This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of American writer Henry Miller. To commemorate him, the American literary world published two biographies about his life according to the "New York Times Book Review Weekly" report: One is "Henry Miller" by Robert Ferguson and the other is "Merry Living, Henry Miller" by Mary V. Delpon; these two biographies make up for the past Ignore the life and work of Henry Miller. For Henry Miller, the character of life and work was a problem that, as he put it in a near autobiography, "straddles the comparison of art and experience." It also makes the writing of biographers extraordinarily difficult, a difficulty that makes Miller's students deliberately ignoring the comparison; for it would make the subject an uncritical argument. The two biographers tried to keep a considerable distance from Miller's position in writing the book; although the two took different paths, each author digs his own narrative and countless works, published and unpublished. material, in order to tease out the facts in the fiction.
Between art and ideology, Miller's contribution to twentieth-century culture is undeniable, and this contribution is first seen in his words about gender issues. Before the first edition of Tropic of Cancer appeared in 1935, Miller was well acquainted with the life of poverty and exile in the tradition of the Tramp mythology, guaranteeing a professionally complete account. (After the book Tropic of Cancer was published in France in 1934, it was banned from distribution in the United States for its obscene content, and it was sold publicly until 1961.) Miller's literary influence is extremely extensive, mainly in the "Shocking" American prose, Norman Mailer said in an article in 1972 that Miller's importance lies in the establishment of a certain "literary tone" in his prose. The complaints against Miller are also well known: he was a gender equal, an anti-Semitic and an anti-stylist; his historic mission was sexual liberation and self-expression.
Ferguson's Biography of Henry Miller is sometimes inappropriately written, although he also cites various ironies from Miller's text to flesh out his arguments. For example, he once quoted Miller as saying, "If there is one thing worse than the temperament of an artist, it may be because you have this temperament yourself." For Miller, with or without the temperament of an artist, the difference between the two The distinction has never been blurred. Ferguson's comparison of Miller to a skilled liar and a clown goes too far; though he does in one respect tell of Miller's character.
Miller was born in 1891. His parents worked hard to make a living. Miller was a precocious child who spent his time on the streets of Brockson, New York, as a child. His mother, a descendant of German immigrants, inherited the strictness of the German tradition; while his father was more accommodating, making Miller an ambivalent tendency that framed his life for almost ninety years. Miller entered the City University of New York in 1908, but he left the school due to a failure in one subject, and then he did various chores, often lowly jobs; during this period, he studied Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Knowles, and Whitman.
Miller loved literature and aspired to be a writer, but had to succumb to his mother's wishes, joining the clothing business his father ran in Manhattan, and later a delivery service. At this time, Miller was married for the first time (he married five times in his life and had two daughters and a son), but he also appeared in the ballroom from time to time and lived a bohemian life. In the ballroom, he met the dancer Joan Smith, who encouraged Miller to become a writer, and she also became the main character in Miller's works. In 1923, Joan Smith introduced Miller to the literary and artistic circles of Greenwich Village, and this occasion made "Henry Miller's Biography" very close to real life. In a homeless atmosphere, Miller and Joan lived together in some cheap housing and devoted themselves to writing. As early as 1922, his debut novel "Broken Wings" was written, but it was rejected by the publisher and later forgotten. Since then, he has written "Morlock God" and "Crazy Cock", published under the name of Joan Smith. He even instructed Joan to collect the royalties, and one of the payers believed that Joan was the author herself and agreed to pay to help her write another work. Miller showed the original manuscripts of these writings to peers and editors, only to receive pessimistic responses.
Of course, these manuscripts had no chance of being published, and there was no other way out. By 1930, Miller had gone into exile in France, and Joan had traveled between Paris and New York, and Miller's life had taken a turn for the better. In 1931 Miller met Anna Ning. In 1934 he wrote Tropic of Cancer, which Ferguson described as Miller's artistic breakthrough. Because Miller changed the fatal wound of his clumsy writing in the Tropic of Cancer in the past, and in the first-person narration, he used crude metaphors for intimate things, thereby expressing his feelings and actions, including sexual behavior and Everything about sex, the result is a freer and more stimulating style than in the earlier works. Miller uses more poetic language, which is an impact on language, making it Miller's new style.
