Henry Miller to Henry James

Consider things from the point of view of Lady Chatterley’s husband. Physically deprived of his passions all he could do was roll around in that big old house and think, or rather, maintain a state of sentience, assuming thinking and feeling are included in the term. With which he seemed quite happy until the gamekeeper started sniffing around his wife. Lawrence believed that anything arising from the passions was well, yes, virtuous. He invented a new, inverted, kind of morality. But in doing so, naive as it seems now, he preserved the very idea of morality for a generation of liberated readers. Or at least, that was the effect on me of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and of Lawrence’s offspring, Henry Miller: the presumptive morality of a life force that undercut traditional morality.

Now, in a post-fascist world, it’s easy to see the disastrous consequences of a vitalistic morality, just as, in a post-Marxist world, the malignancy of a purely rational mentality has become obvious. But the history of consciousness staggers, it seems, from doctrine to doctrinaire to correction to over-correction. One could argue that for a kid growing up in the ultra conventional ‘50s of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the Lawrence-Miller axis was the most liberating path given the going hypocrite/conformist morality.

The ‘60s, Vietnam and the baby boomers gave the coup de grace to that conventional mentality. But the loosening up of the psyche in the direction of liberated passions eventually enlisted passions in the service of hypocrite conformity. One could argue optimistically that we are a loop higher in a spiral of liberation. Sexuality, though more exploited, seems to be more free. Relations between parents and children, when there are any at all, seem to be more open and affectionate. Men are more expressive and women have more drive. One heritage from the Lawrence-Miller mode that seems beneficent is a matter of style—in a word: the extemporaneous. The appeal of the extemporaneous is a combination of the freshness of spontaneity combined with the moral bonus of a presumed honesty. The biographer John Tytell tells us that Miller found his enabling style by writing the way he talked rather than the way he had been writing. The spontaneous quality of speech is what gives Miller’s style its power. The case of Lawrence is more subtle as regards speech. He moves in the direction of the incantatory, which is the direction of ritual and magic, hypnotizing the conscious mind to allow more primal understanding to make itself felt.

I use the word hypnotic in this connection advisedly since there are passages in his work whose rhythms appear to be intentionally mesmerizing. So here we have a polarity: Miller’s speech patterns leading him to an improvisational freedom, and Lawrence’s leading to a kind of releasing compulsion. But there is a problem common to both styles. Lawrence’s invocation of the incantatory leads to a numbing repetition, just as Miller’s garrulousness leads to a loss of sensitivity, of introspective reflection. If these two writers stylistically are similar in their celebration of passion they are also similar in their suppression of thinking. I say “thinking” rather than thought because I do not wish to imply intellectual, much less philosophical formulation. Rather, I mean the normal train of thought of sentient individuals reflecting on the course of things. I mean the kind of monologue that sifts through the mind of Joyce’s Bloom, or Conrad’s narrators, or most notably through Proust’s Marcel.

I once had a job as a nightwatchman in a factory loft building. I had little to do. It was in that unlikely setting that I came across this sentient strain in the work (and it is possibly no accident that the three practitioners above-mentioned are all European) of Henry James. An American. But an American steeped in the ambience of Europe, and therefore a bridge. Reflection does not come easy to a modern American, it having been elbowed out of the way by a simplistic pragmatic tradition. This was especially true of a twenty...