Bohemia on the Coast

...As befits such accomplished personalities and their Bohemia which is of the open spaces rather than of some alleys in a city, esthetic ennervation is out of the question...

...He still is a provocative individual whose destiny it is to continue putting the whole of his relation to life before us...

...He even has a more important assurance, psychically speaking...

...He still reminds himself to wrap a book for someone in a faded water color, for people, as he notes, "develop an appreciation for that which is tossed away...

...Once trifles, they now sell as legitimate works...

...among others there are Ralph the misfit, occasional visitors idle and stupid, Harvey who has trouble writing freely, Eric whose poetry is esteemed by John Cowper Powys and Robinson Jeffers, Roga-way absolutely unconcerned about the work of the world, Neiman who hears the sort of music Shelley thought best...

...Nearly every one," so goes his report, "seems to be a specialist in some field, be it art, archeology, linguistics, symbolism, Dianetics, Zen Buddhism or Irish folklore...

...Surely this is the reaction of a man who is untutored in Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Dadaism, seedy studios, dives, brothels, and the like...

...he has not come to the Englishman's acceptance of duty, but he does see life now from a more common perspective...

...Called a tottering ignoramus and an example of the pathology of isolation, he has also been hailed as an exemplar of anarcho-estheticism and a figure to take a place between Whitman and Melville...

...In a word, life is as real and earnest to him now at Big Sur as it ever was to that genteel Easterner who wrote The Psalm of Life, and who would have been so despised in Miller's former emotional states...

...It was no longer Moricand I was facing but Satan himself...

...Though he fails in significant particulars, his work as a whole, like that of many great predecessors, rises into something massive and successful...

...With each additional book his contribution becomes clearer...

...They are a motley lot...

...They are a unique lot...

...They were perverse, sadistic, sacrilegious...

...Quarterly," "The Personalist" That coast, as every movie fan knows, is the one on the Pacific...

...Whichever judgment is chosen depends on one's prepossessions...

...It is now, for those who live it...

...Or, taking a look at the creative correlative for these limitations, that he has lost his fancy for calculated effusions...

...The change goes better with a man who has young children to take care of, who has perhaps begun to realize, even if he has not admitted it, that the grubby little parents considered sponges or butts these many years have a very valid reason of their own for being what they are...

...I must confess the drawings left a bad taste in my mouth...

...There are his water colors, for example...

...His education in this respect is like George Orwell's in Keep the Aspidistra Flying...

...It has been no easy task and it is not strange that he should have aroused conflicting views about himself as man and writer...

...If it becomes another Chamber of Commerce showplace, credit will have to go to Henry Miller, whose residence there has marked it as Steinbeck has the Salinas Valley or Robinson Jeffers has Monterey...

...Almost wistfully on one occasion he writes, "What a pity that ours is not a society which permits a man to squander his days and rewards him—with a crust of bread and a thimbleful of whiskey—for keeping his tail clear of trouble and ennui...

...Children being raped by lubricious monsters, virgins practicing all manner of illicit intercourse, nuns defiling themselves with sacred objects...

...Though failure to succeed still gets Miller's sympathy, it no longer is his arrogant patent for privilege...

...Miller's other books need but this assurance: The present work, because it marks a development from rebellion to acceptance and so gives another plane to the vast portrait of himself that he has never ceased writing, deserves a place in the procession that is highlighted by early members like The Tropic of Cancer and The Cosmological Eye and such later ones as The Books in My Life and The Time of the Assassins...

...It is, nevertheless, the reaction of the new Miller, citizen of Big Sur...

...He is properly stern, then, when he sounds this call for further members to the brotherhood: "If you have an intellect, bring it with you, but not the rubbish that usually goes with it...

...He still has his recipe for making a touch, and can be very happy about the good things he gets...

...It informs his presentation of those he comes in contact with...

...Those who have read Mr...

...To the present reviewer, whose persuasion is favorable, Miller is a phenomenon...

...This does not mean that the poseur in him is wholly gone...

...Miller rhapsodizes, "I can visualize multitudes living where now there are only a few scattered families...

...By "rubbish" he no doubt means that squalid behavior and superficial creativity which make up, as he has seen for himself, so much of the existence in Greenwich Villages or Montparnasses...

...As for the news, it is nothing less than that the millennium which 15th-century Hieronymous Bosch prefigured in The Garden of Earthly Delights can be achieved, if one has a mind to do so, in the hills and valleys of Big Sur...

...At this stage, unexpectedly enough, Puritanisms of his long submerged rise to the surface...

...What is noticeable on the credit side, however, is that at last he finds himself accepted by society...

...Miller's way of looking at things is pervasive...

...Yes," Mr...

...This process of outsider turning insider represents no diminution in Miller...

...His description of himself at work on a water color or his playing with the meaning of parsley in art are manipulations of effect as opportunistic as his endless use of scatological terms...

...The Bohemia—it is better than a dozen years old today—is at Big Sur, an area about midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles...

...It is no adulator of anarchistic privilege that pens the following but a horrified father of a child that could be the object of similar despoiling: "As he uttered these words, I felt my hair stand on end...

...The only paradise, after all...

...But then it will be another paradise, one in which all share, all participate...

...This place can be a paradise...

...Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch celebrates first Miller's neighbors...

...When all is said and done," continues Miller's report, "there remains the inescapable fact that to keep a footing here taxes all one's resources...

...Indeed, it is more than a presumption that when he broke with Moricand it was not only because the Frenchman was a leech with an extraordinary itch and basically unconvertible to a self-sustaining program in the new paradise, but also because in an unguarded moment the mangy diabolist had revealed an exploit which featured an attack on a little girl...

...When it comes to his older art, writing, he knows well that what he puts forth is going to have an audience not only at home but abroad...

...Is there not warrant in the way so many seek him out that he can achieve his earliest and most consistent dream of himself, that of being a wisdom-giver to all and sundry...

...Or that the panhandler he has been so long is finished with...

...There is room here for thousands upon thousands to come...

...This may be the voice we have heard before but its intent is different, and well that it is...

...How else explain how a writer of a host of questionable matters should speak as he does now in the big set piece of this book (the section that deals with Conrad Moricand) : "It was my first view of his work...

...It is that from his exposure to the wayward about him and within him, being a human creature completely open to experience and an artist dedicated insatiably to creation, he is producing a picaresque autobiography of the soul which is autochthonous yet valid the world over...