The author of a new Henry Miller biography comes to Big Sur and Carmel.

Excerpt republished from May 14, 2014

A contingent from the Henry Miller Memorial Library has just returned from their much-promoted trip to Paris to “retour” to the footsteps of Henry Miller’s former stomping grounds.

They came back yesterday, in time to welcome the speaking engagement of author Arthur Hoyle, who’s written a biography of Miller called The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur. Hoyle picks up Miller’s journey from the time the late author left France and eventually made his way to Big Sur.

Hoyle says he wrote the book for several reasons. In the 1990s, after reading “just about everything” that Miller wrote, then reading existing biographies and correspondence, Hoyle felt there was a disconnect between the two.

“The books Miller wrote himself – almost all are autobiographical,” Hoyle says. “He’s creating a fictional version of himself. He’s wearing a mask. It’s not the real Henry Miller. To get around that portrait, you need to read his correspondence. There, he’s not wearing the mask.”

So he took these two primary sources – Miller’s own books and the letters he exchanged with Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Alfred Perlès, James Laughlin, Wallace Fowlie, Huntington Cairns and Emil Schnellock – and merged the two.

Hoyle says Miller’s been unjustifiably absent from the canon of American literature and anthologies.

“He can’t be assigned to college students,” Hoyle says. “He wasn’t in the required reading list, even for students specializing in 20th-century American literature. When I was in college at UCLA in the ’60s, he was living 20 minutes from campus in Pacific Palisades and had given all his papers to the campus.”

If Miller isn’t taught in colleges and universities, it stymies scholarly study and relegates him to the literary fringe. People find his books and read them on their own, Hoyle says, but Miller fought long to pull his books out of the dismissed, stigmatized and obscure company of censored material considered too graphic or pornographic. Hoyle seems to be on a mission to revive serious consideration of Miller among academic circles.

“Why the editors [of anthologies] have chosen not to include him, I do not know,” he says. “I wrote an email to the woman who edits the Norton anthology: ‘Why include Jack Kerouac but not [Miller], a greater writer who influenced him?’ She did not answer me.”

Hoyle says that Miller – who was born and raised in Brooklyn, worked in Manhattan, and had lived in Paris – thought of himself as an urban writer until he got to Greece and found an appetite for the spiritual in nature. That appetite was fed by the wilds of Big Sur, where he lived from 1944 to 1961. While writing The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Miller took breaks by writing other books, like Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.

“He flourished as a writer in Big Sur because he had the tranquility he needed. He had also built up his personal life: two marriages, he fathered two children, had a small but very devoted following of people who believed in his message.”

Maybe it stems from a shared conventional wisdom that Miller’s “example” revolves around hedonism. That’s not quite right, Hoyle says.

“I think [hedonism] is the wrong word. Yes, he certainly enjoyed the pleasures of the senses. He wasn’t ashamed of his physical appetites. For him, to embrace the instinctual part of yourself was necessary if you were going to develop your spirit. That has a long tradition in Eastern philosophies in Hinduism and Buddhism, which influenced him. He read Spengler, Dostoyevsky, Rabelais, Knut Hamsun. He was drawn to Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman – especially Whitman – who was another writer who embraced the sensual side of life. Hedonism implies someone totally carnal.”

Hoyle just began blogging for the Huffington Post. His first post is titled “Remember Henry Miller? Censored Then, Forgotten Now.”

Maybe not for long.