Was Henry Miller a good writer?
Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," now more than fifty years old, is one of those books that ignites an internal debate: What constitutes good writing? What qualities make a novel good, great, satisfactory or awful? Of course, with this particular book, one must ask: Is Henry Miller a good writer?
I want to strip the issue down to the essentials: I am not asking, in other words, whether Miller was pleasant company, nor whether he had healthy views about women. Put aside questions about the relationship between his writing and drinking, or whether he could have written “Tropic of Cancer” if he had been living not in Paris, but in Florida.
Did he produce good writing?
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
I read those words, and I think: This guy can write. This is good stuff. But I keep going, and a dozen or so pages in, and I start asking questions about good writing. What do we mean by “good”? What do we mean by “writing”?
Never has this question been asked as succinctly as Robert Adams put it in the New York Review of Books back in 1964. He was reviewing several novels one might describe as incendiary, including Hubert Selby Jr.'s “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and the incomprehensible “Nova Express” by William S. Burroughs. The first paragraph made me laugh out loud, but then it got me to thinking about a question that probably doesn’t occur to a lot of readers, and possibly more than a few writers. Here's the paragraph, with the author's own italics.
"A simple question comes out of reading this miscellaneous batch of very contemporary fiction: what is a book for? This sounds like a rhetorical query preliminary to belaboring some book that doesn’t fit in with the reviewer’s notion of what a book should be; but perhaps to it can be asked for its own sake. What is a book for?"
Who was the intended audience for “Tropic of Cancer”? Was it for people Miller had never met who would one day read it? Was it for Anais Nin, who in 1934 wrote in the book’s introduction that the book “goes to the roots and digs, under, for subterranean springs”? Was it for Miller’s circle of friends in Paris? Or did the act of writing it serve some therapeutic purpose for Miller alone?
After me, you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your r----m. You can s--t arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am f-----g you, Tania, so that you’ll stay f----d. And if you are afraid of being f----d publicly, I will f--k you privately. I will tear a few hairs from your c---- and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces …
Norman Mailer called “Tropic of Cancer” “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.” As if this were not enough praise, the cover of my copy features a blurb from the expatriate British writer Lawrence Durrell: “American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done.”
Okay: What did Miller do? True, like so many artists before him, he crashed through doors, permitting Grove Press to publish it in the United States only after a landmark legal victory, which, in turn, paved the way for others artists -- Burroughs, even George Carlin, etc. -- to knock down a few more. “Tropic of Cancer” elevated Miller -- who clearly reveled in the degradation of women -- to the status of a prophet of sexual freedom.
Armed with this information, are we getting closer to -- or are we straying from -- the question of whether Miller produced good writing?
Even within the seemingly narrow scope of that question, there is vast terrain. Because after all, we surely are talking about more than simply one’s ability to produce:
“ … grammatical unit of one or more words, bearing minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it, often preceded and followed in speech by pauses, having one of a small number of characteristic intonation patterns, and typically expressing an independent statement, question, request, command, etc. ….”
So consider: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and “Who is John Galt?” are both good sentences. Maybe even equally good sentences. But is there any serious person who will argue, with a straight face, that Ayn Rand was a better writer than William Shakespeare? Or that she deserves to even be mentioned in the same sentence with him?
This is obviously a minefield.
I want to strip the issue down to the essentials: I am not asking, in other words, whether Miller was pleasant company, nor whether he had healthy views about women. Put aside questions about the relationship between his writing and drinking, or whether he could have written “Tropic of Cancer” if he had been living not in Paris, but in Florida.
Did he produce good writing?
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
I read those words, and I think: This guy can write. This is good stuff. But I keep going, and a dozen or so pages in, and I start asking questions about good writing. What do we mean by “good”? What do we mean by “writing”?
Never has this question been asked as succinctly as Robert Adams put it in the New York Review of Books back in 1964. He was reviewing several novels one might describe as incendiary, including Hubert Selby Jr.'s “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and the incomprehensible “Nova Express” by William S. Burroughs. The first paragraph made me laugh out loud, but then it got me to thinking about a question that probably doesn’t occur to a lot of readers, and possibly more than a few writers. Here's the paragraph, with the author's own italics.
"A simple question comes out of reading this miscellaneous batch of very contemporary fiction: what is a book for? This sounds like a rhetorical query preliminary to belaboring some book that doesn’t fit in with the reviewer’s notion of what a book should be; but perhaps to it can be asked for its own sake. What is a book for?"
Who was the intended audience for “Tropic of Cancer”? Was it for people Miller had never met who would one day read it? Was it for Anais Nin, who in 1934 wrote in the book’s introduction that the book “goes to the roots and digs, under, for subterranean springs”? Was it for Miller’s circle of friends in Paris? Or did the act of writing it serve some therapeutic purpose for Miller alone?
After me, you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your r----m. You can s--t arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am f-----g you, Tania, so that you’ll stay f----d. And if you are afraid of being f----d publicly, I will f--k you privately. I will tear a few hairs from your c---- and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces …
Norman Mailer called “Tropic of Cancer” “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.” As if this were not enough praise, the cover of my copy features a blurb from the expatriate British writer Lawrence Durrell: “American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done.”
Okay: What did Miller do? True, like so many artists before him, he crashed through doors, permitting Grove Press to publish it in the United States only after a landmark legal victory, which, in turn, paved the way for others artists -- Burroughs, even George Carlin, etc. -- to knock down a few more. “Tropic of Cancer” elevated Miller -- who clearly reveled in the degradation of women -- to the status of a prophet of sexual freedom.
Armed with this information, are we getting closer to -- or are we straying from -- the question of whether Miller produced good writing?
Even within the seemingly narrow scope of that question, there is vast terrain. Because after all, we surely are talking about more than simply one’s ability to produce:
“ … grammatical unit of one or more words, bearing minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it, often preceded and followed in speech by pauses, having one of a small number of characteristic intonation patterns, and typically expressing an independent statement, question, request, command, etc. ….”
So consider: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and “Who is John Galt?” are both good sentences. Maybe even equally good sentences. But is there any serious person who will argue, with a straight face, that Ayn Rand was a better writer than William Shakespeare? Or that she deserves to even be mentioned in the same sentence with him?
This is obviously a minefield.
