On Henry Miller by John Burnside

Author:John Burnside
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781400889228
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Like a Fluid (The Great Romantic)

The great artist is he who conquers the romantic in himself.

—Henry Miller, Black Spring

He loved the trees he had played under as a boy as if they were living creatures; that was on the romantic side of his nature. Merely looking at them as representing so many pounds sterling, he had esteemed them highly, and had had, until now, no opinion of another by which to correct his own judgment. So these words of the valuers cut him sharp, although he affected to disbelieve them, and tried to persuade himself that he did so. But, after all, these cares and disappointments did not touch the root of his deep resentment against Osborne. There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger. And the squire believed that Osborne and his advisers had been making calculations, based upon his own death. He hated the idea so much—it made him so miserable—that he would not face it, and define it, and meet it with full inquiry and investigation.

—Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

It comes as a surprise to remember that each of us witnesses small-scale tragedies every day. The colleague I once had, who drank himself into an early grave, who knew exactly what was happening, but could do nothing to stop it, just as we—his friends, his family, his beautiful and intelligent young wife—could do nothing to save him. The battered wife who conceals her injuries and her humiliations and all those around her who go along with the deception. The gifted musician who cannot find the audience that might appreciate her gifts, watching television as “stars” are created instantly on screen via a combination of audiovisual trickery, clever makeup, and public relations. Or simply the grinding down of our parents by an industrial society—something I recall now, forty years after the event, so fiercely that it still smarts.

We have become accustomed to tolerating such things—and yet, if these were not enough, we also allow our hearts to be broken, now and then, by a shred of fiction, or a passing incident in what, for others, is an altogether different tale. My first memory of this self-betrayal comes from a Sunday afternoon in the 1960s, when I first saw the film Lawrence of Arabia, an account that I knew was not altogether “historically accurate.” What got to me most wasn’t even an important event; it was a passing moment in the scene where Peter O’Toole, as T. E. Lawrence, comes into the officer’s club with a young Arab boy and the Englishmen are shocked and offended because he’s brought a bloody native into their holy place. They are, in fact, on the point of throwing both these interlopers out when O’Toole says, with pride and defiance: “We have taken Aqaba.” However, what I wanted to know was: what happened next? something I couldn’t know, because the director cut away here and left me guessing. Did David Lean not know that I—or somebody in the audience, at

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