Henry Miller and the Core Beat Writers: Some Exploratory Notes

R.J. Ellis, University of Chichester

These notes, as my title implies, will explore my contention that Henry Miller likely had, overall, a quite substantial influence on the core Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and (more tangentially) Corso. My proposition is that this influence may be more extensive than is generally estimated. It will take as its focus Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, the two foundational works upon which his reputation was established in the postwar decade and a half, 1945 to 1960.

The semi-autobiographical Tropic of Cancer (henceforth Cancer), with editorial input from and a preface by Anaïs Nin (for a period his lover at that time), was first published in Paris in 1934, by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press, but the book was banned as pornographic in the United States and attempts to import it or publish it in the USA led to several prosecutions. The book, however, early on attracted defenders, including H L Mencken and George Orwell, who both understood that the “cancer” Miller was referring to was what was not infrequently seen as a cancerous infection in interwar society, for which one effective “antidote” was libidinous desire, presented as a fundamental, if partial, curative (Carl Bode (ed.) New Mencken Letters, New York: Dial Press, 1977, pp. 372-73; George Orwell, Review of Tropic of Cancer, 1935, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This 1920–1940, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, pp. 178–80). Miller’s erotic and sexual adventures in Paris in the late 1920s and early 30s constitute the core of this book, which also reflected upon the sordidness of much of Paris and its Left Bank, as seen by the protagonist, a man besieged by bouts of hunger, homelessness, squalid despair and explosive orgasms on his picaresque patrols of its streets and his embraces of its often-prostituted eroticism. Tropic of Cancer’s widespread banning ensured it possessed a notoriety that boosted interest in it.

Much the same can be said for Tropic of Capricorn (henceforth Capricorn), a semi-autobiographical prequel to Cancer, set in the United States and published by Obelisk Press in 1939, Miller having begun work on it as he completed Cancer. Less furiously sustained than Cancer, and at times more reflective, the book, though slightly less continuously and erotically explicit about sex, suffered the same import ban. Though flatter – less rambunctious and perhaps slightly less comical – than Cancer, at its best Capricorn is at times a little more experimental in form and style, as it took even more fundamental issue with the USA within which its protagonist moved, and its social and political lineaments.

Of course, Miller’s influence upon the Beats has been raised before, for example by Michael Oriard (Sporting with the Gods: the Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). My summaries above make clear how Miller’s two books, though graphically obsessed with sex, sexuality and erotic passion, would be fertile, if febrile candidates for the core Beats’ attentions, quite apart from the interest Miller’s censorship travails would have aroused. The two books’ securing of US publication in the early sixties is documented in Charles Rembar’s The End of Obscenity (New York: Random House, 1968), but my immediate point is that Miller would have been of enduring interest to the Beats well before then.

Gregory Corso and Miller

Corso’s early access to Miller’s writings is guaranteed by his sustained sojourns in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s, often located in the now so-called Beat Hotel, petit and seamy but rented out cheaply by its owner to artistic bohemians, at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The censorship travails of Miller and Miller’s own Paris sojourn would likely have piqued Corso’s interest, so I think it is at least likely he read Miller. The main way this emerges is in the way in which Corso represents the American Express office in his novel, appositely titled The American Express, published in Paris by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in 1961 (The American Express, Paris: Olympia Press, Traveller’s Companion No. 85, 1961). The American Express office in Paris was the place to which Corso had needed to constantly, even obsessively return, in order to collect any funds (if there were any) that had arrived for him. It became for him a very intermittent cornucopia featuring long queues, much uncertainty and boredom, as a kind of symbolic alter ego to the adventurous wildness of Paris.

