Radical Aesthetics in the Writings of Henry Miller and Ezra Pound By Guy Stevenson Thesis ...

333 Pages·2015·3.12 MB·English

by  Guy Stevenson

Blast and Bless:
Radical Aesthetics in the Writings of Henry Miller and
Ezra Pound
By Guy Stevenson

Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
Goldsmiths College, University of London,
Department of English and Comparative Literature,
October 2014

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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Caroline Blinder for her expertise and
patience, the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths for
their administrative and financial support, and my partner Veronique Bofane Inkoli,
whose love and encouragement have kept me sane and on track throughout.

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Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to provide a new way of reading Henry Miller by drawing
attention to his unlikely aesthetic and moral intersections with Ezra Pound. It traces
the lineage of a particular strand of radical modernist expression that is exemplified
in Pound’s critical essays between 1909 and 1938 and finds its way – incongruously -
into Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical novels of the 1930s. In the process, I will
illuminate hitherto underexplored territory that is shared by two seemingly
incompatible writers, pointing the way to a better understanding of the aesthetic and
moral contradictions in Miller’s – and indeed Pound’s – work.
Crucially, I propose that Miller’s literature is morally engaged rather than amoral or
unwittingly counter-revolutionary, two common and reductive assumptions. By
reading him in the context of Pound’s often suspect pronouncements on hierarchy
and order it is possible to reassess George Orwell’s widely accepted conclusion that
Miller is simply a ‘passive, unflinching’ recorder of life.1 It is also possible to treat his
textual violence as an important part of his aesthetic, rather than condemning or
glossing over it. This thesis will define a set of aesthetics that are common to Pound
and Miller and involve complex, often paradoxical impulses – most crucially
between the desire to cultivate a radically inclusive artistic approach and the
instinctive adherence to a set of absolute tastes and values.
Taking as my starting point a little known review by Pound of Miller’s Tropic of
Cancer, I demonstrate that the latter’s often brutal, anti-humanist rhetoric enables
rather than undermines his larger humanistic project. I show that Miller’s
idiosyncratic assimilation of high modernist reactionary tropes and ideas were
integral to his original and influential view of art, ethics and reality. Concomitantly,
this comparison of two very different writers seeks to generate a new perspective on
the slippage between retrograde and progressive elements in both their works as
well as the period in which they were writing.

1 George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’ in Collected Essays, ed. by George Packer
(London: Harvill Secker, 2009), pp. 95-137, p. 128. Originally published in Inside the
Whale and Other Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940).
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Contents:
Literature Review 5
Introduction 15
1. Pound’s Moral Reading of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer
1.1 Purging the Literary Landscape: Pound’s essays and reviews (1905-1935) 29

1.2 ‘A Hierarchy of Values’: Pound’s ‘Review of Tropic of Cancer’ (1935) 72

2. Moral and Aesthetic Intersections between Pound and Miller
2.1 Monstrosity and the Aesthetics of Destitution: the anti-humanist reversal
in Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) 101
2.2 ‘Inside the whale’: ‘A world dominated by vision’ 143
2.3 ‘She functioned superbly’: Reimagining the dysfunctional in
Tropic of Cancer 164
2.4 The Attraction of the Blemish: Pound and Miller’s sexual aesthetics 184

3. ‘The Festival of Death’: Eschatology, Economics and Fascism
3.1 ‘The Last Four Things’: Inter-war eschatological obsessions 196
3.2 James Joyce and Henry Miller: ‘The retrospect’ vs. the ‘prospect’ 210
3.3 Miller’s Inferno: A Poundian economic reading of Tropic of Cancer 237
3.4 Leo Frobenius, Oswald Spengler and the Apocalyptic ‘Process’: cultural
morphological intersections between Pound and Miller 265
3.5 ‘The Last Book’: the ‘perceptual’ vs. the ‘historical’ apocalypse 282
Conclusion 300
Bibliography 319

