Henry Miller is not easy to read. If you intend to grok the jumbled thoughts and messages in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, you need to find some sun, quiet, and solitude - and prepare to re-read whole pages if your attention lapses.

This book is fundamentally similar to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Both are stream-of-consciousness narratives with the air of a self-eulogy by the author. Both make use of very graphic, descriptive language (although Hemingway uses his rare adjectives on food and drink, while Miller lavishes descriptions on landscapes and people), and both are weighted heavily with character studies. But, despite all Miller's seeming disdain for his peers (he derides Hemingway and Steinbeck repeatedly in Big Sur), Hemingway is the better writer by far. Hemingway uses words sparsely and places them with precision, constructing beautiful sentences that describe people, places, and things effectively enough to provoke the reader's mind, yet lightly enough that the reader's imagination can play. Miller, however, falls into the Pynchon trap, seeming to write directly from his own mind - which is perfectly legitimate for first-draft material, but Miller also seems allergic to editing. As a result, the reader must put himself in the author's mental state as it was during the writing process in order to understand what Miller wishes to say. If good writing is defined as effective communication, Henry Miller is not a good writer.

Miller is pedantic, intolerant, angry, hypocritical, and unstable bordering on insane. He alternately rants and raves as the pages flow, seeming to forget what he said in the last paragraph in order to make a new (sometimes relevant, usually irrelevant, sometimes contradictory) point in the next. But despite all this, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch is worth reading. If the reader is patient enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, he will find several very engaging ideas about life, politics, nature, religion, and child-rearing - among other topics - buried in Miller's ravings... true gems in the mud.

My favorite book by Henry Miller. Philosophical
and beautifully developed, it traces many of his
influences and brings him to a moment in his life
I find very intellectual and illuminating.

This is the way The Air-Conditioned should have ended: Miller free, transcendent.

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch is about where Miller went after he settled in California: to Big Sur, which was a wild, and open area at the time, inhabited by only a few hundred hardy souls. Miller, a city boy all his life, surprisingly took to this new mode of existence, and flourished. The book is a paean to his neighbors, a kiss of to his old life, and—as is usually the case with him—a plea.

As usual, the book is loosely structured. The orange motif only recurs for the first hundred pages or so, maybe less—although the contrasts of paradise, purgatory, and hell remain throughout. Miller is good at detailing the burdens of paradise-the constant visitors, the unending stream of mail—but also that hardship is baked into paradise: paradise requires work, and the warm acceptance of work. So he strips down to a jock strap, and pulls a cart through the forest to gather wood. So he goes out into a rainstorm and sticks his hand into the septic tank to pull out roots that had clogged it. So he goes on a walk on the days when he wakes early to write—because the place is so beautiful, and calls to him.

At times the prose can become . . . well, prosaic. But at other times it is gorgeous. Listen:

“Though young, geologically speaking, the land has a hoary look. From the ocean depths there issued strange formations, contours unique and seductive. As if the Titans of the deep had labored for aeons to shape and mold the earth. Even millennia ago the great land birds were startled by the abrupt aspect of these risen shapes.”

The first few chapters set the scene—quite literally. He then moves on to discussing his eccentric neighbors. Although this can be digressive—in Miller’s usual manner—it is fairly disciplined. Largely the structure is provided by the sheer abundance of neighbors. Unlike other essays, when he trying to sell the reader on the greatness of one particular person, he never strains for effect, never rarely substitutes cant for description.

The book, too, reads quicker because of the abundant use of dialogue—at least compared to his other works—a deadpan humor, and the presence of his children. Listening to him trying to balance work and child-rearing, listening to his thoughts on child-rearing, listening to his attempts to play Mr. Mom after his wife leaves him—these are great comic moments. And it is no wonder he ran off nannies as he did—his children would have been hard to keep up with: they were raised to be completely free, liberated from birth.

Eventually, the book, moves on to consider a visit from French acquaintance, Conrad Moricand, who was more Anais Nín’s friend than Miller’s. Moricand pulls a Henry Miller on Miller: he cons Miller into raising funds for him to leave war-ravaged Europe, has Miller put him up in a small shack, and becomes an eternal bum. He fulfills Miller’s prophesy that if you’re patient, everything you need will come to you.

