go and be with her. Within the story, Miller is speaking to an acquaintance about The Sun Also Rises and suddenly has the idea to ask this person for the fare to Paris from New York. Endlessly evoking subtle literary references as he tells the story, Miller says to Mona, in a Dostoevskian fashion: ‘I was about ready to do anything to raise the necessary passage money’ [. . .] ‘anything short of murder.’19 Realising the acquaintance wanted nothing short of sexual favours, however, Miller decides to spend the night on the sofa, though he ‘didn’t sleep a wink’.20 At dawn, quietly preparing to leave, he ‘spied a copy of Ulysses’ and instead takes time to read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, casually ‘taking a seat by the front window’.21 He thinks of stealing the book, he reports to Mona, but ‘a better idea occurred’ to him, and instead he rummages through the man’s pockets and takes his remaining seven dollars. All of the allusions in this passage only hint at any connection to their literariness. They are otherwise incidental details in an incidental story, amounting to nothing but a brief episode in a logodaedalous novel. Just as with the figures of Mann and Hamsun, the novels Ulysses and The Sun Also Rises become caricatures, in the sense that they are random, fictional objects that maintain a certain aura of realness in the text, but an aura which has been tarnished or even diminished by their very real quality of being-in-the-world. The fact that this quality of being-in-theworld comes through a fictional text further removes them from their original purpose as texts themselves, just as the figures of Mann and Hamsun are removed both from being writers and from being men in the world. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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A few pages later, Miller is quoting from Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907):

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He who reads wonderful prose or verse is conscious of suggestions that cannot be put into words . . . The world so disclosed is rather the world of dreams, rather the world in which children sometimes live, instantly appearing, and instantly vanishing away, a world beyond all expression or analysis . . .22

The world Machen speaks of, the world to which Miller alludes with the reference, is the same world inhabited by these imaginary figures that populate Miller’s texts. The space that the text creates is neither imaginary nor real but somehow both, in that it provides the idea of a reflection of the world, but what it actually produces is something else entirely, an entirely new creation, which brings together person and persona, the real and the imaginative. Somewhat similar to Proust’s Albertine entering Miller’s text in Tropic of Cancer, certain other ‘fictional’ characters, particularly from paintings, also surface directly in Miller’s work, such as Cézanne’s card players in Nexus, as well as figures from Bosch, Chagall and Matisse paintings in Sexus, a Rembrandt in Plexus and unnamed Renoirs in Black Spring.23 Happily mixing mediums, Miller also makes references concerning one artist or writer in the context of another form of composition completely, such as in Tropic of Capricorn, where he writes: ‘Long before I read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I was composing music to it, in the key of sassafras.’24 Partially playing off his interest in synaesthesia, particularly in light of his interest in Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s fascination with the mixing of the expression of sensory experiences, Miller makes connections that are deliberately difficult, if not impossible, to interpret. This mode of writing again raises Miller’s interest in Carroll and word play and, as referenced here, Wittgenstein and Sprachspiele (‘language games’). Once again, Miller is not simply providing an obvious and straightforward reference but, as usual, is engaging in multiple forms of intertextuality. These include a meta-textual, self-reflexive component that points to the abstruse nature of writing, as seen through Miller’s engagement with the act of reading. There is also a referential component to the text itself that does nothing more than raise the complex issues of Wittgenstein’s language games generally. Miller also adds an oblique form of textual criticism in this passage by combining sensory experiences somewhat nonsensically, also trampling on conventional perceptions of time, or at least of theorising about time and space in writing. This passage is also a critique on the conventional conceptions of what Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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writing does, what art is and the nature of the creation of art in general. It calls into question how forms of art are separated and assumed to make sense only, and necessarily, in certain ways. Finally, the tone of the passage itself draws attention to the ontological absurdity of the concept of truth as a whole, by ironically claiming to know something before it even exists. Manipulating and consciously and unconsciously borrowing from his illuminating predecessors, Miller’s dismissal of conventional language forms leads to a type of literary fragmentation that opens up new avenues for exploring the possibilities not only in writing but also in reading, in terms of understanding the complex and non-linear trajectory of intertextuality and influence. Miller’s often unconventionally improper language is best regarded as a means of empowerment and creation instead of being both excluded and considered exclusive. Before his publication career began, Miller perfectly, and perhaps naively, articulates his writerly goals to Schnellock in 1930, summing up the impossible task he set before himself: ‘What I must do, before blowing out my brains, is to write a few simple confessions in plain Milleresque language.’25 The ironic points to this statement include the fact that Miller lived to be eighty-eight years old, that he created a form of writing that blurs the definition of ‘confession’ and that his other literary innovations add to the realisation that language can hardly ever be ‘simple’ or ‘plain’. Whether or not the reader could ever locate, then, what ‘Milleresque language’ itself might be (and what exactly writing ‘a few simple confessions’ could amount to, particularly in light of Miller’s sarcasm and irony), the important point is to recognise that reassessing the roots of experimental forms, such as those found in Miller, is a productive endeavour. Not only does it recuperate the significance and value of ‘Henry Miller’, it also reveals a tremendous amount about multiple histories of reading and about the interpenetrability of texts. Such an undertaking, in turn, restricts judgements of aesthetic deficiency and instead promotes such writing as a means of expressing originality but also influence, revolution but also convention, singularity but also interdependency, and diversity but also community – regardless of the time or place in which such literary dialogues are continually forming.

