Banned Books: Black Spring by Henry Miller

I wanted a comparison of Tropic of Cancer (previous commentary) to Black Spring. Is one better than the other? They're both written by the same guy with a similar stylistic verve, yet one can see why one book might be preferred. Tropic of Cancer has a more personal feel, but it is also grimier. Black Spring has subject headings. I read someone call them stories, but I'm not sure they're that. If you take “The dreamers dream" quote below, it is a complete paragraph. It could stand alone, or be lumped with another "story" entirely. I suspect that one inspired another, yet I also suspect a completely new book could have been achieved by reshuffling. Perhaps Tropic of Cancer could have used an organizing principle, even if the organization were arbitrary. I'm sure academics have staked their careers on the organization.

It seems to me my initial impression was correct, in terms of savoring a passage and setting the book down. A movie will never be made out of his books*--or  at least not a faithful one based on the events since what are the events? Moreover, this book quotes and structurally a kind of Lewis Carroll's Alice-in-Wonderland surrealist logic. There is a dialogue but it doesn't feel like a real one (see the last quote). No, Miller may best read as a prose poet, as a writer of passages, as etcher of lyric essays. The books may cohere as a poet's as well. Note that Lawrence Ferlinghetti quotes Miller for the famed title of his collection, A Coney Island of the Mind.

Opening a Miller book is like opening a box packed with poets' toys. Karl Shapiro called Miller's work wisdom literature, and in some cases as in some of the quotes below, I believe he's correct.

Cool Quotes:

"I do not have to look in my vest pocket for my soul; it is there all the time bumping against my ribs, swelling, inflated with song."

“The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out.”

"She's got millions of them inside her and they're all whirring around in there dying to get out. Whirrrr ... whirrrr. And if you'd just put a needle inside and puncture the bag they'd all come whirring out... imagine it... a great cloud of soul-worms... millions of them... and so thick the swarm we wouldn't be able to see each other.... A fact! No need to write about China. Write about that! About what's inside you..."

* Bold proclamation that has already turned out to be untrue after a few minutes. He's had four or five, but none of them are especially well received. This one for Tropic of Cancer got a 71 tomatoes from critics, 25 from the lay audience, and a 5.7 from IMDb, which rounds out to a so-so movie. The others, linked to here when the post is finished, fared slightly worse, but still within the so-so range. I do think Black Spring would be particularly difficult to film, so I won't edit out the statement. I don't see how a movie can capture Miller's strengths as a writer.

I discuss two other Henry Miller novels:

1. Tropic of Cancer and
2. Quiet Days in Clichy (his most filmed).

Banned Books: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

This post is rated PG, but it discusses and links to R-rated material or higher. There's a reason this is listed among the most banned books.

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When I first read Henry Miller in college, I had no idea he'd been banned in the US and Great Britain. I picked up a volume called The Henry Miller Reader--a volume compiled to get around the ban by leaving out all of the salacious bits, which is the volume I would recommend to those who want to get a taste for his work but don't want their sensibilities offended--and was smitten by the prose. I read what amounted to a feast of food and words and swooned. I read and reread the passage, seeing what he'd done. I bought a metric ton of his books based on that five-page work alone.

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But I never returned--at least not systematically. Instead, I read him haphazardly. I'd pore over a passage, fall in love, and close the book, feeling no compulsion to read anymore. I thought it a flaw, at the time. South Park creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, call this "And, then" writing (see video clip on right), which they consider bad--at least from the standpoint of getting most people to follow your art.

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I was inspired to revisit Miller thanks to the Bradfield video here (he discusses a book I suspect was never banned and might be a safer exposure to Miller). Bradfield recommends Tropic of Capricorn and Big Sur over Tropic of Cancer. However, others have recommended it over other books--for example, the Modern Library lists as one of the top one hundred books of the 20th century, so why not?

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The way to view Miller's work is through the lens of a lyric poem. In a narrative poem, we expect to be centered in the world. In Miller's work, we are centered in the mind of the narrator or persona who may or may not give you a map, who may or may not lay out entrances and exits, who may or may not (well probably not) give you transitions in place and time. All he lends the reader is his consciousness and unique voice.

