BOOKS
85
THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI.
By
Henry Miller. The Colt Press, San
Francisco. $3.50; limited signed $6.00.
The Colt Press has done a beautiful job on this book: fine binding,
elegant (i.e. unobtrusive) type; and a jacket that dawns on one after a
while, blue, white and violent, like Henry Miller's Greece. Colt has done
well, moreover, to print Miller, who is important as a prose-writer and
(though he makes a great to-do about hating America) as a thoroughly
American case.
"Thus Homer lives on. Though I've never read a line of Homer I
believe the Greek of today
is
essentially unchanged.
If
anything he is more
Greek than he ever was." And thus Miller lives on (etc.). He goes to
Greece on the eve of the war, determined to find it miraculous, for he
believes-on
page 84--in living miraculously. He wanders idyllically
from Delphi to Knossus, bestowing on each a spiritual orgasm. "At
Mycenae I walked over the incandescent dead; at Epidaurus I felt a still–
ness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of
the world beat and I understood the meaning of pain and sorrow." Above
all he meets the Colossus, Katsimbalis, who comes through to us in loving
luminous prose, a magnificent figure. (The most obvious point about
Miller's prose, by the way, is that "the meaning of pain and sorrow"
remains bloated and diffuse, like Nashe or Greene throwing a sop to the
censor. But
if
it's the body of a peasant woman, a storm at sea, or a man
named Katsimbalis, the writing tightens up, at once passionate and firm,
charged with a desperate effort to get at something not REAL or COSMIC
but simply real, intensely realized-like Nashe again.) Now all this is
very festive. Greece is the "carrefour of changing humanity," and Miller
has
his genial finger on "the schism between the human and the divine."
(Alas! with his finger on real schisms Miller has a certain obscene power,
but this metaphysical one stretches over pages and pages, arid and empty
as a desert.) In Athens he visits an Armenian soothsayer who confirms an
old suspicion: that he, Miller, is destined to live forever. And he caps his
rendition of this scene with the remark that he felt "chastened," filled with
a "great sense of responsibility." Is this the change of heart so hopefully
announced by Edmund Wilson some months ago? Don't believe it. Miller
seduces no Greeks, steals no silver, expresses the "desire to serve humanity
in
the highest possible way." And since it costs him nothing he gives more
than we ever
asked
for: "I know now what the world is and knowing I
accept it, both the good and evil." But he's no less Miller than he ever was.
It is not simply that he still finds "contradictoriness, confusion, chaos
-all sterling human qualities" (p. 6), that he
is
still infuriated by Logic,
Progress, the Machine, nor even that he has not ceased to look forward
with impatience to "the inevitable destruction of our present civilisation."
To slip from one term to the other of the reject-accept dichotomy requires
no essential change in Miller, because the dichotomy is verbal, unreal, used
only to splash his canvas with the crude tones of love or hatred. His
