Excerpt from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, 1939

Aug 28

In 1970, Feminist Kate Millett published Sexual Politics, a dissertation that attacked the literary misogyny of three modern male authors — Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and D.H. Lawrence — and celebrated the homosexuality of Jean Genet. Sexual Politics was a bestselling cornerstone of the Women’s Liberation movement, and Norman Mailer was invited to respond as a journalist not only to the charges against him in the book, but to cover the women’s movement as a whole. Mailer’s article “The Prisoner of Sex” was subsequently published in Harper’s. In it, he analyzed in detail the passages quoted by Millett and restored to their full meaning what Millett had cut down to make her points, occasionally even putting words in their mouths. Mailer’s essay burns as a piece of literary criticism that clarifies the philosophical, aesthetic, and political motives of modern authors like Miller, who have gone the way of the dinosaur. Mary Gaitskill claimed recently that “Today, I don’t think any man would dare write what Miller wrote, which is unfortunate. Although at the time, too, he was not approved of — he couldn’t get published in America for a long time. People thought he was disgusting then, as well. For a while, writing about sex was almost the purview of women. Women could write more intensely about sex and it would be accepted in a way it wasn’t from men. I think the reason for that is pretty obvious — women are less threatening than men.” Male authors like Miller have generally been recuperated by a more sex-positive attitude that sweeps across gender or identity, a point Mailer was at pains to make in his criticism that straddled the threshold of a bygone modernist sexual liberation and a developing New Left sexual de-liberation in vogue in some contemporary art enclaves. Of concern was the possibility that what was called sexual liberation was actually a veiled “left totalitarianism” and conformist moral policing that may contribute to instead of challenge the “technocratic state.” But most centrally the point concerned literature, and the development — or alternatively, castration — of a form of inquiry capable of pursuing often difficult truths at any cost.

— Bret Schneider

She was probably the best fuck I ever had. She never once opened her trap — not that night, nor the next night, nor any night. She’d steal down like that in the dark, soon as she smelled me there alone, and plaster her cunt all over me. It was an enormous cunt, too, when I think back on it. A dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up with divans and cosy corners and rubber teeth and syringes and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in like the solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely silent, and so soft and restful that I lay like a dolphin on the oyster banks. A slight twitch and I’d be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of tingling sea crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops. In the immense black grotto there was a silk-and-soap organ playing a predaceous black music. When she pitched herself high, when she turned the juice on full, it made a violaceous purple, a deep mulberry stain like twilight, a ventriloqual twilight such as dwarfs and cretins enjoy when they menstruate. It made me think of cannibals chewing flowers, of Bantus running amuck, of wild unicorns rutting in rhododendron beds... It was one cunt out of a million, a regular pearl of the Antilles ... In the broad Pacific of sex she lay, a gleaming silver reef surrounded with human anemones, human starfish, human madrepores.

from Tropic of Capricorn (1939) by Henry Miller

Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Figures lascives et obscènes, 1777-1825. BNF — Jean-Jacques Lequeu, *Figures lascives et obscènes,* 1777-1825. BNF

What a scum of hypocrisy on the surface of her thought, bold sexual revolutionary who will not grant that such a revolution if it comes will have more to do with unmanageable metamorphoses between love and lust than some civilized version of girls-may-hold-hands-in-the-suburbs. It is the horror of lust, and yet its justification, that wild as a blind maniac it still drives toward the creation, it witnesses such profound significations as, “Her face went through all the metamorphoses of early uterine life, only in reverse.” And the clue again is upon us of that moment of transcendence when the soul stands in the vault of the act and the coming is its mirror. Yes, even fifty clitoral comes in white-hot vibrating laboratory lust is a mirror (if only of the outer galaxies of nausea) but it is not love but lust, good old scientific lust, pure as the lust in the first fierce fart of the satyr.

...

