Brooklyn-born-and-bred Henry Miller, the late-bloomer of modern literature, published his first book in 1934 at the age of forty-three. His previous work had been unpublished, and for good reason; it showed no originality or promise. Miller worked in America as an employment manager of a Western Union office, ran a speakeasy, worked as a gravedigger and proofreader, and lived most of his life in poverty.
He arrived in Paris in 1930 with no money, no prospects, and no place to stay, in his words, “ a writer at the beginning of his career, naïve, enthusiastic, absorbent as a sponge, interested in everything and seemingly rudderless.”
He was little more than a middle-aged vagrant with exalted literary ambitions, tremendous self-confidence, and nothing in print. And there in the City of Lights, a penniless expatriate without a name, a reputation, or a fixed address, he did not just live, he sacrificed all material security and devoured life, searching for “the real Paris.”
His aim, he said, was to “regress” further and further to a state where culture and civilization “do not figure,” to “start completely from scratch in a way that is uncultivated, primitive.” There had to be “a time when I was totally broke, desperate, and living like a vagabond on the streets to start to see and to live the real Paris. I was discovering it at the same time I was discovering myself, undergoing a trial that was as difficult as it was fulfilling”
Miller’s was not the guidebook Paris, not the Paris of Cole Porter. Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, but the lurid backwater slums and dens of vice where he sloughed off American Puritanism and embraced a wild hedonistic, sensual existence–roaming the streets in search of new sensations without a single sou in his pocket, living a hand-to-mouth existence, sponging off friends and strangers alike. He was attracted to cheats, shysters, and rogues, and they to him.
His worldly possessions consisted of the clothes on his back and a toothbrush, a razor, a notebooks, a pen, a raincoat, and a cane. He didn’t know in the morning where he would sleep at night—whether with friends or on a park bench or in an alley or a cheap hotel whose furniture “required the assistance of wires, ropes, and leather straps to keep from collapsing.”
With no bed, no tobacco, and no food, lying, cheating, and stealing for survival, he felt no anxiety, but rather felt liberated and free of worry and believed “there could not be anything better” than what he was experiencing.
He said, “I have no money, no resources, no hope. I am the happiest man alive.” He was euphoric, like a man who had been let out of prison, finding on most every street some rich new experience, some realization, some moment of illumination. He compared himself to a ghost haunting a banquet. His goal was to write autobiographical books that documented the living of a life no one before had ever dared to live, and in a manner no other writer ever had, books written in a new style and consciousness that “would restore our appetite for the fundamental realities.”
Miller felt that the artist’s truth lies in finding a “voice,” and that the discovery of one’s true voice doesn’t happen easily, but requires boldness. Miller imitated every style in hopes of finding the clue to the gnawing secret of how to write. Then: “Finally I came to a dead-end, to a despair and desperation which few men have known because there was no divorce between myself as a writer and myself as a man: to fail as a writer meant to fail as a man…It was at that point…that I really began to write. I began from scratch, throwing everything overboard, even those I loved. Immediately I heard my own voice…the fact that I was a separate, distinct, unique voice sustained me. It didn’t matter to me if what I wrote should be considered bad. Good and bad had dropped out of my vocabulary…My life itself became a work of art. I had found a voice. I was whole again.”
When he left Paris in 1939 Miller was the renowned author of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, autobiographical works that jolted readers new to his writing. His unique books created a vast international following.
© 2024 David J. Rogers
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