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Literature review
My primary reading consists of a selection of Ezra Pound’s essays and manifesto
writings between 1909 and 1938 and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Max and the
White Phagocytes, two of his semi-autobiographical novels from the 1930s. Of Pound’s
essays, I will focus on his initially unpublished review of Tropic of Cancer, written in
1935, on ‘Joyce’ and ‘Ulysses’ - his essays on James Joyce’ value to English literature
in the 1910s – and Guide to Kulchur, his 1938 treatise on culture, politics and
economics. Pound’s review of Tropic of Cancer provides the basis for my re-reading of
Miller’s moral philosophy; the Joyce essays help me to delineate his principal
aesthetics of the 1910s; and Guide to Kulchur explains his application of these early
aesthetics to a conspiracy theory that connected impure literary expression to usury,
liberal democracy and a general decline of values in the Western world.
My secondary reading can be broken down into six main categories: a small body of
Miller criticism that reads him in the high modernist tradition; theoretical studies of
modernism – in particular a selection of books that provide definitions of ‘late’ or
‘minor’ modernisms which are applicable to Miller; Miller’s essays on art, literature
and philosophy from the 1940s to the 1960s; a substantial range of work on Pound as
a literary and economic commentator in the first half of the twentieth century; 1930s
and 1940s reviews of Miller’s novels that provide points of comparison with
Pound’s; and literary philosophical and theoretical writings that inform both
primary subjects.
There are very few studies of Miller in the context of Anglo-European modernism
and none at all that focus on the relationship between his and Pound’s writing. A
small clutch of texts have dealt with Miller specifically in the context of
psychoanalysis and Surrealism – Jane Nelson’s Form and Image in the Fiction of Henry
Miller (1975), Gay Louise Balliet’s Henry Miller and Surrealist Metaphor: Riding the
Ovarian Trolley (1996), James M. Decker’s Constructing the Self, rejecting modernity
(2005) and Caroline Blinder’s A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work
of Henry Miller (2000). These works provide interesting ideas as to Miller’s
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appropriation and reworking of André Breton’s automatic method and his position
within that modernist-related methodology. Besides Blinder, whose work has been
important to my research and whom I shall come on to shortly, these writers do little
in terms of locating Miller’s prose within the ideological or stylistic context of his
more celebrated high modernist predecessors and cotemporaries. Nevertheless, they
have been useful for their commentaries on Miller’s inheritance of Breton’s
aggressive stance against ‘literature’, an area I explore throughout my comparison of
Miller with Pound.
Of the even smaller group of critics who deal specifically with Miller in the context of
Anglo-European modernism, English academic Sarah Garland is the most relevant to
my study. Her 2010 essay, ‘The Dearest of Cemeteries’, is the only attempt to make a
sustained connection between Miller and Pound, identifying their shared interest in
the apocalyptic and the egomaniacal tone that results from this. I have found her
approach crucial for its understanding of the correspondence between Pound as co-
writer of the Vorticist manifestos and the autodidactic passages of Cancer. Moreover,
it has provided me with the foundations for my research into Miller and Pound as
adopters of eschatological language and theory in the 1930s – pointing the way to
many of the theorists I cite in Chapter Three, ‘’The Festival of Death’: Eschatology,
Economics and Fascism’. Treating Miller as a ‘magpie’, a collector of diffuse literary
ideas, tones and textures, Garland identifies Pound as one of many contributory
influences on his work.2 This topographical perspective has helped me to form my
own understanding of Miller’s position in relation to inter-war modernism, allowing
me to think about Miller as a ‘syncretic’ and ‘parodic’ appropriator of suspect
prophetic rhetoric.3 This thesis picks up many of the threads from Garland’s essay

