As the title of Norman Mailer’s book on Henry Miller, “Genius and Lust” suggests, the pugnacious (2) fellow New Yorker really liked Henry.
Like …like-like.
Originally published in 1976, Mailer provides the reader with excerpts from Henry’s major works, accompanied with a healthy dollop of mostly fawning complements (although, though as we’ll see, he does levy the occasional critique.)
This is Mailer, after all, a writer who, consciously or not, brazenly appropriated Miller’s flowery style throughout his career, and as we leafted through an Uncorrected Page Proof in our archives — as, the book itself is out of print — we were continually struck by some of his more ridiculously obsequious musings.
So, with that as a preamble, grab some popcorn, click here, and immerse yourselves in some of Mailer’s most outlandish and verbose bits of commentary on the object of his man-crush!
- “Indeed one has to ask oneself if Miller count not out-write Melville if it came to describe a tempest at sea.” (Page 4)
- “Miller at his best wrote a prose grander than Faulkner’s, and wilder — the good reader is resolved in farrago of light with words as heavy as velvet, brilliant as gems, eruptions of thought cover the page.” (Page 4)
- “One has to take the English language back to Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity.” (Page 4)
- “It is close therefore to incomprehensible that a man whose literary career has been with us over forty years, an author who wrote one novel [Tropic of Cancer] which may yet be considered equal to the best of Hemingway, a better than novel than anything by Fitzgerald, an author who at his richest gave us sustained passages as intense as anything in Faulkner, a writer who could probably produce more than Thomas Wolfe day by day, and beat him word for word, a wildwater of prose, a cataract, a volcano, a torrent, an earthquake — at this point Henry Miller would have fifty better words to string — a writer finally like a great athlete, a phenomenon of an avatar of literary energy who was somehow, with every large acceptance, and every respect, was somehow ignored and near to discarded, ignored indeed most — the paradox embeds itself in new paradox — in just those years when his ideas triumphed most, and the young of America, for the large part ignorant of Miller’s monumental collection of writings, were nonetheless living up to the ears with his thoughts or spouting his condemnations.” (Dude!!; page 9)
- “He is the Grand Speleologist of the Vagina.” (Page 90)
- “The titles of other books ululate through his work like oscillating hairs of the labia majorum. (Page 91)
- “Perhaps his voice is harsh, hysterical and strident so much of the time because he was the first to take a walk through the halls of non-responsiveness, those all-pervasive corporate surfaces which would end by linking plastic hands across every road, building and instrument in America.”
(Readers should note: This is just the tip of the Mailerian iceberg!)