On Henry Miller: or, how to be an anarchist PDF
Preview On Henry Miller: or, how to be an anarchist
• 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
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