Henry Miller on Becoming a Writer

“No daring is fatal”

If you are an artist, that means that you are denuding yourself more and more, that by the time you die you are stark naked and your bowels turned inside out.

— Henry Miller

I think I should also confess that I was driven to write because it proved to be the only outlet open to me, the only task worthy of my powers. I had honestly tried all the other roads to freedom.

I was a self-willed failure in the so-called world of reality, not a failure because of lack of ability.

Writing was not an “escape,” a means of evading the everyday reality: on the contrary, it meant a still deeper plunge into the brackish pool—a plunge to the source where the waters were constantly being renewed, where there was perpetual movement and stir.

Looking back upon my career, I see myself as a person capable of undertaking almost any task, any vocation. It was the monotony and sterility of the other outlets which drove me to desperation.

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm.

I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts.

The facility of speech which I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink.

The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life preserver which sinks them.

Nobody can drown in the ocean of reality who voluntarily gives himself up to the experience.

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge. “No daring is fatal,” said René Crevel, a phrase which I shall never forget.

The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring, i.e., in creating from the flimsiest, slenderest support.

In the beginning this daring is mistaken for will, but with time the will drops away and the automatic process takes its place, which again has to be broken or dropped and a new certitude established which has nothing to do with knowledge, skill, technique or faith.

By daring one arrives at this mysterious X position of the artist, and it is this anchorage which no one can describe in words but yet subsists and exudes from every line that is written.

---