3 - Three Responses: The Examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos

Summary

By 1930, when he left New York for Paris, Henry Miller thought of himself as one of the last heirs of the Lyric Years’ commitment to the value of childlike innocence and unmediated feelings. Bored with literary works like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, he had exchanged studies at City College for a series of dreary jobs that included brief stints with a cement company and his father’s tailoring business and five years as supervisor of Western Union’s messenger service. But it was New York’s street life that engaged him, and its burlesque shows and dance halls, in one of which he met a hostess named June Smith, who became the subject of much of his writing. Later, gaining confidence, he denounced bookishness in favor of experience, spontaneity, and instinct. But his writings – from his early studies of outcasts, derelicts, and prostitutes to the series of novels that made him famous, Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) – are in fact highly self-conscious performances. They are shaped as much by the books he had read – of Walter Pater and Henry James as well as Whitman, Dreiser, Norris, and London, whom he more or less owned up to – as by the things he had done and seen. And they demonstrate what his carefully constructed persona, introduced in New York, perfected in Paris, then transported to California, at once denied and suggested: that for him the doctrines of spontaneity and instinctivism and his celebrations of unmediated experience coexisted with an active, irrepressible aestheticism.