Notes 1. Books, 316. 2. Cosmological Eye, 370.

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188 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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24. 25.

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way Dyer, xlii. Cancer, 163. Fowlie, Rimbaud, xi. Desire in Language, 37; ‘. . . une démarche translinguistique’, Séméiotiké, 146. Sexus, 18. Anxiety, 95. Plexus, 444. Ibid., 444. Nexus, 309. Séméiotiké, 309. Research, online; ‘Et ce n’était même peut-être pas la peine qu’il fût criminel. Je ne suis pas romancier; il est possible que les créateurs soient tentés par certaines formes de vie qu’ils n’ont pas personnellement éprouvées’, Recherche, online. ‘Universe’, 123. Plexus, 16. Letters to Nin, 27–8. Nexus, 104. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 203. Ibid. Ibid., 215. For an in depth analysis of this kind of referential ekphrasis, see my work The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (Camden House, 2011). Capricorn, 226. Emil, 65.

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Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, [1929] 1984. Balzac, Honoré de. ‘Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu’, Contes oubliés du XIXe siècle. Montreal: Cercle du livre de France, [1831] 1949. —. The Unknown Masterpiece, trans. Michael Neff. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co., [1845] 1984. Barthes, Roland. ‘La mort de l’auteur’, Le bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, [1968] 1984. —. ‘The Death of the Author’, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977. —. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. —. S/Z, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. Bataille, Georges. ‘La Morale de Miller’, ‘L’Inculpation d’Henry Miller’, Oeuvres complètes XI: Articles I 1944–1949. Paris: Gallimard, [1946] 1988. Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985. Blair, David. Wittgenstein, Language and Information: ‘Back to the Rough Ground!’ Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. —. La Part du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. —. The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. —. The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Blinder, Caroline. A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Camden House, 2000. Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. —. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1973] 1997. —. ‘Introduction’, Complete Poems by Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon. New York: Liveright, 2000, pp. xi–xxii. Bloshteyn, Maria R. The Making of a Counter-culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Bogen, Nancy. ‘Main Outline of “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge”: Shifting Points