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I thought I'd hit upon an original perspective of Miller but no, at least not completely. Karl Shapiro suggested this in part in his introduction to Tropic of Cancer:

"I do not call him a poet because he has never written a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think. But everything he has written is a poem in the best as well as in the broadest sense of the word."

Side note: I am curious if Miller's autobiographical fiction influenced the confessional mode of poetry. Clearly poets like Shapiro were reading him in the 50s before the ban was lifted.

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There will be those who struggle with Miller's work, not just sexual prudes or narrative prudes, but also moral prudes. He will push all the buttons. He will test readers whether they read for aesthetic purposes or political ones. It's a kind of litmus test. If you don't pass, well, try out his Reader mentioned above. If this had been twenty years ago, I would have been surprised at even the necessity of discussing the distinction between art and morality.

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I don't find his work as sexy although it is full of sexual situations, rather grimy ones--sometimes repulsive. You can try out the Miller Tropic of Cancer excerpts here. The first one links to the first forty pages. The second is an edited excerpt about Germaine--more of a character portrait than a story. It appears about a page and half after the first excerpt. This one cuts out Claude from the original text, which is a comparison of whores. I felt no arousal but found the description a fascinating perspective.

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How can I recommend a writer without sharing his values or suggesting that others have to agree with him? How can one be a good reader and not read about people different from him? Sure, we are free to condemn, but that lies outside the scope of aesthetics and art--two separate issues.

The difference might be likened to watching a nude master swimmer in a public pool. You can comment on his skill on the one hand, and talk about the indecency on the other. Sure, you can focus on only the indecency, but you've missed out on much of the experience.

Do you have to read Miller? Should Miller be forced on others? No and no, respectively, but he is worth experiencing. What I notice in complaints is that a sample represents the whole, missing out on the bigger picture. One could say that he missed the boat on some aspects of human experience, but that is the human experience in literature: It is largely filtered by a human being who may be flawed.

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That said, there are vulgarities that repel me from reading--offensiveness for the sake of being offensive which is not an aesthetic perspective. Maybe if Miller had spent too much time on vulgarity I would not be able to read him [ETA: I just read Quiet Days in Clichy, which did test my resolve. Link will function as soon as I finish writing about it]. It is not even just a matter of quantity but of quality. Miller is an observer, a student of himself, others, and humanity, which is part of what imbues his work with charm. He's a hungry artist, wandering the streets, apartments and brothels of Paris. He is perpetually looking for food and money, perpetually short of both. He is perpetually hungry for words and sex and finding a vitality in both. He is living in Paris after most of the famous literary artists had been there, following footsteps but making his own imprint. He is living in Paris during the Depression and the coming Second World War. His appetites are phenomenal to caress both aurally and on the page.

Since much of the work is within the narrator's consciousness and lacks the kind narrative thread one can follow, I'm not sure if an audio book is the best way to experience Miller, but then his words are also an aural feast, so I'm not sure if even that assessment is correct. There may be multiple paths into Miller's work.

Here's an excerpt that captures much of the elegance and energy and perspective that Miller offers:

As luck would have it I find a ticket in the lavabo for a concert. Light as a feather now I go there to the Salle Gaveau. The usher looks ravaged because I overlook giving him his little tip. Every time he passes me he looks at me inquiringly, as if perhaps I will suddenly remember. 

It’s so long since I’ve sat in the company of well-dressed people that I feel a bit panic-stricken. I can still smell the formaldehyde. Perhaps Serge makes deliveries here too. But nobody is scratching himself, thank God. A faint odor of perfume . . . very faint. Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people’s faces. A polite form of self-imposed torture, the concert. For a moment, when the conductor raps with his little wand, there is a tense spasm of concentration followed almost immediately by a general slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the steady, uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra. My mind is curiously alert; it’s as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water. I’ve never been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations. How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place.

I discuss (or will discuss shortly) two other Henry Miller novels:

1. Quiet Days in Clichy  (his most filmed) and
2. Black Spring.