TURNING LIFE INTO WRITING: HENRY MILLER

An incredible documentation describing Henry Miller’s artistic/creative process, in which he churned out his masterpieces; as well as the way Henry transmuted his life into art, on nothing but what I call the food of the air, and his friends generous Parisian wallets:

“Everything he had lived, everything he had written, would become the source for his art. When he finished, early the next morning, he had a stack of thirty-two closely typed pages, which he labeled ‘June’. He had sketched the basis for much of his life’s work, for Crazy Cock, portions of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Rosy Crucifixion. More importantly, he had fastened upon the intensely autobiographical form that his life’s work would take. From now on, he would be both the author and subject of his life’s work. He would live his life as if it were the raw material for art; then he would turn the life he had lived into art.

Though Miller’s descriptions of sex are surely radical because he wrote down how a certain kind of man talks about sex, what is even more radical are his descriptions of how he seizes for himself the right to do creative work even if it means that he goes hungry, or that he has to invent schemes – like getting well-heeled friends to invite him to dinner – in order to eat. In describing the two-year genesis of Cancer, Miller shows us the lonely, perilous, agonizing, yet exhilarating route that he travelled to do his work, and to learn to speak in his own voice. Unlike privileged writers, who have the time, money, and confidence to devoted to their art, the working-class writer, Miller tells us, must depend upon others for support. In a patriarchal culture, this dependency ‘unmans’ the male working-class writer. It forces him to use charm, guile, and seduction to keep himself fed, clothed and housed – attributes normally ascribed to dependent women.

“How the hell can a man write when he doesn’t know where he’s going to sit the next half-hour, ” the narrator laments, when he’s about to lose his temporary home. “One can sleep almost anywhere but one must have a place to work”, he tells us. “Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.” He has to depend on other people’s money (a wife’s, a lover’s, or friends’) for survival. Or he has to work at demeaning jobs (a houseboy, a proofreader, a tutor) to earn enough just to get by. For if he tries to earn a living in conventional ways, he will dissipate the energy necessary to perfect his craft. He has to learn the art of suffering; he has to give up hope (but eschew despair) and the illusion of safety; if necessary, he must become a predator to survive.

An arresting description of Henry Miller at work on Cancer is provided by his friends Alfred Perles and Wembly Bald, who describe Miller’s apparently limitless sexual and creative energy at the time. He awakened early, often to his friends’ distress, for he would awaken them to talk, even if they had worked all night. If Perle’s live-in French lover was home, Miller would entertain her with anecdotes in his idiosyncratic brand of French; it was a French spoken with a Brooklyn accent, replete with colloquialisms, but using the inflated syntax of Proust (especially the subjunctive), whom Miller was reading at the time.

In the mornings, he would draft letters and notes. Lunch usually would be taken at the home of a friend, or at a cafe, usually at someone else’s expense. Though Miller has been called a shameless beggar because of this, if he had some money, he would practice what he called “reverse pick-pocketing” - putting money in a friend’s pocket without telling him. After lunch, he would return home to take a nap, for which he “undressed, put on his pyjamas, and went to bed.” These daily breaks, he argued, put “velvet in his vertebrae.” They also put him in touch with his unconscious and prepared him for an afternoon’s work of almost demonic intensity.

When he was writing, he “always “managed to knock out his fifteen or twenty pages” in one session. Hunched over his typewriter, a Gauloise bleue clenched between his teeth, his head encircled in smoke, his fingers flew over the keyboard in the fastest display of touch typing Perles had ever seen. At times, colored pencils in hand, he stopped to hunt for a passage he wanted to use among the piles of books he gathered around him; or he consulted a letter he had written (he usually kept a carbon); or her worked from his Paris notebook. At times, he glanced up at a chart tacked onto his wall outlining his work-in-progress to remind himself of what still had to be written. Or he consulted the lists of words he had copied from his dictionary that he wanted to include in his novel. He could work even when other people were present. Often, he typed and talked simultaneously. (It is likely that at times he typed these conversations into the novel.) Sometimes “in the middle of his work he would put on a record or listen to a piece of music. Or he would burst into song himself. His work was done singing.”

[...] Miller’s work shows the process by which the contents of consciousness are created by the storytelling self.  Miller’s avowed aim, as he states in Cancer, is “to put down everything that  goes on in my noodle” without self-censorship. Miller shows how, by choosing the way you describe your life, you can create the consciousness that you desire. Without waiting for the world to change, you can change who you are by the stories you tell yourself and others about who you are.’

From Introduction to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer by Louise DeSalvo, 1995.