Wherein do Miller’s books differ from the other great books of the last twenty years? Think of Proust, of Joyce, of Huxley; their art seems to spring out of non-participation. There is, underneath the dead faecal flow, a refusal somehow to surrender to life. Miller is nearer to Lawrence than to anyone else; but in him we find none of the puritan sensitiveness, the recoil, which we find in the uneven author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover[21]—surely a most disgusting book because it is so painfully romantic. In Miller the process is reversed; he goes out so completely into life that he tends to deform it by his excessive love. He can teach us to see the miraculous in the obscene. (Had I been an Englishman and a critic I should have written “even the obscene.”)
He is not a psychologist but a dramatist; what excites him is the gesture, the mood, the ambience of a person or a place. He does not inform. He reveals.
What is the quality which divides the lesser work of art from the greater? Surely the degree of metaphysical anxiety and incertitude: the germ of discontent, the torment. In Miller you have a writer with the equipment of a romantic and the temperament of an early Church Father; side by side with the buffoonery and laughter that is an undertone of this mystical discontent and fear. His malady is an essentially religious one.
His English critics (I have not read the American) have done him a disservice in being impertinent about his lack of high purpose and moral uplift. The most puerile, George Orwell,[22] finds him the product of a certain social milieu which is on the point of being swept away. These gas-light reformers, finding no mention in his work of better plumbing for the new world have given him up as socially uninteresting; and in the light of their impertinence you would think that poor Henry Miller was a moribund documentary writer, whose work would date with its epoch—just as Huxley’s Antic Hay[23] and the amusing Sitwelliana[24] of the twenties has done. I cannot share this opinion. For me, Tropic of Cancer stands beside Moby Dick.
“Henry Miller’s attitude to sex”—what a portentous phrase! How indeed can one write about sex in English today without being (a) repulsive and fishy like Joyce or (b) repulsed and fruity like Lawrence?[25] Sex in Miller coruscates and roars; syphilis, tulips, sonnets, warm thighs, lavatories, carpets stiff with blood—the whole gamut is there; and how nice it is for once to dispense both with the puritans and with the pagans.
If Eliot[26] has got nearest to God, Miller has got farthest from man. When he strips he teases. And when he digs for water he finds it. Let us thank God for a writer who lacks (a) the common room attitude, (b) an interest in literature. Miller is not interested in obscenity. He is like Nelson.[27] He does not know what the word means. He simply refuses to neglect any manifestation of life which interests him—not even for Mudie’s Circulating Libraries,[28] the Writer’s Guild,[29] or English girls under twelve.
Everyone knows that the English and the Americans don’t know how to make love; Miller, in his work, lops away the whole superstructure supporting the great Romantic Lie of the West. He puts this twentieth-century torment properly in its place—so that the lovers in his books are connected purely and directly to each other below the belt. They do not depend on artificial and conventional attitudes of mind when they make love; they do it with real passion and cruelty. A course in him would turn us all from Stopes to Stoats[30]—surely an admirable transformation.
There is very little whining in Miller. He has no “Here we go round the prickly pear” complex. He roars like the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, until Ars Gratia Artis[31] appears round his head with a laurel wreath.
If he is against anything it is the world that Andy Hardy[32] stands for—the world of the lowest common denominator which is being so brilliantly explored by our trite reformers on both sides of the Atlantic. The world of Nature’s Middle Man, where security and inanity link arms. The world which would like to abolish daring and the internal adventure. The world which we live in.
What sort of world does he want? The question is as empty as it is stupid. Like all great artists he wants a world where art would become unnecessary; he wants a New Jerusalem.[33] But failing that (and we will go on failing to build our New Jerusalems, unless our technique changes radically) he is determined to like the world as it is—with its terrors, obscenities, murders, and loves: the world which can only be changed when there are a few more Henry Millers to spend their love upon it. If “Know Thyself”[34] is a moral injunction, then I think we may call Henry Miller a moralist. Art demands a great degree of cowardice.
