On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist

by John Burnside

Overview

An engaging invitation to rediscover Henry Miller—and to learn how his anarchist sensibility can help us escape “the air-conditioned nightmare” of the modern world

The American writer Henry Miller's critical reputation—if not his popular readership—has been in eclipse at least since Kate Millett's blistering critique in Sexual Politics, her landmark 1970 study of misogyny in literature and art. Even a Miller fan like the acclaimed Scottish writer John Burnside finds Miller's "sex books"—including The Rosy Crucifixion, Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn—"boring and embarrassing." But Burnside says that Miller's notorious image as a "pornographer and woman hater" has hidden his vital, true importance—his anarchist sensibility and the way it shows us how, by fleeing from conformity of all kinds, we may be able to save ourselves from the "air-conditioned nightmare" of the modern world.

Miller wrote that "there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy," and in this short, engaging, and personal book, Burnside shows how Miller teaches us to become less adapted to the world, to resist a life sentence to the prison of social, intellectual, emotional, and material conditioning. Exploring the full range of Miller's work, and giving special attention to The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and The Colossus of Maroussi, Burnside shows how, with humor and wisdom, Miller illuminates the misunderstood tradition of anarchist thought. Along the way, Burnside reflects on Rimbaud's enormous influence on Miller, as well as on how Rimbaud and Miller have influenced his own writing.

An unconventional and appealing account of an unjustly neglected writer, On Henry Miller restores to us a figure whose searing criticism of the modern world has never been more relevant.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691166872
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/27/2018
Series:	Writers on Writers , #10
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	1,122,092
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.40(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

John Burnside (1955–2024) was a poet, novelist, and memoirist whose books included The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Princeton), Still Life with Feeding Snake, and Ashland & Vine. He won many awards for his poetry, including the T. S. Eliot, Forward, Whitbread, and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. His work appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the Guardian, and he wrote a regular nature column for the New Statesman. He was professor of English at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Exploring Henry Miller's reputation and work and making the case for his relevance today, John Burnside has written a lively, engaging appreciation with an exhilarating, globe-trotting literary range."—Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge

"John Burnside, a remarkable writer, vividly shows his affinities with Henry Miller. Paralleling Miller's style, Burnside is impressionistic, digressive, hyperbolic, and sometimes outrageous. He argues that Miller wrote to ‘find out if books can help us to live better,' and this is Burnside's aim too. Burnside and Miller make a good match."—Jay Martin, Claremont McKenna College

Editorial Reviews

01/15/2018
While modern readers often associate Henry Miller’s writing with misogynistic, quasi-pornographic depictions of sex, novelist and poet Burnside’s sometimes slow-going but illuminating book shows a different side to the novelist. Focusing on two of Miller’s less-read works—1941’s The Colossus of Maroussi and 1946’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare—Burnside (Ashland & Vine) portrays Miller as an anarchist opposed to societal institutions that he saw standing in the way of inner truth. Miller contended that marriage, for example, was warped by society’s fixation on property, turning it into a commercial exchange of a man’s breadwinning capabilities and a woman’s sexuality. Miller distrusted formal education, encouraging readers to allow life to be their teacher. In his view, artists must consciously create themselves, and not just their artworks, through a process of unlearning received knowledge and embracing the freedom to be their true selves. In the concluding passages, Burnside writes passionately about, and concurs with, Miller’s contention that people need to abandon the limits of civilization and discover and embrace the “spontaneous, hazardous, beauteous being” that allows them to be a part of nature without wishing to control it. Burnside’s provocative study makes a strong case for Henry Miller as a romantic anarchist comparable, on the basis of the evidence provided here, to Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Burnside shifts the focus from Henry Miller’s unsavoury legacy to the politics of his aesthetics, seeking to draw our attention to 'that most misunderstood of figures, the philosophical, earth-loving pagan anarchist.'"—-Merve Fejzula, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher