Arthur Hoyle's Blog

War is much in the news these days, to the great distress of the world. On every continent on Earth some form of violence is expressing our species capacity for hatred and cruelty. What did Henry Miller think of war and how it could be avoided?
Miller regarded war as the ultimate expression of anti-life. In the midst of World War Two, at the urging of his devoted follower Bern Porter, Miller wrote a pamphlet titled Murder the Murderer that set forth his position. Not surprisingly, Miller’s views on war reflect his belief in the inviolability of the individual human conscience, and his condemnation of mass movements. War results because men surrender their individuality to the will of the herd⎯a herd that is manipulated to pursue the interests of a privileged few.
Murder the Murderer has two parts. Part I, “An Open Letter to Fred Perlès,” was written in 1941 but never sent. It was Miller’s response to a letter from his Paris friend Alfred Perlès, who had moved to England, become a British citizen, and joined the army. Perlès faulted Miller for his “detachment” in taking an American driving tour while his country was at war. Miller replied that the ultimate authority of the individual conscience justifies his detachment from state sanctioned mass murder.
Miller’s argument against involvement in the war effort is based on his belief that wars are fought to advance the economic interests of a vested few whose will to power denies the individual his freedom of choice. “It is the minority which sponsors war, and this minority always represents the vested interests . . . The vast majority of people in the world to-day not only believe but know the sole reason for war, in this day and age, is economic rivalry.” Miller insists on the right of the individual to obey his own conscience and refuse involvement in war. “What I protest against, and what I will never admit to be right, is forcing a man against his will and his conscience to sacrifice his life for a cause which he does not believe in.”
Miller asserts that his detachment, far from being a fault, is actually the highest form of virtue, practiced by the world’s greatest spiritual leaders. “The figures who have most influenced the world all practiced detachment: I mean men like Laotse, Gautama the Buddha, Jesus Christ, St. Francis of Assisi, and such like.” Miller traces his own detachment to his stay in Greece just before the outbreak of the war. “The visit fortified me inwardly to a degree beyond anything I had ever known before . . . In Greece I came to grips with myself and made my peace with the world . . . I succeeded in detaching myself completely . . . I finally became a citizen of the world.”
Miller made this supra-nationalism into an ideal world order that would come about only through the effort of each individual to become free, to self-actualize. “There can be no civilized effort until the organism embodying the ideal becomes world-wide . . . The fact that we are all alike before God has to be demonstrated in practice.”
In Part I of Murder the Murderer Miller defends his detachment and disengagement from the war on the principle of individual freedom. In Part II, he argues for the supremacy of individual freedom, whether of conscience or of expression, over state authority, and implies that militarism and censorship of his work emanate from the same repressive animus that dominates American life. He cites distinguished American thinkers such as Thoreau and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in support of his position. Thoreau: “There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.” Brandeis: “No danger flowing from free speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom.”
Miller saw America’s willingness to go to war and its willingness to censor free speech as driven by a deeply rooted impulse towards conformity and control that springs from greed and fear. “We are paying now for the crimes committed by our ancestors. Our forefathers when first they came to this country, were hailed as gods. To our disgrace, they behaved as demons. They asked for gold instead of grace . . . We have emphasized gold instead of opportunity . . . Power and riches, not for all America⎯that would be bad enough!⎯but for the few.”
Miller refused to participate in a society that suppresses individual liberty. He accepted his role as an outsider, one of a small number of people⎯like Thoreau, or D. H. Lawrence, or Christ⎯whose ability to self-govern eliminates their need for, or obligation to, society. “Men of good will need no government to regulate their affairs. In every age there is a very small minority which lives without thought of, or desire for, government . . . They lie outside the cultural pattern of the times . . . They are evolved beings.” This statement brings into view Miller’s anarchism, a philosophy he adopted at the age of twenty after hearing a lecture in San Diego, California by the anarchist Emma Goldman. Miller viewed himself as being among the spiritually elite of his day, a man in possession of himself, an adept who is attuned to a higher moral order than the vast majority of men. And until all men become adept at living war will not cease. Christ is Miller’s touchstone. “The Christian world has welcomed every excuse to fight in the name of Christ who came to bring peace on earth. There can be no end to this repetitious pattern until each and every one of us become as Christ, until belief and devotion transform our words into deeds and thus make of myth reality.”