2 Sarah Garland, Rhetoric and Excess: Style, Authority, and the Reader in Henry Miller’s
‘Tropic of Cancer’, Samuel Beckett’s ‘Murphy’, William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’, and
Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Ada or Ardor’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of East
Anglia, 2005), p. 17.
3 Sarah Garland, ‘The Dearest of Cemeteries’, European Journal of American Culture, 3rd
ser., 29 (2010), 197-215, p. 200.
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and develops them by narrowing the focus from a general study of Miller in the
context of ‘canonical high modernism’ to a direct comparison with Pound.4
Garland’s 2005 PhD thesis Rhetoric and Excess: Style, Authority, and the Reader in Henry
Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and
Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor deals more closely with Miller’s narrative style,
highlighting an aggressive dynamic between writer and reader that I use to connect
Miller with Pound. Similarly, Katy Masuga’s The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (2011)
uses Gilles Deleuze’s theory of ‘minor’ literature to present Miller as a covertly
antagonistic writer whose language and syntax is purposefully excessive and
frustrating, intended to draw attention to the impossibility of language as a stable
means of expressing reality. It is relevant to this study because its theoretical
discussion of Miller’s incendiary construction of sentences helps to inform and
consolidate my own ideas about his incendiary use of equally unbearable moral
positions to draw the reader’s attention to the problems inherent in ideology and
morality.
Though it does not refer to Pound, Blinder’s thesis Henry Miller’s Sexual Aesthetics: A
Comparative Analysis of Selected Twentieth-Century Influences on Henry Miller’s Writing
(1995) and her book A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry
Miller have been useful for their focus on morality in Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring
(1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Blinder’s translation and close analysis of the
essay ‘La Morale de Miller’, by French literary theorist Georges Bataille (1946)
informs my arguments on Miller’s use of violent and ostensibly anti-humanistic
language to arrive at a position of optimism and tolerance. It also provides a vital
counterpoint in my comparison of Miller and Pound’s approaches to expenditure,
both sexual and economic. My own analysis of Bataille plays an important part in the
thesis - I shall discuss his work in detail later on in this review – and Blinder’s
criticism has provided me with interesting angles from which to develop my own
ideas, particularly when it comes to the blurring of boundaries between radical
avant-gardist aesthetics and the totalising rhetoric of fascism.

4 Garland, ‘The Dearest of Cemeteries’, p. 200.
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To the same end, Gilles Mayne’s Eroticism in Georges Bataille and Henry Miller (2001)
presents Miller as a writer whose subversive project is disingenuous since it seeks to
replace one set of totalising values with another, more extreme and less accountable.
My conclusions about Miller’s rebellion against conventional conceptions of
humanism are tested against Mayne’s comparative analysis of Miller with Bataille as
well as Indrek Manniste’s more recent study, Henry Miller: The Inhuman Artist (2013).
While I agree with Mayne about the suspect overtones of Miller’s professedly
progressive program, and with Manniste about the importance of his self-
presentation as ‘inhuman’, I contend that Miller is more aware of his contradictions
and absurdities than these scholars allow for. Similarly, I take an interested but
cautious approach to work that deals enthusiastically with Miller’s sexual and
spiritual aesthetics – work by Kenneth Rexroth (‘The Reality of Henry Miller’, 1959),
Charles Glicksberg (The Sexual Revolution in Modern American Literature, 1970),
Norman Mailer (Genius and Lust, 1976) and Michael Woolf (‘Beyond Ideology: Kate
Millet and the case for Henry Miller’, 1992) – since I argue that Miller’s project relied
on a certain irreverence and self-deprecation about his purposes and ideas.
Besides Tropic of Cancer and Max and the White Phagocytes, I have found evidence of
Miller’s subversive moral code in his other semi-autobiographical novels of the 1930s
– Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Cancer’s prequel, Tropic of Capricorn (1939) – and
various essays he wrote between the late 1930s and the 1960s. Black Spring and Tropic
of Capricorn describe Miller’s early life in New York before his self-imposed exile as
artist in Paris and are mainly useful for the protests they contain against American
modernity and the restrictions of family and the workplace. For Miller’s explicit
theories about the artist’s role and the relationship between art and life my main
source has been the essay ‘Un Être Étoilique’. Written about his lover and literary
ally Anaïs Nin in 1939, it lays out his recommendations for a sane and healthy
approach to life, art and moral behaviour. Crucially, it contains his most explicit
statements on a new form of sympathy that takes count of the complexity of
pluralistic subjective experience. ‘An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere’ –
published in 1938 - and Time of the Assasins - his short study of the poet Artaud
Rimbaud from 1946 – develop these ideas by providing the philosophical grounding
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for Miller’s beliefs about the primacy of the excessive ‘monstrous’ individual over
the ‘timid’ collective.5 These beliefs are expanded on in various collections of Miller’s
correspondence with friends and literary allies – namely A Literate Passion: Letters of
Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller 1932-1953 (1988), Art and Outrage. A correspondence about
Henry Miller between A. Perlès and Lawrence Durrell (1959), Hamlet: The Michael Fraenkel
– Henry Miller Correspondence called HAMLET (1933) and Letters to Emil (1989). The
last of these, comprising of Miller letters from Paris to his childhood friend Emil
Schnellock, is particularly useful since he it contains his feelings about Tropic of
Cancer as it is being written.
In my attempts to place Miller within the wider historical context of Pound,
Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme’s modernising project, I have consulted Rod
Rosenquist’s survey, Modernism, The Market and the Institution of the New (2009).
Rosenquist provides the template for my understanding of Miller as a ‘late’
modernist, both indebted to and reactionary against the radical manifestos of the
‘men of 1914’.6 He has also helped me understand Miller’s contradictory desires to
reject and be included within the modernist canon as a distinctively ‘late’ modernist
characteristic. Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism by Richard Sheppard – another
overview of modernism cited throughout Garland’s ‘The Dearest of Cemeteries’ –
gives a good account of the evolution of ideas that took place between W.B Yeats,
Pound, T.S. Eliot and Joyce’s era of the 1910s and the 1930s when Miller’s Cancer
appeared. By the same token, Ihab Hassan’s The Literature of Silence and Frank
Kermode’s The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (both 1967) are
referred to in Chapter Three for their analysis of the ways in which apocalyptic ideas
and rhetoric manifested themselves in work by modernists before and after World
War Two.
K.K. Ruthven’s 1990 text Ezra Pound as Literary Critic has provided invaluable
guidance in my close analysis of Pound’s literary reviews between 1909 and 1938.

