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by

VOLKER STRUNK "

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Department of English, MeGi11 University

for the degree of Master of Arts

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Volker Strunk
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ABSTRACT

, Volker Strunk, Surreali.am and the Early Writings of Henry Miller.

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Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirernnts for the
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degree of ~~ter of Arts, McGill University, Montral, March, 1975.

Even though his relation vis--vis the surrealists was peripheral,

Henry Miller's early writings (Tropic of Cancer, Black Sprinf;, Tropic

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of Capricorn) exhibit strong surrealist influences in both style and

attitude. Afb~r an introduction which' establishes Millerts role in ~he'

,

general context of surrealism, subsequent chapters deal with the carly

v~ting6 a) in t~rms of their rnetaphysical implications,

...
a close affinity to the obief tenets of surrealist thought,
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terms of style and method with special consideration of "automatism."
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which auggest

and b) in/ .
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The fourth chapter ia devot~d to a critical examination of Mi1ler's

"Open Letter to S\,1Treal:Lsts Everywl'\ere," which reveals the extent of his

theoreticaJ. involvemen~ in' aurreal.i*cby. ~"Fining his deviatio.n trom its

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main principles.

A comparison with Andr Breton's surrealist texte, which have been

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chosen as main point of referenee, eugg~sts

the- conclusion -t{hat Miller's)/'
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own writings correspond in their Most crucial points t:airly aecurately to 1 /

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the philoeo.phy of SlU"realism.

V. Strunk
M.A. (English) :'~, .)

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Rswn

VO}kr Strunk, Le sur~alisme ~t les premi!r,\

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oeuvres de RePEY Miller.
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Bien que ses liens",le surralisme furent priphriaux, les premiers
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crits d\3 Henry Miller (Tropic of CAAcer, Black Sprins", ,Tropic of

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CaRricorn) montrent des'influence~ surralistes trs pouss~es au point de

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vue de style et d'attitude. L'introduction de cette thse cherche

o
tablir le r81e de Miller dans l-eitexte gnral du surr ~:s --~--

chapi tres}~~i vent ~rai tent ce- pr

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ers oeuvres -a.5 ft~- ~
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leurs implica.tions surralisteevqui suggrent une forte fIfinit a.vec les

doctrines essentielles de la pense sUITa-~J et b)/en ce qui concerne

le style et la, mthode, sur~out en consid'rant "-nJ.' a omatisme". Le

" "

; quatrime chapitre cri tiq~UOplt'~tt., ,tg, Surreali s Everywhere" de

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Miller qui illustre son engagement thorique en montrant'

sa dviation de ses principes fondamentaux.

j En comparent les crits de Miller et l'oeuvre surraliste d'Andr

Breton (mon point de repre principal), on arrive l~ conclusion que

l'oeuvre de Miller correspond assez rigoureuseme~t la. philosophie du

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surralisme.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Preface .................................................. . 1
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Chapter One: Heniy Miller and the Surrealist Expe.rience 3
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} ,r Chapter Two: On the Ovarian Trolley -- ~l.UTealist Motives
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... ,,?
in Black Spripg and the Tropics ~ 19
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Cbapter Three: Into the Nightlife --~echnique and method ~l

Chapter Four: Quarrels wi th Surrealism -- the "Open Letter

to Surrealists Everywhere" ' 74
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Chaptel" Five: C0J:tclusion .. ~........ 1 88

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Selected Bibliography ,; 1. 92

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PREFAC
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\'/hile ernphasizing almost e*clu~ively the issue of Miller's indebted ...
O
nejls to nineteenth century American romntic, writers on one hand, and the 1

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pro~lem of porno~aphy and eensorship on the other, )Ps.:t crilticism ~

neglected to deaJ. sufficiently ,with Henry Mill.er aEj(..brrealist.

1 l
This \t
all the more surprising sinee few critics have failed ta note, though only
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in passiDf' Mill.er's surrealist style. The absence of satisfacto~ criti-

cal works on the 7-t of surrealism in his writinge th~ gives credence

ta our Clr~~~~;)~tlgina1i.ty in this area, and accounts for the minimal use
of seeend~,iources dealing directly .with Miller.

"All theae trouble-bree~ing and thoughl obscuring 't~rms," saye A.o.

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Lovejoy with refer~nce to the current.iglut of isms,

and not of simples -- and of complexes in two senses.

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net". for one doctrine,
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"are names of complexes
They stand,

but for several and olten eonflicting doctrines held

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as a rule,

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l' by di~ferent indi vidufs 'or groups' to whose way of thinking these appellaJ

tions have been pp:j.ied."

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It ia usefu1 to ka.p. thia distinction in mind in
/

/ l -The Great cMia of Be!M (New York: 1960) f p'.6.

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our disou,ssion ~f }1j.ll~~ 1 S indebtedness to surrealism, though, we hve tried

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to ~duce possible ambigbities ari'rg froin the ~ty of t~t ter~ to

a minimum 'by relying for i ts definition and interpret!.ation primarily on the
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writings of Andr Breton -- the movement's founder and chief exponent.

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Cre~i t i6 due here to Professor William Waas of MeGill dniversi ty for

supervlsing this thes~s! and to Professor R~ Ellenwood of York University

for many helpful sugges~ions pertaining to the issue of surrealiem

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CHAPl'ER ONE Henry Miller and the Surrealist Experience

"Swift lS a surrealist in malice. Sade ia a' surreal.ist in sadi sm , "

Breton saya in the firet surreah.st manifesto-. -'''Poe is surrealist ~ adven-

ture. ft These and others, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarm, Saint-Pol-Roux

, etc., "are not always surrealists, in that 1 dise ern in them a certain

number of preconceived ideas to 'Which -- very naively! -- they hold." ~ey

,hold them, he exple.ins, "because they had not heard the surrealist voiee,

the one that continues to preach,on the eve of death and abova the storms,

becauae they did n6t want ta serve simply to orchestrate~he marvellous

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score."

Even though\ Miller' s relation V;i2"kvis the group around Andr Breton
. ~--~

Wa,~nlY pe~iPheral, the latter, wou1d have undoubtedly included him in this

1.1st of informal. surrealiste --; perhaps as a "surrealist in obscenity" --

but Miller's attitufl,e,__ styl.e, and, thinking exhibited in hia early writings
-;---

reveal a kinahip to aurrealit principlas which goes beyond the obeoenity

"

,aspect on which cri tics in the put have fo~used so extensi vely. An explana-
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tion.of what he lIIens by surrealism he givas to George Wi"bkes in the following
.................-"'-t.-ll"'.:o..-..\lr--"""t.

1 Manifest~.e of Surreatie, trane. Seaver and Lana (Ann Arbor: U. of

Michigan Press';'9?2,.), pp.26-?

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manner:
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When l was living 'in Paris, we had an expression, a very Ainerican 1
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one, which in a way explains ,it better than anything else. !fe uaed to ,';
say, 'Let's take the lead.~ That meant going off the d~p ~nd, iving
into the unconscious, jutt obeying your instincts, folflowing your
impulas 'of' the heart, ': ';~ th;-guts, ~or whatever you ~ to calI i t.
But that's my way of ~uttrng-rt, t~at isn't really surrealist doctrine;
2
that wouldn't hold,water, l'm afr~i~~ with an Andr Breton. /
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Our,task in this the~s is to examine Miller'a worka in the light of his own
curious definition and ta show how in its most crucial aspects it corresponds

with surrealist tenets as expounded (primarily) by Breton. ~r concentratio~

t on his ear1y books, Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tro;eic of Capricorn,
)

is not arbitrary; ~ller's surrelist period can fairly accurately be dated

f~om 1930 to 1939, and coincides with his stay in France. Miller's journey
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to lreece in 1939 resul ts "in th~' publication,
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a few years later, 'of The
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Colos5us of Marloussi,
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which is td set the tone, for sub.aequent wri tings \>lhoee
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chief characteriatics inc1ude an alost unbeara~~e_prolixity and an ever-

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increasing flood of aphorisme, betraying an attitude t4at OW9a nathing any

more to surrealism. -Miller the West Coast Guru (he sett1ed in Big Sur in
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1942) exhibits all the traits of a writer turned littrate~, a \~iter who

has forsaken the euphorie affirmation of life, much-tQ the detrime~t of bis
writings, for the lm acceptance of existence along lines suggested by

Eastern mysticism. No reader of Mil~er can f~l to observe the difference in

style and out1ook between earlier warka like Black Sprins and the, TroFics

, y

2 Interview with George Wiokes; Writ.ers at WorIs: The Paris Revi!w ,Inl:r':-
views (New York: Viking, 1964), p.176.

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and ~lOrks written after his return to the Un:rted States, like Sexus,
Nexus, arid Plexus.

Since his later v.rri tings are only of tangential interest to the present
discussion, \'Je ------
shall begin by trying ta establish a connection between the
early Hiller and the surrelists, tnking as a preliminary premise Paul
Eluard' s dictum that surrealism "is a -state of mind. ,,3 Their common meeting-

ground is their suspicion of Literature with a capital L; their rejection

of all cultural val-qes .:wh;ich ,-anly serve to emp)lasize the alienating split
between art and life. This compartmentalization is viewed as the result of
an excessive emphasis on reason at the expense of the imaginaticm and the un-
conscious. Ta this extent the surrealists are the }leirs of the romantic move-
ment, though they go beyond romanticism in their materialistic view of
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society that leaves no room for a~ague ideali6m~hat internalizes freedom
by making t th~ property (If the "inner man .. " Implicit in this position is
the reject on of any forro of r.omantic irony that detaches the
---- ~tist from life,
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that count re each state~nt with its own inherent negation. The realm of

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---iJl.e demoni, the unconacio.us, . ia as Itreal" as is i ta counterpart,
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and the
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synthesis f paychoanalysis and dialectical materialism thus forms the premiae

of surrea1~sm: "The liber,tion 2! ~ mind," as Bl"etoh put it, "demanda as

primary condition, in the opinion of the surrealiste, the liberation 2! \
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man.,,4 . Since interior and exterd.or reality are unified, any possible mia-

-- conception of surrealism as merely another form of trane~e~dentalism la

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3 "Poetic Evidence," it1 Read, ad. t Surrealism <London~ Faber & Faber,
, 1971), p.174 "
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4 "What ie Surrealiam?" in}:riteri;on JU.so,11any 43 (London: Faber &
Faber, 19}4), p.48.
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eliminated. On the contrary, sur'l"""alism des~res to "d~en the foundation

of the real, to bring about an ever clearer apd at the aarne ~ime ever more

\. passionate consciousness of the world percei';'ed by the senses," t'lhile

"refusing to allo\v the pre-eminence of one over the other. ,,5

"
lliller' sace eptance of this position ia not al\otays oz 'clear as one could
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tfsh, espeeially )'Ii,th regards to dialeetical materialism, and he later re-
" ~()
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jects it in favour of a type of romanticism that put~ 'him squar!y in the tra-

dition of Thoreau and Whitman., An acquaint~ce of l1iller during the Paris

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r, period somey/hat wistfully ~emarks that "there were rumours onC"e upon a time, 1.'
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back in America, Henry had gone around "Tith a copy of K8rl Harx under his .:/

arm, ,,6 though one suspects that his affinities to' 'Marxism are closer' to
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Groucho's than Karl's. His deviation from

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the surrealist position, however,

we must examine at a later point; . what concerns us here is his adherence to

surrealist tenets of the post dada period as elucidated by Breton in: the two

surrealist manifestoes, with their emphasi~on automatism and chance creations.

"l \ofas writing surrealistically in America before l had ev en heard the word,"

Miller \trites in his "Open Letter to Surrealists Every\iherejlt fiat a certain

point in my life l decided that henceforth l would "tri te about myself, my

friends, rrry experiences, what l knell/ and y/hat l had seen \dth my own ~e6.
~..'f'
Anything eIse," he adda, "is literature and l am not int.erested ip literature.'~

5 .121., pp.49 and 50.

6 Samuel Putnam, "Henry Miller in Montparnass," in Wiokes, ed. t H29LY
Miller'@Ad the Critics (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Press, 1963),p.14.
7 ':Che C9!!P0~Ogji.cal ire (New York: New Directions, 1939), p.160.
Quotations from pp.151-197 refer to the "Open Letter " .

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The wri~ngs referred to are now lost but Bomcr of their themes are incorpo-
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rnted in Tropic of Capricorn, which deals "li th the Ume lvt;.l1er spent \olor- .
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king for the "coamoder.1onic telegrapp. company" back in Neti York, a period he-

describes as "surrealistic", a " period of slavery.' A disaEiter which was

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full of riches -- 1:e Siberia for Dostoyevsky.~ -

This period becomos the source of his inspiration. Alienation, h:~

cornes to tealize, 1.s by no means rest,ricted to()himse~.T "If things ,~:~-_.
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wrong \.n.th me," he as~erts,' "they \"ere '</rong e"eryw~ere, l was convincd

,of it.,,9 Though

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, he regards potical action as out of the question, his

rebe11ion lS never a-historical despite his ardent individualisme His nega-

tion of the prevalent order indicates the exi~tence of a higher state of reality
\.
which ~an acc9~odate &.l1 the things the present order cannot put up, things

\'le m~ summari1y lump together under ,the heading of "values of t~e imagination."

This negation, furthermore, is d;i.al.ecticaJ. in that it preserves the nega-

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ted order in a movement of sublimation or supercessionlO __ precluding, as

i t were, My possibili ty of transcendence that \iould deny.the material basis

dT this "surreali ty" _

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Mil4.er s desire, 'as he pute i t in Tropic of Cancer,
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is "to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and nowo" Or, in

more poli tical- terms, "the new man will findo himself only when the warfare
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between the eolleetivity and the individual ceases.,,12 As he points out

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later in an otherwiae \mremarkab1e essay:. "AU ideas of .government fail
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8 Henry Miller, Face to Fiee With Hean Miller -, CGmv6r8!tions ''''ith
, Q ! l

G'28S B,lmont (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970), p.14. . ' ,""
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1,9 Trapic of Capri corn
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(Paris: Obelisk Press, 1962), pol?'
)0 Hegel:'~ t~!~ AufheW9a. .;,
11 Trouic ~ef ~er
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(Ne\" York: Grove--. Press,
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1961), p.2,58.
12 IAe Tiple oi:.:the Assassins: A StWit'R0t RiP'.ud (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1962),
, p.6.
'0 "
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insofar as th~y exlud" the poet and the seer \'Iho are ..pne. ,,13

J'he demand
... t\
fa~ the unqualified submission to a p01itical program If$'

denies the independence OL art as "another" means to achieve total 1ibera-

...

tion, as the surrealists \Tere woefully made aware of after their f1irtation

\1ith t~e {.tench Connnunist Party in the mid-1930' s. The P.C.F. at that time
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had pet'ri'fied
, to an extent
,
which made an accomodation impossible. "HO\'1

allo\! that the dialectical, method is only to be applied vMid1y to solving ..../
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social problems?" Bre.tol). asks,' . To Hi11er, and he' is later to deveJ.op
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this into an I-told-you-so attitude, the artist must retain hi~. indepen-

dence at all costs, and dJOt only by refusing to become the mere appendix
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of t~e
. order,
estab1ished bourgici:i..s .. but also by re'fusing allegiance to

,any movement hO\'lever revolutionary: "I am aeainst revo1utions because they

~i"ays invoJ=ve a rcturn ta the statua suo. I am against the status quo

- ~oth befor and after revolutions:,,15 MiJ.ler's demand for a permanent re-
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volution, i t becomes clear, is not as different ,from Trotsky' s (who first
16
coined the phrase) as it might appear at first" aight , and ia quite in

13 "The Gigantic Sunrise,1I Sunda.y After the Wu (New York: New

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J.944 Ji. 59.
14'" "\Ilhat lS Surrealism?" Criterjon m,cellap.y 43, p.?3.
15 22S101q'8jicl lWe, p.160. _ " 1
16 In 1938, during his exile in Mexico, Trotsky co-authrd with Breton
the manifesto "Pour un art rvolutianaire i'"ndpendent" [reprinted, in Breton,
La Cl des cb,amps, Paris: J.J .Pauvert ,1967). The inai~ thesis was that art, to
. r,9.!Uain revolutionary'lf must forfeit al1egiance to orthodox parties or move-
"
mente: "Le but du -'prsent ~t de trouver, un terrain pour reunir les tenants
rvalutio,t'naire de l'a!'t et dfendre la libert de l'art elle-mbe contre
les usurpateurs de la r6volution. Nous 8O~e profonq.nent convaincue que

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line with the surrealist position, expreesed her~ .by ~e\ise, that
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.~ though "art and revolution are uni ted in t chnging the' 'w;Qr~d, '" art in
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Ha practice '!does not abandon i ta own exi,genciea and does not quit i ts
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own dimensions: it remaina non-operational. In art, the political goal

-:;; appe~ only in the transfiguration which i6 the aesthetic l'ormo"l? 'fhe

I~orm" I1iller employs, hO\l/ev~r, ia never purely aesthetic; indeed the

peculiar genre in \'Iroch he writes allows for the depiction of his persona!
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"engagemGrtt" that compensates for the lack of it outside the realm of
r t! , \

resurrectio~
,~

li teratur.~
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; This is neither a of aestheticism n6r an adherence
. . ri:
to a faIse realism sinee, firet; its negativi6lI1 and destructiveneaa

/ assign to li terature only a temporary role and transitional value whose

ultimate end is the achievement of freedorn: "The goal is al\1ayS beyond, ,,18

and, second, aince its realism is never a mere reflection "of the times ll

with which he had charged Proust and Joyce. "We see in them no revoIt: it

i5 surrender, , suicide, and the more poignant sinee i t sprin's from

creat:et::::::'~::: SP~i~-O-:f-a-ct-io-n-are-Mdd)aa .~s -: in hie - - - - - - -

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study of Rimbaud. He "ia in our wor1d but not of itj his allegiance ia

-----el~whe;e.,,20 The poet's al.legiance belongs unequivooal.ly to the "marvellous tt

,
la rencontre sur' ce terrain e_s~,poasible pour 1~5 reprsentants de tendances
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-esthtiques, philo~hj.<ijle6 eJ politiquee passablement divergentes. Les
marxistes peuvent mar~ ici - la main dans la main avec les anarchistes,
condi tion que les uns; et les autres rom~ent implacablement avec l' espri t
policier ractionnaire tt pp.47-8 .
17 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolutioh and Revolt (Boston: Beacon,
1972), p.105.
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and to~: to "the marvelloua in aIl realms and under all aspecta, for -
'there ois only the mar~ellous and nothing but the marvellous, '" 'and to man
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whose objective exist~nce is inseparable from his unconscious beJ.ng.

This consti tutes a radical divergence from the Protagorean notion~ Qf liman
, ~

the measure" \'1hich ,ms sa characteristic' of the expressionist",s' dediated

~

humanism. The "brotherhood of msm" he ridicules as lia permanent delusion

common to all idealists' everywher~ in aIl epochs, Il and adds: "\/hen men

get brotherly thef also ~ get slightly cann~bali8tic. ,,22 chaiacteristically

( he advocates, in the sarne pamphlet, the "brotherhood belm.,r the bel t."

Like the surrealists Mil~er ties., the idea of man the mea.sure \>1hich

. , in man's existenc~, to an over-

denies the validity of the unconscious
...
empha.sis on reason and Iogic that has brought about the "partial man" v/ho

s'ees his salvtion in purely idealistic abstractions. Farfrom ~ncompassing

al} aspects of man, "humanit y " conceiV'~d' in these terms dissect:;; man" and '
~

divorces him from the tO,tal uni~ra~ w-~c!l,. ~_lo:t:lK-as external\s,tandards

are imposed uporr it, cUlnot imprint itself in 'the life and im~rsination of'
, 23
- man. It caters on1y to the "partial man, Il the "dreamers from the neck up. If

~______________________~F~ar
___f_r_o~alt~ring either man's consciousness pr jhe repressive B

and moral conditions, the exhaltation of a conceptioVof man:that excludes

the- Itnightlife~' ,only contributes to the perpetuation of a situation in

which church and state and artist worship together at the altar of strength

and prodution: "B1essing the country, b1essing the ruler, blessing the

21 "The Supreme Object -- Liberation," in Henry Miller on Writing,

ed. T.H.Moore (New York: New Directions, 1964), p.126.
22 Cosmological mYe, pp.152-3.

e 23 Black Spring (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p.26.

 11

firarms and the battleships and the ammuni tion and the handgranades

..:..c ... J Strength . -. strength. All tbat Hp chewing and hornswoggling just to

furnish a li ttle strength!" 24 '

Man will not realize his true nature unless

\ the 'imagination has reasserted itself-- ~ Miller 18 convinced of. r,I'hus

the task that sents itself i5 to liberate man by liberating his vision

fr.om an exce on reason and logic, "to unite imagination

and nature, possibilities a reality," to prove "that no....

dualism exis and reality," as Paul Eluard put

l't 25

The influenc e of Fr.eud t s psychoanalytical wri tings led the surr~ali6ts

to a re-assessment of the value of dreams which henceforth ,were regarded as

. 26'
"not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality." The latent content

of dreams, capable of being expressed through automatic writing,

,~
pro-

vided. fr the "future resolution of these two states, dream, an4 reali ty,
c------~~ .. -~

-which---are seemingly 50 'uontradictory, 1nto a Idnd orabsollIte reali,ty, a

,G
s~reality.,,27 It is impossible, as Breton announced, "te create a' work

of art or ven, properly considered, any use'ful work by expressing only

.the. man; fes _ '1
28

come on a level o~ surreality that stresses the equal importance of the

imagination and real.ity, and it is the poet t s dut y to Itarouse m~

nature, to band him over to the devil and to put him to the supreme test,,,29

24 Tropic of Cancer, pp.261-2.

25 "Poetic Evidence," in Re:d, op_cit., p.l75. ["
26 Breton, Manife!!toes, p.J.l. ;}
27 ibid., p.l4.
28 "Limita not Frc5ntiers of Surrealism," in Read, op.cit., p.l06.
29 He~, Miller, The Air-Conditioned Ni~htmare (New York: New Directions,
1945), pp.21-2. ~
 - - ------ ---- ,/

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to bring this state about by rnaking hirn aware of the deficiencies of his

present condition in an age

ting from 1ife sorne satisfactory

in which "on1y the ki11ers seern to be extrac-
-

mea~ure
,
'V.i

ot:, what they' are putting into it:

' ~~

The age demands violence, but \.re ar only getting abortive explosions.

Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or e1se suc~ed too quik1y. Passion

Men -fa1l bak on ideas,

0
is quick1y exhausted. comme d'habitude.,,3 He

yearns for ecstasy but a11 he finds ia its fake imitation that Qtber ages

would have brandisheds ~ the four hundred years sinee the 1ast

devouring soul, app~ared, the 1ast man to

---. knO\.,r the meaning of eCS118.6Y,

there has be~n a constant and steady dec1ine of man in art, in tbought, in

action. The \.,orld is pooped out: there isn 1 t --a dry fart 1eft. ,,31 To

accomodate his rebir~, his metamorphosis, man must first recognize the

. extent of his criSiS") The' artist who fai1s to contribute to. this' aware-
" 'f . ,
ness forsakes his role as prophet and 'seer, \.,hich nis to revive the pri'!li-

tive, anarchie inst!nets \-,hieh have have been sacrificed for the' iJ..lusio~
\-;.2 -, ),
of l iring in comfort. Il':; Signi:fi-cant1y, Miller sees in both Proust and

Joyce not on1y writers

r
lirho merely .reflect the times, but also ~artists
, /
who retreat into art at the expense df the liberation of man: "A worshi1'
(;

1--~_-=::=====-'rT-:P:--::::;-;;-;':;-~~--~ i1:s own sake -- not for man. Art, in other words, regarded

