FICTION
CHRONICLE
it is this thorough and exquisite honesty that distinguishes Bellow's
writing.
Elizabeth Hardwick
OlD SOUL MAD AGAINE
REMEMBER TO REMEMBER. By Henry Mi ller. Volume II of The Air-Con·
ditioned Nightmore. New Directions. $3.75.
(
Each new book by Henry Miller sends me back to
Tropic of
Cancer
to find out what I could ever have seen in the man. And each
time it is hard to stop reading that book: as hard as it is to finish any–
thing he has written since. What has happened?
Only a psychologist, of course, could supply a conclusive answer;
but some literary formulations may at least justify the question. To begin
with,
Tropic of Cancer
is objective; it is
there,
a brute fact. Miller's
later writings--even the best of them,
Black Spring
and
The Colossus of
M aroussi-are
more in the nature of gestures. Sometimes, indeed, they
verge on the gesticulation, the posture. They are, in short, willed re–
sponses to experience, rather than spontaneous statements of it. Let me
illustrate-strictly
a
la Miller.
In
Tropic of Cancer,
Paris sidewalk urinals
are part of the scenery, written into the book. In
Black Spring,
his second
book, they are written about, the subject of an essay. A brilliant and
charming one, but an essay none the less. Again, in
Tropic of Cancer
he can say about Paris: "She is like a whore. From a distance she seems
ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five
minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked."
Compare this-a momentary feeling, of course, but there and written
in-with the paeans to Paris in
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
The
whore is an angel now, even though a fallen one; and I do not feel that
Miller is at his ease among angels. On their side, yes; but anybody can
be
that. In his current dreams and visions of universal peace, change
of heart, heroic sculpture in San Francisco, Miller resembles the person
about whom Walter Pater remarked: "He does remind me of, well,
a steam engine stuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic."
Besides, and because of, the objectivity (objectness, thingitude)
of
Tropic of Cancer,
there is its style: fresh, buoyant, effortless. Even
in its meditative sections-rapid, brief evocations of decay and doom,
such as still appear, but swollen to intolerable length, in his later books
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