4 — Wednesday, August 12, 1992 — North Shore News

A shameless indulgence of the self

PVE JUST finished reading a biography of Henry Miller.
Needless to say, 1’m saddened. If the biographer is to be
believed, the re2i-life Henry Miller was somewhat fess
heroic than the so-called autobiographical Henry | Miller.

**So-called’” because Henry us-
ed to write stuff about his life that
wasn’t exactly the way it happen-
ed. He cheated.

Although, of course, I knew
this. One of his lines that I always
loved was: ‘‘Sometimes I throw in
alie, just to throw the bastards
off the trail."

According to biographer Robert
Ferguson, it wasn’t just ‘‘some-
times’’ that Henry threw in a lie,
however. More like probably most
of the time.

This is saddening, as I say,
because Henry was considered in
his time to be a free-spirited sage
precisely because of his ‘‘hones-
ty.”

No less a genuine man of letters
than George Orweli devoted an
entire long essay to Miller, entitled
Inside the Whale.

In it, Orwell described an expe-
fience common to everyone who

had read and loved Miller’s first

Bob
Punter

STRICTLY PERSONAL

well-being and contentment could
be trusted to run the country
without leading it into war.

46 All the early beatniks and later
the hippies took their broad moral
‘signal from Miller, or at least the

thinking he personified: namely that

virtually anything went, and to hell
with conventional morality. 99

published book, Tropic of Cancer:
“the peculiar relief that comes not
so much from understanding as
being understood. He knows all
about me, you feel, he wrote this
especially for me.”’

As a writer whose definitely
left-wing views had shaped all of
his own works, Orwell knew only
too well the dangers that arise
“where writers identify themselves
too closely with schools of politi-
cal thought, the most sinister of
these being the voluntary censor-
shiy of one’s own thoughts in the -
name of a prevailing orthodoxy
and righteousness,” as Ferguson
puts it.

A writer ‘‘can only remain
honest if he keeps free of party
labels,’’ Orweil wrote, after
observing at close hand the inner
workings of left-wing politica!
parties, an experiente that gave
him a horror of politics ever
afterwards.

Miller, on the other hand,
‘loathed ail parties, politicians and
ideologies from the beginning, and
he did so with a vengeance, cheer-
fully and shamelessly indulging his
own egocentrism.

The two mien met in Paris one
afternooz in {937 as Orwell was
passing through on his way to

-take part in the Spanish Civil
War. Miiler didn’t attempt to talk
Orwell out of his crusade, but
made it clear that he thought it
was extremely foolish of Orwell to
join the war out of a sense of
obligation.

If he had been doing it out of
curiosity, or some selftsh motive,
it would have been OK.

Miller’s hero, biographer -
Ferguson reports, was Yang Chu,
a Tacist philosopher who lived in
ancient China, who was reputed
to have held the view that ‘‘even
if he could have benefited the
empire by pulling out one hair,’’
he would not have done so.

He was absolutely indifferent to
the fate of the state. This was 2
terrific thing, rather than bad, in
the Taoist view. The argument
was that only a man who was ut-
terly concerned with his own

WOOGA CHUGGA WOOGA CHyGGA WOogaA CHUGGA wooes

After their brief meeting in
Paris, Miller wrote about Orwell:
““What enrages me about people
toda; is their willingness to die for
things.’’

Miller's literary stature has gore

Young

up and down more wildly than
almost any other modern writer.
He was well established as a hero
to liberal society for his frank
writings about sex by the late
1930s. Servicemen returning to the
U.S. and Canada smuggled copies
of his banned books with them,
planting the seeds of his eventual
fare in North America.

By the 1950s, Miller had evolv-
ed into a guru. All the early beat-
niks and later the hippies took
their broad moral signal from
Miller, or at least the thinking he
personified: namely that virtually
anything went, and to hell with
conventional morality.

Today, having been torn to
shreds by feminist writers like
Kate Millet, Miller has been con-
signed, more or less, to the
slagheap titled ‘‘dirty old men,**
and left to decompose. In the
world of AIDS anc the New
Puritanism goat-like sexual!
froiicking is frowned upon in vir-
tually every corner.

With moderation has come in-
tolerance towards excess — and if
anybody exceeded, it was Henry.

According to Ferguson,
nowhere was this excessiveness
more apparent than in the dedica-
tion which he brought to bear on
the creation of his own myth. He
fabricated out of the raw and ac-
tually rather mundane material of
his own existence a gigantic legend
of himself.

It was done at other people's
expense, especially his former
wives, whom he characteristically
started exploiting for literary pur-
poses even before he was through
with them emotionally. He was a
self-centred, pitiless, self-
promoting hustler and freeloader,
who pushed his own agenda re-
lentlessiy, and eventually succeed-
ed, becoming rich arid famous.

However, ! maintain those who
see in Henry Miller nothing but a
sexist pigdog, and who gloss over
or simply do not comprehend the
2piritual seeker beneath the carica-

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ture of himself that he put for-
ward, miss out on the meaning of
his work and his life, which was
that, as enormously and fun-
damentally flawed as human be-
ings might de, as ridiculous and
power-corrupted as iove may be,
and as indifferent or maybe even
as sometimes malevolent as the
universe might be, “underneath
the mess everything is marvelous.
. “I’m sure of it,” he writes in
The Roxy Crucifixation. **I know
it because I feel so marvelous
myself most of the time. And
when I feel that way everybody

: PARKER

seems marvelous ... cverybody
and everything ... That’s what I
want to write about ... and then
we're all going to see clearly, sce
what a staggering, wonderful,
beautiful world it is.”

My feeling is Henry may have
fibbed a bit about how often he
got laid and how spectacularly he -
performed, but he sure turned you °
on to the excitement of life, and
was therefore truly a great writer.
— even if, sadly, he was really
still just another guy screwed up
by his wienie. :
aad

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