This is fiction, but also thinly veiled autobiography. Miller centers on his relationships with his lover, Mona (June), his first wife, Maude (Beatrice Wickens in real life), and a cast of some pretty wacky characters ranging from employers to detectives to people he just owes money to. His explicit sex scenes with Mona and Maude are the hottest I've read anywhere -- they really get my motor turning. However Miller is also a cold fish when it comes to giving Maude the love and respect she deserves. He basically screws her repeatedly, then leaves for the other woman (actually, several other women) without a shred of guilt. In between the sex scenes are plenty of moments of high comedy. Recommended. June Miller
Thisprose-poem I wrote today may be useful to readers of Miller's work. -Ron Price, Australia ----------------------- WHO ARE YOU HENRY MILLER? "All of Henry Miller’s work," writes Jay Morten, "constitutes the autobiography of his legend, not of his life."1 In his writings this American writer(1891-1980) gives expression to his real self—or so some argue—and/or creates another self, an imaginative construct which involves an "obliteration or at least a masking of self."1 To Morten Miller invents himself; a strong aroma of his personality hovers about his writings, impressing readers with an assurance of authenticity. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jay Morten, Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller-An Unauthorized Biography, Capra Press, Santa Barbara, 1978, p.vii. You say, Henry, that you don’t tell the whole story of your life, never will...you have so little of it down on paper and you even lie to throw all the bastards off track, eh Henry? Elaborate webs of guesswork, sheer invention and dubious assumptions about the information-giving ability of fiction, friends know fragment of your life—and that with them—such small fragments they all have Henry, eh? Oh to drive beneath and beyond the façade into the chambers of hearts, the corridors of imagination, eh Henry? No work of biography, no few hundred pages can recreate a life, eh Henry? eh? You wanted none of this writing business, this writing as if someone knew about you. And so I cling to the moment, the mundane trifle, rooms, streets, houses, those tentative gropings toward self-understanding, try to stay as close to the life lived, to catch myself at the point just before my imagination buries its origins. As you once said Henry, you had a thousand faces, all of them very genuine, eh? Motives, perspective, awkward, tangled reality of life, as Gibbon once said, are far too complex to penetrate below the surface.1 How did your mind work, Henry? Who are you Henry Miller? 1 David Womersley, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p. 280. Ron Price 17 November 2008
It would be nice to think that Miller wasn't quite as selfish in his personal relations in reality as in his autobiographical novels. But even if he were precisely the person he created in print for his readers, he would remain a talented novelist of the first order.
