A letter to Henry Miller, who was alive and writing in Big Sur the year I was born and who died when I was eight years old, and whose Black Spring I did not read until I was twenty-seven.
Henry,
I first read Tropic of Cancer because I had been told I should, and I finished it knowing exactly why people had been banning it for forty years, and also not quite understanding what people had been defending. Cancer is a young man’s book about young-man bodies and young-man appetites, and it was banned because the censors of the 1930s and 40s and 50s could not allow those sentences into print, and it was defended because the defenders wanted the category of banned sex writing to shrink. Both the prosecution and the defense were right. Neither was reading the book. Neither was reading you.
I found you, eventually, in Black Spring. It is not a famous book. It is your third — between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) — and it sold poorly, was reviewed thinly, and has been mostly skipped by the readers who found you through the more famous bookends. Skipping Black Spring is the mistake. It is the book where you stopped trying to be a pornographer and became, briefly and completely, a modernist.
Black Spring is not a novel. It is ten long essays, written in Paris between 1934 and 1936, that range across your Brooklyn childhood, your first marriage, the alleys of Paris at four in the morning, the childhood game of stick-and-ball played against a brick wall on Driggs Avenue, the peculiar sensation of walking in a rainy European city as an American of no particular standing, and a final piece — Megalopolitan Maniac — that is one of the great anti-urban prose rants of the twentieth century. The essays do not connect in any ordinary narrative sense. They connect by voice, by cadence, by the specific Miller way of moving from the physical detail of a Paris sidewalk to the metaphysical weather of being alive in 1935 and back to the sidewalk without the transition being noticeable.
This is the thing Tropic of Cancer readers miss. You were not primarily a sex writer. You were primarily a prose-rhythm writer. The sex in Cancer is the subject matter that got you famous and got you banned and got you a generation of young-man imitators who copied the sex and missed the rhythm. The rhythm is in Black Spring without the distracting cover of the sex. Read Black Spring first, and you will learn what Miller actually does at the sentence level. Read the Tropics afterward, and you will see the sentences through the sex instead of the sex through the sentences. The order of reading determines the writer you think you have read.
What I want to tell you, Henry, is that you were doing something in Black Spring that almost nobody else in English-language prose was doing in 1936, and that almost nobody has done since. You were writing autobiographical improvisations — long unguarded prose pieces that moved at the speed of your own mind through your own memory, with the detours left in, with the false starts left in, with the moments of self-contradiction left in. Your friend Anaïs Nin was writing this way in her diaries. Your other friend Lawrence Durrell was almost writing this way in his early novels and would more fully in the Alexandria Quartet twenty years later. Céline was doing something related but cruder. Only you, among the Paris expatriates of the 1930s, were writing full published books in this unguarded improvised mode, and Black Spring is the book where you were most fully in it.
The bop writers figured out what you had done. Kerouac read you. Ginsberg read you. The Beats of the 1950s — the ones who came to visit you at Big Sur in your old age — understood, finally, what you had given them. Spontaneous prose. Bop prosody. The voice on the page moving at the tempo of the mind. They credited you. The literary establishment of their generation gave you only the credit that was already obvious — the sex, the bans, the legal fights — and not the credit for the formal innovation that had actually mattered, and you died in 1980 at eighty-eight, in California, with the formal credit still not fully paid.
A word about your trouble. You wrote about women in ways that half of twentieth-century feminism has been arguing against, and arguing against your voice specifically, since Kate Millett’s 1969 Sexual Politics used you as the exemplary case of male writerly misogyny. Millett was not wrong in her textual analysis. Your treatment of women in the Tropics, and in many of the novels of the 1940s and 50s, reduces women to their bodies, their availability, and their effect on your own psychic weather, and a century of women readers have been within their rights to close the books and not re-open them. Black Spring is the book where this problem is least visible — the women are mostly background — and that is part of why I am writing to you about Black Spring and not the Tropics. You were, when you allowed yourself, a better writer than your reputation. You just did not allow yourself often enough.
Rest easy, Henry. You wrote one book that showed what you could do when you were not performing Henry Miller. The book is out of fashion. The book is the one to start with. The book is the argument for taking you seriously as a prose writer, and not as an entry in the history of obscenity trials.
With respect, and residual complications —
CD Damitio
A related vagobond.com piece: Travel Writing — Dangerous Business.
Readers and fans of Black Spring will really enjoy The Ghosts of Intimacy — my experimental novella in the autobiographical-improvisation mode Miller was working in, written sixty years later, by a man who has also had to reckon with what his rhythm did to the women who were in earshot. Same tradition. Different century. Same weather. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