The American Express begins with a baby’s birth in the Paris American Express office. It seems at first as if the novel itself is the “baby” born there: one can imagine Corso mentally composing some, perhaps even many, of the novel’s short scenes in that office. The characters in the book, which seem in part to be portraits of (American?) arrivals from America, are also foggy, shifting portraits of Corso himself and his friends and the Americans and others he saw queuing in the American Express office. These characters become dream- or nightmare-like allegorical figurations of Americans abroad. For example, one of the characters, Hinderov seems to be in part an allegorical representation of the military-industrial complex. As part of this complexity, the baby born in the American Express office, by the book’s end, has become a “young man”, in part, perhaps, Corso himself: “roaming the streets penniless” (p. 229), before finally returning to the basement of the American Express Office “for the meeting of his life … look[ing] upon Death.” (p. 241)

Miller speaks of the American Express office in Cancer as a place to which he is inescapably carried by his need:

This is maybe how to understand the drawing by Corso of the imaginary “basement” of the American Express office, which also becomes labelled the “Hinderov Express”, with its “Manager’s Office”. Its labyrinthine representation makes it seem like a trap: notice the “customers”, reduced to almost nothing in the bottom right-hand corner, boxed in by the decorated walls and throwing up their arms in despair. They are trapped in the basement of the offices, in a “network … run by underground means [by] …secret tycoons sitting in little offices depicting the oil fields of the Middle East” (p. 28). In his novel, Corso’s characters in his novel amount to both variegated compendiums and the same: reduced to nothing: the “tycoons … believe the human experiment has failed” (p. 28). The architecture merges an American bank and Russia’s kremlin: the two national foundations of the atomic age.

The river [Seine] is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights. … I remember passing this way the other morning on my way to the American Express, knowing in advance there would be no mail for me, no check, no cable, nothing, nothing.

Corso later, in 1970, published a poem also drawing on the ambivalent, materialistic attraction / repulsion and resulting loss of hope and alienation: the ironically entitled “The American Way”:

I love America like a madness!

But I am afraid to return to America

I’m even afraid to go into the American Express—

…

I see in every American Express

and in every army center in Europe

I see the same face the same sound of voice

the same clothes the same walk

I see mothers & fathers

no difference among them

Replicas

They not only speak and walk and think alike

they have the same face!

What did this monstrous thing?

What regiments a people so?

This poem, appropriately, appeared in Corso’s collection, Elegiac Feelings American (New York: New Directions, 1970).

Certainly Corso, like Miller, spent much time in the Paris American Express office, but his experience also compares with that of the usually just-as-impoverished Miller. Miller, over a decade earlier, in Cancer, had represented the experience of visiting the American Express office in Paris as somehow a central part of his world view – the point at which the verminous possibilities of Paris intersected with the almost always frustrated hope / promise of some material release in the American Express Office:

Each morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and each morning the inevitable answer from the clerk. Dashing here and there like a bedbug, gathering butts now and then … squeezing my guts to stop the knowing … … Or wandering along the Seine at night, wandering and wandering and going mad with the beauty of it … and beggars and lice and old hags … the gutters slippery with vermin and garbage and women in satin pumps staggering though the filth and the vermin at the end of an all-night souse. Paris! Meaning the Café Select, the Dome, the Flea Market, the American Express. (Cancer,pp. 16-17)

Corso weaves an even more sur-real, absurd image of Paris than Miller (both were much influenced by turn of the century French writing), offering up a cancerous version of Paris and the American Express’s material place in it: “Cancer exists; therefore cancer is God’ (American Express, p. 128)

These comparisons are, of course, thin gruel. Yet Corso was perhaps, and I believe, likely was peripherally inspired by Cancer’s presentation of the American Express office’s somewhat incongruous yet wholly befitting place in Miller’s Parisian networks, with its contrasting sexless fiscal materialism. Corso positions his American Express literally and symbolically in the same location as Miller as he weaves his fantastic, quasi-allegorical tale.

Jack Kerouac and Miller

Kerouac’s visits to Paris were less prolonged than those of the other Beats, particularly Corso. Even his Satori in Paris has little to do with Cancer and not much to do with Paris, though it has something to say about the cancerous materialism of Western society. However, the Beats’ probable attraction to Miller and his literary enterprise, as it might be called, may likely have led Kerouac to read Capricorn. My reason for this proposal stems particularly the following passage in Capricorn in which Miller impatiently dismisses old modes of writing and insists on submersion in the flow of language.

