سيرة ذاتية طويلة مملة لكاتب بوهيمي + قليل من بهارات الفلسفة.

I really can't take this book seriously nor follow its plot, if there was any. I got past the first 200 pages of comprehensive narration of Miller's sexual adventures, in extreme graphic terms, to no avail. The story does not pick up. I want my time and money back.

The work of Henry miller is in my opinion unsurpassed for opening up a new way of looking at literature. His broad in your face style masks the deeper underlying wants and desires of the human psyche. His wife June wanted Dostoyevsky but Miller could only write as Miller. He remains one of my favorites till this day...the rogue, brash arbiter of American expat writing.

Sexus is an autobiographical story of Miller’s first two marriages, his shit job, and the prospect of becoming a professional writer. The main characters are his friends: an artist, a doctor, and other archetypal characters that he uses as sounding boards, in addition to foils to his own wild life. The writing is energetic and direct. It consumes you in the way that he consumes everything in his vascinity. All material is fair game.

There are two main elements in this first book: the sex and the rants. Which one breaks up which, I’m not sure. The sex is graphic, male-centric, dirty, protracted, filthy, and the juiciest bits. You can’t help but read more. Countering and inspired by these scenes are the rants, which either come about through character encouragement (‘keep going, don’t stop!’ - the same response to his sex) or through a surrealist association of free writing. These associations bounce around filling a stream of conscious roller coaster of energy and emotion. There is a force going on and on, unrelenting, rapturous, consuming all and anything.

When taken as a whole, it’s a success story. We are holding the book that he’s been working towards during these dark years of poverty, betrayal, and animalistic excess. But you get the feeling he doesn’t mind any of it. He doesn’t mind moving from house to house, being cheated on, getting STDs, going through a divorce - none of it. None of the things that we are supposed to care about as part of our perfect American dream. Because in the end, he has succeeded in the long terms goal of becoming the writer of the book we’re holding. Everything leading to this reason, the universe organizing itself to this one point.

He doesn’t care to have the bottom fall out. For him, life is a matter of perspective gained from these moments. And the ability to always find sex and some easy money at the end of it all. Life is all one giant ride, and Miller is taking us by the shoulders and jolting us, slapping us across the face, screaming ‘wake up NOW’. It’s a wake up ride, a call to action. To get drunk off freedom and and enjoy life. Leave work, leave your wife, leave what is holding you back. He spends pages of juicy details of a threesome with his ex-wife then skims over a second marriage ceremony in two pages. The first ends in extacy for all parties involved, lasting well into weeks and years ahead. The second marriage leads to a tumbling downfall. But why should he care? There’s always back up again. Everything’s perspective and there’s lots of sex, easy money, and good times to be had.

It takes a deft touch to write about sex without making it sound cliché or creepy, and in describing his sexual encounters, I have to say, Miller often doesn’t have it. It’s almost comical just how much sex is in this book too – cheating on his wife with a woman he meets in a dance hall (who will become his second wife) and then vice versa, various random encounters, having sex with friends and the wives of friends, a couple of ménage à trois, etc all told in graphic detail. He’s not interested in deft touches or in holding back though. He just wants to have the freedom to express himself about everything in life, to let it rip without censorship. As he puts it early on, “People have had enough of plot and character. Plot and character don’t make life.” And so, with Sexus, he writes the first installment of the autobiographical account of his life in ‘The Rosy Crucifixion.’

Reading this book is hit and miss, perhaps as a result of just how fearless Miller is – in other words, it may be his greatest strength, which, when overdone, becomes a weakness. He’s clearly intelligent and well-read, referencing all sorts of things, e.g. the Tao Te Ching, Dostoevsky, Freud, Chagall, etc but then may just as easily drop a derogatory comment about women or a minority group, e.g. referring to “Chinks” as “white slavers.” He’s sees the bigger picture about life and is profound and sometimes poetic in writing about it, but there is also a seaminess throughout the book – prostitution, grungy streets, cockroaches streaming around his apartment, and references to women self-abortions using knitting needles. I definitely didn’t need to read all the details about how he clogged a toilet one time and the ensuing mess, as honest as that might have been.

