Naughty madness, how I love the man of rants, letters, and contradictions. ( )

I read Tropic of Cancer a few decades ago - this book certainly has the same flavor. Our narrator is jumping from whoring to dumpster diving, back and forth. It's a bit shocking still even today - I can't quite imagine the impact at the time of publication. But it is hardly pornography. Maybe the point is that the sublime inheres in the sordid much more than in the banal. There is a kind of raw honesty here.

There is a zen koan, an old woman burns down a hermitage. Do we acknowledge our sexuality, our animality, our passion, in our meditation, in our probing of the ultimate nature of reality? Perhaps these works of Henry Miller are a commentary on that koan?! ( )

Miller, Miller, hand on ball
Who's the most sexist of them all?

Henry Miller polarises. He's been described through the gamut of adjectives encompassing utterly scathing to gloriously idolising, not the least because of his blank disregard for publishing proprieties and reader sensibilities, which, depending on which end of the spectrum you choose to sit, mean you either laud or loathe him.

He commences [b:Quiet Days in Clichy|247|Quiet Days in Clichy|Henry Miller|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1281421851s/247.jpg|1460732] with a spare prose, an insightful prose, at times even a melodiously lyrical prose, which, while interesting, valuable and a self-inflicted necessary part of my reading experience, does not inspire me to go in search of more of his works. I suppose you could say I've scratched my itch, we've had our fling, and Henry - it was nice knowing you but you were never going to be more than the curious affair of the dilettante in the nighttime, another notch in my totem pole of writers to be savoured but not sainted.

Because for all the gems of wit, the wayward little asides, the rawness of emotion and the peering he affords into his soul, Henry Miller re-scribing in his mid years this semi-bio glimpse of a younger life in Paris as a destitute writer re-confirms and demonstrates a truly hideous objectification of women, of his muses, his lusts, his toys, his objets du desir, his vessels, his fucks-for-the-sake-of-fucking and nothing-to-do-with-art's-sake holes-in-one, when not in two. He reveals a terrible impoverishment of spirit in how he describes his slam-bangs and piss-insides. He simply doesn't see members of the opposite sex as anything other than tools for his own tool, grist for his mill, fodder to be cudded ad infinitum.

All true in stark, monochromatic form, until page eighty-one of [b:Quiet Days in Clichy|247|Quiet Days in Clichy|Henry Miller|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1281421851s/247.jpg|1460732], when Miller is revealed in subtle, water-colour tones and his story in deft, mostly gentle, even heart-rending, prose both assured and vivid, no longer a newspaper reporter's brutal rendition of action but a mature reflection of scene and character, thought and deed. The latter third of the book shows a sensitivity, an empathy, a willingness to understand himself in the context of women, rather than them in the context of himself; he admits even to that most treacherous and debilitating of emotions: love, both consummated, forsaken, and finally, remorsefully, with the remembrance of too little, too late, eternally a promise of what might have been.

To call him misogynistic is as crudely misunderstanding of his attitude towards women as is labelling his work pornography. In the earlier part of [b:Quiet Days in Clichy|247|Quiet Days in Clichy|Henry Miller|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1281421851s/247.jpg|1460732] he indicates no hatred, no desire to abuse, demean or belittle, simply an inability to imagine or acknowledge the personness of women, the validity of their (and his own) feelings, all he can grasp is a reality in which women are not conceived as anything other than receptacles for his own grace, he is constrained to acknowledge them in relation to himself. Monstrously egotistical, but falling short of misogyny.

In the latter part of the book he eviscerates himself, he bleeds emotion, and in the sense of trailing after an illusion, women are a figure on a pedestal which remains forever beyond his reach; he has been enthralled, burned, made aware of the needs of the other and learned, by that experience, of the depth of his own. Women still represent a challenge, a trophy, an object to be acquired and enjoyed, but they are no longer mere things, puppets to be bought and traded on the whim of a moment, but forays into the vast unknown of the human soul, who can wreak havoc or dismiss him with the ease of flicking ash from a burning Gauloises. ( )

French literature has a long history of relative openness and tolerance of pornographic literature, although even in France writers such as Albert de Routisie, a pseudonym of Louis Aragon, taunted the authorities and works such as Le Con d'Irène (1927), republished in 1968 as Irène were still seized and destroyed as pornography.

It is remarkable how little influence this type of literature has had on the American writers living in Paris in the 1920s - 30s, other than on Henry Miller.

Miller arrived in Paris in 1928 and stayed there for a full decade. Born in 1891, he was already in his late 30s when he settled in Paris, but still unknown and unpublished. Most of his works, while published in France, were banned in the US and UK, being considered pornographic.

Quiet days in Clichy consists of two short stories which were written in 1940, when Miller had returned to the USA. As all of his books were banned, he earned no royalties and made a living writing pornography, which paid a dollar per page. "Quiet days in Clichy" and "Mara Marignan" were two such stories, later published together in book form under the title Quiet days in Clichy .

The first story, "Quiet days in Clichy", tells how two American writers in Paris, Joey and Carl, who take in a homeless girls, Colette, who soon turns into their "Cinderella, concubine and cook" (p.40). The second story is about the same Joey and Carl and their adventures with prostitutes in Paris.

Written shortly upon his return to the USA, after a stay in Paris of more than a decade, the stories breathe the atmosphere of Paris, and would be seen, and appreciated by modern readers much more as literature, while the pornographic dimension now seems secondary. Contemporary fiction may contain equally or more explicit references to sexuality. Rather, the stories in Quiet days in Clichy provide an interesting view on life in Paris of the 1930s that other writers were too shy to write about. ( )

The only thing I remember about this book is that Henry Miller was a horny whore of a toad and notably gross about it in this particular volume. Thankfully it is a very short one and it is all very soon over, like one of his quick bangs over a dumpster with one of his countless filthy old prostitutes. I need a shower now. ( )