Until you get one of his works in your hands, Henry Miller remains the name of a would be pop culture celebrity people seldom fail to recognize. Some will remember he was a judge at the Oscar for a few years, others will have heard stories of this or that novel. As far as my personal experience with this guy goes, I approached him from the wrong angle.
Somehow a collector’s copy of Nexus found its way into my hands, and then I couldn’t resist it. I had to read it, but I wanted it to last longer, so I tried to slow myself down, my “wordlust” had finally found the precise flavor of prose it would never get tired of. Miller came to me by chance. I read a few pages, that seemed to pass for an objective description of the daily life of a poor couple struggling through New York’s winter. A sad, sad tale of cold nights and bizarre encounters, but I couldn’t… quite… get it.
These poor people had nothing to do with me. Their stories had no value, at least for my function-oriented brain. And yet I kept dropping the self-help books, the marketing books, the productivity and health books. All of the smart people who were telling me what to do had become secondary to the esoteric prose of Miller. Those now looked to me to be about petty struggles, and Miller’s prose was about the real substance life is made of.
Even as I describe my experience of his writing, I’m painfully aware that all of these words will join the white noise about Miller. Praise does not equal understanding.
And then there’s Miller’s insatiable awe. There’s his awe of women, that most certainly contributed to the sheer number of women he had sex with. There’s his awe of the foreign, the trips to Japan and to Europe. But what intrigues me the most is his connection to the spiritual. Word is it that he didn’t have much interest in Christianity, but that he was fascinated by Buddhist symbols and mystics. To exemplify, who could explain why he had a picture of the controversial Gurdjieff in his infamous bathroom wall?
I’m one to talk. I can’t even explain why I myself am fascinated with the figure of Henry Miller, aimlessly wandering the streets of the world. His mind and sensibility dwelling in the dark, while asked for a few pennies on the street. This might sound like I’m going soft in the head, but I like to retain the sense of the possibility that someday I’ll bump into him and share a few drinks on any given night.