The Devil at Large (38 page)

A
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HENRY
Miller’s complete oeuvre presents a daunting challenge. Because his works were often published first as pamphlets, small-press, or privately printed editions, many of the titles recur. I have limited this bibliography to the noting of the first appearance of the work and the currently available edition.

Henry’s early books were published in France (in English) to take advantage of a loophole in the French obscenity law. Consequently we find first editions appearing in Paris and then the same work reappearing later in America, often after much litigation. In other cases, various anthologies of Miller’s work (minus the sexually oriented pieces) were put together as a way of avoiding prosecution for obscenity

TROPIC OF CANCER
. OBELISK
Press, Paris, 1934; Grove Press, New York, 1961.

Henry Miller’s first published book, but not the first he ever wrote. Preceded by
Moloch
and
Crazy Cock
(not published until well after his death),
Tropic of Cancer
is the exuberant sound of a new voice in American literature. A picaresque rant about one man’s odyssey through bohemian, depression-era Paris. The sex was what everyone noticed first, but reading it now we notice the directness of description and the almost Zen-like acceptance of the good and bad in life.

Black Spring.
Obelisk Press, Paris, 1936; Grove Press, New York, 1963.

Henry’s second book-length work, conceived as a self-portrait, contains such short and hallucinatory pieces as “The Angel Is My Watermark!” “A Saturday Afternoon,” “Into the Night Life …” It also contains the autobiographical gems “The Tailor Shop,” and “The Fourteenth Ward.” Prefaced with the quote “What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say,
literature
,” this book is dedicated to Anaïs Nin and remained one of Henry’s favorites. Many of the pieces in it first appeared in the U.S. in
The Cosmological Eye
(see below).

Max and the White Phagocytes.
Obelisk Press, Paris, 1938.

A miscellany of essays and tales, many of which later appear in
The Cosmological Eye.

Tropic of Capricorn.
Obelisk Press, Paris, 1939; Grove Press, New York, copyright © 1961, released in 1962.

Henry Miller’s second novel, dedicated “TO HER.” This novel jumps back to Henry’s New York life, childhood, mother, Brooklyn, first loves, The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, and the pivotal mad love for June. Henry creates a vast tomb in which to bury this agonizing and inspiring muse.

The Cosmological Eye.
New Directions, New York, 1939.

The first book of Henry’s to be published in his native country, it contains essays, memoirs, pieces which first appeared in
Black Spring
and
Max and the White Phagocytes.
Reprints such treasures as Henry’s autobiographical memoir “The Tailor Shop,” “Un Etre Etoilique,” (Henry’s discussion of Anaïs Nin and her journals), and many other wonderful genre-defying shorter works.

The Colossus of Maroussi.
Colt Press, California, 1941; New Directions, New York, 1958.

Henry’s spiritual travel book about Greece. His central work, and one of his best written. Has none of the unevenness one finds in
Nexus
,
Sexus
,
Plexus.
Its “hero,” the so-called colossus of Maroussi (George Katsimbalis), is marginal in the book, but he became a “hanger” for Henry’s own heroism.
Maroussi
stands squarely in the tradition of
Walden.

Hamlet, Vol. I and II.
With Michael Fraenkel, Carrefour, Puerto Rico, 1939; Mexico, 1941;
Hamlet Letters.
Capra Press, California, 1988.

Letters between Henry and Fraenkel (written 1935–38), which started out with Shakespeare and strayed everywhere else, as usual. Miller’s letters are philosophical essays on writing, philosophy, movies, Jews, and the thought-disease of modern man.

The World of Sex.
Argus Book Shop, Chicago, 1941.

Henry’s explication of the role of the “obscene” in his art and the relationship of sex to literature. A central self-analysis. Though Henry was only known to a coterie at this point, he treats his own contribution as if he knows how major his oeuvre would prove to be.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
New Directions, New York, 1945.

Henry’s phantasmagoric travel book about America. Deliriously antipatriotic and prophetic of the current decline of America.

A Devil in Paradise.
Signet (New American Library), New York, 1946.

