Henry Miller on Writing

The premise is a librarian's insight: Miller's real subject had always been the writing life — no author of his era described the actual practice more often or more nakedly — but the testimony lay scattered across novels, essays, and letters. Assembled by Thomas H. Moore of the Henry Miller Literary Society with the author's cooperation, the 1964 volume gathers it into an arc: the Brooklyn years of imitation and failure; the Paris breakthrough, when he abandoned literature and wrote Tropic of Cancer; the working methods; and the long war with censorship, concluded in the American courts that same decade.

The famous set piece is the list: the eleven 'commandments' Miller posted above his desk in the Clichy days — work on one thing at a time, finish what you start, don't be nervous, work calmly and joyously — a scandalous writer's startlingly sober work rules, since pinned over a thousand other desks. Around it, the deeper doctrine the whole shelf demonstrates: that the writing and the living are one problem, and no technique survives a false life. Aspiring writers keep discovering the book with a shock — the century's great literary outlaw turns out to be its most practical shop foreman.

Selections in a purposeful order: first the apprenticeship testimony — the decade of writing badly, told from inside; then the breakthrough passages from the Paris years, where the voice arrives and Miller catches it happening; then the working life — habits, revision, the desk commandments, the economics of staying unpublishable; and finally the obscenity war, in the essays and statements that carried it. Sourced from across the books, with the passages' origins noted.

Useful straight through or as an oracle: open anywhere and you get the same message at a different temperature — write from the life, or don't bother.