Miller is the only contemporary I have met or read who is really enjoying himself—and it seems to us an unpleasant phenomenon. He himself once described History in a letter to me as “an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.”[35] I am sure that History itself will have a kinder description of him and his work.
As a person he is interesting because he is uncultured—though not uncultivated. His line of vision is not obstructed by derived canons of art and life. Everything registers with pristine clearness. His interest in films and newspapers strikes a note of refined horror in the literary men who admire him. Yet he sees Frankenstein,[36] for example, as a deep symbol drawn from mass psychology, and speaks of it with an almost mediaeval sense of wonder and curiosity, as a great current art-symbol—
The perfected monster of man himself, imperfect, and unpredictable. The subconscious awake and walking. Frankenstein is perfect of his kind.[37]
Among films which have provided him with spring-boards of emotion for his ideas one must list the following: Broadway Follies of 1943, Quai de Brumes, La Femme de Boulanger, The Lost Horizon, The Phantom President, Orage, Un Chien d’Andalou, Le Sang d’un Poete.[38]
The three great books of Miller take one on a journey through the ardours and terrors of the flesh to the ardours and terrors of the spirit. In Tropic of Capricorn the fleshly battle is resolved into a metaphysical struggle; and Miller has undergone, as a man, a great transformation. The easiest way to reflect this change is by giving a list of books which have suddenly come into full force with him. Confessions of St. Augustine, Lao-Tse, the Gita, Balzac’s Seraphita, Nijinsky’s Diary, Rozanov, Blake.[39] Where these will lead him as an artist none can say; as a person they indicate the deepest development of the heart and sensibility. Transforming himself thus, he still retains all his own positive American qualities: a wonderful sense of buffoonery, complete lack of interest in “professional literature” as such, fearless ability to tread where angels fear. And the good leavening Rabelaisian quality which preserves all good work—a sense of living.
He calls himself no longer “The Patagonian” or “Caliban,”[40] but “The Happy Rock”—for he begins to feel as securely anchored in himself as we feel him to be anchored in American literature, of which he is the greatest contemporary figure. Bad writer, often awkward, often a bad critic, often inaccurate, often prejudiced—let the critics make their futile subtractions. Here is a very great man.
Alexandria
Egypt
Studies in Genius VI
Groddeck
1948
IF THE WORK AND TEACHINGS of Georg Walther Groddeck[1] (1866–1934) are not as well known today as they deserve to be it is perhaps largely his own fault. His first job, he considered, was to heal; the writer and the teacher took second place. Over and above this Groddeck also knew how quickly the disciple can convert the living word into the dead canon. He knew that the first disciple is also very often the first perverter of the truth. And this knowledge informs his written work with that delightful self-deprecating irony which so many of his readers profess to find out of place; an irony which says very clearly “I am not inviting you to follow me, but to follow yourself. I am only here to help if you need me.”[2] The age does need its Groddecks, and will continue to need them until it can grasp the full majesty and terror of the “It” which he has talked so much about in his various books and particularly in that neglected masterpiece The Book of the It.[3]
In considering Groddeck’s place i
n psychology, however, there are one or two current misunderstandings which deserve to be cleared up for the benefit of those who have mistaken, or continue to mistake, him for an orthodox disciple of Freud. Groddeck was the only analyst whose views had some effect on Freud; and Freud’s The Ego and the Id is a tribute to, though unfortunately a misinterpretation of, Groddeck’s It theory. Yet so great was his admiration for Freud that the reviewer might well be forgiven who once described him as “a populariser of Freudian theory.” No statement, however, could be farther from the truth, for Groddeck, while he accepts and employs much of the heavy equipment of the master, is separated forever from Freud by an entirely different conception of the constitution and functioning of the human psyche. His acknowledgements to Freud begin and end with those wonderful discoveries on the nature of the dream, on the meaning of resistance and transference. In his use of these great conceptual instruments, however, Groddeck was as different from Freud as Lao Tzu was from Confucius. He accepted and praised them as great discoveries of the age; he employed them as weapons in his own way upon organic disease; he revered Freud as the greatest genius of the age; but fundamentally he did not share Freud’s views upon the nature of the forces within the human organism which make for health or sickness. And this is the domain in which the doctrines of Groddeck and of Freud part company. In this domain, too, Groddeck emerges as a natural philosopher, as incapable of separating body and mind as he is incapable of separating health and disease.
