More on unconventional tools of creation (was: Re: Motto: live a fast life, die young and be a beautiful corpse)

[Laurence Horn]

On Apr 16, 2012, at 7:43 PM, Garson O'Toole wrote:

> Laurence Horn wrote
>> The Renoir story rang a distant bell of a writer who professed the same
>> practice (mutatis mutandis), but I couldn't remember whether it tolled
>> for Lawrence, Hemingway, Mailer, Miller, or one of the other DWMs of
>> whom Kate Millett was notoriously unfond.  A bit of digging produced
>> this artifact:
>> 
>> http://atticfox.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/written-with-the-body/
>> Written WITH the Body
>> Jeanette Winterson, in her novel Written on the Body, recycles the
>> narrator's conversation with two different partners.
>> 
>> With Inge, the anarcha-feminist who hates to blow up beautiful things:
>> 
>> She said, "Don't you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his
>> penis?"
>> "Don't worry," I said. "He did. When he died they found nothing
>> between his balls but an old brush."
>> "You're making it up."
>> Am I? (22)
>> 
>> And again with Catherine, the writer, who feels that writers don't
>> make great companions:
>> 
>> "Yes," she said. "Do you know why Henry Miller said "I write
>> with my prick?"
>> "Because he did. When he died they found nothing between his legs
>> but a ball point pen."
>> "You're making that up," she said.
>> Am I? (60)
> 
> Many thanks to LH for the thematically related quotation attributed to
> Henry Miller. In a quick search I could not find additional support
> for this ascription beyond Jeanette Winterson's novel. Perhaps she
> constructed it as a humorous parallel to Renoir's remark.
> 
> The search did uncover a comment credited to another prominent writer,
> Oe Kenzaburo who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. The book
> "The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and Techniques"
> by Michiko N. Wilson contains this passage:
> 
> http://books.google.com/books?id=KkT6rgd41f4C&q=fountain#v=snippet&
> 
> [Begin excerpt]
> 
> A foreign scholar of Japanese literature who was well known for her
> quips once said to him: "You look up words in a physiological
> dictionary instead of a language dictionary when you write novels,
> don't you?" He replied humorously, "That's correct. And I write with
> my genitals instead of a fountain pen!" [2]
> 
> [Footnote 2] "Eccentricity, Abnormality, and Danger in Sex" (Sei no
> kikaisa to ijo to kiken), Tightrope Walking, p. 239.
> 

And here's a later, but evidently independent, observation along the same lines as Winterson's--not by Kate Millett herself, but clearly a fellow-traveling lit critter.  I love the understatedness of that coy "at least"…
==================
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4724257/His-and-hers-criticism.html

RENOIR IS supposed to have said "I paint with my prick" - though the statement probably sounded less coarse in French. It is now impossible to read authors such as D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller without noticing that, metaphorically at least, they wrote with the same organ.

Thirty years ago, a female student might have felt brow-beaten by Lawrence's hymns to the thrusting phallus, but she would not have been encouraged to say so in her essay. But then the American feminist Kate Millett published a book called Sexual Politics. It "outed" an array of admired writers as male chauvinist pigs. Millett found her way on to the cover of Time magazine and the academic study of literature changed irreversibly. […]

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org