We don’t know how to let go … [But now] I was in an ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam which was whirling about me … The … words I had written, mind you, well ordered and well connected, were as nothing to me—crude ciphers from the old stone age—because the contact was through the head … Everything I had written before was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that’s why it doesn’t catch fire and inflame the world. … I was not only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it whatever. (Capricorn, New York: Grove Press, 1961, p. 280)

These sentiments chime well with Kerouac’s reflections in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief and Technique in Modern Prose” (“Essentials”, Evergreen Review Vol. 2 No.5, Summer 1958, pp. 72-73; Belief and Technique”, Evergreen Review Vol. 2 No. 8, Spring 1959, p. 57). There is a need to proceed cautiously here, since Kerouac advised Philip Whalen in 1956 to avoid Miller, in a long list of other writers to avoid (Paul Maher, Kerouac: the Definitive Biography, Taylor Trade, 2007, p.234). However, Miller was also, significantly, I think, to write the introduction to The Subterraneans. The Subterraneans is certainly one of the novels that most fully incorporates Kerouac’s ideas on modern “spontaneous” writing, as Ginsberg recognised in a review of The Dharma Bums, which included long extracts from both The Subterraneans and “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” in order to establish the importance of Kerouac’s prose innovations (Ginsberg, [Review of] The Dharma Bums, Village Voice Vol. 4 No. 3 (Nov. 12, 1958). Significantly, in pre-war Paris Miller had written in Cancer:

I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts nor my actions … It is the triumph of the individual over art. (Cancer,p. 11)

Capricorn alsocarries several reflections on what might reasonably be called compositional deracination and which, in sum, set up congruences perhaps point to the way in which Capricorn alsomay have contributed somewhat to Kerouac’s ideas on prosody:

I wanted … a chance to know my own body, my own desires … I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of ideas. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins. (Capricorn, p. 70)

Kerouac demands something similar in “Essentials” and “Belief and Technique”, and also quite possibly derives his preparedness to use sexually explicit language from Miller. Miller’s obsession with the female labia and vagina is echoed, and the misogyny even magnified – for example in Visons of Cody:

As far as young women are concerned, I can’t look at them unless I tear off their clothes one by one … This is almost all I can say about almost all girls and any further refinement is their cunts and will do

…

… embedding my prick in the beautiful soft, wet between the legs slam of Cecily Wayne …

… the vision … [of] men enslaved to cunts … poor Mac, Cody, broken by their cunts … (pp. 23, 100, 116)

These possess close echoes of Miller’s writing in both Cancer and Capricorn – for example:

And I enter … sizing up the taxi girls … Into each and every one of them … I throw an imaginary fuck. The place is just plastered with cunt and fuck … I could have the most excruciatingly marvelous time, throwing a fuck into each an every one

…

… such a juicy crotch … if there had been any billboards handy, I could have plastered up a dozen or more. (Capricorn, pp. 97-99; p. 177)

Kerouac’s narrator’s misogynistic frankness closely matches and I believe owes a debt to Miller.

Allen Ginsberg and Miller

Miller’s strictures concerning ‘no revision’ ally him to the core Beats more generally. There, is, again, a need to caution, for Miller and the core Beats have a common admiration for Rimbud, Dada, Blaise Cendrars, Tristan Tzara, Apollinaire, and André Breton (see Capricorn, pp. 287-89). But I want to suggest that there is a more direct, if minor, influence on the Beats stemming from Miller – namely a driving energy brought to this approach. In the case of Ginsberg this is substantial. Again, I need to note, this time preliminarily, that there is a common precursor at work, for it is well established that both Miller and Ginsberg admired Whitman. But the way that Miller adapts the anaphoras of Whitman thematically resembles the use of anaphoras in Ginsberg’s 1950s poems, suggesting some derivation exists on Ginsberg’s half. Miller uses anaphoras in Capricorn quite frequently, and at times I think the contiguity with Ginsberg becomes clear.Take for example the following passages from Capricorn, which to drive home my point, I have rendered not as prose but lineated, as if poetry:

If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished.

I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea.

I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer.

I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn.

I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea.

I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight.

I wanted the eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires.

I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard—and in order to forget.