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of View’, The Cries of Cassandra: A Slide Choreography. 7 August 2009. Online at: http://www.thelarkascending.org/TLA2_CoC/CoCbgd.html. Brown, J. D. Henry Miller. New York: Unger, 1986. Burns, Jim. ‘Walter Lowenfels’, The Penniless Press, Issue 11, August 1999. Online at: http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/prose/walter_lowenfels.htm. Bursey, Jeff. ‘Carrollian Nonsense Prose in Henry Miller’s “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt”’, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, Vol. 1, 2003. Calder, John. Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder. London: Calder Publications, 2001. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan, 1898. —. The Hunting of the Snark and Other Poems and Verses. New York and London: Harper & Bros, 1903. —. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. New York and London: Harper & Bros, 1902. Clayton, Jay and Rothstein, Eric. Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Crane, Hart. ‘Cape Hatteras’, ‘Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge’, ‘Sunday Morning Apples’, Complete Poems, ed. Marc Simon. New York: Liveright, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. ‘H comme Histoire’, L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze avec Claire Parnet. Dir. Pierre-André Boutang, 1989. —. L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1972. —. Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. —. Critique et clinique. Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1993. —. Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. —. Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Editions de minuit, [1980] 2006. —. Proust et les signes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. —. Proust and Signs. New York: G. Braziller, 1972. —. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1991. —. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. —. What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Verso, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other, trans. Christie McDonald. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. —. L’Oreille de l’autre. Montreal: VLB éditeur, 1982. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ed. Ronald Hingley. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Duberman, Martin B. Left Out. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002. Dyer, Geoff. Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence. New York: Picador, 1997. —. ‘Introduction’, Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence. New York: Modern Library, 1999. ffrench, Patrick. ‘“Time in the Pure State”: Deleuze, Proust and the Image of Time’, Time and the Image, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

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Ford, Hugh. Published in Paris. Yonkers, NY: Pushcart Press, 1975. Fowlie, Wallace. Rimbaud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Gordon, William. The Mind and Art of Henry Miller. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Halliwell, Martin. Transatlantic Modernism: Moral Dilemmas in Modernist Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Heath, Peter. The Philosopher’s Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, [1926] 2006. Herbert, Michael. ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Hollander, John. ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, Word & Image, Vol. 4, 1988, pp. 401–28. Ibarguen, Raoul. Narrative Detours: Henry Miller and the Rise of New Critical Modernism. Henry-Miller.com, 7 November 2009. Online at: http://www. henry-miller.com/tropic/walt-whitman-song-of-myself.html. Jong, Erica. The Devil at Large. New York: Grove Press, 1993. Kellerman, Steven G. The Self-Begetting Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. —. ‘The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited’, The Play and Place of Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. —. La Révolution Du Langage Poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Seuil, 1974. —. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. —. Séméiotiké. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1969. Lawrence, D. H. The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. II: 1913–1916, ed. George J. Zyatruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. —. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. —. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. David Ellis. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2002. —. Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1913] 1992. —. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Penguin Books, [1923] 1991. Marra, Frank. ‘The Dostoevsky/Miller Project: Investigations in Human Consciousness and Doubt’, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, Vol. 4, 2007.

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Masuga, Katy. ‘Henry Miller, Deleuze and the Metaphor of China’, The McNeese Review, Vol. 47, 2009, pp. 79–102. —. ‘Henry Miller’s Painterly Eye’, Journal of Humanities, Vol. 34, April 2008. —. The Secret Violence of Henry Miller. New York: Camden House, 2011. Mathieu, Bertrand. Orpheus in Brooklyn: Orphism, Rimbaud, and Henry Miller. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1976. Meltzer, Françoise. ‘On Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”’, Modern Philology, Vol. 76, No. 4, 1979, pp. 344–54. Miller, Henry. Black Spring. New York: Grove Press, [1936] 1963. —. The Books in My Life. London: Villiers Publications, 1952. —. Conversations with Henry Miller, ed. Frank L. Kersnowski and Alice Hughes. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. —. The Colossus of Maroussi. New York: Penguin Books, [1941] 1980. —. The Cosmological Eye. New York: New Directions, 1939. —. From Your Capricorn Friend. New York: New Directions, [1978] 1984. —. Henry Miller: An Informal Bibliography, 1924–1960, ed. Esta Lou Riley (Series no. 1). Hays, KS: Fort Hays Kansas State College, June 1961. —. The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions, 1969. —. Henry Miller’s Letters to Anaïs Nin, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965. —. The Michael Fraenkel – Henry Miller Correspondence Called Hamlet: Vol. I & Vol. II. London: Carrefour, [1939] 1962. —. Nexus: The Rosy Crucifixion, Part III. London: Panther Books, [1960] 1980. —. Plexus: The Rosy Crucifixion, Part II. London: Panther Books, [1953] 1969. —. Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion, Part I. London: Panther Books, [1949] 1970. —. The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948. —. Stand Still Like the Hummingbird. New York: New Directions, 1962. —. The Time of the Assassins. New York: New Directions, 1946. —. Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, [1934] 1961. —. Tropic of Capricorn. London: Panther Books, [1939]1978. —. The Wisdom of the Heart. New York: New Directions, [1941] 1960. —. The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1980. —. The World of Sex. New York: Grove Press, [1940] 1978. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Avon Books, 1970. Mitchell, Edward B. (ed.). Henry Miller: Three Decades of Criticism. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Fairford: Echo Library, 2006. —. Werke. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954, 1978, 1993, ed. Karl Schlechta. CD-ROM. Berlin: Directmedia Publishing, 2004. Nin, Anaïs. Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

