 Big Sur Miller travelled through Europe and the United States (on the trip that would inspire his critique of America, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare) before reaching California and his own personal paradise, Big Sur. Miller was a dedicated Bohemian, scraping together cash here and there, unafraid to bum from others, and work if only accountable to himself—certainly life in wild Big Sur required a lot of manual labor. Miller eked by on very little: looking back from the 1950s on his untouchable royalties in France, for example, he mused, “A hundred a month--regularly—would have solved our problems. (It would have then. Today no sum is large enough to solve anybody’s problems. The bombs eat up everything.)”
He fit in with the developing Bay Area scene well, extending the axis of the Bohemia south to the Monterey Peninsula. His ideas about art were similar to those being developed among the poets and painters of the regions. “And what is the potential of man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words? You think I am searching for God. I am not. God is. The World is. Man is. We are,” he told Conrad Moricand, echoing the Eastern-inflected ideas of the other artists. Every one, every thing was a mixture of good and bad, of white magic and black magic: even the bomb, which could destroy the world but also provide energy. Add Comment  In New York, Miller was a Bohemian manqué, living the lifestyle but never embodying it because he never created Art. (Yes, with the capital A.) He continued this posing when he moved to Paris, where he lived until the early 1940s. But here, he also got serious about writing, and turned out three great pieces of American literature, Black Spring, Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn.
It was also in Paris where he met Anais Nin, with whom he fell in love. Hard. As his biographer Robert Ferguson notes, Henry Miller had to make a choice in order to keep up with Nin. He had to either accept psychoanalysis or astrology, in both of which her work—and thought—steeped. Certain aspects of psychoanalysis—especially the more mystical, such as Jung’s theories—resonated with Miller, but in general he never subscribed to it. (He preferred Algernon Blackwood, who thought encompassed psychoanalysis and much more.) Astrology he did come to embrace—although slowly. | AuthorI am a father, husband, and independent scholar living in Folsom California. I can be reached at joshuabbuhs_at_yahoo_dot_com.  ArchivesDecember 2011 CategoriesAll |
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