To write out of the center of who he truly was
Originally posted by crookedfingers at to write out of the center of who he truly was
Something I read the other night in the book "Renegade: Henry Miller And The Making Of "Tropic of Cancer"" by Frederick Turner has been on my mind and I want to share it with my beloved readers---
Rereading Henry Miller
"How he finally learned to do this is simple enough to state: he learned to write as he talked in those transports that sometimes would come upon him like a fit. This could have been the result of having been told often enough that this is what he ought to do, so finally it sank in. Anecdotal evidence has Emil Schnellock telling him this back in New York when Miller was occasionally lighting up the studio with his brilliant bursts. Miller himself has June giving him substantially the same advice when she told him he'd be better off writing like himself instead of trying to ape his literary heroes. And then here in Paris we have the Lithuanian-born philosopher Michael Fraenkel repeating it when he heard Miller talking in the summer of 1931. The cumulative advice ought to have sounded good to Miller because he was a man who loved talk, his own and that of others: those tough-talking sports on the street corners of the Fourteenth Ward and those famous stem-winders Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, and others whose cultural image went back to rural monologists and the heroically profane boatmen of the national folklore.
Surely, these things went into his learning. But the alchemical process through which advice and example and cultural heritage must pass before these can become personal and therefore precious is rarely direct. Let us grant the importance of these factors and then add one more: his failure. For it was his solitary, heroic confrontation with this that proved decisive in the transformation of the man who called himself "The Failure" into the brilliant success he became with "Tropic of Cancer", the most startling, scabrous passage of which is adumbrated in this March 10th letter to Emil.
For Miller had not come to Paris to find artistic freedom and rub elbows with his fellow artists. That had been the story of the expatriates of the 1920's. He has been exiled here as a failure, a failure as a writer and as a man. The longer he wandered the city's streets and haunted its poor quarters with their stinking bars and gurgling pissoirs, the longer he continued to slash at his manuscripts in this cafe and that, the more absolute his failure came to seem. Writing those rambling letters had a cumulative effect of objectifying this for him, forcing him to see how utterly false "Moloch" and "Crazy Cock" were to the man he was, how misguided his literary aspirations had been from the beginning. He had yearned to be a writer and an intellectual in the Old World mode, someone who would be respected anywhere. He was not, he had been furiously insisting for years, your average Joe from Brooklyn. But over these months in Paris, writing with an increasingly naked candor about his life, he came to see that in many ways that was in fact just what he was and that this was a good thing. For if he could capitalize on this, find a way to write out of the center of who he truly was instead of who he thought he ought to be, this would be the way forward for him. The letters helped him see this, for just as the personal letter can form the bridge between autobiographical experience and literature, so Miller's letters also served as a bridge between his past and his future, which would be the eternal now, this moment that he was living in a city that was anything but a City of Light, that was instead a City of Darkness, of ancient crime and despair and death. And yet, he hadn't gone under here. Instead, he had acquired a strange buoyancy, like one of those India rubber dolls that always pop back up no matter how hard you hit it." pg. 154-156 Frederick Turner
This is a great blog. Enjoy!
Henry Miller Community
You might also like to check out some old ala Henry Milleresque;
Henry Miller In Paris
Henry Miller On The Diversity Of Man
Henry Miller In New York
The Henry Miller Dialogues
Letters by Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller
Tribute to Henry Miller
enjoy!
: )
psp
Something I read the other night in the book "Renegade: Henry Miller And The Making Of "Tropic of Cancer"" by Frederick Turner has been on my mind and I want to share it with my beloved readers---
Rereading Henry Miller
"How he finally learned to do this is simple enough to state: he learned to write as he talked in those transports that sometimes would come upon him like a fit. This could have been the result of having been told often enough that this is what he ought to do, so finally it sank in. Anecdotal evidence has Emil Schnellock telling him this back in New York when Miller was occasionally lighting up the studio with his brilliant bursts. Miller himself has June giving him substantially the same advice when she told him he'd be better off writing like himself instead of trying to ape his literary heroes. And then here in Paris we have the Lithuanian-born philosopher Michael Fraenkel repeating it when he heard Miller talking in the summer of 1931. The cumulative advice ought to have sounded good to Miller because he was a man who loved talk, his own and that of others: those tough-talking sports on the street corners of the Fourteenth Ward and those famous stem-winders Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, and others whose cultural image went back to rural monologists and the heroically profane boatmen of the national folklore.
Surely, these things went into his learning. But the alchemical process through which advice and example and cultural heritage must pass before these can become personal and therefore precious is rarely direct. Let us grant the importance of these factors and then add one more: his failure. For it was his solitary, heroic confrontation with this that proved decisive in the transformation of the man who called himself "The Failure" into the brilliant success he became with "Tropic of Cancer", the most startling, scabrous passage of which is adumbrated in this March 10th letter to Emil.
For Miller had not come to Paris to find artistic freedom and rub elbows with his fellow artists. That had been the story of the expatriates of the 1920's. He has been exiled here as a failure, a failure as a writer and as a man. The longer he wandered the city's streets and haunted its poor quarters with their stinking bars and gurgling pissoirs, the longer he continued to slash at his manuscripts in this cafe and that, the more absolute his failure came to seem. Writing those rambling letters had a cumulative effect of objectifying this for him, forcing him to see how utterly false "Moloch" and "Crazy Cock" were to the man he was, how misguided his literary aspirations had been from the beginning. He had yearned to be a writer and an intellectual in the Old World mode, someone who would be respected anywhere. He was not, he had been furiously insisting for years, your average Joe from Brooklyn. But over these months in Paris, writing with an increasingly naked candor about his life, he came to see that in many ways that was in fact just what he was and that this was a good thing. For if he could capitalize on this, find a way to write out of the center of who he truly was instead of who he thought he ought to be, this would be the way forward for him. The letters helped him see this, for just as the personal letter can form the bridge between autobiographical experience and literature, so Miller's letters also served as a bridge between his past and his future, which would be the eternal now, this moment that he was living in a city that was anything but a City of Light, that was instead a City of Darkness, of ancient crime and despair and death. And yet, he hadn't gone under here. Instead, he had acquired a strange buoyancy, like one of those India rubber dolls that always pop back up no matter how hard you hit it." pg. 154-156 Frederick Turner
This is a great blog. Enjoy!
Henry Miller Community
You might also like to check out some old ala Henry Milleresque;
Henry Miller In Paris
Henry Miller On The Diversity Of Man
Henry Miller In New York
The Henry Miller Dialogues
Letters by Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller
Tribute to Henry Miller
enjoy!
: )
psp