Yesterday night I have been talking to a friend about how Henry Miller's books have influenced both our lives so much – and how a lot of people are really amazed to hear that, not thinking Henry Miller's books are actually the stuff that guides you anywhere, life-changing or enlightening or whatever. There is other books that seem to be classics when it comes to that ... but Miller???? Just why is it his books are so often confined to the scandalous or the obscene? Well, I think maybe these people just didn't read with their hearts and minds open enough ... maybe they couldn't see. Or maybe they didn't read Miller at all. There is a lot of spirituality in Miller's books, a lot of wisdom and insight. It will be different things for different people and I don't claim my perception of his writings to be the only possible one – I sure have my very own, very particular, very lilli-ish relationship with Henry Miller, influenced by my own complex past and self, others have their's ... well, so.
When I first laid hands – and eyes – upon a Henry Miller book I must have been about thirteen – and that had nothing to do with it's contents at all. The book was 'Tropic of Cancer' ... it was bound in purple velvet with red and silver print and had a wonderful abstract illustration of a crab on the front cover. It looked so wonderfully louche and bohemian – I was completely mesmerized by it for years and years. I must admit I have always had a certain liking for louche aesthetics ...
I was about sixteen when I finally read 'Tropic of Cancer' and I was almost disappointed, having assumed to be in for something lewd, judging by the blurb and preface. As it was though, it couldn't actually shock me much. My family was not quite what one might call decent middle-class, my aunts running a whorehouse, one uncle in jail for armed bank robbery, another a shady croupier in a big casino. They were pimps and peculators, gamblers and cheats, at home in the boxing arenas and racecourses of Germany. My mother would tell them again and again to watch their language with us but they never managed for any long time and you bet: my brother and I just loved to hang with them ... it was another world, so fascinating, so seemingly dangerous, so "out of bounds" ... it seemed as irreal as TV or the movies, somewhere between 'Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'. Sometimes my aunts would take us to the brothel (while it was closed, mind you!) where we would sit by the bar on those high, wooden stools, hypnotized by the sounds of the slot machines, feeling strangely excited, completely in awe of the place. The women working there would smother and mother us, teaching us how to play poker and blackjack, letting us win most of the time, so that we always came home with huge amounts of extra pocket money which we had to hide from my mom in order to avoid her getting suspicious or even worse: making us give it back. It was a wild time and always made for interesting stories with our friends ...
Of course, that's only half the truth – just one side of the coin. As you can probably imagine, there was also a lot of bullshit connected to growing up amongst a horde of ... well, – hookers and criminals, really. But what I meant to make clear was that it sure kept me from being especially appalled by any of Henry Miller's writings. I had grown up with all that seemingly obscene language and I knew how it was just words – different words than those we were supposed to use, yet somewhat more honest and direct, often enough spoken with much more feeling (not necessarily positive though) than the hypocritically polite vocabulary used in most of my friend's houses.
What I found with 'Tropic of Cancer' was a book that for the first time blended the two clashing realities I had known so far: the poetic eloquence my literary grandfather had aquainted me with and the blatantly vulgar vocabulary of the streets ... I was thunderstruck, absolutely fascinated. I have always had a special relationship with words, loving them for their sound or feel, without even caring what they mean at times ... and here was Henry Miller ... overwhelming me with his lavish use of them: new words, strange words, complicated and exotic words ... I'm not sure I paid much attention to the actual story when I first read it, all I remember is that it left me hungry for more.
So I snatched 'Sexus' from my parents bookshelf. On the outside it didn't look half as exciting as 'Tropic of Cancer', but ... wow! This time I must admit I was indeed kind of shocked, stunned at the very least. I mean, it was so much more explicit – it may be different for a male teenage reader, I don't know – but as a girl of sixteen or seventeen I was kind of repelled by his detailed descriptions, disgusted even. The way he was talking about sex was like miles from the romantic notions I might have nurtured back then. And yet I couldn't stop reading – I sensed something almost mysterious behind his words, something deeper, something beyond my grasp. I remember I merely skipped over the "raunchy" parts (I couldn't stand the way they made me blush and left me feeling all bashful) but the honesty and frankness of the book had an enormous effect on me. I was reading it in English and didn't understand half of it, neither literally nor figuratively and after stumbling through maybe one third of it, I gave up on 'Sexus' for the time being.
I didn't know anything about Miller back then, he was just a name, just some author. I didn't know any of the backgrounds to his stories. The Henry of his books seemed to be a fictional character to me, yet a strangely touching one. He came across as being so human, so real and likeable in all his scruffiness and that intrigued me quite a bit.
