Henry Miller Recalls and Reflects [Interview 1956] (4/9) 

too bad we can't extend life to people who deserve to stay alive forever. henry miller would qualify that honor because of his honesty and wisdom that he shares with his fellow man. he is profound and humble with his honesty.

Saw an interview with amis, he seems like a depressed kind of guy, wouldnt enjoy a drink with him. But as for Miller he is endlessly interesting.

Miller blows Amis out of the water. Miller's writing comes from a pure place, whereas with Amis, it's contrived, an affectation, a product of fancy schooling and false ideas of how the world is. Amis is forever trying to step out from his father's shadow and it shows in every line of his writing.

Though they are world's apart Nabokov and Miller were both great writers and were both published by the Olympia Press. Amis's mistake was trying to imitate Nabokov. Imitate Nabokov! The only one who could successfully imitate Nabokov was Nabokov, also unsuccessfully .... Amis should have just stuck to reviewing books. Miller is truly inimitable though. Miller's subject, like Whitman's, is himself which is everything interconnected to him. There were periods of The Air Conditioned Nightmare which were so flat, so lifeless, dead, dead that reading those pages was like walking through the valley of the shadow of death. One needed faith to read them through to get to the other side. And once I got to the other side I just had to shake my head and admire Henry Miller's courage! for writing through such ennui. He is a Gargantuan writer. Like Dylan. I never knew Dylan said that about Miller. Dylan doesn't give two shits about what people think about it, he puts it in. Also, Miller. With Nabokov I think writing was a kind of sickness, genius, a game, games within games, in Nabokov there is so much of a gulf, the thinnest thread of sanity, No it is impossible to say what it is. Sometimes a book of his seems to cast a spell, then again the same book will seem as lifeless, as pompous and bloated, as devoid of all meaning as well, as life sometimes also does! but N. never wrung tears and laughter out of me as Miller had done. Nabokov's hatred of Dostoevsky and Freud! Miller's worship, almost, of Dostoevsky! Isn't disparity tremendous.