Stretched with every adrenaline of overkill, her mind next to rigid with fear that women might have some secret but fundamental accommodation to Miller’s lust that brings them into just such absurd positions, she is therefore always missing the point of her case, she is always pushing into that enforced domain of equality where the sexes, she would declaim, “are inherently in everything alike, save reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, orgasmic capacity and genetic and morphological structure. Perhaps the only thing they can uniquely exchange is semen and transudate.” Good laboratory assistant Kate. She is a technologist who drains all the swamps only to discover that the ecological balance has been savaged. She is also one of those minds, totalitarian to the core, which go over to hysteria, abuse (and liquidation at the end of the road) whenever they are forced to build their mind on anything more than a single premise. The real case against Miller is not that he is all wrong, and cocks and cunts are no more than biological details on human beings so that we are even unable to distinguish semen from transudate when suffering from a cold, no, the real case is that Miller is right, yet Ibsen’s Nora is also right when she says, “I have another duty, just as sacred ... My duty to myself ... I believe that before everything else I’m a human being — just as much as you are ... or at any rate, I shall try to become one.” What have we not lost in his novels that there will be never a character like Nora to stand against his men? For it is our modern experience that men filled with every appreciation of sex and women’s rights encounter women with an equal appreciation, and the war still continues with what new permutations only a novelist can begin to explore since the novelist is the only philosopher who works with emotions which are at the very edge of the word system, and so is out beyond the scientists, doctors, psychologists, even — if he is good enough — the best of his contemporaries who work at philosophy itself. If it is easy to mock him when, like Miller, he comes close to stumbling off the end of the word-system, we know his best and wildest ideas will become the ones most quickly attacked by literary technologists like Millett since such ideas lend themselves to confetti-making in ideological mincers.

Marcoantonio Raimondi, Couple making love on bed with drapery, 1520s. British Museum

Salvador Dali, Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity, 1954. Wikipedia

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The Twenties are a thicket for any thesis-monger with an ax. ... Just as the Renaissance was a period in which men dared, as perhaps never before in history, to allow themselves to pursue the line of their thought and embark on exploration with the idea that such activities were good and valid in themselves and so did not have to be initiated with external blessing or forced to scurry under the shadow of inviolable taboo, but rather the world was a theater, and nature a laboratory open to the adventurer with an inquiring mind–so the Twenties were a species of sexual renaissance where man emerged from the long medieval night of Victorian sex with its perversions, hypocrisies, and brothel dispensations, and set out to explore not the world, but himself, not man of Victorian reason with his buried sexual pocket, but man as himself, Henry Miller, with his brain and his balls in the intimate and continuing dialogue of his daily life, which meant that one followed the line of one’s sexual impulse without a backward look at what was moral, responsible, or remotely desirable for society, that one set out to feed one’s cock (as man from the Renaissance had set out to feed his brain) and since the effort was pioneer in the very real way that no literary man with the power to shift consciousness had ever given that much attention before to the vagaries and outright contradictions of a stiff prick without a modicum of conscience, no one had ever dared to assume that such a life might be as happy and amusing as the next, that the paganism of a big-city fucker had its own balance, and such a man could therefore wage an allout war to storm the mysteries with his phallus as a searchlight instead of his mind, because all sexual experience was valid if one looked at it clearly, no fuck was in vain, well, it was a sexual renaissance sure enough, and it depended on a rigorous even a delighted honesty in portraying the detail of one’s faults, in writing without shit, which is to say writing with the closest examination of one’s own. Miller was a true American spirit, he knew that in a nation of transplants and weeds the best was always next to the worst, and right after shit comes Shinola. It was all equal to him because he understood that it is never equal — in the midst of heaven a hole, and out of the slimy coruscated ridiculous comes a pearl; he is a demon at writing about bad fucks with all the gusto he gives to good ones, no fuck is in vain, the air may prove most transcendent at the edge of the vomit, or if not, then the nausea it produces can give birth to an otherwise undiscovered project as the mind clears out of its vertigo. So he dives into the sordid, portrays men and women as they have hardly been painted before, a girl having her period in the middle of an orgy, cock, balls, knees, thighs, cunt, and belly in a basting of blood, then soap and towels, a round of goodbyes — a phrase or two later he is off on the beginning of a ten-page description of how he makes love to his wife which goes through many a mood, he will go right down to the depths, no cellar has maggots or rats big enough to frighten him, he can even write about the whipped-out flayed heel-ground end of his own desire, about fucking when too exhausted to fuck, and come up with a major metaphor.

from The Prisoner of Sex (1971) by Norman Mailer