Born in the Yorkville section of New York on December 26, 1891,
Henry Miller grew up in Brooklyn, went to
school there, and to this day retains much of his Brooklyn accent.
As a young man he often crossed Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, where
his father had a tailor shop. Until 1930 New York was his home. "I
am a city man through and through; I hate nature, just as I hate
the 'classics.'" Of his early years Miller has written most
lyrically in two sections of Black Spring, "The Fourteenth Ward"
and "The Tailor Shop." The world he depicts is not the "American"
New York of Whitman or Edith Wharton, but the immigrant melting pot
with its teeming neighborhoods, all redolent of the old country. In
this polyglot world Miller learned to speak German before English
and grew up with the sound of Yiddish and Polish in his ears. As a
boy he ran wild in the streets, while his father moved in a
comfortable masculine atmosphere of bars and good eating, with the
easy comradeship of actors, salesmen, and other sporting types. In
his prime Henry's father appears to have been gregarious,
easygoing, and bibulous; later Henry nostalgically envied his
father's way of life. Henry's mother, who was rigidly conventional,
seems to have inspired the rebel in him; he never had a kind word
to say of her. There was a streak of insanity in the family,
amusingly represented in Tante Melia, pathetically in Henry's
sister.
Like many artists in America, Miller had to combat not
only public opinion but also his own sense of shame, ingrained
despite his better judgment, at having failed to earn money. In
Black Spring Miller writes, "In the past every member of our family
did something with his hands. I'm the first idle son of a bitch
with a glib tongue and a bad heart." But elsewhere he says there
were poets and musicians among his German ancestors.
Black Spring, published in 1936, two years after Tropic of Cancer,
deals with many of the same themes, but in a different mood. "I am
Chancre, the crab, which moves sideways and backwards and forwards
at will. I move in strange tropics," Miller announces, explaining
the connection between this and the earlier book. And the black
spring of the title is another metaphor of the world's blight. But
he is less fierce now, less hungry, more euphoric. There is less
sex and obscenity, less action and violence. Instead of taking
place only in the immediate present, the narrative moves in time
and place, from Paris to memories of Brooklyn and New York and on
to other planes, to reverie and fantasia. There is more delirium
than cancer now, more dream, hallucination, and schizophrenia, as
Miller explores different modes and levels of perception. The
subject of Black Spring is really the imagination in all its forms,
especially the creative imagination.
Each of its ten self-contained sections is an exercise in a
different medium of art or the imagination, or in several media.
"The Angel Is My Watermark!" for instance investigates literary
inspiration, the vision of the mad, and watercolor technique. It
begins with Miller possessed by "the dictation" that goes on in his
head, beyond his control. He can only write down what is being
dictated to him until finally it ceases, leaving him exhausted. He
then turns to a fascinating book on art and insanity, which prompts
him to do a watercolor. The rest of the piece explains how a
watercolor happens, through a process as fortuitous as his writing.
"When you're an instinctive watercolorist everything happens
according to God's will."
Another selection ("Into the Night Life") is the scenario of a
nightmare. Vividly pictorial, it is like a surrealist film, full of
irrational sequences, screaming terrors, Freudian guilt and logic.
Like any good nightmare it is experienced: one is there, being
pursued, unable to run, locked in, frantically trying to find a way
out. The world tilts and the scene shifts constantly in this "Coney
Island of the mind," where memories are jumbled together with
Gothic visions in a world of crazy symbols that make sense.
Miller has written a great deal about the creative process
elsewhere, but never so effectively. Black Spring demonstrates the
creative imagination at work on all levels. "In ordinary waking
life," Miller explains in his surrealistic vocabulary, "the author
suffers from normal vision but in the frontispiece he renders
himself myopic in order to grasp the immediacy of the dream plasm.
By means of the dream technique he peels off the outer layers of
his geologic mortality and comes to grips with his true mantic
self, a non-stratified area of semi-liquid character. Only the
amorphous side of his nature now possesses validity. By submerging
the visible I he dives below the threshold of his schizophrenic
habit patterns. He swims joyously, ad lib., in the amniotic fluid,
one with his amoebic self." Miller believes that writing should be
as spontaneous and unconscious as possible. Hence his own writing
is full of free association and improvisation. There are passages
of automatic writing--cadenzas, he sometimes calls them--when the
dictation possesses him. Miller at the typewriter is like a
centaur; he becomes one with the machine, and works in furious
bursts. The result is a succession of discontinuous virtuoso
passages that show where he sat down to write and where he left
off.
Stylistically Black Spring is a dazzling book, the work of a
rampant imagination intoxicated with words. Miller is a poet of
reckless abandon, his language exuberant and prodigal, often used
for sound rather than meaning. Fond of jargon and parody, he
readily spins off into nonsense and jabberwocky. "Jabberwhorl
Cronstadt," a verbal caricature of a friend, parodies his
multisyllabic pontification and turns it into nonsense. During the
course of his conversation, Jabberwhorl grows progressively drunk,
and the language reels: "' the great vertiginous vertebration
the zoospores and the leucocytes the wamroths and the
holenlindens. every one's a poem. The jellyfish is a poem too--the
finest kind of poem. You poke him here, you poke him there, he
slithers and slathers, he's dithy and clabberous, he has a colon
and intestines, he's vermiform and ubisquishous.'"
As that final pun indicates, Jabberwhorl's jellyfish is descended
from James Joyce as well as Lewis Carroll. "Jabberwhorl Cronstadt,"
indeed the whole of Black Spring, is full of Joycean passages. Like
the great parodist Miller writes not in one style, but in many. Not
only is each section of Black Spring written in a different style,
but individual sections are written in a chameleon style that
borrows its constantly changing colors from a dozen sources.
Besides Joyce the authors he most frequently resembles are Proust
and Whitman. Like the Tropics, Black Spring is Proustian in its
view of coexistent time and place stimulated by memory and the
senses; Miller's writing is evocative and nostalgic. His affinity
to Whitman is more fundamental, for Whitman contributes to his
stance as well as his style. "For me the book is the man," Miller
declares, "and my book is the man I am, the confused man, the
negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous,
thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man that I
am." Miller's rhetoric is like Whitman's, with long rhythmic lines
pulsing along through present participles. His description of the
Seine could be scanned as Whitmanesque verse:
"this still jet rushing on from out of a million billion roots,
this still mirror bearing the clouds along and stifling the past,
rushing on and on and on while between the mirror and the
clouds moving transversally I, a complete corporate entity, a
universe bringing countless centuries to a conclusion, I and this
that passes beneath me and this that floats above me and all that
surges through me...
Like Whitman too, Miller is fond of catalogues. Black Spring is
full of them. One catalogue of American names runs on for two full
pages, recapitulating the American scene from American Can to the
Banks of the Wabash.
An excerpt from George Wickes’ chapter on Henry Miller from
American Writers, 1974, Vol. 3, p. 170-192 (altogether 29 pages)