A long essay (eventually incorporated into
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
) relating the invasion of Henry’s Big Sur paradise by Conrad Moricand, an old friend from Paris of the thirties, who, hearing of Henry’s “success,” decided to descend upon him. Typically, Henry cabled him “our home is yours.” He was certainly to regret it. One of the most amusing accounts of the troubles Henry’s generosity got him into.

Remember to Remember.
New Directions, New York, 1941.

Subtitled Volume 2 of
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
, this book is really a series of essays and portraits. It contains studies of such Miller-friends as Jean Varda, Abe Rattner, and Jasper Deeter. “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection,” Miller’s major piece on the uses of sex to awaken the reader, appears here, as does “Artist and Public” and “Remember to Remember,” a strange and beautiful piece about memory, forgetfulness, and Miller’s recollections of his expatriate decade in Europe.

The Wisdom of the Heart.
New Directions, New York, 1941.

Another Miller miscellany, dedicated “to Richard Galen Osborn…. who rescued me from starvation in Paris and set my feet in the right direction. May heaven protect him and guide him safely to port.” Contains “Mademoiselle Claude,” the first piece in which Miller’s direct first-person voice asserted itself clearly; “The Philosopher Who Philosophizes,” a curious little riff, written on Corfu, about Keyserling, and “The Enormous Womb,” a Henry-ish essay on birth, death, illusion, and world peace.

The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder.
Duell, Sloane & Pearce, New York, 1948; New Directions, New York, 1948.

Henry’s story of Auguste, the famous clown who wanted more than to make his audience laugh. He wanted to give them ecstasy and illumination, and in so doing found it for himself. A most atypical Miller text, both for its brevity, and because it is a philosophical parable, written in the third person. Henry says in the epilogue that it was provoked by a request from Fernand Léger that he provide a text to accompany forty illustrations of clowns and circuses. By the time Léger had rejected it as unsuitable, Henry found he had already written something he was very pleased with. The first edition (1948) had reproductions of works by Picasso, Chagall, Rouault, Klee, among others, and a later edition (1958) was illustrated by Henry himself.

Nights of Love and Laughter.
Signet (New American Library), New York, 1955.

Anthology containing “The Brooklyn Bridge,” “Mademoiselle Claude,” an excerpt from
Maroussi
, and an excellent introduction by Kenneth Rexroth that evokes Henry’s innocence and naïveté. Rexroth recognizes that Henry is a naïf and a truth-teller like Petronius or Casanova.

The Books in My Life.
New Directions, New York, 1952, 1969.

Proof that Henry regarded books as living beings, which influenced him every bit as much as the people in his life. Idiosyncratic Henry-essays on Rider Haggard, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, John Cowper Powys, Krishnamurti, and others. Contains a marvelous essay entitled “Reading in the Toilet,” that brings together all Henry’s preoccupations, from bookishness to excrement to enlightenment. A wonderful collection. It proves that the impetus to become a writer is the joy of having been a reader.

The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud.
New Directions, New York, 1946, 1962.

Purportedly a study of Rimbaud, but really a study of Henry. It illuminates his attachment to his mother’s womb and his many efforts to struggle free. By analyzing Rimbaud’s passion for liberty, he analyzes his own. Contains the amazing sentence: “There are obsessive, repetitive words which a writer uses which are more revealing than all the facts which are amassed by patient biographers.” Henry points to Rimbaud’s constant repetition of
eternity
,
charity
,
solitude
,
anguish
,
light
, and pronounces them “the warp and woof of his inner pattern.” Not proper literary criticism, but criticism lifted to the level of philosophy and self-analysis.

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
New Directions, New York, 1957.

Henry’s poetic evocation of the wild, rocky coast of California’s Big Sur, its birds, its magic, its mystery: “Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity.” For Henry, the West was full of “dreamers, outlaws, forerunners.” He became a westerner himself and Big Sur was the catalyst. Unfortunately Henry blasted this earthly paradise by writing the book. From then on fans and curiosity seekers were drawn to Big Sur, and they made it impossible for him to continue writing there. Like
Maroussi
, this book is a strong response to the spirit of a place; it goes beyond nature writing and becomes meditation.

The Intimate Henry Miller.
Signet (New American Library), New York, 1959. A paperback original.

