# Relationships and Addictions: Some Personal Perspectives



## RonPrice

Henry Miller knew a great deal about relationships and addiction. I post a somewhat long thread below and I advise readers to skim or scan. If readers find an interest in what I write here keep reading and, if not, just stop and go somewhere else. Relationships and addiction have many windows into their complex worlds. Each reader brings to this subject their own concerns. If what I write below strikes a reader's sensibilities well and good. I leave all that I've written below FY possible I.-Ron Price, Australia
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HENRY MILLER and ME

This afternoon I had the pleasure of listening to a Radio National program based on the correspondence between Henry Miller(1891-1980) and Lawrence Durrell.1 Neither of these writers are well known, probably hardly known, by most of those immersed in the print and image-glut of popular culture. After listening on my radio to their letters being read and the commentary, I wrote the following, and made this collection of prose-poetic pieces for some internet site or two.--Ron Price with thanks to 1 *ABC Radio National*, 1:05 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., 14/4/’13.

“When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is complete another set of destruction will set in. And it will be far more drastic, far more terrible than the destruction which we are now witnessing in the midst of this global war. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world crumble.”-Henry Miller in The Phoenix and the Ashes, Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p.55.

Some of Carl Von Clausewitz’s observations on war have applied in this new ‘far more drastic, far more terrible’ destruction. Some military strategists argue that his was the first written effort to systematize the principles of conflict. His essays appeared from 1817 to 1828 and were published in On War(Princeton UP, 1976). He said “everything in strategy is simple but not easy”(p.656) and “there is no higher or simpler law...than keeping one’s forces concentrated.”(p.664). Both principles apply, I often think, in the kind of war that we in the West who never go to war, but have to deal with the battles of the interpersonal domain in our families, our workplaces and in what you could call the private sphere of one’s inner life. -Ron Price, comment on Clausewitz’s* On War*.-Ron Price, *Pioneering Over Five Epochs,* Updated on 14 April 2013.

After that superficial propriety of mine
was given a good hard kick in the teeth 
by raucous rock-and-roll which woke us up 
from our day-dream of Mr Clean, Doris Day, 
General Ike, no ******* or genitalia: the war 
started and I had no idea that it had begun!!

I had just moved to Dundas at the time; it 
was a little town in the Golden Horseshoe.
I call it travelling-pioneering now; that was 
back in ’62. I had just taken my first steps.

The battle has been on ever since on so
many fronts: running across two very wide
continents, caught in cross-fires that left me 
bleeding raw, wounded, slowly recovered, 
found the right prophylactic, taking it slowly 
now, walking, hands in my pockets, and just
watching the fires burning, harrowing up the 
souls of billions in an orgy of violence—of such
complexity and confusion, bewildering and so 
often a silent agony that insinutates itself into
the very soul, mind and spirit of men's children:
but it is an agony that our print and image-glut
gives us this silent, protective, comforting sleep.

Ron Price
13/1/’96 to 14/4/’13.
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WHO ARE YOU HENRY MILLER?

“All of Henry Miller’s work,” writes Jay Morten, “constitutes the autobiography of his legend, not of his life.”1 In his writings this American writer(1891-1980) gives expression to his real self—or so some argue—to his created, other, self, an imaginative construct which involves an “obliteration or at least a masking of self.”1 Morten sees Miller inventing himself with the result that a strong aroma of Miller’s personality hovers about his writings, impressing readers with an assurance of authenticity. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jay Morten, *Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller-An Unauthorized Biography*, Capra Press, Santa Barbara, 1978, p.vii.

You say, Henry, that you don’t tell
the whole story of your life, never 
will...you have so little of it down 
on paper and you even lie to throw 
all the bastards off track, eh Henry?

Elaborate webs of guesswork, sheer
invention and dubious assumptions
about the information-giving ability
of fiction, friends know fragments of 
your life—and that with them—such 
small fragments they all have Henry, 
eh? Oh to drive beneath and beyond 
the façade into the chambers of hearts, 
the corridors of imagination, eh Henry?