Henry Miller was one of those rare artists, like the English Romantic poet William Blake, to have achieved mastery in two media, language and paint. Though better known for his novels and essay collections, especially the notorious Tropic of Cancer, Miller was also a skilled and devoted watercolorist who painted throughout his writing career and beyond it. Unlike writing, which Miller considered work, his job, he regarded painting as play, a form of relaxation, a way to refresh and recharge his imagination. But watercolor painting also served Miller in a number of practical ways. When short of funds, as he often was, he used his watercolors to barter for services, such as dentistry, and goods, such as household supplies and food. Sales of watercolors at his numerous shows supplemented his slender royalty income from his published books. He also gave watercolors to people who had done him favors or sent him unsolicited presents or cash. After his banned Paris books were finally published in the U.S. during the 1960s and ran immediately to the top of the bestseller lists, Miller, on the advice of his tax attorney, used his watercolors to shelter his income by donating them to museums.
In The Paintings of Henry Miller, a collection of four-color plates of Miller’s watercolors accompanied by several Miller essays on the art of watercolor painting, Miller tells us that he began to paint around the year 1928 when he was living in Brooklyn and struggling to find himself as a writer. His interest in painting had been stirred by watching his close friend Emil Schnellock at work in his Manhattan studio and listening to Emil discourse on various artists and their methods. Over the years of his evolution as an artist, Miller would write frequently to Emil, sharing intimate details about his goals and methods in both painting and writing.
One night as Miller was walking home with a friend from an evening of unsuccessful panhandling, they stopped to study a reproduction of a painting by Turner on display in a department store window. Fired by the image, Miller went home and began to paint in a kind of frenzy, using whatever materials were at hand, including old coffee grounds. Painting gave him a creative outlet from his frustrations as a blocked writer. Though Miller never had formal instruction in art beyond a class in high school⎯the teacher found Miller utterly without talent (“I was an aesthetic leper, so to speak,” Miller remarks) ⎯the experience of painting had a tonic effect on him. “I remember well the transformation which took place in me when first I began to view the world with the eyes of a painter. The most familiar things, objects which I had gazed at all my life, became an unending source of wonder, and with wonder, of course, affection.” This discovery led Miller to formulate the credo by which he approached not only painting but all forms of art: “To paint is to love again.”
Once in Paris, Miller continued to paint and made the acquaintance of many prominent artists whom he met in the bohemian cafés of Montparnasse: Zadkine, Max Ernst, Soutine, Tihanyi, and above all, Hans Reichel, from whom he took lessons.
Miller never became an accomplished technical painter. He admitted that he had no aptitude for drawing, his figures and shapes looking as though a child had lined them. He avoided putting ears on human heads because he could not draw them. But he was a gifted colorist, and painted fearlessly, uninhibited by his lack of mechanical skill. In an essay he titled “The Angel is My Watermark” that was published in Paris in 1936 in his book Black Spring, Miller describes his anarchic method of composition. He launches into his watercolor without plan or design, proceeding instinctively and impulsively. He begins to draw a horse, working from his memory of Etruscan horses he has seen on ceramics in the Louvre. The horse soon mutates into a zebra and finally is obliterated altogether as other shapes are formed by Miller’s truant pencil. But Miller is not dismayed by his inability draw, to produce images that are representational. He glories in it. “When I get into a predicament of this sort I know I can extricate myself when it comes time to apply the color. The drawing is simply an excuse for the color. . .” What allows Miller to “succeed” as a painter, to produce works of art that satisfy him and give him pleasure, is that he does not fear failure. He incorporates his mistakes, his false starts, and builds on them until he achieves the desired result. Miller finds a larger life lesson in this process. “And this is precisely the ritual of life which is practiced by the man who evolves. He doesn’t go back, figuratively, to correct his errors and defects; he transposes and converts them into virtues.”
Beyond discoursing on technique and methods, Miller reflects on the significance of the act of painting and the aesthetic of the watercolor. “It’s only when we look with the eyes of love that we see what the painter sees,” Miller writes. “What the painter sees he is duty bound to share.” Though Miller does use his paintings as a form of currency, selling them or using them to barter, he derives the greatest pleasure from simply giving them away. When he was trying to obtain a pardon for a reformed criminal serving a life sentence in Missouri State Penitentiary for repeated armed robbery convictions, Miller sent watercolors to the warden of the prison, who hung them on the walls of his office. The convict was pardoned.
Miller also muses on the nature of the watercolor, as distinct from other paint media. “The watercolor has affinities with the sonnet, or the haiku, rather than the jeremiad. It captures the flux and essence, the flavor and perfume, rather than the substance.”
Miller’s paintings are easy to look at, bold and striking, often bringing forth a smile of delight from the viewer. Themes and patterns recur in ever changing variations. Though he confesses no skill at portraiture, many of his paintings depict the faces of men and women⎯whether the subjects were people he knew or simply imagined makes no difference. They all look vaguely alike in shape. What distinguishes them is color. Miller likes to place strong colors side by side⎯orange and black, red and blue, yellow and green⎯often in the same painting. The effect is of richness and exuberance. He uses simple, roughly drawn geometric shapes⎯squares, rectangles, circles, cones, crescents⎯to suggest forms. Forms he likes are birds, houses, sailboats, and flowers. He spices the paintings with plain symbols⎯asterisks, Xs, Os, the Star of David, musical notations (sharps and flats), words. The cumulative effect is both charming and gentle on the eye. His favorite image is the clown, an archetypal self-portrait.
Miller learned to paint by studying the work of other painters, masters of the medium. His acknowledged sources include Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, as well as Turner, Seurat, and Rouault. He notes that many great painters, such as Vincent Van Gogh, were also gifted writers, and great writers, such as Goethe and Victor Hugo, also expressed themselves through graphic arts. “When one is an artist all mediums open up,” Miller observes. “No one medium is sufficient to express the wealth of feeling which burdens the soul of an artist.”

