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Henry Miller
- Thread starter bazonix
- Start date
RonPrice
New Member
This May Help, bazonix.
I wrote this prose-poem today about Miller, his life and work. You folks may find this useful.-From Ron Price in Australia
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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
I wrote this prose-poem today about Miller, his life and work. You folks may find this useful.-From Ron Price in 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