Word: miller
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...HENRY MILLER READER (397 pp.)-Edited by Lawrence Durrell-New Directions...
Readers who know Henry Miller only by his reputation as the bogeyman of the U.S. Bureau of Customs generally are surprised to discover that in many ways the man is as moralistic as Cotton Mather, and not much more interested in writing fiction. He seems incapable of composing more than half a dozen pages of narrative without dribbling off into the cosmic. In the present collection-largely a sampling of the literary glue that holds together the naughty passages of such works as Tropic of Cancer, Sexus, and Plexus-he interrupts a reasonably interesting travel piece to proclaim that...
Joyce the Baboon. It is ironic that, for the most part, Miller remembers to be an artist instead of an orator only in the wacky, obscene, and sometimes brilliantly comic passages that make most of his books unmailable-but that will not be found here. Reading Miller in his scurrilous top form is like ending a riotously drunken evening by getting a foot caught in a chamber pot; but such sport cannot be had in this book...
...sentence from one of Miller's most mailable literary essays is typical: "Joyce, the mad baboon, herein gives the works to the patient antlike industry of man which has accumulated about him like an iron ring of dead learning." In a collection of aphorisms, the reader learns that "in life's ledger, there is no such thing as frozen assets." If the sage of Big Sur were to be judged from this book alone, it would be hard to justify Editor Durrell's prophecy that Miller may one day be classed with Whitman and Blake...
Goldilocks the Victim. But even the present volume has its moments. With great glee, Miller lampoons the shock of the American tourist upon first encountering a Paris pissoir, adding: "I do not find it so strange that America placed a urinal in the center of the Paris exhibit at Chicago. I think it belongs there, and I think it a tribute which the French should appreciate. True, there was no need to fly the Tricolor above it." Oddly enough, the best piece is Miller's account of how, a little squiffed from cognac, he told the story of Goldilocks...