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 His previous work had been unpublished, and for good reason; it showed no originality or promise.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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Psychologists classify people in categories according to their personality traits. Yet they cannot measure 
Given the gift of exceptional powers of 
I have been a professional, best-selling author, poet, teacher, and blogger for a long time. I am obsessed with and think about writing, painting, and other arts all the time. I have published two hundred prescriptive-posts that were written solely to improve the performance of the thousands of creative people who read them.
A sparrow flutters its wings just above the grass,
Of spoons against coffee cups
Butterflies, you and I,
Snow drifts smother every highway,
think of my favorite writer, Ernest Hemingway, and ask myself, ‘How could an editor with any judgment at all reading young Hemingway’s beautiful prose say, ‘We can’t publish you because no one knows who you are.’ Hemingway would often cry as he received still another rejection slip. Yet he persevered submitting stories and in not many years he would be recognized as the best writer in the world, and in a few more years he would be the most famous and the most highly paid. The same happened to Jack London–unable to be published, hundreds of rejections, a publication, then within a year the most popular writer in the world.“
What unpublished author hasn’t had the depressing experience of reading crappy books by writers who have published fifteen other books just as crappy and thought, “I’m better than they are, so how does such a thing happen? Is there no justice?” It’s “The Matthew Effect” in operation—they hath and you hath not. The artist who hasn’t been recognized yet must understand and overcome “The Matthew Effect” to now become recognized—to become one who hath.
Small and delicate, fair as a flower,
We enter that tumult of sweat and whiskey, amidst the
Has passed away.
I delight in darkness and know that a bond
And I watch a lightly falling snow.
So there it is, laid out in my mind: that moment in our lives,
Sometimes a person who one day will become a serious writer doesn’t know herself what she might do with her life. But she feels instinctively that she’s good for something and has some reason for existing. She has a hunch that there is something important in her that’s worth pursuing further. She finds that something in words. She makes herself into a writer–an expert in expressing herself via written language. At times, with some people, writing becomes the center of their identity, and they become another Saul Bellow who said that when he wrote he felt like an artist, but when he was not writing he didn’t feel like anything.
A main goal of writers and all other creative people is to produce works. Writers make the structure of their creative lives by means of their work. If they are unable to work or the work doesn’t go well, they suffer. The writer–the artist, whatever the art–uses the art to express emotion and when they are denied that expression they feel tension and conflict.
The sciences and anything involving a machine are mysteries to me. I have no aptitude for them. Once I got hold of an old used paperback on how to become handy around the house and did some wiring and put in a light switch in the children’s bedroom without burning the house down. My children watched me and marveled. I swelled with pride. I felt I’d really accomplished something. I’d say to guests, “come upstairs for a second” and show them the light switch and brag, “I put that in.” A very unusual accomplishment for me. But writing I understand and am good at. I’m confident about it. It’s my best craft.
I will arrive in the evening as the sun
Working so hard on abstract
The gaudy, intermittently-flashing lights of the vacancy
davidjrogersftw 