by Ken Gibert
After reading Anais Nin's diaries, I was prepared not to think much of Plexus-The Rosy Crucifixion, by Henry Miller. The first half of the book was about what I expected. Miller was self-centered, self-indulgent, irrational, amoral-the sort of person you'd expect to say, "But that's enough about me, what do YOU think about me?" and mean it literally and non-ironically.
He was, however, funny and entertaining if you could, as I only sometimes could, suspend your moral judgments as he breezed through page after page of pan handling and scams. Whatever else was going on in his life, he lived in a headlong, reckless way and wrote about it with great energy. The Rosy Crucifixion was supposedly autobiographical, and it's a wonder the man wasn't killed by any number of people.
The beginning of the book was apparently a time well before Nin encountered him. Miller was in the process of quitting his job as a hustler in a stock broker's bucket shop and deciding "to write." He says he never did write during this time, though, except for long, passionate letters. Instead, he lived through a series of adventures, from migrating to Florida at the end of one of its land booms (so it was a total failure for Miller) to operating a speakeasy. None of them were successful. I would guess that Mona, Miller's wife at the time, was actually a prostitute, but this is not entirely clear. Certainly there were times when she totally supported Miller (so he could write) in lavish style with money she obtained from a variety of men she visited. But she was not always able to do so.
The mystery of Mona's occupation provided a little cohesion to what the Oxford mail describes, very accurately in my opinion, as a "vast, gusty, turbulent cataract of a book." Unlike the writer for the Oxford Mail, however, I did not find myself laughing and crying with Miller. All that unexamined gusty turbulence was...wearisome to me.
Suddenly near the end of the book, though, the voice changes. Instead of telling the tale as it happens, Miller is looking back. Instead of the heedless charging through the events of the day, he has become wise and insightful. He still writes with great energy and passion, but instead of a rambling narrative of each day's activities, the story has taken on direction. He's discovered his passion and purpose, and although it's no clearer when he wrote the end of the story than when he wrote the beginning, he speaks as one who has mastered his craft and accomplished things. He speaks with impressive conviction.
And so I found myself wondering again about Anais Nin near the end of the book. It would have seemed impossible for someone like her to have interested the Henry Miller who wrote the first part of Plexus for very long. He wouldn't have held on to her ponderous self-importance for long simply because it would have been at odds with his own egotism and because she was not, in the final analysis, a particularly rich or interesting person. But if the first Henry Miller wouldn't have been interested in Nin for long, it is hard to believe the later Henry Miller would have spared her an instant's thought. It is difficult to see how anything she might have said could have interested him in the least.
Plexus is the second novel of a trilogy called The Rosy Crucifixion. I may yet read the other parts. As much as I admired the incredible energy with which Miller wrote and liked the person he became late in Plexus, I still found the book "person-bound." That is, the story was too focused on Miller himself and did not cast enough light either on his time and place or on human nature more generally, to be enduringly interesting to me.
Ken Gibert is a professional writer and business marketing consultant and operates Golden Sun Consulting. He specializes in writing--articles, copywriting, ghostwriting...any kind of writing--and marketing consulting.
If you're interested in the author or for more information on marketing or writing samples, please see my site at:
http://www.goldensunconsulting.com