Henry Miller and Otto Rank
E. James Lieberman
Slightly emended, with postscript, from
Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal 2: 1, 2005, 80-99.The day before his first and only session with Otto Rank, whose books he had studied and admired, Henry Miller wrote Anaïs Nin, "I am going to Rank in full panoply, with questions and with indictments." Enclosed with the letter were ten pages of Rank excerpts. Miller was "closing in on the problem more and more, getting supersaturated so that when the discharge comes it will be a cloudburst. I want it to rain blood" (Letters 80). The appointment, 5:30 on Monday, March 6, 1933, lasted over an hour. Miller described it to her the next day in a 14-page missive. Rank was then 48, Miller 42. Nin, soon to be the crux of a very different struggle between them, was just 30; she became Rank's patient in November.
"Panoply" means a full suit of armor; a protective shield; an array or display to impress someone. Henry Miller only seems to open himself unabashed in his writing, and this defensive display is in character with ambivalence about vulnerability, and the need to make an impression, to conquer something external. Like most battles, the session contained stratagem and feeling, if not a bloody rain. Miller had nothing to lose but his anxiety. He gave that up gladly in the presence of the confident but never cocky Freudian disciple-turned-dissident. A decade earlier in Vienna, Rank had tried to enlarge Freud's edifice with The Trauma of Birth (Das Trauma der Geburt, 1924); that book, which emphasized the mother-child (pre-Oedipal) relationship, and Rank's first and highly successful voyage to New York, led to the anguished separation of foster-son and his mentor after two decades of unique collaboration.
The session passed "with the rapidity of a nightmare...in that quick, brilliant challenge of minds, a tremendous and fabulous exultation going on in the depths of me, a trampling down of many lives in me, of many failures, of many misgivings" (81). Afterwards Miller felt like Napoleon "when he came away from the signing of the great treaty--a mere affixing of the signature to something long ago inspired, envisaged and destined..." (81). To Miller it was a mutual test of strength in which he emerged equal to Rank or better. "I was able, through the swift contact with the very core of the man, to emerge 'cured'" (81).
Cured of what? Not illness, but "terrible timidities:" How cured? For Rank, "cure" must come from the patient (sufferer) with the therapist serving as midwife at a psychological rebirth. Rank soon replaced the term analyst with therapist (attendant). Rank later called himself a philosopher of helping, and his method, "will therapy."
Miller and Rank had much in common. German spoken at home, trilingual as adults; dysfunctional families; estrangement from alcoholic fathers; suicidal moments. Self-education. Literary and artistic preoccupation and ambition. Sensitivity. Wide-ranging interest in everything human, psychological, cultural, philosophical. Enchanted by Greece. A capacity and need for friendship. A passion for women that could be controlled or wild. The ability to work hard, to be productive, but to elevate real living over artistic pursuit--at least in principle. Each had a kind of epiphany at 40: Rank risked--and lost--his relationship with Freud; Miller completed his autobiographical Tropic of Cancer. Each emigrated to Paris for a decade: Rank from Vienna in 1926, Miller from New York in 1930. Besotted with coquettish Anaïs Nin (wife of Hugh Guiler), they competed on her terms, while she two-timed each with the other and sometimes both together. Both were spiritual, not religious (Rank an assimilated Jew, Miller from a Protestant background) and enjoyed myth, music, and the insoluble life-and-death mystery. They wanted to live fully in the moment, accept the inevitable (including decay and demise) and exercise will gamely, responsibly. They loved paradox and humor. Both experienced depression and highs that were probably hypomanic. Mark Twain was important to both: Rank signed intimate letters "Huck" in his last years; Miller became an honorary member of the Mark Twain Society. As authors both suffered relative neglect, their books languishing quietly for too long in a world that still barely recognizes their genius in life and words. Both men were vulnerable to Walt Whitman's feminine ideal (as in "A Woman Waits for Me"). Well into adulthood both suffered pain and humiliation--adolescent sexual pathos--along with moments of ecstasy and periods of stability and comfort.
They were, of course, also different in many ways. Otto, a short (5' 3"), homely, sickly, solitary but optimistic locksmith, became Freud's secretary, finally earning his Ph.D. at 28. Henry, 5' 8", physically fit, cynical college dropout, managed a Western Union office and was married twice before taking the plunge into penury-for-art. Otto's father was brutal and violent, his mother loving and supportive; Henry's father was weak, ineffective, his mother critical, vicious. Miller had five wives and lived to 89. Rank married twice, died at 55. Miller was iconoclastic, coarse, sexual, sometimes cruel, dismissive, self-destructive, bigoted but also loving, vulnerable, elegiac, ecstatic. Rank, a shy wunderkind, initially subservient, became a force in the psychoanalytic movement, its most prolific author after Freud. Rank kept secrets, rarely spoke ill of anyone, decried bigotry, welcomed women and homosexuals as colleagues. Among men Henry had more friends, it seems, though Otto was more predictable, steady, trustworthy. Rank could be angry, but not cruel like Miller. Except for his youthful diary, Rank kept himself out of his writing and left little in the way of personal documents or correspondence. Miller, the opposite, wrote copiously even to nearby friends, providing biographers a booby-trapped treasure because, as in his so-called autobiographical writing, fiction often trumps fact. Rank loved the same United States that Miller called The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). "One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work," said Henry (Tropic of Cancer, 33); the opposite was probably true for Rank.
To engage at the core was Rank's way: no blank screen; rather, an exchange between real human beings. Conscious will, essentially missing from Freudian psychology, has a central place in Rank's life and thought (Lieberman). He believed that a conflict of wills between therapist and patient was the effective moment of therapy. Given Miller's knowledge of Rank and his own expressive powers, Rank probably was amazed in the session, even bewildered, as Miller says. Rank agreed that his own best writing was what Miller liked most, and concurred with Miller's assessment of its weakness--"the dynamic, aggressive, hopeful, wishful thing which always leads the German mind, in the end, into the bogs of hopeless mysticism" (Letters 82).
In the proud, effusive letter Miller explores themes in Rank's writings--Art and Artist (1932) and Seelenglaube und Psychologie (1930).1 Miller asserted that Spengler had an equally valid theory of soul, and that Rank had not gone beyond Nietzsche. Apparently Rank agreed--at least he did not argue. But in Seelenglaube, Rank praises Nietzsche and faults him for construing will narrowly, and calls his psychology of will a "patchwork" (Stückwerk) (109, 121).2 Miller especially lauds two chapters in Art and Artist--"Microcosm and Macrocosm" and "The Formation and the Creation of Speech"--claiming that Rank agreed these "were his real contributions to the subject" (Letters 83).3
Miller continues in the letter to Nin: "The conception of the soul takes its stance here in the idea of that something which was part of the body, very real, visible, etc. that lived on perpetually and contained in itself the seed of future rebirths, reincarnations, etc. And here art takes its rise, art being nothing more originally than the endeavor to make concrete that abstract idea of a soul; and that concretization proceeds by means, naturally, of plastic representation. This, then, in its crude way, in its staggeringly read, corporeal aspect, is his view of the genesis of art" (Letters 83). There follows the question of primitive man's delayed recognition of the connection between sex and birth, and the rejection of the idea because it "disproves his theory of death, or rather of immortality which the soul achieves as a triumph over bodily death. But since it is a fact which he cannot deny, this reality of the sexual act, this birth and dying of the individual, he incorporates it into his cosmological scheme, his metaphysics, if you like, and gives it an exaggerated emphasis, a sacred character, a symbolic import, etc. etc. Do you follow me?"
Miller refers to Rank's Seelenglaube and the explanation of cultural misogyny, "directed not against woman per se but against that generative symbol which she expresses and which negates his cosmical view of life and birth, of creation and death. Marvelously clear to me" (84). Miller explains that denial of sex, the man's opposition to the female principle, is part of an illusion that protects man's ideology of creation and immortality. The incest idea operates "to discredit the father-mother relationship....[man] accepts the element of sex, along with its fatality...while still clinging to the older and the more potent conception--parturition [parthenogenesis?], self-creation.....He persists...in restoring the magic, the deeply religious quality to his creative faculties4....Here, and am I happy to state it, lies what there must be of Orphic mystery!....Anyway, life reduced to its fundamental terrors, its horrors, its awfulness, its absurdity, its sublimity. But Life--even though the way be through Death" (85-6). Miller closes: "You have been the teacher--not Rank, nor even Nietzsche, nor Spengler" (86).
His letter, rich but somewhat cryptic, touts Miller's conquest of his romantic self, but later says, "One is privileged in the end to drink of wisdom. I say this very, very romantically! It is sheer romanticism in this day and age to speak of the value of wisdom, for it is a value that is no longer wanted. It has no efficacy in this world of reality which has been created, because this world of reality is a world of death" (86).