Miller saw the tedium of life and wanted no part of it. He writes “Suddenly now and then someone comes awake, comes undone, as it were, from the meaningless glue in which we are stuck – the rigmarole which we call the everyday life and which is not life but a trancelike suspension above the great stream of life – and this person who, because he no longer subscribes to the general pattern, seems to us quite mad…” He sees himself as this person, and the artist who understand that the world is something that isn’t meant to be put in order, that the “great secret will never be apprehended…he has to make himself a part of the mystery” through connection to all aspects of reality and acceptance of it. I don’t believe all of the following, but still found it to be a lovely, philosophical gem:

“A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and rightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow men, about right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit.”

In order to be this free spirit, though, Miller wants to do as little work as possible (“There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in – work.”), mooches off his friends, and is completely absent as a parent to his child. He’s also got this view about caring for what’s going on in the world: “I despised people who, because they lacked their own proper ballast, took on the problems of the world. The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.” Wow.

At the end of the day, I think it’s a mistake on his part to view the world’s periods of suffering as the same as its better times (he literally equates the two), and to focus on himself (in several ways; his pleasures, opening himself up, self-knowledge, etc). In fact, it’s probably the definition of selfish. Miller certainly wasn’t cheated in life and I admire how he pushed the envelope in describing life honestly, but he’s not always such a likable guy. It’s like reading Kerouac with the sex dialed way up, and the heart dialed way down.

A few more quotes:
On falling asleep with someone:
“Incarnate or discarnate, we were now wheeling off into space, each to his own orbit, each accompanied by his own music. Time, with its endless trail of pain, sorrow and separation, had folded up; we were again in the timeless blue, distant one from another, but no longer separated. We were wheeling like the constellations, wheeling in the obedient meadows of the stars. There was nothing but the soundless chime of starry beams, the bright collisions of floating feathers churning with scintillating brilliance in the fiery sound track of the angelic realms.”

On the future, and living life to the full; here he channels Walt Whitman:
“Joy and faith are inherent in the universe. In growth there is pain and struggle; in accomplishment there is joy and exuberance; in fulfillment there is peace and serenity. Between the planes and spheres of existence, terrestrial and superterrestrial, there are ladders and lattices. The one who mounts sings. He is made drunk and exalted by unfolding vistas. He ascends sure-footedly, thinking not of what lies below, should he slip and lose his grasp, but of what lies ahead. Everything lies ahead. The way is endless, and the farther one reaches the more the road opens up. The bogs and quagmires, the marshes and sinkholes, the pits and snares, are all in the mind. They lurk in waiting, reading to swallow one up the moment one ceases to advance. The phantasmal world is the world which has not been fully conquered over. It is the world of the past, never of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full.”

On travel:
“Indeed, the true adventurer must come to realize, long before he has come to the end of his wanderings, that there is something stupid about the mere accumulation of wonderful experiences.”

❝To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with the virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty and magic that he desires to create, why does he put millions of words between himself and the reality of that world? Why does he defer action—unless it be that, like other men, what he really desires is power, fame, success.❞

I loved this book the first I read it. It is a confessional poured out of a spittoon full of of piss, bile, semen, angst, blood, guts and ego. The moments when he meets June Mansfield Smith, Mona, Mara whatever are sublime. The trajectory downward into self humiliation, self deception and utter depravity are rivetting. This is warts and all story telling of one mans defeat in everything he was puruing in life but he continues to spit out his philosophical arguments and his world view at the very moments when he is at his lowest ebb, oblivious to how incongrous this may all seem. The book is a revelation on the duplicity that exists in the human personality and how ego can drive us on when all else has failed. I love this and Nexus and Plexus as well. Worth the effort if youve got the energy to trawl through Miller. Most people dont have the stomach for it.

