Essays for Wildmen Magazine:
Henry Miller | The Devil at large

In the spring of 1995 I was asked to write an article for Wildman Magazine. The theme of the issue was belief. Wildman Magazine, which no longer exists and was published in dutch, was centered around all sort of themes that related to the development of the Male self. It was in this way inspired by the work of Robert Bly. An American Poet who was a pioneer of Men’s workshops for personal development. One of his main books on the subject is called Iron John.

A lot of the articles and essays that were part of that Spring issue centered around experiences with religious belief. By writing an article on Miller and on belief I had two objectives in mind: one: to introduce Miller to an audience that was unaware that Miller could be one of the sources for another view on Manhood and liberation. Secondly to make clear that the belief in oneself, in the end, outreaches the belief in something out there. In fact of all beliefs it is the healthiest and Miller certainly can serve as the prototype of such attitude. What folows here is a shortened version of the original.

The Devil at Large

When I was about sixteen years old I discovered a book by Henry Miller in my fathers collection of books. This book, Sexus, was labelled by my father as a disgusting book, but for me the book meant something completely different. Of course I agree that the voice that spoke from it was raw and without consideration, but at the same time it was extremely energetic, alive and genuine. What was most impressive though was the fact that it made me experience something one can hardly find in other books: This was a Voice, and a Voice that was directly talking to me!

The awakening of Miller’s authorship had reached it’s final momentum at the time when Miller started to live in Paris in the thirties. He was living there as a voluntary exile. In America he had tried to write, but had failed. The fact that he had also failed as a husband, as an employee, had never been as important to him as the fact that he had not been able to establish himself as a writer.

His life in New York, or as he calls it: The Cosmodemonic world, the ice-cold neon night, had made it impossible for him to find his own way. In America to be an artist or author, you only have value if you immediately become a success, a bestseller and achieve money and fame. This meant that there was no room for the development of a creative existence.

By instinct Miller felt that in Europe there was a chance. His life in Paris set him apart from his family, his friends, and all the other non-believers in his talent. For sure Paris started with being down and out, living on the streets, sleeping under the bridges and the experience of hunger and loneliness. But as he said: The loneliness in France was of a different quality than the loneliness he had experienced in America. When eventually he met an old friend, Alfred Perles, who was working as a corrector at the Chicago Herald Tribune and invited Miller to live at his place, he was ready to make the effort that had been breeding inside. In fact, in Tropic of Cancer, his first books he describes what he calls his liberation:

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse…
To sing one must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

There is a strange parallel between this turning point in Miller’s life and the Male initiation ritual that is described in Robert Bly’s Iron John. 
To become a Man, the young uninitiated boy has to be taken away in the dark forest on the shoulders of Iron John. It is there that the Wild Men take care of the transformation from boy to man. It is there that the boys are divorced from their mothers, so that they can start to learn to love them in a different way, not as boys but as Men.

Miller’s Parisian years were such an initiation and decline into the dark forest. It was his break with his dominant mother, his alcoholic father, his fatal marriages and his non-believer friends. It was also his connection with Wildmen like Alfred Perles and Michael Franks and his introduction by them into the Parisian art world.

In Paris he grew up and liberated himself from the past. It was there that he found his own voice. A process that he best describes in his book The Wisdom of the heart. Paris made it possible for him to write The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and Black Spring.

The more he wrote the more humane he became. What he wrote may have seemed monstrous to some, but it made him humane because by doing so he lost his poison.

The Tropic of Cancer is a description of his liberated life in Paris. Black Spring is a surrealist contemplation on his youth and Tropic of Capricorn his stunning view on life in America.

If you compare Miller’s work with Dante then Tropic of Cancer is his Purgatory, Tropic of Capricorn his Hell and The Colossus his Paradise.

Most of his books, like Cancer, Capricorn and the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Plexus and Nexus) are described by criticism as pornographic. Miller himself says about this:

Most of my readers, as I noticed many times, are divided in two factions. The first those who are disgusted by the large doses of sex. The second those who welcome the existence of this element. The first group is shocked by the recognition that the same person who wrote all sorts of valuable essays and stories could produce such different work at the same time. The second group is bewildered by what they call my serious side and they like to label this part of me as nonsense and mysticism. Only a few enlightened spirits seem to be able to understand that these so-called contradictions and contradictory elements are in fact the essence of a person who has tried in his written works to not withhold something of himself.

In 1939 Miller gives himself time off for a holiday. In Greece he finds what he calls his Inner Homeland. 

I think the Colossus is one of Miller’s masterpieces, next to The Wisdom of the Heart. Both books are proof of his religiosity. A feeling and an attitude that is not based on religion or tradition, nor east or west, although he had Lao Tse as one of his favourites, just as the wisdom of Zen. Such a point of view was a personal experience. An experience that resonates with the experience of forest dwellers, hungry for more of life.

Of course his time in Greece is also the end of his European adventures.

His return to America brings him a lot of new hardships. He returns to New York, but soon finds himself a new place in Bug Sur in California. A rough place in the mountains near the ocean where he lives in a cottage. He could not have wanted more. He lives on a low status, but is very productive at the same time: The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Plexus and Nexus), The Air Conditioned Nightmare (his most harsh comment on America) and his later works: The books in My life, My complete book of friends, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.

Does Miller have importance and meaning for us today?

Milller has founded a revolutionary style of writing. A special way to get down to life, which has not found many followers as one might believe. This is not a simple style. It is chaotic, full of life, jumping from subject to subject at random. Such a style reveals the inner patterns of situations and circumstances. Above this time and space move at different levels through each other. Time is in Miller’s work the time of the subconscious, which means that time as such does not exist. Everything is happening at the same moment. Facts and situations are for Miller only a starting point and a stepping stone on the road to truth. This is essential.

At heart Miller is a wisdom writer, in a way like Herman Hesse or Krishnamurti. He uses life as a parable. He is not an ordinary novelist. His objective is not to please, behave or show good manners. His objective is to liberate. Himself and his readers. That is why he wants to write about the dark sides of himself, just because this is not done.

Miller always writes in the first person. He teases us by mixing crumbles of truths with thetalk of the street. By doing so he gives us an unforgettable impression of what it means to be alive, not as a saint, but as a man.

This is his gift to us and it is still relevant today. He challenges us to read his work with an open mind and leave our prejudice behind. By doing so he asks from us to look ourselves straight in the eye.

> Wildmen work in Holland today.
> Erica Jong on Henry Miller
> The Henry Miller Library
> Robitaille and Miller by Henk van Gelre
> Miller on the web Linklist by Washley
> The Cosmodemonic Miller Blog

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