I wanted something of the earth which was not of man’s doing, something absolutely terrestrial and absolutely divested of ideas.

I wanted feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation.

I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system.

I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. (Capricorn, pp. 69-70)

… I am dancing the soul dance of white desperation, the last white man pulling the trigger on the last emotion, the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws.

I am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the center of a satin-like emptiness; the hight glows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into black velvet space.

I am the black space of night in which the buds break with anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon.

I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. (Capricorn, pp. 114-15)

The debt of Miller to Whitman here is clear enough—think, for example, of “From Pent-up Aching Rivers”, “I Sing the Body Electric”, “Not Heaving from my Ribb’d Breast Only” and “Trickle Drops”, and the rhapsodic beat of Whitman’s anaphoras, but there is also an affinity with what comes later. The structure of the long-line anaphoras of Ginsberg are more than simply Whitmanesque. Miller’s sentences’ surrealistic edge to their incantatory rhythms, add a threnodic edge (an elegy to lost America) to the soaring romantic throb of Whitman within Ginsberg’s poetry:

… I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. …
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? (Berkeley 1955)

The closer one reads Miller’s and Ginsberg’s anaphoras together, the more both verbal and prosodic overlaps emerge within the incantatory rhythms. These can become particularly pronounced when Miller’s reflections on his protagonists’ relations to America and its ravages are considered:

She had dropped below the human sphere, below the animal sphere, below the vegetative sphere even:

She had so mastered the art of deception that even the dream was powerless to betray her.

She had learned how not to dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched off the current.

If one could have caught her thus and opened up the skull one would have found an absolute void.

She kept no disturbing secrets: everything was killed off which could be humanly killed.

She might live on endlessly, like the moon, like any dead planet, radiating an hypnotic effulgence, creating tide of passion, engulfing the world in madness, discoloring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays.

Sowing her own death she brought everyone around her to fever pitch. (Capricorn, p. 239)

Capricorn here is developing what Miller was moving towards in Cancer:

New York is cold, glittering and malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy go the activity going on.

When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind white rage licks my guts.

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints … and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs …

A whole city erected over the hollow pit of nothingness. (Cancer, p. 68)

Such rhapsodic outpourings, in Cancer and especially in Capricorn,seem to find a later echo in Ginsberg’s more heated, even somewhat more frantic, excited effusions. Inspired by his own visions of New York and more personal in tone, nevertheless these lines from his Howl circle round Millers’ vocabulary and despair:

Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror though the wall,

…

Who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

…

Who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

Who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of stem-heat and opium

…

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

…

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! … Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! (Howl)

Also, I think, Ginsberg, like Kerouac, seems to have been emboldened by Miller’s use of sexually-explicit vocabulary to move in that direction as well:

Who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vison of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

Who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red-eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks in the barn and in the lake (Howl)

This, I think, leads me readily on to Burroughs.

Burroughs and Miller

Burroughs poses more problems for my exploration, mostly because the possible influence of (or, indeed, the lack of influence) upon Burroughs has already been given more and more careful consideration. A good example of this can be found in Reality Studio’s “Scholarship” on-line cache (https://realitystudio.org/scholarship), where an essay by Keith Seward, “Henry Miller and William Burroughs: An Overview”, explores the possibility of Miller’s influence on Burroughs, and largely rejects it on the basis that Burroughs did not arrive in Paris until 1959. So, this argument runs, since both Tropics were banned in America, Burroughs was unlikely to have read them (though in this line of argument the quite extensive reworkings of the manuscripts / typescripts / letter texts in Paris at the time – with Ginsberg contributing – are perhaps too readily set aside). This idea is then challenged in a reply, a “letter” by Ian MacFadyen, claiming that Burroughs, in common with the other core Beats, could not and would not have wanted to avoid tracking down Cancer and Capricorn, given their reputation. Consequently, the observations in the original essay about how many commonalities exist between Miller’s and Burroughs’ early writings become rebalanced.

