DM: Was Miller's work influential?

WE: Not in any stylistical way. What Miller taught me was ... how shall I put it? Not just the desirability, but the necessity of going-for-broke. And not just in the aesthetic sense.

With both Jeffers and Lawrence there was always the primacy of the aesthetic. Traditional literary values were used to orient the mind into violational areas, sexual explicitness subsumed in the aesthetic intuition. Miller taught me the truth of going-for-broke even without the blessing of the aesthetic. Just the raw force of language humping you through, that preaesthetic draft into the unconscious, the sexual surcharge lifted out of the pornographic, not by aesthetics as other writers had done, but by the naked energy invested in language itself. That alone. I never attempted it for myself, but at last I began to realize what was possible. With those three masters behind me I was set up for the work I had to do.