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Works Cited

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Orend, Karl. Henry Miller’s Red Phoenix: A Lawrentian Quest. Paris: Alyscamp Press, 2006. Orwell, George. ‘Inside the Whale’, Henry Miller and the Critics. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, [1940] 1963. Parkin, John. Henry Miller, the Modern Rabelais. Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Canada and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Pearson, Neil. Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Pitcher, George. ‘Wittgenstein, Lewis Carroll and Nonsense’, Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 3, 1965, pp. 591–611 Pizer, Donald. American Expatriate Writing the Paris Moment. Baton Rouge, LA and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Polhemus, Robert M. ‘Lewis Carroll and the Child in Victorian Fiction’, The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Powell, Jason E. Jacques Derrida: A Biography. London: Continuum Press, 2006. Pritchett, Victor Sawdon. The Complete Essays. London: Chatto & Windus, [1947] 1991. Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu 1: Du côté de chez Swann. Paris: Gallimard, [1913] 1987. —. A la recherche du temps perdu 3: Le côté de Guermantes. Paris: Gallimard, 1921. —. A la recherche du temps perdu 6: La fugitive. ‘Proust – à la recherche du temps perdu – texte integral’. [1925] 6 May 2010. Online at: http://www. page2007.com/news/proust. —. Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. II: The Guermantes Way, trans. Charles Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. London: Penguin, 1981. —. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Penguin, 2002. —. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 5: The Captive. University of Adelaide Library, 6 May 2010. Online at: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96c/ complete.html. Reed, Brian. Hart Crane: After his Lights. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Sagar, Keith. D. H. Lawrence: Poet. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007. Scott, Grant F. The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994. Shapiro, Karl. ‘Introduction’, Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Shields, David. Reality Hunger. London: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, 2010. Solomon, William. ‘Burlesque Dreams: American Amusement, Autobiography, and Henry Miller’, Style, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter 2001. Spitzer, Leo. ‘The “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, or Content vs. Metagrammar’, Comparative Literature, Vol. 7, 1955, pp. 203–25. Whitman, Walt. ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, [1855] 1949.

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Wickes, George. Americans in Paris. New York: Doubleday, 1969. Widmer, Kingsley. Henry Miller, revised edn. Boston: Twayne, 1990. —. ‘The Legacy of Henry Miller’, Henry Miller: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. E. B. Mitchell. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Williams, William Carlos. ‘Against the Weather’, Selected Essays. New York: Random House, [1939] 1954. Winter, Yvor. ‘The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X?’, In Defense of Reason. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 1987, pp. 475–604. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations / Philosophische Untersuchungen, bilingual edn, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1953. —. Zettel, bilingual edn, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1967] 2007. Zytaruk, George J. D. H. Lawrence’s Response to Russian Literature. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

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Index

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Abelard and Héloïse, 7 Alice, 71, 72, 76–7, 79–84, 86, 88–91, 94–5n America, 8–10, 14–15, 24–5, 53–7, 64–6, 172 Anderson, Sherwood, 7, 27, 28, 138 animal, 3–4, 148, 161, 163 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 5, 53, 59, 73 Balzac, Honoré, 3, 7, 12, 146, 173 Barthes, Roland, 4–6, 37, 43 Bataille, Georges, 89, 91, 152n Baxandall, Michael, 5, 6, 27, 31, 123 Beat poets, 1, 156, 176n Beckett, Samuel, 10, 115, 147 Black Spring, 14, 23, 27, 29, 32, 71–3, 77, 110, 113, 124, 135, 157, 160, 163, 164, 186 Blair, David, 36 Blanchot, Maurice, 11, 12, 14, 27, 37, 38, 50, 64, 142, 168, 169 Blinder, Caroline, 100, 112, 115 Bloom, Harold, 14, 19, 27, 38, 42, 59, 91, 137, 173, 181 Bloshteyn, Maria, 6, 11, 54–7, 62–5 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 7 Books in My Life, The, 2, 3, 6, 12, 27, 29, 45, 63, 64, 71, 76, 94, 115, 124, 125, 129, 132, 179 Bosch, Hieronymus, 7, 186 Breton, André, 12 Brooklyn, 13–15, 23, 26–38 Brown, J. D., 22, 29, 87, 112 Bursey, Jeff, 74–6, 85, 87, 114, 116

