Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick

Doing It with the Cosmos: Henry Miller's Big Sur Struggle for Love Beyond Sex Elayne Wareing Fitzpatrick

DOING IT WITH THE COSMOS: HENRY MILLER'S BIG SUR STRUGGLE FOR LOVE BEYOND SEX explores the evolving pantheistic vision and agonizing personal relationships of this rogue elephant of American literature.

After years of exclusive conversations with people who knew Miller when he lived in Big Sur, the author concludes that, contrary to a popular mindset, Miller was not an apostle of gratuitous playboy sex. On the contrary, his books detail the man´s tortuous efforts to integrate "impulsive urges that were wholly beyond control" into a higher, more spiritual, form of love that may, or may not, include sex.

His message: "We don't have to make [the earth] a paradise. It is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it... Love is not a game, it's a state of being."

This book is a unique introduction to one of America's most controversial literary greats, tracing his spiritual development from its shaky beginnings in Paris through its expansion in Greece to its culmination in Big Sur.

The book not only serves as a manual of happiness, it is a caveat for people planning to play house together. Miller's ultimtely joyful Nature wisdom, is an antidote for what ails an entire generation of restive, sex and violence-inundated Americans.