Yet Reality Studio also notes that Tropic of Cancer anticipates Burroughs in some of his obsessions. For example, Seward’s “Henry Miller: An Overview” points out how Miller toys with a collage technique that can be related to experimental work on Naked Lunch and later writing by Burroughs: “These beautiful paragraphs we sometimes lifted from the encyclopaedia or an old guide book … they had a surrealistic character.” And Seward also tellingly observes how quite possibly Miller reproduces a French limerick whose subject is that most Burroughsian of images, the erotic hanging:

L’autre soir l’idée m’est venue
Cré nom de Zeus d’enculer un pendu

Anon. [Keith Seward], “Henry Miller and William Burroughs: An Overview”, Reality Studio, https://realitystudio.org/scholarship/henry-miller-and-william-burroughs-an-overview/

[The other evening the idea came to me to sodomise a hanged man—however much fuss Zeus might create]

However, it seems to me that additionally Burroughs in part, perhaps only in small part, learned another thing from Miller. Namely the way to launch out on burlesque riffing routines, laced with comedy but also a certain cold despair. Take this passage from Cancer:

There are people who cannot resist the desire to go into a cage with wild beasts and be mangled … The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not hear. The drama he thinks is going on inside the cage. The cage he thinks is the world. Standing there alone and helpless, the door locked, he finds the lions do not understand his language … .

The lions, too, are disappointed. They expected blood, bones, gristle, sinews. They chew and chew, but the words are chicle and chicle is indigestible. Chicle is a base over which you sprinkle sugar, pepsin, thyme, licorice. Chicle, when it is gathered by chicleros, is OK. The chicleros came over the ridge of a sunken continent. They brought with them an algebraic language. In the Arizona desert they met the Mongols of the North, glazed like eggplants. Time shortly after the earth had taken its gyroscopic lean—when the Gulf Stream was parting ways with the Japanese current. In the heart of the soil they found tufa rock. They embroidered the very bowels of the earth with their language. They ate one another’s entrails and the forest closed in on them, on their bones and skulls, on their lace tufa. Their language was lost. Here and there one still finds the remnants of a menagerie, a brain plate covered with figures. (Cancer pp. 9-10)

The cod information, the almost jazzy flow of the imagination, the routine’s focus on violence, death, and language are surely resonant. As is the insistence on sexual excess and perversion:

Standing there knee deep in the lave beds and my eyes choked with sperm; J. P. Morgana is placidly wiping his ass while the telephone girls plug the switchboards, while dicks with rubber hoses practice the third degree, while my old friend MacGregor scrubs the germs out of his cock and sweetens it and examines it under the microscope. Everybody caught with his pants down, including the strip teasers who wear no pants, no bears, no mustaches, just a little patch to cover their twinkling cunts. Sister Antolina lying in the convent bed, her guts trussed up, her arms akimbo and waiting for the Resurrection, waiting, waiting for life without hernia, without intercourse, without sin, without evil, meanwhile nibbling a few animal crackers, a pimento, some fancy olives … [boys] on the East Side, in Harlem, the Bronx, Canarsie, Brownsville, opening and closing the trapdoors, pulling out arms and legs, turning the sausage machine, clogging up the drains, working like fury for cash down and if you let out a peep out you go (Capricorn, p. 99).

Such flights may have helped inspired Burroughs to also set out on riffs of cod-obscene fantasy that seem so much less peculiarly extreme, when set beside the cumulative effect of Miller’s sexual insistence, even if the tone can be comparatively judgmental:

… the cousin was a softy, If she came within a foot of a stiff prick she was like putty. An unbuttoned fly was enough to put her in a trance. It was almost shameful the things Curley made her do. He took pleasure in degrading her. … He went at it cold-bloodedly. “Fish it out!” he’d say, opening his fly a little. “Fish it out with your tongue!” … [and] once she got the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her. Sometimes he’d stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow. Or else he’d do it dog fashion and while she groaned and squirmed he’d nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her legs. Once he played a dirty trick doing it that way. He had worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he had almost polished the ass of her with his back-scuttling he pulled out for a second as though to cool his cock off, and then very slowly and gently he shoved a big carrot up her twat. “That, Miss Abercrombie,” he said, is a sort of Dopplegänger of my regular cock,” and with that he unhitches himself and yanks up his pants. Cousin Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let out a tremendous fart and out tumbled the carrot. (Capricorn, p. 175)

Such fantastic flights find echoes in Burroughs:

I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses … So close I could reach out and touch them … They wear shorts … I can see the goose pimples on their legs in the cold spring morning .. I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Marv, “Do you think they will do it?”