Tropic of Cancer was published in Paris in 1934 by the Obelisk Bookshop, with Anna Nin trying to get money for printing from an Austrian psychoanalyst, Otto Lunk. Miller was accustomed to self-promotion, and when the book was published, it was distributed to poets Pound and Elliott and other literary friends, and was praised by them. "The Tropic of Cancer" and its sequel "Gloomy Spring" (1936) and "The Tropic of Cancer" (1939), in which the author lived in poverty in New York, earned the author an underground title, but not received substantial income. In order to make money, he had to sell his letters, watercolors and manuscripts to friends and collectors, far more than his father's income from selling clothing. Miller's spontaneity, which Ferguson called the "religious instinct"—the neo-instinctiveism of Miller and his friend Fred Pearl—removed from the old-fashioned and crude writing of his past has won the appreciation of a group of readers. Miller moved to Big Sol, California after World War II, and moved to Los Angeles in 1963 until his death in 1980.
Mary F. Dilpong's "The Happy Living, The Biography of Henry Miller", the title of the book comes from a sentence in "The Tropic of Cancer", which emphasizes Miller's decadent career in his later years more than Ferguson's biography. Depression comes from the increasing contradictions that Miller encounters. Miller hated the commodification of art, but in fact he privately relied on his reputation and selling his hands for a living. Now money and fame are making his head hurt because he can no longer pretend to be a poor and outcast genius. Dilpong saw this paradox and used it as the main thread of her biography, a more moving story of Miller's life than Ferguson's book, although she was not very good at it.
The childhood scenes she writes about Miller are particularly rich because she writes with a feminine and slightly psychoanalytic perspective. She considered Miller an important writer because he was an example of modernity literature. Miller's mother was not only strict but also a blatant sadist, and his docile father was homosexual. Miller became the center of this "contradiction" and had to pay for it. Dearborn believed that although sex was a major factor in Miller's work, Miller's later tendency to share the sufferings of women was deeply contradictory, and this became a never-ending theme in his work, as he shared Homosexual roots in the family. She attaches great importance to Miller's anti-Semitism, and believes that it is related to Miller's childhood when a large number of Jewish immigrants came to the United States.
Dearborn also attached great importance to Miller's literary career. She wanted to persuade readers to pay attention to the literary style that Miller had cultivated in Paris. Miller immersed himself in the writings of writers Henry James and English Walter Pater, as well as his careful creation of fictional characters on the Left Bank of Paris, forging his instinctualism to the admiration of Anna Ning. Although Miller is naturally attractive and gentle, he is also obscene and vulgar. The rudeness brought about by his gags and pretences in his prose was liked by Anna Ning, on the contrary, Miller also liked Anna Ning's "ice-like arrogance". The two sexes influence each other, and what the one lacks is supplemented by the other.
In 1931, Miller's "Crazy Cock", which he completed in Paris, did not make much progress, and even brought him from failure to notoriety. This is a third-person story about his love relationship with Joan Smith and another lesbian artist. The writing of "Crazy Cock" foreshadows Miller's later style, although the tone and fluency of language are quite different. "Crazy Rooster" is stuffed, exaggerated, self-defeating, full of too much self-consciousness, and becomes unconscious instead. At that time, Miller hadn't noticed the anti-aesthetic attitude in Tropic of Cancer, so his prose seemed jumpy and neurotic. But the penchant for brutishness and metaphor makes Miller's writing "Crazy Rooster" and the two Tropic of Cancer have a coherence. Miller often pursues a literary atmosphere for writing, and "Crazy Cock" provides a blueprint.
Now, in a review of Miller's achievements in 1991, he is no longer as rude as he was then, and he has become a role model for several writers in the 1950s and 1960s. The temperament he shares with his girlfriend Anna Ning - Ning's "Diary" looks almost like Miller's handwriting - is one that is pretentious rather than approachable. Miller emphasizes literary effects, and these effects are hard-earned by writers. Ferguson defended Miller, saying that Miller understood life from the characters he loved in Dostoevsky and Hamson. He said Miller couldn't identify different people, and often saw people he met as characters in a book. Intuition, spontaneity, hilarity, all this is necessary to restrain Miller's lively aesthetic point of view comparing real life to life in books. Regardless of the ironic tone in Tropic of Cancer, this desire to separate reality from book life, especially art and life, has truly become the irony in Miller and Anna Ning's writing. The experience was interesting to both of them because it reminded them of the books they had read and the movies they had seen, and in any case they felt that their innocence allowed them to live more intensely than others. They think that if you write down what happens in powerful or poetic words, it will be interesting. But we have yet to see the effect of this claim.
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