Years passed and I was well in my twenties when I touched 'Sexus' again. It was amazing, it suddenly felt like a completely different book. It couldn't floor me with it's language anymore – I mean, I was warned, I knew what was coming and my notions on sex had become somewhat less innocently romantic by then – but it left me speechless, once again. What struck me unexpectedly was the depth, the profoundness, the straightforwardness and stark honesty with which Miller laid open his innermost self.
I came to adore Henry Miller. In 1994 I read 'The Colossus of Maroussi' – my favourite of all Miller's books – and that finally sealed my high esteem of the man. It was a revelation in terms of insight, history, philosophy, apperception and the relativity of truth. Greece seemed to come alive in front of my eyes and I yearned to go there and explore it for myself. One year later I finally did, ending up on a Kaiki, a greek fishing boat, in a little harbour on the Peloponnese, near Epidaurus, facing the island of Hydra. I would spend night after night sitting on deck with a petrol lamp and a glass of Retsina, with just a dog and hundreds of mosquitoes for company, reading Miller ... not exclusively but to a great extent. It's forever etched on my memory, the atmosphere of those nights ... the distant noise of the taverns by the harbour, the greek music and voices, the smell of garlic and mediterranean herbs and the distinct tasty smell of the inevitable gyros being prepared in the bar by the pier. My time with Henry, yeah!
My english friends were laughing at me, joking I was too young to waste my life on a dead guy, however ingenious, that there were other men out there, alive even ... but I was smitten. For weeks on end, every night, there was just Henry Miller ... and Lilli clinging to his every word, smitten with his eloquence, smitten with the truth he spoke. By then, I had long come to understand that his writing was mainly autobiographical and I admired him for his arresting candor. I still had to swallow hard at certain chapters, still felt myself blushing, happy to be alone and unobserved while reading – but first and foremost it was the deep and sharp, pictorial thinking that had me hooked on him. That and the way he described people and places, making them come alive through his words. It was a gift I came to highly appreciate ever after, a gift I would forever seek and venerate, in my heroes as much as in the everyman.
The complexity of Miller's character fascinated me. He was a failure in the eyes of some ... and yet some kind of hero. A heartbreaker and an asshole at the same time. A poet and a plague. How somebody could be so obscene and yet so gentle, so careless and yet so profound – so bemusing ... it simply sent my head spinning. Reading Miller I started to question a lot of things – but most of all my own thinking and (mis-)conceptions. The second time I read 'Sexus' it was not so much the action or the words that fascinated me but the person Henry – I was mesmerized with this personality ... so real, so wild.
My sailor friends brought back a biography from England but reading it I found that all I needed to know was already there in his own books. He gave me food for thought, causing me to reflect on a lot of things, but as I returned to Germany by the end of the year, I became too busy to read or occupy my mind with Miller – or any other writer – for a long time. My obsession with Henry Miller ebbed off, yet his way of seeing things had influenced my thinking quite a bit – and for good, I tend to say.
I didn't touch his books for more than ten years. Then there was this day last winter, when picking a book by buddhist writer Pema Chödrön to take to bed with me to read, I suddenly found myself staring at 'Sexus' and felt a sudden urge to take that one instead. And once more it was like ... wow!!! It was all there again, right upon reading the first pages ... so stunning, moving, touching, exciting, stimulating and arousing ... in more than one aspect. But just like the last time, it was like reading a different book yet again. It was like the book had grown with me or I with the book ... I found myself almost dumbfounded by paragraphs and sentences I couldn't even remember to have read the last time. They kind of jumped out of the pages, sometimes shouting at me, sometimes whispering ... as spiritual as anything possibly can be, or so it seemed to me. So much wisdom in there. This time it really touched my heart and soul, somewhere beyond fascination, much deeper. My understanding of his words was a different now. I could feel the pain and the many shattered dreams, the lost hopes and illusions ... and still so much joy, so much optimism, faith and strength ... Miller's energy is so contagious, almost addictive. He makes me hungry for this life, always. Vibrant with joy and a restlessness to go out there and live, just live, in spite of all and everything, in spite of life itself even.
The beauty of his words is so rough and true and universal, so all-enclosing and evocative, it's staggering. I read 'Sexus' and it adds a new dimension to reality, a dimension that reconciles the right with the wrong, reconciles irony and hope, joy and bitterness. I can see beauty in the obscene and wisdom in the trivial, the devine in the dirt and dust of everyday life. Lightness in the seemingly overbearing. It brings out every possible emotion in me, the whole spectrum of colours and moods. It makes me want to have a relationship with reality that is true, genuine ... somewhere beyond the dullness and routine ... direct, instantaneous, full of passion. It makes me want to risk more, defiant of potential pain or fear, despite possible shattered illusions.
Henry Miller ... somewhere beyond or besides or beneath being so drawn into his words and his world, he led me to see my own world so much clearer, bringing me much closer to it. What a genius he is, a wordsmith, an alchemist ...
