Henry Miller's rebellion

(Henry Miller portrait web image)

Feng Xinping/Wen

On March 4, 1930, a shipping train from England sailed into Paris, and Henry Miller came to the streets of the most cosmopolitan metropolis in the Western world. After checking into the Hotel Saint-Germain de Presse, he opened his luggage and placed Whitman's Blades of Grass next to his two unpublished manuscripts of the novel, then went out for a walk and ate. During his first weeks in Paris, he told his childhood friend Emile Schnoker about his life in a foreign land. While in New York, he had flipped through Snooker's map of Paris, pestering his friends to point out various locations. Now, he himself has come to this wonderful place and is equipped with his own map to explore the city's rich literary history. Although his poor French made him struggling, what stretched before him were endless days of free writing.

It would be unwise to trust Miller's entire statement about his life, but there is good reason to believe him when he says, "From early adulthood, my whole activity revolves around, or is inspired by, the fact that I consider myself to have great potential to be a writer." Yet Henry Miller, who saw the Paris experience as a rare opportunity in his life, and Henry Miller, who moved a mahogany table home from his father's tailor's shop a few years ago, have no clear idea of what it means to be a writer. Although he has an almost desperate confession of his literary ambitions, he finds himself writing with nothing worth expressing.

He examines his life experiences to date: the background of German immigrants, his childhood on the streets of Brooklyn, the experiences of ranch workers in the West. It all seemed so bland that he was dumbfounded by a mixture of fear and anger: What did it all mean? And how can he, the "poor brooklyn," discover the possible meaning of it? Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, Knut Hamson, he tried to find a way to rank among these great masters in the books of these great masters, but his voracious reading of world literature did not seem to be of obvious help to him.

Miller met Joan Mansfield in New York in 1923. At the time she was a dancer on Broadway in New York, while Miller was a personnel manager at Western Union. Unlike his family and wife, who ridiculed his ambitions, Joan was convinced of his writing talents. Miller divorced his wife, a pianist, for her sake. After the two were married in 1924, Miller resigned to write, during which Time Joan did everything in his power to support the family. But as far as literature is concerned, all their efforts have been in vain. Miller went door-to-door to sell some of his own literary sketches, wrote a novel called "Moloch, and another based on their dark life in New York. Miller felt that the works would never have a chance to be published, and Joan began to doubt her decision.

She used the money of the "admirers" to buy Miller a steamboat ticket, and then pushed him out of the apartment door, destitute. He boarded a ship bound for Europe with ten dollars borrowed from Schnoker. "I can't understand my failure," he wrote to Schnoker from Paris. "The reader must be waiting for my text somewhere. Where are they? He continued in the same letter, "Doesn't anyone want what I write?" Oh my God, I get angry at the thought of being 38 years old, but poor, lonely, and nameless. I reject such a life. There will be a way out. "That's what Henry Miller really was doing at the time. He threw his luggage at the Hotel Saint-Germain de Presse, facing a free but difficult prospect.

Relying on Joan's intermittent remittances, Miller soon discovers that, like the protagonist of Cnut Hamson's Hunger, his freedom includes the freedom to starve in public. Every day he would go to The American Express office, hoping to hear from Joan. Most of the time nothing was found, and occasionally a telegram was received telling him to hold on and that the money would soon arrive. Meanwhile, he's looking for cheaper hotels, and as the bill increases, he has to hide from the gloomy eyes of his bosses. In September, Joan came to visit him. A month later, she abandoned him. Miller felt lonely more than ever. Although he continues to revise the novel about him and Joan with a sense of self-abandonment and despair, the illusion of marriage fades with the obscurity of the novel's publication.

Yet, like a rubber ball that won't be completely squashed, the troubled Miller wrote in his August 24 letter to Schlock: "Start writing a book about Paris tomorrow: first-person, uncensored, formless—go to his everything!" The novel, published in 1934 as Tropic of Cancer, is written in the form of a memoir in which Miller weaves his experiences in Paris in the early 1930s, with a preface written by his mentor, patron, and lover Anaise Nin. Born anonymous, she, like Joan, firmly believes that Miller will achieve great achievements in literature, but the premise is to get rid of the burden of intellectuals and accumulate years of literary experience, and spiritually strip herself into a primitive state. His life so far has been almost a failure: two failed marriages, two poor novels, and the kind and quantity of work that he may not even know himself. His prospects looked "primitive" and barren, and he had nothing to lose.