No work of biography, no few hundred
pages can recreate a life, eh Henry? eh?
You wanted none of this writing business, 
this writing as if someone knew about you.

And so I cling to the moment, the mundane
trifle, rooms, streets, houses, those tentative
gropings toward self-understanding, try to
stay as close to the life lived, to catch myself
at the point just before my imagination buries
its origins……As you once said Henry, you had
a thousand faces, all of them very genuine, eh?

Motives, perspective, awkward, tangled reality 
of life, as Gibbon once said, are far too complex
to penetrate below the surface.1 How did your
mind work, Henry? Who are you Henry Miller?

1 David Womersley, *The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p. 280.

Ron Price
17/11/’08 to 14/4/’13.

Henry Miller wrote: "At the last desperate moment-when one can suffer no more!-something happens which is in the nature of a miracle. The great open wound which was draining the blood of life closes up, the organism blossoms like a rose."1 In 1992, after a series of tests and trials going as far back, perhaps, as 1962, there was, it seems to me now in retrospect, the beginning of a blossoming like a rose. That blossoming was poetry.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Henry Miller in The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller, Mary Dearborn, Harper and Collins, London, 1991, p.248.

Henry Miller wrote1 that he was reaching out for life, for something to attach himself to, when he reached out for June. June became his second wife. But, he says, he was left high and dry from his effort to grasp life in this way. In the process he found something he had not been looking for--himself.
It seems to me, as I look back over those first fifty years of travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community, from 1962 to 2012, that I too was often reaching out for life, for something to grasp on to, something to attach myself to. 

I always found something. It turned out, as I gaze in retrospect at the events in that half-century, that I found a series of stimulating pacifiers and meaning constructs: (i) the women in my life, who took the edge off loneliness and made me feel good; (ii) the academic life and its translation into a career, the teaching profession and a host of jobs; (iii) the Baha'i Faith and its intellectual and spiritual resources.
With each of these 'attachments,' these 'meaning and activity systems,' I did find survival mechanisms and pleasure, purpose and the ability to live another day, and so much more. 

Like Henry Miller, too, I found myself by sensible and insensible turns of the tide of experience, by 1992, by 2002, and even more-so by 2012, that I was able to express this process in prose and poetry. The process involved a finding that was also a losing, a sense of power that was also a sense of powerlessness, a sense of meaning and richness and a sense of bone-dry weariness that came back again and again. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Henry Miller in Mary Dearborn, *The Happiest Man in the World: A Biography of Henry Miller*, Harper Collins, London, 1991, p.310.
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Mary Dearborn is an American biographer and author. Dearborn has published biographies of Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Peggy Guggenheim, and others. She received a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1984. In her biography of Miller she states that he walked a narrow line between acceptance and rebellion, rejoicing and disgust. Perhaps we all do, each in our own way; some are more conscious of it than others; for some the extremes are not as sharp, not as demarcated. 

My bi-polar illness and the simple consciousness of my failings, my sins of omission and commission, have perhaps made me more conscious of this same narrow line. I am certainly conscious of this line as I survey my own experience as a traveller-pioneer as far back as 1962 when my parents and I moved to the next town, and helped form the first Baha’i locally elected body in that little town in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe.

I was a matriculation student at the time, in ’62, had just finished my last season on the mound. I can look back and see the lines and sinews of that narrow line even into my early childhood in the late 1940s. I try in so many different ways in my writing, in my poetry, to focus on the forging of my soul, my spirit, my life, on the anvil of experience and suffering. 

I also write, though, of many other topics and themes; for there has been so much more than suffering in my 7 decades on this earth. There has been joy and the rich cultural attainments of the mind. -Ron Price with thanks to Mary Dearborn, *The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller*, Harper and Collins, London, 1991, p. 311.