In light of such an encounter, it is disappointing today (as it was for Miller) that he is thought of by so many as a pornographer and rake. He has been the subject of biographies, critical books, and a tribute by Erica Jong, The Devil at Large (1993). Rank, too, was pilloried and pigeonholed after the break with Freud, who himself misunderstood The Trauma of Birth. Freudians chaired most U.S. departments of psychiatry through the 1950s, and Rank's ideas were ridiculed or, if accepted, were not attributed to him. Nin's expurgated diaries began to appear in 1966, treating Rank respectfully, for the most part. Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (1974; Pulitzer Prize), praised Rank highly, expounding his ideas. Rank's American lectures have been published as A Psychology of Difference (1996) and he is knowledgeably presented in a recent book along with William James, Ludwig Binswanger, Erik Erikson, and Oliver Sacks, as a "romantic scientist" (Halliwell).
Miller's later tributes to Rank are muted, as when he equates Rank with Dr. René Allendy, "both of whose works made a profound impression upon me (Reader 252). In The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), Miller reflects on his "psychoanalyst friends. I wrote out three cards, one to France, one to England, one to America. I very gently urged these broken-down hacks who called themselves healers to abandon their work and come to Epidaurus for a cure. All three of them were in dire need of the healing art--saviors who were helpless to save themselves. One of them committed suicide before my word of cheer reached him; another died of a broken heart shortly after receiving my card; the third one answered briefly that he envied me and wished he had the courage to quit his work" (60). This is undoubtedly fiction, but, for the record, French analyst Allendy died in 1942; Rank died October 31, 1939 of a side effect of sulfa drugs--not, as rumors flew, from suicide or in reaction to the death of Sigmund Freud a month earlier. (His widow, Estelle, then 35, told me that Miller contacted her shortly after Rank's death but she declined to see him). Miller wrote: "One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. The truth is no way disturbed by the violent perturbations of the spirit....One anchors oneself in the flow: one adopts the lying mask to reveal the truth" ("Reflections" 25).
Miller's put-down of analysts is a far cry from earlier times. Beginning in 1934, Henry competed furiously for the love of Anaïs against Otto ("Huck"). He followed them to New York, and practiced a forerunner of clinical philosophy in Brooklyn, while Nin shared an office with Rank in Manhattan. She got referrals and supervision from Rank and evidently passed some patients along to Miller, who would have brooked no supervision. Henry and Huck's trysts and torments with Anaïs are depicted in startling detail, in her unexpurgated, but still fictionalized, diary.5
Art and Artist [O.R., 1932]
In "Microcosm and Macrocosm" Rank's prose evokes Miller, as does the content, connecting soul-worms, snakes, small animals, the womb, the liver, signs of the zodiac, totem symbols, priests, kings, God, the constellations, art, architecture, Africa, Asia, Greece...sex, death, and immortality, the unity of the individual with the universe.
Rank and Miller study and embrace everything human: men, women, children, science, philosophy, the heroic, and the neurotic. They go unflinching into the morgue, the sewer, the zoo, the birthing room, the artist's loft, the astrologer's den, the confessionals of priest, and psychoanalyst.
We allude to the conception of the "soul-worm," ...obviously founded on observation of the worms appearing on a corpse, which do undeniably denote new life. ... (129)Tropic of Cancer [H.M., 1934]Thus we perceive a development of the belief in the soul, ranging from the denial of maternal origin (as a symbol of mortality) to the assumption of divine descent from the imperishable stars, with the king (or chief) at first as earthly representative thereof. This development, which has left a precipitate in art-history also, goes, however, beyond the animal, and the final result of the whole process, in the early Oriental world-picture, is the transfer of the animal to heaven. But to understand the detail of this development, which eventuated in the curious signs of the zodiac, we must remind ourselves that the very earliest conception of this animal was that of the soul-worm and similar reptiles or amphibians, and that these, living, as they did, half underground and half in the water, stood nearer to the macrocosmic womb-symbolism than did the larger mammals or the birds of the air, venerated by a later cult. Again the idea of the soul-worm as emerging from the soft parts of the human body bears a close relationship to the idea of the animal's interior (the mother's womb) as the origin of life--later, as the seat of the soul--although even at the primitive worm-stage we can see a hint of parthenogenesis--in other words, a self-creative tendency of the soul-concept. This tendency becomes still clearer in the celestial assimilation of man, and of other large mammals living on the earth, to the stars, which constantly renew themselves; and in the end it finds the purest creative expression in the spiritual conception of the soul, released from all matter, which first began to take shape in Greece. (133-134)
....Whereas in the beginning the soul-concept was concerned only with the keeping of something given--that is, with the conservation of life--the essence of creativity lies first in the ability to regenerate something lost and eventually in the triumph of new-creating something that had never existed. On the basis of this formulation it is easy to fix the point at which the sexual ideology became important to man, attaining a significance which it had never before possessed and was subsequently to lose. ... Those theories which have made out that artistic creativity is the expression of the sexual impulse have only made use of a transition phase of man as creature to secularize the conception of man as creator. Indeed, this latter conception itself, as manifested in the idea of God, amounts to nothing less than an objectification of a creative urge that is no longer satisfied with self-reproduction, but must proceed to create an entire cosmos as the setting of that self. (134)
Miller's philosophy echoes Rank's quite often, despite their different lifestyles; yet even those merged for a year or so, with Nin the vortex of passion. His breakthrough came with Tropic of Cancer (1934). Written in 1931 and 1932, the book was culled from a much larger manuscript. It is energized not just by sex but by all the body functions. Contrary to general opinion, food trumped sex in Miller's pantheon: "my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, I dream about it at night" (69). Otto Rank funded the first publication of the book. Nin borrowed money from him to cover the initial costs. Presumably Rank read the book, but nowhere mentions Miller. Nin wrote a brief, vivid introduction--"It is beyond optimism or pessimism....Pain has no more secret recesses" (Preface xxxi). She says, "there is no question of heroism or struggle since there is no question of will, but only an obedience to flow" (xxxii). But there is struggle and conflict, between creature and creator--Rank's phrase describing the strong-willed person, living in an animal body and living out a conscious imperative to make something of the self, to recreate oneself.
"This is not a book...this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art" (2). Art itself is a grain of sand inside the shell of culture, around which a pearl is formed. Intense, rambling, ranting, Tropic of Cancer rings true, the characters a psychiatric ward without walls, au naturel. The episode with Carl and the rich British woman (disguise for an American writer) confronts the male as a hapless would-be fucker (gigolo), unable to take what is offered (sex, money, enjoyment) or even to dispel the pain of a full bladder. The story blends Rabelais with Lenny Bruce: how an intelligent man fumbles and fails to open the lock when handed the key. Invited to the secret place, the treasure house, the banquet, he trips and stumbles with childish overexcitement and fear. He cannot play the bodily instrument in tune or in time, and comes unstrung. This is life-and-death drama played out as earth-bound man encounters divine woman who wants him to fulfill his desire with her. He cannot. Earthly heaven frightens, unmans him. Miller knows. His lust is often loveless, he rarely gets carried away; his passion comes through when pleading for sanity in an insane world. What he deplores is not death but spoilage, timidity, indignity, failure to live. Forget about salvation or the next life; live it now or lose it.
"I've lived out my melancholy youth....I'm healthy, incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. (50)....It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone--if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness." (66).
Rank emphasized the here-and-now in therapy and in life. Freudian analysis tended to keep neurotics stuck where they were, he points out, by taking the patient on an excursion into the past, and by referring present emotion to the past as "transference" (Lieberman, "Evolution"). In Art and Artist, he shows how the artist separates from the group to express his or her genius--individual will--then reunites to get communal acceptance as an artist, only to feel compromised by this merger with the group. The artist separates again to create, balancing between poles--the guilt of willing against the guilt of failing to will, or life fear against death-fear. The neurotic, the artiste manqué, freezes in place on the high wire. Miller, in excerpts below from Wisdom of the Heart, echoes Art and Artist, Where Rank concludes:
A man with creative power who can give up artistic expression in favor of the formation of personality--since he can no longer use art as an expression of an already developed personality--will remold the self-creative type and will be able to put his creative impulse directly in the service of his own personality....But the condition of this is the conquest of the fear of life, for that fear has led to the substitution of artistic production for life, and to the eternalization of the all-too-mortal ego in a work of art. For the artistic individual has lived in art-creation instead of actual life...and has never wholly surrendered himself to life....the creative type who can renounce this protection by art and can devote his whole creative force to life and the formation of life will be the first representative of the new human type, and in return for this renunciation will enjoy, in personality-creation and expression, a greater happiness. ("Deprivation and Renunciation" 431)The Wisdom of the Heart [essays by H.M. 1941]
But in the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. (6)In order to accomplish his purpose, however, the artist is obliged to retire, to withdraw from life...If he chooses to live he defeats his own nature. (8)
Sin, guilt, neurosis--they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The tree of life now becomes the tree of death. But it is always the same tree. And it is from this tree of death that life must spring forth again, that life must be reborn....Through madness and ecstasy the mystery of the [Dionysian] god is enacted and the drunken revelers acquire the will to die--to die creatively...to save man from the fear of death, so that he may be able to die. (11-12) --"Creative Death."