Still another assortment—many published elsewhere before. This collection contains an excellent introduction by Lawrence Clark Powell, the U.C.L.A. librarian who became Henry’s friend, inspired
The Books In My Life
, and brought Henry Miller’s collected papers to their present place of honor in the Special Collections of the U.C.L.A. library.

The Henry Miller Reader,
edited by Lawrence Durrell. New Directions, New York, 1959.

A fairly complete Miller reader, containing literary essays, portraits, stories, pieces of
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
,
Maroussi
,
Black Spring
, and
Tropic of Cancer
, as well as a chronology of Miller’s life, written by Henry especially for this edition. The introduction by Lawrence Durrell calls Henry a “great vagabond of literature.” Here, Durrell stresses Miller’s uncategorizability: “I suspect that his final place will be among those towering anomalies of authorship like Whitman or Blake, who have left us, not simply works of art, but a corpus of ideas which motivate and influence a whole cultural pattern.” Also has an introduction and headnotes to each selection by Henry himself.

SEXUS, The Rosy Crucifixion, Book One.
Obelisk Press/Editions du Chêne, Paris, 1949; Grove Press, New York, 1965.

A vast, chaotic novel of Henry’s New York origins and his emancipation into the writing life.
Sexus
begins with Henry’s meeting Mara, the taxi dancer (based on June), who turns on him “the full incandescent radiance of her love.” It is Mara who proposes: “
Why don’t you try to write?
” This book is the story of Henry’s response to that provocation. Full of insights into the writer’s life, it has a driving energy, but, as a whole, proves V.S. Pritchett’s theory that if you remove the weaknesses of a book, you also remove the strengths. Bombast and bad writing abound, but it is nonetheless worth reading for the accuracy with which it captures Henry’s desperate need to become a writer.

PLEXUS, The Rosy Crucifixion.
Olympia Press, Paris, 1953; Grove Press, New York, 1963.

Another installment of the June/becoming-a-writer story. Here the muse is called Mona and the book begins with our hero’s moving in with her in Brooklyn. Covers Henry Miller’s Greenwich Village life, the speakeasy, Henry’s first attempts to compete with James Joyce by writing for a fee. It seems that each time Henry went back to this old material he discovered new treasures. And yet, it is the ending digression of
Plexus
—an elaborate cadenza about Spengler, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Hesse, and the
Tao Te Ching
, that makes it most interesting. Here Henry says “perhaps in opening the wound, my own wound, I closed other wounds, other people’s wounds.” In short, Henry discovers the reason for all his suffering: to give something back to the world.

NEXUS: Volume I.
Obelisk Press, Paris, 1960; Grove Press, New York, 1965, 1987.

The last installment of Henry’s New York life. Again, the setting is Greenwich Village in the twenties and again the heroine/muse is Mona (who is betraying Henry with another woman). The marvels here are the digressions. They cover everything—from America, to philosophy, to writing, to memory. At the end of the book, Henry is launched from America to Europe. He says good-bye to Daniel Boone, the Street of Early Sorrows, Sherlock Holmes, Houdini, Oscar Hammerstein, O. Henry, P.T. Barnum, Jesse James, and Rudolf Friml.

Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel.
Loujon Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1966.

A strange and beautiful essay about the origins of art. It is here that Henry describes his love affair with chaos, his desire to be as creative as God.

Quiet Days in Clichy.
Olympia Press, Paris, 1956; Grove Press, New York, 1987.

Two erotic tales set in Paris in the thirties, written in 1940 for a collector of pornography who rejected them as “too poetic.” The price was supposedly “one dollar a page.” Even as a pornographer, Henry couldn’t hold a job. This book is rawer than
Tropic of Cancer
and doesn’t have as many digressions, but it is still
not proper
pornography, i.e., “the copulation of clichés” (Nabokov).

Insomnia or The Devil at Large.
Loujon Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1970; Gemini Smith/Doubleday & Co., New York, 1974.

The story of an old man falling in love with a beautiful young woman, who taunts him and causes him to lose sleep. The devil here is love, longing, imagination, sleeplessness. This exquisite account of Henry’s infatuation with Hoki, his ultimate wife, is full of wisdom about the eternal riddle of unrequited passion. Illustrated with Henry’s “Insomnia” series of watercolors, which are among his best.