The years of poverty in Paris made him materially in line with Anaes Nin's advice, and his cultural heritage as an American made it mentally possible to put them into practice. On the surface, this may seem strange. Because no American writer has ever made a sustained critique of local culture. Indeed, Miller's life in Paris, whatever its original motivation, was itself a repudiation of America's anger. And throughout his work, there were few American writers of the 20th century who were more radical than him. He admired Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson and their shared American spirit. Miller quotes Emerson in Tropic of Cancer: "These novels will gradually give way to diaries or autobiographies—contagious books—as long as one knows how to choose what he calls his own experience what is truly his experience, how to record the truth." This is not only an expectation of American literature, but more importantly, it reflects Emerson's interest in the process of spiritual decompletion and reconstruction. In his view, this is the essence of the national experiment: the American individual, under the influence of its historical and geographical circumstances, recreates itself in an unprecedented way, just as the nation was reborn from the morass of monarchy and colonialism.

For Emerson, like his successors Thoreau and Whitman (and now Miller), the discovery of the New World was both a central spiritual fact of the American experiment and a dominant metaphor for the American experiment, and a refutation of all the mistakes of the past: something new emerged from the old, the obsolete, and the dead. Emerson felt this first-hand. In his thirties, he shrugged off feelings of ill health, self-pity, and the gloomy ghosts of the Puritans, proposing that individuals must look inward for a guide to life, that they must shift their attention inward from the expectations of society to their own spirits, thus sparking a widely influential Romantic movement and becoming part of the reform movement before the American Civil War. If Emerson's thoughts are like lightning that illuminates the Hearts of Americans, then Whitman's Blades of Grass is like thunder and thunder in the era of the thriving New World. The duo went forward to lead the American Renaissance.

Henry Miller, who began composing the "Song of the Self" in middle age, echoed Whitman at the beginning of Tropic of Cancer, "If you want to sing you have to open your mouth first, you have to have a pair of lung lobes and a little knowledge of music theory." It doesn't matter if you have an accordion or a guitar, what matters is that you have a desire to sing. Well, here's a song, and I'm singing. Whitman said that great writers are great "because of their down-to-earth approach to writing and their honest and frank personality traits." He argues that the latter quality is so important that as long as a writer is completely honest, all his other flaws can be forgiven. Henry Miller not only made a shocking confession of himself in his first work, The Tropic of Cancer, but continued his "barbaric cries" for the next thirty years. He found that there was no other way but to completely reinvent himself as a writer. He abandoned all the literary conventions he had painstakingly learned, told stories in a clever way, and wrote no longer painstakingly but with pleasure, no longer pretentious but casual. Miller at his peak was unlike any of his contemporaries. His language rushes out in a vast torrent of imagination and sweeps the reader like a wild, dazzling journey. As he struggled to chase his goal, the images and effects of ordinary writers throwing their heads and spilling blood in order to achieve their goals were thrown aside. Miller's best works give the impression of being spoken rather than written. Reading his work is like listening to some extremely talented bar soloist or jazz soloist in front of them.

Miller could certainly write more traditionally, and indeed in his later years, the lessons of Paris seem to have begun to fade, and the Miller of the New York period seems to have come back to rebuke him for literary extremes. In those days of Paris' downfall, he described himself as a ghost at a banquet, lazily walking through the metropolis. Now, this seems to be happening again. The ghost of young Miller haunts the feasts he prepared in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. A photograph of him in the Villa Seurat in the 1960s (where his best works were done) shows an elderly man raising his hand to his lips as if to ask, "Am I writing all this?" As in this case, after all the passions, did Whitman still take bold risks in self-revelation. Is Blades of Grass "just a language experiment"?

Miller, however, did not change his literary intentions in Paris. He told interviewees that the only writers he respects "are those who are fully engaged in their work, not those who do something with their dexterous hands." In my opinion, this is not writing. He went on to say that he prefers people who are "unskilled, clumsily written, but put themselves into every page." He claims that he was never drawn to those classics (though it is clear that he had read a lot of them) because the works were "too skilled and followed the old pattern ... Improvements can be made on top of them, but only those who speak with their own voices can make breakthroughs. "Reading Henry Miller's work never requires doubting who is speaking. He is one of the most unique voices in the history of American literature. It is a free, rough, even paranoid voice, the voice of a singer who has reinvented himself from nothingness and failure, and it expresses something that is hidden deep in the depths of human consciousness.