GEORGE STADE
617
new appreciation , an anthology of selection s from eleven of Mill er' s
works, to pi call y arranged and with an interl eaved commentary by
Ma il er, the la tter makes an observa tion about Hemingway tha t he stops
just sho rt o f appl ying to Mill er. With respect
to
Th e Sun A lso R ises,
"we come slowl y to the rea lization tha t Hemingway a t the time he
wrote it was no t the equal of Jake Barnes-he had created a conscious–
ness wiser, dri er, purer, more classic, more sophi stica ted, and mo re
judicial than hi s own . He was still naive in relation to hi s crea ti on ."
T o thi s day Henry Mill er the author is naive in rela ti on to hi s
p ro tagoni st. We can get a more-o r-l ess qirect look a t the author
through hi s letters, his literary criti cism, hi s social commentary, hi s
phil osophizing. He h as less grace, poise, apl omb than hi s p ro tagoni st,
but he is more soli cito us of our admirati on; he is no t as wise, but mo re
op ini ona ted; no t as pure, but also less comp li ca ted; less ori gin al, but
more cranky; no t as despera te, but more self-pitying; less terr ibl e, mo re
of a trial; no t an un liberated libera to r, but a chide.
It
is the protagoni st we are interes ted in, ra ther than the author–
the " I," the cha racter written into the books, no t the writer, not the
costumes the other two write about. Let us call him Henry. Here, in a
passage from
T rop ic of Cap ricorn
no t included in
Genius and L ust,
is
Henry's moment of concepti on:
... in my dream life I frequentl y ch anged pl aces with my sister,
accepting th e tortures inflicted upon her and no uri shing them with
my supersen sitive brain .
It
was in these dreams, always accompani ed
by th e sound of glass breakin g, of shri eks, curses, groan s and sobs,
that I ga th ered an unformul ated knowledge of the ancient mys teri es,
of the rites of initi ation, of the tran smigrati on of soul s and so on.
It
mi ght begin with a scen e from rea l life-the sister standing by the
bl ackboard in the kitch en, the mo th er towering over her with a rul er,
say ing two and two makes how much? and th e sister screaming
five
BANG!
no, seven,
BANG!
no, thirteen, eighteen, twen ty!
I would be
sitting at th e tabl e, do ing my lesson s, just as in real life durin g these
scenes, tvhen by a sli ght twi st or squirm, perhaps as I saw the rul er
come down on the sister's face, suddenl y I would be in another realm
wh ere g lass was unknown, as it was unknown to th e Ki ckapoos or
th e Lenni -Lenape. The faces of those about me were familiar-they
were my uterine relatives who, for some mysteriou s reason, failed
to
recogni ze me in thi s n ew
ambiance.
They were garbed in bl ack and
th e color of th eir skin was ash gray, like that of the T ibetan devil s.
T hey were all fitted out wi th kni ves and other instruments of torture:
th ey belonged
to
the caste of sacrificial bu tchers. I seemed
to
h ave
abso lute liberty and the autho rity of a god, and yet by some capri –
ciou s turn of events the end would be that I'd be lying on the
sacrifi cial block and one of my ch arming uterine relati ves would be
