Misplaced Pages

Henry Miller

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
#843156

114-502: Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He broke with existing literary forms and developed a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness , explicit language, sex, surrealist free association , and mysticism . His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer , Black Spring , Tropic of Capricorn , and

228-549: A grace , on his sixth birthday: At nine, Service re-joined his parents who had moved to Glasgow . He attended Glasgow's Hillhead High School . After leaving school, Service joined the Commercial Bank of Scotland which would later become the Royal Bank of Scotland . He was writing at this time and reportedly already "selling his verses". He was also reading poetry: Browning , Keats , Tennyson , and Thackeray . When he

342-551: A "farm labourer and store clerk when he first met Constance MacLean at a dance in Duncan B.C. , where she was visiting her uncle." MacLean lived in Vancouver, on the mainland, so he courted her by mail. Though he was smitten, "MacLean was looking for a man of education and means to support her" so was not that interested. To please her, he took courses at McGill University 's Victoria College , but failed. In 1903, down on his luck, Service

456-527: A Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses . Although he did not pursue the idea further at the time, he eventually commenced work on a novel using both the title and basic premise in 1914. The writing was completed in October 1921. Serial publication of Ulysses in the magazine The Little Review began in March 1918. Ulysses was finally published in 1922. While Ulysses represents

570-459: A Red Cross Man are an advance on his previous volumes. He has come into touch with the grimmest of realities; and while his radical faults have not been cured, his rude lines drive home the truth that he has seen." Reviewing Service's Rhymes of a Rebel in 1952, Frye remarked that the book "interests me chiefly because ... I have noticed so much verse in exactly the same idiom , and I wonder how far Mr. Service's books may have influenced it. There

684-609: A best-seller." Newly wealthy, Service was able to travel to Paris , the French Riviera , Hollywood , and beyond. He returned to Dawson City in 1912 to write his third book of poetry, Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912). During that time he became a freemason , being initiated into Yukon Lodge No. 45 in Dawson. It is unclear what happened between Service and Constance MacLean as no known letters between them exist after Service's departure for Dawson City. In 1912 she "married Leroy Grant,

798-669: A child, he lived for nine years at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn , known at that time (and referred to frequently in his works) as the Fourteenth Ward . In 1900, his family moved to 1063 Decatur Street in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. After finishing elementary school, although his family remained in Bushwick, Miller attended Eastern District High School in Williamsburg. As

912-438: A forceful stream of consciousness, thoughts sprouting in all directions". Novelist John Banville describes Roberto Bolaño 's novel Amulet (1999), as written in "a fevered stream of consciousness". The twenty-first century brought further exploration, including Jonathan Safran Foer 's Everything is Illuminated (2002) and many of the short stories of American author Brendan Connell . Stream of consciousness technique

1026-512: A formative impact on him. Tropic of Cancer is referenced in Junot Díaz 's 2007 book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as being read by Ana Obregón. Miller's legal difficulties, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are mentioned in Denis Johnson 's 2007 novel Tree of Smoke , in a conversation between Skip Sands and his uncle, Colonel Sands. Miller is mentioned again later in

1140-601: A friend, "I start tomorrow on the Paris book: First person, uncensored, formless – fuck everything!" Although Miller had little or no money the first year in Paris, things began to change after meeting Anaïs Nin who, with Hugh Guiler , went on to pay his entire way through the 1930s including the rent for an apartment at 18 Villa Seurat. Nin became his lover and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934 with money from Otto Rank . She would write extensively in her journals about her relationship with Miller and his wife June;

1254-649: A lot of dreamlike aspects of Mysteries . In that book ... it is ... two chapters, where he invents stream of consciousness writing, in the early 1890s. This was long before Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce". Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor, in a work as early as Portrait of a Lady (1881). It has been suggested that he influenced later stream-of-consciousness writers, including Virginia Woolf , who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them. However, it has also been argued that Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), in his short story '"Leutnant Gustl" ("None but

SECTION 10

#1732852122844

1368-517: A major example of the use of stream of consciousness, Joyce also uses "authorial description" and Free Indirect Style to register Bloom's inner thoughts. Furthermore, the novel does not focus solely on interior experiences: "Bloom is constantly shown from all round; from inside as well as out; from a variety of points of view which range from the objective to the subjective". In his final work Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations

1482-533: A major modern writer was by George Orwell in his 1940 essay " Inside the Whale ", where he wrote: Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he

1596-686: A memorial to his family in the town cemetery. He also visited the USSR in the 1930s and later wrote a satirical "Ballad of Lenin's Tomb ". For this reason his poetry was never translated into Russian in the USSR, and he was never mentioned in Soviet encyclopedias. Service's second trip to the Soviet Union "was interrupted by news of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact . Service fled across Poland, Latvia, Estonia and

1710-615: A pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin' and keepin' power. In 1973 , Miller was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by professor of the University of Copenhagen Allan Philip (1927–2004). Miller and Tokuda divorced in 1977. Then in his late 80s, Miller filmed with Warren Beatty for

