{"id":36191,"date":"2012-07-26T15:14:21","date_gmt":"2012-07-26T19:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=36191"},"modified":"2016-01-28T10:40:41","modified_gmt":"2016-01-28T15:40:41","slug":"a-rosier-crucifixion-the-erotic-world-of-henry-miller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/07\/26\/a-rosier-crucifixion-the-erotic-world-of-henry-miller\/","title":{"rendered":"A Rosier Crucifixion: The Erotic World of Henry Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Henry Miller has just been laughed at for rhapsodizing about Walt Whitman. He\u2019s sore. A woman enters the apartment. Henry drags her into the bathroom. He fastens his \u201clips to her red mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cPlease, please,\u201d she begged, trying to squirm out of my embrace. \u201cYou\u2019ll disgrace me.\u201d I knew I had to let her go. I worked fast and furiously. \u201cI\u2019ll let you go,\u201d I said, \u201cjust one more kiss.\u201d With that I backed her against the door and, without even bothering to lift her dress, I stabbed her again and again, shooting a heavy load all over her black silk front.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I closed my copy of Miller\u2019s The Rosy Crucifixion<\/em>, restored my tray table to its upright position, and avoided eye contact with the gaunt elderly woman in the aisle seat as I squeezed past her legs. I locked the door of the tiny bathroom and leaned against the dispenser of toilet seat covers. I slipped my hand inside my jeans. My eyes shot open as the tremors began, and I saw, in the milky glass above the sink, that I had become Miller\u2019s description of the woman at the moment of climax: \u201ca wild, tortured look as if her face were under a mirror pounded by a hammer.\u201d Once the sensation returned me to myself, I met my still-widened eyes and understood with discomfiting clarity the delight Henry took in forcing this bestial transformation upon his sex partners.<\/p>\n

In a recent New York Times<\/em> review<\/a> of Renegade<\/em>, a new Miller hagiography by Frederick Turner, Jeanette Winterson argues that the book\u2019s main shortcoming is one shared by nearly all Miller criticism: a failure to grapple with the question \u201cWhy do men revel in the degradation of women?\u201d While I find such a purely political treatment of Miller\u2019s content to be a willful denial of his complexity, I was interested in Winterson\u2019s query because it reminded me of my contorted, twenty-four-year-old face in the airplane bathroom. I had to wonder why I<\/em> revel in representations of men degrading women in ways I find appalling in real life. Indeed, the aggressive, one-sided encounters I experienced in high school and college were my initiation into a new kind of pain.<\/p>\n

During this period, there was no possibility I would receive pleasure from the interaction\u2014aside from very short-lived excitement. Boys would push my head to their waists and ejaculate within seconds or thrust inside me nine or ten times, groan, and collapse. Always, ejaculation would occur just as I was becoming most open and aroused, feeling another person\u2019s entire self caught up entirely in me. And then he was gone, looking away with an expression of bewildered defeat. I was alone with a monstrous need set loose in my chest, striking my rib cage with each inhale, keeping me from sleep. I felt as desperate as the woman Henry \u201cdisgraces\u201d in the bathroom, who later clings to him and begs him not to leave.<\/p>\n

Even with my first few boyfriends, my orgasm was often a halfhearted encore. I\u2019d try to show them how to touch me, moving their hands and whispering, \u201cSofter. Softer.\u201d Mostly, they seemed to have no erotic interest in the mechanics of my pleasure. But then, neither did I. I could only come by imagining men roughly taking their pleasure with reluctant partners, scenes I\u2019d gained from watching online porn when my sexuality was too demanding to ignore but too unformed to be selective.<\/p>\n

Miller is one of a handful of writers whose sex scenes include realistic depictions of female orgasms\u2014realistic in part because his characters appropriate masculine desire as a stand-in for their own needs. This is particularly true of The Rosy Crucifixion<\/em>, in which women \u201cin heat\u201d beg Henry to fuck them with variations of the chant, \u201cYou want it! You want it!\u201d While Miller is richly attentive to the physics of female lust, there is something hateful in his attention. He describes his wife June (whom he calls Mara) \u201cstruggling frantically to bring on an orgasm\u201d for so long that Henry loses all sensation in his penis.<\/p>\n

\n

It looked disgustingly like a cheap gadget from the five and ten store, like a bright-colored piece of fishing tackle minus the bait. And on this bright and slippery gadget Mara twisted like an eel. She wasn\u2019t any longer a woman in heat; she wasn\u2019t even a woman; she was just a mass of undefinable contours wriggling and squirming like a piece of fresh bait seen upside down though a convex mirror in a rough sea.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Henry \u201cshooting a heavy load\u201d on a stranger\u2019s dress is naturally sexier than this prolonged, desperate striving. Henry needed something and he got it, giving no thought to the implications of that need or its means of fulfillment.<\/p>\n

Female pleasure is more complicated than male pleasure. It generally takes longer for women to come; there are more ways of achieving orgasm, or failing to; numerous emotional and psychological factors enhance or inhibit a woman\u2019s pleasure. Perhaps this is why I often imagine scenarios of coercive sex or enact poses of degradation. Deprived of the capacity to respond to the often convoluted demands of my will, I can experience sex as pure sensation, immune to striving and analysis. It\u2019s sexy to be freed\u2014even through a trick of the imagination\u2014of the complications of my own needs and the elusive but constant fear that they will not be met.<\/p>\n

Because Miller is aware of this fear, his accounts of sexual recklessness are much more than misogynistic bravado. Soon after he gets married for the first time, Henry runs into an ex-girlfriend. They go back to her apartment and fuck silently for fear of waking her son, Georgie, who is dying of tuberculosis in the next room. Henry has the sense that she is crying throughout the sex, \u201clike a toilet box that won\u2019t stop running.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

And though she had begged me in a frightened whisper not to come, that she couldn\u2019t wash because of the noise, because of Georgie in the next room, though I knew that she was the sort who gets caught just by looking at her, and that if she were caught it would go hard with her, still, and perhaps more because of the silent weeping, more because I wanted to put an end to the gurgling, I came again and again \u2026 There was something fiendishly detached about it, almost as if I were a pyromaniac sitting in a comfortable chair in my own house which I had set fire to with my own hand, knowing that I would not budge until the very chair I sat in would begin to sizzle and roast my ass.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

During the act of intercourse, Henry is erotically compelled by his own \u201cfiendish detachment.\u201d But what he later recalls most acutely of the experience is not pleasure but the frightening image of Maude\u2019s face when they said good-bye: \u201ca face looming out of darkness, the upper part of the head caught as if in a trap door.\u201d While the thought of submitting to brutish lust may at times turn me on as a concept or a pose, I know that for a woman to endure such an experience in life is most often a deadening lesson in sexual intimacy. Many of my friends can only have orgasms with a vibrator or not at all, even with boyfriends or husbands who long to satisfy them. When I was talking with one of these friends recently about the bad sex we had in college, the word disconnected<\/em> came up again and again. To avoid the pain of wanting pleasure from someone unable or unwilling to provide it, a woman may silence her sexual feelings so thoroughly that they go into permanent hiding.<\/p>\n

When I used to watch porn as a teenager, I would always put one hand over the worn, fake-tanned faces of the girls. I didn\u2019t want to see the way their eyes floated, detached, in the midst of the fucking, as if a personality that belonged to someone else had gotten lost inside them and was searching for a way out. I told myself that as long as I didn\u2019t pay for this brutality to women, I wasn\u2019t hurting anyone by getting off on it. But then I stumbled on a scene in which a middle-aged man kept pressuring a teenage girl to have anal sex. She eventually relented, staring at the ground in front of her face and asking no one in particular, \u201cIt\u2019s probably better than giving it up in the shelter, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

I have not been tempted to watch porn since. And I no longer find The Rosy Crucifixion<\/em> very valuable as either literature or erotica. I agree with Miller\u2019s assessment<\/a> that The Colossus of Maroussi<\/em> is his best book largely because \u201cit expresses joy, it gives joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is not to say that I now fantasize about men in sequined boxers feeding me vegan cupcakes at the foot of a rainbow. I still find nothing sexier than a man\u2019s selfish, reckless pleasure. But I now understand this to be an innate desire, one that is simply fun so long as my partner also cares about my satisfaction. Inviting rough sex with my boyfriend is worlds away from enduring unexpected aggression from an acquaintance.<\/p>\n

Still, when I\u2019m not engaged in sexual activity, it makes me sad to think that my arousal is based in crude animality. On the most basic level, there is little difference between my fantasy life and a lion\u2019s mating rituals: male finds desirable female; subdues; ejaculates. Yet I want sex to be a shared delight so strong it releases me from the strictures of everyday living. So the urge to dramatize poses of degradation is what Miller calls \u201ca sultry, passionate rebellion\u201d against the fact that one\u2019s needs do not result in what one wants. I will always want sex to be more than the physical act of intercourse it will always insist on being.<\/p>\n

Miller puts it this way in Tropic of Cancer<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

Going back in my memory over the women I\u2019ve known. It\u2019s like a chain which I\u2019ve forged out of my own misery. Each one bound to the other. A fear of living separate, of staying born. The door of the womb always on the latch. Dread and longing. Deep in the blood the pull of paradise. The beyond. Always the beyond.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hannah Tennant-Moore is a writer living in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Miller has just been laughed at for rhapsodizing about Walt Whitman. He\u2019s sore. A woman enters the apartment. Henry drags her into the bathroom. He fastens his \u201clips to her red mouth.\u201d \u201cPlease, please,\u201d she begged, trying to squirm out of my embrace. \u201cYou\u2019ll disgrace me.\u201d I knew I had to let her go. 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