as a means of salvation, as a redemption from suffering, as a compensation

- - ...- ,... .. \

~~~or of living. Art a.,...-Slibatitute for Life.,~3 The result ia a

;J ~
3e-~'Cancer, p.12.----- ' r--
31 ibid., 1'.249.
32 Cosmo1ogicaJ. @le,
33 ibid., p.l11.

;
1
 .'..

f ;. 0

13

-----
1 ---
, 4 ------- --
"description via the ~ummy,,3 --,li terature \'/ri tten from the head
J

iIlBtead fro the tmconscious.

'His &:~ pos~tion Miller describes in these terms:

I/o~e m~to the dadaists ant'!"~ur:!alists. C ] rtr a/m, -in writing,

'A's ~t:bliSh a greater REALITY. l am not a realis/ or a naturalist j
l am for lire, \"hich in literature, n seeme to me, can only be
attained by the use of dream and symbole 1 am at bottom a metaphysi-
cal \'Iri ter, and my use of drama and incident is only a deviee to
, ,
posit something more profound. l am against pornography and 10r ob-
scenity !'"- and violence. Above all, for imagination, fantasy, for
a liberty as yet undreamed of)5

He.makes it abundantly clear that, like the surrealists, he does not re-

gard art as therape'!tic but as a bridge that CM unite the marvellous wi th

, '!reali ty" -- the pleasure principle wi th the reali ty principle (to use

Freud' s terminology). In the proe ess "reali ty" gets redefined 1 ci viliza-
cs

tion l..rhich parades its repressivenees under the guise of the reality prin-

, ciple ia sho\ffl the true nature of the Censor ainee the reality principle,

aB J.1arcuse will point out lter, is nothing but the "performance principle"

in disguise. The change that i6 to be brought about by restoring the libido

to Hs co-essential motive-force of behaviour 16 thus to be of a qutP-i tative

------------------------------ ----------
natur~se revolutionary potentiaJrlies in ite advocacy of a nonMrepreesive
.>

existence tliat "aublimates" (in the sense of Aulhei;en) the present stte of

affair"s.36
t

34 lbit;l., p.130.
35 ~., pp.,370-1. In a P1ayboy interview (Sept.1964) Miller defines
pornograp~ as titi11ating, obscenity as cleansing. IIObseenity gives you
"
a catharsis."
36 Mareuse's term is "non-repressive sublimation." Bee Eros and
Civilization (New York: Vintage, 196a), p.ix.
 :
14

This precludes an' "adjustment lf to soci ety of which, as Miller says,

artisss in the past have been guilty. Neither,does the artist merely let

off' steam through art conceived as an escape ,valve, nor does he rectify 0

a situation \-lhich by thi'13 commi tment would only petrify. ,,Art, as Hiller

repeats agai,n and again, is o not a "cure" but it can lead to astate whCre
,

the distiction between .oonsciousness and un-consciousness won't matter any\

lone:er. "To adjust man to reality" is not merely a foolish attempt of

quacks and panaCea-mongers, bu~ a defini te hindrance to the"recreation of

reality through art. [ J To try to eradicate the disturbing elements of

life b~r ~adjustment' is tantamount to expropriating the artist. ,,37 Art "is

only. steppingstone to reality Co ]; man's task is to make himself a

,york of art, u38 "making life a poem .. ,,39 If the metamorphosis he achieves

in Black Spring ana the Tropics -- to be discussed in the ne~ chapter --

,.
fails to te~rify him it ia because health and disease are of equal value

and the natural components of life.

As far as we kno\... , man bas never been free of disease. Heal th and
disease have always co-existed. [ ] No physician has ever proposed
to give man health -- only tc!' eradicate disease. [' J Health is kept
r

~~----------~~~~---
.
_iIL-.the backgroun.tl,---l-ike- an ideal,---but Olle moves realiBtically ~-~::--=-==-=---:--

curve t)wards this ideal. One 'does not move towards the ideal of health
directly, drastically, f'anatically. Part of the great fear of d:i6eas~ ~

37 Cosmological :Bye, p.166. Cf .Breton, Jfapifesto9s, p.123:- "There

exista a certain point of mind at which life and death, the real and the
imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunic;ilble, caaae
te be perceived as contradictions."
38 Sunda.y After the War, p.20.
39 Cosmological Eye, p .152.

. \
 15

\oJ'hich is in us has i ts origin in the unconscious desire of the

physician to exploit disease. [ ] In stressing health we are
stressing an urit~able ideal,
istically, we ~ve
a delusion. [ ] Also falsely, casu-
minimized the importance, the benefits of dis:
ease. In short, we have interpreted the history of the warfare
between health and disease as \'le have interpreted aU other histories
t- according to our intuition, our prejudices.
40
~
Like Lautramont' s Maldoror, but unlike Kafka t 8 Gregor Samsa ''Iho one fine

morning "/akes up as a Riesenkafer, Miller feels no disgust at his metamor-

phosie. He welcomes and cherishes it.

Perhaps it should be made clear at this point that this type of meta-

morphosis is dialectibalJ-y mediated in the sense that "lhi1~ it negateljl, it

at the sarne time "preserves" ,,hat Miller calls the disease -- albei t on a

higher level and even though this level be termed surrealisme (Miller even

goes so far as to deny the IIexistece" of surrealism: "There is no such

thing: there are only surrealists tl41 ) As a host of critics of Breton' s

I------~--~- - ~-- - - __~ - ____ _

Nadja have failed to realize, surrealism ia not the final goal of the

surrealists; only freedom i8. Surreali8m, as Miller remarks, is the

-'
statement of the problem: it is nothing more than life and always less
- - - - - -- - - - - - - - - -~--------------------------~~---~

than freedom to which it aspirs, just as socialism is not the final stage

of dialectical materialism. Surrealism is only the st epping-stone , the

synthesis become thesis again. If surrealism serve~ to destroy the death-

v ,

grip culture, he says, "it will serve a valuabl;' function. But rather

i t seema to me that surrealism ia mere1y the rM;I.ction of the death-'"

~

,. 40 Cosmologi.cal &e, pp .164-5.

41 .!.!:?g., p.18!.

f
 )

16

process [ J aven though it moves in the right direction.,,42

Cancer, syphilis, tuberculosi~, neurosis, are as definite and

fix~ a pert of our lire as thJ machine, the aeroplane, the sky-
~~;~
scraper etc. This 1s the psychic configuration that we want. The
1iU.~..... ,

m.Q~~t we want another one \'Ie ~ha11 have i t -- just .l wanting! And
\
the~ aim of the artist, as l see i t, i6 to make people ~ another,
a different picture. 43 ... ' ~I
,
To those sane souls who say that this is quite impo'Ssible he replies in the

finest surrealist manner: "You are right. l want on1.y the ilTlPossi bf, th
44-
marvellous."

What he desires, first of 811, is thus astate where everyone aspires

to, and,reaches, the level of the artist, becomes an artiste The surrea-
\
lists had\announced tnat this wa:y was open to al1, which meant, conversely,
\ ~

that the "rtist" was stripped of talent and genius, that "the ridiculous
tradition of the poet .'in the clouds,,,45was abandoned.

1------ ______-"-Le~t--'ec.<a::uc....h"'__'_o..,n...e'_tul!Il_his_ gaze im-Tard and regard h~mself witli-awe and

wonder, with mystery and reverence; let each one promulgate his own
1a,'1s, his theories; let each one work his own influence, his
O\ffl

own havoc, his Otm miracles. Let eah one as an individua1, assume
~ ____________t_h_e_r_o_l_es of_ at:tis~jl~lert-- p.r~;,--pr;Wst-,- king-,warrior, saint.
No division or lab~ Let us recombine the dispersed elements of our
" d"2V~"du al"t
l.n l. y. Let " t egrat e. 46"
reln '.
-fi

We should note in this context that though Miller subacribes to Lautramont's

dictum that "Poetry should be made by al1, not o;e ,,,47 he does not forsake
,

the traditiona1 conception of the poet as prophet and seer who alone can

42 Cosmological le, p/194 ,

"

43 ibid., p.167.
44 ibid.
45 Breton, Manifestoes, p.169.
46 Cosmo1ogical ~e, pp.174-5. J
lt7 ci ted by Brton in "What i8 Surrealism?" Cri terion Mis,cellany, p.46.
1

?
 17

,-
contribute to a reversal of values and a spiritual and material rebirth.

-This may seern obvious sinee the surrealiste themselves had abhorred a type

of "equalization" dowmlards ~8 an adjustment to the lOvlest eommon (in this

case: creative) denominator. The criterion, in aIl cases, is the desire

to ernbrace the marvellous -- vlhich can be realized by everyone, though

~ -- hiatorical eircumstances under "lhich man t S imagi!lation is fettered make

this impossible.

Do- \ITe ''lant every man to become an artist and thus eliminate art? Un-
consciously l think that every great artist is trying \."ith might and main
- J

bv~ak
.
to destroy art. By that l mean that he is desperately striving to
down this wall behreen himself and the rest of humani ty. Not
for the sake of the brotherhood of man [ ] but in the hope of de-
bouching into sorne more quick and vivia. realm of human e~erience. He
ia not struggline to isolate himsel~ from his fellow-rnen, ainee it ia

his very isolation 1:1hich drives him to create, but rather to emanci-
pate hirnself from false relations ,vi th nature and \.,i th all the objects
49
whioh mlrround him.

Side by side with the human race (under the domination of Urizen, as Blrute
-----
"Fould say) "there 'UIls another r8:ce of beings, the inhuman ones, the race

of artists ,.,ho, goaded by unknown~mpuls~s, take the lifeless mass of

48 Marx had called it Gleichmacherei, an equalization of poverty deemed

desirab1e by Babeuf t s type of ,"raw communism." l5konomisch...philosophische
Manuskripte (Leipzig: Rec1am, 1970), pp.l81. and 317nllO. Cf. Breton, Mani-
festoes,_, pp.155-6: "I do not believe in the present possibility of an art Or
literature \ihich expresses the aspirations of the working class [ J for the
\. 1 __ _

very excellent reason thatZhi ' [proletari~] culture does not yet ~ist, even
under proletarian rep.mes. 1t
49 CosmoloeicaleEe, p.167-8.
/
 /

18
D

soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.

~ Out pf the dead compoat and the inert slag they breed a song tha.t contami-

1 50
nates."

Significantly Miller contrasta this "inhuman" race of the artists

(influence of La\ence?) to that of "the creaking machinery of humanity."

The realm of the marvell~he envisions 1a thus anti-intellectual and

j

l ' Dionysian, reliGio:Q.S-.in a very_ primitive, sense. "1 belong to the ,earth!

1 l say it with a Mad, hallucinatory grin, and l will keep on saying i t

1 <l

1 though it rain crocodilea.,,5l The implications of this attitude shall

1
become clear in the next chapter.

50 Cancer, p.254.
51 ibid.
.
------"._.--
, . -

r a

-
,~

-
r,

/

r

CHA.Pl'ER TWO: On the Ovarian Trolley _:. Surrealist Motivs in Tropic

of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capri corn

The most important writings of Miller' s su:rrealist period, as we

suggested above, are the two Tropics and Black Spring. Like so many other

surrealist texts ~eae bOOk~ defy classification into genre and we shall

have to be content with ca1ling them "poetry" -- after Breton' s definition

that regardless of exterior form it is the inner structure that counts.

Poetry to the surrealists, as Mary Ann Ca.ws explains in her ~tudy of Breton,
, J./ ~
"has more to do ,ori th the lives of the writers (or nonwriters) than \a--cn- .
what they 'lTI'i te or could write." She adds: ''The surrealist writes from a

metaphysica'l and moral need as compelling ae any of the ueual values accep-

ted by non-surrealists; and the act of writing effects a major unification

.
of his personality against the exterior social ramifications of ordinary

living."l In Miller's words: "It is the quality about aU art that givee

it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or

integratee it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which ie

'therapeutic' : significance, purposelessnese, ':infini tud~. ,,2

(',
l Andr Breton (New York: Twayne, 1971), pp.31 and 44.

2 The Wiedom of the Heart (New York: New Direotions, 1960), p.ZO
In The Time of the Assassins (p.38) Miller declares:

--
who is capable of profoundly al t~ng- the world."
"1 eaU that man a poet
 1

20
-"

...
The works under discussion in this chapter deal with Mi~ler himself

in a sometimes expository, sometimes narrative mode.

1
Cancer, the

earliest work (1934), "describes" his second yea:r in France and can be

v{ewed as a chronolo!,:ical extens~on of the theme of the third book, Tropic.

,.
- of Capricorn (19.39), \1hich goes back to his years in America. Black
,-.',. ,.
~.; _

",
t~1

i
Spring (1936) provides a metap~ysica1 comment on both Cancer and Capricorn
,
and a thematic link that allows us to treat all the above ...,orks as a trilogy~

as unified as the late:t' Rosy Cruc~fixion (~, Nexus'J Plexus). Th0'lfh

exhi bi tins the elements of autobiography, nov el , and automatic \1l'i ting,
,
the above \'lOrks combine all these elements in an essentiall~, unstructured

manner. This, hO\<lever, does not absolve us from examinine; thesE=' \'1l'i tings

systematically. We ~ropose, therefore, to deal firet,

exclusively, \'lith the metaphysical aspects of these \oforks ip this cha:pte:r;,

and then to examine their implications as th~y manifest themselves in style

-
~ , "

and method, in the next. This distinction, demande~ by critical analysis;

should nevertheless not blind u&! to f'tr r.{ content ~d m~od as separable.

As a surrealist Miller has his roots in dada, -.a,t times one cannot

be qui te sure which element predominates. ''Hi~ imaginati-on i8 German, II Anais

-~----~-*~

Nin remarks. "His writing r-esembles George Grosz. He- has a Tove of ugli-

ness .. ,,3 She fails to add tha.t he has also a love for truth, and his aelf-

imposed role 'as po't and seefo sees him state the conflict> pertaining to

mmself and society paradin&"Wlder the guise of cult~re and civilization in

3 The Dim of Anais ,N-in';/vol. I, ed. Gunther Stuhlmanh (New York:

Swallow Press!_19661~ -;:48 .. O'

1 0
 a
,.
21

._ 1

,
- unequivocal terms and thereby suggeating i ts
~

\. ,
,
resoluti~~.
,
-- "I saw the Horatio

Alger heto, the dream of a sicf America, mounting higher and higher,JI he
,(

saya in Capricorn, "

first messenger, then ope~ator, then manager, then chief, then super-
intendent, then vice-president, ~
then president, then trust magnate,
then beer barQn, then Lord of all the Americ~, the money god, the
god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-
severt thousand decimals fore and aft.
a
You shits, I said to myself, l
will give you the nicture of twelve men, zeros without decimals, ciphers,
digits, the twelve uncrushable worms \V'ho are hollowing out the base of
c. ,
,'-
your rotten edifice. l will give you Horatio as he looks the day
Al~r
; 4 __ J
aftr the Apocalypse, "when aIl the stink has cl~ared away. ~~
>
Like his obscenities, the preva1ent~,.ugliness in Miller's writings ie

catharticj
.
it i6 never gratuftous or't~ing. ItShoul~ it hecome overnight .

a bestseller," he 'saysoof Lautramont' s Maldoror -- 81fd Miller must have

his own wri tings in the back of his minet -- it liould be due "ta- those by-

products so .hungrily sou~h~_ ~~t~_ ,?y. ~g.1o-_Saxons.t viz., lust, crllelty,

o
vice, hte, vindictiveness, raget violence, despair, ennui, rape, etc.

[ ] God had a hand'in the creation of this book, as he did in the creation

.\ of A Seasorl in Hell, Flowers of Evil and other so-called disturbing w9rks,---

------ --~-

~.-----f-----

which are disturpi~ because we are loath to recognize the shadow as weIl as

the maj est y 0 f the A1mighty. ,,5 The relill'gious tone in the last passage is
.rat11er characteristic of wh{lt we have tentatively defined as Miller's second

or post~surrealist periode In this instance, however, it aoes net differ

0--

4 p.34
.
5 "Let Us Be Content Wi th Three Little Newborn Elephants,"
Still Like,the Hummingbird, p.168.
-Stand

, C " d

Cl
 --~

too greatly from his

'"universal
of <\isease,
.c"
~
er~ier

individuel salvation

of "God' s shadow, "

position

ia
in~which

predominate~

r~ognized
not individual but bath

0 In both cases the value

as an essential part of

truth which in books like Cancer is stated in terms of the Apocalypse.

The resurrection of the passions and the imagination, Miller saye,

must be accompanied by the apocalypse on bath the level of the individual

1 <
and society, where "the petty principles which divide us" are swept away
"
6
and the "establishment of the empire of man on earth" can be brought about.

l love everything that nows, even the menstrual flow that car.ries
away the seed unfecund ~ J, everything that has t\~e in it and be-
coming, that brings us back to the beginning \"here )here is nevr end:
n J
the violeflce of the prophets, the obsceni ty that i6 ecstasy, the \olis-
dom of the fanatic, [ ] aIl the pus and dirt that jn flO1o/ing i6 puri-
fied, that loees i ts sense of origin, ,~hat makes the great Cir1;l~~
., . / J
e. toward death and)dissolution. The great lncestuous wish lS' ta fl~on,
one Iii th time, ta merge the great image of the beyond" ",i th the hE're
and now. A fatuous, suicidaI wish that lS constipated by words and
p~a1yeod by thought. 7 ,. ~
l
Passages like this are intensely personal and preclude his wri tings from
0
being mere "Literature". ' The poet and the man are one.
\ , '"
Echoing Breton' s

remark that "literature is pretty well the sorriest road that leads ta every-

where, u
8 Hiller later confesses that "the tru1y grat wri ter does not warlt

t~ "'.Tite: he wants the world to be a place where he can <'liv.e the life of

the imagination. The first guivering ward that he puts to paper is the word

6 Air~Conditioned
, ;
Nightmare, p.21.
I"
7 Cancer, p.258.
'.

8 "Wluit ia Surrealism?" Cri terion Miacellany 41, p.62

'
..
o

b
 _______ - - - - - - - - - - _ _ _ _ _- 1 . , 1 ' - - -

, 23

of the wounded ~gel: p_ain.~,9 __P~itL~n4icates a !lroc_~s of indjviduation. __ -

from \~hich there is no seeming escape. "In youth we were whole," he' ,

wri tes in Black Spring; "we are never whole again but live in fragments. ,,/0
This fragmentation is reflected throughout Miller's writings and

______ c_ounterpart_ to his diiri_ous embrace' 0 f the apocalypse. It would,be chur-_

, "
lish to disrcgard the pain that led to his dismemberment or beli ttle i ts 1

literary manifstations as stylistic mannerism. It is an integral part of

a process in which Miller creates himself, as Anais Nin put it. "1 said to
...
Henry: 'In the books, you are really creating yo~rself. In Tropic of
.:.
Cancer you were only sex and stomach. In the second book, Black Spring,

you begin to have eyes, a heart, ears, hands. By and by, wi th each book,

you \vill create a complete man, and then yeu will be able te wri te about

wornan, but not until then.' "Il lndeed there is a prpgression in his books

which suggests his conquering -- not the thug, the lunatic and the fanatic,
12
as he is to maintain in a later essay -- but t l1 e "wounded angel" who co~

pels him to write. It is a progression from defience to revenge to accep-

tance; a conqu~st of self, aB he says in Capricorn: "! reached out for

something to attach myself to -- and l found nothing. But in reaching out,

in the effort to grasp, to attach myself [ ] l neverthe1ess round some- ~

;1'
thing I had not looked for __ myqelf. ,,13 ,"
~

Since in his books the writer (the "1") ia indistinguishable from

o

Miller the man, the prdces of 'creation is reflected in his use of language

9 Sexus (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p.25.,

10 pp. 10 and 12.
11 Diary, vol. l, p.356.
12 "The B:rooklyn Bridge," . Cosmologie al Eye, p.356.
13 p. 15.
 24

--. , for Beckett and Ionesco, to a nj,ght into silence (the loeical conclusion

of the nihilistic element in dada carried to i ts extreme) but to the re-

, , '
surrection of the~. Lit.erature has defiled langua~e by "weird, ghastly,

ghoulish abstracts" devoid of. "flash and b~oodlt14 from whicn it can get

purged only by the vlord become 'flesh aeain: "behind the word is chaos, If he

,-~-,'
says, for everyone to see. ''Eah ward a stripe, a bar, but there la not ~
~ 15 It lS only on this basis
and never will be enough. bars to make the mesh. 13

t~at language can be restored, by the word that puts on flesh again;6 but

to be reborn words have to paee thr-Ough death. Millerts criticism, we

rnay- fiOte in passing, :i.s- primarily directed against the symboliste t'Tho, by

confusine the mysterious \.,i th the marvellous, had through verbal arnbigui ties

created an ersatz air of,mysterYI as ~na Balakian calls,it,17 but also

against a type "of realism which by the very nature of i ts technique had

failed to penetrate the core of the human problem by describing instead of

' . 18
.
,evok 1ng pass1on.

Wi thout further analysis of this problem at this point we shall pro-

ceed to describe ho\." quite ignorant of dada and the surrealists, Miller

developed an out look and a "style" (n admi ttedly inappropriate terrn)" which

closely resembled theirs in his attempt to sublimate the rational'by empha-

sizing chance' and spontanei ty and the all-encompassing ''marvellous''.

14
Cancer, p.168.
15- Ibid., p.ll.
16 tbid., p-98.
17 Anna Balakian, Surrealism The Road to The Absolute, revi~ed edi~ion,
(Toronto: Clarke, In'lin, 1970), p.47.
18 See Breton, Manifestoes, p-9: "Our brains are, dulled by the'in-
curable mania to make the unknown known, c1assifiable. The desire for ana- ,
lyis wins out over the a'entiments. 1t
(
 (
2")

-------- ----
1 was ignorant of the fact that there t'lare men
the\outlandish names of Blaise Cendrars,
-~i~~~g- Wh"'(jent -~;-------
Jacques Vach, Louis Ara--
l
gon '..:' Tristan Tzara, Ren Crevel, Henri de Montherlant, Andr Bre-
ton,~"Max Ernst, Georges Grosz; ignorant of the fact that on July
14, 1916 [ ] the first Dada Manifesto had been proc1aimed.
After a long quote frorn the Manifesto he contin11es:

Thirty-two years later and l am still saying Yesl Yes, Monsieur

Antipyrine! Yes, Monsieur Tristan Bus.tanoby Tzar! Yes, Monsieur
Max Ernst Geburt. Yee! Monsieur Ren Crevel, now that you are dead,
by suicide, yes, the world i6 crazy, you were right. ~~e7,4~~Y~------
dear dead Vach, how right you are and f~nny and how boring and touch\ng
and tender and true: "It ie the essence of the symbo1 to be syrnbolic."
S~y i t again frorn the other wor1d! Have you a rnegaphone up thre'l [ . J
Do you r~trnber the meeting in 1916 with Andr Breton? Did you cele-
,
brate the
.' .
birth of 'hysteria toge'ther'? Had he told you, Breton, that
" .
there was only the ~arvellous and nothing but the marvellous and that
the marve1lous was always marvellous -- and isn' t i t marvellous to hear
i t again, even though your ears are stopped? " ,

"Ah yas, Il he co~cludes, "if 1 had lmown then that these bir<i exist'ed

Cendrars, Vach, Grosz, Apollinaire

,
-- if , l had known that in their own

way they \-tere thinking exactly the sarne 'things l was, l think l t d have blown

up. Yes, '1 think l'd have gone off like a bomb." But, he co

But l was, ignorant. Ignorant of the faot that 'almost fifty years
previously a crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such start-
ling inarvellous phrases as "doubt' s duck wi th the vermouth lips" or
"I have' seen a fig eat an onager" -- that about the sarne time a French-
,
man [ J was saying: "Find flowers that are chairs ll , "my hunger
ia the black air's bits" "his heart amber and spunk.,,19

19 Capricorn, pp.305-6.
"

,
 26

e-----
---------
- --- ~----
__ -.This communi-ty' of like-minde~ _spirits was hon";;ex1stent l.nAnerica,

writing the way he did only earned him a "kick in the pants. l wrote for
,
and

, 20
ten years in America wi thout having a manuscript accepted." "What l

~eeded,1I Miller reflects in Nexus, "was companions who felt the sarne way
_But there was ncthicng te worship or adore, there were no companions of

like spirit. There was dhly a wilderness of steel and iron, of stock~ and

bonds, of crops and produce, of factories [ J, a wilderness of boredom,

21
of u~~Jess utilities, of loveless love fi
"

This period of alienation in America is cruc.ial to an understanding of

lerta writings sinee the dilemma posed by the type of ~asteland culture

he at home "Oorresponds fairly accura~,'(o that encountered by the

dadasts and surrealiste in Europe durl:ngand after the First World War.
C:
1

The difference, as he put in Capricorn, was that "in America they're con- i
1

stantly running amok" whereas in Europe they have \'lars a~ an outlet "for
22
thair blood lust." In bath instances real passion is lacking. Miller be-

came aware of the similari ty in outlook beh/een..#imself and the surrealists

during h~s first years in Paris, where his writings found a receptive audi-

ence of fellow artists ,and critics like Edmund Wilson. In Paris, Allais Nin

remarks, f>filler "did not remain enclosed in his local, colloquial language"

but P~iCh i t "by s~realistic flights' of language in counterpoint

to the plainness and earth~ language .~,~3

~---
AIl three bo~ls& under discussion here provide/yl~g conunent on/

familiar dada hemes, though it is important~ note that the destructive-

Cosmological ?OCe, pp.160-l.

(Neto[ York: Gro~e Press, 1965), p .272.'
22 Capri corn , pp.45-6.
23 The Novel of the Future (New York: Collier, 1970), p.169.
 27

--e'---- ness stemmilliL- from tljjs olltlook'gets sublimat in--a.---mil-lenarian

closer skin to the surrealist v~w. "There is a great negative work of

vision

Ir.

destruction to be accomplished," ~ristan T7,ara~had declared in ~he second

Dada Hanifesto. "He must s\'leep and 'clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the

individual af~er_ the st~te of madness, aggressivc com~lcto madnes6 of a

\'lOrld abandoned to the hands of bandi ta, "/ho rerta one another and destroy

the centuries. Vlithout aiF.l or desigy vri thout organization: in~~e,

madness, dccomposition.,,24 The movement is downward, no doubt, but for

Miller "the reelization that nothing ,.,as to be hoped for had a salutary

eHect." "Inspired by the ahsolhtc hopelessness of everything, l felt

relieved. ,,25 t
,
IIReslgnation" , hO'-lever, ''iould be a rnHmomer for this atti tud0, for

though Cancer (as ''iel1 aS Blac~ Spring and Capricorn) is the analof,ical de-

scription of 1ife experienced as flo\V, i t is also a recerp of this journey,

a record, He must remember, of a man whose role as poet imposes a set of

standards unon him of \'lhich that of prophet is not the least. The ''l've-

seen-Nineveh: you-have-had-i tU attitude of :Hi1:ter the prophet, in fact, is

always discernible amidst the rubble of Bwashbuckling flights into dada

grotesqueries, and amongst this rubble of words we are able to ~erceive

Miller the incurable romantic yearning for value, though value that like

Blake's eternity i6 of ~he here and now. The miraculous, he says, i6

.
visible only from the bot tom of the abyss, from a vantagepoint of madne6s
26
and annihilation and despair. The fol16wing long passaee from Cancer

24 in Robert Motherwell,ed., The Dada Painters and Poets (New York:

Witt enborn , 1951), p.8l.
25 Cancer, p.97.
26 ~., pp.96-7.
-.
 \

28

For the fraction of a secord perhaps l experienced that utter clarity

'-'Thich the epileptic, it i8 said, is given to know. In that moment
F

l lost completely the illusion of time and space: the ""orld unfurled
its drama simultaneously along a meridian whioh had no axis.

(Despite the curiously Herrucleitean emphasis on flow, Miller's universe i6

~~eless in St. Augustine's sense in that it recognizes only a past present,

a present proper, and a future present -- all united through the mediating

ego, dialectically sublinlated to synthetically include all three.)

In this sort of hai.c-triggar eternity l felt that evarything \.fas

justified, supre~ely justified; l faIt the wars inside me that had
le ft behind this pulp and wrack; l felt the crimes that were seething
here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamersj l faIt the misery that
was ~inding itself out with pest le and mortar, the long dull misery
that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the maridian of time
e. there i6 no injustice: thare is only the poetry of motion creating
the illusion of truth and drama.

The prevalent imagery ie Iess than edenic; indeed what we have here i5 a

monstrous vision of an imagination turned inside-outj a type of rom~ticism

with all the barriers of irony removedj a pightmarish vision

.., -,~-
in ,.,hich the idealism inherent in romanticism' 3s shawn in its destructive

aspects conducive to an absoluteness which finally will ~clude the essen-

tial component of "d;i.sease l1 -from man 1 s life in favour of an unattainable

r

"heal th ":

If at any moment one cornes face ta face ~ith the absolute, the great
sympathy \~hich IVakes men ,like Gautama and Jesus "seem d~vine freezes
aWa::!; the monstrous thing i&not that men have creatad roses out of
4" ?
 -
L----~----------- ..-----
29
this dung heap, but that, for sorne reason ~T'_ oth~r.,- __ they Bhould-
~ roses. For sorne reason or other man looks fer the miracle, and
to accomplish i t he \.n.ll \rade t1;1rough blood. He will debauch himself
\li th ideas, he \-lill reduce himself to a shadow if for only one
second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality.

Though he appears not to have known Lautramont' s \i tings firsthand before

his return to America,2 7 the passa<1;e discussed here bars a striking re-

semblance to Haldoror in its uttar rejection of the miraculous conceived in

terms of the ideal. Like Haldoror -- ,,,ho, "after not finding ~~ l sought, Il
~
suddenly "eaur;ht sight of a throne fashionad of human excrement and )~Qld
"
'-28
upon \vhieh, Hi th idiotie pride [ ~J sat he who calls himself the Creator"-

-- Hiller proceeds to give ~ version of the m1:raculous divested of a11

idea~-

ifuat if at the last moment, \"hen the banquet table is Sf't and the
cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly Iorithout
vrarning,' a silver !llatt,er on which avel the blind could see that there
is nothing more, and nothing IeeE than{~enormous lumps of shit.
'l'hat, l believe, \.rould be more miraculos than anything \oThich man has
looked for\'lard to. Tt vTould be miraculous because i t ...rould be un-
dreamed of. It \'l'ould be more miraculous than even the vlildest dream
because mxbody could imagine the posslbility but nobody ever has, and
probably never a~ain \.,rill.

With Lautramont he sharea the conviction that reason and scientific pro-
.
gress 'dere the. \nstruments of a mad "Creator" who by instilling in man the

/'

?-7 Though throu[\'h the surrealiste, who c laimed him as their precursor,
Miller must have been acquainted with Maldoror. The "crazy Je\.,r in South Arne ...
riea" who "had given birth to such marvellous phrases as tdoubt's duck with
vermouth lips "[cf.p.25 aboveJ is, of' course, Lautramont, who was born
in Montevideo. No reference to him ls made in Miller' s Lettera to Anais Nin,
which otherwise provide ueeful sources Qf information on bboks and people
who influenced him during the Paris years.
1
28 Lautramont [Isodore Ducasse}, Maldoror, tr. Alexis Lykiard (Ne\-l
York: Crowell,1972), p.52. ~
 --- ~-- - --~-

30

-.- notion of goodness separable from evil had divorced him from his natu~e,

for .../hich He had compensated him \<Ii tJ1 the idea of justice and the vision

of infini ty from ti'hich on1y the Ca.esars and Napoleons of this world could

\ extract their mad inspiration: "It is the just who are committing the

crims against man, the just who are the real monsters. [ . ] If l had

the chance to be God l Hould reject it,,,29 Miller announees ,in .8. fashion

reminiscent of Ivan Kara.mazov. "By what he calls the better part of his

na ture , man has be ---........;~-=oJ In Lautramont' s w:ords: "Through the

ages he had believed [ ] th t h~was cornpound0d on1y of good and a mini-

mal amount of evil. Sharply ~ed him [ ] that on the contrary, he

i6 compounded a minimum amount of good." 31

......
A unire~se measure" Miller opposes "li th one in 'Ii'hich the

highest is explained by the lOHest, and not only in biological terms.

Darwin gets supplanted by Freud when Miller explains the conscious by the

unconscious, the "night life".

When l think of all the fanaties who were crucified t and those who
were not fanatics, but simple idiots; al1 slaughtered for the sake
of ideas, I begin ta dra.w a. smile. BQttle up every avenue of escape,
l say. Bring the lid down bard on the New J erusalem! Let' 6 feel
each other belly to belly, wi thout ~ope-12 1

The Miller who in Black Sprins had remini6e~d that "Once l thought there
.
wre, marvellous things in store for me, ,,33 turns his injured pride into

29 Capri corn , pp. 239-40.

30 Cancer, p.98.
31 Maldoror, p.34.
32 Black Spring, p.26.
33 p.127

----------------
'-
 31

an attitude of defiance which in his writin~manifests itself in an

abundance of ugliness so characteristic of the bsence of direction and

.. motivation n his life. This ugliness, which Anais Nin finds so distur-

bing, is not entirely nihilistic. The "oub...ard toughness of style" which,

_~_Mis~_Bin _:r:.emU'ks.1 "cQvered ms sensi ti vi ty, It~~_ is nde-ed--Uftefi" betrEiyed

by the show of emotion almost approaching tenderness:

When l realize that she ~s gone, perhapa gane forever, a great void
opens up and l feel that l am falling, fal1ing, fa!ling into deep,
black space. And this ia worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain
or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. 35

,Significantly, this passage oceurs in Cancer, the first book, ~d is thu6

not merely a reflection of Miller being tired to be "considered a mere

bunt painter', an experimentalist, a revolutionary," as Anais Nin al1eges. 36

In fact both ugliness and tenderness are integral parts of a view of life

essentially surreali8tic in that the type of tensions created ean~ot be

played off aeainst each other. It would be abaurd, as Breton says, "ta

define surrealiam solely as constructive or destructive: the point to which

we are referring is a fortiori that point where construc~ion and destruction

can no longer be brandished one against the other. ,,37 Indeed we ahould see

both in terms of the dialectic which assigna to them the value of necessity.

34 The Nov~l of the Future, p.14? In her Diary (vol.I, p.92) she
wonders: "Is that an Amerwan disease? They are ashamed to show feeling."
1

35 Cancer, p .178. See also p. 251: ".! waa a man wi th body and soul,
l had a heart that w~s not'protected by a steel,vault. t .., had moments of
ecstasy and l sang wi th ~urning sparks. l sang of the equtor, her red-
feathered legs and the island dropping out of sight. But nobody heard. Il
36 Di!EY' vol.!, p.143.
37 Manifestoes, p.124.
 -\-
~

32

Lautramont had realized this quite clearly when he \f.rote:

then maintain

~Wm, the Creator,

that because l had insulted -- as if in child's play --

and myself in rny explicable hyperboles,

t~ould you

my mission

\'Vas complete? No: the most important part of my work still remains a '
task to be accomplished"." And this task- he defines as the s~a:rc~ fbr- trufli~--- ----
or, as ",e might call i' sur-reali ty, in \"hich thesis and anti thesis are

sublimated. "Indeed r"rip off the mask of his [Maldoror'sJ villainous,

muddy face and make the sublime falsehooda lfith which he deceives himself
Il

fall one by one, like bails of ivory into a silver bowl." And, he adds,

"it is tmderstandable, then, that he does not direct Calm to lay

-
her- - hands
- - - -
-~- ~ ~ --- __ _

upon his face even ",hen Reason disperses the dark shades of pride .,,3
8

This, then, ia not a negation of falseness but rather its sublimation.

"\vi thout Contraris is no progression," as Blake saw already. "Attractiort

and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Rate, are necessary ta Human

Existence.,,39, In Miller, as i~ Lautramont, \.,.e should not mistake the

emphasis on one aspect of existence for the author's ultimate espousal of

it, or, conversely, its negation as less than a sublimation.

Of s~preme importance in o~ discussion of Miller as surrealist is the

tension that this juxtaposition of opposites creates; a tension, as Pierre

Reverdy had put it, brought about by a "juxtaposition of two more or le66

distant real1ties," which proved so attractive to the surrealistsj a tension

. 38 Maldoror, p.l72.
39 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3. 1

 33

that creates the "spark" of which Breton says: "The more the relationship

bet\.,reen twojuxtaposed reali ties is distant and true,. the stronger the

image will be -- the greater, ia' its emotional' power and poetic reality," a

surreality uhich "cannot be born from comparison.,,40 Rence not only the

-~ ~~-often violently -cQntraSted realities in Miller' s wri tings, but also the

hyperbolic langua~e in which they are expressed. Miller was certainly

correct when he described himself as a metaphysical writer, as indeed the

surralists regarded themselves as heirs of the metaphysical poets. It

cornes aSno surprise that the type 'of beauty in Miller's writings -- since

determined by a desire fo~ chance and s~ontaneity. It thus presents not

only a triumph over a falsely conceived notion of beauty, as Miller says,

but also the "triumph of the individual over art"

41 : "THE GREAT ARTIST IS

HE WHO CONQUERS THE ROMANTIC IN HIMSELF!" to which he cannot avoid adding

-42
"Filed under R for rat po ison. "

Breton had stated this c~nclusion in similar terms when he remarked

that only by overreaching himself, by "passing through the ~ast st~ge of

-
aestheticism," the artist i6 capable of achieving a higher vantage point:

"It is in fact from the diBgustng cauldron of these meaningless mental

images that the desire to proceed beyond the insufficient, the absurd,

distinction between the beautiful and the ugly, true and false, good and

evil, ia born and sustained. ,,4~ "Me-aninglessness" hf!re corresponds to

-' 40 Manifestoes, p.20. fee als~, p.37: "When the difference exists
only slightly, as in a comparison, the spark is lacking."
41
Cancer, p.ll.
42 Black Sprins, p.228.
43 Manifestoes, p.125. The"last line of Breton's Nadja ie "Beauty
will be convulsive or i t willnot be at aIl."
 (

the truth value of a certain statement which ~ be as boring as i t ~

be enchanting. In the -absence of artistic "genius" there is only truth to

be expressed, albeit truth arising out of a conflict, and lest \.,e mistake

this for a var,.te admission of artistic i!lcompetence ,-le should bo reminded

that the potential power of these more or lees "automatic" expressions i8 "1\'

derived from the source of pur~,im~~ination, simulated madness, and, of

course, the latent content of d,reA1lls .. - contrasted l~ith the "other" reality.

Ar,ain, surrealis 1; texte aan be boring precisely' because there 16 no filter

~

:-
through \"hich poetry passes into that receptacle called Literature. But

1--~~~~~~-~~-'trfl~:--'the--tmrrClists !leveI atterrrpte w '''rl te Li -terabrre -in the first 'Place,

44
the "languar-e that i6 merc Hords," as Biller calls i t, a languar:e devoid

of rue confusion and ecstasy. "He \lho have made nb effort whatsoever ta
/
,1

fil ter , "ho in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of sa

many echoes, modest recording instruments[ J, thus we do render with

integri ty the 'talent' which has been lnt to us."

45 The understatement

of Breton'a remark becomes obvious in the light of the actual surrealist texts

produced, not .at the least in Miller's own writings which, as Anais ,Nin

sayai are the result of Miller feeling "trapped by what he helievedDto he

a duel between rea,;ti ty and illusion. ,,46 Indeed ahe thinks that Miller' a "
-,
"tri tings come "closer to Hieronymus Bosch, ft this medieval patron saint of

the surrealists, and "closer to Dali than Breton. ,,47 \ofe should see no

44 Cancer, p. 256,
45 Breton, Manifestoes, pp.27-8. , .
,-
,
...
46 Diery, vol.I, p.13.
47 The Novel of the Future, p.180.
~.. a~
"or..
.r ""

,
 . 35
Ci!I 0 .r

contradiction in the fact that Miller, in one' and the sarne pa$6age,

should demand: "Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but

let i t produce ecstasy, " and at the sarne time feel exal ted by the "flat-

ulence and tediousness" of works which wallow in "chaos and confusion."

They ,,tere aIl mired in their own dung. AlI men \-/ho over-elaborated.
So true is it th~t l am almost t~pted to say: 'Show me a man who
over-elaborates and l will show you a great man!' What is called
their 'over-elaboration' is my meat: it ia the sign of struggle, it
is struggle itself with ~l the fibres clinging to it, the very
aura and ambience of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a
man who expresses himself perfeetly l will not say that he is not
----------------~-----=.----- ------------~----------~~--------------------------------------
great, but l wll say 'that l am unattracted l miss the eloying
48
qualities.
.1
The cloying and convu1siV\e qualities of Miller's own writings will be

examined~in the next chapter. Q

Here it must 8uffice to state the spiritual

attitude whieh underlies the stylistic manifestations .

As a convenient startingpoint we shall take what Anais Nin had called

. " ,~
Miller '.s struggle between reality and. illusi~n on th: jorney to th:e centre.

of the abyrinth. We have seen in the preceding pages that Miller' s re-
,
ject~n of the ideal i~plied a rejection of any forro of cure; that, in fact,

the whole notion of ide~ism in its etress on transee~dence was ,faulty

sinee it negleeted that aspect of man of which he could not be cured sinee,
t 4

in truth, even in i ta sublimated form i t ':fOuld reappear as an essential

Q
part of" his existence: diseas. Transeendentalism is Ildialectical; it

o ,,-----
"
-', 48, Cancer, pp. 2,52-3

/
 --

negates but does not, sublimate.

Miss Nin had e.ptly described

Hiller reached this conclusion by v/hat

as his struggle behleen ree.lity and illusion,

e. conclusion which synthesized t;oth on the, level of surree.li ty ,.,here they

,-,1
'1
, ..
,

j'I'"
"

cbuld nQ lon&er be played off against each other. It is on these r,round~

that he rejects, somewhat unfairly, the idealism of one of his earliest

favourable cri tics, George Orwell, who, on his ~,ay to join the Republi-

-- -- --can forces in the Snaifr-sh C1V War;:-met Millerir--paris.---orvlelh~d - - - - -

noted Miller 1 s "individualistic but completely passive" vie\'ipoin~ -- the

,

------Ilviet-rpoint of a man ",ho believe6~ the world process to be outside his con-'

trol and t'lho in e.ny ca.se hardly t"ishes to contr0l i t." He '-JaS "fiddling

''l'hile Rome ,,,as burning, " Orw'ell says, but "unlike the enormous majori ty 1

of people !;(no do t..a:i:e-;--ft'd'dli:rrg'WtlrniS-r-ce'-tovla.rsth- flanies. rr49-This .---- ---~

r undoubtably correct assessment of Miller 50 did not l'ead the latter to vie",

Or"vTell in an equally charitable light.. fi In the end l thought him stupid,"

r.1iller saya in the Paris Review interview \lith George ltlickes; "He was like

50 many Bl1g1ish people, an idealist, Uld, i t seemed to me f a foolish

idealist.. A man of principle, as ' Y'e say. Men of principle bore me. ,,51

"Stay on the earth, you eagles of the future! The heavens have been,
,
8 explored and they are empty. And wha.t lies underneath the earth is empty

tao, !illed wi th oones and shadows. Stay on the earth and swim another

!~~ hunared thousan~ years! ,,52 This call for flow ,.,rhich underlies all of

49 The
J
Collected Essaye, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed.
Sonia Or"~1:l and Ian Angus CHarmonds''I'orth: Penguin, 1970), p.569.
"---~ .
50 P(. Black Spring, p.26: "To proclaim the future is not enough.
One must Illet as' if the past ",ere dead and the future unrealizable. One must
--
act as if the next step ...,ere the laet, which it is.'~
'
51 In ''''rUers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, p.181.
52Cancer, pp.24 5-6. r

o
....,

-1
 37

Hill:r 1 S surrealist works must

had caused,

rift \,Tith the tide,

~een
a clinging to an untenable ideal.
as a resul t of the pain his

"I decided to let 'myself

to make not the least resistanee to fate, no matt~ in

"cli~ing"
1
~
0

\'/hj ch fom i t present ed 'i tsel!. ,,53 "Not to, belong to sornething enduring,"
00- 4oo~l\

as rie S~q in CaTlricorn, "is the last ag:ony, ,,54 but only drift and hence

chance can break the spell of a ~,or1.dr \"hose goals are predetermihed sinee

___~i.cth....____'2t_is -only-- the tumult and confusion' which is of - import8!lce ~--

that \ore must get down and \'lorship. ,,55 The ;ornantics' had fled into a
v

_____ Na.rchenwelt; he flees in~o lire, a lif of' which the "actif is the 6upreme

manifestation,56 a life \<,here the "brain' i6 in the heart .,,57 "My idea,

~riefly, has, been to Tc'resent a resurrection of the ernotions, ~to depict

_ _ _t_h_e_c_onduct ,Q..:L1Lhum~~ing in tb gr;!' of deHr-itHl'l. '1:'0 paint a pl'e-

Socratie being, a being part goat, 'Part Titan. In short, ta erect a

(
world on the basis of the omphalo6,. note an abstract idea nailed to the

~ros6. ,,58 The influence of Nietzsche "'here is not te be over!ooked. Nietzsohe

had portr!lyed Socrates as the "prototype of' th~ theoretical o~timist who,
wi th his fai th that the natur of things can be fathomed, ascri bes ta

lmowledge and insight 'the. power of panacea [ .... ] ., Sinc~ So~rates., thi~.,......

mechanism of concepts, judgments, and in~erences haB been esteemed as the

highest occupation and the mot admirable gift of nature.n~9

53 Cancer, p.97:
54 p.61,
~55 Black 'Sprina, p.191.
56 CaQricorn, p.303.
57 Ibid., p.309.
58 Cancer, p.243.

59 The Birth of Trageg.y, trans. Kaufmilnn (Ne~ York: Vintage, 1967),

p.97 (ch.:t5). Miller acknowledges his debt to Nietzsche in The Books in
l{y LUe. , .'.
 Miller's agreement with Nietzsche,:,is never strQnger than in his re-
~ ~
/ ./
, jection cf this type of Socratic optimism which elevates reason over the

emotions, Apollo over Dionysos. The realm of the latter he comes to equat~

wi th the "ovarian world" and indeed somewhat rotesquely subti t1e Tropic

of CaJ?ricorn "On the Ovarian Trolley."

The ovarian \10rld is the product of a life rhythm. Th. moment a

-----------r;cnh'f"~lr1d---,~-;;;s-roborn if becomes part of a world in "/hich there is not on1y
the life rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live,
ta live at all costa, is not a ~~~,.t of the_ life rhythm, but of the
-- - - ---- --------
death rhythm. There is not on1y no need to keep a1ive at aIl priee,
but, ....
i f life is undesirable, it is absolutely \Yrong. This keeping
ones~lf ali ve, not of a blind urge to defeat death, is in i tself a
means of so\Vin~ death. Every one who has not fully accepted life. ).o!:.l.13Iil-.._ __
- - - - - - b--- - ---- -
L------------"'i:h::e;-:l l.~.n=-g:::-:it::o:-:;f;:::i:-;-1~I~th2-e wor Id vri th death. 0
p=-,

1>Iiller, . i t seems, is here in a~eement IIi th Freud in regardine; the death

instinct as not necessarily destructive but potentially con~ucive to a re-

lief of tension and thUG life-giving -- "life" defined here---in terms of

instinctual act~ as opposed t() a eonsciously Jllediated existence j life on

<. .
the leve1 of the Id but also on that of "re al:l.. ty", though \.,i thout the me-

diating Ego. A life, in other \-lOrds, t1ith the Censor removed. On this

level, nar.te1y th~t of surreality, lif is free from the forms and prin-
'-
cip1es which constitute the con~ous, social individ~al. This essentia1ly

surrealist position indicates a step beyond Freud ".,ho, to Breton, was too

timid to extend his conclusions far enough to break down the barrier between

psychic and rnaterial reali ty. 61 Miller t s "inhum~ ni ty" , teferred to earliE:;r,

60 Capricor~, p.3P2.
;>61 See Breton, l'Trois Lettres de Sigmund Freud Andr Breton," ~ a,

'- ,
Vases Communicants (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp ..173ff.

)
 /
.,

39
.-
is thus a r~jection of civilized man in the grips of a repressive'conscious-

ness. "I have slipped a",ray to rejoin an aIder stream of con~ciousness, a.

~ -
raee antecedent - to the buffaloes, a rac e tha twill' survive the buffalo. ,,62

~~ in accord \rith the life rhythm defined in these terms is thus

"nei ther affected by time nor troubled by contradiction" (as Mru:cuse says

~li th reference to the Frlldian Id); III i t lmows no values, no good and evil,

no morality.' It does not aim at self-preservation: aIl it strives for iB

satisfaction of i ts ins~inctual needs, in accordance VIi th the pleasure prin-

67:
ciple."./ One might wonder at this point whether this interpretation'
-,
of what

M:i~ler
- had called "life rhythm" does not \orreak havoc wi th the reali ty prin-

,ciple \.,rhich, after aU, is an i-ntegral part of life on the level of Bur-
__ _ ___
~ ~ ~ ____ ~ ___ ~..---_~~ __ . ___ ~~ ~~ __ ---s----- _.- --~- -
_ __ ~ w _ _ _ _ _ .". __ - - - - . .- --- - - --- -- - ~----

realism sinee surrealim does not negate rli ty but sublimates it, as

Breton implies when he states tbat the "imaginfil,tion i5 perhaps on the point
t

of reasserting itsel!. ,,64 The difficul ty gets Jesol ved when we regard, as

l think we (nust, the F'reudian t'eality principle as no reality principle at

all, but" as the performance vrincinle which, ~ccording tO,Marcuse, parads

1

, und0r its guise. Thus~we arrive at a new definition of the reality principle
\

as non-repressive sinee divested of a11 those rnediating influences of the

.
Ego which could lead to its domination over the pleasure principle. Miller's

"death rhythm", aocording1y, belongs to a world in which the performance

principle reigns, a world a5aociated wi th the optimism of the Socratic man

who sees in reason and und'crstanding the cure of' all il1s. The prece(iing

62 Capri corn , p.61.

,
63 Eros and Civilization, pp.2?-8.
64 Manifestoes, p.lO

..
,
 J

40

pag~s harhOwn that this is as una~c.eptable to Miller as the optimism

of the idealist who finds consolation in the belief that

, a resolution of

his/present dilemma awaits him in the beyond. The performance prinqiple

1

must not be by-passedj the conflict must be carried out in a world ,domi-

nated by the, death rhythm. \uEveryone who has not fully acpepted life C ]
.
is helping to fill the world with d~th" -- as we quoted Miller earlier.

---~/!_---'-t'Tlt'tl-p-e UNei., \Vorld" (nit was an ovarian world, still hidden away in the

Fa1lopian tubes ll65 ) is thus the \'iorld of life i tself , of life experienced
1
-66
as flow, \ri thout "hore" for the beyond, a Ilfe in -\,hich "the negativism

that causes you to overreach yourseif" leads to a ne\'! fanaticism, to "real

love, rea.l ha tred," that hlis nothing in common any longer wi th the "Keep
____ :____ ~__ .-.--u_4i.i_-the-_GpfI;Bs+ll -merttaH ty--.Uby -whieh- peopl~
. live ._,,67 ------. -- -- "--. -----.-

It also leads to a new conception of optimism (not totally the result

of Miller's "Yankee mentality": ''l'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.

Carl finds 'it disgusting, this optimism,,68) which is of a variety \',hich soes

t'b~"'~ld~out hope" but also wi thout despair. "I am up a blind alley,

and ifis cozy and comfortable.,,69 It is an optimism, Miller says, \<Jhich

o \
ca~t only resul t from ,generosi ty as the suprame principle of the lire rhythm:

We don't want te hear about the log~c of avents -- or any kind of loCic.
/'
1lJe ne parle pas logique," said Montherlant t "je parle gnrosit."
/
/ [ ] You nevr practice it, any of you, either in peace or in war.
/

/
65 Cagricorn, p.300.
66 Cf. Breton, Manif estoes, p .144: "Or else one vlould have to r,o through

,
once more the ola nonsense of grace to (Set there " Like Miller, Breton
condemns the religi6us attitude, retaining only its human aspirations. See
1
Ferdinand Alqui, The Philosonhy of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: U.of Michigan

-
Press, 1969), p.13.
67 Canricorn, pp.66-7. 1

68 Cancer-, p.49. 1

1
69
- ibid., p.151.~

l ,
 41

[ J You don t Imo\l \lM t the fucking word means,

you past ards! To
. c ~
be generaus is ta say Yes befare the man'even opens his mouth. To
say Yes yon first have' to be a 81lrrealist or a dedaist, because you
, 70
have understoQd ulmt i t means ta say Ho.

The PRin X1reCsE'n in tl:le> lRst sentence t"E'v.erberats throue;hout Miller t s

surrealist \Iorl~s and cive:::; ,credrnce to his contention thay "t~ere are no

re1'1.dy-made infernoG for the tormented,,71 from which the stage of paradise.

can be 1'1.ttmned matter-of-factly. Consequently the ride on the "Ovarian

- Tro] ley" abounds wi th turmoil and violence ",hicp reminds us of fhe material
...
conflict rIiUer undcrgoel3, a conflict ,,,hich no longer (eB Freud had thought)

uert1'1.ined
- to the. ~ndividual alone and can be resolved on the level of the

individual, but ...,hiC'h encompasses the "",hole stinking civilized world,,72

" , "
and \"hich, in effect, must be !'esolved on its leveI. No ready-made infer-

nos and no ready-made naradise of the ~', in other ,,,ords. "It i8 no use

putting on rubber Gloves j aIl that can be coolly and intellectually handled

belones te the carapace," but

a man \Tho i5 intent on creation a,lways dive beneath, to the open

wound, to the festering 9bscene horror. He hft~hes his dynamo to the
tenderest rarts; if only blood and pus gush forth, it is something.
The dry, fucked-out cr:ater is obscene. Mere obscene than anything is
inertie.. Hore blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysie.
t
If
there is only 'a gaping \...ound left then i t must gush forth though i t
produce nothing but toads and bats and homunculi. 73

if the \-J'Orld i5 a mirror of himself d.Ying,7

4
the~ the mirr<!>r must be destroyd

,
70 Capricorn, pp_3 0 8-9. Cf. Breton, Manifestoes, PP.9-10: "We are
still living under the reign of logic [ J. But in this day and age logical
methods are applicable only to solving probleme of secondary interest. [ ]
Under the pretense of civilizaticm and progresB vIe '{lav~ managed to banish
froID the mind everything that might [ ] be termed superstition or fancy."
71 Cancer, p.l8.
72 ibid., pp.283-4.
73 iill,., pp.249-50
74 Black Spring, p.26.-
 42

befere the image of his ewn anguish petrifies in i t. "The narcissistic

individual," as Ren Crevel had put it l "becomes himself the object,

and thereby not only becomes insufficient tmto himself but destroys him-

self. In the island ",hose outline is that of his lUtle person the isola-

ted being succurnb.s before the mirror he has questioned.,,75 This 1.8 the

obscen:lty of inertia l1iller had referred to, the obscenity of Narcissus.

~t---Uthe vlorld [i6] not dying any more than l die [ . ] When each thing

is li ved through to the end there is no death and no regrE'ts, nei ther is
, 76 G
there a false s!,>ringtime" -- and therein lies the significance of the ti tle

of Miller's second \v'ork: Black Spring.

He destroys the mirror by assumlng the form 0 f thE' "Chancrp, the crab,"

--- --- --w!lfC11-inoves sideways and backwards and forwn.rds at \\Till. ,

"

l move in strange tropics and deal in ~tgh explosiv~s, embalmine fluid,

jaSPQr, myrrh, smara~d, fluted snot, and porcuplnes' toes. BecausE'
of Uranus whieh crosses my longi tudlnal I am inordinately fon,d of cunt,
hot'o-hitte::-lings, and water bottles. Neptune dominates my ascent.
That means l am composed of a watery fluid, that I am volatile, quixot-
ic, unreliable, independent, and evanescent. Also quarrelsom~. With ,.
a. hot. pad under my a66 l can p] ay the bra~p;art or the buffoon as good
as any man, no matter what sign h~ be born under. This is a self-
portrait which yields'only the misaing parts -- ap anchor, a dinner
bell, the remaina of a beard, the hind part of a cow. 77

The clarity of vision which results from the destruction of the mirror which

had !'ntrapped him leads to his acceptanc' of lifel- an accpptance which results,

pro,.erlY speaking, in th!> "death of tratr,edy": from here on the comie view

75 quoted in Anna Balakian, Surrealism the Road to the Absolute, p. 139.

76 Black Spring, p 26 .

77 t bid., Il 29
 predominatea. The "Land of Fuck," as he aubti tles the "Interlude" in

Capricorn, bears this out most succinctly~

AlI those doors seemed to be opening at once j th~ pressll(e is so

great thatan implosion occurs and in the swift plunge the skeletons

,
-
burst asunder. It was sorne such gigantic collapse which Dante must
have experienced when he situated himself in Hell;
bottom which he touched, but a core,
it was not a
a dead centre from which time
itself is reckoned. Here the comedy begins, from here it ie seen to
be divine. [ ] If from this point l do not begin, it ia because
there is no beginning. 78

From this point, then, Miller's universe is timeless, as we saidj the

"startingpoint" (if thie i8 not a contradiction) for his surrealistic

flights of disorientation and confusion that carry him past time and space

and render these terme meaningless outside the context in which they oceur.

The tragic sense of lire is gone: one lives on like a flower, a rock,
a tree, one with nature and against nature at the swne time. [ J
Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you re-
cord the pasaing show. [ ] Sympathy alone flourishes [Montherlant's
gnrosit] but it is not a human sympathy, a limited syrnpathy --
it is something monstrous and evil. You care so litt le that you cau
afford to sacrifice yeuraelf for anybody and anything. [ ] There
is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: aIl is
flux, l is perishable. 79

The this passage cannot be overstressed: his surrealistic

unconacious leada,to an acceptance of the

world which, an equaJ. footing \Wi th nature (IIThere ia no

1,

fundamental, unalterable dHference between things") " destroys the pre-

78 Capricorn, p.217.
79 ibid., p.6~.

\
 1J

sumptious nonsense of the claim that an order exists simply on the strength
44

,of believing desperately tha t an order ~ exist, when all one actually

perceives i6 chaos. Miller undoubtably would have agreed with Hans Arp's

demand that "Han should no longer be the standard against which everything
-~

is measured, nor should he relate everything to his own st~ture. On the

contrary, all.things and man should be like nature, and not have any
80
~tl:Vldard scale."

When the dream is no longer regarded as contradictory but complemen-

tary to the waking state, our traditional means of perception will become

as, redun~ant and indeed as inapplicable as Newtonian physics to the univer~e

of Einstein. The "new cosmogeny, where the anthropocentric view of the

world iG bypassed for an analogie vision whose principal purpose. ls ta en-

81
courage a humanized nature and a 'naturalized' man to converse together/'

leads to an objectification of the unconscious in the "surrealist abject"

which, as Dali put it, is a "realized world of dreams l1 and the "true

realization of solidified desires.,,82 According to this definition the)

surrealist chance abject (the bronze glove in Nadji, Durp's __ nreadY-

mades U ) can be any natural or created object that ful/ills the deaire of
~ / .
the unconscious by dialectically reconciling "the% two terms -- percep-

tion and representation -- that are go vio~ontradictOry for the /

adult man. 1183 On the level of surrealist poetry this reconciliation ~akes
place in the meta~hor, which ariae$"not from-a comparison but a juxtaposi-

tion "of two moI"e or les6 distant realities." This ahall concern us in

80 Quoted in S.Alexandrian, Surrealiat Art (New York: Praeger, 1970),

pp.86-7. Cf. Breton, Manifestoes, p.293: "Man ia perhaps not the centre,
the cynosure of the uni verse. "
81 Michel Beaujour, cited/in)f.aerehman, The Surrealist Revolution in
France (Anli Arbor: U.of Mic'Mgan Press, 1974), p.122.
82 ~ited by Breton in ~festoes, p.26l.
83 Breton,~., p .. 278. ~
 -------
---------
some detail in the ~~~tr. ----------~- 1
~~~om
---
---the notion of the surre81ist object, objectified chance, there
-------- -
f ,L- ~ arises the notion of "objective humour" which, sim:i.,larly, represents

