The obscenities in Henry Miller’s books made them sensations in the 1960s, after the trials that finally allowed them to be published—but they obscured his essentially religious task.

Miller synthesized his ideas from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, fromCarl Jung, and from Otto Rank.  In his opinion, there was a creative spirit—what Bergson called an elan vital—inside each human being.  This spirit leads to the creation of religion, of art . . . and of sex.

The vast universe itself, he suggested, was a sprawling, undirected mélange of things and energy.  Each person needs to become awakened—enlightened, a la the Eastern mystics—in order to understand this energy and channel it correctly.  His books were about his own struggles to overcome the inhibitions and blocks in his life, to come fully awake so that he could be free and creative, so that the energy could flow through him unimpeded.  Sex, in this sense, was not instrumental, not merely for reproduction or pleasure, but was a sacred act, and, when performed correctly, between two connected people, holy.

The land of fuck, he said, was Cockaigne: the Medieval land of plenty, when all pleasure was at hand, when everyone lived fulfilled lives, freed from the shackles of work and the rigid caste system.

He told Nin in the 1930s, “Here is the crux of the matter: art is not the translation or the representation or the expression of some hidden thing.  It is a thing in itself—pure, absolute, without reference.”  It, like sex and religion, was the highest output of humankind.

But Miller saw himself as more than just an example for his readers.  Beginning in the 1930s, he started fashioning himself into a guru.  “The gulf between knowledge and truth is infinite.  Parents talk a lot about truth but seldom bother to deal in it.  It’s much simpler to dispense ready-made knowledge.  More expedient too, for truth demands patience, endless, endless patience.”  Miller was a purveyor of truth, he thought.    

This was a way of reconciling two parts of himself: he was a common man, from a working class background, never attended college, and had a well developed distaste for elite toffs.  (Admittedly, astrology was far from the man of the street, but it took account of all, high and low.)  Miller was also an intellectual.  Being a guru allowed him to raise the quotidian to the level of enlightenment.

Borrowing from Nietzche, Miller thought himself a Dionysian artist, that is, an artist fully in touch with the emotions of life (as opposed to the Apollonian personality, who is intellectual, reserved, controlled).  And like Dionysus—like Jesus—he needed to die, at least symbolically, and be reborn—hence his Rosy Crucifix series, in which he was crucified.  That death fertilized the what T. S. Eliot called the modern “Wasteland.”  Miller did not like Elliot’s work, or that of the other moderns, Joyce and Pound, which was all too Apollonian.  He wanted something messier, and his works were supposed to offer Gnostic knowledge—Rosicrucian knowledge—Theosophical wisdom—for a world that was too mechanical.

A bit more on Henry Miller, clarifying some of the earlier post, which overstated some points.

Henry Miller was born 26 December 1891 and raised in Brooklyn, New York.  By his own account, he had a happy childhood.  In the 1910s and 1920s, he moved the Greenwich Village, a Bohemian center.  His family had been unreligious, but Miller himself was drawn to religious ideas, and so found himself captivated by many of the Metaphysical movements then current in Greenwich Village>  He played around with Ouija boards, for instance.  As well, he was  drawn to Eastern religions.  Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, was especially influential, as were Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (on the life of the Buddha) and Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism.  He said he always found gurus more interesting than Christ because of their quest for Enlightenment.

“Freedom,” he wrote in the 1950s, “is a misnomer.  Certitude is more like it.  Unerringness.  Because truthfully there is always only one way to act in any situation, not two, nor three.  Freedom implies choice and choice exists only to the extent that we are aware of our ineptitude.  The adept takes no thought, one might say.  He is one with thought, one with the path.”

Miller (whose literary evaluations were always as eccentric as he was: “My encounters with books I regard very much as my encounters with other phenomena of life or thought.  All encounters are configurate, not isolate.  In this sense, and in this sense only, books are as much a part of life as trees, stars or dung.   I have no reverence for them per se.  Nor do I put authors in any special, privileged category.  They are like other men, no better, no worse”) also found himself drawn to the early weird writers: he was in “thrall” to Rider Haggard’s She.  (Indeed, his Books in my Life spends an inordinate amount of time on Haggard.)  He was also a devoted fan of Algernon Blackwood.  These works, and others like them, including the books of Bulwer-Lytton appealed to him as Romantic yawps against the deadening materialism of the time.  He wrote, “around 1880 English novelists of imagination—the writers of ‘romances’—began to introduce into their works the so-called and miscalled ‘supernatural’ element.  Theirs was a revolt against the fateful tendency of the times, the bitter fruits of which we of this generation our tasting.”

It may be that this love of early weird writers and his own religious quest fuelled his interest in Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical movement—after all, there are a lot of echoes of Bulwer-Lytton in Blavatsky’s writings.  At any rate, he found Theosophy endlessly engaging.  Blavatsky’s Voice of Silence (along with Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism) provided his writing with themes, symbols, and character names.

It may also be that Miller was impressed by Blavatsky because he had a life-long interest in finding a unity to all the world—and Blavatsky’s systemization of science, religion, and the occult certainly did that.  Spengler’s The Decline of the West also did something similar.  Miller became fascinated with it, as did many in the Greenwich Village scene.  (Excerpts appeared in one of the Little Magazines.)  It gave an intellectually respectable base to Blavatsky’s speculation.  It also resonated with his own sense of history’s trajectory.  Despite having an exuberant love of life, Miller thought that the world was running down, and Spengler advocated this, with his premonition that the West was on the decline.  Miller wrote in the 1950s:

“That the American way of life is an illusory kind of existence,  that the price demanded for the security and abundance it pretends to offer is too great.  The presence of these ‘renegades,’ small in number though they be, is but another indication that the machine is breaking down.  When the smash up comes, as now seems inevitable, they are more likely to survive the catastrophe than the rest of us.  At least, they will know how to get along without cars, without refrigerators, without vacuum cleaners, electric razors and all the other ‘indispensables’ . . . probably even without money.  If ever we are to witness a new heaven and a new earth, it must surely be one in which money is absent, forgotten, wholly useless.”