1824-464: A result of alcoholism. In 1961, Miller arranged a reunion in New York with his ex-wife and main subject of The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, June. They had not seen each other in nearly three decades. In a letter to Eve, he described his shock at June's "terrible" appearance, as she had by then degenerated both physically and mentally. In 1948, Miller wrote a novella which he called his "most singular story,"

1938-463: A single day of [its protagonist] Firmin's life ... and in the range of interior monologues and stream of consciousness employed to represent the minds of [the] characters". Samuel Beckett , a friend of James Joyce, uses interior monologue in novels like Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies ) and L'innommable (1953: The Unnamable ). and the short story " From an Abandoned Work " (1957). French writer Jean-Paul Sartre employed

2052-501: A small two-room cabin on Eighth Avenue in Dawson City from Mrs. Edna Clarke and began his career as a full-time author." He immediately "went to work on his novel.... He went for walks that lasted all night, slept till mid-afternoon, and sometimes didn't come out of the cabin for days. In five months the novel, entitled The Trail of '98 , was complete and he took it to a publisher in New York." Service's first novel also "immediately became

2166-715: A stream-of-consciousness narrative told by a loquacious young Indian man". Other writers who use this narrative device include Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar (1963), the Soviet underground writer Pavel Ulitin in Immortality in the pocket , and Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting (1993). Stream of consciousness continues to appear in contemporary literature. Dave Eggers , author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), according to one reviewer, "talks much as he writes –

2280-662: A summer home at Lancieux , Côtes-d'Armor , in the Brittany region of France. They had twin girls, born in January 1917, but one died of scarlet fever in February 1918. Thirteen years younger than her husband, Germaine Service survived him by 31 years, dying aged 102 on 26 December 1989 in Monte Carlo, Monaco. Service was 40 when World War I broke out; he attempted to enlist, but was turned down "due to varicose veins ." He briefly covered

2394-653: A surveyor and railroad engineer based in Prince Rupert ." Service left Dawson City for good in 1912. From 1912 to 1913 he was a correspondent for the Toronto Star during the Balkan Wars . In 1913, Service moved to Paris, remaining there for the next 15 years. He settled in the Latin Quarter , posing as a painter. In June 1913, he married Parisienne Germaine Bourgoin, daughter of a distillery owner, and they purchased

SECTION 20

#1732852122844

2508-516: A trip which was financed by Freedman. One day on a Paris street, Miller met another author, Robert W. Service , who recalled the story in his autobiography: "Soon we got into conversation which turned to books. For a stripling he spoke with some authority, turning into ridicule the pretentious scribes of the Latin Quarter and their freak magazine." In 1930, Miller moved to Paris unaccompanied. Soon after, he began work on Tropic of Cancer , writing to

2622-495: A twenty-third printing in 1910, and thirteen more by 1917." "Service eventually earned in excess of $ 100,000 for Songs of a Sourdough alone" (equal to about $ 3.3 million today after inflation). "When copies of the book reached Whitehorse, Robert's own minister took him aside to let him know how wicked were his stories. Service hung his head in shame... But, that summer, tourists from the south arrived in Whitehorse looking for

2736-523: A work of fiction entitled "The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder". In February 1963, Miller moved to 444 Ocampo Drive, Pacific Palisades , Los Angeles, California, where he would spend the last 17 years of his life. In 1967, Miller married his fifth wife, Japanese born singer Hoki Tokuda ( ja:ホキ徳田 ). In 1968, Miller signed the " Writers and Editors War Tax Protest " pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against

2850-767: A work probably influenced by the narrative poetry of Robert Browning , including " Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister ". Prominent uses in the years that followed the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses include Italo Svevo , La coscienza di Zeno (1923), Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1929). However, Randell Stevenson suggests that "interior monologue, rather than stream of consciousness,

2964-433: A writer, his sexual escapades, his failures, his friends, his philosophy – in his autobiographical trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion . Miller's second novel, Moloch: or, This Gentile World , was written in 1927–28, initially under the guise of a novel written by his wife Juliet (June). A rich older admirer of June, Roland Freedman, paid her to write the novel; she would show him pages of Miller's work each week, pretending it

3078-595: A young man, he was active with the Socialist Party of America (his "quondam idol" was the black Socialist Hubert Harrison ). He attended the City College of New York for one semester. Miller married his first wife, Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, in 1917; their divorce was granted on December 21, 1923. Together they had a daughter, Barbara, born in 1919. They lived in an apartment at 244 6th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn . At

3192-658: Is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah , a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. In 1940, Miller returned to New York. After a year-long trip around the United States, a journey that would become material for The Air-Conditioned Nightmare , he moved to California in June 1942, initially residing just outside Hollywood in Beverly Glen , before settling in Big Sur in 1944. While Miller

3306-707: Is also used in song lyrics . Songwriters such as Sun Kil Moon and Courtney Barnett use it in their songs. An early example is Outkast 's song "A Life in the Day of Benjamin André (Incomplete)" off their 2003 album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below . Some filmmakers use the narrative technique. For example, the documentary Anonymous Club about songwriter Courtney Barnett is narrated using stream-of-consciousness. Terrence Malick 's films use it as well. 2022 film You Won't Be Alone also uses it. Robert W. Service Robert William Service (16 January 1874 – 11 September 1958)