the world conceived in terms of'accident and chance.

84 Breton's Nadja

is perhaps the best exemple of a surrealist text in which the "marvellous"

l,
is seen throughshance in the "quotidian", where the "contradictions of

15eing awake and sleeping lo -r.eality and-dream), of reason and madness,

of objectivity and subjectivity, of perception and representation,

\
of

past and future, of collective and individu81, and of life and death,,,8 5

are being resolved. But Miller's own writings which, we said, follow

surrealist tenets in their most crucial aspects, provide ample evidence

of 811 the characteristics cited above.

Like Breton in Nadja, Miller derivee his view of the marvellous from the

vantagepoint of "objective reality" ae defined above; like Breton he de-

lights in the chance object and the chance arrangement of things "of a. more
or lese familiar character, whose secret we feel might be learned merely by
/
questioning ourselves closely enough. n86

Nothing people were writing or talking about had any re81 interest
for me. Only the object haunted me, the eeparate, detached, insig-
nificant thing. It might be a part of the human body or a staircase
in a vaudeVille house; it might be a smokeetack or a but ton l had
found in the guttar. Whatever i t was it enabled me to open up, to

84 Breton refers tQ. objective humour as the "synthesie in the Hegelian

sense of the imitation of'nature in its accident81 forms on the one band
and of humour on the other," and na paradoxical triumph of the pleasure
principle over re81 conditions." (flLimi te not Frontiers of Surrealiem," in
Raad, op.cit., p.I03) - -
85 Nadja, trans R.Howard (New York: Grave Press, 1960), p.l?
86 , ibid.
, ~,
 J -- -------

' - - 46
,
aurrender, to attach My signature. ~ the ~ife about me, to the
people who llllide up the world l kn.ew, l could not attach rrr:r signature.
[ . ] l was filled with ~ perverse love for the thing-in-itself --
not a philosophie attacbment, but a passionate, desperately passion-
ate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthlese thing which everyone
ignored there was containad the secret of my own regeneration.

Like the l Ching, the surrealist object does not provide the anewer, but

restates the question in a light tbat ~ lead to an answer. The object

itse1f is c,omp1etely irrationaJ.j nothing CM be deduced from it except

associatively.

In every object there was a minute particle which particularly claimed

my attention. l had a microscopie eye for the blemiah, for the grain
of uglineas which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.
Whatever set the object apart, or "made it unserviceable, or gave it
a date, attraeted or endeared i~ to me. If this was perverse it WaB also
heaJ.thy, considering tbat l was not destined to belong to thia world
whieh w~ 8
springing up about me. ?

The streets of Paris, aceording to this scheme of thinga, provide another

example of chance objectified and, in 60 far as the labyrinth they cr~ate

corresponds to the inner labyrinth, of objectified deaire.

Tod~ is the third or fourth day of spring and l am ai tting at the

Place Clichy in full sunshine. [. 'h] l begin to think of myaelf alone
in space, ~ingle being aurrounded bf' the Most magnificent empty
atreeta, a hwnan biped walking between the skyscrapers when 811 the
inhabi tants have nad and l alone am walking, singing'~ commanding
the earth. l do not have to look in my veat pocket to find My soul;
i t ia there all the time, bumping against my ri ba, awelling, in-
f1ated, wi th SOng.88

87 Capricorn, pp.58:9.

88 Black Spring, p.25

v 0
,
 ., ~

Lest we forget tbp,t the rea:Lity thus ereated is not one of freedom

but a surreality whieh eonts.;!-ns the statement of unfreedom in it, it is

necessary to make i t clear that ~the "unresolved

,
antagonisms of reali ty, If

as Adorno put i t, "recur in the worka of art as the immanent problem of

its form.,,89 The fragmentation whieh thus oceurs in Miller's writings as

objeetifieation of chance lS not freed~m but a stage that can lead to ilt;

as .!!i these fragmentations already embody freedom amidst unfreedom sinee

they contain the seed of a higher reali ty in them: chance as the negation

of the present repressi ve reali ty

_ Renee the 'indomitable optimism (a1ready referred to) which pervades

Miller's \vritings; an optimism which manifests its~lf in what Breton had

called "objective humour." It arises out of the realization of conflict

between what is and what can be on the level of surreali ty. Nothing could

illustrate this better than the following passage irom Cancer which states the

problem and suggests its resoluti6n:

Row CM one wander about all day on an empty belly, and even get an
erection once in a while, is one of those mysteriea which are too
easily explained by the 'anatomists of the soul.'
Coming away my mind reverts to a book that l was reading only the otJ1er
dey. 'The town waa in shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and -
stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from
the black death and other pl~es crept in
l
the suburbs to eat them;
to keep them coml\lany, and the English came marching on; the while
the danse macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries '
Paria during the reign of Charles the Silly f 90

89 Theodor W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) ,

p.16.
90 Cancer, pp.40-4l;
 48

------ __-~--ijnage .
of the danse macabre underlies al1 the "convulsive" grotesque-

ries that are traceab1e throughout Mi11er's surrealist writingsj it stems

trom the realization that no miracles are to be hoped for save those arising

from a chance constellation of objects and occurrences in a "humorous"

vision of the marvel1ous.