To Freud the psyche of man was made up of two halves, the conscious and the unconscious parts; but for Groddeck the whole psyche with its inevitable dualisms seemed merely a function of something else—an unknown quantity—which he chose to discuss under the name of the “It.” “The sum total of an individual human being,” he says,
physical, mental and spiritual, the organism with all its forces, the microcosmos, the universe which is a man, I conceive of as a self unknown and forever unknowable, and I call this the “It” as the most indefinite term available without either emotional or intellectual associations. The It-hypothesis I regard not as a truth—for what do any of us know about absolute truth—but as a useful tool in work and in life; it has stood the test of years of medical work and experiment and so far nothing has happened which would lead me to abandon it or even to modify it in any essential degree. I assume that man is animated by the It which directs what he does and what he goes through, and that the assertion “I live” only expresses a small and superficial part of the total experience “I am lived by the It”…[4]
This fundamental divergence of view concerning the nature of health and disease, the nature of the psyche’s role, is something which must be grasped at the outset if we are to interpret Groddeck to ourselves with any accuracy. For Freud, as indeed for the age and civilisation of which he was both representative and part, the ego is supreme. There it lies, like an iron-shod box whose compartments are waiting to be arranged and packed with the terminologies of psycho-analysis. But to Groddeck the ego appeared as a contemptible mask fathered on us by the intellect, which by imposing upon the human being, persuaded him that he was motivated by forces within the control of his conscious mind. “Yet,” asks Groddeck, “what decides how the food which passes into the stomach is subdivided? What is the nature of the force which decrees the rate of the heart-beat? What persuaded the original germ to divide and subdivide itself and to form objects as dissimilar as brain cortex, muscle or mucus?”
When we occupy ourselves in any way either with ourselves or with our fellow-man, we think of the ego as the essential thing. Perhaps, however, for a little time we can set aside the ego and work a little with this unknown It instead.…We know, for instance, that no man’s ego has had anything to do with the fact that he possesses a human form, that he is a human being. Yet as soon as we perceive in the distance a being who is walking on two legs we immediately assume that this being is an ego, that he can be made responsible for what he is and what he does and, indeed, if we did not do this everything that is human would disappear from the world. Still we know quite certainly that the humanity of this being was never willed by his ego; he is human through an act of will of the All or, if you go a little further, of the It. The ego has not the slightest thing to do with it.…What has breathing to do with the will? We have to begin as soon as we leave the womb, we cannot choose but breathe. “I love you so dearly, I could do anything for you.” Who has not felt that, heard it, or said it? But try to hold your breath for the sake of your love. In ten seconds or, at most, in a quarter of a minute, the proof of your love will disappear before the hunger for air. No one has command over the power to sleep. It will come or it will not. No one can regulate the beating of the heart…
Man, then, is himself a function of this mysterious force which expresses itself through him, through his illness no less than his health. To Groddeck the psychoanalytic equipment was merely a lens by which one might see a little more deeply than heretofore into the mystery of the human being—as an It-self. Over the theory of psychoanalysis, as he used it, therefore, stood the metaphysical principle which expressed itself through man’s behaviour, through his size, shape, beliefs, wants. And Groddeck set himself up as a watchman, and where possible, as an interpreter of this mysterious force. The causes of sickness or health he decided were unknown; he had already remarked in the course of his long clinical practice that quite often the same disease was overcome by different treatments, and had been finally led to believe that disease as an entity did not exist, except inasmuch as it was an expression of a man’s total personality, his It, expressing itself through him. Disease was a form of self-expression.
