George Stade
MAILER AND MILLER
"Wear any uniform so long as it's not yours," advi ses Henry
Miller, and the various uniforms of bum, stud, psychopomp, jeremiah,
and saint he wears in hi s books never quite fit the forms and motions
we see behind the garb and the ga b. The protagonist of his books, name
of Henry Miller, describes himself as being such-and-such, and thi s so–
and-so varies from book to book, from passage to passage. But we do
no t see him as he sees himself. The figure we ma ke out from passage to
passage exposes only new lineaments of its eternal consistency. The "I"
of his books does not know itself, and what it doesn 't know remains
pretLy much the same. The shiftings of Proteus confi gure a Prometheus
bound to hi s obsession but sure he is free.
So far , then , we have two Henry
Mill~rs,
one a wardrobe of
costumes, the other their inh abitant. A third Henry Miller is the
designer of the cos tumes, the author holding onto the shirt-ta il s of his
protagonist, the man whose hand we can sha ke or whom we can see
condescended to in the
Diaries
of Ana"is in . Sometimes the au thor and
the protagonist seem pretLy close. " I have moved the typewriter into the
next room where I can see myself in the mirror as I write," says the
protagonist of
Tropic of Cancer.
From all the sq uirms and craning, we
ga ther that the image lacks definition, Dracula eluding hi s own gaze
into the pier-glass. Similarly, the author never sees through his
reflections and so has to keep rewriting hi s single book under numer–
ous titles, always one step behind a protagonist who keeps running in
place, but in the very bes t form.
More often the author and protagonist are some distance apart. In
an ea rlier apprecia tion of Miller, Norman Mailer wondered a t "the
gulf which forever exists between an artist's personality and hi s work–
here particularly the violent, smashing fu ck-you gusto of
Trop ic of
Cancer
and the strong, beni gn , kindly mood of the man today." The
Henry Mill er who wrote
Cancer,
more parti cul arly, was fas tidiously
hi gh-German about hi s ho usekeep ing and hygiene, but the Henry
Miller writLen into the work was messil y American demotic. In this
