So what did Lamantia mean when he wrote that he had died in 1945? Certainly, part of it may have been his break with surrealism. He had invested a lot of himself into the movement, had defined himself as a revolutionary—both socialist and surrealist—and seeing this movement flounder would have been difficult. But he did not act like a dead man: he continued to study and investigate other forms of cultural radicalism.
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.
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