The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur - Softcover

Hoyle, Arthur

9781628726039: The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628726032 ISBN 13: 9781628726039

Verlag: Arcade, 2016

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Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature, yet he remains misunderstood. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of his career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned “Paris” books—beginning with Tropic of Cancer—were published here and judged by the Supreme Court not to be obscene. The Unknown Henry Miller recounts Miller’s career from its beginnings in Paris in the 1930s but focuses on his years living in Big Sur, California, from 1944 to 1961, during which he wrote many of his most important books, including The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, married and divorced twice, raised two children, painted watercolors, and tried to live out a credo of self-realization.

Written with the cooperation of the Henry Miller and Ana�s Nin estates, The Unknown Henry Miller draws on material previously unavailable to biographers, including interviews with Lepska Warren, Miller’s third wife. Behind the “bad boy” image, Arthur Hoyle finds a man whose challenge of literary sexual taboos was part of a broader assault on the dehumanization of man and commercialization during the postwar years, and he makes the case for restoring this groundbreaking writer to his rightful place in the American literary canon.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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Arthur Hoyle is an educator, writer, and independent filmmaker. His documentary films have won awards and aired on PBS, and he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California.

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The Unknown Henry Miller

A Seeker in Big Sur

By Arthur Hoyle

Skyhorse Publishing

Foreword by James M. Decker, 
Introduction, 
Chapter 1 The Paris Years, 
Chapter 2 Interlude in Greece, 
Chapter 3 Adrift in America, 
Chapter 4 Settling in Big Sur, 
Chapter 5 A Writer in Big Sur, 
Chapter 6 Marriage and Family, 
Chapter 7 A Year of Crisis, 
Chapter 8 The Rosy Crucifixion, 
Chapter 9 Europe Beckons, 
Chapter 10 Farewell to Big Sur, 
Chapter 11 Celebrity, 
Chapter 12 The Henry Miller Legacy, 
Appendix A "Notes on H. M." by June Lancaster, 
Appendix B Horoscope of Henry Miller by Conrad Moricand, 
Appendix C "O Lake of Light" by Henry Miller, 
Appendix D Academic Survey Findings, 
Acknowledgments, 
A Note on Sources, 
Notes, 
Sources, 
Index, 
Photo Insert,

CHAPTER 1

THE PARIS YEARS

"A Writer Is Born."

IN THE SPRING OF 1939, AS THE EUROPEAN POWERS PREPARED FOR WAR, the writer Henry Miller sat down to his typewriter in his Paris apartment at Villa Seurat and composed a five-page, single-spaced letter to his American friend Huntington Cairns. Miller, age forty-seven, had been living in Paris for nine years. He had come there in flight from a failed life in America in a desperate bid to find himself as a writer. Now, as he made preparations for what he hoped would be an extended sabbatical from writing, during which he intended to travel to Greece and points east, he decided to recapitulate for a trusted friend all that he had accomplished during the period of his voluntary exile from his homeland.

His choice of correspondent for this letter might at first glance seem odd. Huntington Cairns was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who lived in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was a partner in a prominent law firm. In 1934, the same year Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer was published in Paris, Cairns was appointed a special legal advisor to the Customs Bureau of the United States Treasury Department. In that capacity, he served as the official US censor, advising the bureau on the application of the obscenity standard under the Tariff Act of 1930. Miller's notorious novel had been seized by customs officials in 1934 and declared obscene by a US district court.

In addition to his professional training in the law, Cairns was also a serious student of literature who wrote essays and book reviews and cultivated relationships with leading literary figures of his day. This probably explains why the critic H. L. Mencken, who wrote for the Baltimore Sun, had forwarded to Cairns the copy of Cancer he had received from Miller. Although the book was banned in the United States and in England, Miller sent copies to prominent writers and critics in both countries in an effort to establish the book's reputation as serious literature.

Informed by Mencken that Cairns had read and admired Cancer, Miller wrote to Cairns in May 1936 announcing the imminent publication of another controversial book, Black Spring, and offering to send it to him. A few months later, Cairns and his wife, Florence, were in Paris, and the two men met. Over the next several years, they corresponded frequently, primarily about strategies for obtaining reviews of Miller's work that could be used to rebut the charge of obscenity and give Miller access to the American publishing market. Cairns also made arrangements for a show of Miller's watercolors in Washington, DC. By the time Miller wrote Cairns in April 1939, he considered him to be one of only two Americans he could count as friends, the other being his boyhood Brooklyn chum, the painter Emil Schnellock.

Miller's letter to Cairns begins on a gloomy note. War now seems certain and his own future cloudy. Fearing German bombardment and invasion, he plans to leave France. He has accepted an invitation to visit the Greek island of Corfu and stay with his friend, the English writer Lawrence Durrell and his wife, Nancy. As usual, Miller is without funds and has had to cobble together his travel money from an assortment of friends, admirers, and advances on book sales. Worried that he may be separated from his personal papers, or even killed in a surprise air raid, he feels the need to produce for posterity a brief account of what the Paris years have meant to him as a writer and as a man.

To this end, Miller sketches first the years of his early manhood in Brooklyn and New York, years of restless questing and failed romantic relationships as he sought his true vocation. He describes his origins as a writer and his first halting attempts at novel writing, his false starts. As the formative influences on his world outlook and aesthetic sensibility, he identifies the anarchism of Emma Goldman, whom he met in California during his early wanderings; the doctrine of acceptance that he found in Zen Buddhism and the teachings of LaoTse; the uncompromising explorations of the human soul that he discovered in the works of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky; and the writings of Knut Hamsun and August Strindberg, which he admired greatly — all influences from the Old World of Europe and Asia. He then goes on to sum up his accomplishments as a writer during the decade that he has been living in Paris, emphasizing his debt to Ana's Nin, who gave him both financial and emotional support as he wrote several of his major works. Finally, Miller concludes by peering into the future, anticipating his return to America as war erupts in Europe and predicting for himself a life isolated from the mainstream of American culture.

The letter thus provides a layered snapshot of Miller at the moment of his maturation as a writer, which is where the present account of his life begins. Describing his artistic birth, it outlines the material — his life story during his formative years — that will occupy him for much of the remainder of his writing career as he labors through his magnum opus, The Rosy Crucifixion, the story of his spiritual death and rebirth. The letter also contains the seeds of themes that Miller will treat in many of his essay collections in years to come. Before tracing the path that would eventually take Miller to Big Sur, let's explore in detail his self-portrait as a writer at this decisive juncture in his life.

MILLER DATES HIS ORIGINS AS A WRITER to September 1924 when, at the urging of his second wife, June, he quit his job as personnel manager of Western Union in order to write full time. But he tells Cairns that he actually began writing in 1912, when he was twenty-one and working in his father's tailor shop on Fifth Avenue in New York. His early writing took the form of long, humorous letters to friends, a practice he continued throughout his life. (Miller estimated in 1939 that he had already written twenty-five thousand letters to twenty-five hundred different people.) In 1922, when he was married to his first wife, Beatrice, and was the father of a two-year-old daughter named Barbara, Miller wrote his first book, Clipped Wings, a seventy-five-thousand-word novel about twelve messengers under his employ at Western Union. (The book was never published and the manuscript has been lost.)

During the period from 1924 to 1930, he wrote two other novels, Moloch, or, This Gentile World, and Crazy Cock, both of which he brought with him to Paris hoping to publish. Crazy Cock was turned down for publication and...

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