5 Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud by Henry Miller (New
York: New Directions, 1962 [orig. ed.: 1946]), p. 31.
6 Rod Rosenquist, Modernism, The Market and the Institution of the New (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 10.
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Ruthven’s analysis of Pound’s review work benefitted my study by its
uncomplicated, comprehensive approach and its methodical negotiation of
inconsistent terrain. He manages to piece together a coherent aesthetic and moral
theory from Pound’s constantly mutating and contradictory essays, building up a
picture of Pound as critic and literary ideologue that is convincingly supported by
primary evidence. Ezra Pound as Literary Critic has also been particularly useful for its
explanation of Pound’s complicated metamorphosis from literary critic interested in
championing truthful, ‘concrete’ literary expression to economic theorist who saw
writing as means of reflecting and realigning economic and social relations.
Hugh Kenner’s seminal 1972 text The Pound Era makes useful if partisan attempts to
explain the imagery at the core of Pound’s Imagist and Vorticist aesthetic and
political proscriptions. While these have helped me in my comparison of Pound and
Miller’s rhetorical modes, Kenner’s analysis - undertaken in a decade when his
subject’s pro-fascist wartime activities still rendered him unacceptable to Anglo-
American literary circles - is overly influenced by a desire to restore Pound’s
reputation. The counter-offensive efforts of critics like Kenner, Marshal McLuhan
(‘Pound’s Critical Prose’, 1949) and metaphysical philosopher Brian Soper (‘Ezra
Pound: Some Notes on his Philosophy’, 1950) – steeped in the notion of Pound’s
desire for understanding and communication - help illuminate the paradox of
Pound’s insistence on art that records ‘the full gamut of values’ and his increasingly
fierce intolerance towards people and groups who did not share his particular value
system.7
As Kenner, Marshal McLuhan and Soper all note, Pound’s ideas about order and
values are heavily influenced by his reading of the Ancient Chinese philosopher,
Confucius. For this reason, I refer to Pound’s 1928 translation of Confucius’ ‘Ta Hsio:
The Great Digest’, his 1937 essay ‘Immediate Need of Confucius’ and various of his
‘China Cantos’ throughout the thesis. Of the academics who have focused specifically on
this aspect of Pound’s aesthetic and moral approach I have found Ira B. Nadel’s 2003
essay ‘Constructing the Orient: Pound’s American Vision’ and Feng Lan’s 2005 study

7 Ezra Pound, ‘Review of Tropic of Cancer’, in Critical Essays on Henry Miller, ed. by
Ronald Gottesman (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1992), pp. 87-90, p. 88.
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