After Henry Miller married his second wife June Mansfield and, at her urging, gave up his job as the employment manager of Western Union, he vowed never again to hold a job, never again to march in lockstep with the rest of humanity. Writing would be his work, his career, and he would scavenge and scam, beg and borrow (but not steal), to keep himself afloat. And with the exception of a brief employment with the city parks department of New York during the 1920s, a hastily abandoned position teaching English at a lycée in Dijon, France, and a short stint as a proofreader at the Herald Tribune in Paris, Miller stuck to his vow. Though Miller had been writing full time since the mid 1920s, it was not until he began receiving royalties from Europe in the 1940s that he could support himself, barely, from his writing. His financial mainstay during this period of extended poverty was Anäis Nin. But he also had a network of male friends who, over the years, helped him in a variety of ways: by giving him emotional and psychological support through their affirmations of belief in his writing, by picking up tabs at cafés and restaurants, by serving him meals in their homes, by letting him bunk in their apartments and hotel rooms, by providing needed services he could not afford to pay for, by publishing and distributing his writing at their own expense.
Miller’s oldest and closest friend was his Brooklyn boyhood chum Emil Schnellock, a painter who became an art instructor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was Schnellock who gave Miller ten dollars at the moment of his departure for France, his only stake as he boarded the ship in New York. It was Schnellock to whom Miller wrote long letters on Paris café stationery describing his life in France. Passages from these letters Miller transferred verbatim into Tropic of Cancer. And it was Schnellock to whom Miller wrote about watercolor painting and the meaning of living one’s life as an artist.
Shortly after arriving in Paris, Miller reconnected with Alfred Perlès, an Austrian expatriate whom he had met on a previous trip to Paris in 1928 with June. Perlès was a true bohemian, a novelist himself, eking out a living as a journalist for the Herald Tribune, and mingling with other artists at the Montparnasse cafés. Perlès covered Miller’s tabs at the Dôme and the Rotonde, and let Miller sleep in his shabby hotel room while he was at work, giving Miller a place to rest and to write. Perlès later wrote My Friend Henry Miller, a flattering tribute to Miller’s talent and character.
Another important literary friend from the Paris years was Lawrence Durrell, the British author of the highly regarded Alexandria Quartet. Durrell was living on Corfu and wrote Miller an admiring letter after reading Tropic of Cancer. Miller replied, and a friendship and correspondence that lasted until Miller’s death in 1980 was born. Miller shared with Durrell both his aspirations as a writer as well as intimate details of his personal life and emotional struggles. In 1959, Durrell edited The Henry Miller Reader, an anthology of Miller’s writing that did not include any obscene passages from the banned Paris books.
A surprising friendship developed between Miller and Huntington Cairns, the government lawyer who censored Miller’s obscene books and prevented their publication and distribution in the United States. Cairns was a literate man who recognized the artistic intentions behind Miller’s use of obscene language to create disturbing effects in the reader. But he was also a lawyer serving the Bureau of Customs and he measured Miller’s words against the prevailing obscenity standards of the US courts. He kept Miller’s books on “the list,” but privately he advised Miller how to overcome the ban. He also arranged a show of Miller’s watercolors in Washington, and provided Miller with secretarial services, storage space for papers, and free legal advice. Miller and Cairns corresponded for almost thirty years, until the Paris books were finally published and accepted in the United States.
Two other allies from Miller’s Paris years should not be forgotten. Michael Fraenkel, another American expatriate, gave Miller shelter at his comfortable Villa Seurat apartment. But more importantly, he pushed Miller into adopting the clownish voice and anarchic attitude that pervades Tropic of Cancer. “Write as you speak, write as you live,” urged Fraenkel, and Miller took his advice. Later, Fraenkel published a lengthy correspondence they exchanged about Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Richard Osborn, a young attorney and aspiring writer who worked at the same bank in Paris as Nin’s husband Hugo Guiler, introduced Miller to Nin. He also let Miller stay at his elegant apartment on Rue Bartholdi and put “pin money” on Miller’s typewriter each morning before leaving for work. Osborn fled France to escape a romantic entanglement with a French woman of ill repute, an episode that Miller treated with Rabelasian humor in Tropic of Cancer. Miller stayed in touch with Osborn after he moved back to Connecticut to live with his mother, and arranged for publication of a poem Osborn wrote.
