The Happy Rock

Re-reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn after almost three decades... Miller's genius was proletarian; furthermore, it was the genius of a man who, in his writing if not his daily affairs, had never acquired the super-ego, the censor, shame. He was pure, proletarian id. He was Walt Whitman without the ear for a higher calling. Whitman wished to elevate his reader with his Leaves; Henry Miller just pulls one aside and runs at the mouth. And what a mouth! One moment, the wisdom is Heraclitean and profound. The next, the mind-numbing ramblings of a colossal boor. And this seems to me to have been his project: to record everything, to slowly translate himself, word by word, into the symbolic residue of his voice--his genuine Brooklynite voice.

In a way, this had to happen: Whitman had to be followed by one who would sing a song of himself that few could stomach. Of course, he was followed by multitudes with such songs, but Miller's song has remained because, at the end of the day, say what you will, it is artful. Brutally frank, obscene, embarrassing, disgusting, revolting, even--but artful. And he knew it. He knew he had the chops and so he exercised them with wild abandon. And this is what remains: an early 20th century white American proletarian Brooklynite; a man like any other man, only moreso. A man in full. A man revealed from the inside out. A man who would dare to confess himself a man. No more, no less.

Strange as this may sound, his was a remarkable achievement. It took a singleness of purpose and unflinching resolve to tell it all and, at times, to tell it all superbly. If, as Lawrence Durrell argued, "American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done," we are entitled to ask "whither American literature?" For once one particular writer has managed to "get it all down," what remains to be done? Here, perhaps, time may prove itself on a writer's side. For with the passage of time and the consequent shifts of what it means to be an American, it is possible that the task of "getting it all down" is generational. In the wake of Miller, this may be what being a writer in the American grain has come to. Then again, there may be other vistas, other visions, other tasks, as yet unseen. American literature awaits the arrival of its next genius, its next "prophetic figure" of letters in the Emerson-Whitman-Miller line.