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Radical Aesthetics in the Writings of Henry Miller and Ezra Pound By Blast and Bless: Radical Aesthetics in the Writings of Henry Miller and Ezra Pound By Guy Stevenson Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Department of English and Comparative Literature, October 2014 1 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Caroline Blinder for her expertise and patience, the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths for their administrative and financial support, and my partner Veronique Bofane Inkoli, whose love and encouragement have kept me sane and on track throughout. 2 Abstract The aim of this thesis is to provide a new way of reading Henry Miller by drawing attention to his unlikely aesthetic and moral intersections with Ezra Pound. It traces the lineage of a particular strand of radical modernist expression that is exemplified in Pound’s critical essays between 1909 and 1938 and finds its way – incongruously - into Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical novels of the 1930s. In the process, I will illuminate hitherto underexplored territory that is shared by two seemingly incompatible writers, pointing the way to a better understanding of the aesthetic and moral contradictions in Miller’s – and indeed Pound’s – work. Crucially, I propose that Miller’s literature is morally engaged rather than amoral or unwittingly counter-revolutionary, two common and reductive assumptions. By reading him in the context of Pound’s often suspect pronouncements on hierarchy and order it is possible to reassess George Orwell’s widely accepted conclusion that Miller is simply a ‘passive, unflinching’ recorder of life.1 It is also possible to treat his textual violence as an important part of his aesthetic, rather than condemning or glossing over it. This thesis will define a set of aesthetics that are common to Pound and Miller and involve complex, often paradoxical impulses – most crucially between the desire to cultivate a radically inclusive artistic approach and the instinctive adherence to a set of absolute tastes and values. Taking as my starting point a little known review by Pound of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I demonstrate that the latter’s often brutal, anti-humanist rhetoric enables rather than undermines his larger humanistic project. I show that Miller’s idiosyncratic assimilation of high modernist reactionary tropes and ideas were integral to his original and influential view of art, ethics and reality. Concomitantly, this comparison of two very different writers seeks to generate a new perspective on the slippage between retrograde and progressive elements in both their works as well as the period in which they were writing. 1 George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’ in Collected Essays, ed. by George Packer (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), pp. 95-137, p. 128. Originally published in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940). 3 Contents: Literature Review 5 Introduction 15 1. Pound’s Moral Reading of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer 1.1 Purging the Literary Landscape: Pound’s essays and reviews (1905-1935) 29 1.2 ‘A Hierarchy of Values’: Pound’s ‘Review of Tropic of Cancer’ (1935) 72 2. Moral and Aesthetic Intersections between Pound and Miller 2.1 Monstrosity and the Aesthetics of Destitution: the anti-humanist reversal in Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) 101 2.2 ‘Inside the whale’: ‘A world dominated by vision’ 143 2.3 ‘She functioned superbly’: Reimagining the dysfunctional in Tropic of Cancer 164 2.4 The Attraction of the Blemish: Pound and Miller’s sexual aesthetics 184 3. ‘The Festival of Death’: Eschatology, Economics and Fascism 3.1 ‘The Last Four Things’: Inter-war eschatological obsessions 196 3.2 James Joyce and Henry Miller: ‘The retrospect’ vs. the ‘prospect’ 210 3.3 Miller’s Inferno: A Poundian economic reading of Tropic of Cancer 237 3.4 Leo Frobenius, Oswald Spengler and the Apocalyptic ‘Process’: cultural morphological intersections between Pound and Miller 265 3.5 ‘The Last Book’: the ‘perceptual’ vs. the ‘historical’ apocalypse 282 Conclusion 300 Bibliography 319 4 Literature review My primary reading consists of a selection of Ezra Pound’s essays and manifesto writings between 1909 and 1938 and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Max and the White Phagocytes, two of his semi-autobiographical novels from the 1930s. Of Pound’s essays, I will focus on his initially unpublished review of Tropic of Cancer, written in 1935, on ‘Joyce’ and ‘Ulysses’ - his essays on James Joyce’ value to English literature in the 1910s – and Guide to Kulchur, his 1938 treatise on culture, politics and economics. Pound’s review of Tropic of Cancer provides the basis for my re-reading of Miller’s moral philosophy; the Joyce essays help me to delineate his principal aesthetics of the 1910s; and Guide to Kulchur explains his application of these early aesthetics to a conspiracy theory that connected impure literary expression to usury, liberal democracy and a general decline of values in the Western world. My secondary