However unlikely it may seem, it is nevertheless a fact that any sort of treatment, scientific or old-wife’s poultice, may turn out to be right for the patient, since the outcome of medical or other treatment is not determined by the means prescribed but by what the patient’s It likes to make of the prescription. If this were not the case then every broken limb which had been properly set and bandaged would be bound to heal, whereas every surgeon knows of obstinate cases which despite all care and attention defy his efforts and refuse to heal. It is my opinion, backed by some experience with cases of this nature, that a beneficent influence may be directed upon the injured parts…by psycho-analysing the general Unconscious, indeed, I believe that every sickness of the organism, whether physical or mental, may be influenced by psychoanalysis.…Of itself psychoanalysis can prove its value in every department of medicine, although of course a man with pneumonia must be put immediately to bed and kept warm, a gangrened limb must be amputated, a broken bone set and immobilised. A badly built house may have to be pulled down and reconstructed with all possible speed when no alternative accommodation is available, and the architect who built it so badly must be made to see his mistakes…and an It which has damaged its own work, lung, or bone, or whatever it may be, must learn its lesson and avoid such mistakes in future…
Since everything has at least two sides, however, it can always be considered from two points of view, and so it is my custom to ask a patient who has slipped and broken his arm: “What was your idea in breaking your arm?” whereas if anyone is reported to have had recourse to morphia to get sleep the night before, I ask him: “How was it the idea of morphine became so important yesterday that you make yourself sleepless, in order to have an excuse for taking it?” So far I have never failed to get a useful reply to such questions, and there is nothing extraordinary about that, for if we take the trouble to make the search we can always find an inward and an outward cause for any event in life.
The sciences of the day have devoted almost the whole of their interest to the outward cause; they have not, as yet, succeeded in escaping from the philosophic impasse created by the natural belief in causality, and side by side with this a belief in the ego as being endowed with free will. In all the marvellous pages of Freud we feel the analytical intellect pursing its chain of cause-and-effect; if only the last link can
be reached, if only the first cause can be established, the whole pattern will be made clear. Yet for Groddeck such a proposition was false; the Whole was an unknown, a forever unknowable entity, whose shadows and functions we are. Only a very small corner of this territory was free to be explored by the watchful, only the fringes of this universe lay within the comprehension of the finite human mind which is a function of it. Thus while Freud speaks of cure, Groddeck is really talking of something else—liberation through self-knowledge; and his conception of disease is philosophical rather than rational. In the domain of theory and practice he is Freud’s grateful and deeply attentive pupil, but he is using Freud for ends far greater than Freud himself could ever perceive. Psychoanalysis has been in danger of devoting itself only to the tailoring of behaviour, too heavily weighted down by its superstructure of clinical terminology it has been in danger of thinking in terms of medical entities rather than patients. This is the secret of Groddeck’s aversion to technical phrases, his determination to express himself as simply as possible using only the homely weapons of analogy and comparison to make his points. In The Book of the It, which is cast in the form of letters to a friend, he discusses the whole problem of health and disease from a metaphysical point of view, and with an ironic refusal to dogmatise or tidy his views into a system. But the book itself, brimming over with gay irony and poetry, does succeed in circumscribing this territory of experience with remarkable fidelity; and from it Groddeck emerges not only as a great doctor but also as a philosopher whose It-concept is positively ancient Greek in its clarity and depth. “In vain,” says Freud somewhere, “does Groddeck protest that he has nothing to do with science.”[5] Yes, in vain, for Groddeck’s findings are being daily called upon to supplement the mechanical findings of the science which he respected, but of which he refused to consider himself a part. “Health and sickness,” he says,
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