Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He broke with existing literary forms and developed a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blends character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, and mysticism. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, which are based on his experiences in New York City and Paris, and all of which were banned in the United States until 1961. He also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism and painted watercolors.
Early life
Miller was born at his family's home, 450 East 85th Street, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City. He was the son of Lutheran German parents, Louise Marie and tailor Heinrich Miller. As a child, he lived for nine years at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known at that time as the Fourteenth Ward. In 1900, his family moved to 1063 Decatur Street in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood. Although his family remained in Bushwick, Miller attended Eastern District High School in Williamsburg after finishing elementary school. As a young man, he was active with the Socialist Party of America. He attended the City College of New York for one semester.Career
Brooklyn, 1917–1930
Miller married his first wife, Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, in 1917; their divorce was granted on December 21, 1923. Together they had a daughter, Barbara, born in 1919. They lived in an apartment at 244 6th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. At the time, Miller was working at Western Union; he worked there from 1920 to 1924 as personnel manager in the messenger department. In March 1922, during a three-week vacation, he wrote his first novel, Clipped Wings. It has never been published, and only fragments remain, although parts of it were recycled in other works, such as Tropic of Capricorn. A study of twelve Western Union messengers, Clipped Wings was characterized by Miller as "a long book and probably a very bad one."In 1923, while still married to Beatrice, Miller met and became enamored of a mysterious dance-hall ingénue who was born Juliet Edith Smerth but went by the stage-name June Mansfield. She was 21 at the time. They began an affair, and married on June 1, 1924. In 1924 Miller quit Western Union to dedicate himself completely to writing. He described this time—his struggles to become a writer, his sexual escapades, his failures, his friends, his philosophy—in his autobiographical trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion.
Miller's second novel, Moloch: or, This Gentile World, was written in 1927–28, initially under the guise of a novel by his wife Juliet. A rich older admirer of June, Roland Freedman, paid her to write the novel; she would show him pages of Miller's work each week, pretending it was hers. The book was unpublished until 1992, 65 years after it was written and 12 years after Miller's death. Moloch is based on Miller's first marriage and his years working at the Western Union office in Lower Manhattan. A third novel written around this time, Crazy Cock, was also unpublished until after Miller's death. Initially titled Lovely Lesbians, Crazy Cock told the story of June's close relationship with the artist Marion, whom June renamed Jean Kronski. Kronski lived with Miller and June from 1926 until 1927, when June and Kronski went to Paris together, leaving Miller behind, which upset him greatly. Miller suspected the two of having a sexual relationship. While in Paris, June and Kronski did not get along, and June returned to Miller several months later. Kronski died by suicide around 1930.
Paris, 1930–1939
In 1928, Miller spent several months in Paris with June, a trip financed by Freedman. One day on a Paris street, Miller met another author, Robert W. Service, who recalled the story in his autobiography: "Soon we got into conversation which turned to books. For a stripling he spoke with some authority, turning into ridicule the pretentious scribes of the Latin Quarter and their freak magazine." In 1930, Miller moved to Paris unaccompanied. Soon thereafter, he began work on Tropic of Cancer, writing to a friend, "I start tomorrow on the Paris book: First person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!" Miller had little or no money the first year in Paris, but things began to change after he met Anaïs Nin, who, with Hugh Guiler, paid his entire way through the 1930s, including the rent for an apartment at 18 Villa Seurat. Nin became his lover and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934 with money from Otto Rank. She wrote extensively in her journals about her relationship with Miller and June; the first volume, covering the years 1931–34, was published in 1966. Late in 1934, June divorced Miller by proxy in Mexico City.In 1931, Miller was employed by the Chicago Tribune Paris edition as a proofreader, thanks to his friend Alfred Perlès, who worked there. Miller took this opportunity to submit some of his own articles under Perlès's name, since at that time only the editorial staff were permitted to publish in the paper. This period in Paris was highly creative for Miller, and during this time he also established a significant and influential network of authors circulating around the Villa Seurat. At that time a young British author, Lawrence Durrell, became a lifelong friend. Miller's correspondence with Durrell was later published in two books. During his Paris period he was also influenced by the French Surrealists.