3420-578: Is buried in the local cemetery. A book he had written in 1956 was published posthumously. In the spring of 1958, not long before Service died, Canadian broadcaster Pierre Berton recorded many hours of autobiographical television interviews for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation , in Service's Monte Carlo flat. During these interviews, Service recited "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and " The Cremation of Sam McGee ". Robert Service wrote

3534-636: Is the appropriate term for the style in which [subjective experience] is recorded, both in The Waves and in Woolf's writing generally." Throughout Mrs Dalloway , Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech , freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient description , indirect interior monologue , and soliloquy . Malcolm Lowry 's novel Under the Volcano (1947) resembles Ulysses , "both in its concentration almost entirely within

Henry Miller - Misplaced Pages Continue

3648-492: The Whitehorse Star . White suggested: "Why don’t you write a poem for it? Give us something about our own bit of earth. We sure would appreciate it. There’s a rich paystreak waiting for someone to work. Why don’t you go in and stake it?" Returning from a walk one Saturday night, Service heard the sounds of revelry from a saloon, and the phrase "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up" popped into his head. Inspired, he ran to

3762-698: The Baltic to Stockholm . He wintered in Nice with his family, then fled France for Canada." Not long after, the Nazis invaded France, and "arrived at his home in Lancieux ... looking specifically for the poet who had mocked Hitler in newspaper verse." During World War II , Service lived in California , "and Hollywood had him join with other celebrities in helping the morale of troops – visiting U.S. Army camps to recite his poems. He

3876-507: The French Riviera . Partly because of their popularity, and the speed with which he wrote them, his works were dismissed as doggerel by the critics, who tended to say the same of Rudyard Kipling , with whom Service was often compared. This did not worry Service, who was happy to classify his work as "verse, not poetry". Robert William Service was born in Preston, Lancashire , England, the third of ten children. His father, also Robert Service,

3990-539: The Klondike ten years after the Gold Rush when his renown as a writer was already established. After having collected enough poems for a book, Service "sent the poems to his father, who had emigrated to Toronto , and asked him to find a printing house so they could make it into a booklet. He enclosed a cheque to cover the costs and intended to give these booklets away to his friends in Whitehorse" for Christmas. His father took

4104-717: The Klondike Gold Rush . The railway that Service rode in on, the White Pass and Yukon Route , had reached Whitehorse only in 1900. Settling in, "Service dreamed and listened to the stories of the great gold rush." He also "took part in the extremely active Whitehorse social life. As was popular at the time he recited at concerts – things such as ' Casey at the Bat ' and ' Gunga Din ', but they were getting stale." One day (Service later wrote), while pondering what to recite at an upcoming church concert he met E. J. "Stroller" White, editor of

4218-513: The University of Texas at Austin holds a selection of Miller's watercolors, as did the Henry Miller Museum of Art in Ōmachi City in Nagano , Japan, before closing in 2001. Miller's daughter Valentine placed some of her father's art for sale in 2005. He was also an amateur pianist. Miller's papers can be found in the following library special collections : Miller's friend Emil White founded

4332-434: The 1981 film Reds , which was also directed by Beatty. He spoke of his remembrances of John Reed and Louise Bryant as part of a series of "witnesses". The film was released eighteen months after Miller's death. During the last four years of his life, Miller held an ongoing correspondence of over 1,500 letters with Brenda Venus , a young Playboy model and columnist, actress and dancer. A book about their correspondence

4446-508: The Brave", 1900), was the first to make full use of the stream of consciousness technique. It was not until the twentieth century that this technique was fully developed by modernists. Marcel Proust is often presented as an early example of a writer using the stream of consciousness technique in his novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) ( In Search of Lost Time ), but Robert Humphrey comments that Proust "is concerned only with

4560-851: The Nightlife". He writes about his fellow artists who lived at Anderson Creek as the Anderson Creek Gang in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch . Miller paid $ 5 per month rent for his shack on the property. In other works written during his time in California, Miller was widely critical of consumerism in America, as reflected in Sunday After the War (1944) and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). His Big Sur and

4674-512: The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch , published in 1957, is a collection of stories about his life and friends in Big Sur. In 1944, Miller met and married his third wife, Janina Martha Lepska, a philosophy student who was 30 years his junior. They had two children: a son, Tony, and a daughter, Valentine. They divorced in 1952. The following year, he married artist Eve McClure, who was 37 years his junior. They divorced in 1960, and she died in 1966, likely as

Henry Miller - Misplaced Pages Continue

4788-575: The US by New Directions in The Henry Miller Reader in 1959. In addition to his literary abilities, Miller produced numerous watercolor paintings and wrote books on this field. He was a close friend of the French painter Grégoire Michonze . It is estimated that Miller painted 2,000 watercolors during his life, and that 50 or more major collections of Miller's paintings exist. The Harry Ransom Center at