But he is not a hero. He comes to represent the decadence of the old world—in such a way one wonders how Miller could have let him anywhere near his own daughter. And he, unlike Miller, cannot be happy with what he has: he cannot give up needing, desiring, demanding. He always wants more and more. (And not the good kind of want: the craving for excellence. Rather what Miller would term the needless desiring.) In other books, given Miller’s expansive acceptance of humanity and its foibles, one can imagine that it was the desiring that marked Moricand as a Satan, rather than the child rape. But here, hates both—which violates his mystical commitments but humanizes him. Indeed, that may be what makes the book so much better than Miller’s late output: he is drawn way from his own narcissism, constant reflections on his own childhood or the love he lost in June, and is forced to be more oriented toward the world, even if rarely politically aware.

The book ends with a short, bemused—in the ancient and more contemporary sense of that term—section that returns again to the problem of mail for Miller: how much he gets, how hard it is to cart up the mountain, how little of it he can respond to. This is his narcissism again—poor, poor me—but the piece is more than that, too. He uses the second person perspective brilliantly here to bring the reader into his experiences. And, given what has come before—this is a good use of his spiraling organization—it is again about the burdens of paradise and the difficulty one has in balancing both his or her own needs with the need to connect with the world.

Henry, you old rascal, you finally figured out the whole deal. If this is what it's like to get old, I'm not scared at all. Helluva nice little collection here. Always merry and bright!

You've helped me figure it out, time and time again. Right now I'm in my thirties so I'm kinda on that "Tropic" and "Rosy Crucifixion" mode. But the "Big Sur" stage is something I now look forward to, should I be lucky enough to make my way there. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

In my best moments I'm already there now, usually when I'm smoking a cigarette by myself and looking at a sunset, or eating a good meal with my wife. Stand Still Like the Hummingbird...Remember to Remember. Thanks, homie.

This was my grandmother’s favourite book, so far as I am able to tell.

Her library still lives in the cold hallway of my eldest aunt’s manor. My copy of this Miller isn’t hers- because her books are all German translations from the sixties and earlier - but I felt her with me while I read this.

I’ve felt her presence all summer actually. She died in 1997, but for the six years we had together before that, we were each others person. My mother still talks about us with some amount of chagrined humour. My grandmother didn’t have the easiest relationship with her, or her sisters — she was critical, demanding, horribly vain, gloriously cool, spoiled, damaged —all of which she took out on her daughters.

But with me it was just pure love. Mum speculates it was old age softening the sharpest edges of her character, but I honestly just think we recognised each other from day one.

Anyway, while she was alive and we knew each other, she lived in the same house on my uncles estate. She was in many ways an exile in the Swedish countryside. She had judged Swedish a ‘children’s language’ and refused to learn more than the basics, so her library was her lifeline. She was an exile in many parts of her life when I think about it. First from the pre-war Germany of her youth, then from the party-heavy West Africa of her second marriage and the sixties, and finally from a socialite Hamburg lifestyle she could no longer afford.

But when I was a kid I knew about none of this. She was just my favourite person. I came to her house and clicked on the little dog-shaped lamp. She took out her teeth and let me play with them. We sang old hunting songs together. Once, she found a half-eaten mouse, and built it a little matchbox bed, told me it was asleep, and let me pet it every visit. It was ‘supremely weird shit’ as my Mum would say. We were two little weirdos who’d met each other at the tail-end, and at the start of life.

She was a person who re-read books. She didn’t need many new ones. She learnt something new every time. I read Big Sur, a book my Mum assures me was in heavy rotation, and I wonder what parts spoke to her and when. Was it the wilderness of the setting that mirrored the dark forest around her house? Or did she long for a shining social circle like Miller had - full of weirdos and mystics, artists and good-for-nothings — people like her to be frank— when she was stuck, surrounded by Swedish farmers who’d been having the same gentle conversation for the last half century?

The book itself was tedious to get through. I think Miller has some real shining moments in here, some real things of note — but they get lost in his endless pontifications and his (kinda sexist) judgements. I literally had to take a two week break from reading after he said that ‘Japanese women are the perfect women.’ It’s not that it’s bad - it’s just Miller’s thoughts are the bare bones of other more inclusive concepts that have come since.

Earlier this summer I went to the coast in Poland where my grandmother had spent her happy childhood. It sounds cheesy man, but I felt her there. I felt her in this book too, this little miniature of a wild and interesting community, the kind of belonging she longed for all her life, and the kind of fellowship we had — if only for six years.

Some of the finest writing I've ever had the pleasure to read.
Love Henry Miller.

Have to come back to this extremely convoluted biography of Big Sur during its art compound heyday

“Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do.”

“Lucky the father who learns to see again through the eyes of his children, even though he become the biggest fool that ever was!”

“Vision is entirely a creative faculty: it uses the body and the mind as the navigator uses his instruments. Open and alert, it matters little whether one finds a supposed short cut to the Indies—or discovers a new world. Everything is begging to be discovered, not accidentally, but intuitively.”

“I come back once again to those individuals who came here full of needs and who fled after a time because ‘it’ was not what they hoped to find, or because “they’ were not what they thought themselves to be. None of them, from what I have learned, has yet found it or himself… I speak as if they had been marked by the whip. I do not mean to be cruel or vindictive. What I wish to say quite simply is that none of them, in my humble opinion, is a whit happier, a whit better off, an inch advanced in any respect. They will all continue to talk about their Big Sur adventure for the rest of their lives—wistfully, regretfully, or elatedly, as occasion dictates.”

“Those who no longer have anything to worry about will, in desperation, often take on the burdens of the world. This not through idealism but because they must have something to do, or at least something to talk about. Were these empty souls truly concerned about the plight of their fellow-men they would consume themselves in the flames of devotion.”

“The day is sure to come when you will look upon the world as if it had never received the impact of a single uplifting thought.”

“Boredom—the ransom one pays for flirting with perfection.”

“Nothing is bad when you look at it hungrily. (The first step in the art of appreciation.)”

“Suddenly, as I put it down now, Mature seems like a strange new word to me. What a discovery man made when he found the word, just one, to embrace this indescribable thesaurus of all enveloping life!”

“All the observations so painstakingly noted and memorized evaporate as I leave my place of contemplation to amble homeward. They evaporate, yet they are not lost. The essence remains, stored away in one's intangible parts, and when they are needed they will appear, like well-trained servants. Even if I do not succeed in making a wave as I knew it in a moment of ‘sudden seeing,’ I at least will be able to capture the waviness of the wave, which is almost better. Even if I forget how certain leaves are shaped, I at least will remember to denticulate them.”

“‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,’ goes the saying. Obviously, angels see farther and deeper than ordinary mortals; if angels give pause it is assuredly from no thought of self-protection.”

“The question was how to go forward, how to be of greater service without creating new emptations, new traps, which the ego ever lies in wait to exploit.
With every ounce of wisdom she possessed she schooled herself anew each day to banish even the most innocent kind of intercession. Aware that self-exhortation is but a reminder of hidden failings, she also disciplined herself to do whatever her inner promptings urged. Fighting to leave herself open, to avoid making decisions, to eliminate opinions, use no will, meet each situation as it arose when it arose and not before, fighting not to fight, struggling not to struggle, deciding not to decide, she was indeed making herself a battleground.”

“A man who can enlarge on the tragedy of a hangnail, who can elaborate on it for five and six pages, is a comedian from heaven sent.”

“What *is* one to say to young people who, at the very threshold of manhood or womanhood, throw themselves like dogs at your feet and beg for a crust of comfort? What has come over these youngsters who, instead of upsetting the world with their fiery thoughts and deeds, are already seeking ways of escape from the world? What is happening to make the young old before their time, frustrated instead of liberated? What is it gives them the notion that they are useless and unfit for life’s struggles?”

“If I read the stars, it was not to find out what was going to happen tomorrow but to seek confirmation in what was taking place at the moment.”

“Il sentit toujours que sa naissance avait déjà été une chute, et que son enfance était comme le souvenir de l’époque où il prit conscience de la gravité de cette chute.”

“The subjects touched on appeared to be nothing more than pretexts for the unraveling of something vastly more important, though what this something might bring we never even tried to formulate.”

