Irreconcilable differences …

… Henry Miller’s James Joyce: A Painful Case Of Envy — Sam Bluefarb. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Joyce was only some nine years older than Miller, but he was already famous enough for the younger man to look upon him as a father figure or at least as an older brother, with all of the sibling rivalry implicit in those words. Yet what sticks in Miller’s craw is that Kahane should have thechutzpah to urge him to write a critical treatment of his great contemporaries—Joyce, Proust, and Lawrence. Miller could not bear the thought that anyone close to his own age could be his superior. Although something of a Freudian, even when he damns Freud, he cannot help but act out the Freudian role, that of a son who needs to vanquish the father synthesized as Proust/Joyce. With Proust, as we have seen, it is a stage killing rather than the mayhem he reserved for his true bête noire, James Augustine Joyce.