4902-482: The United States in 1961 by Grove Press led to a series of obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography. The U.S. Supreme Court , in Grove Press, Inc., v. Gerstein , citing Jacobellis v. Ohio (which was decided the same day in 1964), overruled the state court findings of obscenity and declared the book a work of literature. This was one of the signature events of the sexual revolution . Elmer Gertz ,

5016-545: The Vietnam War. After his move to Ocampo Drive, he held dinner parties for the artistic and literary figures of the time. His cook and caretaker was a young artist's model named Twinka Thiebaud who later wrote a book about his evening chats. Thiebaud's memories of Miller's table talk were published in a rewritten and retitled book in 2011. Only 200 copies of Miller's 1972 chapbook On Turning Eighty were published. Published by Capra Press, in collaboration with Yes! Press, it

5130-627: The Yukon in 1946 "and visited Whitehorse and Dawson City, which by then was becoming a ghost town. Service could not bring himself to go back. He preferred to remember the town as it had been." Service lived in Monaco from 1947 to 1958. He wrote prolifically during his last years, writing two volumes of autobiography , Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948), as well as six books of verse, which were published from 1949 to 1955. He died in Lancieux and

5244-536: The adventurous themes of Robert Service." Service did not call his work poetry. "Verse, not poetry, is what I was after ... something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in the pub would quote. Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened. I belonged to the simple folks whom I liked to please." In his autobiography, Service described his method of writing at his Dawson City cabin. "I used to write on

5358-594: The aforementioned novels remained banned in the US for over two decades, in 1939, New Directions published The Cosmological Eye , Miller's first book to be published in America. The collection contained short prose pieces, most of which originally appeared in Black Spring and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938). Miller became fluent in French during his ten-year stay in Paris and lived in France until June 1939. During

5472-532: The apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, or logic – but the stream‐of‐consciousness technique also does one or both of these things." Similarly, the Encyclopædia Britannica Online , while agreeing that these terms are "often used interchangeably", suggests that, "while an interior monologue may mirror all

5586-401: The bank to write it down (almost being shot as a burglar), and by the next morning "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" was complete. "A month or so later he heard a gold rush yarn from a Dawson mining man about a fellow who cremated his pal." He spent the night walking in the woods composing "The Cremation of Sam McGee", and wrote it down from memory the next day. Other verses quickly followed. "In

5700-439: The bank transferred Service to Dawson, where he met veterans of the Gold Rush, now ten years in the past: "they loved to reminisce, and Robert listened carefully and remembered." He used their tales to write a second book of verse, Ballads of a Cheechako , in 1908. "It too was an overwhelming success." In 1909, when the bank wanted Service to return to Whitehorse as manager, he decided to resign. "After quitting his job, he rented

5814-435: The book." Service's book, Songs of a Sourdough , given the more Jack London -ish title, The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the United States, was "an immediate success." It went through seven printings even before its official release date. Ultimately, Briggs "sold fifteen impressions in 1907. That same year there was an edition in New York, Philadelphia, and London. The London publisher, T. Fisher Unwin , struck

SECTION 50

#1732852122844

5928-476: The coarse rolls of paper used by paper-hangers, pinning them on the wall and printing my verses in big charcoal letters. Then I would pace back and forth before them, repeating them, trying to make them perfect. I wanted to make them appeal to the eye as well as to the ear. I tried to avoid any literal quality." One remarkable thing about both of Service's best-known ballads is how easily he wrote them. When writing about composing "The Shooting of Dan McGrew", 'easy'

6042-491: The commonest collective emotion," and "the charge of writing jingles ." All those charges, and more, could be levelled against Service's best known and best loved works. Certainly Service's verse was derivative of Kipling's. In "The Cremation of Sam McGee", for instance, he uses the form of Kipling's " The Ballad of East and West ". In his E. J. Pratt lecture "Silence In the Sea," critic Northrop Frye argued that Service's verse

6156-400: The company of his doorman, a retired policeman, to visit the lowest dives of the city". During his time in Paris he was reputedly the wealthiest author living in the city, yet was known to dress as a working man and walk the streets, blending in and observing everything around him. Those experiences would be used in his next book of poetry, Ballads of a Bohemian (1921): "The poems are given in

6270-510: The day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early While

6384-450: The discussion of sexual subjects in American writing from both legal and social restrictions. He influenced many writers, including Lojze Kovačič , Richard Brautigan , Jack Kerouac , Norman Mailer , Vitomil Zupan , Philip Roth , Cormac McCarthy , Paul Theroux and Erica Jong . Throughout his novels he makes references to other works of literature; he cites Fyodor Dostoyevsky , Joris-Karl Huysmans , Balzac and Nietzsche as having

6498-414: The early spring he stood above the heights of Miles Canyon... the line 'I have gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on' came into his mind and again he hammered out a complete poem, " The Call of the Wild ". Conversations with locals led Service to write about things he had not seen (some of which had not even happened) as well. He did not set foot in Dawson City until 1908, arriving in