This essay, about D.H. Lawrence, brings together hero, artist, god, the individual, the universal.
* * * * * * My life itself became a work of art. I had found a voice, I was whole again. (21)Understanding is not the piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it. (23)
Art is only a means to life...In becoming an end it defeats itself...All art...will one day disappear. But the artist will remain, and life itself will become not "an art" but art, i.e. will definitely and for all time usurp the field. In any true sense we are certainly not yet alive. We are no longer animals, but we are certainly not yet men. Since the dawn of art every great artist has been dinning that into us, but few are they who have understood it. Once art is really accepted it will cease to be. It is only a substitute, a symbol-language, for something which can be seized directly. But for that to become possible man must become thoroughly religious, not a believer, but a prime mover, a god in fact and deed. ....The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one. And the trend is toward awareness, towards that blinding consciousness in which no present form of life can possibly flourish, not even art. (24-25)
The facility of speech I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. (29)
Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring...creating from the flimsiest, slenderest support. In the beginning this daring is mistaken for will, but with time the will drops away and the automatic process takes its place.... (29-30). --"Reflections on Writing."
Rank and Miller were voracious readers, travelers, observers, art and music lovers (and critics), philosophers. They both identified, finally, with the philosophy of Huck Finn, the uneducated, humble but simply sophisticated liver of life.
* * * * * * Instead of exposing the secret of health and balance by example, they [analysts] elect to adopt the lazier course, usually a disastrous one, of transmitting the secret to their patients. Instead of remaining human, they seek to cure and convert, to become life-giving saviors, only to find in the end that they have crucified themselves. ...The acceptance of the situation, any situation, brings about a flow, a rhythmic impulse towards self-expression. To relax is, of course, the first thing a dancer has to learn. It is also the first thing a patient has to learn when he confronts the analyst. It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live. It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender. (32-33)
...he reveals himself as something more than a healer, reveals himself as an artist of life... [with] a faith broad enough to include death, as well as other so-called evils. For in this broad and balanced view of life ...the healer has a role..."to play the gynæcologist to death." (34) --"Wisdom of the Heart."
* * * * * * Surrender was not part of Miller's audition with Rank, it seems; this was written some years later. Rank would agree that the midwife role of therapist includes birth and death--the two are inseparable. It was Rank who discovered the ending as a key therapeutic issue: ambivalence about dependence; love-hate relationship with the seemingly powerful but really just human therapist. This ambivalence crystallized into the life-fear/death-fear paralysis--neurotic hope to avoid death by avoiding life.
It has been said that with the development of civilization this nameless fear [of the life instinct] gradually crystallized into a fear of death. And that in the highest reaches of civilization this fear of death becomes a fear of life, as exemplified by the behavior of the neurotic. (95)Everything that lives has will, that is, creativeness. Will is the verb, which is the most important adjunct of our speech. ... (97) --"The Enormous Womb."
* * * * * * Compare this with a passage from the second chapter of Rank's Art and Artist: "This romantic dualism of life and creation, which corresponds to our psychological dualism of impulse and will, is in the last resort, the conflict between collective and individual immortality, in which we have all suffered so acutely since the decay of religion and the decline of art. The romantic type, flung hither and thither between the urge to perpetuate his own life by creating and the compulsion to turn himself and life into a work of art, thus appears as the last representative of an art- ideology which, like the religious collective-ideology, is in process of dying out" (46).
* * * * * * When the individual is wholly creative, one with destiny, there is neither time nor space, nor birth and death. The god-feeling becomes so intense that everything, organic and inorganic, beats with a divine rhythm. At the moment of supreme individuation, when the identity of all things is sensed and one is at the same time utterly and blissfully alone, the umbilical cord is at last cut. There is neither a longing for the womb nor a longing for the beyond. The sure feeling of eternality. Beyond this there is no evolution, only a perpetual movement from creation to creation. The personality itself becomes a creation. From symbolizing himself in his works man symbolizes himself in his being. (191) --"Uterine Hunger."
