Voyeur or visionary?

Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked to contribute the latest volume of Princeton’s ‘Writers on Writers’ series, he planned to choose Marianne Moore, a clearer influence on his poetry. Miller was too messy. A non-conformist and autodidact, his most famous novel, Tropic of Cancer, opened the door to literary obscenity, and also gave him the reputation of a pornographer. Burnside admits that he wrote the book less from a conscious decision than ‘out of need’.

To his credit, he does not skirt Miller’s notoriety, nor does he deny that much of his subject’s erotic writing is ‘embarrassing’. He does, however, announce that he will focus not on the ‘sex maverick’, but introduce in due course the ‘unhappy son’, the ‘dignified old man’, and most importantly, the ‘voyant’. To appreciate Miller is not to read him selectively but to understand why a writer who championed self-liberation could have made the mistake of equating it with the degradation of women.

Grounding Miller’s early books in the context of Teddy Roosevelt’s cult of masculinity and the soft pornography of writers such as Frank Harris (a frequent patron of Miller’s father, ‘a feckless tailor with a fondness for alcohol’), Burnside examines the codes of ‘manliness’ which dominated Miller’s Brooklyn childhood. None of this is to excuse Miller, but to shine a light on how his principles of artistic freedom — ‘first person, uncensored, formless — fuck everything!’ — never liberated him from viewing sexuality as inextricably bound to competition and hyperbole.