Your program today, Philip, stimulated the prose-poem below, written before my evening meal today and after LNL---4:05 to 5:00 p.m. I am an optimist, too, like Rose, but the tempest ahead, as Henry Miller points out in my quotation from him below, is going to do a great deal of blowing in the decades ahead. Such is my view which i send to you for your possible reading pleasure.

Thanking you yet again
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Ron Price
George Town Tasmania
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REGIME CHANGE

Stanley Hoffmann(192, the founder of Harvard's Centre for European Studies in 1968, said in his review of *The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States and Regime /Change*(2011) by John Owen that: “This volume is far more ambitious and proves that--as in world politics itself--ideas and historical understanding are more important than accumulations of numbers."

Another book about “the clash of ideas” is an eBook, a collection of essays, entitled: *The Clash of Ideas-The Ideological Battles that Made the Modern World--And Will Shape the Future.* It is drawn from the archives of Foreign Affairs published by the Council on Foreign Relations since 1922. 

These essays trace the ideological battles of the past century and the evolution of the modern order. The authors include: Harold Laski, Victor Chernov, Paul Scheffer, William Henry Chamberlin, Giovanni Gentile, Erich Koch-Weser, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Isaiah Berlin, Benedetto Croce, Leon Trotsky, C. H. McIlwain, Alvin Hansen and C. P. Kindleberger, Geoffrey Crowther, David Saposs, G. John Ikenberry, Azar Gat, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, and Nancy Birdsall and Francis ***uyama.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, also founded in 1922, as The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, is a leading independent, nonpartisan organization committed to influencing the discourse on global issues through contributions to opinion and policy formation, leadership dialogue, and public learning.-Ron Price with thanks to Philip Adams for his interview with Gideon Rose editor of Foreign Affairs magazine on “LNL,” *ABC Radio National*, 8 February 2012.

The sea was not calm to-night. 
The tide was full and the moon 
was fair.1 The Sea of Faith was 
full of the worst with an endless
passionate intensity; the best still
lacked all conviction, & ignorant 
armies still clashed at night & day.

1922 was a very big year seeing
as it did the routinization of that
charismatic Force as Max Weber
called it in his complex but fresh
sociology of religion about 1910
when Virginia Woolf said the old
world ended little did she know.

That latest of Abrahamic religions,2
little did they know, so quietly, so
unobtrusively, except in old Iran
where one of modern history’s
many blood baths took place,
lending a special poignancy to
a new Centre, as all old centres
would not hold over time, those3
outworn shibboleths, and that 
planetization of the ancient land 
evolved sensibly & insensibly, a 
curious inevitability while we, ill-
equipped to interpret the social 
commotion at play throughout the 
globe as it sank deeper into that 
slough of despond which, as C.W. 
Mills said so long ago,4 liberalism 
and socialism could not in any way 
save us from that tempest ahead.5

1 Mathew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach
2 The Baha’i Faith
3 W.B. Yeats’ prophetic poem of 1920 The Second Coming about the centre not holding among other topics.
3 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959.

4 “When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is complete,” wrote American writer Henry Miller in 1941, “another set of destructions will set in. And it will be far more drastic, far more terrible, than the destruction which we are now witnessing in the midst of this global war. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world crumble.”1-Ron Price with thanks to 1Henry Miller in *The Phoenix and the Ashes,* Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p.55.
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THE CURRENT OF LIFE

The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called for a literature of "diaries and autobiographies"1 instead of novels. The twentieth century American writer, Henry Miller, endorsed this idea in an effort to open himself to the "whole dammed current of life". Miller was trying to make of the chaos about him "an order which was his own." He was also trying to affirm the inner light of selfhood against the darkness, the slaughterhouse, the cancer of the world, the collapse of traditions, the breakdown of connections between the self and the great and complex social milieu, as well as the disappearance of modes of authority outside the self.

