"Wear any uniform so long as it's not yours," advises Henry Miller, and the various uniforms of bum, stud, psychopomp, jeremiah, and saint he wears in his books never quite fit the forms and motions we see behind the garb and the gab. The protagonist of his books, name of Henry Miller, describes himself as being such-and-such, and this so-and-so varies from book to book, from passage to passage. But we do not see him as he sees himself. The figure we make out from passage to passage exposes only new lineaments of its eternal consistency. The "I" of his books does not know itself, and what it doesn't know remains pretty much the same. The shiftings of Proteus configure a Prometheus bound to his obsession but sure he is free.

So far, then, we have two Henry Millers, one a wardrobe of costumes, the other their inhabitant. A third Henry Miller is the designer of the costumes, the author holding onto the shirt-tails of his protagonist…. Sometimes the author and the protagonist seem pretty close. "I have moved the type-writer into the next room where I can see myself in the mirror as I write," says the protagonist of Tropic of Cancer. From all the squirms and craning, we gather that the image lacks definition, Dracula eluding his own gaze into the pier-glass. Similarly, the author never sees through his reflections and so has to keep rewriting his single book under numerous titles, always one step behind a protagonist who keeps running in place, but in the very best form. (p. 616)

To this day Henry Miller the author is naive in relation to his protagonist. We can get a more-or-less direct look at the author through his letters, his literary criticism, his social commentary, his philosophizing. He has less grace, poise, aplomb than his protagonist, but he is more solicitous of our admiration; he is not as wise, but more opinionated; not as pure, but also less complicated; less original, but more cranky; not as desperate, but more self-pitying; less terrible, more of a trial; not an unliberated liberator, but a chide.

It is the protagonist we are interested in, rather than the author—the "I," the character written into the books, not the writer, not the costumes the other two write about. Let us call him Henry. Here, in a passage from Tropic of Capricorn …, is Henry's moment of conception:

… in my dream life I frequently changed places with my sister, accepting the tortures inflicted upon her and nourishing them with my supersensitive brain. It was in these dreams, always accompanied by the sound of glass breaking, of shrieks, curses, groans and sobs, that I gathered an unformulated knowledge of the ancient mysteries, of the rites of initiation, of the transmigration of souls and so on…. I seemed to have absolute liberty and the authority of a god, and yet by some capricious turn of events the end would be that I'd be lying on the sacrificial block and one of my charming uterine relatives would be bending over me with a gleaming knife to cut out my heart…. I go completely off my nut and there is no more pain, no more terror, even though they are piercing me everywhere with knives. Suddenly I am absolutely calm and the body which is lying on the block, which they are still gouging with glee and ecstasy, feels nothing because I, the owner of it, have escaped. I have become a tower of stone which leans over the scene and watches with scientific interest. I have only to succumb to the law of gravity and I will fall on them and obliterate them. But I will not succumb to the law of gravity because I am too fascinated by the horror of it all. I am so fascinated, in fact, that I grow more and more windows. And as the light penetrates the stone interior of my being I can feel that my roots, which are in the earth, are alive and that I shall one day be able to remove myself at will from this trance in which I am fixed.

That day is still to come. He never removes himself from his fix. He continually rehearses its stations, which never occurred, except in a dream, as mankind rehearses Freud's myth of the Primal Horde, which also never occurred. In a dream of a scene from real life he soaks up punishment he deserves only by virtue of his uterine connections with other people…. (pp. 617-18)

The god tries to love the victim, for Henry is a narcissist (not a man who loves himself, rather one who works at it)—"My whole aim in life is to get nearer to God, that is, to get nearer to myself"—but neither the love of God nor of the Cosmological I is a substitute for the love of a mother. (pp. 618-19)

Henry's God … is the Imperial Self (the phrase is Quentin Anderson's) of Emerson and Whitman brought up to date. The relation is one of identity, which is the negation of relation. Between two things that are identical there are no dialectics. Therefore although Henry's prose is serial, it does not progress. It encounters nothing that might bounce it off the path of its return…. Henry's style never trips on itself; his balance is perfect because beyond the reach of gravity; he is as light on his feet as an acrobat in outer space. (p. 621)

A man with an Imperial Self is one who wants to generalize his void. His project is to destroy. His notion is that peace lies in an equalization of the pressures within and without him. His favorite sound is silence. (pp. 621-22)

"I put down everything which came into my mind, whether it made sense or not," says Henry, but his aim is a Walpurgisnacht. His way is not the way to rout habitual usage with new meaning, saturate words with consciousness, permeate them with mind, construct a world of words that is a reproach to the other one. Each word has to be emptied and refilled separately. The work goes slowly. (p. 624)