With its forbidden and river novels, it is an example of thought freed from the patterns of modernity and adhesion to life. Today he even inspires a rapper like Guè. A similar brave research was that of Charles Bukowski: another “cursed” author, who is republished and is to be rediscovered.
“A Walt Whitman among the corpses.” So George Orwell defined, not without a tip of admiration, Henry Miller. He had only read the first novels: Tropic of Cancerof 1934 e Black spring of 1936, which was followed in 1939 Tropic of Capricorn. And he was deeply hit. At times perhaps disgusted, of course, but still hit. He had caught the essence more than many critics who over the decades would have measured themselves with the prose river of Miller, with his flows of consciousness, his descents in the rotten and his restarts towards the peaks of the spirit. For more, and for a long time, Henry Miller was simply a pornographic writer. Not that he did a lot to take off the label, you have to say it. Indeed, in 1941 he wrote – commissioned by the publisher Milton Luboviski – the alienating Opus Pistoruma novel entirely made up of sex scenes. Scenes that certainly did not miss in his other works, which in fact were mostly censored and offered. Even today, Miller is engraved in the collective imagination as a somewhat disadvantaged, itchy author. It is no coincidence that Guè, celebrity of Italian rap, has just fired an album – moreover particularly interesting – entitled Tropic of Capricorn. In the interviews, he explained that the patina of “forbidden” that still envelops the Millerian work, the charm of the censored and in some way dangerous, was motivated precisely. It doesn’t matter that today’s reality is decidedly more pornographic than Miller’s most pushed pages, and that nobody is rewarded to censor the rappers, to whom any explosion of verbal violence is granted (and that’s okay, we would miss it).
It remains that Miller – and Orwell had understood – has little to do with pornography. Just as David Herbert Lawrence, who Miller and his epigones have always admired, had very little to do. In the eyes of the author of the celebrated 1984the American colleague was “a completely negative, non-constructive, amoral writer, a mere giona, a passive accuERTER of evil”. One who was “in the whale belly”. In Orwell’s opinion, what Miller characterized Miller was precisely passivity, the acceptance of the world “as it is”. To those who compared Miller’s work to Journey to the end of the night Of Céline, Orwell replied clearly: «Both books use indelible words, both are in some way autobiographical, but that’s all. Journey to the end of the night It is a book with precise intentions, aimed at protesting against horror and senselessness of modern life; Indeed, of life. It is a scream of intolerable disgust, a voice that climbs from the black well. Tropic of Cancer It is almost exactly the opposite. This has become so unusual that it seems almost an anomaly, but it is the book of a happy man. This also applies to Spring Nera, even if capable slightly less, because they are veined here and there of nostalgia. Although he has years of lumpearrier life behind him, years of hunger, wandering, of Sozzura, of defeats, of nights to the flooding, struggles with border officials, of interminable efforts to have some spices, Miller realizes to enjoy life. The same aspects of life that fill with horror céline are those that attract it. Far from protesting, he accepts. And the same word “acceptance” illuminates its authentic affinity with another American, Walt Whitman ».
There is, in these phrases of Orwell, a strange mixture of recurrence and admiration. On the one hand, he seemed to be unable to tolerate that Miller accepted life in his totality, that he “dared” to be somehow happy. On the other hand he looked at him full of curiosity and a tip of envy. In any case, George had seen us right: in the veins of Henry Miller (which are those of America) the same clear blood flowed that irreveled Whitman’s electrical body. But with a thread of more courage. If in fact the poet of Grass leaves “He wrote in an era of incomparable prosperity”, “in a country where freedom was something more than a word”, Miller on the contrary is immersed in the ancient “ossuary of Europe, where every grain of land has passed through countless human bodies”. He writes in an “terror, tyrannide and unrequedation”. Orwell concluded: “Accepting civilization as it is practically means accepting the forfeiture”.
Here is the great theme, and the great message. Henry Miller describes a cloudy reality, as not: it is his version of the dark forest that each of us must cross. True, he accepts, but it is not as passive as Orwell believed. On the contrary, a large part of his writings are a ferocious act of revolt against modernity. Mario Praz, a great scholar of decadentism, immediately caught this aspect, approaching Miller to Arthur Rimbaud and Lautréamont: “The world described by Miller is truly the carcass, the carrion of a civilization in the breakdown, represented in the horror of his squalid and attempted cities, and the emptying of mechanized life”, said the critic Mario Praz. However, he grasped, unlike Orwell, the real reaction of Miller: “against this world the Miller, one of the many intellectuals who gave voice to the return to the primitive health of the breed, has raised his protest:” I want to die as a city to be born as a man “”. The point is this: Miller accepts, but does not stop fighting. All its delicate work is aimed at showing readers the harsh reality of the existing. In Big Sur and the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (and the reference to the fearsome painter of hell on the ground is not at all random) writes: «The great deception that we perpetuate every day consists in our belief of making life easier, more comfortable, more pleasant, more useful. We are doing quite the opposite. Every day that passes, we make the old, flat and useless life in every way. A bad word summarizes everything: waste. Our thoughts, our energies, the same life of ours serve to create what is irrational, superfluous, unhealthy. The wonderful activity that takes place in the forest, in the field, in the mine and in the factory never contributes to the happiness, satisfaction, peace of the spirit or the longevity of those who are committed to it “. Trying to escape from suffering is useless, on the contrary, it damages us, makes us slaves.
He looked at him in the eye. So much to write by commenting on his tropics: «I raised myself with suffering. Suffering is the heritage of each of us, just like rice, joy, perfidy or other things that belong to us. When the function, the value, the usefulness is understood, is no longer feared, this daytime suffering that we are all ready to avoid. To know how to consider it in light of reason, it becomes something else. I defined this transformation my “rosy crucifixion”. Lawrence Durrell, who at that time had come to live with me at Villa Seurat, was expressed in another way; He baptized me, “for the future centuries”, the happy rock “.
You can cross the suffering and out of it, however, winners, even happy. In this sense, Miller is a sort of oriental monk, a seeker of the spirit. If the sometimes paranoid style brings him closer to William Burroughs, his spirit refracts him to Charles Bukowski (whose main works return to the bookstore now in the new economic edition for Tea). Even “buk” has been apostrophized as a pornographer, it has been reduced to the Beone speck for crushed teenagers. His novels and short stories are far from praise of excess: if anything they are a acceptance of the harshness of life, which however does not bother the poet’s heart. Bukowski is less refined than Miller, but with him he shared the teeming western normality, decades of unnerving anonymous and not very paid employee. Both observed the horror of modernity and are not backward, they did not take refuge in artificial paradises, even if the alcohol has chased them for a long time.
It is no coincidence that buk – rebellious and fighter – did not love young contesters of the sixties too much who also read it. He spoke of their riots as a “revolution for amazing. It is a fashion revolution, “he invested,” is a sleepy boring revolution of young minds already prefigured to the surrender. If the child gets angry dad badly and the mummy will take him out of the mess and you, cops, will be better than you have not hurt my baby ». No, there are no easy, or funny revolutions. The only possible revolution is the acceptance of reality. Obstinacy in the battle, with the risk of losing everything. Even if he has already lost departing.
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