Robert Ferguson: Henry Miller: A Life (1991)

Robert Ferguson's Henry Miller is no hagiography: Miller is in general depicted as a person with a huge appetite for sex and with little care for the wives and girlfriends – or children created – that he leaves behind when his love affairs have reached their inevitable final climax.

Henry Miller was addicted not only to sex (especially with much younger women) but also to marriage, and tied a loose knot five times: with Beatrice, June, Lepska, Eve and Hoki, although the final marriage was merely one of convenience and the young Japanese woman had no intention of having sex with an old man, no matter how many gifts he bestowed on her or how many love letters he wrote.

Before, in between – and during – his marriages Miller also made good use of his libido. And he eventually made very good use of his experiences by transmuting them into explosive autobiographical fiction. But for many years – particularly in the thirties when he was in Paris – Miller was just struggling to get by, using his charm and flattery with anyone he met in order to bum money and/or find somewhere to crash for a few nights. But his relatively long and frequently fraught, poverty-stricken relationship with June, which began in America and ended in France, was closed by Anaïs Nin, the wealthy married woman who wouldn't marry him and who came to understand what a bastard he could be.

Inevitably, because Henry Miller's life was frequently distorted by the myth he lent to it by his exaggeration and his outright lies, some of the truth about Miller gets lost, and there has to be some reading between the lines. Towards the end of his life Miller really played to the gallery, and photos of the beautiful young Brenda Venus with her arms around a much older, cloth-capped man, or the same old man playing ping pong with a naked young woman are of course just set up for publicity, an attempt to stretch a legend to places which reality couldn't reach.

George Orwell briefly met the pacifist Miller in Paris on his way to fight in Spain and was told that his action was 'sheer stupidity'. Famously, Orwell wrote about Miller in the essay 'Inside the Whale', in which he sees him insulated against reality by all the blubber around him.

What is surreal is Miller's visit to Eudora Welty in Jackson, Mississippi, having previously informed her that if she needed the money anytime he could 'put her in touch with "an unfailing pornographic market"'. Ferguson says that Miller spent three days with Welty and her mother, although other (surely more credible) sources say her mother refused to see him and that Welty got some male friends together to attempt to entertain him but that he didn't seem interested in anything – plus, he wasn't at all interesting.

What is real, as Ferguson points out, is Henry Miller's influence on other writers. He mentions the admiration of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, John Updike and James Baldwin for such attributes as 'the courage and honesty of his sexual writing'. The Beat writers, on the other hand, were also attracted to his anti-Americanism, anti-materialism and his appreciation of eastern religions.

I've only ever read Tropic of Cancer and the very different novella The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, but what now interests me is re-reading Cancer, and probably Tropic of Capricorn too, in the light of what Ferguson has shed on them being romans à clef.

Oxford American #72

The latest issue of Oxford American has just arrived, and shows the writer Barry Hannah (1942-2010), who died last March, on the cover.  It contains several pages of tributes, and an article on him by John Oliver Hodges. He was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and died in Oxford MS, where he had taught Creative Writing at Ole Miss for 28 years. Hodges took a drive around Tuscaloosa AL with Hannah a few years ago, and I'd already seen the 10-minute video of it, which is here.  An example of Hannah's writing is this short story 'The Spy of Loog Root', published in Oxford American in 1992. This is his obituary in The Guardian, although far more interesting is this article in The New York Observer.

Also in this season's issue is an article about someone unfamiliar to me: Judy Bonds, a coal miner's daughter from Whitesville, West Virginia who died in the New Year, and was a staunch campaigner against mountaintop removal.
Another thing that initially catches my eye (apart from a few pages of correspondence between Eudora Welty and William Maxwell)  is the editor Mark Smirnoff  saying 'the book and first movie handled the material with more wisdom and art' of the Coens' True Grit re-make. Maybe I was right not to go and see it then, although I'll no doubt catch it when it comes to DVD.  And while on the subject, this February Will Self wrote a revisionist take on the Coens.

Jackson, Mississippi: Eudora Welty: Literary Landmarks of the Southern United States, #10

Jackson celebrates Eudora Welty's centenary, and this was a very eventful day for us. We were, as we had been for the past three days, staying in a hotel in Vicksburg, and the Welty house was within easy reach, particularly as an interstate exit was very close to the house in the centre of Jackson.

The street marker outside the house reads: 'Eudora Welty (1900–2001), one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, lived in this house for seventy-six years. The house was built by Welty's parents, Christian and Chestina Welty, in 1925. Eudora Welty wrote all of her major works here, including the Pullitzer prize-winning novel The Optimist's Daughter. Welty and her mother were devoted gardeners, and many of the flowers and bushes they planted still grow in the garden. The Eudora Welty House is a National historic Landmark.'

As the whole region had suffered torrential rains for several days – some roads in Atlanta had been severely flooded, but we managed to avoid it – this was unfortunately all that we were able to view of the garden that Welty and her mother in particular had tended so lovingly. (I might add that although by this relatively early stage of our journey the rains were coming to an end, toward late afternoon for several days, we had been subjected to almost unbelievable rainstorms when driving back to the hotel, making the journey a little longer than expected. but I must admit that I even found this somewhat enjoyable.)

I was given a leaflet entitled 'Eudora Welty Driving Tour' at the house, so took the occasion to explore places in the area associated with Welty. This is the birthplace of Eudora Welty on North Congress Street.

The plaque says:

'This house, built by Christian and Chestina Welty in 1908, was the birthplace and childhood home of their daughter, Eudora. Many of the events memorialized in Miss Welty's book, One Writer's Beginnings, occurred here and take on a sense of timelessness for those who visit.

'David Norris and Joe purchased the property in 1979 for offices. Their restoration efforts reversed the tragic decline of the condition of the house and preserved it for its later acquisition by the Mississippi Writers Association to serve as the focal point of the Eudora Welty Writers' Center. The foresight of the Mississippi Legislature in funding this project and the leadership efforts of Jo Barksdale, Writers Association Executive Director, combined to make possible this living tribute to one of Mississippi's greatest writers.'

The leaflet, although quick to point out the difference between the park Welty knew as a child and today, quotes from one of her stories, 'The Winds': 'They ran through the park and drank from the fountain. Moving slowly as sunlight over the grass were the broad and dusty backs of pigeons. They stopped and made a clover-chain and hung it on a statue. They groveled in the dirt under the bandstand hunting for lost money, but when they found a dead bird with its feathers cool as rain, they ran out in the sun [...] they floated magnolia leaves in the horse trough, themselves taking the part of the wind and waves, and suddenly remembering who they were. they closed in on the hot-tomale man, fixing their frightened eyes on his lantern and on his scars.'

The Jefferson Davis Elementary School which Welty attended is also on North Congress Street, just a few steps from her birthplace.

This restaurant was once George Street Grocery, where Welty's parents would send her on errands.

This building on Griffith Street is now the Mississippi Department of Education in this state capital, but it was formerly the Central High School where Welty was educated after the elementary school.

Welty attended this church in North Congress, the Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church.

Welty's gravestone bears a quotation from The Optimist's Daughter: 'For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.

On the other side is a quotation from One Writer's Beginning: 'The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.

As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.'

The Eudora Welty Library on North State Street.