We all are supposed to know about Henry Miller and his walkabouts with all kind of women. Here the main one I would say is the one personified as June. But there are so many, that one could think he should have been destined to be a pornstar kind of. This sexually hiperactive tall and slender author writes about a sort of underground America where, precisely because these people matter to nobody, they were allowed to do things nobody else's does. So, his stories all along this, during some time censured, novel in various countries, go constantly breaking taboos. His style is somehow careless but very fluid. Guided by the principle of free association, one thing leading into another as it comes to his mind. He describes an ultra liberal America, quite often difficult to believe. One has to think he is speaking of an America period that goes from the thirties and up to the fifties, and those were years of a brainless puritanism in the States. You may think he wrote what he did just to fight against all that. But he keeps the "book" going horny as in an oven. So far it goes, that it falls beyond any imagination. Some of it possibly happened, other things may probably be fruit of his imagination. Anyway, it's good entertainment. Providing you make love before and after reading it. So hot it is. Can you imagine a post office or mail clerk working somewhere in the States and doing all that in his leisure time?? - don't remind if it was in here, or in Cancer Tropic or some other, but there were some stellar appearances of counter culture celebrities as Burroughs and some others. In fact he established a solid friendship with Durell, what may explain somethings about this singular and much more significant writer. Their correspondance is perhaps interesting. Aside, Miller was "a major influence to the Beat Generation writers". It is surely easy to relate the Kerouac style or lack of, his fluid way of writing with the Miller one. Free association of ideas, once again. But others did that saying or implying much more than him. Some other writers became friends of him, and seems he was a witty, funny and nice man. His relationship in Paris with the clever, Anais Nin, affair included and trio included, who cares, gave place to an Alan Rudolph movie. Anais was of great help for him while his staying in Paris. Anycase, if sex is a reaffirmation of life - think is just what it is - Miller was a full time reaffirming it, man. Or semental, as you fancy. Haven't read The Colossus of Maroussi , but was told that was a good book. For this Sexus is after all, not much more than a Richard Crumb comic, or better said, another of the kind Bukowsky wrote or published, after him, think. Does not say much more than love, laugh and enjoy as much as you can. Without hurting nobody, of course. Some may say it could also teach teenagers how wild women can be too, when desiring a man. Think maybe Cancer Tropic would be his best. As Keith Richards would say, in this sense Miller's life was a real celebration. Amusing sex stories. Probably exaggerated. In the Bukowsky trend, if not exactly the same. Not far from a Pleasures or Dyonisiac Philosophy. But frankly and to end with, H. Miller was a bit of a scandal at the time he tried to publish this or that, and I value his fight against America's hipocrisy, with its double morality and its puritanism... But as a writer, he is not of my kind : he don't says enough to me, and maybe is a bit outdated and/or or overpassed nowadays. If it all is like the one am reviewing...

Pretty much everything that Miller writes is self-important tasteless garbage. But there are always a few ecstatically joyously truthful and beautiful stretches which more than make up for all of the trash. Five stars are for compensating brilliance, not for perfection

Honestamente, la primera vez que lo lees lo que más te entusiasma y atrapa en la lectura es el sexo y como lo narra. Lleno de pasión, desinhibido y explicito. Cómo habla de la mujer y del amor es atrapante y te hace obsesionarte con él esperando a que diga o haga algo más. Te hace odiarlo porque es egocéntrico, pero a la vez te encanta y te atrae con su libertad sexual.
También, hace reflexiones y observaciones muy interesantes (sobre las mujeres, el proceso de escribir, sobre quienes no tienen vocación por su trabajo, sobre la amistad, el dinero, el amor, el desamor y su transformación). Por supuesto, mis reflexiones favoritas son sobre las relaciones entre hombres y mujeres más que nada cuando solo conversan y es obvio que sus cuerpos comunican lo opuesto a lo que expresan “La conversación es sólo un pretexto, para otras formas más sutiles de comunicación.” Además cuándo habla de Mara/ Mona por momentos expresa una desesperación muy atrapante con la que te podes identificar “Cómo odiamos admitir que nada nos gusta más que ser esclavos. Esclavos y amos al mismo tiempo. Porque aún en el amor el esclavo es siempre el amo disfrazado.”
Es un libro que se podría releer varias veces y siempre entenderlo de manera distinta.

Most truthful novel I've ever read

I'm an artist, blah blah blah blah blah, I have promiscuous sex, blah blah blah blah blah, my wife is a lesbian, blah blah blah blah blah, I just got some genital warts, blah blah blah blah blah, banged my wife's lesbian lover, blah blah blah blah blah, I'm a poet, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah....