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mouse obviously this is speculation but I can imagine maybe that type of jargon was what she liked. Even if it wasn‘t, it’s still a product of its time and I look at it as such
Jan 28, 2025
mouse I honestly have no idea. You leave it to a man to tell you where the body parts characteristic of a woman are located, and he'll tell you your clit got ripped off alongside your umbilical cord when you were born. But at least the enthusiasm in the letter was perceived.
Jan 28, 2025
mariamaria It’s so funny that you say that bc you’re exactly right. This is what she had to say about DH Lawrence but it’s what she came to love about Miller too who always wrote about sex in an almost grotesque way and was known as a tasteless degenerate provocateur
“If to some, his work is nothing but crude realism, to others who know poetry it is more than that: the prose is lyrical as well as sensual, the descriptions full of sensitiveness as well as crudeness, of beauty as well as obscenity. Why the crudeness and the obscenity of the language? First it was necessary to dethrone mentally directed love. He pleads for an instinctive beginning. He gives us an honest picture of all the aspects and moods of physical love. But he writes neither scientifically nor for the sake of pornography. Even when he is most naturalistic and apparently obscene, there is a reason for the obscene words.
They are the very words by which he believed one could alone renew contact with the reality of sexual passion, which the cult of idealism has distorted for us. His war was against evasive, reticent language, which makes for evasive, reticent living and thinking.
Love has been travestied by the idealists. The words they used aroused lofty exaltations or timorous reactions in the head, which had no connection whatever with sensual love. He took the naked words and used them because they conveyed realities which we were to live out not merely in action but in thought. ‘I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and cleanly.‘ Now this cannot be done if we are afraid of words.”
Excerpt From
A literate passion : letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953
Feb 25, 2025
