Henry Miller

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Henry Miller, 1940. Photograph by Carl van Vechten
Henry Miller signature

Henry Valentine Miller (born December 26, 1891 in New York , † June 7, 1980 in Los Angeles ) was an American writer and painter .

biography

The early years

Henry Miller was born on December 26, 1891 in the New York borough of Yorkville (Manhattan) in simple circumstances. Both parents were Catholic and came from Germany; the mother Louise Marie Neiting from Hessen and the father Heinrich Miller, who was a tailor by profession, from Bavaria .

During his school days he lived in New York - Williamsburg (Brooklyn) . After finishing school, Henry Miller began studying at City College of New York University , but he dropped out after two months because all the prescribed reading list did not like. "If I kind of reading must read," said Miller, which he to Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser was referring, "I give up."

After dropping out of college, he worked for the Atlas Portland Cement Company in New York's financial district. But the job did not satisfy him: in 1913 he made an "attempt to break out" and traveled to the West to work as a cowboy and escape the hated city life. But his romantic notions quickly collided with reality. A few months later he was back in New York. He started working in the tailoring shop for his father, where he discovered his love for fine fabrics and suits, which he would keep for the rest of his life.

In 1917, at the age of 26, Miller married the first of five women, Beatrice Sylvas Wickens. He thought she was a 'good girl' his mother would like, and marriage kept him from going to war. But after the marriage, his first impression turned, he now had the feeling that he was living with his mother again '. Beatrice was critical and demanding of him and scoffed at his ambition to become a writer. He was unable to stay on a job for any length of time, with which he could have satisfied Beatrice. Again and again he let himself go to write or to study philosophical writings. The first daughter named Barbara comes from this marriage.

In 1920, after his father's tailoring business went bankrupt, Miller applied for a job as a messenger with the Western Union Telegraph Company, New York, but was turned down. He then complained angrily to a higher level in the company and asked why they didn't want to hire him for such a simple job. This made an impression, and he was given the job he had previously been denied. With an additional task: As a messenger, he should get to know the various branches and deliver regular reports for the management, i.e. spy. In return, he was offered a position as HR manager in one of the numerous branches of the Western Union Telegraph Company as soon as he had gained sufficient experience and proved himself. He took up this position after a few months. Everyday wages and fires, human tragedies and what he felt was the infernal machinery of the company later formed the basis for his novel " Tropic of Capricorn ".

The head of the Telegraph Company came to him one day with the idea that someone should write a book about messengers like Horatio Alger . Miller was given leave of absence from his employer for this and wrote the book within three weeks. Miller presented a book called Clipped Wings , which contains twelve messengers from a telegraph company. Miller wrote of “gentle souls who are offended, hurt, run amok , or endure and suffer violence; Stories of sorrow and bitterness in which people either become murderers or kill themselves, usually both. ”Miller viewed the book as a failure because he did not know much about good writing; but this first attempt gave him a strong urge to learn how to write and learn more about it.

Miller worked for the Telegraph Company for four years until he met his second wife June Edith Smith Mansfield. June was a taxi girl by profession , a dancer who can be hired for a dance. She encouraged him to quit his job and continue writing. She supported Miller financially so that he could continue his self-taught education and pursue his dream of writing more intensively. During this time he began to print shorter works at his own expense and to publish them in the form of small subscriptions , which he sold on the street, in restaurants and in bars with the help of his wife June and a few friends.

Anaïs Nin in the 1970s

June saved enough money that both of them could vacation in Paris for several months in 1928 and 1929 and get a taste of bohemian life . Thanks to June, Miller traveled to Paris for a long period in 1930 as part of a European tour, where he wrote more than 36 creative and analytical works. In 1931 he took a job at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune as a proofreader , which he owed to his friend Alfred Perlès , who worked there and temporarily lived with him. This period is described in the partially autobiographical novel " Stille Tage in Clichy " , first published in 1940 and revised in 1956 , which originally consisted of the two novel fragments "Stille Tage in Clichy" and "Mara Marignon".

In Paris he felt particularly close to unconventional artists, which helped him develop his own writing style. His most important muse and patron was the American writer Anaïs Nin , born in France , who gave him the decisive impulses for self-discovery due to her psychological empathy and with whom both he and his wife June cultivated an intense sexual relationship. Anaïs Nin wrote the foreword to Miller's first book and processed the relationship of the three in her diary entries "Henry, June and I".

During his stay in Europe, he created works such as “ Tropic of Cancer ” (1934), “Black Spring” (1936) and “ Tropic of Capricorn ” (1939), in which he wrote down many of his own sexual experiences, but also philosophical insights.

