What we write about fiction is never an objective response to a text; it is
always part of a bigger mythmaking -- the story we are telling ourselves
about ourselves. That story changes. George Orwell, writing in 1940 about
Henry Miller, has very different preoccupations from Kate Millett writing
about Miller in 1970. Orwell doesn't notice that Miller-women are
semihuman sex objects. In fact, his long essay "Inside the Whale" barely
mentions women at all. Millett does notice that half the world has been
billeted to the whorehouse, and wonders what this tells us about both Henry
Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.
Norman Mailer needed Miller to be like Shakespeare (this is plain wrong,
but the need is interesting); Erica Jong wanted to be Athena to Miller's
Zeus -- born straight out of his head and saving him from the Feminist
Furies in her book "The Devil at Large" (1993).
-- Jeanette Winterson. Review of
The Male Mystique of Henry Miller.
New York Times Sunday Book Review
(January 26, 2012).
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/books/review/renegade-henry-miller-and-the-making-of-tropic-of-cancer-by-frederick-turner-book-review.html