And he says, “I think so. They are hungry.”

And I say, “That’s the way I like to see them.”

Makes me sorta feel like a dirty old man but, “Son cosas de la vida,” as Sobera de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the dead body to thr Bar O Motel and fucking it …

(Sobera de la Flor was a Mexican criminal convicted of several rather pointless murders.) (Naked Lunch, p. 59)

Naked boy in the middle of the room … Another boy lean back in bed smoking kief and blowing smoke over his erect cock. They play game with tarot cards on the bed to see who fuck who. Cheat. Fight. Roll on the floor snarling and spitting like young animals. The loser sits on the floor chin on knees, licks a brokentooth. The winner curls up on the bed pretending to sleep. Whenever the other boy come near kick at him. Ali seize him by one ankle … The boy kick desperately at Ali’s face. Other ankle pinioned. Ali tilt the boy back on his shoulders. The boy’s cock extends along his stomach, float free pulsing. Ali put his hand behind the boy’s knees, push his legs over his head. Spit on his cock. The other sighs deeply as Ali slides his cock in. … Sharp musty odor of penetrated rectum. Nimun drive in the wedge, force jissom out the other cock in long hot spurts. (The author has observed that Arab cocks tend to wide and wedge shaped.) (Lunch, 77)

The sexual dynamics as they might be called, are, importantly, different but note the overlaps of structure and note the reciprocal use of ersatz footnotes (chicleros, Arab cocks) and the quasi-erotic suggestive use of smoke. Burroughs goes to further shocking lengths, but his route is somewhat paved by Miller.

At other times the tone of the early sections of Junky seem to be anticipated (albeit tempered by Gide, for example), as in this passage, before it veers off into Milleresque heterosexual, misogynistic territory at the end:

Maxie was so confused and flustered he couldn’t disengage a bill … Leaning over the coffin reverently I peeled off the topmost bill from the wad which was peeping out of his pocket. I couldn’t tell if it was a single or a tenspot. I didn’t stop to examine it but tucked it away as rapidly as possible and straightened myself up. …

At the corner, by the lamppost, Curley was waiting for me …

… What relieved me more than anything was the sight of what I had filched from Maxie’s wad. It was a twenty dollar bill! That sobered me up at once. And at the same time it enraged me a bit. It enraged me to think that in the pocket of that idiot, Maxie, there was more bills, probably more twenties, more tens, more fives. If he had come out with me, as I suggested, and if I had taken a good look at that wad I would have felt no remorse in blackjacking him. … The most immediate thought was to get rid of Curley as quickly as possible—a five spot would fix him up—and then go on a little spree. What I particularly wanted was to meet some low-down, filthy cunt who hadn’t a spark of decency in her. (Capricorn, pp.112-13).

Such a representation perhaps constitutes a precursor of the adventures of Burroughs’ protagonist Lee when rolling lushes with Roy in Junky. Or consider these two passages:

At the corner by the lamppost, Curley was waiting for me. I grabbed Curley by the arm and rushing him down the street I began to laugh, to laugh as I have seldom laughed in my life. I thought it would never stop. … Finally I got frightened. I thought I might laugh myself to death. (Capricorn, p. 112)

“I let him have it with the faucet end [of the pipe], and he goes on running … the blood spurting out of his head ten feet every time his hear beat.” He made a pumping motion with his hand. … Jack began to laugh uncontrollably. “My girl was waiting out in the car. She called me—ha-ha-ha!—she called me—ha-ha-ha!—a cold-blooded killer.”

He laughed until his face turned purple. (Junky: The Definitive Edition, pp.5-6)

Burroughs does seem to have read Miller attentively, at the least.