6612-437: The evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit. In

6726-447: The expense money, he bought himself a raccoon coat ." Throughout this period, Service continued writing and saving his verses: "more than a third of the poems in his first volume had been written before he moved north in 1904." Whitehorse was a frontier town, less than ten years old. Located on the Yukon River at the White Horse Rapids , it had begun in 1897 as a campground for prospectors on their way to Dawson City to join

6840-437: The famous poet; and he autographed many of his books." "In 1908, after working for the bank for three years in Whitehorse, he was sent outside on mandatory paid leave for three months, a standard practice for bank employees serving in the Yukon." According to Enid Mallory, he went to Vancouver and looked up Constance MacLean. Now that he was a successful author, she agreed to become engaged to him. Following his leave, in 1908

6954-524: The first novel in The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, a fictionalized account documenting the six-year period of his life in Brooklyn falling in love with June and struggling to become a writer. Like several of his other works, the trilogy, completed in 1959, was initially banned in the United States, published only in France and Japan. Miller lived in a small house on Partington Ridge from 1944 to 1947, along with other bohemian writers like Harry Partch , Emil White, and Jean Varda. While living there, he wrote "Into

SECTION 60

#1732852122844

7068-433: The first volume, covering the years 1931–34, was published in 1966. Late in 1934, June divorced Miller by proxy in Mexico City. In 1931, Miller was employed by the Chicago Tribune Paris edition as a proofreader , thanks to his friend Alfred Perlès , who worked there. Miller took this opportunity to submit some of his own articles under Perlès' name, since at that time only the editorial staff were permitted to publish in

7182-442: The gold rush or mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity. Encouraged by this, he quickly wrote more poems on the same theme, which were published as Songs of a Sourdough (re-titled The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the U.S.), and achieved a massive sale. When his next collection, Ballads of a Cheechako , proved equally successful, Service could afford to travel widely and live a leisurely life, basing himself in Paris and

7296-416: The half-thoughts, impressions, and associations that impinge upon the character's consciousness, it may also be restricted to an organized presentation of that character's rational thoughts". In the following example of stream of consciousness from James Joyce's Ulysses , Molly seeks sleep: a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for

7410-498: The internal consciousness of the protagonist. Because of his renunciation of chronology in favor of free association, Édouard Dujardin 's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) is also an important precursor. Indeed, James Joyce "picked up a copy of Dujardin's novel ... in Paris in 1903" and "acknowledged a certain borrowing from it". Some point to Anton Chekhov 's short stories and plays (1881–1904) and Knut Hamsun 's Hunger (1890), and Mysteries (1892) as offering glimpses of

7524-408: The late 1930s he also learned about German-born sailor George Dibbern , helped to promote his memoire Quest and organized charity to help him. In 1939 Lawrence Durrell , British novelist who was living in Corfu , Greece, invited Miller to Greece. Miller described the visit in The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), which he considered his best book. One of the first acknowledgments of Henry Miller as

7638-532: The lawyer who successfully argued the initial case for the novel's publication in Illinois , became Miller's lifelong friend; a volume of their correspondence has been published. Following the trial, in 1964–65, Miller's other books, which had also been banned in the US, were published by Grove Press : Black Spring , Tropic of Capricorn , Quiet Days in Clichy , Sexus , Plexus and Nexus . Excerpts from some of these banned books, including Tropic of Cancer , Black Spring and Sexus , were first published in

7752-400: The manuscript to William Briggs in Toronto, whose employees loved the book. "The foreman and printers recited the ballads while they worked. A salesman read the proofs out loud as they came off the typesetting machines." An "enterprising salesman sold 1700 copies in advance orders from galley proofs." The publisher "sent Robert's cheque back to him and offered a ten percent royalty contract for

7866-532: The mind" of a narrator. It is usually in the form of an interior monologue which is disjointed or has irregular punctuation. The term was first used in 1855 and was first applied to a literary technique in 1918. While critics have pointed to various literary precursors, it was not until the 20th century that this technique was fully developed by modernist writers such as Marcel Proust , James Joyce , Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf . Stream of consciousness narratives continue to be used in modern prose and

7980-404: The most commercially successful poetry of the century. Yet his most popular works "were considered doggerel by the literary set." During his lifetime, he was nicknamed "the Canadian Kipling ." – yet that may have been a double-edged compliment. As T. S. Eliot has said, "we have to defend Kipling against the charge of excessive lucidity," "the charge of being a ' journalist ' appealing only to

8094-770: The narrative". Although loosely structured as a sketch show, Monty Python produced an innovative stream-of-consciousness for their TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus , with the BBC stating, "[Terry] Gilliam's unique animation style became crucial, segueing seamlessly between any two completely unrelated ideas and making the stream-of-consciousness work". Scottish writer James Kelman 's novels are known for mixing stream of consciousness narrative with Glaswegian vernacular. Examples include The Busconductor Hines (1984), A Disaffection (1989), How Late It Was, How Late (1994) and many of his short stories. With regard to Salman Rushdie , one critic comments that "[a]ll Rushdie's novels follow an Indian/Islamic storytelling style,

