“To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like a deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with the virus of his disillusionment. No man would set word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty and magic that he desires to create, why does he put millions of words between himself and the reality of that world? Why does he defer action – unless it be that, like other men, what he really desires is power, fame, success. ‘Books are human actions in death,” said Balzac. Yet, having perceived the truth, he deliberately surrendered to the angel, to the demon that possessed him.
A writer woos his public just as ignominiously as a politician or any other mountbank; he loves to finger the great pulse, to prescribe like a physician, to win a place for himself, to be recognized as a force, to receive the full cup of adulation, even if it be deferred a thousand years. He doesn’t want a new world which might be established immediately, because he knows it would never suit him. He wants an impossible world in which he is the uncrowned puppet-ruler dominated by forces utterly beyond his control. He is content to rule insidiously – in the fictive world of symbols – because the very thought of contact with the rude and brutal realities frightens him.”
– Henry Miller (Sexus)
2 Comments
Interesting take on writing from Mr. Miller. It may be true that a writer creates other worlds where he can be the “uncrowned puppet-ruler”, but I disagree with Miller’s view on the motive. Rather than avoiding the “brutal realities” of the real world, are writers not simply trying to make sense of them? Unless one submerges one’s self in the real world, the fictitious world he creates will be flat and empty. The created world is a direct product of the real world, not an escape from it.
Power, fame and success are all well and good, but that can’t be the only motive for writing. Children do write, although he claims they have no need of it because they haven’t been thoroughly poisoned by their “false way of life” yet. Children write for the same reason adults do: To understand the world.
well, yeah, but that’s Henry Miller.
I’m reading his trilogy now. Sex and what can only be called neo-existentialism.
I write to write. I know I’ll never be published. I guess that’s why I like the blog. So maybe he’s right.