This "inner light" and "order" which Miller sought and affirmed is also at the centre of my work, but the light and order that I seek and manifest are derived from "the verses of God that have been received"2 by me over some 60 years. Emerson's call for 'diaries and autobiographies' at the dawn of the Baha'i Era has not gone unheeded. The last 170 years has seen a plethora of these genres. My literary effort is part of the response to Emerson's call, my desire to open myself to the whole "damned current of life." -Ron Price with thanks to 1Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self:" *Psychic Survival in Troubled Times,* WW Norton, NY, 1984, p.134; and 2 Baha'u'llah, *Baha'i Prayers, *USA, 1985, frontispiece.

Inventorying and stylizing myself,
daily events, life's events, the dizzy 
world going by, a manipulation of 
details with the status of facts, & no 
bare chronicle of fact, creating…and
defining, self, world and my religion.

In the end I’m producing my life by an 
infinite chain of signifiers & constructs:
therapeutic self-discovery, just spinning 
a yarn,1 as it were, in the current of life.

1 Lynda Scott, "Similarities Between Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing,"* Deep South, *Vol.3 No.2, Winter 1997.

Ron Price
13/5/’01 to 14/4/’13.
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A WORK OF ART

Henry Miller wrote that “only when we are truly alone does the fullness and richness of life reveal itself to us.”1 I would add that the presence, the existence, of the social side of life makes for the value of the solitary side. There is an essential polarity that is at the core of the experience of oneness. There are also other essential realities that are part of this same experience of oneness: the abstract nature of life, the interrelatedness of all creatures, the omnipresence of life, transcendence, the notion of germination and the concept of divinity. 

Guy Murchie describes these several ‘mysteries of life’ in a rich texture of analysis and example.2 These mysteries are part of my progression toward a felt unity; they are the underpinnings, the context, of my woes and tribulations. For one of the great principles through which these mysteries are manifested is suffering: with fire We test the gold.3 Part of this unity, too, is the sense of common purpose arrived at individually. 

Finally, I have created what for me is a new life in this prose and poetry. I can create more. I can understand more. But I feel it can come to an end at any time, as can my life. I cling to it no more. I have made of myself, as Gordon writes, a work of art. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Henry Miller in *The Mind and Art of Henry Miller*, William Gordon, Jonathan Cape, London, 1968, p. 193; 2 Guy Murchie, *The Seven Mysteries of Life*, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1978; 3 Baha’u’llah,* The Baha’i Writings;* and 4 William Gordon, *op.cit.*, p.191.

And I pass from my art to my life,
for art is only a means to life, & it
points the way, a necessary means,
as I learn to think, to feel, in a new 
way, an educated way, in my own 
way which took many many years 
to form as I slowly threw myself 
into a poetic current, voluntarily,
perhaps of necessity, giving myself 
up to the experience as it became so
automatic, with a new certitude, and
a new anchorage which is difficult to 
describe yet subsists and exudes from 
everything that I have lived & written.

Ron Price
14/8/’00 to 14/4/’13.
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BREAKING THROUGH

"The idea of modern total war," writes sociologist Robert Nisbet, "was born in the famous decree of the National Convention, August 23, 1793." This decree resulted in the creation of a mass army, a citizen army, the first in human history in France. Karl von Clausewitz's book On War followed forty years after. 

Clausewitz wrote, according to Nisbet, "the single most influential book written in modern times on war" in the years 1817 to 1827. *On War,* a book on strategy and tactics, on the philosophy of war and the relation between society and the individual, was begun one hundred years before another book on war, a spiritual war, *The Tablets of the Divine Plan*. 

In 1793, too, Shaykh Ahmad left his home in Bahrain to begin the process of that spiritual, that total war, a war of quite a different character, characterized in those Tablets by what you might call 'a military metaphor.'-Ron Price with thanks to 1Robert Nisbet, *The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought, *Heinemann, London, 1973, p.70.

Sharper than blades of steel
and hotter than summer heat,
placed somewhere inside,
pervasive, subtle, natural
as the weather, unassuming,
unobtrusive, you'd never know
or guess that this was war.

Reposing on that green Isle
of Faithfulness in that place
of honour in the central square,
a crystal concentrate of exquisite
power---slowly the people came,
citizens from everywhere, feeling
its intolerable beauty, growing
accustomed to its ways. This was
no temperate, limited engagement,
no indecisive contest, a gentle war,
silent, you would not have called it
war or death, but life, ideal forces,
lordly confirmations, rushing from
hidden ramparts, strong fortifications,
impregnable castles razed to the ground,
unbeknownst, the lines of the legions
breaking through, & breaking through.

Ron Price 
1/10/’02 to 14/4/’13.
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KAHLO

Part 1:

Dying as she did in 1954, as a new type of war was beginning to spread across the Earth, a war described succinctly by one Henry Miller during the heart of WW2 as follows: "When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is complete, another set of destructions will set in. And it will be far more drastic, far more terrible, than the destruction which we are now witnessing. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world crumble."

Miller was, as far as I know, the first to get away with using that “f” word in his trilogy: *Sexus, Plexus and Nexus *back in the 1950s and early 1960s. I was just finishing my baseball career at the time, trying to make it with girls, and not very successfully, and getting into a religion for the first time, a religion that was claiming much from me, a much I was not sure I wanted to give. It was also a religion which was and is claiming to be the youngest of the world’s great religions, especially the Abrahamic religions.

Part 2:

Anyway, by 1954, Frida Kahlo’s artistic life on this Earth was over. Her war with life--and she loved life--although was not particularly enamoured of the painful elements of the war she had to endure, was over. Her art remains and, like a number of artists in our world of inflation especially since 1973, it gets prices in the millions of dollars. There is much to say about her art. But for this entry in AAF in the Winter Contest, this will suffice.
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FISH AND CHIPS

This evening, as I waited for my fish and chips to be cooked in a deli in Beauty Point, Tasmania, I bought a copy of Henry Miller’s novel *Sexus. * I had always been intrigued by Miller’s flattering comments about the Baha’i Faith. He was, as far as I know, the only significant post-war American novelist to say complimentary things about the Cause in the first three decades after WW2.1 

I had spent the day at a Baha’i devotional meeting and my mind felt stimulated, although a little tired. There was the usual wide selection of magazines but, in the corner, perhaps a dozen second-hand books were spread thinly on a wide shelf. 

I approached the books not expecting to find anything; indeed, the corner of the deli was poorly lit and rather tired looking. Sexus only cost $3.00, was published in the UK in 1962 and in the USA in 1965. This UK edition had been travelling around English speaking countries since the beginning of my travelling-pioneering life. 

I had a ten dollar bill; the fish and chips cost $7.00. It seemed like this purchase was meant to be, as they say.-Ron Price with appreciation to Henry Miller in *The Phoenix and the Ashes, *Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald, 1985, p.55. 

I don’t think I’ve bought a book
in a deli in years, maybe ever.
In fact, I don’t think of books
and delis in the same breath.

Although back in Belmont, I1 
I put a copy of a special book, 
Baha’u’llah, in about a dozen 
of the delis all over the suburb.

I’d read a good deal about this 
Mr Henry Miller, but have never 
owned any of his books &, since 
his work is an autobiographical 
wrestle with world, flesh, devil 
& angel, I thought I might learn 
a little something for my own 
autobiography and my struggle 
with world, flesh, devil & angel.2

Ron Price
2/4/’00 to 14/4/’00.

