All Gravy
The Best of Henry Miller. Edited by Lawrence Durrell. (Heinemann, 30s.) 'I AM a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on.' From the gargantuan autobiography of Miller's published works Mr. Durrell has culled some 400 pages and prefaced them with an introduction in which he compares him to Whitman and Blake. Miller himself points out that for those who still have questions there is a Henry Miller Literary Society in Minneapolis. He stares out from the chic cover, a faintly gleeful lama. How on earth is it, one wonders, that he has managed to involve so many people, such heated partisanship, in the processes of his life? 'I am not establishing values: I defecate and nourish,' he says elsewhere and there's a good deal of shrewdness in the comment: in his early books, at least, he dealt in an original reassuring honesty. He has rarely been interested in tidying life into art. And the best things here have this raggedness, an uncouthness of total recall. There is the farcical account of schoolmastering in terrible Dijon; the story of his return home to a dying father after years as an expatriate; a flat, funny piece about a motor-car. Friends and
acquaintances—tragic Max, clowning Perles- come quite alive. He is always liable to knock off a startlingly evocative paragraph (the paragraph seems to be his hit-or-miss unit, and not the sen- tence). But how sadly much of his 'best' is very bad indeed, even in this pruned assortment. The self-indulgences accumulate as he modulates from an anecdote into careless surrealism or wild utopian prophecies: in some of the essays solemnly reproduced he reads like nothing so much as a beatnik's Norman Vincent Peale. His 'Aphorisms' are either stale or near-nonsense.
And it is all a great pity—that he should now be so pinnacled in wisdom—because he also emerges as a gay, courageous man with a vivid eye. The true Miller simply rejoiced, in Black Spring. its all gravy, even the urinal.'
JOHN COLL-MAN
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