8208-427: The narrator. Prior to the 19th century, associationist philosophers, like Thomas Hobbes and Bishop Berkeley , discussed the concept of the " train of thought ". It has also been suggested that Edgar Allan Poe 's short story " The Tell-Tale Heart " (1843) foreshadows this literary technique in the nineteenth century. Poe's story is a first person narrative , told by an unnamed narrator who endeavours to convince

8322-438: The new Beat Generation of American writers, most notably Jack Kerouac , the only Beat writer Miller truly cared for. By the time his banned books were published in the 1960s and he was becoming increasingly well-known, Miller was no longer interested in his image as an outlaw writer of smut-filled books; however, he eventually gave up fighting the image. In 1942, shortly before moving to California, Miller began writing Sexus ,

8436-445: The nonprofit Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur in 1981. This houses a collection of his works and celebrates his literary, artistic and cultural legacy by providing a public gallery as well as performance and workshop spaces for artists, musicians, students, and writers. Miller is considered a "literary innovator" in whose works "actual and imagined experiences became indistinguishable from each other." His books did much to free

8550-444: The novel. Miller's relationship with June Mansfield is the subject of Ida Therén 's 2020 novel Att omfamna ett vattenfall . Miller appeared as himself in several films: Several actors played Miller on film, such as: Multimedia Stream of consciousness In literary criticism , stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through

8664-652: The paper. This period in Paris was highly creative for Miller, and during this time he also established a significant and influential network of authors circulating around the Villa Seurat. At that time a young British author, Lawrence Durrell , became a lifelong friend. Miller's correspondence with Durrell was later published in two books. During his Paris period he was also influenced by the French Surrealists . His works contain detailed accounts of sexual experiences. His first published book, Tropic of Cancer (1934),

8778-404: The persona of an American poet in Paris who serves as an ambulance driver and an infantryman in the war. The verses are separated by diary entries over a period of four years." In the 1920s, Service began writing thriller novels. The Poisoned Paradise, A Romance of Monte Carlo (New York, 1922) and The Roughneck. A Tale of Tahiti (New York, 1923) were both later made into silent movies. During

8892-460: The reader of his sanity while describing a murder he committed, and it is often read as a dramatic monologue . George R. Clay notes that Leo Tolstoy , "when the occasion requires it ... applies Modernist stream of consciousness technique" in both War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878). The short story, " An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge " (1890), by another American author, Ambrose Bierce , also abandons strict linear time to record

9006-449: The reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and that he "was deliberately recapturing the past to communicate; hence he did not write a stream-of-consciousness novel". Novelist John Cowper Powys also argues that Proust did not use stream of consciousness: "while we are told what the hero thinks or what Swann thinks we are told this rather by the author than either by the 'I' of the story or by Charles Swann." Let us go then, you and I, When

9120-619: The room, the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" 1915 Pointed Roofs (1915), the first work in Richardson's series of 13 semi-autobiographical novels titled Pilgrimage , is the first complete stream-of-consciousness novel published in English. However, in 1934, Richardson commented that " Proust , James Joyce , Virginia Woolf , and D.R. ... were all using 'the new method', though very differently, simultaneously". James Joyce

9234-435: The same sense". But the term is commonly credited to William James who used it in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology : "consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life" . The term

9348-509: The story of June's close relationship with the artist Marion, whom June had renamed Jean Kronski. Kronski lived with Miller and June from 1926 until 1927, when June and Kronski went to Paris together, leaving Miller behind, which upset him greatly. Miller suspected the pair of having a lesbian relationship. While in Paris, June and Kronski did not get along, and June returned to Miller several months later. Kronski committed suicide around 1930. In 1928, Miller spent several months in Paris with June,

9462-431: The technique in his Roads to Freedom trilogy of novels, most prominently in the second book The Reprieve (1945). The technique continued to be used into the 1970s in a novel such as Robert Anton Wilson / Robert Shea collaborative Illuminatus! (1975), concerning which The Fortean Times warns readers to "[b]e prepared for streams of consciousness in which not only identity but time and space no longer confine

9576-458: The term has been adopted to describe similar techniques in other art forms such as poetry, songwriting and film. Alexander Bain used the term in 1855 in the first edition of The Senses and the Intellect , when he wrote, "The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness–on the same cerebral highway–enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of

9690-491: The terms stream of consciousness and interior monologue as synonyms, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms suggests that "they can also be distinguished psychologically and literarily. In a psychological sense, stream of consciousness is the subject matter, while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it". And for literature, "while an interior monologue always presents a character's thoughts 'directly', without

9804-420: The time, Miller was working at Western Union ; he worked there from 1920 to 1924, as personnel manager in the messenger department. In March 1922, during a three-week vacation, he wrote his first novel, Clipped Wings . It has never been published, and only fragments remain, although parts of it were recycled in other works, such as Tropic of Capricorn . A study of twelve Western Union messengers, Clipped Wings

9918-561: The trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion , which are based on his experiences in New York City and Paris (all of which were banned in the United States until 1961). He also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism, and painted watercolors. Miller was born at his family's home, 450 East 85th Street, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City. He was the son of Lutheran German parents, Louise Marie (Neiting) and tailor Heinrich Miller. As

