Henry Miller
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nothing can possibly change because this, like your teeth, is perfect...
It is Sunday, the first Sunday of my new life, and I am wearing the dog collar you fastened around my neck. A new life stretches before me. It begins with the day of rest. I lie back on a broad green leaf and I watch the sun bursting in your womb. What a clabber and clatter it makes! All this expressly for me, what? If only you had a million suns in you! If only I could lie here forever enjoying the celestial fireworks!
I lie suspended over the surface of the moon. The world is in a womb-like trance: the inner and the outer ego are in equilibrium. You promised me so much that if I never come out of this it will make no difference. It seems to me that it is exactly 25,960 years since I have been asleep in the black womb of sex. It seems to me that I slept perhaps 365 years too many. But at any rate I am now in the right house, among the sixes, and what lies behind me is well and what lies ahead is well. You come to me disguised as Venus, but you are Lilith, and I know it. My whole life is in the balance; I will enjoy the luxury of this for one day. Tomorrow I shall tip the scales. Tomorrow the equilibrium will be finished; if I ever find it again it will be in the blood and not in the stars. It is well that you promise me so much. I need to be promised nearly everything, for I have lived in the shadow of the sun too long. I want light and chastity - and a solar fire in the guts. I want to be deceived and disillusioned so that I may complete the upper triangle and not be continually flying off the planet into space. I believe everything you tell me, but I know also that it will all turn out differently. I take you as a star and a trap, as a stone to tip the scales, as a judge that is blindfolded, as a hole to fall into, as a path to walk, as a cross and an arrow. Up to the present I travelled the opposite way of the sun; henceforth I travel two ways, as sun and as moon. Henceforth I take on two sexes, two hemispheres, two skies, two sets of everything. Henceforth I shall be double-jointed and double-sexed. Everything that happens will happen twice. I shall be as a visitor to this earth, partaking of its blessings and carrying off its gifts. I shall
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neither serve nor be served. I shall seek the end in myself.
I look out again at the sun - my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on the roof-tops. Everything above the horizon is dear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal - the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendour while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the Maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow...
September 1938 Villa Seurat, Paris.
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MODERN CLASSIC
Henry Miller
Crazy Cock
With a foreword by Erica Jong
In 1930 Henry Miller moved from New York to Paris, leaving behind (at least temporarily) his tempestuous marriage to June Smith and a novel he fully expected to be his masterpiece. Begun in 1927, and originally titled Lovely Lesbians, Crazy Cock sprang from his anguish over June's love affair with a mysterious woman called Jean Kronski. Purging himself of this pain through the writing of Crazy Cock helped Miller to discover his true voice a few years later in Tropic of Cancer.
'It is a shame that Miller is not around to report on the War of the Hormones. Crazy Cock is a dispatch from the front. His critics will use the novel's sexual and political incorrectness to disguise the reality that he understood the ever-present prejudices and confusions of women and men better than any of the talk-show munchkins. Crazy Cock is full of the sheer force of Miller's language and the sexual pitch and youthful literary eagerness which start cafe brawls and outrage high-school librarians.'
London Review of Books
'Miller's account of the writer's misery is vivid and affecting and he tells his story with feeling. At times it is so raw it hurts, at other times the rawness manifests itself in an exhilarating spontaneity.' Sunday Telegraph
MODERN CLASSIC
Henry Miller
>Tropic of Cancer
With an introduction by Robert Nye
A penniless and as yet unpublished writer. Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930. Leaving behind a disintegrating marriage and an unhappy career in America, he threw himself into the low-life of Bohemian Paris with unwavering gusto. A fictional account of Miller's adventures amongst the prostitutes and pimps, the penniless painters and writers of Montparnasse, Tropic of Cancer is an extravagant and rhapsodic hymn to a world of unrivalled eroticism and freedom.
'A rhapsody deriving from Whitman, Joyce, Lawrence and Celine, Tropic of Cancer is a ranting, randy book carried along by a deep, sensual enjoyment of living. ' Sunday Times
'Tropic of Cancer is a great prophetic book, a warning of what deadens life, an affirmation that it can yet be lived, though with extreme difficulty, in an age whose sterile non-cultures seek to thwart all mainsprings of fertility. Miller reveals himself as a battered faun, a crafty innocent, a lonely, lazy, sometimes fearful, always steadfast, worshipper of life. ' Colin Maclnnes, Spectator
MODERN CLASSIC
>Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead
With an introduction by John Pilger
'The best war novel to come out of the United States.' The Times
The Naked and the Dead traces the story of a platoon of young American soldiers as they pick their way, through treacherous terrain, across the Japanese-held Pacific island of Anopopei. Caught up in the confusion of close-armed combat, preyed upon by snipers, the men are pushed to the limit of human endurance. Held together only by the raw will to survive and barely sustained dreams of life beyond the maelstrom, each man finds his innermost hopes and deepest fears laid bare by the unrelenting stress of battle.
In his early twenties Mailer was himself a Second World War combatant in the Far-Eastern theatre. Published three years after the war ended. The Naked and the Dead, a shattering masterpiece of nightmarish realism, catapulted Mailer to instant fame.
'Mailer recorded every foul thought and word of his characters, wrote about ignorant, savage, primitive men . . . For maturity of viewpoint, for technical competence, and for stark dramatic power. The Naked and the Dead is an incredibly finished performance. ' New York Times
'Mailer writes like an angel - a master of small surprises that are precursors of seismic shocks.' London Review of Books
flamingo
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