By and About Henry Miller
KENEE, FRANCES
By and About Henry Miller By Frances Keene "There is a truly seasonal quality about Henry's writings: the words and sentences bud, blossom and ripen into fruit, at the appointed time. In this...
...Taken together with the autobiographical parts of The Time of the Assassins2, it would seem to constitute a pretty fair picture of how a major literary force (and even the most recalcitrant must admit Miller is one) got that way...
...The collection should be bought by those who know Miller for the introduction alone...
...Signel...
...3.00...
...Though you may quarrel with a few loose definitions like that on page 71 in which he so wildly identifies the genius with the undisciplined as to rule out an Einstein, a Freud, a Stravinsky, an Eliot the essays are rich, thoughtful and...
...These stories and fragments, taken from several book-including the excellent Colossus of Maroussi, have been presented by Kenneth Rexroth, one of the few straight-thinking and creative critics we have...
...contempt if he renounces the power to move us, his medium becomes worthless...
...And what Miller writes of the "professional rebel" occurs over and over in different forms in his work: "What he wants above all is his common humanity, his powers of adoration and reverence...
...essential for an understanding of Miller...
...he does not want to be forever a fish out of water...
...as Miller calls it in his introduction...
...Surely some of the joyous reminiscenses will make a handful of today's conservatives (yesterday's rebels with Perles and Miller) whirl in their contour chairs...
...How exact it is, how biographically complete, is not too important to ascertain...
...The reissue by New Directions of The Time of the Assassins, Miller's two naked and powerful essays on Rimbaud, is cause for rejoicing...
...New Directions, 163 pp...
...By Henry Miller...
...the artist, in a world become blindly acquisitive and competitive...
...By Henry Miller...
...This is, of course, preeminently true of Miller in our time...
...it was far more stable and enduring than the rainbow, and it was at the same time destructive of hope and of longing...
...It is interesting that in the last category, of six entries only two are issued by American publishers...
...The bridge was for me a means of reinstating myself in the universal stream...
...for the rebel above all men it is necessary to know love, to give it even more than to receive it, and to be it even more than to give it...
...And at last there is that Mediterranean womb of beauty, Poros Harbor: "This is one of the lowest moments in the history of the human race...
...And there follows a definition of Perles's main attraction for Miller...
...Perles's book1 has liveliness, devotion, occasional flashes of critical insight like the foregoing, and it is highly readable...
...they are content simply to call themselves such...
...May they come, may they disembark, may they stay and rest awhile in peace...
...In this sense, his books are natural phenomena, but nature in the virginal state, without trace of...
...artifical irrigation...
...Amen...
...He adds, "Is it really non-fiction...
...All subjects of biographies or attempted biographies should have a chance to say why they knew and kept on knowing that fellow in the first place...
...2 The Time of the Assassins...
...By Alfeed Perles, John Day, 255 pp...
...It was a shadow of disapproval, silent and insidious, like a poison slowly injected into the veins...
...3 Nights of force and Laughter...
...4.00...
...After the war, they met again this time in Spain and eventually Perles came to this country and settled in with Miller and his wife at Big Sur to write "this droll piece of non-fiction...
...Signet brought out a fair sampling of Miller last fall in Nights of Love and Laughter3, the first crack the mass public in this country will have had at an inexpensive peep-show of Millers material...
...Perles first met Miller in 1920 and knew him up hill and down dale for a decade, until Miller returned to this country in 1938...
...There is much wisdom in the piece on The Brooklyn Bridge and one remembers Brooklyn was home base for Miller's turbulent youth when he writes: "I was seeking a link which would bind me to the past...
...It is not surprising that Miller identifies to the extent he does with Rimbaud...
...vend son ame.'' In writing of Rimbaud, Miller says long overdue things about certain contemporary poets: "The modern poet seems to turn his back on his audience, as if he held it in...
...On almost every page there is some sharp analysis of the plight of the creative man...
...Dreamer and man of action, he is both at once...
...They have not proved themselves poets...
...The hideous, masterful documentary, Astrological Fricassee, is the party to end all parties, with its types so indelibly drawn that the reader winces as he lives through it...
...0.25...
...The book's value is that it gives a running account of Miller becoming a writer...
...He is sick of standing alone...
...Let the world have its bath of blood I will cling to Poros I can see the whole human race searching for egress into the world of light and beauty...
...Perles is, according to Miller, capable of "dispensing this most precious of all gifts absolution...
...143 pp...
...Dichotomy is hard to cope with, yet "tout homme qui n'accepte pas les conditions de sa vie...
...1 My Friend, Henry Miller...
...it seems to me...
...So Alfred Perles writes of the creative process as he witnessed it daily in his great and good friend, Henry Miller...
...Our poets are jealous of the name but show no disposition to accept the responsibility of their office...
...They justify their impotence by deliberately making themselves unintelligible...
...Yet] I repeat I am not sad...
...He writes of the poet: "The one side of his life is just as fabulous as the other...
...A literary service somewhat overdue (at least I don't know as complete a job available anywhere) is the inclusion of a bibliography which covers Miller's works in chronological order (cum translations), prefaces by Miller to the works of others, books which contain stories or essays by Miller, and lists of books and brochures about Miller, with a list of "a few books in which there are essays about Henry Miller...
...Lovely tribute to the authenticity of the relationship, and to Miller's knowledge of self: Who would need this built-in absolution more than a man who has written, "I felt [my mother's] shadow across my path constantly...
Vol. 39 • June 1956 • No. 23
