photograph of Henry Miller by Brassai
“During one of our talks I happened to reproach Miller for his long-windedness, his repetitiveness, his wandering digressions, which could sometimes seem a thousand miles away from the subject under treatment. Smiling his quiet mandarin smile, he replied that his chaoswas completely deliberate, that what he was looking for was neither
logic nor order, but something like the overflow of the Mississippi — impetuously rolling down toward the sea, picking up and sweeping away everything in its path, its muddy waves carrying a million odds and ends: uprooted trees, furniture, cadavers. Writing meant being carried away by the current, and he wanted the reader, too, to be taken, to be swept up and then drowned in the torrential onrush of his prose. As hewrites in Tropic of Cancer, “I… love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences.” “When I begin to write,” he would tell me, “I feel like a breakwater has collapsed. Why would I want to stop the onslaught?” I would reply that I conceived the role of the artist somewhat differently. Rather than giving in to the torrent, the artist should channel it, endowing the formless with form. Imperturbably, Henry would reply, “I have no absolutely no ambition to become an ‘artist,’ such as you conceive him. I couldn’t give a damn about art! I am but a man and I want to express myself completely and without constraints. Once and for all! I do not believe I am a writer. Nor do I have any ambition to write well or to have a pretty style…All I know is that there is a force in me that must express itself. So I stammer, I grope, I look for any and all means possible and imaginable… You see, my dear Brassai, I am very far from being what you might call a ‘litterateur,’ and especially one of the French variety, enamored of logic, clarity, proportion, strict adherence to form. It may be that my works are not literary. Call them
whatever you like! I couldn’t care less!”
“I don’t want to progress, I want to regress. Yes, regress, become more stupid with every day, as stupid as the plants and animals. To get rid, once and for all, of the effects of five thousand years ofhistory, gods, religions, books, ‘great men’ … If I had the power, I would do away with schools, museums, I would burn all the libraries. I would even do away with history, that maker of war. So you would do away with all civilization, all culture? Why not do exactly that? You cling to your idols: Goethe, Nietzsche, etc. I have mine too, a whole
pantheon of them, but I would offer them all up to the conflagration, every single one of them… What have I gained from the enlargement of my knowledge, the enrichment of my culture. Nothing. I’ve lost more. Do you know why I called my first book Tropic of Cancer? It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, theendpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch…Yes, from scratch, no question about it, for better or for worse… What I want is to halt evolution, to go backward down the path we have taken, to go back to the world before childhood, to regress, regress, regress, further and further, until we get to the place we have only lately left behind, where culture and civilization do not figure… It is time that we start to think, to feel, to see the universe in a way that is uncultivated, primitive — but this is also without doubt the most difficult thing in the world to do.”
-from Henry Miller: The Paris Years by Brassai