10032-437: The use of stream of consciousness as a narrative technique at the end of the nineteenth century. While Hunger is widely seen as a classic of world literature and a groundbreaking modernist novel, Mysteries is also considered a pioneer work. It has been claimed that Hamsun was way ahead of his time with the use of stream of consciousness in two chapters in particular of this novel. British author Robert Ferguson said: "There's

10146-458: The use of the narrative technique of stream of consciousness is usually associated with modernist novelists in the first part of the twentieth century, several precursors have been suggested, including Laurence Sterne 's psychological novel Tristram Shandy (1757). John Neal in his novel Seventy-Six (1823) also used an early form of this writing style, characterized by long sentences with multiple qualifiers and expressions of anxiety from

10260-676: The verses just flowed: "I took the woodland trail, my mind seething with excitement and a strange ecstasy.... As I started in: There are strange things done in the midnight sun, verse after verse developed with scarce a check ... and when I rolled happily into bed, my ballad was cinched. Next day, with scarcely any effort of memory I put it on paper." In 1926, Archibald MacMechan , Professor of English at Canada's Dalhousie University , pronounced on Service's Yukon books in his Headwaters of Canadian Literature : MacMechan did give grudging respect to Service's World War I poetry, conceding that his style went well with that subject, and that "his Rhymes of

10374-639: The war for the Toronto Star (from 11 December 1915, through 29 January 1916), but "was arrested and nearly executed in an outbreak of spy hysteria in Dunkirk ." He then "worked as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver with the Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross , until his health broke." Convalescing in Paris, he wrote a new book of mainly war poetry, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man , in 1916. The book

10488-469: The winter season, Service used to live in Nice with his family, where he met British writers, including H. G. Wells , A. K. Bruce, Somerset Maugham , Rex Ingram , Frank Scully , James Joyce , Frank Harris , and Frieda Lawrence , who all spent their winters in the French Riviera, and he wrote that he had been lucky to have had lunch with Colette . In 1930, Service returned to Kilwinning, to erect

10602-647: Was 21, Service travelled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia , with his Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams of becoming a cowboy . He drifted around western North America, "wandering from California to British Columbia," taking and quitting a series of jobs: "Starving in Mexico, residing in a California bordello , farming on Vancouver Island and pursuing unrequited love in Vancouver ." This sometimes required him to leech off his parents' Scottish neighbours and friends who had previously emigrated to Canada. In 1899, when Service

10716-579: Was a Scottish-Canadian poet and writer, often called “The Poet of the Yukon" and "The Canadian Kipling". Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in the west in the United States and Canada, often in poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush , and wrote two poems, " The Shooting of Dan McGrew " and " The Cremation of Sam McGee ", which showed remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of

10830-485: Was a banker from Kilwinning , Scotland, who had been transferred to England. Service's second name, "William", was in honour of a rich uncle; after that uncle neglected to provide for him in his will, Service dropped the middle name. When he was five, Service was sent to live in Kilwinning with his three maiden aunts and his paternal grandfather, the town's postmaster . There he is said to have composed his first verse,

10944-545: Was a prisoner of the Boers at the time. He had been captured on 15 November 1899, alongside Winston Churchill .) The Colonist also published Service's " Music in the Bush " on 18 September 1901, and " The Little Old Log Cabin " on 16 March 1902. In her 2006 biography, Under the Spell of the Yukon , Enid Mallory revealed that Service had fallen in love during this period. He was working as

11058-688: Was a store clerk in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia , he mentioned to a customer that he wrote verses. The customer was Charles H. Gibbons, editor of the Victoria Daily Colonist , who invited Service to submit his work. By July 1900, six poems by "R.S." on the Boer Wars had appeared in the Colonist – including " The March of the Dead ", which would later appear in his first book. (Service's brother, Alick,

11172-686: Was a time, fifty years ago," he added, "when Robert W.Service represented, with some accuracy, the general level of poetic experience in Canada, as far as the popular reader was concerned.... there has been a prodigious, and, I should think, a permanent, change in public taste." Robert W. Service has been honoured with schools named for him including Robert Service High School in Anchorage, Alaska , Robert Service Senior Public School (Middle/ Jr. High) in Toronto, Ontario , and Robert Service School in Dawson City. He

11286-566: Was also asked to play himself in the movie The Spoilers (1942), working alongside Marlene Dietrich , John Wayne and Randolph Scott . "He was thrilled to play a scene with Marlene Dietrich." After the war, Service and his wife returned to his home in Brittany, to find it destroyed. They rebuilt, and he lived there until his death in 1958, although he wintered in Monte Carlo on the French Riviera . Service's wife and daughter, Iris, travelled to

11400-565: Was another pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness. Some hints of this technique are already present in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), along with interior monologue , and references to a character's psychic reality rather than to his external surroundings. Joyce began writing A Portrait in 1907 and it was first serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915. Earlier in 1906, Joyce, when working on Dubliners , considered adding another story featuring

