Henry Miller Resources

Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another's way of life - so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off! - Henry Miller

Wiki entry
Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American writer and, to a lesser extent, painter. He is known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also an imaginative construct. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.

Henry Miller, a personal collection (a site by his daughter)
June 7, 2005 marks twenty-five years since my Dad passed away. It seems impossible but I miss him more each year. He was a great listener as well as a fascinating raconteur. He had a very warm persona, treating everyone he came in contact with as though they had something special to say and often they did. His curiosity in his fellow man came across as being genuinely interested in all people. He was generous in every way, from sharing his home, giving to anyone who asked for money (if he had it), he gave his watercolors away, happy that they were admired. He had many friends throughout his life that were true lifelong relationships. He was a loyal friend. He loved to laugh and share meals and wine, always exchanging ideas about literature and art. He truly enjoyed life and made the world a better place by his wholehearted embrace of the world. He was tolerant, kind, inspiring, droll, genuine, loving, intelligent, thoughtful, a wonderful combination of many talents, humble as well as proud.

I love you Dad,

Your daughter,
Valentine


Insomnia series - shaking cobwebs out of the sky (watercolor by Henry Miller)


The Reality of Henry Miller - Review by Rexroth
Quote: I once crossed the Atlantic — eighteen days in a Compagnie Générale Transatlantique freighter — with a cabin mate, a French African Negro, who was only partially literate, but who was able to talk for hours on the comparative merits of Black Spring and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. When he found out I came from California and knew Miller, he started treating me as if I were an archangel newly descended, and never tired of questions about le Beeg Sur and les camarades de M’sieu Millaire. He had a mental picture of poor Henry living on a mountain-top, surrounded by devoted handmaids and a bevy of zoot-suited existentialist jitterbugs.

Henry Miller tells. Andersen told about the little boy and the Emperor’s new clothes. Miller is the little boy himself. He tells about the Emperor, about the pimples on his behind, and the warts on his private parts, and the dirt between his toes. Other writers in the past have done this, of course, and they are the great ones, the real classics.

It is hard to tell sometimes when Miller is being ironic and when he is being naïve. He is the master of a deadpan style, just as he has a public personality that alternates between quiet gentleness — “like a dentist,” he describes it — and a sort of deadpan buffoonery. This has led some critics to consider him a naïve writer, a “modern primitive,” like the painter Rousseau. In a sense this is true.

In some mysterious way, Miller has preserved an innocence of the practice of Literature-with-a-capital-L which is almost unique in history. Likewise he has preserved an innocence of heart. But he is not unsophisticated. In the first place, he writes a muscular, active prose in which something is always going on and which is always under control. True, he often rambles and gets windy, but only because he likes to ramble and hear his head roar. When he wants to tell you something straight from the shoulder, he makes you reel.

His absolute freedom from the Christian or Jewish anguish of conscience, the sense of guilt, implication, and compromise, makes Miller humane, maybe even humanistic, but it effectively keeps him from being humanitarian. He might cry over a pet dog who had been run over, or even punch the guilty driver in the nose. He might have assassinated Hitler if he had had the chance. He would never join the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or the Friends Service Committee. He is not involved in the guilt, and so in no way is he involved in the penance.

There is a rank, old-fashioned masculinity about this world which shocks the tender-minded and self-deluded. It is far removed from the Momism of the contemporary young American male. This is why Miller is accused of writing about all women as though they were whores, never treating them as “real persons,” as equals. This is why he is said to lack any sense of familial love.

Henry Miller Links