This is one of my retro notes from the times when I called them entries. Written back on March 14, 2023. A bit spastic and all over the place, but still important to me (yeah, I’m trying to act like I got much better).
The topic is a bit unexpected. I would rather say – unplanned. Even though I had Henry Miller for some time on my list, I wasn’t expecting to write about him this soon. However, today I finished reading another his book Tropic of Capricorn, and before that I read Tropic of Cancer. And since the impressions are still fresh and these two books left me under certain impressions, I can’t help but write my random thoughts.
First of all. Those are all my thoughts. I didn’t read any reviews, opinions, or books with theories. I’m not this kind of person. I love to create my own opinion on the thing. Like with Fight Club (the book, never saw the movie, yet aware of memes) – I’m a strong believer this is a Romeo & Juliet kind of story with some dose of homemade terrorism and personality disorder. People I talk to sometimes did their best to prove me wrong, even sent me a video of someone on YouTube who explained the theory. I, being a polite guy, just said aha to the one and even tried to explain that it’s how I see it to the other, but was met with aggressive insists that I misunderstood the book and it’s just my opinion while the majority has a completely different understanding. After approximately two minutes of intense mindfuck, I made a mental note to ignore their input on any topic. I don’t have time to fight over nonsense.
Okay, since now you know I’m a petty little jerk, we can go back to Miller and his works. Henry Miller was in our home library for as long as I remember myself. Alright, maybe not this long, but let’s say I knew about his existence since I was 11 or 12. Something like that. You know, this age when you finally realize that this thing down there is not just to pee, and whenever you see something interesting (like a naked female or drawing of a naked female), it activates and sends peculiar signals to your brain.
Alright, basically, I found out about Miller when I got interested in sex. I still didn’t find a DVD with porn yet and had to go with imagination and educate myself on the topic via reading. I heard somewhere that Miller basically wrote about sex and the process and what it looked like. So I was intrigued. I went through our library, and much to my satisfaction, we had a full series of his most distinctive works: Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, and maybe something with short stories (I remember one about sad clown). Since I was a dumb (and already horny) kid, I went straight for Sexus (perhaps, I still didn’t read it, so I can’t be 100% sure, I only know it was none of Tropics) and expected to read all kinds of nasty, lewd stuff.
Instead, I read the weirdest description of sex I could think of. There was something about carrot (I think that’s what Miller called his dick), sex in a taxi (or attempted sex in a taxi), and periods before everything went into some bizarre direction, and the next ten pages were dedicated to cosmos, the universe, life and eternal thoughts of the omnipotent being in the word of fuck. Not much. I got bored and forgot about the book. Besides, I got my hands on The Godfather (the book, never saw the movie) and besides the plot that held me a hostage till the end, it also had more than enough graphic sexual scenes. In fact, it had much more than I could understand.
Since then, I didn’t think much of Miller. For me, the core memory was – taxi, carrot, and periods. Then I added there a boring story about a sad clown I didn’t even finish. I think I was around 14 when I read this story. Anyway, fast forward sixteen year and a decision was made – become a writer. And since the best thing you can do – read true, recognized masters of the written word, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing religiously. Reading, reading, reading, and reading.
In fact, I’m not Stephen King – I’m not a good writer, so I do have time to read all kinds of stuff – good, bad, weird, ugly. That’s why I don’t say no to anything right now. If there’s at least one sentence that stays with me, one idea which leaves me under the impression and makes me think – the time wasn’t wasted. Of course, my first thought – return to the books I wasn’t mature enough to read. Henry Miller was one of those authors. Scandalous, provoking – I had to read him.
I went through two of his books. The one I wrote in the beginning, and what can I say? I loved them. Hands down, I loved them. At first, his narration style – random and jumping – was weird to me. Those strange descriptions of intercourse combined with sudden streams of consciousness about the most random things, memories, and thoughts seemed out of place. It was the first book, Tropic of Cancer. And when it finished, I said one thing: “Well, that was fucking weird.”
As sometimes it happens to me, I need to have some time to understand whether I liked the book. With Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it took me approximately two-three weeks. Suddenly, I missed everything he wrote about and wanted to read it again. Everything he wrote started making strange sense. Not that I could relate to everything he wrote. I couldn’t, but I was more under the lasting impression of the way Miller commanded the word. And after finishing his second book, I can express my random thoughts about him.
For me, he is an undisputed master of the written word. The way he writes is just pure perfection. It’s fluent, it’s masterful, and precise. Miller uses extremely rich vocabulary (for an illiterate baboon like me), however, everything he writes is clear, understandable, and makes perfect sense. It’s as if he mastered the language to the point where he knows exactly how to write complex, interesting, melodic, and rhythmic sentences. And much to my surprise, only after finishing his second book, it got to me – he doesn’t masturbate with words.
You feel me? You know that kind of authors who enjoy themselves to a point where it seems like they are jerking off to how well they write and how many complex words they know? I don’t want to be a jerk, so I won’t write names of the writers I believe involved in this (after all, I’m trying to avoid talking negative trash about others, especially in something this subjective like art, where there’s literally no way to express yourself wrong or bad, but rather I like it or I don’t like it), but basically there are certain authors who are impossible. 100% you know such writers who make their writing complicated for comprehension for the sake of it. As if they ate a damn vocabulary and now showing off how many words they can cram into one sentence. Miller, for me, is, on the contrary, one of the guys who has absolute command of the word, and it shows in the way he can convey emotions and abstract concepts with sudden ease.
The stories he tells are bizarre, surreal, yet relatable at certain moments. For example, his description of work in the office, all kinds of corporate bullshit you have to go through to be just the guy who still works there – those things didn’t change much. 100 years passed, and we’re still there, only now, instead of typewriters, we have computers. Idiocy didn’t change, unfortunately. Some of his descriptions were also spot-on. And I’m writing that from the point of view of a guy who lives in 2023, and those descriptions still make sense, nevertheless. The topic of sex, while dominant, doesn’t actually take this much spotlight. Alright, maybe in Tropic of Cancer, there was much more sex than in the next book Tropic of Capricorn, at least that’s how it felt (maybe those who counted all sorts of sexual remarks would beg to differ), but still if you ask me what those books are about in few words, I would say – thoughts on life and society where dream, reality and fantasy fuse into a combination of experiences through a prism of an emotionally dead individual on the verge of a breakdown.
And that’s pretty much it. Just wanted to share my random thoughts on Miller. Maybe later I’ll go through his books, but as of now, this is what it looks like to me. Also, I’ve noticed I’m about to fall asleep, so my thoughts aren’t as sharp as they were in the beginning. Good time to put a dot and finish it.