: : Henry Miller Online by Dr. Hugo Heyrman : :

Henry Miller Online An intimate portrait of Henry Miller by Dr. Hugo Heyrman: a tribute to his unique personality, his life, work, art, loves & friends, with an excellent collection of hard-to-find Miller items.
		Henry Miller / Chronicle 1960

		Photo: Harry Redl

		Brenda Venus, Henry Miller's last 'love goddess'

		As a very young woman, Brenda Venus met the famed Henry Miller. He was the father of the sexual revolution. He became her mentor, and she his muse, his inspiration. In just four years, he wrote her 4000 pages of letters. They were collected and condensed for the book, "Dear Dear Brenda," which represents Miller's last significant body of work --comparable to, "Tropic of Cancer." Aside from being Henry Miller's last "love goddess", and best selling author, Brenda Venus is also an actress, ballet dancer, director and producer.

		Dinner with Henry: a glimpse into the mind of one literature’s great provocateurs

		’Dinner with Henry’ is exactly what the title suggests. Over a plate of food and glass of wine, the 87 year old Buddha of Brooklyn enthusiastically riffs on his hero Blaise Cendrars, D.H. Lawrence, Rimbaud and the surrealists. Shot by Richard Young and John Chesko in 1979, this ’lost’ documentary has recently surfaced and it’s a wonderful peek into the life of one literature’s great provocateurs.

		The Paris Review Interviews

		HENRY MILLER The Art of Fiction No. 28 Interviewed by George Wickes Issue 28, Summer-Fall 1962 INTERVIEWER Didn't you say somewhere, "I am for obscenity and against pornography"? MILLER Well, it's very simple. The obscene would be the forthright, and pornography would be the roundabout. I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it. In other words, obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.

		Henry Miller in Paris 1933

		Photo: Brassaï

		Quote from 'Black Spring'

		"What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature." —Henry Miller, Black Spring (1936)

		Tropic of Cancer

		Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934 "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive." —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer "I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!" —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer


		Front pages from the second edition of Tropic of Cancer (Obelisk Press, Paris, Sept 1935)

		Brenda Venus & Henry Miller

		Henry Miller's last love was Brenda Venus, an actress, his letters to her "Dear Dear Brenda" were published in 1986. Dearest Brenda, Does everything matter? Yes! The little things are often more important than the seeming big things. Do you follow me? If we had more faith we would not push so hard, we would be more confident, more serene. And to my mind serenity is greater than happiness. Happiness is a much over-rated word. Joy is the thing -- or bliss. That 7th Heaven feeling. Agreed? Your infatuated inamorata - Henry V. Miller, Beloved of Brenda Venus (Miracle of Miracles)

		Henry Miller "Asleep & Awake" in his bathroom with Gurdjieff

		Filmed when the author was 81, "Henry Miller Asleep & Awake" is a voyage of ideas about life, writing, sex, spirituality, nightmares, and New York that captures the warmth, vigor and high animal spirits of a singular American artist. The man is Henry Miller and the room is his bathroom. It's a miraculous shrine covered with photos and drawings collected by the author over the course of his long and fruitful life. Graciously, in his raspy, sonorous voice, he points out the highlights of his improvised gallery, speaking of philosophers, writers, painters, mad kings, women, and friends.

		Henry Miller’s paintings

		‘Lips’, 1952 (watercolor and ink)
		Henry Miller had always loved art, he began painting in the 1920s (before he began writing), after seeing some Turner prints in a Brooklyn department-store window. There was only one minor drawback: he couldn’t draw. It wasn’t long before he realized that what he lacked in draftsmanship, he made up for in color and composition sense. Henry Miller painted over 3000 watercolors in his lifetime.

		Henry Miller / Passages
		... float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with the virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty... Small souls perhaps, burning like tapers, but burning steadily— and capable of throwing portentous shadows on the walls which hem them in. Walk down any street in the soft violet light. Make the mind blank. A thousand sensations assault you at once from every direction. Here man is still furred and feathered; here cyst and quartz still speak. There are audible, voluble buildings with... Everywhere broken nests, egg shells, fledgelings with twisted necks and dead eyes staring into space. Nostalgic river dreams under tin copings, under rusty sheds, under capsized boats. A world of mutilated hopes, of strangled aspirations, of bulletproof starvation. A world where even the warm breath of life has to be smuggled in, where gems big as pigeons' hearts are traded for a yard of space, an ounce of freedom. All is compounded into a familiar liver paste which is swallowed on a tasteless wafer... The State, the nation, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it till death— and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it "life".... The world is not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order... Ida is important to the events which follow: She hated the thought of waiting on me in bed. She didn't do it for her husband and she couldn't see why she should do it for me. To take breakfast in bed was something I never did except at Woodruff's place. I did it expressly to annoy and humiliate her. These are the fluid, solvent egos who lie still as a fetus in the uterine marshes of their stagnant self. When you puncture the sac, when you think Ah! I've got you at last! you find nothing but clots of mucus in your hand. These are the baffling ones, in my opinion. They are like the "soluble fish" of surrealist metempsychology.... Contours wriggling and squirming like a piece of fresh bait seen upside down through a convex mirror in a rough sea. I had long ceased to be interested in her contortions; except for the part of me that was in her I was as cool as a cucumber and remote as the dog star.... we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless. We have first to acquire vision...

		Rue Henry Miller

		There is street in Paris named after Henry Miller. The street can be found nearby in the suburb of Créteil, nested amid a warren of residential streets named for American authors. Rue Ernest Hemingway traces the main artery of the neighborhood, which branches off into streets bearing the names of Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Jack London, Tennessee Williams, Pearl Buck and William Faulkner.


		Henry Miller on New York

		Henry Miller appears to be walking through a movie/TV set version of New York rather than along a real city street. Note that, despite some background and overhead noises, the "street" is deserted, and, nowithstanding what look to be fading ads on the side of a building, every place on camera appears unnamed and unoccupied --perhaps to emphasize Miller's surreal comments. Henry Miller on New York: “Today, I think it’s the ugliest, filthiest, shittiest city in the world. When I was a kid, there was hardly anything that we have today - no telephones, no automobiles...no nothing, really. It was rather quaint. There was color even, in the buildings. But as time went on, why, it got more horrible to me. When I think of the Brooklyn bridge, which was the only bridge then in existence...how many times I walked over that bridge on an empty stomach, back and forth, looking for a handout, never getting anything...selling newspapers at Times Square, begging on Broadway, coming home with a dime maybe. It’s no wonder that I had these goddamned recurring nightmares all my life. I don’t know how I ever survived, or why I’m still sane.”

		Henry Miller from Brooklyn

		"I like Henry Miller. I think he's the greatest American writer." —Bob Dylan

|| motions of the mind ||