Out of strangled Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between
beauty and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he
looks aidelong lS Satan himself and when he looks upwards sees a'
buttered angel, a snai1 wi th wings. 91

l sho';d have b,een a clown; i t wou1d have afforded me the widest

range of expression. But l underestimated the profession. [ J
People wou1d have appreciated me precise1y because they would not have
understood; but they wou1d have understood that l was not to be
understood. 92

' \.. - .. <

If indeed, as Anais Nin suggested, Miller was creating himse1f, the
-.1
\.'\.1 .....

r .,;.,-r '''whole man", ib his writings, it iB a creation out of contradictions,

'" ,'\

at a conflict between r'eality ~d illusion.

out ~ .... '~stoyevBky understood

that man will never accept 1ife unquestioning1y until he ia threatened wi th

. ~

extinction, " he says in Nexus, and this acceptance, as we have tried to

;

make clear in this chapter, is never to be confused ri th a facile .resig-

nation which hopea for th resolution of i ta conflict in the "beyond. "Ther - -

i8 no reason to die, none whatever. We d~ because we lack fai th in life,

because we refuse to surrender to 1ife complete71' ,,93 Rather t acceptance

91 Cancer, p.24 7.
92 Capricorn, pp. 58-9
93 Nexus, p.~2. ,

e-
 ia to be equated wi th affirmation,

deatJl, reality and dre8I!l,

but an affirmation which a1ready

conta:ins the germ of the resolution of the contradictions which lire and

objectivity and subjecfivity, pose. tlThe

world is diaeased," but "life can be [radiant] if only we were bitten in

~ ,

the rigllt plac~ again!,,9

4
Only then a reconciliation, brought on by the

powers of the imagination, can take pla~, I~a conciliation of man in the

making with the reality of the exterior' world.,,95

: .
Disease can be n9urishment, an eS61ential part of existence, as Lau-

tramont had realized, and when Miller states that "Between me and the

machine there ia no estrangement: l am the machine, ,,96 we must, aimilarly,

not take thia for a submission to the apparatus but for i ta immanent con-

quest by a man. who refuses to be dominated by the alienation it imposes.

''Laughter! counseled Rabelais.. For all your ills laughter! But Jesus it 's

bard to take th.j.s sane, gay wisdom after all the quack medicines we've

poured dO\m our throats. How can one laugh when

r
the lining ia worn off his

Btomach?,,97 Proofreading' for the Paria edi tion of the Chicago Tribune, -,

Miller BayS, '

-,-,
had a wonderful therapeutic effect u~nJme. [. ] l am abso1.utely
" '
immune. [.;. ] None of\IIT1 cmpanions aeem to underatand why l appear

50 contented. They grumble all the time, they are ambitious. [ ]
This life which, if l were still a man With pride, honor, ambition

,.
94 Black Spripei,. p.29.
95 Tristan Tzara, quoted in Balakian, Surrea:tism the Road to the
Absolute, p. 136. 0 '"

96 Cancer, p.28~
97 Black Spripg, pp. 26-7
One iB reminded of Nietzsche' a "Ife who
wanta to kill Most thoroughly laughs! If (Alao Sprach Zarathustra (Stutt-
gart: RecJ.Ml, J.969), p.303.

r 1
 '1 50

and so forth, wouJ.d aeem like th bot tom rung of deg-adaticn, l
welcome. now, as an "invalid welct>mes death. [ ] In this htonian
world the only thing cf importance ie orthography and pubetuation.
It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity ie, only whether
it is spelled right. 98 .

This i6 .tlte life of Miller the clown whose bla;ck humour annihila tes the

destructiveness tbat threatens hJ!l, on i te own terms. It i6 a life cen-

ceived as danse macabre, utterly impervious t9 the miselJ" that accompanies

it. 99 "The only thing t.hat stand!'! between me and the future :ls a Meal,

another Meal. [ ] l am heal thy ,

Q
incurab1y heal thy No. sorrewB, ne

r~ets. ""'No past, no. future. ,,.100 "If l had a beer and a harn sandWich
what a friend l would have in Jesus! Anyway, the curtain is r..i.sing.

s~~speare was right .. - !!!! ~ i!! ~ thing! ",101

From the bottom of the pit the sho~'Pegins, a mad spectacle, which

'we now lu:t.ve to examine in the light of i ts tecbnical li terary implications.

98 ,cancer, pp.l47-8.
99 Cf. Breton, "Limita not Fron!iers ef Surrealism," in Read,~.
m., p. 105: ''We deny that the art ef a period censista o:f an imitaticn,
pure and simple, of Ha external. trappings. We therefore rejeet as ~roneoWi
the conception of 'socialist reali~' which attempts to impose upon the
t artist ~he exclusive dut,. of describing proletarien l7Iisery { ] ."
100 Cancer, p.49
.
~Ol B~ack Spring, p.220.

f-"'~ . -

.... '

, .
1
)-
 ..

_':1 '

CRAPI'ER THREE Int the Nightlife -- Technique and Method

\

From the refusal to- 'assume the heroic stanc.e agailfst forcee that st

any rate lie outside his control stems Millel?'s desire to assimilate him-

, self to the automaton that seemingly controls him. His "abandonment", how-
S1'
ever, is not i tself mchnical sinee i t ~'Precludes any "ambition" tha t

could give independent value to the apparatus. The machine -- dieease

ie part of the natural order, an essential part of existence and, sinc

no standard scale exists whereby to judge existence, ."

equivalent tp health

in terms of value.
. Implacability of belief that underlies the tragic view-

point is subsumed into a comic vision fortifie<! by black humour which Ipads

to what Adorno has called "subjective freedom in a etate of objectiv.e un-

freedom. ,,1

We are obviously faced here with a contradiction, and lest've mietake

, 0 Q

. 'f> ~

eurrealism for a vaguely-disguised latter-day sto~cism we aboulA. make i t

,
elear that i t ie indeed a posi ti ve' force of change, though precisely to the
J

extent to which, as we have seen, constructiveness can -no longe!"_, be J>1.ayecL_ ~..:
~ ~ ,

off ~nat destructiveness. Subjective freedom, as 'fie pointed out in

<

our dicuBsion of, the Sur~ealist object, loses its mere subjectivity by ...

1 "Rckblickend au! den Surrealismus," Versuch das

;
!ndsPel zu yer ..
stehen '(Frankfurt; Suhrkamp, 1973), p.l04.

'.
.'
 "

52

being elevated to the level of objectivity -- through the me~iating in-

,
flun~Or the unrestrained imagination which no longer caters to the

(romantic) partial man, to the IIdreamera from the neck up," but -to the"

whole man who does not negate the existing repressive ord,r but sublimates

it." This sublimation involves hie voluntlary a~similation te the ma~hine

which thus loses its alienating characteristica and beeomes, like the

labyrinth, a source or-inspiration. The emanating images are consequently

. ,
not taken from fla world elsewhere" but f,rom just these sO}lrces" provided

by a bankrupt civilization, though not in an imitative manner: sinee all

inner control instances are abandoned, the. images surface in a new light,

in a language ~of free a.sociatio~ auto\atic writing, which la essentially

2
apontaneoUB sinee i~ partakes to an equal extent in the unconsclous.

The liberation that it implies is never cenfined to art alone, as

Breton makes sufficiently clear when he states that w~t he is concerned with

is "the problem of human expression in all i ta forms, Il though " whoever

_s~a.ks of expression speaks of lan~e first and foremost.,,3 We shall

.. ::... l

see in detai! be10w to what extent Mi11er'a 1iterary practice corresponds

to Breton'
--/ s defini tion.

2 Breton defines surrealism as "psychi autom~trsm in i ta pure state,

by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word,
or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by
thought, in the agsence of any control exercised by reason, exempt irem
any aesthetic or moral concern." Manifestoes, p.26. ~ _________________ _
-~ ~. ---y--Man11'toes, p-.1.51:---f~ J.H.Matthew' comment tht "Behind this
conception of the vitali ty of ~age lies a seminal belief of surrealism --
that everything existing stands at the centre of an ver-widening circle of
possibilities. This be1ief underlies Breton's defilrl.tion of the imaginary .

as 'that which tends to become real,' imposing the conclusion that rea1~ty
is not an externa1 fact to which man must aubmi t. 1t Surrealist Poetry in ~
France (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse U.P., 1969), p.7.
 53

Automatim, with which we are primarily concerned in this chapter,

thua forms a counterpart in the literary realm to the type of lIacceptance"

referred to earlier. Again, -its underlying principle ia that of' iree

association \'Ihich stems from a "comic" view that preeludes the rise of i ts

tragic counterpart sinee i t denies the validi ty of norms imposed upon i t

in the name of reason and a repressive reality. Just as man ia no longer

\. f . .
the measure :ln the realm 0 nature, 50 in art:lstie creations he too :l6 no

longer bound to standards 'which;il literature, manifest themselves as " realism"

based on the logical qequence

, of thought and systematic descriptiQn. Auto-
. ~;

wi th a capital L l'lad denied i t.

-
matism is liberating sinee it restores to the word the freedom a Literature

The resultant fragmentation of thought is

ref1eeted in metaphors reminiseent of metaphysical poetry, stemming, as

Reverdy had said, from a violent "juxtaposition of two more or lees distant

realities." This fragmentation, however, doea not appear as grammati ..

cally irrational :s dada poetry or late;' "abaurd" wri tings. "What iB

irrational," " says Anna Balakian, "is the effect produced, on the observer
when the mind is, in the process, unburdened of the overwhelming armor

of patterns which are called 'ra,.tional' becauae of collective, social.

4 ~
agreement. Il , 0

No leBs ia meant by Miller when he states that his desire had been "to

get off the gold .stahaard of literature. ,,5 The imperative, as Breton saw

it, ~nla for the poet "to express himaelf in a more and more highly evol'Ved

4 ''Dada -- Surrealism: Fundamental Differences," in W.T.Zy1a, ed.,

From Surrealism to the Absurd (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University, 1970)"
p.22. Cf. Breton, Manifestoes, p.299: ttTh experiment proved that very few

neologisms show up, and that this contin\1.al f'low bro~t about neither
syntactic dismemberment nor disintegration of vocabulary."
,
tI'

5 Cancer, p.243. ..
 ~

state,,'~~capturing the "concrete vitality that logical habits of t$ught

are about to cause him to 10..... 6 Again i t must bs' .mphaf'iz.d that'(P.Y~hiC
.. automatism as defined by Br'tQn' is not identical wi th "mechanical" writing:

it is automatic to the extent to which conscious thought and volition do

not interfere ifu the creative procQss.

:r
Automatism in the context of the

language of the "absurd", on the contrary, ia i tsel! irrational and, as

Anna Balakian remarks, "offerE'd as evidence of man's condition as auto-

maton, deprived of his autonomy in a world reduced to automation."? Though

its roots ar"a in dada,

",
automatic writing is essentially surrealistic aince~
the despair of dada, givea ~lay to a desperato affirmation of .life expressed

through a method which does not remain an end in itself, not a mere device

or technique, but v/hich ~ugge5t5 the possibili ty of the realization of the

unconsciously expressed desire in a higher reality.8 Automatism 15 purely

d f

imaginative, as Paul Eluard remarked. It "lacks the imitative instinct. It

ia the spring and torrent which we do not re-ascend. Out of living sleep

daylight i6 ever born and ever dying it returns there. It is-a universe

/
without association, a universe which is not part of a greater universe, a
"
godle~s universe, sinee it never lies, aince it naver confuses what will be

\-lith \rIhat has been. n9 "'rhe poet," he continues,

~
"is he who inspires more

than he who is inspired," and one is reminded of M:i:l1er's ontention that-

to see in the poet' B work nfu1fi1lment instead of a horizon" is "the woret

6 Manifestoes, p.268.

7 ''Dada -- Surrealism: Fundamental Differences;" in Zy1a, op_ci t _,
p- 23.

, .
\'
8 Cf. Breton, Manifestees,
time there are great expectations
p.16~: "It seems that at the present
for certain techniques of pure deception
f whose app~ication ta art and 1ife will result in fixing the attention, not
any longer on what is real, or on
of rea.ll.ty."
9 "Pootic Evidence," r the imaginary, but [: ] on the other sid1e

R.ad, op.cit., p.173.

-- -
 55
~

sin that can be commi tted against the artist .,,10 The, artist "do9sn' t
~ ..,. Il
propose a cure -- lie makes everybodj crazy. 11 The ul timate aim there-

fore is to revive man's sensory powers and his instincts which enable him

to "look upon the WOI'ld about him with renewed exaltation and more vivid

consciousness."I~ Automatisrn as the method of projecting this new1y-

gained insight into the forro of literature is thus the gate to the under-

standing that ean lead to 1iberation sinee it never remains an end in itse1f.

IThe absurd character of chance occurrences, furthermore, are notA

taken as manifestations of the futility of man ts endeavors but ~ a "tribute

to man' s capaei ty te marvel. ,,13 Apart from uncover:ing psychic inhibitions

automatism 1ays bare th roots of the artificial division of what once was

a single faculty; a distinction,- as Balaki~ maintains, which ia due to

a "false separation that the adult and civilized mind -- in contrast to the

minds of the ehild and of primitive man -- make between the inner image,

creation of the imagination, eidetic, and the outer object which in truth

has no independent value outside of human receptivity, whieh alone gives

",14
J.' t meanJ.ng.
~

\'li th the oracular function of the \V'ord the poet as prophet cornes to

the fore again, and Mi11er's pre-ccupation with the word as eeho of the

miraculous must be seen in this 1ight. As he says in a letter to Anais Nin:

10 Cosmological Ey~, p.174

Il Caprieorn, pp. 318-19.
12 Cosmological ~e, p.174.
13 Balaldan, "Dada -- Surrealism: Fundame~ta1 Differences," in Zy1a,
op.oit., p~~
14 Bilakian, Andr Breton Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford U.P.,
1971), p.62. p

\
 ~ the beginning was the word, but for the Word to come forth there
had firat to be a separation of sorne kind. To detach itae1f from
the bos~m of creatipn there had to be a need, a human need. The
.word ia alwaYs a reminder of a more perfect state, of a union or
unit y which ia ineffable and undescribable. Creation is a1ways dif-
ficult because it is an attempt to recover what is lost. To reg~p' ( .
we first must f.eel abandoned. 15

The "most exuciating agony, li he eomp1ains e1aewhere, "was to have the

word annihi1ated before i t had ev en left my mouth, Il and hia subsequent

'4
~ssociationrfrom a humanity of bomb-droppers and holy-water-sprinklers
...r!lose language he recognizes as the codification of "rape and murder,,16 we

m\lat thus see as the result of his desire to resurrect the word in a 1an-

guage that recognizes the essential equality of object and subject, of man

and "thing" and nature. On1y then is he able to create, and, sinee

chance rules, the ~ is prevented from becoming a mere logical arrange-

(
mentrhat co~ld parade under the name of 1iterature.
\
If we now look at the forma! implications Mi1ler's style poGi~s we

find them large1y in agreement with automatism as defined by Breton, and

sternming from the sarne desire to create a new reality out of fragmentary

and juxtaposed images derived from both external reality and unconscious

desire. Here ia first of al1 Mi11er's own amusing description of auto-

matism, of the "messages" ,}le received while taking a snooze:

... '
..
,,~'..,
'
/"
In lieu of kat ttIIeSsages. This business ha.s been going on
sleep .L
:'
ever since l got the llappy thought about Hieronymus Bosch. This

15 HenrY Miller Lettera to Anais Nin, ed. G.St;lhlmann (New York:

Putnam, 1965), p.l54. ,...
16 Capricorn, p.30l.

(
 'j
"

'1
1

57

noon i t was bad, very bad. [ ] l closed rrry eyes, but the messages
kept on coming. [ ] l thought that in tabbing a few key words l could
turn off the current. But it didn't work. Whole sentences poured in
on me. Then paragraphs, then pages.... It's a phenomenon that always
astounded me, no matter how often it happens. Try to bring it about
and you fail miserably. Try to squelch it and you_become more victim-
ized. [. ] The inundation was almost continuous. Huge blocks --
particularly the dream parts -- came to me just as they appelU' il1. print
and wi thout any effort on nr:r part, except that of equating rrry own
-
rhythm with that of the mysterious dictator who had me in his thrall.
[ ] Bangl Like a sack of coal it ,would spill out. l could k~ep it
up for three or four hours at a stretch, interrupted only by the arrival
of the mailman. [ ] l was so keyed up that l confidently expected
fil to \'tri te two more books :gronto. However, nothing worked out as l
had expected.
,
C ] It was the 'dictation' that got me- down. It was
like a fire whi~h refused to be extinguished. For monthe it went on,
wi thout let up. l couldn' t take-'a drink, even stanFing a t a bar,
without being forced to whip out ~>pa11 and pencil. [ ] If l climbed
into bed and made the mistake of sri tching off -the Iight, i t would
begin. all over agaiti, like the itch.

Miller relates how, while writing Capri corn in the Villa Seurat in Paris,
"the real Shenanigans took place;" when, sitting at his desk, "that
voice" would come on again:
l would yeU 'Je t'coute! Vas-y! 1 [ ... ] And how it would come! l
didn' t have ~o think up as much as a comma or a semicolon; i t was all
given, straight from the celestial ~cording room. Weary, l' would
- -beEifor a break, an intermission [ J. Nothing doing! l had to
take it in one fe1l swoop or risk the penalty: excommunication.
17 .,
. The passage in Capricorn Miller refers to ie enti tled "Interlude" and

.. ----
17 Big Sur and the Oranges of HieronymUS Bosch (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1957), pp.126-9.

1
 ('

contains some of the best automatic ~exts he ever produced. The setting

is the mythological Land of Fuck where IttelegraVhic cunts practice the

Morse code, Il and a great number of other and very different cun~s make

up Miller' s Pantheon of di vine lays midst ecstatically dancing" skeletons

who celebrate the Fall of Rome. The hallucinatory effect becomes contagious

as the external reality recedes and gets transformed into a mere source

of impressions from which the imagination creates a poetic objectivity.

"Ia it the fall of the world? Is i t the dance of death which has been so
)
often heralded? Ta see millions of skeletons dancing in the snow while the
0
. t y f ound
c~ . ht ,,10 The macab re 1
ers 'J.n a\lesome sJ.g. 50 characteristic of

Miller' a surrealistic wri tings 1 is accompanied bv an almost monstrous

gaiety v/hich controls tila horr-oI' ~f death through the invocation of laughter;

there is no distinct~on between the dance of death and the danse macabre

To be able to grasp all this, he says, one has to devote oneself

totally to the "Sears Roebuck catalogue endorsed hy the Anglican Church, ,,19
-
or become an "etheric bodytf like "a rel schizerino 'l : then "flying is

the easiest thing in the world [ J, to fly only with your own immutable
~

self which C J ia always equipped with wings.,,20 His freedom consists of

ft

and is reflected in passages of "disinterestedness" (as Breton had called

2l
it ) and "generosity" that go beyond the "dead centre of the earth" and
"

steer towards Dante's Paradise whe:re verything lS 1l'esolved in pure comedy.

"If l am against the conditions of the wcr Id," he says, "i t la not because

18 Capri corn 1 p. 209

19 ibid., p.200.
20 ibid., p.215.
21 ~~ifestoe8, p.129.
 J)',
59

22
am a moralist -- i t is because l want to lall$h more."

l speak ,wi th extreme unction, and lori. th precious unguents too. I

put away the clashing cymbals, the tubas, the white marigolds, the
ohanders and the rhododendrons. Up ,ri th the thorns and the menacles!
Christ is dead and mangled wi th quoi ta. [ ] The moon is up and the
Nile ruminates on her riparian ravages. The earth belches silently t
the stars twitch and bleat, the rivera slip their banks. It's like
this... There are cunts which regist~r the rise and fall of sap; there
\
\are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like jaws of the whaIe--and
SWal101l1 alivej there l are also masochistic cunts which close up like
the oyster and have bard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside j
~Ihere are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the
penis and get wet all over in ecstasy j tJMre are the porcupine cunts ._
whiCh unleash their quills and wave li ttle flags at Christmas time;
there are telegraphic cunts which practise the Morse code and leave -the
mind full of dQts and dashesj 'there are the political cunts which
m\e saturated wi th ideology and which deny even the menopause j there
ar~ the vegetativ~ cunts which make no response until you pull them by
th~ roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh Day
Ad~entists and :u.e full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings
an~ now ~d then dried brea~crumbs [ J.
23

Enough! ,nough! one ia tempted to cry out in exasperation -- the list is by

no means complete 1

We get an idea in this passage of what Miller can accomplish when he

abandons words as semantic entities and gives free reign to sound which in

turn lads to the diacovery of new meanings hidden in the metaphor, aven

though this particular passage i8 still too descriptive to fulfill Reverdy's

22 Capricorn, pp.3l9-20.
23
-ibid., pp.202-3.
 60

demand for

for example,
tl pure creations of the mind.,,24 \1e are still aware (as,

in Dreton's "L'union libre ll \-nth its recurriIlg

of the mechanical method that underlies automatism,

'ma fennnet)

but the confidence to

the ear that the repeated "which" in Miller's passage invites is-shattered
, -
by a metamorphosis in meani.ng tbat familiar words undcrgo in an apparently

spontaneous association. This is even more obvious in the folloW1ng

passage;

It is my idea, and of course l am willing to be corrected if l am

wrong, that standing thus in the rising mist he suddenly heard the
Angelus peal and 10 and behold there appeared before his eyes a gor-
geous green marshland in which the Choctaws were making' merry with the
Navajos; in the air above were the white condors, their ruffs festooned
wi th marigolds. He also saw a huge slate on which was written the
body of Christ, the body of Absalom and the ev:H whiJllis _luet. He
saw the sponge soaked "rith fro-g's blood, the eyes which Augustine'

bas s~wn ,into ~is skin, the vest which was not big enoUgh to cover our
\.

ini~uities. He saw these things in the whilomst moment when the Navajos
,
were making Merry wi th the Choctaws and he was so taken by surprise
that suddenly a voice,issued from between his legs, from the long
thinking r.eed whieh he had lost in dreaming, and i t was the Most inspi-
red, ahri11 and piercing" the most jubilant and ferocions
caclunating sa of voice that hadrl~yer wong1ed up from the de th. Re
began to sin ugh that long cock of his with such divine
elegance came out of the sky and shat pur
ail over th~ gr marshland. Our Lo1"d Christ got up from his s~one bed
~ ,
and, marked by the guoit though he was, he danced like a mountain goat.
The fellahen came out of Egypt in their chains, followed by the warlike
19oro1:s and the snail-eating men of Zanzibar. 25 .