After he returned to the United States in 1940, Miller lived for a time in a community near the University of California at Los Angeles that was popular with artists and academics. There he was reconnected with Lawrence Powell, the UCLA librarian and book lover whom he had met in Dijon during his abbreviated teaching appointment. Because of his friendship with Powell, Miller gave the bulk of his personal papers to UCLA, then persuaded Anäis Nin to deposit her papers there as a companion collection. Powell also helped Miller by sending him copies of books he needed to research The Books in My Life, his tribute to the writers who had influenced him. Later, Powell introduced Miller to Jay Martin, Miller’s first biographer. Miller resisted the book, and scolded Powell for encouraging it.
The facilitator of Miller’s arrangement with UCLA was Bern Porter, one of Miller’s most dedicated admirers and supporters. He was an advanced physicist who knew Einstein and had been tapped to work with J. Robert Oppenheimer on The Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Porter opposed the application of scientific knowledge to the machinery of warfare, and sought to put science in the service of art. He approached Miller in Los Angeles with proposals to publish and disseminate Miller’s work, including both his watercolors and his pacifist views. He also compiled and edited a book of tributes to Miller titled The Happy Rock that included essays by Durrell, Schnellock, and Fraenkel, among many others. Porter's publishing ventures, though well intentioned, put him into debt. When Miller learned that Porter, citing the costs, had not given courtesy copies of The Happy Rock to its contributors, he broke with him.
Miller attracted young men disenchanted with the direction of American life. One such was Judson Crews, a disaffected Word War Two soldier who in 1943 made a pilgrimage to Miller’s Beverly Glen residence in Los Angeles. He had read Miller while an undergraduate at Baylor University in Texas and was drawn to Miller’s anarchism and pacifism. After his medical discharge from the army, Crews returned to Texas to resume his studies in literature and sociology. He operated a small press and bookstore through which he disseminated Miller’s work. He followed Miller to Big Sur, spent a year there, and wrote a book called The Brave Wild Coast: A Year with Henry Miller.
Through Porter, Miller was introduced to George Leite, a young radical living in Berkeley, California. Leite had been expelled from UC Berkeley for refusing to take a required defense course. Supporting his wife and their small daughter by driving a taxi, Leite had started an avant-garde literary periodical titled Circle to which Miller submitted articles. He also harbored grandiose ideas to publish not only Tropic of Cancer, but also the diaries of Anäis Nin. These plans came to naught, and Leite, after briefly moving his family down to Big Sur to be near Miller, suffered a physical and nervous breakdown from drug use and was admitted to Napa State Hospital. He recovered, to become a high school math teacher.
Another ally who came to Miller’s rescue in a time of need was Walker Winslow. Winslow was a recovering alcoholic and writer who had worked at the Menninger Foundation in Kansas and had been contracted by a New York publishing house to write a biography of Menninger. Winslow had met Miller while living briefly in Big Sur as Miller’s neighbor at Anderson Creek, a bohemian enclave not far from the sulfur springs that became the hallmark of Esalen. In 1951 Miller’s third wife left him to live with another man and acceded to Miller’s plea to give him custody of their two young children, ages six and three. Miller was soon overwhelmed with the task of caring for them and asked Winslow, who was looking for a cheap and secluded place to write, to help him. Winslow moved into Miller’s small studio on Partington Ridge, but soon the two men realized they were in over their heads. Winslow persuaded Miller to return the children to their mother, allowing Miller to return to his typewriter. Miller gave this episode humorous treatment in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
The most devoted and long-standing of Miller’s followers was Emil White. Emil was born in Central Europe, the son of a strict orthodox Jew named Wieselmann. After his family fled to Vienna to escape the horrors of World War One, Emil struck out on his own, first to Switzerland, then to Paris. He immigrated to New York and found work as a messenger at Western Union, under Miller’s supervision, but lacked the English skills to hold the job. He eventually moved to Chicago, and during World War Two he began reading Miller’s books aloud at meetings of radical political groups. He would pass the hat for Miller and send the collection to him in Big Sur. The two men reconnected while Miller was visiting Chicago, and Miller subsequently invited Emil to join him in Big Sur. Emil came, and took on the role of man Friday. He helped Miller with his extensive correspondence and the daily chores of survival. In return, Miller encouraged Emil to become a painter, which he did, producing works of startling beauty executed in a detailed primitive style. Emil remained in Big Sur for the rest of his life and bequeathed his home on Highway One to become the Henry Miller Memorial Library.