11514-489: Was characterized by Miller as "a long book and probably a very bad one." In 1923, while he was still married to Beatrice, Miller met and became enamored of a mysterious dance-hall ingénue who was born Juliet Edith Smerth but went by the stage-name June Mansfield . She was 21 at the time. They began an affair, and were married on June 1, 1924. In 1924 Miller quit Western Union in order to dedicate himself completely to writing. He later describes this time – his struggles to become

11628-555: Was dedicated to the memory of Service's "brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, Killed in Action, France, August 1916." Robert Service received three medals for his war service: 1914–15 Star , British War Medal and the Victory Medal. With the end of the war, Service "settled down to being a rich man in Paris.... During the day he would promenade in the best suits, with a monocle . At night he went out in old clothes with

11742-617: Was establishing his base in Big Sur, the Tropic books, then still banned in the US, were being published in France by the Obelisk Press and later the Olympia Press . There they were acquiring a slow and steady notoriety among both Europeans and the various enclaves of American cultural exiles. As a result, the books were frequently smuggled into the States, where they proved to be a major influence on

11856-466: Was exactly the word he used: "For it came so easy to me in my excited state that I was amazed at my facility. It was as if someone was whispering in my ear." And this was just after someone had tried to shoot him. He continued: "As I wrote stanza after stanza, the story seemed to evolve itself. It was a marvelous experience. Before I crawled into my bed at five in the morning, my ballad was in the bag." Similarly, when he wrote "The Cremation of Sam McGee",

11970-520: Was first applied in a literary context in The Egoist , April 1918, by May Sinclair , in relation to the early volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage . Richardson, however, described the term as a "lamentably ill-chosen metaphor". Stream of consciousness is a literary method of representing the flow of a character's thoughts and sense impressions "usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue." While many sources use

12084-574: Was hers. The book went unpublished until 1992, 65 years after it was written and 12 years after Miller's death. Moloch is based on Miller's first marriage, to Beatrice, and his years working as a personnel manager at the Western Union office in Lower Manhattan . A third novel written around this time, Crazy Cock , also went unpublished until after Miller's death. Initially titled Lovely Lesbians , Crazy Cock (along with his later novel Nexus ) told

12198-490: Was hired by a Canadian Bank of Commerce branch in Victoria , British Columbia, using his Commercial Bank letter of reference. The bank "watched him, gave him a raise, and sent him to Kamloops in the middle of British Columbia. In Victoria, he lived over the bank with a hired piano, and dressed for dinner. In Kamloops, horse country, he played polo. In the fall of 1904, the bank sent him to their Whitehorse branch in Yukon. With

12312-647: Was honoured on a Canadian postage stamp in 1976. The Robert Service Way , a main road in Whitehorse, is named after him. Additionally, the Bard & Banker public house in Victoria is dedicated to him, the building having at one time been a Canadian Bank of Commerce branch where Service was employed while residing in the city. Service's first novel, The Trail of '98 , was made into a movie by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , directed by Clarence Brown . " Trail of '98 starring Dolores del Río , Ralph Forbes and Karl Dane in 1929 ...

12426-431: Was not "serious poetry," but something else he called "popular poetry": "the idioms of popular and serious poetry remain inexorably distinct." Popular poems, he thought, "preserve a surface of explicit statement" – either being "proverbial, like Kipling's ' If ' or Longfellow 's ' Song of Life ' or Burns 's ' For A' That '," or dealing in "conventionally poetic themes, like the pastoral themes of James Whitcomb Riley , or

12540-438: Was published by Obelisk Press in Paris and banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity. The dust jacket came wrapped with a warning: "Not to be imported into the United States or Great Britain." He continued to write novels that were banned; along with Tropic of Cancer , his Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) were smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation. While

12654-486: Was published by William Morrow, NY, in 1986. Miller died of circulatory complications at his home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, on June 7, 1980, at the age of 88. His body was cremated and his ashes shared between his son Tony and daughter Val. Tony has stated that he ultimately intends to have his ashes mixed with those of his father and scattered in Big Sur . The publication of Miller's Tropic of Cancer in

12768-443: Was pushed to the limit, abandoning all conventions of plot and character construction, and the book is written in a peculiar and obscure English, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. Another early example is the use of interior monologue by T. S. Eliot in his poem " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock " (1915), "a dramatic monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action,"

12882-588: Was the first talking picture dealing with the Klondike gold rush and was acclaimed at the time by critics for depicting the Klondike as it really was." In 1968 Canadian-born country singer Hank Snow recorded recitations of eight of Service's longer poems for an album entitled, Tales of the Yukon . The album was released by RCA Victor . Snow and other musicians including Chet Atkins and Chubby Wise provided background music. Folksinger Country Joe McDonald set some of Service's World War I poetry (plus "The March of

12996-411: Was the first volume of the "Yes! Capra" chapbook series and is 34 pages in length. The book contains three essays on topics such as aging and living a meaningful life. In relation to reaching 80 years of age, Miller explains: If at eighty you're not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking

#843156