Back in America

Entrance to the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur

Henry Miller moved to Greece in 1939 and returned to the United States the following year because of World War II . In 1940 he took the painter Abraham Rattner (1895–1978), whom he had met in Paris in the 1930s, on a trip from New York to the southern United States. Miller's description and illustrations Rattners the trip were published in 1945 The Air-Conditioned Nightmare ( The air-conditioned nightmare ). In 1944 Miller settled for the next 18 years of his life in the California coastal region of Big Sur and continued his writing activity there. Miller's main work from this period is the three-volume work "The Rosy Crucifixion", which includes " Sexus " (1949), " Plexus " (1953) and " Nexus " (1960). These three volumes contain his earlier experiences and adventures. In addition, Miller wrote:

  • " Lawrence Durrell / Henry Miller" - Letters 1935-1959, published 1962nd The correspondence continued until 1980.
  • "Letters to Anaïs Nin", published in 1965.
  • "The World of DH Lawrence : A Passionate Recognition," published 1980.
  • " Opus Pistorum ", published in 1983 posthumously. Most critics doubt that this purely pornographic work is really Miller's work. All that is known is that Miller allegedly repeatedly sold individual pages to the publisher of this book. For details, see Opus Pistorum.

The publication of the book "Tropic of Cancer" in the United States in 1961 led to a series of trials in which the American judiciary had to examine the book for its shocking content, which violated all sexual taboos. The US Supreme Court declared the book non-obscene and part of modern literature in 1964.

The linguistic openness in erotic descriptions meant that Miller's books were banned in the USA and Great Britain until the 1960s . In France, his book "Sexus" was not approved for publication for 18 years.

In 1957 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

The late years

In the later years, Miller was largely admired for his role as a speaker and thinker. Criticizing the empty materialism of modern existence , he called for a new religion of the body and mind based on the ideas of the philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and the two writers Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and DH Lawrence (1885– 1930) is based.

He was also interested in educational issues and financially supported AS Neill's Summerhill School .

Miller lived alone in his last years and mainly pursued watercolor painting without considering himself an artist. He was a close friend of the French painter Grégoire Michonze . He was also an amateur pianist.

Miller was married a total of five times: to Beatrice Sylvas Wickens (1917–1928), June Edith Smith (1928–1934), Janina Martha Lepska (1944–1952), Eve McClure (1953–1960) and Hiroko Tokuda (1967–1977). The writer Anaïs Nin was his most famous mistress.

He died on June 7, 1980 in Pacific Palisades , California.

Literary style and influences

Henry Miller (1959)

Miller's style includes a strongly naturalistic spelling with surreal visions and lyrical prose. His criticism of modern, above all American, civilization is significantly influenced by his reception of Nietzsche's philosophy of life and Spengler's downfall of the West , under which he also processes psychoanalytic ideas. Throughout his life he orientated himself on the great wisdom teachers of mankind like Buddha or Laotse and Taoism . He was an admirer of the American feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman and counted Georges Gurdjieff among his spiritual teachers. His involvement with esoteric teachings and astrology made him a forerunner of the New Age movement of the eighties. The authors who shaped Miller's thinking and writing include DH Lawrence, Dostoevsky , Knut Hamsun , Sherwood Anderson and Louis-Ferdinand Céline . He dedicated a literary study to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud ( On the Great Revolt ).

The process of writing and the phenomenon of creativity itself play a major role in Miller's work. His writing reflects the sometimes desperate, sometimes exuberant and cheerful confrontation with life and his path to becoming a writer. Behind a spelling that despises all restrictive forms reveals the unconditional devotion to life itself, which in its disordered juxtaposition of high and low, cruel and tender, ridiculous and adorable, is affirmed and spread before the eyes of the reader in all its diversity and intensity. Here Miller is a soulmate of authors like Walt Whitman , Ralph Waldo Emerson or François Rabelais , whose struggle for independence and freedom he shares. In this context, he regards art and especially literature as a means of liberation from social fetters, conventions and constraints.

His work reflects, almost exclusively in the form of an autobiography or diary, his sometimes surreal world of emotions and thoughts. The various characters in his books show an unmistakable physiognomy with which they master existence or fail because of it. According to Miller, it was a matter of depicting life as it was presented to him and avoiding artificial stylization . His deliberately provocative and realistic descriptions of sexuality were part of his self-declared efforts to expose a bourgeois value system that was perceived as lying and false and to replace it with an individualism that was just as sober as it was poetic .

With his provocative language and his non-conformist attitude and way of life, Miller had an impact on many authors of the Beat Generation and so-called postmodernism , who, like him, despised the values ​​of middle-class society. Well-known representatives of the Beat Generation were the writers Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) and Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997).

Henry Miller as a painter

Throughout his life, Henry Miller felt a strong inclination towards painting without ever having had any training in this field. The importance of the fine arts for him is shown by the detailed mention of all the painting activities that he left behind in the short biography he wrote himself. On his numerous travels he met painters again and again. B. 1937 with the American expressionist Abraham Rattner in New York, 1939 with the Cubist Nicolas Ghika (1906–1994) in Greece, 1941 with Fernand Léger , 1945 with the Israeli painter Bezalel Schatz (1912–1978; son of Boris Schatz ) and 1961 with the Italian sculptor Marino Marini , who cast his head in bronze.