As is the case with many men, any discussion of Henry Miller’s relationship with women, both in his life and in his work, must begin with his mother. Henry’s relationship with Louise Miller shaped his character and his sensibility as a writer, predisposing his relationships with the women who became his lovers and wives, underpinning his literary attitudes, and influencing his treatment of women and sex in his fiction.
Miller’s parents, on both sides, were second-generation German immigrants whose forbears had come to America before the outbreak of the Civil War. Louise came from damaged stock. Her mother was institutionalized when Louise was a girl of twelve or thirteen. Her older sister Emilia was mentally incompetent, and in later life was also “put away,” an episode that Miller poignantly recounts in his essay “The Tailor Shop.” As a young girl, Louise had become responsible for maintaining order in her household while her father Valentin Nieting supported the family as a tailor. Her humorless, autocratic, tyrannical management of Henry’s home can be traced, in part, to her childhood struggle to manage a chaotic domestic scene poisoned by mental illness.
Louise and her husband Heinrich, also a tailor, were conventional middle class Americans, aspiring in the turbulent world of the Gilded Age to “keep up” by providing a home with material comforts and other signs of respectability. Louise was determined to pass these aspirations along to Henry, but her erratic behavior, her henpecking of his soft-hearted father, her unpredictable outbursts of violent rage, made those aspirations suspect. When Henry’s sister Lauretta was born and quickly showed signs of being mentally defective (she never developed mentally beyond the age of nine), Louise became abusive trying to force her to be “normal.” His horror at his mother’s treatment of Lauretta⎯rapping her knuckles with a wooden ruler when she failed to perform even the simplest mathematical sums, slapping her face when she mistook salt for sugar⎯revolted him against her and made him question the conventional, bourgeois values she espoused.
In a long essay on the French poet Arthur Rimbaud that he wrote during the 1940s, Miller remarked the similarity between Rimbaud’s cold, unaffectionate mother and his own: “Like Madame Rimbaud, my mother was the Northern type, cold, critical, proud, unforgiving, puritanical . . . My natural temperament was that of a kind, joyous, open-hearted individual⎯as a youngster, I was often referred to as ‘an angel.’ But the demon of revolt had taken possession of me at a very early age. It was my mother who implanted it in me. It was against her, against all that she represented, that I directed my uncontrolled energy.” Much later in his life, his fame as a writer established, Miller returned to this theme in a short essay published in the collection Sextet. “When I finally found the courage to write what I’d been storing up for years, it came pouring out into one long relentless tirade. Beginning with the earliest memories of my mother, I had saved up enough hatred, enough anger, to fill a hundred books.”
Opposed to Miller’s demonic image of his mother was an idealized image of woman that Miller had formed as an adolescent around a girl who lived some distance away from him, in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Her name was Cora Seward. Though they rarely met and never dated, Miller at age sixteen developed an obsessive fascination for her that pulled him out of his house on Decatur Street every evening after dinner. He would make the hour-long walk to Cora’s house on Davoe Street, then stand outside gazing through the windows hoping to catch sight of her. He followed this routine for years, never working up the courage to mount the front porch and ring the doorbell.
Late in his life, Miller wrote about his unrealized love for Cora in Book of Friends. “It was Love I felt for Cora, love with a capital L that reached the skies.” In another essay published in Sextet when Miller was eighty-five, he reports a dream that placed him in Devachan, the temporary resting place where souls reside until they return to Earth in a reincarnated form. Miller encounters his dread mother there, but finds her transformed into the loving, affectionate woman he wanted her to be. He asks Louise if she has seen Cora, and is told that Cora has already returned to Earth. In reality, when Miller was twenty-two and working in his father’s tailor shop, Cora had married a scientist.
Miller graduated from high school in 1909, enrolled briefly in the City College of New York, then dropped out and took a clerking job at a cement company. He began an affair with Pauline Chouteau, a thirty-seven year old divorcee with a son named Georgie about Henry’s age. They first met at the home of Pauline’s friend Louise, who was paying Miller thirty-five cents to give piano lessons to her daughter. Pauline would stay through the lessons, and Miller would escort her to her home on Decatur Street, a few blocks from his parents’ house. There they would make love. Miller moved in with her briefly, but quickly found their relationship troubling. Pauline was old enough to be his mother, and his rivalry with Georgie, who suffered from tuberculosis, for her attention and affection, tormented him with guilt. Then Pauline became pregnant, but miscarried in her seventh month. To escape his relationship with her without actually breaking it off, Miller decided to move to California to take up the life of a cowboy. Able to find work there only as a fruit picker, he returned after nine months and began serving an apprenticeship in his father’s tailor shop. He also resumed his relationship with Pauline. In the winter of 1914, in the kitchen of his parents’ house, Miller told his mother that he intended to marry Pauline. Louise brandished a kitchen knife at Miller, vowing to use it on him if he married Pauline. Miller was unnerved by this apparent castration threat with its incestuous undertone. No marriage plans ensued.