canonicity, 11, 21, 26, 87, 170 Carroll, Lewis, 7, 12, 13, 15, 26, 68n, 71–92, 113, 116, 124, 158, 166, 186 Cendrars, Blaise, 2, 3, 7 Cézanne, Paul, 6, 7, 180, 186 Chagall, Marc, 186 Chambers, Jesse, 179–80 Clayton, Jay, 4, 6, 16n, 58, 140 Colossus of Maroussi, The, 104–6, 109–13, 115 Conrad, Joseph, 12 Conversations with Henry Miller, 71 Cooper, James Fennimore, 12, 173 Cosmological Eye, The, 106, 124, 125, 156, 179 Crane, Hart, 7, 27–34, 37 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 6, 7, 13, 51, 77, 124, 140–50, 153, 171 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 7, 21, 43–4, 47, 64, 98–9, 107, 164 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 2, 3, 4, 6–11, 13, 15, 26, 42–66, 73, 92, 98, 100, 101, 111, 124, 157, 164, 182, 183, 184 Dreiser, Theodore, 28 Duberman, Martin, 76 DuChamp, Marcel, 7, 184 Dumas, Alexander, 12 Durrell, Lawrence, 1, 10, 54, 109, 115 Dyer, Geoff, 179 ekphrasis, 27–36, 40n, 85, 116, 124, 133

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Eliot, T. S., 159, 164 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 12, 19, 29, 179, 180 Faure, Elie, 2, 7, 173, 179 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 114 ffrench, Patrick, 153n Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 10 Fowlie, Wallace, 104–7, 120n, 180 Fraenkel, Michael, 81, 124, 126, 129, 133 France, 9–10, 25, 88, 109–10, 172 Frye, Northrop, 20, 72 Gauguin, Eugène Henri Paul, 7, 9, 139, 173 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 24, 181–2 Goldilocks, 90–2, 113 Gordon, William, 14, 21–2, 29 Gutkind, Erich, 12

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Halliwell, Martin, 9 Hamsun, Knut, 7, 182–5 Heath, Peter, 68n, 91 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 180 Hemingway, Ernest, 3, 7, 8, 10, 125, 181, 185 Hugo, Victor, 7, 12, 99, 173 Ibarguen, Raoul, 26, 87, 163 influence, 1–15, 19, 21–31, 38, 42–7, 54, 56–8, 64–6, 71, 74–6, 90–4, 102, 104, 106, 110, 112–13, 115, 119, 124, 126, 128–9, 137–42, 145, 156–62, 167, 173–4, 179, 183, 187 intertextuality, 2–4, 4–7, 15, 19, 26, 28, 37, 46, 51, 54, 57–61, 89, 98, 112–13, 123, 140–2, 156–7, 179–82, 186–7 involuntary memory (la mémoire involontaire), 132, 137, 145, 148 James, Henry, 12, 173 Jong, Erica, 53, 75 Joyce, James, 1, 3, 7, 8, 10–12, 17n, 49, 115, 124–6, 130, 157, 159, 163, 164, 173, 175n, 185

