Henry Miller
December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for his departure from the forms of existentialist literature and the development of a new type of novel (a blend of fiction, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism) that clearly always describes the real life of Henry Miller and is also fictional. The works that most characterize this style of his are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and social-critical essays and analyses.
Henry Miller was born on December 26, 1891 in the New York borough of Yorkville (Manhattan) in simple circumstances. Both parents were Catholic and came from Germany; the mother Louise Marie Neiting from Hesse and the father Heinrich Miller, who was a tailor by profession, from Bavaria.
During his school years, he lived in New York–Williamsburg (Brooklyn). After graduating from high school, Henry Miller began studying at the City College of New York University, but dropped out after two months because he did not like the given reading list. "If I have to read such reading," Miller said, referring to Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, "I give up." After dropping out, he worked for the Atlas Portland Cement Company in New York's financial district. But the job did not satisfy him: in 1913 he made an "escape attempt" and traveled to the West to work as a cowboy and escape the hated big city life. But his romantic ideas quickly collided with reality. Just a few months later, he was back in New York. He started working for his father in tailoring, where he discovered his penchant for fine fabrics and suits that he would keep for the rest of his life.
In 1917, at the age of 26, Miller married the first of five women, Beatrice Sylvas Wickens. He thought she was a 'good girl' who would please his mother, and the marriage saved him from being drafted into the war. But after the marriage, his first impression changed, he now had the feeling that he was living with his mother again. Beatrice was critical and demanding of him and mocked his ambition to become a writer. He was not able to stay at a job for a long time, which would have satisfied Beatrice. Again and again he let himself be released to write or study philosophical writings. From this marriage comes the first daughter named Barbara.
In 1920, after his father's tailoring business went bankrupt, Miller applied for a job as a messenger with the Western Union Telegraph Company in New York, but was turned down. He then complained angrily to higher up in the company and asked why they didn't want to hire him for such a simple job. This made an impression, and he got the job that had been denied him before. With an additional task: As a messenger, he was to get to know the various branches and regularly deliver reports for the management, i.e. spy. In return, he was offered a job as a human resources manager in one of the numerous branches of the Western Union Telegraph Company as soon as he had gained sufficient experience and proven himself. He took up this position after a few months. The everyday hiring and firing, the human tragedies and what he felt was the hellish machinery of the company would later form the basis for his novel Tropic of Capricorn.
The head of the Telegraph Company came to him one day with the idea that someone should write a book about messengers in the style of Horatio Alger. Miller was given leave of absence by his employer and wrote the book within three weeks. Miller presented a book entitled Clipped Wings, which contains twelve messengers of a telegraph company. Miller wrote about "gentle souls who are offended and hurt, who run amok or endure and suffer violence; Stories full of suffering and bitterness, in which people either become murderers or kill themselves, usually both" Miller considered the book a failure, as he did not know much about good writing; but this first attempt gave rise to a strong urge in him to learn and learn more about writing.
Miller worked for the telegraph company for four years until he met his second wife, June Edith Smith Mansfield. June was a "taxi girl" by profession, a dancer who can be hired for a dance. She encouraged him to give up his job and continue his attempts at writing. She supported Miller financially so that he could continue his self-taught education and pursue his dream of writing more intensively. During this time, he began to have shorter works printed at his own expense and published them in the form of small subscriptions, which he distributed on the street, in restaurants and in bars with the help of his wife June and some friends.
June saved enough money so that both were able to spend several months on vacation in Paris in 1928 and 1929 and get a taste of bohemian life. Thanks to June, Miller traveled to Paris for an extended period of time in 1930 as part of a trip to Europe, where he wrote more than 36 creative and analytical works. In 1931, he took a job as a proofreader at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, thanks to his friend Alfred Perlès, who worked there and lived with him for a time. This period is described in the partly autobiographical novel Silent Days in Clichy, first published in 1940 and revised in 1956, which originally consisted of the two novel fragments Silent Days in Clichy and Mara Marignon.
In Paris, he felt particularly close to unconventional artists, which helped him to develop his own literary style. His most important muse and patron was the French-born American writer Anaïs Nin, who, due to her psychological empathy, gave him the decisive impulses for his self-discovery as a writer and with whom both he and later his wife June maintained an intense sexual relationship. Anaïs Nin finally wrote the foreword to Miller's first book and processed the relationship of the three in her diary entries Henry, June and I. During his stay in Europe, he wrote works such as Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939), in which he wrote down many of his own sexual experiences, but also philosophical insights.
In 1939, Henry Miller moved to Greece, and the following year he returned to the United States because of World War II. In 1940, he undertook a journey from New York to the south of the USA with the painter Abraham Rattner (1895–1978), whom he had met in Paris in the 1930s. Miller's description and Rattner's illustrations of the trip were published in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare in 1945. In 1944, Miller settled in the Californian coastal region of Big Sur for the next 18 years of his life and continued his writing there. Miller's major work from this period is the three-volume work "The Rosy Crucifixion", which includes "Sexus" (1949), "Plexus" (1953) and "Nexus" (1960). These three volumes contain his earlier experiences and adventures. In addition, Miller wrote: "Lawrence Durrell/Henry Miller" – Letters 1935–1959, published in 1962. The correspondence continued until 1980.
"Letters to Anaïs Nin", published in 1965.
"The World of D. H. Lawrence: A Passionate Recognition", published in 1980. "Opus Pistorum", published posthumously in 1983. Most critics doubt that this purely pornographic work is really Miller's work. All that is known is that Miller is said to have sold individual pages to the publisher of this book again and again. The publication of the book "Tropic of Cancer" in the United States in 1961 led to a series of court hearings in which the American judiciary had to examine the book for its shocking content, which violated all sexual taboos. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the book non-obscene and part of modern literature. The linguistic openness of erotic descriptions led to Miller's books being banned in the USA and Great Britain until the 1960s. In France, his book "Sexus" was not approved for publication for 18 years. In 1957, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In the later years, Miller was admired mainly for his role as a speaker and thinker. Criticizing the empty materialism of modern existence, he called for a new religion of body and mind based on the ideas of the philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and the two writers Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930).
He was also interested in educational issues and financially supported A. S. Neill's school Summerhill. Miller lived alone in his last years and mainly pursued watercolor painting, without considering himself an artist here. He was a close friend of the French painter Grégoire Michonze. He was also an amateur pianist.
Miller was married a total of five times: to Beatrice Sylvas Wickens (1917–1928), June Edith Smith (1928–1934), Janina Martha Lepska (1944–1952), Eve McClure (1953–1960) and Hiroko Tokuda (1967–1977). The writer Anaïs Nin was his best-known lover.
He died on June 7, 1980 in Pacific Palisades, California.