His works contain detailed accounts of sexual experiences. His first published book, Tropic of Cancer, was published by Obelisk Press in Paris and banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity. The dust jacket came wrapped with a warning: "Not to be imported into the United States or Great Britain." He continued to write novels that were banned; along with Tropic of Cancer, his Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn were smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation. While the aforementioned novels remained banned in the US for over two decades, in 1939, New Directions published The Cosmological Eye, Miller's first book to be published in the US. The collection contained short prose pieces, most of which originally appeared in 1938 in Black Spring and Max and the White Phagocytes.
Miller became fluent in French during his ten-year stay in Paris and lived in France until June 1939. During the late 1930s he also learned about German-born sailor George Dibbern, helped to promote his memoir, Quest, and organized charity to help him.
Greece, 1939–1940
In 1939, Durrell, who was living in Corfu, Greece, invited Miller to Greece. Miller described the visit in The Colossus of Maroussi, which he considered his best book. One of the first acknowledgments of Miller as a major modern writer was by George Orwell in his 1940 essay "Inside the Whale". Orwell wrote:California, 1942–1980
In 1940, Miller returned to New York. After a year-long trip around the United States, a journey that became material for The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, he moved to California in June 1942, initially residing just outside Hollywood in Beverly Glen before settling in Big Sur in 1944. While Miller was establishing his base in Big Sur, the Tropic books, still banned in the US, were being published in France by Obelisk Press and later Olympia Press. There they were slowly and steadily gaining notoriety among both Europeans and various enclaves of American cultural exiles. As a result, they were frequently smuggled into the US, where they were a major influence on the new Beat Generation of American writers, most notably Jack Kerouac, the only Beat writer Miller liked. By the time his banned books were published in the 1960s and he was becoming better known, Miller was no longer interested in his image as an outlaw writer of smut-filled books, but he eventually gave up fighting the image.In 1942, shortly before moving to California, Miller began writing Sexus, the first novel in The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, a fictionalized account of the six-year period of his life in Brooklyn falling in love with June and struggling to become a writer. Like several of his other works, the trilogy, completed in 1959, was initially banned in the US, published only in France and Japan. Miller lived in a small house on Partington Ridge from 1944 to 1947, along with other bohemian writers like Harry Partch, Emil White, and Jean Varda. There he wrote "Into the Nightlife", about the artists who lived at Anderson Creek as the Anderson Creek Gang in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. Miller paid $5 per month rent for his shack on the property.
In other works written during his time in California, Miller was widely critical of consumerism in America, as reflected in Sunday After the War and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, published in 1957, is a collection of stories about his life and friends in Big Sur.
In 1944, Miller met and married his third wife, Janina Martha Lepska, a philosophy student who was 30 years his junior. They had two children: a son, Tony, and a daughter, Valentine. They divorced in 1952. The next year, he married artist Eve McClure, who was 37 years his junior. They divorced in 1960, and she died in 1966, likely as a result of alcoholism. In 1961, Miller arranged a reunion in New York with his ex-wife June, the main subject of The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. They had not seen each other in nearly three decades. In a letter to Eve, he described his shock at June's "terrible" appearance, as she had degenerated both physically and mentally.
In 1948, Miller wrote a novella he called his "most singular story", The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder.
In February 1963, Miller moved to 444 Ocampo Drive, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California, where he spent the last 17 years of his life. In 1967, Miller married his fifth wife, Japanese-born singer Hoki Tokuda. In 1968, Miller signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. After moving to Ocampo Drive, he held dinner parties for the artistic and literary figures of the time. His cook and caretaker was a young artist's model, Twinka Thiebaud, who later wrote a book about his evening chats. Thiebaud's memories of Miller's table talk were published in a rewritten and retitled book in 2011.
Only 200 copies of Miller's 1972 chapbook On Turning Eighty were published. Published by Capra Press in collaboration with Yes! Press, it was the first volume of the "Yes! Capra" chapbook series and is 34 pages long. The book contains three essays on topics such as aging and living a meaningful life. Of reaching age 80 years, Miller writes:
In 1973, Miller was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by University of Copenhagen professor Allan Philip.
Miller and Tokuda divorced in 1977. Then in his late 80s, Miller filmed with Warren Beatty for the 1981 film Reds, which Beatty also directed. He spoke of his remembrances of John Reed and Louise Bryant as part of a series of "witnesses". The film was released 18 months after Miller's death. During the last four years of his life, Miller held an ongoing correspondence of over 1,500 letters with Brenda Venus, a young Playboy model and columnist, actress, and dancer. A book about their correspondence was published by William Morrow, NY, in 1986.