Durrell and Miller



Lawrence Durrell



There was a time, many years ago, when Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller were my favorite fiction writers.  Much of the Alexandria Quartet I read aloud to my first wife.  In those days many, including professors of mine in both college and grad school, considered Durrell to be among the top 5 novelists of the 20^th century, but now, barely more than a decade after its close, he seems largely forgotten.  Both writers reflect the desire, evident over the past couple of centuries, to escape ordinary, mundane, everyday reality for some form of hyper-reality, an uber-reality.

 Durrell and Miller were friends.  The climax of their extensive correspondence came when, after reading Sexus, which went beyond the casual obscenity of the Tropics trilogy to outright pornography, Durrell sent Miller a telegram calling it “disgracefully bad,” and insisting that he must withdraw it at once, before it did irreparable damage to his reputation.  As a young man Durrell had decried British prudery, but at this point his own reawakened.  It’s ironic, given his concern for Miller’s reputation, that it would be his own that was sullied by factors beyond his control, such as the suicide of his daughter and subsequent unsubstantiated rumors that he had molested her, while Miller, who treated the matter of his reputation with blithe, cavalier disregard, and who could certainly be accused of gross neglect of his own children, has skated free. 

Henry Miller



Most people think Tropic of Cancer is Miller’s best and I think a solid case may be made for that, but it is the Rosy Crucifixion, of which Sexus is the first volume, that tells the central story of his life, the saga of his escape from a life of drudgery to one of self-realization and some measure of fulfillment, and the price he had to pay for it.  It comes across as more of what Miller essentially is: not a traditional novelist so much as a raconteur who button-holes you in a bar and starts bending your ear. In between the sexual bouts are rants about living on the edge economically, emotionally, and existentially, an approach he believes makes for the fullest, most intense life, because more than just a writer he is the advocate of a mode of living.  It’s a life style few have the courage for, and even he can only manage it with the crutch of a mystical faith that he is “protected,” for to live so nakedly would be too terrifying in a universe of sheer randomness.  He was like everyone else in this respect: he believed what he needed to believe in order to live as he was predisposed to live.

What strikes me most in revisiting these enthusiasms of my youth in the current context of commercial fiction is how original they seem.  Tropic of Cancer and Justine are like no other books before or since; they are sui generis.   In the decades since their release the processes of commercialization, homogenization, and institutionalization, prominent features of the industrial world, have proceeded apace, so that contemporary novels are far more like one another.  For a time art, and literature as art, took the place of religion as a vehicle of would-be transcendence, but now it is just a commodity like any other.  Writers have lost the revolutionary, shamanistic mystique they had in Miller’s youth and been reduced to craftsmen, priests of the system, celebrants of the Mass of consumerism.  This is not so much the result of any imposition from above as it is due to the corruption of the artists themselves: where once they pursued immortality, the veneration of posterity, now they are satisfied with celebrity.  This diminution of aspiration is due to the fact that we no longer believe in posterity; we are living in the moment, amidst the processes of rapid irrelevance.  The only future we can imagine is dystopia. 

The best contemporary work is the best on account of the sheer beauty of the sentences from which it is constructed, not because of any revolutionary ideas it communicates about how we might strive to reach over and beyond the confines of contemporary society or any big insights about the nature of ultimate reality.  Contemporary literary novels are enjoyed for the sheer play of language, not for any meaning they contain.  They are, as it were, gorgeously wrapped empty packages.  The fun is in the unwrapping, not in what is found inside.  Durrell and Miller followed Joyce in the language play line (Miller once said that he hoped one day to write sheer nonsense and some would say he achieved that goal on more than one occasion), but they still had one foot in the old novel-of-ideas camp.  With them it was language and the big idea, language and meaning.  Now it’s just the language.