Henry Miller

He ended up living on a ferryboat in San Francisco in a kind of hippy milieu in the 1960s. Agnes Varda made a short documentary about him in the late sixties, which I've never seen.

There's a timeline about his life here:

http://www.vallejo.to/artists/varda_timeline.htm

Yes, he frequently writes good passage - but I feel it became something of a trap for him. He is good at writing exuberantly about something (I think he describes it as 'getting drunk on his own words'), but as a result his books as a narrative structure suffer.

Perhaps I'm filled with the same ridiculous teenage energy that every alienated fledgling bookworm experiences when a book speaks to him in way that finally convinces him isn't wrong about everything. Or that you can't be wrong about anything.

If I were older and more well-read I might find my naive enthusiasm distasteful--if I were older than that I might love it again.

Why is Henry Miller a tiny blip on ILB? Is it because his are so unlike most of the books that people come here to talk about? Or is he rendered obsolete by greater talents that for some reason haven't spoken to me?

Once one regains a measure of confidence in one's sanity, it is normal to exhibit more interest in applying it than in locating it repeatedly. If one is lucky, it tends to stay located, so that it can be found with little fuss or wasted motion, much like a good tool you can pick up or put down at need. If your sanity tends to stray on you from moment to moment, then I would see this as a rather tricky problem and I'd recommend you dose yourself with Mr. Miller heroically, for as long as is necessary and effective, or until you lose your sanity altogether.

Good luck.

His greatest virtue is that he wasn't fooled by the vast machinery of propaganda and mindless entertainment that had captured so many ordinary people. His worst failing is that he believed this made him far more extraordinary than he was.

Especially in Tropic of Capricorn he writes like a caricature of a man who suffered from delusions of granduer. He always reserves his greatest enthusiasm for HENRY MILLER, GOD AMONG MEN. And he seems to expect all his readers to feel the same way about him. It wearies after a time, when such miracles as he can scrounge out of his bag of tricks grow stale. While they are fresh, they amuse. At the end, their aroma changes.

I used to read Miller as a tonic when I was feeling beaten down about something, but after awhile (a dozen or so pages) his assertions seem pathetic and desperate and his contempt for everyone except himself just sounds like whining -like the kid in high school who stands next to people at parties and talks about how uncool everybody else is.

(Very unlike his beloved JJ who celebrated the ordinariness of his characters.)

A girlfriend of mine gave up on Tropic of Cancer saying, "God, he must have the littlest dick".

At fourteen Varda, according to his fond mother, was a portrait painter worthy of hanging in the Louvre.

9 years on, I own one of these Varda portraits of prominent athenians.

I really enjoyed Tropic of Cancer and Orwell's favorable take on it; also thought it might be an inspiration for some of the best Beat writing, some of Mailer's better essays etc too, but somehow one was enough, or so it seemed.

Dunno why that happens, like The Moviegoer sated me re Percy.

"air conditioned nightmare" was a good read (or was when i read it about a decade ago) but yeah, i dunno if i could read much more than a book's worth of him.

Good to go from "a painter worthy of hanging in the Louvre" to his announcing that he'd committed suicide three times---that's class. I always enjoy HM excerpts, never think to look for them.

i just bought joy of man's desiring again the other day and also john cowper powys too! totally because of hm after all these years. so, his faves stuck with me. i owe him so much for introducing me to krisnamurti when i was a kid and K has been a lifelong friend ever since. haven't read one of hm's books in decades. the self-regard brought up above neglects to mention how discouraged he could get in his early books. he was hard on himself when he was young. i could see myself reading the rosy crucifixion trilogy again when i'm old. maybe. i got way more out of him than i got out of all the beats combined. he could be crude and yeah he could blab but he was alway really readable! entertaining. but also uh not the most enlightened at times. he was pretty weird actually.

also, i always like to mention that the first great love of hm's life was my cousin cora seward. he wrote about her a lot.

of course the crudeness thing was a big part of his thing. the earthiness thing. such a young dude hero. i don't know if i've ever met a young woman who was inspired by him. this isn't true of bukowski.

Yeah, come to think of it, I had female book store customers looking for Bukowski, never for Miller. Which ones would you recommend?

i dunno if i could read much more than a book's worth of him.

If pressed for my own recommendation, I'd say that one book should either be Colossus of Maroussi in which he discovers the virtues of pre-touristic Greece, or else the old standby Tropic of Cancer, which established his reputation and also covers all his main themes.

Yeah like I said, ToC is the one I did read, and enjoyed. Colussus appeals re a different setting, maybe challenging himself in that way.

colossus is good. black spring takes his writing in a more fantastic quasi-surrealist direction (criticised by orwell for that reason in his essay), but i remember enjoying it. not much of his work i'd want to read again, but can't hate on miller given his generosity/enthusiasm for others. pointed me towards cendrars for one. and anyone namedropping john jacob niles and richard jefferies is okay by me.

John Jacob Niles! He was the only one in No Direction Homewhom I hadn't previously heard, ans what a sound. Reminds me of Miller telling his Rolling Stone interviewer, probably Jonathan Cott, about Baez bringing Dylan to meet him, and Dylan didn't seem thrilled, to put it mildly. Sounded like Mom dragging her brat to meet Great-Uncle. Cott or whomever would read a passage to Miller, and ask him about it; Miller: "I wrote that? Amazing!!" He was fascinated. A fascinating interview as I recall; certainly those were different times, Rolling Stone-wise.

ToC is the one I did read

ha, that could be one of two books and personally i think i liked capricorn the most out of all the miller i read, sort of celine transposed to brooklyn iirc

books in my life is worth reading. just cuz he was a weird reader and cuz yeah who else is gonna tell you to read cendrars.

"that could be one of two books" but I was referring to the one Aimless mentioned, Tropic of Cancer. Since my local library also has Capricorn and Black Spring, I'll check those too. Maybe I'll ask them to buy or borrowColussus and Books(prob Cendrars before either, cos seems like it's time for him).