,
24 Breton, Manifestoes, pp.20-1.
25 Capricorn, pp. 201-~.
 , .
n 61

The Iogic of the unconscious endures the Most surprising combinat ions

of images and creates an effect which c~e properly recognized and appre-

ciated only (to quote Pater) "by like intuition on the part of the reader,
and in a sort of immedi'ate sense .,,26
....
The spontaneity of the images arises from a hodgepodge of hallucina-
\
tians and memories and flows on a wave of words which we are not invited to

analyse just as, similarly, it is not required of us to choose between the ~ -<.

~maginary and the real since their poetic truth lies in their eombination.

There is no logieal sequence ta control the free flow of the imagination

whieh effortlessly outpaces the familiar and plunges us without warning

into the realm of the marvellous. True to his demand: 'mo anything, but
,
27
let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it produce ecstasy," he eludes
" and takes us with him
with ease the demands of good taste and common sense

on a verbal journey whieh "desensetizes the universe to the sole advantage of

man' s faculties" and which "permits man tq see differently, different .things.

His old vision is dead, or false. He discovers a new world, he becomes a

new man."
28

The verbal
,
magic
. which underlies sorne of Miller's finest passages trans-

forma the c?mmon reality on whieh it feeds and enriches our experience of it

while giving testimony to his refusal to die, as he said, to hie refusal

, ., /' 29
to be "pieked clean by the human worms."

26 Walter Pater, AEEreciations (London: 1900)., p.3j.

27 Cancer, p.252. li'
If

28 Paul EIuar, cited in Matthews, Surrealist Poetry in France, p.l04.

;

29 CaEricorn, p.61.
 t

62
The faces about me were familiar they were my uterine relatives
"
who, for sorne mysterious reaaon, failed to reeognize me iPJthis
new ambiance. l seemed to have absolute liberty and the authority
of a god, yet by sQme eapricious turn of event the end would be
that l'd be lying on the sacrificial block and sorne of my charming
uterine relatives would be bending over me with a gleaming knife to
cut out my heart.
G
What follows has the characteristics of a surrealist textbook journey which

is he Id together on1y imaginatively but not atructurally, yet here, too,

Cl

1ike in so many other and similar passages, the parodia~ic spirit of dada

surfaces to:prevent its lapse into a gratuitous lyricism:

<'

In sweat and terror l would begin to rec~te My 'lessons' in a high,

screaming voiee, faster and faster, as l felt the knife searching
for My heart. Two and two ia four, five and five is ten, earth, air,
fire, water, Monday, Tuesday, Wedncsday, hydrogen, oxygen, nitro-

gen, Meoeene, Pleocene, Eocene, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost,
Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, red, blue, yellow, the sorrel,
the persimmon, the pawpaw, the
.catalpa...
'
faster ~ faster Odin,
Wotan, Parsifal, King Alfred, ~ederick the Great, the ~seatic

League, the Battle of ~tings, Thermopylae, 1492, 1776, .1812,

Admiral Farragut, Pickett's charge, the Light Brigade, ve are gathered
here today, the Lord ia my shepherd, l ~hall not, one and indivisible,
no, 16, no, 27, help! murder! police! -- and yelling louder and louder
<' and going faster and faster l go eonpl~te1y off M:Y nut and there ia no
more pain, no more terrer, ev en though they are piereing me every-
....... "='"

where with knives. [ ] l have only to succumb to the law of gravity

,
and l will fall on them and obliterate them. .But l do not succumb to
the law of gravit y becauae l am tao faseinated by the horror of it all. 30

30 Caprieorn, pp.344-5.
 63

Passages like this ar~ counterbalanced by more subtle ones which do

not rely exclusively o~-slapstick rhythm, and in which the marvellous and

irrational momentum comes from an imaginative invention rather than from 0

a verbal aggressiveness. The difference is one between nightmare and dream,

a difference in tone, though both are emphatical~y not images of escape

but the setting for hi~ self-exploration. In both dream and nighbare the /'

reflective process is dismi6sed for resSons made'cle~ in the last chapter:

.
the journey of adventure comes too easily to a hal t before- a mirror in which '

motion petrifies. _Memort (and the tragedy i t implies: "In youth we were

whole lt ) gets inunediately undercut by flights into sarcasm and irony which help to

overpoWer the co~trol instances the rational mind imposes. The statement

"I was alive \.,ri thout a memory" gets modified moments later by "1 remember
....
,too
- much. , l remem~er everything, but like a
;j
d~mmy sitting on the lap of a
' Jo!.
ventri~oq!fist ."
31
.

- Ren Char had written that "the childish ambition of the poet [ ] to
.
become someone living in spac.e" la "contrary to what he wa.s intended to do
-' , His firet poetic operation: to submit to the invasion

of'~imself, to

combine ~s emotions [ ] to withdraw himself by divine right from'general

2
oblivion, to ttLsmantle himself without destroylng himself _,,3 We find

echoes of this sentiment (also expressed by Breton in his suggestion that

"perbaps life n~;ds. to be deciph~red

'
like' a crypto~amn33) in Miller' s o 1

~ "1
lik,ning himself'to a museum in which the'mirror of memory ~comes trans-
o

31 Capricor4, pp.240 and 245.

dl 32 cited-in J.H.Matthe~s, Surrealist Poetry in Fr~ce, p.122.
Miller, Capricorn, p.340: flI ws constantIy' liquidating myself."
33 Nada, p.112.
 64

pare'nt in a monstrous vision which refuses to make allowances to an

aesthetic view of the ~arvellous in tranquility:

The house in which l live is 4being tom down. AlI the rooms are
exposed:' My house is like a human body wi th the skin peeled off. the
'"
wallpaper bangs in tatters, the bedsteads have no mattresses, the ainks
are gone. EY'7~ night before entering the house l stand and look at i t,.
The horror of it. fascinates me" After all, why not a little horror?
Every living man :i.s a mus~um that ho us es the horror of the race. Each
man adds a new wing to the museum. 34 ., .

TMe reality he finds acceptable, i onditionally -- a sur-reali t~ is un-

-,"
compromising and dependent on ~ infinite mutation which cannot be charac-

te!-ized by a single attribute: - The flux under~ying thi. s mutation ia forever

balanced by the cessation of movement at a point irom which lucidity and

-"
J
transperancy issue: ''Every man is a museum" -- though one can har~ly fail to
(,

note that he is not speaking of the Louvre. The most admirable images ob-

tained form a, juxtaposition of objects and occurrences in flux, tA/Juc.h

stretch to the limit the rational connection between thefu:

'f;,.

Vie livd at marble ,heat, th~o ascending' glO\of of luman flesh warming tqe"
snake-like coila in which we were locked. We lived riveted to the
nethermost depths, our skins smoked to . the color of a gray cigar by
the fumes of worldly passions. [ ] Lite was a perpetuaI bla~k
about a fixed pole .of insomnia.3 5 4
'Images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the
go~t , the spider, the crab, sY'Phi1J.s wi th her wings outstretched and
6 .
/ the door of the womb always on'" the latch [ J. 3

34 Black Spring, p.188;
... ~ 1

35 Capri corn, p.244. {

36 Cancer, p.252.

~ 1

 65

The cold north wind pointed wi th barbed sbafts, icy, malevolent,

c~gr'eed3l,
<l
blighting, paralyzing. The streets turn aw:y 6~ their
crooked elbow6; they break from the hurried Bl.ght; the sterR. glanc-e.
They hobble a'tla:y down the drifty lattice work, wheeling the church
"hina sight ~ont.37

o
o The universe becomes obedient to the oracular word, functioning as

,ilDage, as he submits it to the demanda of' his O'fm desiresf' Patently absurd
L

images like "syphilis with her wings outstretched," and "streets" that "turn

awa:y on their elbows," become part of his poetic equipment which through

their verbal freedom severe the rational connections that could lead to an

enslanng JJpepspeetiveTlL -Dreem and hallucination creste more anamorelin- -------

'-
familiar -images of protest agcrinst the submissive acceptance o'f reality which

results in the dreaded perspective/from which through iree association/he

tries
c,
to escape.

, Once more referring to the danger of the mirror, this time in Capri-

E.2.!:!!, he conceives of the idea of a "hall of mirrors" in whicl!lI "there ia

no wa:y to turn your back on yourself, ,,38 where "perspective" negat~s itself

while gi ving value to the mul tifaceted image of man as monster, aB Fr8.nken-

stein, \'Ihich i8 lIa1wayS more real when it does not assume the proportions

, of flesh and blood." The importance of this passage cannot he overrated,

though i ts proper analys1s falls outside our present discussion. It suffices

to note here that the "mirror which yields both i~e and the horror u39

creates a mpnster, a Frankenstein, whit!h 16 beyond conventional reality,

- - - - - - - - - - - - ._,...._--- ~~---,~-~--------------~----------I
37 Cancer, p.28l.

,. 38 Capricorn, p.338.
39

ibid., p.242. A more extensive discussion would have to take into
consideration "woman" as mirror of what Goethe had called ~ Ewie8If,bliche,
--"
"eternal womanhood." ,A
 66

which triumphs over the external horr:~r, though the multifaceted mirror

of the imagination ia even more monstrous than "the monsters of the screen."

But, sa:ys Miller in -the sarne passage which could not undrrline his affini ty
,
to the surrealists more firm1y, "to be the mqnster and the patho1ogist t-'
"
the sarne time -- that is reserved for certai~ species of men who, disguised

as artista, are aupremely EH-lare that aleep ia an aven greater danger than

inaomnia." He continu~6:

In order not to f~l as1eep, in order not to become victims of that

insomnia which is caJ.1ed'living', ~ey re~rt to the dr~g of putting
worda together endlessly.
-
This is not an automatic process, they
-------------:-:---~SSlI3J!IV";,;--"ibHe!tC:1la[tlujs~entilh:eerrse~atwtfs present""" the illu~ioli"t1iitt:fiey -rui -stop-- -- - ~
it at \ri11. But they cannot stop; they have only succeeded in creating
\
an illusion, which is perhaps a feeble ~omething, but i t ia -far from
being wide awake and neither active nor inactive.
-l wanted ......
to be wide
---~

awake ..tithout tallci.ng .2!:. writina about i:!:" i:!!. order .!2. accept .ll!!
-absolutely.4
.'

Though worda can be liberating -- they are tyrannical only 50 long as they
"
are governed by reason -- they themse1ves and the images they create ar'
bu~ the image of objective unfreedom, as we have ~en earlie~ Surrealism
"

is not freedom but the necessary step in the dialectic that can 1ead to it. 1

The attitude we can deduce from the passage quoted above is characteristic , 1

of a man '" -
wuo'~s perpetual1 y haunted by the -
quest~on " Who am I?' ,41 a

question which casta doubt on the apparentl;y limitlesa freedom creatd by

a
~ the word, and which accounts for the cfirulsivness and inhumani ty of his

40 Capricorn, PP.338-9.
41 Cancer, p.282. "Who am I?" la of course also the opening line of
NadJ.
 \
\
/
67

metaphors. As Ador1io put i t 50 succinctly in his essa:y "Ist die Kunst

hei ter'?": "The m~r thorough1.y bowgeois culture remaina indebted to the

reconciliation the bourgeois spirit had promised as Enlight~nment of the

Mythos, the more irresistibly comedy ia torn into the Orcus; laughter,

once image of humanity, relapses into inh)4manity.,,42 The ''l'' had trans-
/'
formed the world into an empire of the &co?scious, though too often the
\.
image of his unfreedom surfaces, and this, as we aha11 see in the next

coopter, will lead to Miller 1 s serious quarrel \-4 th the surrealist move-
~ ,
\
\ ,/ ment. If this concern, tantamoimt to Miller in his "Open Letter ,fi

does not show except sporadically in the books und('r discussion in this
"
chapter, it is because he is too intoxicated with the freedom the word

suggests to be troubled by the freedom it denies, the freedom that can only
-
be conduct. 43

__~__~__w is perhaps Millerts most cbaracteristically surrealist

both style and attitude, entirely committed to expressing the joys

of his,imaginative discoveries in a language pregnant ,with images which

''J' ."
gi ve testimony to bia contention that to b' "bi tten in the right ptace" is

indeed the firat step tO\-Iards liberation. "Schizophrenia! Hobody thinka any
lt

more how marvellous it is that t,he whole world is dj,sease~.,,44 If this ia

madness, i t i6 madness on' tlie eve of the apocalyps~~', and th~ occasionally
(
-,

. \
42 'V;ersuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen, p.13. Cf;'!hab Hassan, The
Li terature f Silenoe: He
(,

Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Knopf,

-
-'-~---~---~67~p.27-:~the~-ivilization that Apollo sponsored haB tlecome totalita-
rian, and the tools he gave man to live by have become machines fueled on '(

abstractiana. ~!
43 Cosmolo si cal E:ye, p a83
'-,., 44 Black SpriIlEj, p. 22

--~ __ ._ ----. ---- - - - - - - _ . _ - - - - - - - - - - - _ . _ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - , - - - - - - - - - 1

 68
/

~' lapidary humour of Cancer and Capricorn is obliterated in a hallucinatory

,/ gurg1ing fort~f a turbulent recon?Uiation of dream and reality in sur-

I

realist imagery. "I believe that only a dreamer who has fear nei ther of
.' '

life nor death will disco~er the infinitesimal iota of force which will

hurtle the cosmos into w~c~ -- instantaneously,,,45 Saying that lIit i5 the

tumult and the confusion which is of importance and that \1e must get [to]

worship,,,46 he proceeds to give us a taste of the spring to come, a Black

Spring "coming on the wings of mares, their manes flying, their nostrilf!

smoking:
"47

____________________~~-eene-Py--yawnB-- with open--tO"e'S+..-;i-.~-4fhe antonrAt"onS craok 'oowitn----

mighty suits of armaur'encumbered and hinges rusting and bolts unlocked,
alDandoned by the tin trust. The butter blossoms out in huge fan
t.~eaths, fat, oleandrous butter marked with craw's feet and twie spliced
by the hangman John the Crapper .... The butter YO\olsels in the mortuary,
pale shafts of moonbeam trickling through; , clogged,
the estuaries the
freights ashudder, the sidings locked. Brown beagled bantams trimmed
with red craw and otter'a fur brm"se the bottom lands. The larks!?ur
does a hemorrhage. The magnesia wells igni te, the eagle -soara alott ,

with a cleaver through the ankle.

hawk's feet slashed and trimmed. [".]
tering like the qawn,
Bloody and wild the night with all
All the world wide awake twit-
and a low red fire crawling over the gums. AlI
"
through the night the combs break, the ribs singe Twice the dawn breaks,
then steals away again. In the trickling snow the oride fumes. AlI
through the street the hearses pass up and down, up and down, the
drivers munching their long whips, their white crapes, their cotton
48
gloves.

lt5- -Black Spring, p.193.

____________ - 46 lb id ., p. 191- 1) ,

. -- - . 47
4S -
ibid., pp. 198-9.
1.!2!2.. t pp .180-1. ,"
 69
)
Miller plays with.words like a juggler plays with a dozen balls at

a time; the analogies he creates -- evocative and "marvellous" in the

surrealists' sense of creating a "spark" between two juxtaposed realities

appear dark and arbitrary to the analytic mind which refut;>es to be torn-

into the maelstrom of the unconscious. Through the dream the unconscious

produces an identity which the Apollonian mind would never accept since

this part of human nature is unknown and foreign to it. But it is just this

conciliation of the outer world of abjects with the inner \"orld, the un-

conscious, which for Hi 11 el' suggests a \"ay to a higher, all-encompassing

r~ality that---Gan~r--be--b!ousht aboul b;y Ll'atIscendmrce but only 1Jy sub11-

mation in man himse1f. The fantastic, whieh Breton had regarded as the

key to the latent content of the age, 1eads to a point where "human reMon

loses i ts control," where "the most profound emotion of the indi vidual

has the fu11est opportunity to express itself.,,49

On the surface, and viewed formal1y, ~ti11er's images are immacu1ate

metaphors or comparisons ("the grenery yaune with open toes;tt "great no-

madic onions with emerald e!e~,,50), yet their content reveals that the appa-
rent analo6Y is devoid of all logic and no longer obedient to rational

1aws: ,unconscious thought reigns and we .cou::tll say l'nth Breton that "the

p1easure princip1e bas never ~venged itse1f more obviously upon the prin-
J

51 c
ciple of reality." "We talle about reality," notes Miller, "as if it were

50 Black Spripg, p.181.

51 "Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism," in Read, op_cit., p.l08.
I;t- ~~
"

~~
 70

somothing commensurable, a piano exercise, or a lesson in physics. The

Black Death eame with the return of the Crusaders. Syphilis came with the

return of Columbus. Reality.!2ld ~ i22,! Reality prime, says my friend

2
Cronstadt. From a poem written on the ocean floor ,,5

Miller' s surrealist warks are always elated and euphorie, fri volous

and swaggering at times, anS! i t takes sorne stretching of the imaginatio~

(or else a misconception of his writings) to regard Miller as ~ advocate

of silence through anti-litrature. Ihab Hassdn's The Literature of Silence:

Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett sggests just this, but, though an other-
-
--- - -- - -- -- -----wi"se--excel1ent study of both authors, i t fails, ~rprisingly, to

live up to the contention suggesteq in its title. At',t~e bottom of Hassan's

\
misunderstanding lies his confusion of surreal:ism ,vi th the anti-li terature

of the absurdo -"If metaphor dies," he says in the foreword, "silence \.:ill

become the stat e tO\.,rard "/hich the entropy of language te~ds." I.f i t is the
traditional metaphor he has in mind, then he i6 undoubtable correct, -but

it needs hardly t? be p:)ted out again that Miller is as little concerned

with traditional metaphors as he is .vith traditional literature. "I '-waa

sick to death of the lack of substance in English literature, ')rith its

portrayal of a truncated, a partial man~" he reflects in the Playboy inter-

view, and when he hirnself lets "the '1ordJ~_ecome flesh" it must be seen as
~ --------~~
anything bt a re~erting to silence.

If Miller is not always innocent of the confusion that results from

L------------------sQ-r,a~t~e~m~e~n~t~s~ll,ikk~e~~"~I~am---th-inking-that ~--he~-t-h-e--gr--e--a-t--s-i-I-e-n-c-e--d-e-s-ce-n-d-s--u-p-o-n--------j
all and everywhere music at last ,nU triumph, ",53 it is because he is

52 B~ack Sprins, pp.27-8

..-
53 Cancer, p.2.
2

71
A.-

perfectly aware that this tr.usic ,iill not be born from an aesthetic aJ.oof-

ness characteristic of Verlaine's

..
demand "De la musique avant toute chose,"
c

but fr~~'~'stru5gle in vrhich "sile~ce descends in volcanic chutes, 11 54 a

silence that, as another criti observed, is constantly undercut by bis

ta+king at the top of his voiee. 55 I~veryt~ing that was literature haa
fallen from me," !ller asserts, but far from lapsing into an absurdist

1 will dance over your dirty corpse."

56'.
silence he "".dll sing \.,rhile you croak,

Hans Hayer's dictum that "the failure of langu~e, finally, derives f:;:~m

the realization that there ,.,rere times, onc~, when it did net fail, ,,57 i5

more appropriate to the language of Beckett and Ionesco than to Miller.

It is not silence, after all, that Miller advoca.tes, but a. different

language, a ne\.,r languaee which, aS Marcuse put it, projects "the new

5ensi~ili ty and the ne,.,r consciousne65."

l
It has been said tha.t the degree to v/hich a revolution is ~lOping

gualitatively,different social conditions and relationships may per-

haps be indicated by the development of a different l~guage: the
Il /
rupture \.;ith the continuum of domination nfust also .he a rupture l'li th
the vocabulary of domination. The s~realist t~s, ,:trccording to
which the poet ia the total nonconformist, ~~s.in t~e~ic lan-
guage the semantic elements of..j:he revol~yon. 5
If ~assan's contention that~ in Miller's wr.;t1~s metapho~ dies, turus into

silence, is true,thi8 thesis will m~little if no sense at all. Fortuna-

./
tel~ however, the reverse is ~$O true, and Hassan implies this much
.. .///

74 Cancer, p.2~~~.:/'~/------------------------------------------------------
"'....
55 Her~~t""~lull.er,
"The World of Hnery J.ller, fi in Wickes, ed.,
Hen;:;v:_.MilXr and the Cri tics, p.47.
... ..--- / 56 Cancer, p.2. It i8 only in an absolute future, beyond surreality,
that "all that ~; vlill ! beyond the imagination." _ Capricorn, p.34 9.
57 Das Geschehen und das Schweigen (Frankfurt: SUhrkamp,1969), p.22.
58 An Ess~ on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p.33

..
 o

72
,

e \...hen he reverses '"lti.-s original position by suggesting that the "new l i terature"
,/
~

of violence/*esul!>oses Dachau and Hiroshima but ~.!2i necessarily limi-

hem.,,59 [Italics mine] This, indeed, is so, but for reasons

--~ .....-=~
\on. th "silence". It became popular in post-,18.r

Germany, as the mOIlBtrosities of Dachau and Auschwitz becanJe known, to

speruc of the impossibility of ever again writing poetry, though people who

held this opinion forgot that silnce plays into the hands of those who

\Iere aptest in institutionalizing terror. Jmns Mayer realized this when he

60
WI.'ote that "it is a death-thought, after Auschwitz, to relinquish poetry."

To Miller silence implies acceptance of a type that is abhorrent to

",

him: . "l1ore blasphemtms than the bloodiest oath is paralysis,,6l __ his aban-

donment to the machine has i ts limi ts. As madman 9 as fool, ,... e could say

wi th Nichel Foucault, "he stands centre stage as the guardian of truth [ ].