Finally …

These reflections have sought to expand upon the recognition that, in Robert McCrum’s words, “Miller’s delight in rubbing the reader’s face in filth was intoxicating and influential. His “fuck everything” would inspire Kerouac … Burroughs … and Ginsberg, among others.” (Robert McCrum , 2014, “The 100 Best Novels”, The Guardian, https://www.guardian.com/books/2014/nov/03/100-best-novels-tropic-of-cancer-henry-miller). I am arguing things are more complex than this fascination with explicit eroticism and sexual activity, which I see as only part, if an important part, of the story.

I think it is necessary to move decisively beyond doubts about the influence of Miller on the Beats. When John Tytell asked writer John Clellon Holmes, a close associate of Kerouac at that time, “Do you know whether [Kerouac] read Henry Miller, or even expressed any attitudes towards Miller’s work?” … Holmes replied, “Frankly, no” (John Tytell, Jack Kerouac et al., Kerouac and the Beats, New York: Paragon House, 1988, p. 156). Indeed, Kerouac himself offered a denial: “Don’t say that I read Henry Miller all my life, it just isn’t true … I could never find a copy of the Tropics anyway. I think Miller is a great man.” (Kerouac, in Kevin J. Hayes, Conversations with Jack Kerouac, Mississippi: University Press, 2005, p 24). But the involvement Kerouac established was close, and suggests a longer-standing engagement with Miller’s writing than this disavowal allows. They never met (see, for example, Big Sur, p. 185 and passim), but they corresponded frequently after Miller had lauded The Subterraneans and written an introduction to the book.

In his Reality Studio essay on Miller and Burroughs, Keith Seward notes that “In a 1974 interview, John Tytell asked Burroughs if Henry Miller had ever been an influence. ‘No,’ Burroughs replied without further elucidation” (Seward’s source here is John Tytell, “Interrogation,” in William Burroughs, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997,New York: Semiotext(e), 2002, p 252.) Similarly, Seward notes how Victor Bockris reported, “I also found out that Bill has never been particularly interested in the writings of Henry Miller.’” (Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A report from the Bunker, New York: St Martins, 1982, p 132). In these reflections I have clearly suggested otherwise. Both Kerouac and Burroughs’ work seem to suggest longer standing involvements than these verdicts suggest.

Indeed, other statements can be found suggesting these verdicts are faulty: “Wanting money is wanting the dishonesty of a servant. Money hates us, like a servant; because it is false. Henry Miller was right; Burroughs was right. Roll your own, I say.”3 These are Kerouac’s words. (Jack Kerouac, in Ann Charters, Selected Letters: Volume 1 1940-1956, New York: Penguin, 1996, p 194).

Burroughs also aligns himself differently: in 1984 Burroughs wrote a cover puff for Miller’s Opus Pistorum, the $1-per-page written-to-order 1941 pornographic novel: “Miller at his buoyant bawdy rollicking best — a spicy whiff” (Ian McFadyen, Henry Miller and William Burroughs: A Letter https://realitystudio.org/scholarship/henry-miller-and-william-burroughs-an-overview/henry-miller-and-william-burroughs-a-letter/). As Oliver Harris has pointed out to me, the core Beats also may very well have been an admirer of Henry Miller’s consideration of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (1946), not least because Rimbaud was an influence they all held in common (but also notice how Miller’s title uses the word “assassins”, maybe was one lead-in for Burroughs’ recurrent interest in Hassan -i Sabbah). Relatedly, Corso also quotes from Miller in Minutes to Go (Sinclair Beiles, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Minutes to Go, 1968; see also Oliver Harris, Two Assassins: William Burroughs / Hassan Sabbah, Moloko, 2023). I think it is more wrong to say that Henry Miller was a “reluctant forbear” of the Beats (James Campbell, July 2016, “Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs: Celebrating the Beats in Paris”, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/09/beats-paris-pompidou-centre). Rather he would seem to have recognised the contiguities (see also Greg Stevenson, “Henry Miller and the Beats: An Anti-humanist Precedent”, in Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Another way of highlighting how these writers come to have these related commonalities is to observe that both Miller and the Beats engaged with Spengler’s Decline of the West, especially the conception of the rise of the “Fellah[een]’ type” (Spengler, The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World-History, 1923, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. Vol. 2. New York: Knopf, 1928, p.200ff.). Spengler’s diagnosis would have certainly been disturbing. As Miller put it, in his The Air-Conditioned Nightmare:

Most of the young men of talent whom I have met in this country give one the impression of being somewhat demented. Why shouldn’t they? They are living amidst spiritual gorillas. God, if I were a young man today, if I were faced with a world such as we have created, I would blow my brains out (Nightmare, NY: Avon Books, 1945, 136-37).