Next: Henry Miller’s Women, Part Two: Orgasm

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Henry Miller was a devotee of astrology. He employed astrological imagery in his writing for expressive purposes, and he relied on astrology when faced with important decisions in his personal life. Miller viewed astrology metaphorically, as a system of correspondences between the inner world of the psyche and the soul and the outer world of the planets and the stars⎯between the microcosm and the macrocosm. And because Miller wished to lead an astrological life marrying his own personal rhythms to the larger rhythms of the universe, he looked to astrology for guidance through personal difficulties.
Miller’s interest in astrology as a literary device is evidenced by the titles of two of his most famous books, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. These titles reference both geographical zones on the planet Earth as well as signs of the zodiac. As he worked on Capricorn in Paris, he wrote to his lover Anaïs Nin explaining the astrological significance behind these books. “For me Cancer means the crab⎯the creature which could move in any direction. It is the sign in the zodiac for the poet⎯the halfway station in the round of realization. Opposite Cancer in the Zodiac is Capricorn, the house in which I am born, which is religious and represents renaissance in death. Cancer also means for me the disease of civilization, the extreme point of realization along the wrong path⎯hence the necessity to change one’s course and begin all over again. Cancer then is the apogee of death in life, as Capricorn is of life in death.”
Nin introduced Miller to Conrad Moricand, a famous Swiss astrologer living in Paris. Moricand cast Miller’s birth chart, then wrote a lengthy interpretation of it, describing Miller as “an angel surrounded by flames.” In 1939, shortly before he left France for a short stay in Greece, Miller read The Astrology of Personality by Dane Rudhyar and was profoundly affected by it, later listing it in The Books in My Life among the one hundred books that had influenced him most. Miller began a correspondence with Rudhyar, whose insights into Miller’s dysfunctional relationship with his mother deepened his belief in the validity of astrology as a tool for understanding the self.
Some years later, while Miller was living in Big Sur, California and working on his novel trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (another title rich in occult symbolism), he received a letter from the astrologer Sydney Omarr, who had noted the frequency of astrological imagery in Miller’s books and proposed writing a study of it. “To me you are a symbol of the direct tie between literature and astrology, which first became evident during the Renaissance,” Omarr wrote.
Omarr asked Miller for cooperation in writing his study, to be called Henry Miller, His World of Urania. In his forward to the book Miller wrote, “What interests me primarily in astrology is its holistic aspect. The man who is whole sees whole, and for him the universe is an ever expanding universe, that is, a universe more infinite to be part of. . . Only astrology can reveal this potential reality which is man’s kingdom⎯or the garden of fulfillment.” Elsewhere in the forward Miller warned against using astrology as a predictive tool: “It is not to discover what is going to ‘happen’ to us, it is not to forestall the blows of fate, that we should look to our horoscopes. A chart, when properly read, should enable one to understand the over-all pattern of one’s life.”
But despite this disclaimer, Miller did turn to astrology to help him cope with stressful periods in his life. In the winter of 1956 Miller traveled from Big Sur to New York to attend his dying mother. Distressed by her stubborn resistance to his efforts to help her, and alarmed by the prospect of having to care for his mentally retarded sister Lauretta, Miller wrote to Omarr wondering when the ordeal would end. Omarr answered that the position of Mercury in the heavens would soon bring relief. Miller’s mother died six weeks later and, unable to arrange care for Lauretta in New York, he brought her back with him to Big Sur.
Another critical juncture for Miller occurred in 1961, the year Tropic of Cancer was finally published in the United States. Miller had begun an affair with Renate Gerhardt, a German woman from Hamburg who was translating Nexus. She was a widow in her late thirties with two teenage sons. He wanted to move to Europe to start a new life with her. But he was conflicted about leaving his own two teenage children behind in California. As he drove around Europe looking for a suitable place to settle but never finding it, he became despondent and consulted a woman astrologer in Switzerland for advice where to look. She suggested Portugal, so Miller immediately flew to Lisbon. But when Portugal also disappointed him, Miller nearly had a nervous breakdown and abandoned the idea of making a life with Renate.
Miller’s interest in astrology is an important clue to his mission as a writer. For many years he contemplated writing a purely astrological work to be called Draco and the Ecliptic. Omarr explains the significance of Draco: “For the esoteric astrologer a tremendous idea lay behind the myth of the Dragon, which was called the thirteenth House of the Zodiac. For the Chaldeans the Dragon was the first created being; it was through the Dragon in the sky that man gained admittance to the ‘heaven beyond heaven’. . . The Dragon which creeps through the fence into Paradise is the same as the sage who liberates himself from the thralls of destiny, the same as Buddha attaining Nirvana.”
Miller saw in Draco a symbol of escape from personal history and from human history into the “heaven beyond heaven.” That he never wrote the book may signify that Miller never attained the state of human perfection that he sought.

