MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

For a man intent on living life to its fullest, Henry Miller was often preoccupied with the imminence and significance of death. Scholars have focused on Miller’s theories concerning symbolic death leading to a rebirth into the “inhuman” artist. Yet, before his emergence as an artist, Miller had to extricate himself from the stultifying New York City environs. His early writings make a distinct correlation between the workingman and a constructed environment, reminding Miller of a morgue. Miller draws reference and analogies to morgues, exposing his preoccupation with the physicality of death in his urban environment. During the 1920s, an inability—or unwillingness—to perform a routine salaried job led Miller to “quit” his job and eventually leave New York for Paris. This interim was his wandering period—a period of conceiving and expanding his philosophy on death. Specifically, Miller’s disgust for New York City is drawn from his perception that modern man has built around himself a technological morgue, replete with elaborate mausoleums.

Interestingly, in both his literature and correspondence, Miller’s application of the word “morgue”, with reference to New York City, often integrates his own physical presence. Consequently, in his early, unsuccessful, attempts at publishing, Miller struggled to categorize the working class condition that eventually led him to consider his own surrounding environment as a stimulus for questioning the value of modern life. Such questioning, Miller later admitted, caused him to contemplate jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge out of sheer desperation, and attempting suicide in 1927; similar personal revelations expose the secret turbulence within Miller that foregrounded his transformation in France. Analyzing Miller’s morgue analogies, moreover, reveals the ensuing mortality of the modern man and contemporary culture’s misdirection, heading toward death rather than toward the affirmation of life.