ESSAY

By Pico Iyer

All across the world, America is still regarded as the home of optimism. But nations, no less than individuals, are often negligent of their blessings. This year marks the centenary of one of the republic's most bountiful and boundless founts of optimism; yet the occasion is more likely to be marked abroad than in the U.S. Henry Miller -- his middle name was Valentine -- was born the day after Christmas, 100 years ago, and spent the next 88 years as a professional enthusiast, making a living out of pleasure and a music out of saying yes. Where an Old World master, like the peerless Graham Greene, could write elegant circles around doubt, hedging belief in with a knot of moral ironies, Miller just went straight to faith. From the first page of his first book, Tropic of Cancer -- "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive" -- through 50-odd books about finding ecstasy in squalor, he simply sang of life and love as if the two were interchangeable. His guiding star was Rabelais's "For all your ills I give you laughter."

When Miller was growing up, the genteel tradition was in its prime: so much of America was so captive to European proprieties that it might have seemed the Revolution had been fought in vain. A writer like Henry James, for example, in transporting a nuanced country-house sensibility to England, was, almost literally, carrying coals to Newcastle; Miller, by contrast, brought to Europe things it was less accustomed to seeing: naked appetite, hopeless high spirits, French spoken with a Brooklyn accent. And what he brought back was something even richer: the great French passions -- of love and talk and food -- translated into a rough Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Joie de vivre made American.

For however much he tried to school himself in foreign masters of despair -- Mishima, say, or Celine -- Miller could not help remaining a fearlessly joyous soul, "100% American," as he put it, right down to his repudiation of America. No one ever embraced life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness more lustily. An Emersonic boom was his, and Whitmanic energy. Like Emerson, he saw the Greek roots in enthusiasm -- the word means divine possession -- and knew that the poet "speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly . . . Not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar." And like Whitman, his fellow rhapsodist of Brooklyn, he sang only of himself -- in that great American form, the comic-romantic monologue -- but found in the self everything he needed: "If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without." Celebration, not cerebration, was his thing: even in old age he was young enough to set about listing all the books & he'd ever enjoyed, to fill his pages with reminiscences of his friends, to dash off 1,500 letters to a starlet named Brenda Venus (with whom, just before his death, he enjoyed an unlikely but passionate friendship). And even when inspiration failed him, Miller simply kept writing and writing till he broke into epiphany. No one who ever wrote so badly wrote so well.

But more than his art it was his life, the only subject of his art, that served to inspire millions. By now it is easy to forget how many of our myths of youth were all but patented, or lived out most wholeheartedly, by Miller. The college dropout devouring dictionaries while working as a messenger for Western Union. The would-be writer heading off to Paris with $10 in his pocket. The self-anointed artist collecting his mail at American Express, while living off his crooked smile. The underground man going back to nature and living, in his 50s, without telephone or electricity. The prophet unhonored in his home whose Tropic of Cancer was a cult classic in Europe but, true to the martyr-artist mystique, had to wait 30 years, until 1961, to make it past the censors of America. Carloads of Europeans still make the ritual pilgrimage to the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, Calif. There they can find his legacy all over: in the QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper sticker on the van in which a wandering Englishman sleeps beside the road; in the HOW TO BE AN ARTIST poster on sale on the front porch; in the young man practicing his juggling on a sunlit lawn amid the redwoods.

Miller was so spendthrift with himself, and so loud in praise of folly, that he laid himself open to every charge. Yet to return to his books is to find him much more shaded than the goatish orgiast of stereotype. Those who would brand him an irresponsible apostle of hedonism must explain why he grew so censorious when it came to drugs. Those who would call him a male chauvinist pig must account for his fervent championing of Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer. Those who would write him off as a pornographer must tell us why he spoke out against the sexual revolution (in which he found more signs of jadedness than love). Even his ardent worshiper Anais Nin confessed some disappointment that he kept so clean and "monastic" a home. Besides, the one person who called him "monstrous" was himself.

For many Americans, Henry Miller is still a slightly embarrassing presence, the unruly bumptious country cousin who makes a display of himself at the dinner table. At the age of 69, he had not yet seen his first book published in his homeland. And even now, 11 years after his death, he remains a tireless troublemaker (the movie about his love affair with Nin, Henry & June, prompted a new kind of X rating). Yet all this is precisely what endears him to the visitors. It is why he is the envy of many an Old World sophisticate (George Orwell called him "the only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past"). And it is also why the perennial schoolboy from the streets of Brooklyn -- a New World Rabelais -- is still, 100 years on, one of the great American exports, unlikely to be eclipsed even by the Japanese.