“For a long time I have sought the justification for Henry [Miller’s] angers, hostilities and revenges. I believed it was a reaction to unusual suffering. So many American writers show this bitterness and hatred.
"But when I compare their lives and suffering with the lives of European writers (Dostoevsky, or Kafka) I find that the Europeans suffered far more, and all knew greater poverty, greater misery, yet they never turned into angry, hostile men like Edward Dahlberg, or Henry. Suffering became transmuted into works of literature, and into compassion. The asthma of Proust, the Siberia of Dostoevsky, contributed to their compassion for humanity. In some American writers any deprivation, any suffering, turns into mutiny, criminal anger and revenge upon others. There is an almost total absence of emotion. They hold society responsible and writing becomes an act of vengeance.
"It seems to me that the answer lay in the attitude towards suffering. To some American writers anything but paradise was unacceptable. To the European it was part of the human condition, and something shared with other human beings.”
–Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume Two