382
P' ARTI
1
SAN REVIEW
has an Umbilicus!
There is, nevertheless, an element of novelty in Miller's nightmare-–
novelty, that is, as far as the average American bad dream is concerned.
He makes his protest from the standpoint of the artist and bohemjan,
whose sufferings are ignored in the popular version of our
cauchemar.
It is a serious indictment (better expressed in his
New R epublic
letters
and
Plight of the Creative Artist in the U.S.A.)
and there is much
truth in it. But it is the truth of the self-sufficient man, a little smug in
his righteousness, who doesn't have to take account of more than
he
al–
ready knows. He is at once spokesman and poseur ("I prefer cordu–
roys") ; he is honest while he fakes and a faker in his honesty, and has
not been able to resist playing the lion to all the woolly cubs, and creating
a cult with each angry swish of his tail. Perhaps the greatest homage
one can pay him is not to take him too seriously.
The limitations of bohemianism are all too obvious. (Miller himself
may be aware of some of
them-vide The Colossus of Maroussi.
Or was
'that the supreme bohemian effort, the gesture at faith?) H e has nothing
'to say of American society and politics that his pose and his gesture have
not already summarized. Anything not fully covered by his pose is in–
cluded in his prayer for the immediate destruction of civilization-a
device whereby silence can be made
to
say everything.
But despite the persistence of his bohemian, grimace, Miller shows
signs of softening up. He has heart-to-heart talks with convicts, painters,
children, desert rats, automobile mechanics, etc. (spoiling some of these
passages, as he frequently spoils the best of his pieces, by running off
a surrealist coda, or indulging himself in the delight of the obvious
moral he has drawn). His conversations, and his witty or whimsical
moods, when he forgets about his toothsome snarl and lets himself go,
are better than what one expects of travel-talk, and there are some
occasional pages of tl-:e simple, lively prose that he does so very well.
Miller, you sometimes begin to feel, is really the homey sort.
It may be the onset of age, or in some way the effect of America,
but Miller back-at-home is not the same old Henry. The image he
created for himself, among the despairing ecstasies of
Tropic of Cancer,
of a man, flashlight in hand, peering down a vagina, is hard to connect
with the motorist peering through a windshield. It may be because
America is everything he says it is, the very same sterile horror (how
else account for the Miller cults?) that his indictment bears no weight.
He falls so readily into the American stride, the tricky, self-advertising
gait, that he becomes merely a conscious citizen, disgusted by his society,
but by no means dissociated from it. Miller, the decultured man, can
thrive 'only on the ruins of ancient cultures. Without traditional or
classic setting, his pose is no more than another American eccentricity.
I sAAC RosENFELD
