Let's Get Reading: Newsletter 72

“I feel just worthless today. I have to drive myself. I have used every physical excuse not to work except take illness. I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water. Really childish.” – John Steinbeck

The 11 Commandments

Before he was banned in the US and lionised in France, Henry Miller was just a struggling writer in Paris trying to will a novel into existence. But unlike 99% of the people who find themselves in a situation like that, he actually had the mettle to make it happen. He’s of course best known for Tropic of Cancer (1934) and its companion Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Along with forming a pivotal plot point in a particularly entertaining Seinfeld episode, they’re both explosively candid and semi-autobiographical novels which spent decades on the American obscenity blacklist. And now to geography, if you want a handy trick to help you to remember their respective positions on the globe, use the following mnemonic: Ca-N-cer lies North of the Equator and Capric-O-rn lies Opposite (South). Is that actually helpful/interesting/something that will be useful in your day-to-day? Probably not, but you may as well know it anyway. Lit With Charles, not just a literary face.

Miller made his name by breaking nearly every rule of polite literary society. He wrote with wild abandon about sex, philosophy, poverty, art, and the existential gymnastics of being an American abroad – about 10 years before James Baldwin would make the same journey, and end up doing the same thing.

However, beneath the bohemian image and stream-of-consciousness prose, Miller was surprisingly disciplined. Still waters run deep, as it turns out. In 1932, while working on Tropic of Cancer, he sat down and wrote a list of “Commandments” to keep himself focused. The list is both earnest and theatrical – half productivity hacks, half artistic manifesto. It’s the kind of thing that could only have come from someone who once said, “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”

Below, Miller’s own rules for getting the work done – straight from the writer who seemed least likely to follow any.