From the date of publication in Paris of his breakout novel Tropic of Cancer, the American author Henry Miller faced a career long struggle against the censorship and suppression of his most important works. Although he enjoyed a brief period of celebrity and notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s after his banned books were finally published in the US, today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains a marginalized and largely forgotten American writer. This despite the fact that Miller was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and provocative authors whose writing and literary example influenced many well-known writers who followed him, including Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Norman Mailer, Phillip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Theroux, and Erica Jong, not to mention such pop culture icons as Bob Dylan and the Beatles.
Miller’s battle with censorship began as soon as Tropic of Cancer was issued by Obelisk Press in 1934. The book jacket was wrapped with a warning that read, “NOT TO BE IMPORTED INTO THE UNITED STATES OR GREAT BRITAIN.” Even in free- thinking Paris, bookstores sold the novel under the counter. As word spread, copies were gobbled up by American tourists and smuggled into the United States disguised under dust jackets from other books. Miller mailed copies of the book to prominent American literary figures hoping for reviews and word of mouth that would announce his arrival as an author. (Tropic of Cancer was Miller’s first published book, although he had been writing steadily for more than ten years.)
One of the copies of the book that Miller sent to an American friend was intercepted by a Customs official and ended up on the desk of Huntington Cairns, a young Baltimore attorney who served as a legal advisor to the US Treasury Department. Cairns, a literate man who counted among his friends H.L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, read the book and, with some reluctance, banned it. Cairns recognized the literary merit of Tropic of Cancer, but was certain that under prevailing standards of decency, it could not be admitted. Tropic of Cancer was obscene because it brought into public view subjects and language that society wished to keep hidden.
Cairns discussed the Miller dilemma with Mencken, who wrote to Miller about Cairns’ admiration for the book and the legal reasoning behind its censorship. Miller then wrote to Cairns expressing his understanding of the predicament that Cairns faced. A thirty-year friendship was sparked. Cairns advised Miller that in order to overcome the ban, he must build a reputation in America as an author of recognized literary merit, such as James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence enjoyed. Ulysses had been admitted, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover would follow. Cairns offered to help Miller establish that reputation, and set about enlisting respected American critics like Edmund Wilson (who had written a favorable review of Cancer) in Miller’s cause. But although Miller’s reputation as a literary artist grew with the publication in America of less controversial works such as The Colossus of Maroussi and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Cairns never became confident that Miller could pass the smell test of literary respectability in American courts, and so he placed all of Miller’s major autobiographical novels⎯Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus⎯on the list of banned books. All of these titles⎯covering the years 1936 to 1959, Miller’s most productive period⎯were originally published in France, in English.
Miller’s banned books were not published in the United States until 1961. By then he was seventy years old and pretty much written out. The literary uproar lasted three years, put Miller’s books on bestseller lists, brought him fame and, for the first time in his life, financial security. But though the US Supreme Court ruled in June 1964 that Miller’s banned books were not obscene, Miller drew no satisfaction from this finding because he knew that American readers were consuming his books for their sensationalistic elements and missing the liberating message of deliverance from hypocrisy and shame that lay behind them. In a 1972 interview with Digby Diehl published in the Los Angeles Times Miller confessed, “More and more I’ve grown disgusted with my readers. I revealed everything about myself, and I find that they’re interested in this sensational life. But I was trying to give them more than that.” What he was trying to give us through his writing and his example was the path to individual freedom⎯spiritual freedom, not political freedom⎯a path that must be followed into the dark depths of the soul if one is to ascend to the realm of the angels.
Miller’s star burned brightly and briefly in America, then burned out. Norman Mailer and Erica Jong attempted to revive his reputation and defend him against misperceptions of his literary mission and accomplishments, but he has been denied his rightful place in the American pantheon. He has been excluded from anthologies of twentieth century American literature, even though there are numerous examples of his more chaste writing⎯“The Tailor Shop” and “Reunion in Brooklyn” spring immediately to mind⎯that display his literary gifts without the slightest possibility of offense. Yet lesser writers, such as Kerouac, are anthologized. As a consequence, young readers are not exposed to Miller in their high school or college English literature courses. They are left to find him on their own.
Why read Miller now? His voice is as fresh and personal as when he wrote his first letter to a Brooklyn friend. You will feel as you read Miller that you are in company with a man who has acquired wisdom through suffering, that he is sharing his experience with you out of love. You will know you are in the presence of a spirit who was willing to embrace life at both its darkest and brightest extremes. His message of self-realization as the goal of life is timeless.