“The former, who is truly religious-minded, finds no need to introduce the word God. The other, who is a religionist, though he may call himself a sceptic or an atheist, will deny vehemently that there is any intelligence in the universe greater than his own limited one. He has an explanation for everything except what is inexplicable, and his way of disposing of inexplicable phenomena is to pretend that they are beneath his attention. In the animal world his brother is the ostrich.”

“We abdicate before the throne we might occupy is even offered us. There is a white charger, champing at the bit, ever ready to carry us to the most undreamed of goals. But do we mount him? Those who do leave a trail of fire behind them.”

“No one can really aid another except by urging him to move on.”

“The man of reason disdains to use the word miracle. He sweats to prove that there is no such thing, and all the while he is but proving that he is a miracle of incomprehension.”

“‘God wants us to be happy,’ said Nijinsky. Likewise an author hopes that in giving himself to the world he will enrich and augment life, not deny it or denigrate it. If he believed in direct intervention, he would be a healer and not a writer. If he believed that he had the power to eliminate evil and sorrow, he would be a saint, not a spinner of words. Art is a healing process, as Nietzsche pointed out. But mainly for those who practice it. A man writes in order to know himself, and thus get rid of self eventually. That is the divine purpose of art.”

If you have never been before, go to the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. It's like a weird little cabin in the woods.
Make sure you bring a friend that you really, really like, then read this book.
You will never forget it.

28 Aprile 2013
- Oggi un sole carico nel cielo e tu a scoppiarmi nelle vene. -

Big Sur è il luogo in cui Miller ha trascorso parte della sua vita in tranquillità, tra l’incantevole paesaggio delle colline e le scogliere che fermano gli urti del mare contro la terra.
Le prime pagine sono tempestate di personaggio vissuti anch’essi a Big Sur, superate queste pagine per nulla personali si ha modo di leggere di Miller e del rapporto con i figli, Val e Tony, dell’educazione e della sua idea di crescita libera. Un uomo traboccante vita e libertà non poteva non dare tali insegnamenti ai suoi figli.
Sono molto belle le riflessioni sul luogo, quasi sperduto ed incontaminato, che in un futuro si chiede il mio caro Miller potrebbe essere modificato non lasciando traccia di ciò che si rivela con meraviglia ai suoi occhi.
L’ultimo capitolo è proprio uno dei suoi libri, Paradiso Perduto, in cui la figura di Conrad Moricand troneggia con i suoi colori cupi.

“La gioia suprema del sogno giace in questo potere trasformativo. Quando la personalità si liquefà, per così dire, come accade deliziosamente in sogno, e la vera natura del proprio essere viene alchimizzata, quando forma e sostanza, tempo e spazio, diventano docili ed elastici, sensibili ed obbedienti al più piccolo desiderio, colui che si sveglia dal sogno sa con ogni certezza che l’anima immortale che egli dice sua non è un veicolo di questo eterno elemento della mutazione.”

“La comunità ideale, in un certo senso, sarebbe lo sparso, fluido aggregato di individui che scelsero di star soli e in disparte per essere in armonia con se stessi e tutto ciò che vive e respira.”

“La mia disperazione arrivò a un punto tale che ero quasi convinto di non sapere più scrivere. A peggiorare la situazione, i miei amici intimi sembravano divertirsi a insinuare che io riuscivo a scrivere solo quando le cose mi andavano male. Era vero che apparentemente non avevo nulla con cui lottare. Stavo solo lottando con me stesso, lottando contro il veleno che avevo inconsciamente accumulato.”

“Molte cose mi sono accadute, nei tempi andati, mentre passeggiavo in quel luogo familiare. Parlo di avvenimenti interiori, fatti dei quali nessuno si sogna mai di scrivere, perché troppo sfuggevoli, troppo impalpabili, troppo vicino alla sorgente.”

Though it was quickly approaching a year of reading this book. I finally finished it. Having never read Henry Miller, I often found myself forced to put the book down for long periods of time. Not because it was bad, it just had a strange way of relating to my life at various moments. His ending proved that this indeed was his point, I guess I'm just crazy enough to relate.

Undulations