ABSTRACT
the simplest things to say about Henry Miller is that he can write, but the temptation is then to add, if only below one’s breath, some word like “beautifully”, and that at once gets away from the truth. At the beginning of his first book, Tropic of Cancer, Miller wrote: “A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.” That was in 1934, but in whichever is his latest volume, he will list more than twenty volumes, about half of them already published, half “in preparation”. But not one of them, Miller would explain, is a book in the ordinary sense of the word. His whole work is “a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty …” Miller has written consistently in that spirit, and the result, as it mounts up, is one of the most significant contributions to the literature of our time.