reading can be broken down into six main categories: a small body of Miller criticism that reads him in the high modernist tradition; theoretical studies of modernism – in particular a selection of books that provide definitions of ‘late’ or ‘minor’ modernisms which are applicable to Miller; Miller’s essays on art, literature and philosophy from the 1940s to the 1960s; a substantial range of work on Pound as a literary and economic commentator in the first half of the twentieth century; 1930s and 1940s reviews of Miller’s novels that provide points of comparison with Pound’s; and literary philosophical and theoretical writings that inform both primary subjects. There are very few studies of Miller in the context of Anglo-European modernism and none at all that focus on the relationship between his and Pound’s writing. A small clutch of texts have dealt with Miller specifically in the context of psychoanalysis and Surrealism – Jane Nelson’s Form and Image in the Fiction of Henry Miller (1975), Gay Louise Balliet’s Henry Miller and Surrealist Metaphor: Riding the Ovarian Trolley (1996), James M. Decker’s Constructing the Self, rejecting modernity (2005) and Caroline Blinder’s A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller (2000). These works provide interesting ideas as to Miller’s 5 appropriation and reworking of André Breton’s automatic method and his position within that modernist-related methodology. Besides Blinder, whose work has been important to my research and whom I shall come on to shortly, these writers do little in terms of locating Miller’s prose within the ideological or stylistic context of his more celebrated high modernist predecessors and cotemporaries. Nevertheless, they have been useful for their commentaries on Miller’s inheritance of Breton’s aggressive stance against ‘literature’, an area I explore throughout my comparison of Miller with Pound. Of the even smaller group of critics who deal specifically with Miller in the context of Anglo-European modernism, English academic Sarah Garland is the most relevant to my study. Her 2010 essay, ‘The Dearest of Cemeteries’, is the only attempt to make a sustained connection between Miller and Pound, identifying their shared interest in the apocalyptic and the egomaniacal tone that results from this. I have found her approach crucial for its understanding of the correspondence between Pound as co- writer of the Vorticist manifestos and the autodidactic passages of Cancer. Moreover, it has provided me with the foundations for my research into Miller and Pound as adopters of eschatological language and theory in the 1930s – pointing the way to many of the theorists I cite in Chapter Three, ‘’The Festival of Death’: Eschatology, Economics and Fascism’. Treating Miller as a ‘magpie’, a collector of diffuse literary ideas, tones and textures, Garland identifies Pound as one of many contributory influences on his work.2 This topographical perspective has helped me to form my own understanding of Miller’s position in relation to inter-war modernism, allowing me to think about Miller as a ‘syncretic’ and ‘parodic’ appropriator of suspect prophetic rhetoric.3 This thesis picks up many of the threads from Garland’s essay 2 Sarah Garland, Rhetoric and Excess: Style, Authority, and the Reader in Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’, Samuel Beckett’s ‘Murphy’, William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’, and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Ada or Ardor’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia, 2005), p. 17. 3 Sarah Garland, ‘The Dearest of Cemeteries’, European Journal of American Culture, 3rd ser., 29 (2010), 197-215, p. 200. 6 and develops them by narrowing the focus from a general study of Miller in the context of ‘canonical high modernism’ to a direct comparison with Pound.4 Garland’s 2005 PhD thesis Rhetoric and Excess: Style, Authority, and the Reader in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor deals more closely with Miller’s narrative style, highlighting an aggressive dynamic between writer and reader that I use to connect Miller with Pound. Similarly, Katy Masuga’s The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (2011) uses Gilles Deleuze’s theory of ‘minor’ literature to present Miller as a covertly antagonistic writer whose language and syntax is purposefully excessive and frustrating, intended to draw attention to the impossibility of language as a stable means of expressing reality. It is relevant to this study because its theoretical discussion of Miller’s incendiary construction of sentences helps to inform and consolidate my own ideas about his incendiary use of equally unbearable moral positions to draw the reader’s attention to the problems inherent in ideology and morality. Though it does not refer to Pound, Blinder’s thesis Henry Miller’s Sexual Aesthetics: A Comparative Analysis of Selected Twentieth-Century Influences on Henry Miller’s Writing (1995) and her book A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller have been useful for their focus on morality in Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939).
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