Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T07:44:21.048Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Three Responses: The Examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos

from 3 - The Fate of Writing During the Great Depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Sacvan Bercovitch
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

By 1930, when he left New York for Paris, Henry Miller thought of himself as one of the last heirs of the Lyric Years’ commitment to the value of childlike innocence and unmediated feelings. Bored with literary works like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, he had exchanged studies at City College for a series of dreary jobs that included brief stints with a cement company and his father’s tailoring business and five years as supervisor of Western Union’s messenger service. But it was New York’s street life that engaged him, and its burlesque shows and dance halls, in one of which he met a hostess named June Smith, who became the subject of much of his writing. Later, gaining confidence, he denounced bookishness in favor of experience, spontaneity, and instinct. But his writings – from his early studies of outcasts, derelicts, and prostitutes to the series of novels that made him famous, Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) – are in fact highly self-conscious performances. They are shaped as much by the books he had read – of Walter Pater and Henry James as well as Whitman, Dreiser, Norris, and London, whom he more or less owned up to – as by the things he had done and seen. And they demonstrate what his carefully constructed persona, introduced in New York, perfected in Paris, then transported to California, at once denied and suggested: that for him the doctrines of spontaneity and instinctivism and his celebrations of unmediated experience coexisted with an active, irrepressible aestheticism.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×