With the exception of a few etchings on copper plates, his own artistic oeuvre consisted of several hundred watercolors ; he was able to present these works at numerous exhibitions and in some cases also sell them:

  • 1927 in Greenwich Village , NYC
  • 1943 in the American Contemporary Gallery Hollywood, CA
  • 1944 in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and in the Yale University Art Gallery
  • In 1946 Leon Shamroy bought more than 30 of his watercolors
  • In 1954 he had his first traveling exhibition in Japan
  • 1957 at Gallery One, London and in Israel (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv). That year he was also elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Sciences .
  • In 1963, Henry Miller was initiated into silk painting by nuns at Immaculate Heart College ; then 115 watercolors were created between March and July alone.
  • 1967 in the Daniel Gervis Gallery , Paris; then in Uppsala , Sweden
  • 1968 second traveling exhibition in Japan (Miller had married the Japanese Hiroko Tokuda, known as 'Hoki', the year before).

These diary-like entries end in 1971 when they were incorporated into the more detailed autobiography My Life and Times by Henry Miller , which was published by New York-based Playboy Press that same year .

Works

Further works in German translation:

Kurt Wagenseil has translated almost all of Miller's works into German.

Audio

Film adaptations

The actor Rip Torn plays Henry Miller in the 1970 adaptation of the book Tropic of Cancer . In 1970 the book Stille Tage in Clichy was filmed by the Danish director Jens Jørgen Thorsen in a low-budget production , in which the Miller character 'Joey' is played by Paul Valjean . The director Claude Chabrol made a remake of Silent Days in Clichy in 1990, in which the actor Andrew McCarthy played Miller's alter ego . In the same year, Miller was played by Fred Ward in the film Henry & June .

Film documentaries (selection)

literature

  • Mary V. Dearborn: Henry Miller . A biography (Original title: The Happiest Man Alive ). German by Sabine Schulte. Knaus, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-8135-1152-9 .
  • Robert Ferguson: Henry Miller. A life without taboos . Kindler, Munich 1991.
  • Erica Jong : The devil personified: Henry Miller and me . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1999.
  • Jay Martin: Henry Miller: the love of life . Translation by Werner Waldhoff. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1980.
  • Walter Schmiele : Henry Miller. Represented with testimonials and photo documents . 15th edition, 68–70. Thousand. Rowohlt's monographs (Volume 61). Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1992, 190 pages, ISBN 3-499-50061-2 .
  • Lawrence J. Shifreen (Eds.) Et al .: Henry Miller. A Bibliography of Primary Sources . With a foreword by Henry Miller. Volume 1, 1993; on this: Volume 2, Addenda, Corrections and Updates , 1994; on this: Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources , 1999.
  • Arthur Hoyle: The unknown Henry Miller: a seeker in Big Sur , New York, NY: Arcade Publ., 2014, ISBN 978-1-61145-899-2 .

Quotes

  • " Arno Gruen is the first psychologist who would have been appreciated by Nietzsche ." - Henry Miller
  • "A Buddha to create that exceeds the generally respected Buddha, which is a tremendous fact. For me, Siddhartha is a more effective medicine than the New Testament. ”- Henry Miller on Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha

Web links

Commons : Henry Miller  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ George Wickes, 1974, pp. 170-192.
  2. ^ English language Wikipedia Henry and June , Henry, June and I: intimate diary 1931–1932. OT: Henry and June. 1986, transl. Gisela Stege, Scherz Verlag 1987, ISBN 3-502-19509-9 . as Knaur Taschenbuch, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-426-03252-X
  3. ^ Henry Miller Memorial Library : from the short biography written by Henry Miller himself (accessed May 8, 2014)
  4. ↑ The Limits of Literary Freedom: The Subversive Role of Pornography . In: ZEIT ONLINE . ( zeit.de [accessed on September 30, 2018]).
  5. ^ Members: Henry Miller. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 15, 2019 .
  6. ↑ ASNeill, Neill, Neill, Birnenstiel , 1st edition Rowohlt, Reinbek 1973, p. 197
  7. ↑ Original: The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud , New York: New Directions, 1946. In addition: Herbert Eisenreich: Der Große Aufstand. On an essay by Henry Miller , Die Zeit , February 24, 1955
  8. ↑ Henry Miller Memorial Library : Short biography (the fragment ends with entries for 1971)
  9. ↑ [1]
  10. ↑ [2]
  11. ↑ klett-cotta.de
  12. ↑ Materials on Hesse's Siddhartha , Vol. 2, p. 302, cit. January 24, 1973
personal data
SURNAME Miller, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Miller, Henry Valentine (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and painter
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1980
Place of death los Angeles