One of my objectives in writing a biography of Henry Miller was to bring young new readers to his books. Last night, at an author talk I gave at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, this happened right before my eyes. At the conclusion of my talk, a young woman sitting just to my left asked what Miller book I would suggest. I recommended The Colossus of Maroussi, Miller's account of his six month stay in Greece just before the outbreak of WWII. It was Miller's own favorite of his books, and certainly one of his most accessible.

When the program ended, and after I had chatted with some friends, I noticed this young woman leafing through the pages of The Colossus of Maroussi, which she had just purchased. Before she left, she told me she wanted to become a writer, and asked for my advice. I advised her to carry a notebook, and write in it every day about whatever caught her attention.

One of the pleasures for an author, especially a first time author such as myself, is connecting with readers of your book. Before the days of the Internet and social media, this was not such an easy thing to do. A reader wishing to send questions, words of appreciation, or criticism to an author would have to mail a letter to the publisher and hope that it would reach the right editor who could forward it on to the author. One might wait days or weeks for a response, or not hear back at all.

Henry Miller, the subject of my book, carried on an extensive correspondence with the readers of his many books during the years that he lived in Big Sur. Each week, scores of letters would be delivered to his mailbox on Highway One. A few readers enclosed donations of cash or stamps along with their words of encouragement and admiration. Some asked him for advice. Others wrote that reading his books had changed their lives.

Miller felt an obligation to answer these letters. He set aside time to do this every day, usually after lunch. If the correspondence had been especially heavy, he would hand off some of it to his wife to answer. Miller kept the letters he received, and made copies of his answers if the subject was weighty. He also maintained a card file of his donors, and repaid them when he could.

I have started to received messages from readers of The Unknown Miller through my web page www.arthurhoyle.com and my Goodreads page. It is very gratifying to learn that what I have written about Miller has reached complete strangers thousands of miles away and had the effect I intended. I would say that this is the writer's greatest reward.

Thursday evening many locals turned out to attend my talk and book signing at the Pacific Palisades Library. Miller lived in the Palisades from 1961, the year Tropic of Cancer was published in the US, until his death in 1980. Several of the locals shared memories of encounters with Miller as he rode his bike around town, went to the bank, or had his hair cut. One attendee who lived next door to Miller mentioned that her daughter had seen Henry swimming in his pool sans bathing suit. Tony Miller, Henry's son, joined me for the Q&A, and shared some of his experiences growing up in Big Sur and then working in restaurants there as a young man. It was a great evening.

First review of The Unknown Henry Miller out in March 15 issue. Review calls the book "a refreshing biography . . . that plunges into his work . . . and offers generous interpretations of Miller's oeuvre." The reviewer recognizes the importance of California's Big Sur environment to Miller's development as a writer.