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From Stephen Elliott
Henry Miller hated Brooklyn almost as passionately as he loved Big Sur and dirty sex. In “Henry Miller, Brooklyn Hater,” Alexander Nazaryan takes a look at Miller’s lifelong contempt for the borough.
In a 1975 documentary, Miller refers to Brooklyn as:
...morea place where I knew nothing but starvation, humiliation, despair, frustration, every god damn thing—nothing but misery.
In reviewing RENEGADE: Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer,” Jeanette Winterson explores mythmaking in cultural criticism, unearthing who and what gets ignored in the process.
“There is beauty as well as hatred in “Cancer,” and it deserves its place on the shelf.
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Was there ever a place greyer, wetter or lonelier than Paris in the fall?
For an Irish person, that’s a weighty question to consider. I guess that in some other incarnation of myself I might have found the glistening cobblestones of Montmartre immeasurably romantic but with my fiancé away on tour and being (scarcely) self-employed, the dampness weighed down heavily on my mood, pushing me into a period of semi-hibernation.
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There’s a black and white photo in which the poet Stanley Kunitz lovingly holds Gerald Stern’s cheeks in both hands. It’s 1990. They’re looking into one another, and Kunitz says, “You’re the wilderness in American poetry.”
Thinking back on his first stay in Hollywood, Miller often reminisced about the Green House, “where I made so many watercolors, sold them for a song or for an umbrella I had no use for, but where I also made and found friends I never knew existed.”
“Carol wants me to write a novel: ‘You’ve met so many interesting people,’ she tells me.
Very good, there was a young man and he could never get his hands on enough women. That’s a novel.
There was an idiot and he became God.
...moreIn the Guardian, novelist Ewan Morrison — whose newest novel is called Ménage — tosses out a list of literary ménages à trois, leading off with the Hemingway erotic novel (some would call it an embarrassment that Hemingway never intended to publish) The Garden of Eden.
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