1 In the Belmont Baha’i community one of my contributions to the teaching effort was to place this ‘proclamation book’ in as many ‘shops’ as possible. I placed nearly twenty copies one year.
2 Miller’s autobiographical trilogy, of which* Sexus* was the first book, took his life to about 1960. My work starts about 1960. * Sexus *takes his life to the late forties; my autobiography starts in the late forties. Together we cover the twentieth century autobiographically.
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THE SECRET-AGENT MAN

When I was in my teens or late childhood, at some time during the years 1953 to 1959, my mother told me that my father had been in “the secret service.” I had no idea what that meant for the only evidence I had was a long knife that he kept in the basement. It was more like a cross between a knife and some thrusting instrument about a foot long. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, before or since. I’d seen a few who-dun-its on TV, the first generation of this genre in the 1950s. So I had some distant, some imagined idea what my dad might have done. For he never talked about it and I never asked him.

As the years went by and my life as a Baha’i pioneer went from decade to decade, epoch to epoch, early adulthood to late adulthood, I often felt as if I was in some kind of “secret service” as well. What my father had joined during or after WW1, I had joined in 1959 at the start of a different kind of war, a war, American writer Henry Miller said would be far worse than the first two.

Virtually no one knew my game plan, no one knew much about the spiritual war I was part of. Like my father I rarely, if ever, talked about it. I kept it all under my hat, so to speak. I played the role of: father, husband, teacher, taxi driver, editor, writer, but the secret I possessed was rarely revealed, except by indirection–Ron Price, *Pioneering Over Four Epochs,* July 12th 2005.

It was not out of a desire
to keep a lid on it that this 
secret was kept year after 
year, as the epochs flowed 
on. I was only coming to
understand it myself, this
war to end all wars or so I
was told, and read about.

And, of course, not everything
that a man knoweth can ever be
disclosed, nor is it timely, nor is
it suited to the hearer’s ears, and
this refined & sophisticated tact
seems to take a lifetime to learn 
both in and out of that new war.

And now, here, I talk to myself
and try to regain what I have lost,
covered, overlaid by familiarity’s
veil and time’s grey sheath where 
my father has been these forty 
winters, where love alters and 
grows with its brief hours and 
years and where some secret, 
some mystic transformation 
transmuteth the souls of men.

Ron Price
12/7/’05 to 14/4/’13.
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A HIGHLY CRITICAL PHASE

The years of my teen age life, 1957 to 1964, were the years of the movement to abolish the censorship of literature in the USA. The movement was successful. The two books central to the issue were *Lady Chatterley’s Lover* by D.H. Lawrence and *Tropic of Cancer* by Henry Miller. In June 1964 the Supreme Court declared the *Tropic of Cancer *not obscene. It was the end of an era for the old censorship war. 

In September 1962 Miller moved down from Big Sure, the mountain in California where he had lived for seventeen years.1 It was an end of an era for Miller. Miller saw writing as a struggle with the tyranny of silence. If Beckett scratched the silence, as he said he did, Miller put a scar on it. Price’s intent was to leave a trace, a mark, that would last forever. Miller, it is interesting to conclude, was impressed with the Baha’is in Wilmette and said that he thought the Baha’i Faith would increase in strength in the next hundred years.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Robert Ferguson,* Henry Miller: A Life*, Hutchinson, London, 1991.

I went pioneering, Henry,
just before you moved from
Big Sur with your battle just 
about over and new ones on 
the horizon1 and mine, too, 
Henry, mine too. I was just
heading for pioneering: phase 
one, a complex, a little mix of 
towns, teen age passion, and
depression, mild hypomania, 
death in the family, and nearly 
losing it all through intellectual 
battles and aloneness in those 
days when we were just entering 
a highly critical phase in this era 
of transition, so wrote our leader..2

Ron Price
11/5/’99 to 14/4/’13.
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1 Henry Miller became quite rich when the censorship laws allowed his books onto the market. His new wealth brought him new problems after 1962.
2 Universal House of Justice, Letter to Baha’i Youth, 10 June 1966. What we were just entering, the House pointed out in October 1967, sixteen months later, was ‘the dark heart of this age of transition.’
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