* * * * * * Balzac, who eventually became a Colossus, was a living travesty of the Will. ... Balzac, the writer, deflected his great will in order to subjugate the world...His whole life was a contradiction of his philosophy: it was the most stupid, aborted life that any intelligent man every lived. .... His intuition was cosmic, his will was titan-like, his energy inexhaustible, his nature truly protean, and yet he was unable to emancipate himself. (220-22) --"Balzac and His Double."This passage brings to mind not only Rank on will and personality-creation, but his The Double (Der Doppelgänger, 1925; Don Juan: un Étude sur le Double, 1932). There are two Balzac essays by Miller, one on Seraphita, which he compares with the late Beethoven string quartets, and this one, on Louis Lambert, "the record of his parting with his real self [Louis]...is it not a projection of Balzac's own aborted desire?" ("Seraphita" 207).
Rank eschewed the apocalyptic; perhaps he and Miller represented twin personalities, a philosophical union expressed in different languages, affects, aesthetics. A number of links could be explored further: Georg Groddeck, the German physician, novelist, and mystic engaged Freud, Rank, and Ferenczi in 1922. Lawrence Durrell wrote a long essay about him, which introduced an edition of his classic, The Book of the It.8 Miller must have known about him, too. Salvador Dali, an acquaintance of Miller's, was influenced by Rank's Trauma of Birth (Schiebler).
Neither man was politically active. Rank criticized Carl Jung's rightward leanings in a letter, supported unionization of teachers, and the anti-Franco side in the Spanish Civil War. Rank had served for two years as editor of a military newspaper in Krakow in World War I. Rank's last book, Beyond Psychology (1941, posthumous), lacked his final editing touch, and may have been altered in some respects by well-meaning friends. It does mention Hitler and the changes in Europe that led him to make New York his permanent home in 1935. He had applied for U.S. citizenship and was planning to move to California with his new wife, Estelle, his companion of several years, when he died.
Miller could sound Gandhian or warlike; some of his comments fit today's issues all too well. "In America youth means simply athleticism, disrespect, gangsterism, or sickly idealism....The American scarcely knows what anger is, nor joy, for that matter. He oscillates between cold-blooded murder, as depicted by the gangsters or those who are punishing them, and a bright, hard gaiety devoid of all sensitivity, all respect and consideration for the personality of the other....their humor is hysterical, a reaction born of panic, a refusal to look life in the face" ("Raimu" 51). "The medical men are not interested in health, but in combating sickness and disease. Like the other members of society, they function negatively. Similarly, no statesmen arise who appear capable of dealing with the blundering dictators, for the quite probable reason that they are themselves dictators at heart" ("Wisdom of the Heart" 37).
No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which any one can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance. The greatest men have always reaffirmed this thought. But the men who dazzle us and lead us astray are the men who promise us those things which no man can honestly promise another--namely safety, security, peace, etc. And the most deceptive of all such promisers are those who bid us kill one another in order to attain the fictive goal. (122) --"The Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium."
* * * * * * From France earlier, in Tropic of Cancer, Miller wrote: "America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit" (94 ).What would these men think about America today? Race relations and the status of women have improved, contraception and abortion are legal--but under siege. Slavery is not gone but better hidden; the poor of the world trade their labor for a pittance, women still sell their bodies to eke out a living, too many parents sell their own children. The war machine chomps wealth and lives; space fantasies percolate in the minds of promisers. A photogenic tart named for a hotel is the latest mainstream celebrity to have her career boosted despite or because of sexual scandal. We can't use Miller's everyday term for her. Our kids watch hours of television, where corporations relieve them of their imaginations, numbing their skulls with perpetual sexual motion, sex without sweat, blood, babies, germs. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech if you own a newspaper or television outlet, but teachers risk their jobs if they tell the truth about condoms in the abstinence-only school daze. A statesman and a baseball star advertise an expensive drug to treat erectile dysfunction--a phrase that would make Miller laugh or cry. As Goethe wrote in "The Diary" about a wavering erection, "Illness is the truest test of health." But we listen more easily to faint signals from Mars than to obvious messages from our own bodies. That impotent men are at a psychological loss, like Henry's friend Carl in the Paris boudoir, should be obvious, yet psychiatrists listen less and hand out pills, as their time and money depends on "managed care," i.e., insurance companies, who in turn listen to the pharmaceutical industry.
"With us the soul problem has disappeared, or rather presents itself in some strangely distorted chemical guise," Miller wrote ("Reflections on Writing" 28), in keeping with Rank's Seelenglaube. Why struggle with soul when an erection can be had for nine dollars? We are richer in goods and poorer in spirit. The promisers will unify us in a war against terror, but the real terror is inside, and can only be calmed by love. Our children know this-- even though corporate America arms them, too, only to turn around and try them as adults if they shoot to kill.
