Just Being
Art and Outrage. By Alfred Perles and Lawrence Durrell. (Putnam, 10s. 6d.) 'HE himself seems to me essentially a man of one book. Sooner or later I should expect him to descend into unintelligibility or into charlatanism.' The book was Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, published in 1934, and Orwell was writing about it six years later. Time has largely confirmed his diagnosis, but it would have needed a fortune- teller rather than a critic to foresee the none the less steady and unabashed growth of a legend to which these latest exercises in hagiography bring their small accretions of anecdotes and surmise. Mr. Miller himself—and this has often been seen as his most engaging quality—is as unabashed as his following. In Art and Outrage, a series of letters ostensibly exchanged by 'Larry' and 'Fred' on the master's contribution to life and literature, he can't resist—as the resident guru of Big Sur— some exuberant interventions: `. . . all the young, and often the old too, are unanimous in writing of the therapeutic value of my work. . . . They thank me, bless me, bless me for "just being," as they often say.' Mr. Durrell begins, in a richly Cynaran vein ('the little tin vespasienne with its ads for Quinquina still stands at the road-junc- tion'), by condoning and expanding the implica- tions of this. Mr. Perks finds critical qualifications irrelevant : the man who gave him 'the facts of life, a language, a mode of expression'—the only reflection of this linguistic dowry would seem to be a spray of four-letter words—is a genius.
But, as the inconclusive debating about inten-
tions, Zen and prudery jerks along, a sort of rhetoric shadow-boxing with its own effects, a noticeable change comes over the first fervours. Mr. Durrell lets slip : '1 felt he had taken all the data about himself as equally important simply because it happened to him' (anyone who has ever tried to wade through the incredibly dull and ingenuous Books in My Life, to the French edition of which was solemnly appended a list of some 5,000 'books read,' will know how central this criticism is to Miller's case); and Mr. Perles, as if suddenly goaded, lashes out at his 'facile je-neen-foutisme. For, after all, man is not really a lily-in-the-field and can't live like one.' If Miller has to be allowed some form of genius, these little books would suggest it is a genius for inspiring affection : he has directness, a gift of the gab, and an instinct for happiness. But it looks as if 'dear Fred' may have had enough for the moment of Henry's obsessive presentation of him as the funniest thing on God's earth. The two Reunion pamphlets, also masquerading as 'letters,' are pointlessly personal descriptions of meetings in Barcelona, London and Big Sur : all one is likely to carry away from Miller's is the appalling rumble of incessant laughter. `All through Spain I laughed, all of us laughed, whenever your name was mentioned.' Poor Fred!
JOHN COLEMAN
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