By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine
IN MY last summer of high school, I worked a part-time job at my tita’s gravel and sand company. It involved long hours of doing nothing more than watching trucks come and go, so I started bringing books to pass the time. I had always been a voracious reader, and regularly scoured the book stores along Recto and Avenida for bargains. I’m dating myself, but in those days when National Book Store held a “cut-price book sale,” paperbacks went for one peso each. Among my finds were the Grove Press editions of Henry Miller’s books.
At that time, there was still an air of the illicit around Henry Miller’s works. They had been banned in the US until a landmark court decision ruled they were literature, not pornography. (This was before the advent of “Deep Throat” and the whole sexual revolution that followed.)
Anyway, I started with the first of the series, “Tropic of Cancer,” and was immediately hooked by Miller’s semi-autobiographical account of his bohemian days in Paris in the early 1930s, living on his wits and managing a ménage a trois with his wife and another female character clearly based on Anais Nin. I quickly devoured the rest of Miller’s ouvre: “Tropic of Capricorn,” “Sexus,” “Plexus,” “Nexus,” “Black Spring,” and “Quiet Days in Clichy.”
To my delight, when I enrolled in my freshman year of college (as a business major!), I discovered that the university library was well-stocked with Miller’s other works (as well as Nin’s). I read “The Air Conditioned Nightmare,” “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch” and the rest of the canon. Finally, I came to the last book of Miller’s that the library had, which was “The Books In My Life,” his loving tribute to the books that he had read and which had made an impact on his life. I tracked down each and every title in his list that the library had, among them Balzac’s mystical “Seraphita” and Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger.” (Miller also had a taste for Franz Werfel — author of “The Song of Bernadette” — which I never acquired.)
Each book led to others, and by the time I had worked my way through the cycle, I realized that I was on my way to becoming a writer.
Much later, a colleague at work — a published fictionist — would huff “The dirty old man of literature!” whenever Henry Miller’s name came up in conversation. I could only smile.
For more books — life-changing, uplifting or plain entertaining — check out the Sunday Inquirer Magazine’s Summer Reading Issue this Sunday, March 30.