If folly leads each man into blind.n~6s where he is l:ost, the madman, on the

contrary, reminds each man of his tr~n;, in a comedy whereeach man deceives

the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the
62
deception of deception .11 As jf to substantiate Foucault' s contention

l'liller remarl on the methodology of his wri tings that "the best way: to

create this novel is to tell ho"l'l i t should be wri tten. It is the na1'el of

the novel, the creation of creation, or God of God, Deus de Deo. ,,63
---
The Cx\Cial point ''l'hich Hassan misses is that words, passing through

the grave, ,~OUgh death, do not succumb to silence, but at the hand of
~-------'~- ---~-------
~- ~- -- ~---~--~--
~-- -~------

59 Hassan, op.cit., p.5.

60 Deutsche Literature seit Thomas Mann (Hamburg: RO\ofOhlt ,1968), p~122.
61 Cancer,, p.250.
62 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Ar.e of Reason,
transe R.Howard (New York: Vintaee, 1973), p.. 14.
63 Capri corn , p.310
 73

the poet, the clown, the seer, herald rebirth. The voice never falters.

The re~~f freedom i8 seen as lying beyond necessity and the silence it

threatens to impose; life as spectacle, as play, is "the very essence

of creation., one cM't go wrongl C. .-.] As Boon as other things enter,

t h ere .' , ~r64 by whic

' is adul terahon, . h he means ornement,
" lu:xury, and holiday

which relegate play to mere method. Curliously enough i t is this ri th

which he charges the surrealists in hie "Open Latter ", and we have to

come to grips with this and related criticisme in the next chapter.

64 RentY Miller Letters to Anai Nin, p.3l0

,.[ '1:1.

/.,

- \

~
l,

,,:
 \
CHAPI'ER FOUR Quarrels with Surrealism the "Open Letter to

Surrealists Everyvthere"
"

.,
"1 do not mean that play and surr,ealism are one and the sarne; sur-

realism makes use, in part, of this thing, but is again defective or

poisoned, by ulterior motives."l What are these ulterior motives Miller
';~
considers adulterating the supposed purity of surr&!lism? In the 1ight of

Mil1er's later explanation that dadaism "was aven more important to me

tlian surrealism" Ca st~tement we May reasonably doubt), that "the dadaist

movement was something truly revolutionary,. [a] deliberate c?nscious

2
effort to turn the table upside-down," the conclusion suggests itself that
l
he regards these motives as political in the largest sense, though he eLther

fails, or refuses, to see that this is only one aspect of surrealisme

Surrealism reconcfles the "latent content of an age" with its manifest

counterpart, as Breton never fails to point out, to the degree that both

li:-can no longer be brandi shed one against the other." "Surrealism was never a

~," Maurice Nadeau remarks, aJJ.d "if agreement is reached as to the

necess~ty of destruction 'as radical as possible,' it does not necessarily

exist concerning what must must be reconstructed or even the means of such
dl!Jtr~ction.,,3
1

p
"!
1 ;;H.;;;,;e::;'L.,.;;,;;:,;;__;;...,;;;",;;.;:~o:...;,_t_o__Anai;;;;;;;;;;;;.;;.s...;N;.;,;i__
n, p. 310.
2Writers at Interviews, p.l??
3 The Histo ism, p.ll?
 75

It is the utmost of folly, in ot~er worda, to play off dada against

surrealism. "Surrealism, Il as Hans Richter put it, "gave dada signifi-

cance and sense, dada gave su'rr~alism life.,,4 Yet Miller's criticism

deserves to be taken seriously; his intuitive leanings towards dada can-

not be explained s,91ely by the spell Emma Go1dman' s brand of anti-socialist

anarchfsm cast on him in his youth, and i t becomes increasingly clear that ..
1
it, is not so much the theory of surrealism that is suspect_ to him, but its

practice. Though never prone to overt political involvementl , Miller' s early

"
attitude can ne;ertheless be called pb1itical i~, the sense that he regarded

~ malaise as universal, pertaining not only to himself but~~]'IL!ie]'1- _______ J

------------ - --- - -- _. ------------ --------_ -- - -- -----------
... -----~ ...

to the rest of society. l1i 11 er , s later attitude exhrti ts changes best

exemplified by his saying that "the wor1d pr,oblem becomes the problem of the

Self,,5-- instead of ei ther the other way around or, as Breton h~d advocated,
a combinat ion of both. In a letter to Anais Nin (1933) he develops a theme

that, in his "Open Letter ", he will later turn into the chaIg e of

Ific~box-madnessll against the surrealists.

If l don't add it now, l may later add a little more about the function
#,
of the surreal.is~s -- their way of going yellow, their use of nascent
forms, of "fragments of old forms as dynamite and ridicule, their
exploi tation of the substrata, the common Id posseasion~ "etc. Not ~....\,
that their vision of yel10w ia the lasting one, on the whole, or the
best, but that it i6 altogether in the key of ye110w,' and for that
reason ,valid and valuable.
6

The often irri tating inconsistency in

1
Miller is in this case only apparent,

4 Dada art and anti art {New York: Abrams, 1~65t.,~}y.
5' Cosmological PIe,
6 He Miller Letters to p.126.
-,

J
 76

')
and indicative of the extent to ""hich he himself is more of 'a surroalist

than a dadaist.

terms of contradiction,
How e1se could we explain the last sentence except in

namely that while "valid and valuable" surrealism

,

~
is at the sarne time the "reflection' of the j,eath process," 7 which

strengthens oW' forMer contention that far from being the end, freedom, it

is onl.y- the stage tha t can l'ead to i t : the synthesis bec orne thes\s again.

Surrealism "will serve a valua~le function. ,l~... J it moves o in the

right direc~io'n,,,8 he says. At the srune time Niller's ofJ;en'"'%a.rely hidden

- ,
romantic sentiment resurfaces \.Jhen he says t,hat surrealism doesn' t go far

eno~~ te. .r.-eali~-the- import~ce of ~rear'EyPrrnC-J.pr ~even- .-------

------- -------
.j' -:

. \. ~ for the surrealiste. Breton' s Nadja ie a running commentary on the notion

of self-preservation, and Nadja hersel~ the perfect symbp~of the impossibility

, l? :'
pr~sent
of living an absolutely free liie -- und"r . so9a1 conditions -- -',.,
-.
"enjoyed as unrestrictedly as i t iB granted, \.J thout pragmati consid-erations

of any sort: ,,9 soctety is incapable of accomodating Nadja' s natural mad-

ness and she get"s' ae~royed.

II- l' .. 1\
One is r-emind d of Goe,the's "Zauberlehrling"
..... ~:. <;0 ... 0'

["The Sorcerer' s' A:P~rentice"J who, having conjured up the demonic elementa,

cannot get rid of them. To Miller, however, to be less than ~ perpetual

.
sorcerer' e apprentice arnounta to the betrayal of hia role as prophet and

aeer.

7 Cosmological Bye, p.l94. c

-
3 ibid.
from the special, indefinable
reaction at the sight of extremely rare objects or upon our arri val at a
, strange place C ] to the complete lack of peace with ourselves provoked
1
by certain juxtapositions, certain cornbinations of circumstances which
greatly surpass~our undl"'rstanding and permit us to resume rational activ~:f::y
onl.y if, in m~t cases, we calI upon our very ins\~ct of self-preservation
to enable us to, , ......do so."
 77

Miller, of course, is quite correct when he takes the surrJalists

at their own word ("unfl~ging .fideli ty ta the commi tments of surrea.1ism

.' presupposes a dieinterestedness, a contempt for risk, a refusal to comp-

romise"lO) and, charges them, in the light of Nadja, with "icebox-madness":

Madness is tonie and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The
orJ.y ones who _are unable ta pro fi t by i t are the insane. Very oft en
the surrealists gJ.Ye
us the impression that they are insans in a very
~ ". 11
sane way -- that is 'icebox-madness' [ J aTld not real madtless.
12
The ul timate" he says, "CM only be expressed in conduct," . but few

"of them' hava. connni tted suicide" and "not olle of them has as yet a6sassinated
0-.

a tyrant. Thy believe in the revolution but the~e i\o' real revolt in
-.------- ---------~-~-- ------------- .~----------------------~'---------~
them."

,'. This cri ticism of surrealism has been echoed by a number of cri tics,

.. , above al~ by S~t\, ~but Ha proper discussion falls outside our present

discussion. The last word has by no means beetl said, and in th light of

the 1968 Paris student revolt, inspired by surrealism, one might beg to

disagree with Roger Shattuck.'s remark that "outside a few manifesto6s and

inflammatory public letters, the political tungoil and conscience-searching

n14
.' "have lost their urgency for us. The fact remains,' ho wever, that, as
1 ""'!""~ ~
,l', Susan Sontag sid of the anti-war movement in the late ;si?cties, they have
, <{J

not succeeded because "the nature of this society is that i't doesn' t have' a

10 Breton, Manifestoes, p.129.

11 Cosmological Ele, pp. 180-1.
12 ibid., :e~;!.f,3.

lbid.,~p.132.
13
14
-
Roger Shattuck, Introduction to Nadeau, Histoljl of Surrealism,p.27.-

,,
;!,
..
'.!':
 /

78

direct responsa t,P criticism.,,15 Such an objection, o;\ourse,

unacoeptable to Miller, and when he caJ.ls the surrealists

t7
t
"the authori ties knO\l they are harmIess" -- he qualifies this by a ing
'\",
<)

that they "1 a ck guts" in a "'/ay nVillon, Rabelais, Sade,

.
\

did note

!:L'he failura to communicate is entirely their 0','11. Jesus mnnaged, to

commullicatej so did Gautama the Buddhaj so did Hohammed [. . ]. In '
each 'cse the simple fact! is that the man acted upon his belief, --- ~
regardJ.ess ~ lli. coase9uenc~s. [ ]
,Society vlas no more favora'\)~ -
"
then to th'e iJieas they brought orward than sm:iety i6 today. 17

If their failure to 'communicate is unde'rst9od in this sense, and \ofhen the

"ult imate" is regard od as 'coUDl1:micable onl~ in 'co ndu ct , Mille:.:' seri ti cism, \

of course, is correcb---But it' ap:poars that all too often Hi1ler soes in
"
their failur:e the ref1ection of his own, 4espite'S$suvances to the contrary
1
in 1ater ~sri tings .18 In a passage reminiscent of the one quoted from Nadja
'"
lIi~ler refuses to tross the bridge of insanity:' ",! refuse to budge another
~

. , t 0 ,

, 15 Intervie,of \rith Susan Sontae, CBC "i,.9-eas", December 8, 1971. "The 0

tap: is', ;vaiiale from the CEe (ng. 798)'. Cf .\Paul Goodman'- Gro"nns Up Abaurd
(New York: Vntage, 19-56), 'n.LtO: "where
.e- - .
there'i~ official
#
censo~ship it is
a sign that speech is serious," Nadeau (o:p&ci~_., .p.141) : remarkB that the
surre:.lsts, "despi te their noisy demonstration, were incapable of consti-
~ (: , I.J

tuting ,a, force likeJ..y t', alarm the bourgeoisie because the~e demonstrations
\ofere confine"d' ta th.e mora! level, and on thisolevel the bourgeoi~ie readily
, ,
forgi VC5."
\ '"
16 CosmologicaJ. Eye, p .102. Q
. I,

/ -
17 ibid.
-----
18, ~~e Henq Miller on. Writing, p.122: "He \Jho, goesQoth; \.,rhole wa'y
r?into the )ieart of the 1,abyr:i.nthJ ~ours~ alail,l" . l hav gone the \vho'le
f-----~-----'_~------.w;:-;;ay
.....---.r----,;hj~iVe t i f ered nzyself up as a sacrifie e- That is \ofhy l can liva. on now,
and record it with no suffeying involv.ed."
u ,~~ )

1;
,-
,
'8

1

79

step, l balk at crossing that crazy bridge. [ ~ re~iZe'qUietlY what

a terribly ci;'ilized person l "am -- the need l have for, people, conversation,
"
, 19
1 books, theatre, music, c~s, drinks, and so fort'h." 'What could be

more reflective of ~s, olm 7~ure, according ta the standards by which

he judges the 6urre~ist6, than this passage? "They talk of ushering in

a general c'onfusion, but they live like the 'bourgeoisie. n20 So does he,
o
, 'and he resents it.
.
The surrealist have demon6t~ated the possibili Hes of the marvellous

\vhich lie concealed in the commonplace. They have done it by juxta- f'

position. But the effect of these strange transpositions and juxta-

pOQition of the !hast unlik things bas been to f:reshen the vision. -
. 21
Nothing ~.

It i6 1ike itwani ty -- which destroys the insane ("He has completely lost
~

touch with reality, we say of the madman. But bas he liberated himse1f?22)
1
1 " but far from leading t:Q.e a.rtist,\~ho sinnhates madness,to freedom, it only

enslavea him 'to

\ .
tlife restricted visipn of the madman outside of external

reality. "Th~ sW'l'ealists af the 1ast people to go insane. They hS.ve too

great a need, to;'ereat a tohi~st, for the ma.rve}lO~6.,,23 \

~ ; "
It seems here ~hat l-fil1er falls prey to a mif?~oncepti911 of surrealism,

a misconc'eption which explains the i~ter writings of .hia post-surrealist

.
period but does not illuminate the books discusaed. BO far. "The vision
", 24
.precedes the arrangement," he,sayst but notlrlng ocou1d be further from;
!-

, 0

19 Ca:pricorn, pp.322 ..3.

,,20 Cosmo1ogicaJ,. Eye, pp .181-2.

21 1~d .~.~P~.1=9~3_.~ ___~__________~--~------~------~------\~~

22 lb~., p.192.
-\ '23
-
ibid." p.1G3.
: 24
-
I:>id., p. 193.

". ',\

,
\

80
the.. t~th in the light of either surrealis't doctrine or Miller's own

surrealist writinga. Surrealisrn ia not a technigue, or at least not

primarily, and to co~use the end ,.,ri th the means is to thirt of madness,

the marvellous, confusion, as the goal to which it aspires. Dy revealing

society' s incapacity to accept madness as natural (Nadja is locke'd up in

a madhouse) Breton lays bare the contradictions of present civilization

The vision does most emphaticCilly not !lrecede the arrangement, but i6 de-

rived from it, spontaneou61y. Rad not Miller himself suggested that "chance

ruleG"? Rad he not expressed joy at ho\-, marvellous i t _was ta be nt:,i tten in
..
the right plac"? "The rationalists and their criticism presuppose the pre-

cedence of tthought' over 'v/!'iting'. [ J But how could the poet not Bee

that thought is contemporaneous with the act of writing, that it arises

from the direction and trajectory of words, that it iB the. dictation of words

e- in action?,,25 Anais Nin saya of Miller t s wri tings that if they are insane,

't.it ia the insanity produced by life, ~and not by the absence of life. The

insanity of- the surrealists Breton and transition is in a void; whereas

that
,,
0' H.enry is caused by the abaurdi tiea,
26
ironies, paifis of a surcharged
over-full llfe."

At this point ...we may wonder \1hence Miller' s cri ticiam of the surrealists

, arose in the first place. Hadness he doea not condone because a) to the

true madman it is, not liberating; b) in those \-/ho emulate him it leads to

a -restrici;ed vision, purely ofl.;sthetic; 27 c) those t'lho make use of i t, ' 1

25 Alain Jouffroy, cited in liatthews, Surrealist Poetry in' France, p.153.

26 Diaa, vol.l, p .230.
27 "The marvellous, and only the marvellous, iB v/hat hypnotizes man.
=--.-c=--=====--==='J.'TehaaJZt ~Jtim_a::::g:ulltde.--::fmr~ J:aJ.Gt-; a--cpiminaI, a martyr, a
r
saint, a hero, a death-eater. In his moment o~ g,enius lie is mad; if he is
 / " .
",0
--> - -~, -/--'-
., 81

reveal the naturalneas of madness and aspire to the vision it offers

wi thout losing their grip on reality (Breton in jidja) it prevents

them from fhro\'Ilng themselves headlong into the abyss. To ~he sufrealist,

however, this abyss is real in a sense that to the romantic i t ~s not,

because the latter knows to detach himself from i ts implications ~Y means

~ 1
of romantic irony.

I~st anbiguous' are Niller' s remarks in the light of his earlier wri tings,

Cancer, Black\'Surin~, and Capricorn. A passage from the latter ~is re-
\
presentative: "Itis.terrible to be civilized," he saya, "becauae \vhen

you come to the end df ,the world you have nothing to support the terro!' of

lonelincss. To b ci vilized ia to have complicated needs ,,,28 Contrast this

..rith his avowed intention te dehumanize himself, and his contention that
. ,
"

trThe.....fear of standing alohe i6 the evidence that .. he fai th is ueak. ,,29 It

becomcs clear that he is torn between two types of liberty effered by sur-

realism and romanticism respectively. To come down, as he later does, in

favour of the latter, he has to d:Lscredi t the former, but this disavowa.l

of surr1ism i8 never convinci:r;).g. \Ilhat could be further from the truth

"'\
than hilil remark that the -surrealists suggest "to discred~t the world of

reali ty"? Or that "they are looking baskward~ instead of forWl7dsll?

30

~'--~ (
not mad he goes insane, and then h~ unable to distingtdeh be~\I;en'~
lS marvellous and wha t is not marvello If (osmological Eye, p .183.) Yet
he cri ticizes the surrealiste for adher to the
principle of self-preservation, suggest ng. at the sarne time that "the sur-
realiste are too conscious of \lhat they are' doing." (~., p.163.) ~
28 Capricorn, p.323.
29 Cosmological Eye, p.184.
-
30 lbid.
-
 .82

And \1hat could be more of an affirmation of surrealist principles tban

,
his contention that "The' stress on- the unconscihus forces of man does
.
not neces~y imply the elimination-of consciousness ll ?3 l
Breton does z_

not express i t r.lore clearly: "We have ~i~ed to ou;sves the task of

confr,onting these two realities \'ri.th one anotlulr on every possible occasion,
"

of refusing to allo\'! the pre-eminence ot' the one over the other, yet not

of acting on one and the other ~ & once, because that \'/ould be tG-
\
7,2 \
suppose that they are less apart from one another than they are. ,,/

Co~sciousness,

Breton, remarks "how the

alas,

o~en
also involves the rational, and it is.when

rationalism \'lhich defincs the present position

of scholars (as a sequel to the concepl1on of ndh-Euclidian -- a' generalized

~
\
geometry, non-Newtonian mechanics, non-Maxwel1ian physics, etc.) cannot

fail to corres;ol}? \1 th the open realism or surre)n{sm, ,,33 that Hiller

begins to ~mell a rat. "Th!? question, i t seems to me [he says] , which

eae~~ne must pose for himse!f is this: which reality is more_~~tal, more

life-giving, more-dUraoI'e"- i~ th'rea1i ty of science or the reali ty of ~t?"

4
Betvlee'n these hm, the" schism bas grO\ffl impassable. ,,3 Not 'surp;iSingly

Miller the romantic-at-heart conc1udes by modifying the Byronic 'The tree

,r, '
of knowledge is not that of life' that .' f)

31 Cosmological E[e, p.189.

32 "What is Surrealism?" in Criterion Hiscellany, 41, pp.49-50.,--------J
33
"Limits not }l'''rontiers of Surrealism," in Read, 0F.cit.,. .:p~101.
There is 1').0 contradiction here beb/en this statement -and his stigmatization,
\J in the Hanifestoes (p.128) of "the basenes6 of \'lestern thought" exemplified
by "logic. 11
Cosmological-Ye, pp.165-6

,
-.
 Knowledge is a sifting,

- Kno~\I~fl~e~B--J~s--;~v-e:reasS:s6ee:nntt:l.r.alaf---:ttco the po et.

cause
mind,
he feels;
but vn th
his passion is to embr~ye-~he \>1orld,
his heart. [ . J
./
The j)oet cOlllprehends be-
not "rith his
~/n1y begins to comprehend ,,,hen
, one begins to stop trying to k~d~/. The surrealists are trying to
open the magic chamber oj>man's beiiig thr(\;gh kno\edge. That is where
the fatal mis'tN:e-
~ ,- -35
lies. - -
... 1 .... ,,~,

.>

,.,. Lik,e _La1trrence he regards ~ type of probing as sinister and discards the

prospective liberty offeredOby a reconciliation of these two types of know-

ledce. His typically anti-intellec'Lual refusal to reconcile art and science

in the manner of Breton does not, of course, rnruce him either more or less

of a surrcaliGt, but '~e should note that this implacabili ty of belief in

the schisrn makes it impossible.for Miller to conceive of a reconciliation

of any sort outsidc the realm of mysticism. '~he mystic, who is mor

dual than other m~n, arrives momentari1y at a so1~tion of the enigma by

achieving a- state of ecstasy in \~hich he is at o~ with the universe. [ J

He is beyond hims~lf [ . ] in the'sense that his consc}ousness has sa far

6
expanded as to embrace the two opposite poles of his being.,,3

/
The surrgalists themselves toyed 'vith similar sentiments,3? though

they aQ1Cepted mysticism only conditiona11y ami-on t'h.e'u:ade.r.s.tandi..llg_,~~tt, _ _ _ _ _

as Breton said, "\>/e shall :b.ave the beyond in our time, ,,38in .the here and
, ,
now and not in a supernatural order. The sources of surrealism are not to

35 Cosmological Xe, pp.183-4. , .

-
36 ibid., p.19l.
3? Most notably the sometime-member Artaud. See his "Letter to the
Chancllors of European Universities," reprinted in Jthe IISur'r'ealismH issue.. .
of Radical America, January, 1970, p.4.
38 cited in Hadeau, on.cit., p.119.

