On Rereading Nexus by Henry Miller
Acquiring and reading Nexus came about through a visit to a small used book store I hadn’t been to in years. It’s had the same owner for decades, and I used to frequent it and stock up on books when I would visit Seattle while living in Greece. I wanted to purchase something to show solidarity with his efforts to keep his shop open, and Nexus is what I came up with after a quick browse.
I haven’t read anything by Henry Miller in years; when I was young, though, and just starting to learn what a commitment to writing was really all about, I somehow stumbled upon Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. It had a profound effect on me. It’s the story of Miller’s early years in Paris, when he was dirt poor and often itinerant, a companion of all sorts of nefarious street people. It’s shot through with vivid imagery, surrealistic descriptions, and eroticism. It is a cry of freedom of expression, a hallelujah celebration of Miller finally finding his own unique voice. That’s what got to me most: that Miller found a voice that was his and his alone, and though it was frequently raunchy, iconoclastic, and even depraved, he shouted it out as loud as he could.
Tropic of Cancer was his first full-length autobiographical novel. He followed it up with Tropic of Capricorn and others. His magnum opus, though, was the three-volume Rosy Crucifixion, consisting of Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus, which tell of his years in New York struggling to get started as a writer before becoming an expatriate in France and later in Greece. In Nexus, he and his wife are seriously contemplating a trip to Paris; his wife and her girlfriend even go to Europe for a time but leave Miller behind. The book ends just as he and his wife are about to board the boat to France together. Before that, Miller exuberantly describes his misadventures and the idiosyncratic people he meets leading up to the voyage in his own inimitable style. For instance, while in the midst of a passage depicting an altercation between himself, his wife, and his wife’s female companion, he might suddenly launch into a prolonged exposition on Dostoyevsky; a visit to his Jewish neighbors might bring on all sorts of discourses on history, literature, and international cuisine. He deals in the absurd, and he delights in allowing his multitudinous idiosyncratic characters ramble on and delve into all sorts of subjects.
I approached this book with trepidation; I’ve kind of outgrown Henry Miller. If you read him long enough, you’re sure to find something to offend you. Sometimes he seems to be out to deliberately offend everyone and everything. He maligns everyone, especially himself, and often his antiquated slurs carry more offensive weight now than when he wrote them many decades ago. A quote from the beginning of his novel Tropic of Cancer helps put this all in perspective: “This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing.” That’s Henry Miller for you. If you can’t handle that passage, you’re better off reading some other less offensive writer.
As for me, as I said, I haven’t read much by Miller or even thought much about him lately. Reading this book for me was primarily an exercise in nostalgia. It reminded me of how important Miller once was for me in my development as a writer. He helped me realize that abandoning conventions and rules and the styles of other writers was essential in breaking free to discover my own voice. I would suggest, though, if you’d like to sample some of Henry Miller’s work (he really is a fine writer) without all the raunchy language and controversy, start with his excellent travel memoir on Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi.
