Um ... WOW.
I was going to say that it is amazing that you were able to draw all of this from Miller from what I mentioned in this thread. I assumed you must have a real education in psychology. But now I see you must've read about Miller a bit.
Here's a quote from the biography I'm reading about Miller. The name of the book is "Happiest Man Alive" by Mary V. Deerborn.
"Henry idolized any man involved in an activity from which women were excluded. Unfortunately, most of these activities were either illegal or required special talents beyond the reach of the young boy. Henry admired wrestlers and boxers (known as "pugs"), gamblers, con men, and gangsters. Cops would have made the list, but they were actual every day authority figures and thus ineligible. All his life he would search out institutions that were exclusively male; he was fascinated by prisons, for example, and the sheer accident that all-male occupations were often criminal ones led him to associate being a man with rebellion, with doing something wrong, or, in his younger years, with being a bad boy."
But more to the point of the homoeroticism and the being caught in his childhood, here is a very interesting couple of paragraphs. This is a paragraph about Henry Miller and his two young male friends, Tony and Joey Imhof:
"Only toward the end of his life Miller revealed, very casually, that he and Joey 'had acquired the habit of buggering one another.' They thought nothing of it, but Tony believed they were committing a grievous sin (the Imhofs were Catholic) and threatened to tell the priest. He went on to note that sometiems the two boys tried to bugger Tony, but that 'it was useless -- he was incorruptible.
Henry's friendship with Joey and Tony lasted for five years, until he was around twelve. While he wrote about the rest of his childhood repeatedly and obsessively, he mentioned this sexual relationship only once. (He would, however, name his son Tony and rename all his best friends Joey.)"
Here's the passage that refers to the gangbang. It refers to Henry Miller's erotic dream he had while still a teenager:
"He used to dream that his friend George Wright led him to Cora's house, and he wondered why George, whom he saw as his double, had to appear in these dreams. He simply could not perform -- however symbolically -- without another man present. This would later be borne out by his distinct fondness for the gangbang over any other form of intercourse. Miller always preferred to have male onlookers when he had sex with a woman, or, failing that, to find some buddies he could regale with the story afterwards. The homoerotic, voyeuristic nature of these episodes escaped him; on the contrary, he would come to consider his behavior the very essence of virility."
About discarding Henry Miller for DH Lawrence, I'm not really much of a fan of Henry Miller's, actually. Never finished one of his books, come to think of it. I am simply reading a biography of him and I found this interesting and realized that these passages are the perfect description of the type of heterosexual homoeroticism I was talking about in this thread.
Anyway, it's interesting that you'd say Henry Miller was trapped in his childhood. This will probably irritate some readers here, but I'm sure you're aware that there are some (not all) psychologist who say that this is true of homosexual men as well. Some psychologists have said that gay men are emotionally/psychologically stuck in that era of their childhood where boys don't want to be around girls. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this statement. I'm just saying that this is what some psychologists have said about gay men, so it's interesting that you would say this about Henry Miller. And, by the way, one of Anais Nin's psychologists (Otto Rank, I think) said that Henry Miller was an unconscious homosexual.
With respect to Henry Miller's erotic habits: these do seem to me less indicative of chauvanism or egoism (though those attributes are there) than symptomatic of an adolescent inhibition towards or even recoil from the feminine. His erotic identity is stunted and seeks refuge in the world of the adolescent boy. He has failed to develop a mature relation to and recognition of the woman as a fully sexual being (something which his hero DH Lawrence constantly struggled towards). If you're interested in this process as explored by literary art, I would recommend you discard your Miller and turn to Lawrence, in comparison to whom Miller is exposed as something of a vulgar and misleading charlatan, whose writings are full of special-pleading and manufactured convictions.