Another consequential congruence is established by a common involvement with Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, following on from his father, Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press. Symptomatically, The Olympia Reader, edited by Maurice Girodias (NY: Grove Press, 1965), brought together writings by Miller, Corso and Burroughs, who had all published in Girodias’s “Traveller’s Companions” series.

The core Beats generally espoused Miller’s dictum, when he wrote “I had to learn … that one must give up everything … one must write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you” (Capricorn, p. 17). The total outputs of all the core Beats were substantial and their commitment to their art plain.

But maybe the most compelling influence is how the Beats take up Miller’s scathing critique of America and his advocacy of off-piste lives. For Miller, that was Paris most centrally, and later West Coast California (as it was for Ginsberg for a time), but Burroughs also turned to Mexico and Morocco, Ginsberg to India, Corso to Paris in particular – for all of them as part of a peripatetic life – all more or less escaping, in a common impulse,from what Miller depicted as:

… all the streets in America combined … forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number. (Capricorn, p. 4)

The futile materialism of American life is central to the Beats’ writing in turn:

I had travelled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City” (Kerouac, On the Road, p. 106)

… the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives …

The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog … that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial—modern—all that civilization … (Ginsberg, “Sunflower Sutra”)

There is something about Chicago that paralyzes the spirit under a dead weight … Here the dream is suffocating, more real than the real … the horror, the fear of stasis and decay closes around your heart. (Burroughs, “Outtakes: The Rube”, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, New York: Grove Press, 2001, p. 258)

It is easy to frame these sentiments by adding another Miller quote:

… the thing was senseless from the bottom up. A waste of men, material and effort. A hideous farce against a backdrop of sweat and misery” (Capricorn p. 12)

And maybe underlying all this something William Burroughs probes at: “someone else who said a great deal, in one way, was Henry Miller – “Who writes the books? – Not we who have our names on the paper on the covers”. A writer is simply someone who tunes in to certain currents …. A writer shouldn’t think too much. In other words, he’s sort of a medium” (quoted in “Henry Miller and William Burroughs: An Overview” Reality Studio n.d., https://realitystudio.org/scholarship/henry-miller-and-william-burroughs-an-overview/)

Perhaps all this leaves one question hanging: why aren’t there mentions of Miller more often in the writings of the core Beats, if he was a more substantial influence than has been allowed? I think this comes down to anxiety—possibly even a species of anxiety of influence: obtaining Miller’s work was illegal in the post-war period as it was censored, and this censorship gave his writing a reputation that rendered over-close literary association with him at least problematic, and perhaps dangerous to a starting-out writer and his aspirations—and the core Beats were already taking literary risks. It is noticeable that as the immediate postwar period recedes, mentions of Miller by the core Beats increase—well, of course: his work was being published from the early nineteen sixties onwards, but also his reputation as a writer was, at least to a degree, slowly being revived. The core Beats could more happily note their admiration.

It’s my hope my exploration in these pages contributes to one dimension of this restorative process (so far as is possible, pace Miller’s misogyny and racism), and, incidentally, renders up Miller as something of a proto-Beat in Cancer and Capricorn with: their integration of explicit autobiographical detail into the composition, usually with a satiric edge; experimentalism; their commitment to ‘writing, writing”; a preparedness to use minimal revisions; their sense of socio-political estrangement, marginalisation and economic disadvantage ; and their sexual explicitness—often hyperbolised. Miller, substantially, helped open up this arena for the core Beats. My reflections here have sought within this nexus to focus upon some thematic, stylistic and linguistic propinquities to underline the influence that is involved. What I’ve written is tentative and tendentious, but hopefully suggestive.