'"
p
 84
o

be found in esoterism. 39 By the extent, of his embrace of mysticisrn

Miller indicates his abandoning of principles in essence poli tical ...hich,

.'"
ta Breton, led to "the resolutiort of th,e social crisis in the only place
.'
where it can be resolved -- i!l ~ streets.,,40 i'lhat is important to note

is not that Hiller should decline (any longer) ta be impressed with such

st'atements .2E! ~ incHnation, but, nov', on principle. His ardent

individualism of Arnerican neo-romantic provenience, coupled with an un-

compromising mysticism, makes it impossible for Miller to follow the

surr.ealists on ~ road, though one rnight vlonger ",hy he chose yo cri ti-

s:i.ze thern for being "yellO\;" in the f~rst place -- surely an unqualified
~ mysticism isn' t the ans,.,er to questions raised by the surrealists. But the

very fact that J.!iller feels called upon to conunent on certain issues raised

by the 3urrealists Sqg0ests that perhaps his mysti~ism is not as absolute }

na at times he makes it out to be, A situation of incommunicability of the

.
type referred to
.
by Arthur Koestler in his The Yogi
"

and the Co~issar, in

) i

other \-lords, is absent; the questions' raised are still regarded as valid ,.

and not (yet) as meaninglL!ss. They become ... ohly in Miller's later, post-

surrealist period \o,1hich, howeve:r:, falls Ql,ltside our present discussion.

~-------
--- .
Important to note is that' the principles of mysticisrn make it increasingly

difficult for Miller ta accept a reconci1:l.ation not only in the realm of

science and art, individual life and social (political) life, but also in

the realm of poetry and life: with the mystic prinipl~L ther~ re-surlaceJL_____ _

39 For a full discussion, see

. Alqtli, op. ci t., p. 24. ...,
40 "Limits not Frontiers of ~alism," in Read, op.cit., p.98.
-- <-:< --------
 85

the (to the surrealists) much-dreaded notion of "genius", the "poet in

the elouds. 1I \Jith the mystic principle alienation petrifies, but we can

only suggest here sources of !1ille.r's later development; in the "Onen

Lette!' .. " "these source1 are often disguised itnd more often than not contra-

dicted by statemen~ich still betray a close affini ty to the tenets of

surrealism.

In the context of the "Open Letter " there remaina to be discu6sed,

finally, Hiller' s "indebtedness to sorne aspects of Freudian psychology.

He have suggested in the introduction that deapi te }liller 'a ardent indivi-

dualism his rebellion was never a-historical if only, by'implication, he

/" realized (to quote Narcuse) that Hprivate di~order reflects more directly
41
than before the disorder of the whole." Civilization, like religion,
. 1+2
saves man from acting out his neuroses and portrays thern as eVl.I j instead

of "violence L ] \>le are only ge:tting abortive explosiQns," 1E l1iller

said in Cancer. Like the surrealists he abhors crimes and violence per-

petrated \li thout passion, i;hough again he falls into the gratuitous error

of assigning ta the surrealists ideas they never he Id "The surrealists

are guilty of the sarne mistnke an all other \larring idealists -- that human
4
beings have an imperative need to kill.,,43 In fact Breton had \l'itten, and

been werely cri tisized for i t, that "the simplest surrealist aet consilii~s

of dashing fnto the street, pis toI in hand, and firing blindly [ ] into

41 Eros and Civi~zation, p.~11.

42 Sigmunq. Freud, _A~b_r_i..B~d";;,er___P_o;;.,"'........-.;;=~...;;,,.;;~...
D_as__,,;;,Un_b=e~...e_n;.:...l.Oi_n;;;...;;d;;.;e;.;.r....;.;K;.;;u:.:;l;.;;t.;;;u~r
_ _~___ /(Frank!ur\:Jo.Fiseher" 197~, p.82. -, -

43 Cosmological Eye, p.1S6.

, .
..
 86
44
the crowd," by \-/hieh, apart from. shocking the feeble-minded, he

meant to indicate his refusaI ta liUIJ. on prineiple. Miller himself

, says

as mueh when he ctate.s that "Every time \"e fail to strike or kil~, the per-
.... ~,;'"

son who threatens to humiliate or degrade or enslave or enchain Uf\ \1e pay
,
\ \
the penalty for i t in collective suicide, \>/hich is \'Iar, or in fr~riCidal

slaughter, \>lhich ia revolution. n45 Numerous other passag~s in his \ ther

)
\11"'i tings attest to this conviction which only apparenl:y contradicts h" s
)

desire, discussed earlier, to "abandon" himself ta the machine.

meant in dead-earnest, it never left the realm of the symbolic.

rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbour ta get the food he neeqs,

than keep up the

(1
autom~c l'rccess by pretending that he has ta carn a

li ving, II thouCh he alsa says, - in the same passage: 'llone can starve ta

dehth -- i t is much bette-r. ,,46

,

Killing and) abandonment, it seems, are but symbolic expressions of the

des ire to li~ Iree of the rEWtrictions a repressive civilization imposes.

, ,
""
UTha event from which each of us lS entitled ta expect the reve~ation of

ms O\1n life' s meaning [ ] is not earned ;[

-- ~,,,47 Breton had aaid, and

~ller could not agree mo:ee:

Nen are struggling for the right to \"ork! It sounds almost incredible
but that ~ precisely '."bat it ~~unts to, the great' ~~al of civilized
,
'-'
man. What an heroic struggle!'>~cll, for my part, ! \Till say that
! ,'\:.\" 48
vlhatever else I may wan.h l ~r. that I don' t \'lant v/ork.

44 }funifestoes, p.125.
45 Cosmological Eye, p .154.
46 Capricorn, p. 322.,
47 Nadja, p.60. _
*0
Cosmological E:x~., p.,15 6 , Cf. Cancer,? p.144: lias long as that spark
of passion is missing the~e is no human significrulce in ,the performance,."

{ ,
'C>,
 87

Despite occasional misconceptions of basic principles of surrealism

Miller' s cri tique is valuable in that i t shows the weaknesses of .the move ...

l'lient; but then, ,,,e nrnst remember, lli. contradictions are only those of

- society at large: ,-l'Truth", Breton quotes Lafargue (and "li th equi justi-
o
fication he might have cited Francis Bacon) "after aIl is merely the hypo-

thesis ,"hich 1.,rorks best; error is often the--shortest route to discovery.

1 or
[ ] A system is alive oniy to the-ertent that it doesn't pretend to be

infallible, definitive, but on the bontrary sets great store by l'lhat

i,
- 49- 1.
appears to be most contradictory." "

If IIiller does not formally join the surrealists i t 'is not lastly because
0
his individualism abhbrs the idea of a tl cult,,5 around "Andr Breton," that
\ _~-----I--- . "
"great fish ~~t of '-later" who IISOII Y pontifioates as usual" in the language

of Dr. Johnson, "distorted thJ:Qugh \hiS Freudian French.,,51 Nevertheless,

he maintains, "scarcely anything bas been as stimulating to me as the

------- '52 '
" theories and the products of the B~_ea1ists. 11- Surrealism he cornes tp re-

cognize as a movement of a,transitional period IVith onl~ a.temporary raIe,

o
and he concludes: ;
,
1
Ho\-.. , my dear feIIows, ury dear--Belgian, S\-Iedish, Japanese, Dptch,
British, French, American, Rhodesian, Arthurian, Cro Maenion, Neander-
thalian sU!'realists, now is the time to grab hold of that 'most wonder-
.. -~--- -- ~ - - -
fuI prehensile tail ",hich };las been dragging in the r.1Ud for countless
centuries. Get hold of it if~ou can,
JI
and swing for your lives! It's ~
one chance out of a miilion, and l v1t,?h .you lu~, you poor bleedjng
'bastards. 53

49 -~----
--- .'

_~5?O~~C~o~sm~_~Q~~~~~~~
51 -ibid.;
52 ~., a

53 ~t

1 0
 (1

CHAPTER FIVE Conclusion

t-
"1 have juat finiahed the firs'b vol)lltle of ury long work (Tropic of

Cpricorn); the whole theme of this volume iB full of consciousness

versus automatism." This staternent, contained in a letter to Count J(eyser-

ling (dated August 25, 1938)~ .

is characteristic of art attitude of dis-

sociation from surrealiarn'which Miller will display with increasing age.

,It mattera little that he should openly contradict himaelf a few years later
~' 0
on the issue of automatism,2 or that his own writings should prove him

wrong (as was shown in Chapter III); what is of importance -- and one cou'ld
paraphrase J.H.Matthew's comment on Ren Char is ~ot Miller's privilege

to interpret sorne of his writings in a way ,that de~aches them from aurrealism,

as rather our right to put them back in context, and to ask what they con-

tributed to Burreali~.3

,To take Miller at his own .. word can often be rnisleading because state-
ments like "Do not confound me wi th the surrealiste" (from the letter to

, ,
.,,
published in The International Henry Miller Letter V" August, 1963,
" \.'

14~\ ~
2 Big Sur and the 'CraMes of H:i,erowmua BosC,h,_p:128. Se P',56 above.
3 See Matthewa, Surrealiet poetb in France, p.1l5.

'f (

','
 89

~eyserling) are irmnediately checked by the r~velatory explanation:" "Ci t

is b~cause theyJ have tried to put the dream under a glass bell that l

rebel. For me there is no differenee between the dream and reality ~- if

there is ,- 60 much worse for reali ty." Breton himself could not have ex-

pr,essed it better, and it becomes clear that ~ller's ~uarre18 pert~i~

not so m~ch to the theories of Burrealism as ta its practice, , aven though

we have to concede mino~differences in opinion even with regards ta thearyo

Why .then the deliberate misunder~t~~ing on sorne occasions when on others

~'!
he prbves himself t~roughly fmiliarwith the surrealist philosophy?

Miller's gradual change in outlook, as was'suggested in the'introduc-

tion, became more and more pronounced upon his r~turn to the United States,

and is man~fest already in The ColossUB of Maroussi, which smacks suspicious-

ly more of neo-romanticism than surrealist ideas. It is interesting as

: '

~--ro~~~ic autobiography, stre~sing the simple virtues of life, yet devoid

__,, _ _o-ff"''''

:J~f the spark of the marvellous that characterized

, the earlier books. "There
i .---- , /. ."""'..:\
v.ra.s a period, you. knO\of -- my yout};l -- when l =\horri bllf arrogant," he
, \

confides to Georges Belmont in an interview condu ad in the l~te 'sixties.

/ , .J
"
"But as l vtrote l changed my ideas -- and how! rlhen l am at peace and feel

J
\

on good terms \1ith myself, calm,

t'ranquil, l say to myself, '.maybe, after
4" .
all, the vlorld is all right as i t is? t Il Ta be reminded of his surrea.list
~
heritage embarrasses him to no little degree, yet again and again, and'

~ ~ide by side with passages of almost un1:tearable bathos, he can bring himself

. ,.
,
4 Henry Miller, Face to Face \ofi th Hepry Miller Conversations with

1
 1>
-~

'1 , . 90[
\ j

around to statements like "I believe in miraculous things which don't

happen step',by step, but all at once, _suddenly . 11 5

\'/i tb increasing fame, says Georr;e \Vickes (his perhaps most reliable u
o

"ri tic) , "Hiller began to take hirnself too seriously. His later essays

are solemn j8l1d pontifical, as he addresses the faiiihful, ,,6 echoing an

~r :~J.
earlier remark'.by Isaac Roselfeld~that "11iller back at home i6 not the old

. H~./I The limitations af Bohemianism, conludes RosenfeJd, "are aIl tpo

.
o bvioul? , Il and he wonders: "Or ""as tha t the spreme Bohemian effort, the

gesture of faith?,,7Already in The Air-Conditiond Nightmare -- though it

"
displays an often devastating Nenckenesque humour in i ts diatribs against

the wast'eland culture he finds upon his ret~rn from France -- signs of

1<Iil'ler the West Coast Guru cannot be overlookEtd. .In Big Sur and the Oranges

of HieronYffiBs Bosch he has.completely turned away from his earlier style and
cs
,
attitude and has become merely autobiographical. SadIy enough', as tru to
~
Anais Nin' s prediction he creates himself as whole man, he becomes Iess '
()
interesting as a writeF.

Though ~he RoGy CricMixion trilogy s~ill contains sorne fine passage~
"..
J

\'lhich on stylistic'llgrounds could be classified as surrealistic, one is

o
?onstantIy reminded of the $ources he uses: to an extent to which thi~ was
not true for his earlier wri tings, surrealism becomee. a mare r'ecipe wi th
, ,
too much at1;ention given to ornament and decorurn. Like qO manvr other writ~rs,

.- ~~.'';'
,
"

'___ 5
6 -
ibid., p.56.
, . (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota, 1966), P .41.
Henry Miller'
7 ''Henry Miller in Arlerica,." An Age of Enormity (New Yor~~..World
Publishing Co., 1962), 117-18. ,.,' ~ ar 1

"

, . "
 8

~ 91

.he found it useful to adopt. the style and teehhique of surre~~sm with-

o~t adhering any longer to ~ts

"
'"
phi1osophieal premises.

of a nIan entering old age lOOking ba~k on the confusion of his youth," ~
"~here

"
is a pathos
,

\>tri tes Hassan wi th 'referen'e to the Rosy Crucifixion; "the pathos, of the

mature artist "/ho 50 miSjU~ges his ~chievement to believe that Sexus lB .

.. , ' '. 8
a rieher and deeper book than ~r()pie 9 f Q!}?ricorn. Il

In Quiet Days in Clichy, fihally, the ever~present drabness turna

the book into mere trash,. unimaginati'tre, dull,

.~
and completely lackJ.ng
.
"
the spark of passion which ~i
, eharacterized'books 'likeBlack S and the

Trapics. But an evaluation of these books limita of the

~fI;... .
~ present study. ~")Ione of what has been said in this
v
chapter,~ of course,
~~iShe6 the stature of Miller th~one-time 5urreali~t who,- ~~ough the

~early worka discussed in thisCth~sis, made ~Qsting co~tri~~tion to ,

surrealist l;t~rature. IfI do not believe, ,i says Breton,- "there' is any

, .
serio'us pro blem as far as surrealism is concerned, beca'se ,i t hs suffered

the" loss of thip ~ndiVid~a1 or tha~, ~ however ,brilliant t- and .IeapeC~ally the ~
.
one who, afte~ he has left 'the fold, [' J ind<fates bY'hiyrery action that'

he i6 desirous. 'o'f
oP
returni~g to -normaii ty ,,9 - ,,~~ ther no~ti (~o
1
g,i ve Hill~ ~
the last "lOrd)" ,"ask the insoluble fish. ,,10,
(. -
o.

. . '"

8 Hassan, op.ct., p.86.

9 Manifestoes, p.164.
~O Miller t s IdDraconian P~sts'cri,pt ft oto ~eor.ge vliekes. ed. t Henry Miller
J

, . . ana the Cri ties, p.190. .'

J
7
,t

.'-
"
\ r
'II.

" . 1# 0- ------"0 -- - - -

" , f'f "." ,. '.

, ~c ..

<, , , . , .-,. .
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SELECTED BIBLIOORAPHY

,.

, 1. Worka by Henry Miller

The Air-Condi tioned Nightmare, New York, 1970.
Big Sur and tl).e Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, (
New York, 1.957.
Black Sprins, New York, 1963.
Th.e Books in My Life, New York, 1.969 ,

The Colossus of Marou8si, New York, 1944. ..
The cOsmo1ogicai
;
Eye, New York, 1939.
Face. to Face Wi th Hem Miller: Conversations ri th, Georges Belmont, London.,
1970. ~

Henry Miller. Letters to Anais Nin~ ed. G. Stuhlmann, New York, 1965. \
)

-
Nexus, New York, 1965.
, On Wri ting '. New. York, 1964.
Plexus, New York, 1965.
Q.iet Da.ys in Glichy, New York, 1965. \
,
~ Stand Still 1ike 11 Hummingbird, New York: 1962.
!lwday After the War t Ntw York, 1944. /
The T~e 'of the Assassine; A Study of Rimbaud, New York; 1956'. /
Tropic -of Cancer, New York, 1961.
/
/
Tropic of Cap'l:-icorn, ~aris t 1962). /
/

.
(

The Wisdom of the Heart, 'New York, 1960.

/
/

/
/
,
,/
A

. /
./
/

/
/
. / /
 93

II. S econdary Saure es

/
Adorno, Theodor'" W. Asthetische Theorie, Frankfhrt, 19'10.
-----;------, Versuch, dE..S Endspie1 zu verstehen, Frankfurt, 1973.
Alexandrian, Sarane. Surrealist Art, New York, 191Q,.
Almansi, G. "Three Versions on an Article on Henry MMler, Il T\-1entieth
Century Studiea l, ii, 1969,' D!l' 4-1-5').
, tr.B.Haldron
Alqui, Ferdinand. The Phi1osophy of, Surr:ealism, 1\ New York, lQ65.
Balakian, Anna. Andr Breton Hagus of SU'rrealism, . New York, 1971.
----------, The Literary Origine of Surrealism(new edition), New York, 1965.
-~--------, Surrealism The Raad to the Absalute (revised edition), New York,
1970.
Belmont. Georges. "Henry Miller: Assis la droite de l'homme," Nouvelles
Littraires, janvier: la, 1972.
j31ake, William. pomp1ete Writipgs, ed. Keynes, ~c>ndon, New York, 1966.
Breton, Andr. La Cl des chamPs, Paris, 1967~ ~
----------, . ''Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism," see under )Hey6e:rt Read.
----------, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Seaver and Lane, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 1972.
---------, Nadja, trans. R.Howard, New York, 1960.
----------, Les Vases Communicants, ""Papis, 1970.
---... ------, "What i~ Surrealism?!' Criterion Miscei1any
4
41, 1934, pp.41.;-90.
Ca\/S, , Hary Ann. Andr Breton, New York, 1971.
--------, "Motion and Motion Arreted:" The Language of the Surrealist
\Adventure,u SymposiUIl, \-linter 1970, pp. '30:Z:-109.
Daugherty, Francia L. "Henry Miller and ,he Heterocosm: the Generl and
App1ied Literary The6ry of an# American Neo-Romantic," unpublished
Doctoral thesis, Texas State University, 1970 (71-18623J.
,d, E1uard, P~u1. "Poetic Evidence," see under Read.
Freud, Sigmund. AbriB der Psychoanal.yse/ Das Unbehagen in der Kul tur,
Frankfurt, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. MadnesB and Civi1ization: A History of Insanity in the
Me of Resson, transe R.Howard, New York, 1973.
,-
---".......

, - ~

d
 / " Gershman, Herbert. The Surrealist Revolution in France, Ann Arbor,
Michigan,
. 1974.
GoU, Yvan. "Histoire de Parmenia L 'Havanaise Henry Miller," Cirele,
vol. I, Hi, 1944, l ' .,V.
Gordon, \V.A. The l1ind and Art of Henry Hiller" Baton Rouge., La' 1967.
1
----------, ilriter and Critic: A Corres ondence with He Mi1l~,
B~ton Rouge, La., 19
Goodm~, Paul. Growing Up Absurd, New York, 1956.
Hassan, Ihab. The Literatw~ of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett,
Net.." York, 1967. . .
International He~ Miller Letter, ed. H.van G~lre, Nijmegen, Nether1ands,
1-7, 19 1-1967. .
. ~

) Lautramont [Isodora Ducasse]. Maldoror, trans.

'" Lovejoy, A.O. The Great Chain of Being,
A.L~iard,

:rrw York, 1960.

,New York, 1972.

Mailer, Norman. "The Prisoner of Sex," Harper "s, March 1971-

i1aXuse~ Herbert. Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston, 1972.
1

. ----.,,----_-, Eros and Civilization, New York, 1962.

---------, An'Essa.y on Liberation, Bo~ton,
19'9.
Mayoux, Jean-Jacques. "De Meilleur en Hiller," Etudes Anglais~a, XtlI:4,
Oct.-Dec. 1963. Fp. "'56<)-73.
Marx, Kar1. konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, Leipzig, 1970~
Matthevls, J .JI. "Surrea.lism a,nd England,1I Coml'arative Literature Studies,
Li. 1964~ pp.55-n" o

---------, StU'realism and the Novel, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1969.

----------, "Surrealism in the Novel," Books Abroad, 43,ii, 1969~ pp.,1(\2-9.
----------, SurreaJ.ist Poetr;y in France, Syracuse, N. Y., 1969.
----------, l "Surrerlism, Politics, and Poetry," Mosaic, 3:1~ 'Pp. 1 ...13.
Mayer, Hans. Deutsche Literatur seit Thomas Mann, Hamburg, 196&.
----------,
-
Das Geschehen und das Schweigen,
'Frarikfurt,
. 1969:
Mitchell, E.B. ed., Henry Miller Three Dec~deB of' Criticiam, New York,1971.
\ Moore, T .H. Biblioqam of Henry MiIler; 'Minn e.apo1is, 1961.
Motherwell, RObert.d,The Dada Painters and Poeta, New York, 1951.
 "

95

...

Nad eau , Maurice. The History of Surrealisni, transe R.Howard, Harmonds-

worth, 1973.
---------, "Miller Paris, n Lettres Nouvelles ~ no. 9, 29 avril 1959. pp .1-2.
~

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Bir~ of Tragedy, transe Kaufmann, New York,

~_____~96:~so Sprach zarat~ Stuttgart, 1969

Nin, Anais. The Diary of ,1. ed. -G.Stuhlmann, New York, 1966.
----------, The Novel o~ the Future, New York, 1970.
Harmonds-

Or"lell , George. The Collected Essaya! Journalism and Lettera,
worth, 1970.
Pater, \yalter. Appreciations, London, '1900.
Ple,yboy "Interview with Henry Miller,". September, 1964.
(-
Radical America, Special "Surrealisrn" issue, 'January,. 1970;
Ray, Paul C. "Hhat' was Surrealism1" JO'!,1I'nal.of 110dern L-iterature, Li. 1970.
Read, Herbert. ad., Surrealisrn, London,. 197.l.
Renken, l-faxine. Bibliography of Henry Miller' 1945-1261, Minneapolis, 1961. /
, /

R:i,chter, Hans. ,Dada art and anti art, New York, 1965.
Rosenfe1d, Isaa. An Ageto! Enormity, New York, 1962.
Sontag, SUSaD;. "CBC Interview with ", CBC "Ideas", December 8, 1971;
this tape is available through the CBC (no.798).-
\wickes, George. ed., Americans in. Paris, Garden City, NY ,
----------, Minneapolis, 1966.
Henry Millet,
r"
----------, "Henry Miller, It Wri ter. at Wark: The Paris Review Interviewe,
second series, New York, 1964.
---------, ed.,. Henry Miller and the C;itics,' JCarbonda1:, nI., 1963. tIt
Zyla, Wolodymyr T. ad., From Surr.ealism t the Absurd, Lubboek, Texas, 1970.

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