On Henry Miller: or, how to be an anarchist

208 Pages·2018·0.947 MB·English

by  Burnside, John;Miller, Henry

• ON HENRY MILLER
WRITERS ON WRITERS
Philip Lopate Notes on Sontag
C. K. Williams On Whitman
Michael Dirda On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling
Alexander McCall Smith What W. H. Auden Can Do for You
Colm Tóibín On Elizabeth Bishop
Michael Wood On Empson
John Burnside On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist
JOHN BURNSIDE • ON HENRY MILLER
Or, How to Be
an Anarchist
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press .princeton .edu
Jacket photograph: Henry Miller © René Saint Paul /
Bridgeman Images
Excerpt from the Tao Te Ching, trans. Derek Lin, from
www.Taoism.net and Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained,
SkyLight Paths, 2006. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from “Carmel Point” by Robinson Jeffers,
in The Collected Poems (Stanford University Press, 2002).
Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Robinson Jeffers.
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 16687- 2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961232
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Minion Pro and Myriad Pro
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
• for Phill Pass
— Be Well

• CONTENTS
By Way of a Preface ix
In Praise of Flight 1
Like a Fluid (The False Pornographer) 25
On Love and Property 46
Henry Miller as Anarchist 72
Like a Fluid (The Great Romantic) 96
The Air- Conditioned Nightmare 106
The Time of the Assassins 131
The Creature World 141
Notes 165
• vii

• BY WAY OF A PREFACE
I was stuck. The book was almost finished, and
I was trying to make a decent fist of liking it
(though only to myself, for I had yet to sum-
mon up the chutzpah to show it to anyone else),
but I was failing miserably. From beginning
to end (though with a great big hole where the
sex should be), the book I had privately titled
Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist was a
perfectly honorable, if rather lopsided, homage
to the work I most loved by a writer I mostly
admired, but the whole thing was dull as ditch
water. At the same time, apart from a grudging
admission that Kate Millett’s critique of Sexus in
her groundbreaking study of misogyny in litera-
ture,1 was more or less fair, most of my “appre-
ciation” of Miller was based, like a house built
on sand, on a plucky attempt to pretend that a
handful of cringe-w orthy passages (though by no
means all) about sex were no longer relevant and
• ix