I read this novel by Henry Miller. I had read it when I was 15 or 16, I guess. It does not age particularly well, to put it delicately. I think just about anybody could write about sex better than Henry Miller. It could only be published in the US in 1961 or so, and a decade later it was already being denounced by one of the first works of feminist literary criticism. Well of course. There's something in the rawness of it that I realize must have seemed appealing at one time, if you can ignore all the offensiveness of misogyny and antisemitism.
4 comments:
I have not done the research but I've decided it might actually be hard to write interestingly or well about sex. One of my colleagues gives a course, "Erotic Literature," but it's standard love stories, not writing about sex except to the extent you get some in Madame Bovary, the rocking chair scene in Niels Lyhne, things like that.
I'm not that impressed by Anaïs Nin, perhaps I am dense. Lorca and Vallejo are kind of good at it though.
Norman Mailer once compared Miller and Hemingway's "Paris" books (Tropic of Cancer and The Sun Also Rises). He said that Miller was writing to leave the persona of his character behind while Hemingway spent the rest of his life trying to become as cool as Jake Barnes. For Mailer, this was supposed to explain their very different paths through life (and their different deaths). But reading your post it occurs to me that it might also explain why the Tropics don't age as well Hemingway's early work.
OK then, I will finally read the Sun also, etc. I have refused to read any Hemingway so far because I found the old man and the sea so bad in junior high school.
The Sun Also Rises and The Torrents of Spring always put me in a good mood.
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