It is as though censorship in America hides meaningful contests of will, and prohibits examples of real surrender in mature loving relationships. Nevertheless, if Miller and Rank could face the world of the 1930s with such energy and passion, we should go on and be fortified by what they learned, lived and taught so well.
A final thought. According to Nin, Rank wanted her to help translate and edit his books for the English-speaking world--she who could not keep Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn straight! (Lieberman, Acts of Will 346). Rank would have been better off with Henry Miller's help. Huck, Henry, and Anaïs could not be a threesome. She did not want what both of them wanted with her: an exclusive relationship. Miller wrote to her on December 11, 1934, complaining that Rank would not help them with money. "Once it would have been possible for us to work for and with Rank. Now I am afraid it is out of the question. I really hate him. And he feels the same no doubt. He will offer you the whole world, and sincerely, but not to help us" (Nin and Miller 250). Less than three weeks later (Dec. 29) Miller wrote her again:
I am going to appeal to him [Rank] as a man to do something for me, to make a place for me, if not your job then another. I can do him a lot of good--and also a lot of harm if he crosses me. But I will give him a fair chance...He doesn't know my capabilities at all. He knows me scarcely at all, and then mostly as an irresponsible artist, as a kept man, as a leach, I suppose. But I am capable of doing anything under the sun. I don't need to lie in bed until noon. I don't need to be paid a magnificent wage. I don't need to be instructed like the ordinary American. I'm just as big a man as he is, every inch, though my life and my training has been utterly different. I chose to live--but that does not make me worthless, or irresponsible, or incapable or inefficient. He should give me a chance, at least. (284-85)7But the mischievous green-eyed monster, nourished if not created by Nin, made that impossible. Sex and jealousy trumped creative work. For these two prodigiously creative men, living had to take precedence over art.
Postscript After completing this essay, I came across some notable items. The Journal of the Otto Rank Association, published between 1966 and 1983, but not indexed, reprints Miller's letter to Nin about Rank in the first issue (1:1, 1966, 57-65) "with consent of Mr. Miller and Ms. Nin." Later, an essay "A Novel Triangle" by Sharon Spencer (JORA 14:2 1979, 7-16) addresses the Nin-Miller-Rank relationship. She provides additional references, including The Mind and Art of Henry Miller by William A. Gordon (LSU Press, 1967) which has an excellent chapter on Rank's philosophy and influence. Gordon also published his correspondence with Miller (LSU Press, 1968). Laid in with the Spencer article is a copy of a two-page handwritten letter from Miller to Spencer of Jan. 3, 1978, in which he says he lost faith in Rank: "To think he could help others and be himself a very lonely man, baffled me. Anaïs didn't take it so bad." He goes on to disparage analysts and their work, and Nin's "idolators" and her "unsociability." He concludes, "At best this kind of post-mortem writing is intellectual poppycock."
* * * * * *
Notes 1 Translated as Psychology and the Soul, Introduction by EJL.
2 In a 1931 letter Rank wrote of Nietzsche, "Lately I have emancipated myself from him, too (Lieberman, Acts 304).
3 Rank, Art and Artist, [1932] 1989. Ch. V, 48 pp., and VIII, 30 pp., in a book of 14 chapters averaging about 29 pp. Seven chapters (but not these two) were reprinted in Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and other writings, Philip Freund, ed., 1959. The original German text Kunst und Künstler, Rank's magnum opus, was finally published in 2000. The original American edition had a fine introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn, replaced in the 1988 edition by a lighter one by Nin.
4 A corresponding passage from Psychology and the Soul:
Given his increasing recognition and understanding of the relationship between sexual relations and conception, the early male had a strong motive to preserve his original soul belief--a belief embodied in the closed system of totemism--by denying this recognition. If he himself animated the child, not only (most importantly) soul-belief but also the religious and social system resting upon it would collapse. In totemism, the primitive male made certain of the soul's existence and his own salvation by leaving the ensoulment of children to the spirits of the dead. It was denial of the relationship between sex and conception, not ignorance, that formed the basis of totemistic soul-belief, just as it was denial of death, not ignorance, that formed primitive belief in the bodily soul. In totemism the maintenance of soul-belief, which would have disappeared with acceptance of the nature of procreation, had vital significance--and as we shall see, not just for primitives. In later human history we find tenacious attempts to preserve belief in the soul's immortality in religious, social, and scientific institutions, all pitted against the combined evidence of sense, reason, and knowledge. Psychology is only the latest of these attempts. (16)
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5 From Nin's Fire: From "A Journal of Love" 1934-1937:February 1, 1935. ...Huck is preparing to leave for California. He wants me to meet him in New Orleans. We planned a few days' vacation there before Henry came. Now I don't want it. Huck buys me a beautiful valise, for New Orleans. He has 'N.O.' engraved on it. We play with it; he himself fills the black lacquer boxes with powder, cream, etc. All the time I know I am packing for Henry, to join Henry. But I said to Huck, "You see, I am packing for New Orleans. Playing with the idea that I am leaving with you." That makes him happy. I also tell him that until Hugh comes I will stay here in Room 906--but the very day he leaves I am moving in with Henry, into a double room somewhere. So the valise lies on the armchair, and Huck gets me underwear, things I am to wear only for him, but which I will wear for Henry." (19-20)Nin criticizes Miller's bawdy approach to love in "Eroticism in Women" from Playgirl (1974), reprinted in In Favor of the Sensitive Man (1976), which includes a tribute to Rank.
