The Kinkdom and the Power :...

Henry Miller believed in luck--all his long life he consulted astrologers, graphologists, phrenologists and numerologists--but his own personal timing was off. Good things came to him, but they came either too early or too late.

He missed being born on Christmas by one day (his mother, he complained, had a “clutching womb”). He lost the Lost Generation by a decade and arrived in Paris long after the more fashionable expatriate writers had decamped. He fell in love with impeccable illogic--his first love was a girl he didn’t dare touch, his last a girl who wouldn’t touch him on a dare, and the two most important loves of his life, June Smith and Anais Nin, were girls who preferred to touch each other.

Although he was an elegant-looking older man, he was too shabby, bald and bespectacled to be considered handsome in his prime. He struggled with poverty, unpopularity and plain neglect for almost half a century, and then, when “The Tropic of Cancer” finally was published in the United States, found himself literally catapulted into fame and fortune overnight. Acclaimed as a writer, he no longer cared much for writing, and spent his last years playing competitive Ping Pong in his Pacific Palisades mansion. He died in 1981 with no full-fledged biography.

Now, 10 years later, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, he is being treated to not one but two, quite similar, biographies.

Which to choose? Both Robert Ferguson’s “Henry Miller: A Life” and Mary Dearborn’s “The Happiest Man Alive” cost the same (Ferguson’s book has more photographs) and both give essentially the same information: We learn about Miller’s German immigrant parents, his childhood in Brooklyn, his years in Europe, his struggles to create himself as a writer, his five marriages, his love affair with Nin, his friendships with Lawrence Durrell and Alfred Perles, his battles with censorship, his years in Big Sur, and his delayed recognition. There are a few differences (Dearborn has him die on June 7, Ferguson on June 4) but they are minor. Both books are serious, scholarly and well-written.

Both are, as well, subtly insane. Most literary biographies are, and most readers of biographies enjoy them for exactly that reason. The kinkiness in Dearborn’s book manifests itself in dark speculation about Miller’s masculinity; Ferguson engages in weird word bursts that blossom and fade, with no follow-through.

Dearborn, whose previous books include a study of gender and ethnicity in American culture, sees Miller’s life as a “story of twentieth-century male identity,” and she is interested in his childhood boyfriends, his mother’s emotional abuse, his father’s “somewhat feminine” personality, and his gay Boys Brigade leader. She notes Miller’s obsession with physical exercise and worries about his bicycling; she sees it as an erotic outlet that only escalated his “sexual anxieties.”

“What was for America largely a healthful pastime,” she sighs, “was for Henry a hyper sexual experience.” (She does not tell how.) Dearborn adds that Miller was always more comfortable with men and was “drawn to women almost in fascinated horror.” He was homoerotic, voyeuristic, fascinated by cowboys and prisons, with “a distinct fondness for the gangbang over any other form of sexual intercourse.” Sex to Miller was neither “beautiful” nor “nice”; it was a part of life but it was “more like defecation than eating.”

Dearborn claims that June Smith, “who was what we would call today ‘streetwise,’ ” kept Henry fascinated primarily because of her numerous intrigues with others, men and women alike. Although she sees only a “girlish courtship” between Anais Nin and Smith in Paris, she suggests that Miller saw more, and wanted to “be hated and perhaps punished” for his vision. “All his life Miller entertained the idea that he might in fact be another Jesus Christ.”

Dearborn’s book is studded with juicy tidbits about Miller’s eccentricities, and from her we learn he had an “irrational hatred of banks,” was unable to manage the simplest machine (even dial telephones confused him), harbored a “passionate dislike for any woman with a young child” and was repeatedly humiliated by his last wife, who refused to sleep with him.

Ferguson’s attitude toward Miller is both more startling and more studious. He starts his book with two gratuitous dictionary definitions, one for the “female pudenda” and the other for “an act of sexual connection” (neither of which he refers to again), and goes on to announce that Miller, who “began life as a human being,” ended it as “a rare hybrid of man and book”--a dicey proposition he wisely abandons.

He describes the young Miller as “friendly and cheerful,” able to cut the trousers in his father’s tailor shop but unable to master the “complexities of the jacket and coat.” He does not see Miller rattled by “sexual anxiety” but describes him instead as an essentially romantic man “addicted to love.”

Miller’s early adoration of a 13-year-old neighborhood beauty he never bedded affected him deeply. Ever after, Ferguson says, Miller was “an over-realist in matters of sex . . . determined never . . . to be frozen in a sexual fetter.” He avoided long relationships, giving each wife seven years, no more. June Smith was his muse, and Ferguson seems to like her, describing her as a “promiscuous mythomaniac” and a “platonic lesbian,” but he can’t stand Nin, “a fully fledged neurotic” who just wanted “something to write about in her diary.”

A previous biographer of Knut Hamsun, Ferguson discovers, not surprisingly, that Miller was profoundly influenced by Hamsun and hoped to write a book as good as “Hunger.” He sees Miller’s move toward the writing of this book as hilariously portentous: “The time of the unorthodox hero was nigh. Rin Tin Tin was about to start work on his first barking picture, and within a few short months of arriving in France, Henry Miller, too, would be raising his rough, wild voice.”

The bulk of this book is more sober than these quotes suggest. Ferguson is a careful historian and he grounds Miller solidly within the context of his times. He deals head-on with Miller’s lifelong anti-Semitism and tells us quite a bit about Miller’s second career as apainter of watercolors. (For years, Miller made more money from these than he did from his writing.) He notes that Miller’s bid to win the Nobel Prize by asking everyone he knew to write letters for him was “unseemly behavior . . . but then practically everything Miller ever did was unseemly in one way or another.”

Both biographers excuse Miller’s unseemliness, and both slide over some rather sticky moral questions--did Smith prostitute herself to support him? Did he act as her pimp? He ran several sick cons during his lifetime, none of which are judged. The agreement seems to be that Miller was a clown and a child (all his life he happily referred to himself as “little Henry”) and that he was therefore essentially innocent. There is no suggestion in either book that Miller was a great artist, and there is, oddly, no desire, at least in this reviewer, to read or re-read anything he wrote.

For those who are encouraged to read this book, Capra Press has just come out with a collection of “wisdoms” called “Nothing but the Marvelous,” which has been culled from Miller’s books and interviews. The quotes are divided under headings like Punishment (“God doesn’t punish ourselves--we punish ourselves”), Sex (“Sex can strengthen and deepen love, or work destructively”) and Reading (“To read is always to interpret”).

They remind us that Miller’s primary aim, as expressed in a letter to a friend, was “to be read by the ordinary guys, and liked by them. Because I’m just the most ordinary guy in the world myself.”

Until you got him on a bike.