Henry Miller - Henry Miller on Writing

The One Book I Always Wanted to Write
(The World of Sex)

The Supreme SubjectLiberation
(The Books in My Life)

This Unilateral, Multilingual, Sesquipedalian Activity
(The Books in My Life)

The Voice
(Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch)

Work Schedule, 1932-1933
(Henry Miller Miscellanea)

Obscenity and the Law of Reflection
(Remember to Remember)

First Letter to Trygve Hirsch
(Henry MillerBetween Heaven and Hell)

Second Letter to Trygve Hirsch
(The Henry Miller Reader)

It was several years ago that I first began making notes of certain passages in the works of Henry Miller on the subject of writing. Since then I have received letters remarking on the stimulating effect of some of these selections. This encouraged me in my then vague idea of collecting them into a volume. I finally decided to go ahead with the book after reading the passage from Art and Outrage reprinted here as an epigraph.

In the first section, The Literary Writer, are to be found the selections dealing with Henry Millers struggles to perfect his style by imitating various writers he admired. The section covers the period from about 1917 to 1927.

The second section, Finding His Own Voice, is a record of his successful search within himself for his own way of writing. It begins about 1930 and continues into the present time.

The third section, The Author at Work, attempts to show, in a small way, the methods Henry Miller used in preparing his books.

The fourth section, Writing and Obscenity, contains the most important writings by Henry Miller on obscenity and its relation to his own idea of the artist as writer. I think it is very important for an understanding of Henry Millers works.

I was fortunate in being able to obtain the help of Henry Miller in the final selection of the passages.

To conclude, I feel that, first of all, the selections will be found enjoyable reading. I also know that they will be an inspiration and a stimulus to those who are, or ever hope to be, writers.

T HOMAS H. M OORE

I proved to my satisfaction that, like any other mortal, I too could write. But since I wasnt really meant to be a writer all that was permitted me to give expression to was this business of writing and being a writer; in short, my own private struggles with this problem. My grief, in other words. Out of the lack I made my song. Very much as if a warrior, challenged to mortal combat and having no weapons, must first forge them himself. And in the process, one that takes all his life, the purpose of his labors gets forgotten or sidetracked.

Art and Outrage

During this period when I was drifting from door to door, job to job, friend to friend, meal to meal, I did try nevertheless to rope off a little space for myself which might be an anchorage; it was more like a life-buoy in the midst of a swift channel. To get within a mile of me was to hear a huge dolorous bell tolling. Nobody could see the anchorageit was buried deep in the bottom of the channel. One saw me bobbing up and down on the surface, rocking gently sometimes or else swinging backwards and forwards agitatedly. What held me down safely was the big pigeon-holed desk which I put in the parlor. This was the desk which had been in the old mans tailoring establishment for the last fifty years, which had given birth to many bills and many groans, which had housed strange souvenirs in its compartments, and which finally I had filched from him when he was ill and away from the establishment, and now it stood in the middle of the floor in our lugubrious parlor on the third floor of a respectable brown-stone house in the dead center of the most respectable neighborhood in Brooklyn. I had to fight a tough battle to install it there, but I insisted that it be there in the midmost midst of the shebang. It was like putting a mastodon in the center of a dentists office. But since the wife had no friends to visit her and since my friends didnt give a fuck if it were suspended from the chandelier, I kept it in the parlor and I put all the extra chairs we had around it in a big circle and then I sat down comfortably and I put my feet up on the desk and dreamed of what I would write if I could write. I had a spittoon alongside of the desk, a big brass one from the same establishment, and I would spit in it now and then to remind myself that it was there. All the pigeon-holes were empty and all the drawers were empty; there wasnt a thing on the desk or in it except a sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much as a pot-hook.

When I think of the titanic efforts I made to canalize the hot lava which was bubbling inside me, the efforts I repeated thousands of times to bring the funnel into place and capture a word, a phrase, I think inevitably of the men of the old stone age. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years, three hundred thousand years to arrive at the idea of the paleolith. A phantom struggle, because they werent dreaming of such a thing as the paleolith. It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or they dont happen, thats all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because weve lost the habit of falling asleep. We dont know how to let go. Were like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.

I think if I had been crazy I couldnt have hit upon a better scheme to consolidate my anchorage than to install this Neanderthal object in the middle of the parlor. With my feet on the desk, picking up the current, and my spinal column snugly socketed in a thick leather cushion, I was in an ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam which was whirling about me, and which, because they were crazy and part of the flux, my friends were trying to convince me was life. I remember vividly the first contact with reality that I got through my feet, so to speak. The million words or so which I had written previously, which were intelligible words, mind you, well ordered, well connected, were as nothing to mecrude ciphers from the old stone agebecause the contact was through the head and the head is a useless appendage unless youre anchored in mid-channel deep in the mud. Everything I had written before was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and thats why it doesnt catch fire, doesnt inflame the world. I was only a mouth-piece for the ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one thought which would come up out of me, out of the life-buoy, was a Herculean task. I didnt lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expressionI lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the juice. The bloody machine wouldnt stop, that was the difficulty. I was not only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it whatever.

I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the other mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials, and which I had made with my own hands and my own blood, slowly began to function. I had gone to the theatre nearby to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing on line in the lobby, I already experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of normality, which is a very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow its foul breath in my mouthit wouldnt matter. I might bend over and kiss the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm could possibly come to me. There was not just a balance in this constant warfare between health and disease, which is all that most of us may hope for, but there was a plus integer in the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease was completely routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment, one would never again be ill or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this conclusion is to make a jump which would take one back farther than the old stone age. At that moment I wasnt even dreaming of taking root; I was experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the miraculous. I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was willing to die then and there for the privilege of the experience.