Kafka, Franz, 3–5, 8, 10, 59, 128, 147 Kahane, Jack, 159, 175n Kellerman, Steven G., 137–9 Krieger, Murray, 28 Kristeva, Julia, 4, 5, 37, 43, 59, 72–4, 87, 180 language of children, 90–1, 152n Lao-tse, 12 Lawrence, D. H., 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 26, 30, 100, 102, 130, 139, 149, 150, 156–74, 179, 180, 185 Machen, Arthur, 7, 186 Mailer, Norman, 75, 76 Mann, Thomas, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 124, 182–5 Marra, Frank, 43, 52, 60–2, 66 Mathieu, Bertrand, 15, 102–17 Matisse, Henri, 7, 133–5, 186 Meltzer, Françoise, 118 Melville, Herman, 149, 173 Millett, Kate, 72, 76 Mitchell, W. J. T., 30–1, 34 New York, 9, 15, 29–33, 56–7, 63, 185 Nexus, 4, 43, 48, 49, 53, 56, 57, 66, 103, 110, 114, 138, 182, 184, 185, 186 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 7, 13, 34, 43–5, 67n, 99, 101, 103, 133, 139, 167, 179–82 Nin, Anaïs, 10, 54, 61, 115, 124, 130, 131, 133, 135, 159, 160, 163, 165, 171, 173, 183 Nostradamus, 12 Orwell, George, 11, 24, 72, 92n Paris, 8–10, 15, 23–4, 56, 66, 86, 97, 105, 109, 123, 124, 165, 175n, 184–5 Parkin, John, 15 Pascal, Blaise, 7 Petrarch, Francesco, 7 Petronius, 7 Picasso, Pablo, 6, 180 Pitcher, George, 79 Pitzer, Donald, 9

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Index Plexus, 10, 45, 51, 89, 102, 110, 113, 127, 139, 157, 181, 186 Plutarch, 12 Poe, Edgar Allan, 173 Polhemus, Robert M., 90, 91, 95n Pound, Ezra, 7, 114, 159, 164 Powell, Jason E., 98, 103, 107 Pritchet, V. S., 162 Proust, Marcel, 1, 3, 6, 7, 9–10, 13, 15, 33, 103, 119, 123–50, 153n, 157, 163, 169, 171, 173, 179–81, 183–4

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Rabelais, François, 7, 15, 124 Rembrandt, 186 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 186 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 8, 10, 138, 173 Rimbaud, Arthur, 7, 11, 13, 15, 26, 92, 97–119, 124, 138, 139, 156–8, 164, 167, 173, 180, 186 Romanticism, 19–20, 23–5 Rothstein, Eric, 4, 6, 16n, 58, 140 Sacher-Masoch, Leopol Ritter von, 7 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François Marquis de, 7, 12, 138 Sagar, Keith, 30 Schnellock, Emil, 8, 9, 123, 124, 128, 129, 133, 138, 139, 148, 149, 158, 159, 162–6, 187 Sexus, 3, 13, 48, 58, 59, 102, 110, 116–18, 124, 139, 143, 144, 147, 181, 186 Shapiro, Karl, 103, 167 Shields, David, 168–9 Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, The, 106 Solomon, William, 73

197

Spengler, Oswald, 2, 3, 7, 173, 179–82 Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, 19, 53, 97 Stein, Gertrude, 7, 8, 10, 115, 125 Strindberg, Johan August, 7, 138–9 Sunday after the War, 156, 165 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 7, 46 Swift, Jonathan, 12 Thoreau, Henry David, 19 Time of the Assassins, The, 97, 102–4, 111–12, 114–15, 157 Tropic of Cancer, 8, 10, 11, 23–5, 64, 103, 110, 127, 133, 135, 138, 144, 156, 159, 160, 180, 186 Tropic of Capricorn, 20, 23, 27, 29, 32–5, 89, 110, 136, 145, 149, 150, 186 Twain, Mark, 12 Valéry, Paul, 7 Van Gogh, Vincent, 3, 7, 9, 139, 173, 180 Villon, François, 7, 138 Whitman, Walt, 1, 7, 10, 13–16, 19–39, 76, 157, 173, 176n, 179 Wickes, George, 1, 9, 10, 71, 124, 137 Widmer, Kingsley, 14, 17n, 19–22, 29 Williams, William Carlos, 31, 35, 85, 114 Wisdom of the Heart, 106 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7, 51, 79–80, 89, 186 World of Lawrence, The, 156–7, 160–4, 166–72 World of Sex, The, 26

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