According to Tiffany Thayer’ Doubt, Henry Miller joined the Fortean Society sometime around 1945. Miller was the notorious author of, among other works, The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn, both of which were banned in his own country. At the time he joined the Fortean Society, he had settled in Big Sur, where he continued to write, to watercolor, and become a guru to the disenchanted: Bohemian youths, Conscientious Objectors as they were released from work camps in Oregon, those looking for something more in this materialistic age—an age savagely satire by Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book he wrote about the cross-country trip which took him to California and Big; in the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company section of The Tropic of Cancer; an age of materialism that devalued the most valuable material possession, the body, censoring discussion of its pleasures even as it sent young men across the world to be torn apart.
Miller’s joining of the Fortean Society was not a surprise. As Kenneth Rexroth, the San Francisco poet, notes in his introduction to Miller’s Nights of Love and Laughter, Miller had long been interested in the occult. His writings are sprinkled with references to Mu and astrology—he was a deep devotee of astrology since his time in Paris. (He fled to France after walking out on the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company—Western Union—the rest of his life living by his wits and what he could bum from others.) His writing was resolutely non-conformist. In her biography of him, Erica Jong catches Miller saying,
“I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life. The facts and events of life are for me only the starting points on the way toward the discovery of wisdom.”
With the exception of that final phrase, a more Fortean approach to literature is hard to imagine.
Miller’s joining of the Fortean Society was not a surprise. As Kenneth Rexroth, the San Francisco poet, notes in his introduction to Miller’s Nights of Love and Laughter, Miller had long been interested in the occult. His writings are sprinkled with references to Mu and astrology—he was a deep devotee of astrology since his time in Paris. (He fled to France after walking out on the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company—Western Union—the rest of his life living by his wits and what he could bum from others.) His writing was resolutely non-conformist. In her biography of him, Erica Jong catches Miller saying,
“I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life. The facts and events of life are for me only the starting points on the way toward the discovery of wisdom.”
With the exception of that final phrase, a more Fortean approach to literature is hard to imagine.
