The Virtual Rambler

Number forty three: 20^th December 2013

A Literary Nexus

In late 1929 Eric Blair (later to become George Orwell) returned to England after living in Paris for eighteen months. It was not long afterwards that Henry Miller arrived in the city and during that same year (1930) D.H. Lawrence died in a French sanatorium. He was a writer held in high regard , though for very different reasons , by both Orwell and Miller. “Lawrence reminds me of someone from the Bronze Age,” Orwell said. Miller followed Lawrence in deeming it “bad to do too much thinking.” Evidently so , for his view of Lawrence was as colourful and subjective as that author’s view of the Etruscans. Orwell later became an admirer of Miller’s first published book , Tropic of Cancer , and visited him in Paris en route to joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Miller subsequently spoke of Orwell as “A foolish idealist , a man of principle.” He generously added the sentiment that men of principle bored him.

Wallace Stevens remarked that ‘the only definite impression I have of Miller is that he is prolix’. A natural gift for overstatement and a lifelong preference for quantity over quality led him to authors such as Oswald Spengler , who rejected the division of history into the ancient-mediaeval-modern epochs. Instead he envisaged panoptic sequences of cultures which evolve as organisms - Magian , Apollonian and (our own) Faustian - with about 1,000 years of flourishing and then a similar span of decline. Borrowed from such sources , one of Miller’s tricks is to sprinkle every other page with phrases like ‘cosmological flux’ and ‘lunar attraction’ and with sentences like ‘the orbit over which I am travelling leads me farther and farther away from the dead sun which gave me birth.’ Ever eager to suspend disbelief , he was congenitally drawn to every spiritual charlatan he came across , from Madame Blavatsky to Lobsang Rampa , the ‘Tibetan Monk’ author of The Third Eye , who proved to be a plumber from Devon called Cyril Hoskins. Henry the cheerful , amoral pauper of Paris eventually became a Big Sur tax-dodger listing his 'main interests' as astrology , flying saucers and table tennis. He led the way towards a sixties' embrace of all that was mumbo-jumbo , from the lost wisdom of the Ancients to the hidden influences of extra-terrestrials on today's world.

Some have observed that Lawrence believed and said more stupid things than any other novelist in history , although Miller provided him with some stiff competition in this regard. Towards the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover , Mellors tells Connie that everything would be all right if men sang and danced every evening , dressed in tight red trousers. Here was an author nominated by the relentlessly humourless F.R.Leavis⁽¹⁾ as his model of moral sanity. Orwell conceded that the novels were hard going but in Lawrence’s letters and poems “one comes across passages of an extraordinary freshness where he has seized on an aspect of things that no one else would have noticed.” His undisciplined enthusiasm for ‘Nature’ on the surface of the earth appealed to the down-to-earth , smallholding side of Orwell’s personality. Lawrence’s persistent preference for wild natural creatures as the opposite of over-conscious intellectuals was what appealed to Miller. Contradictory rants and outlandish pronouncements were second nature to both these men.

Throughout Lawrence’s final , nomadic decade he was often unwell and it’s tempting to view his enthusiasm for a vital , instinctual life as a sick man’s dream of health. The incessant moves to new locations made for a perpetually renewed sense of animal aloneness and this feeling of isolation was something he shared with Orwell. Both of them died of T.B. in their mid-forties. Miller liked to think of himself as a solitary man but in actuality he liked sycophants around to remind him of his genius. He was almost ninety when he died. The literary reputations of Miller and Lawrence ebbed away on the PC tide of finger-pointing – they became a ‘racist misogynist’ and ‘wife-beating fascist sympathiser’ respectively - whereas Orwell remained equally popular with those on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.


Wig

⁽¹⁾ Leavis was a bald Cambridge don who became an influential literary critic from the 1930s to the 1950s. His high-minded laying down of the literary law was described accurately by Philip Larkin (when writing about John Coltrane) – “long-winded and portentous investigations of oriental tedium”.

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan and Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20^th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20^th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21^st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 – Deconstruction, 20^th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home Town, 19^th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient History, 21^st July 2013
Virtual rambler #39 – Possessions, 20^th August 2013
Virtual rambler #40 – Sporting Stoics, 20^th September 2013
Virtual rambler #41 – Free Time, 20^th October 2013
Virtual rambler #42 – Ewan Don't Allow, 20^th November 2013