6 See Durrell's "Studies in Genius VI: Groddeck." 7 The editor (G. Stuhlmann) adds: "There is no evidence that Dr. Rank let H.M. work for him, thought both A. N. and H. M. subsequently took on some 'patients' while in New York in 1935 and again early in 1936" (Nin and Miller 285).* ~ * ~ * Works Cited Durrell, Lawrence. "Studies in Genius VI: Groddeck." Horizon 17. 102 (1948):
384-403. Rpt. as the introduction to G.G., The Book of the It, 1949.
Halliwell, Martin. Romantic Science and the Experience of Self: Transatlantic
Crosscurrents from William James to Oliver Sacks. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
Lieberman, E.J. Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank. NY: Free Press
1985. Pb. updated ed. Amherst: Univ. Massachusetts Press 1993.
La volonté en acte. La vie et l'oeuvre d'Otto Rank, tr. Aline Weill, Paris:
PUF, 1991. Otto Rank: Leben und Werk tr. Anni Pott, Giessen:
Psychosozial-Verlag, 1997
----."The Evolution of Psychotherapy since Freud." Creative Dissent:
Psychoanalysis in Evolution. Ed. A. Roland, et al. NY: Praeger, 2003. 37-44.
Miller, Henry. "The Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium." The
Wisdom of the Heart. Norfolk: New Directions, 1941. 103-139.
----. "Balzac and His Double." The Wisdom of the Heart. 214-56.
----. The Colossus of Maroussi. New York: New Directions, 1941.
----. "Creative Death." The Wisdom of the Heart. 1-12.
----. "The Enormous Womb." The Wisdom of the Heart. 94-102.
----. The Henry Miller Reader. Ed. Lawrence Durrell. New York: New Directions, 1959.
----. Letters to Anaïs Nin. Ed. Gunther Stuhlmann. 1965. New York: Paragon, 1988.
----. "Raimu." The Wisdom of the Heart. 47-62.
----. "Reflections on Writing." The Wisdom of the Heart. 19-30.
----. "Seraphita." The Wisdom of the Heart. 198-213.
----. Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove, 1961.
----. "Uterine Hunger." The Wisdom of the Heart. 187-191.
----. "The Wisdom of the Heart." The Wisdom of the Heart. 31-46.
Nin, Anaï. "Eroticism in Women." In Favor of the Sensitive Man
and other Essays. 1976. San Diego: Harvest, 1994. 3-11.
----. Fire: From "A Journal of Love" 1934-1937. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
----. "On Truth and Reality." In Favor of the Sensitive Man
and Other Essays. 57-65.
----. Preface. Tropic of Cancer. H. Miller. New York: Grove, 1961. xxxi-xxxiii.
----, and Henry Miller. A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin
and Henry Miller, 1932-1953. Ed. Gunther Stuhlmann.
New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1987.
Rank, Otto. Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development.
Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. [1932]. Intro. Anaïs Nin NY: Norton, 1989.
----. Kunst und Künstler. Giessen: Psychosozial, 2000.
----. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and other Writings. Trans.
F. Robbins and S.E. Jelliffe. Ed. Philip Freund. NY: Random House, 1959.
----. Psychology and the Soul: A Study of the Origin, Conceptual Evolution,
and Nature of the Soul. Trans. Gregory C. Richter. Intro. E. J. Lieberman.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Schiebler, Ralf. Dali: Genius, Obsession, Lust. Munich: Prestel, 1999.
* * * * * Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal
James Decker, ed. 915 Crestview Drive Sherrard, IL 61281