"Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!" Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
It was the message board in our hall that signalled we were getting in too deep. Late at night, coming back completely pished, my flatmate had scrawled "Corpus Diem!" in a fit of zealous enthusiasm for life, little realising her mistake.
This was the height of our Henry Miller obsession. I don't know who found the book first, but we both started reading Sexus from the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Miller's lewd, "fictional" autobiography. Nexus and Plexus followed. We revelled in his tales: getting drunk on water, chasing "tail" (in the books he had sex with most women he met, yeah right), bemoaning his job at the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company...
He never had any money, cadging off his rich friends but he never once felt sorry for himself. Life was about Art. Fun. Sex. Corpus diem, etc. But Miller wasn't anti-intellectual, he also had a voracious appetite for books - calculating (roughly, mind) that if you spent just two hours a day reading, you get through all the greats in a couple of years. I almost tried.
However, Miller's legacy is tits and bums; a self-mythologising grifter. George Orwell was a fan, and interestingly his piece on Miller from 1940 highlights a problem has plagued the American writer: he has rarely been the name to drop.
"The average sensual man is out of fashion. Preoccupation with sex and truthfulness about the inner life are out of fashion. American Paris is out of fashion. A book like Tropic of Cancer, published at such a time, must be either a tedious preciosity or something unusual, and I think a majority of the people who have read it would agree that it is not the first. It is worth trying to discover just what this escape from the current literary fashion means."
There is something unliterary about someone writing about drinking, having sex and seeing God on the way to work. No formal plot, but feverishly gripping nonetheless - why is he not seen as a Great? There is a priggishness - especially in the UK - about writerly mores. You're supposed to concentrate on the nice things (warm weather, good people), bad things (death, corruption, war) - but nothing raunchy. We have the Literary Review's Bad Sex award ... but no good sex version.
Above all, Miller conveyed his attitude to life as a joyous bloody fuck you. In many ways Miller was similar to JP Donleavy - a wonderful novelist, with a fair few torrid fumblings going on in his novels. The male characters in these tales are absolutely awful, no sane person would conclude otherwise, but they are important in that they represent the male psyche.
Are we now too PC to welcome a comparative talent to Miller? Who would be his natural (if not a little overdue - he died in 1980) successor?
If Miller were writing today, his keen sense of spirituality would be translated into New Age mumbo jumbo. His keen sense of erotic hijinks would be categorised as porn. He would squeezed into genre writing - something I think he transcends.
So, let's grumble on. Last week, I happened to be in Paris. It's mid-afternoon - what better idea than to go to the Hemingway bar at the Ritz - in the spirit of Papa and Miller (who were firm friends) - and drink a cocktail toast to the old boys? Bloody place didn't open till "18.30 heures". What a con.
