On Henry Miller: Or, How to be an Anarchist

While modern readers often associate Henry Miller’s writing with misogynistic, quasi-pornographic depictions of sex, novelist and poet Burnside’s sometimes slow-going but illuminating book shows a different side to the novelist. Focusing on two of Miller’s less-read works—1941’s The Colossus of Maroussi and 1946’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare—Burnside (Ashland & Vine) portrays Miller as an anarchist opposed to societal institutions that he saw standing in the way of inner truth. Miller contended that marriage, for example, was warped by society’s fixation on property, turning it into a commercial exchange of a man’s breadwinning capabilities and a woman’s sexuality. Miller distrusted formal education, encouraging readers to allow life to be their teacher. In his view, artists must consciously create themselves, and not just their artworks, through a process of unlearning received knowledge and embracing the freedom to be their true selves. In the concluding passages, Burnside writes passionately about, and concurs with, Miller’s contention that people need to abandon the limits of civilization and discover and embrace the “spontaneous, hazardous, beauteous being” that allows them to be a part of nature without wishing to control it. Burnside’s provocative study makes a strong case for Henry Miller as a romantic anarchist comparable, on the basis of the evidence provided here, to Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. (Mar.)