Beat generation writer Henry Miller dies – archive, 1980

Henry Miller belonged in kind, though not in stature, to the great odd-man-out figures of literature like Blake, Whitman and Lawrence. Despite his incoherence as artist and philosopher he made a powerful impact on his time, thanks chiefly to the assurance and the sheer headlong energy of his work, expressed with equal vehemence in his protest against contemporary civilisation and in the affirmation of his own ego. Being banned also helped.

Born in Brooklyn, Miller went to Cornell University and then – after a succession of odd jobs – to Paris where he launched himself on the ebb tide of American expatriate writing. He was already in his forties when his first and most famous novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1934. It was not until many years later, when it came out as a paperback, that the book was banned in the United States. This made it more celebrated than ever.

After decades of exclusion the first British edition hit this country soon after the Lady Chatterly’s Lover furore and the vindication of Lawrence’s novel in our courts, so that moral reactions were somewhat inhibited. We were well spared a second such cause célèbre.

Though frankly obscene, Miller’s already widely-read book could hardly be thought dangerously corrupting. The vital sleaziness of the writing, with its unrestrained sexual adventures, meant more than one thing to many men. Some saw in it a fertilising compost heap. There were clergymen who found him religious. There were critics who judged him to be some kind of sage and even saint, Ezra Pound admired him. George Orwell praised him, Lawrence Durrell was his friend and brought out the best in him (The best of Henry Miller, which appeared in 1960).

Tropic of Capricorn and subsequent works like the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy – Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus – provided further instalments of what amounted to a life-long autobiographical novel, in which established moralities were ditched for what Miller clearly regarded as an intensely moral purpose. Little else is clear in the windy philosophising that distends so much of his work.

It was in the earlier Black Spring which appeared between the two Tropics, and in some of his published letters, that he managed to convey a rather more articulate idea of what his message was really about – a sense of the meaninglessness of facts, a translation of reality into dream, an intimation of “metaphysical certitude” that was evidently not easy to put into words. Indeed, he once said that he believed true language to be “something beyond words.”

Too much had to be taken on trust. To reject the world’s terms so uncompromisingly, and persuasively to recommend one’s own instead, needs on the face of it more art, or more metaphysical gift, or perhaps just a more interesting mind, than Miller ever managed to reveal. Whether or not it was what he wanted, he did succeed in setting himself up is a monumental naïf, a child-figure who could not believe in death.

As chief literary anarchist of his day, a kind of low priest celebrating the last rites of what he regarded as a doomed civilisation, it was not surprising that he became a hero of the Sixties beat generation, As anti-writer, anti-logican and anti-American, it was equally natural that he should have returned to the “air-conditioned nightmare,” settling in Big Sur, California. He mellowed in his later years, concentrated on painting more than on writing, and staged a one-man show in Los Angeles.