PARTISAN REVIEW
ignored or badgered by the Philistines. The chapters on Rattner, Bufano,
DeLaney, Varda, and Deeter, and the corresponding parts of the first
volume are among the best things Miller has done since leaving Europe.
Havelock Ellis said that a man is always right in his affirmations, always
wrong in his denials. Certainly Miller's denials-his angry rejections of
certain American values, in which he may be quite right in the usual
sense-are less alive, less right creatively, than his affirmation, possibly
wrong, of the moral and artistic stature of his pet colossi, with its bold
assumption that people will be led to admire them simply by his words
and by photographs of their faces rather than by examples of their
works. As prophet, judge, prosecuting attorney in the trial of civilization,
Miller is a flop. This is less obvious when, as in
Tropic of Cancer,
his
apocalyptic visions are integral to an earthy text. Far too much of the
present book is taken up by "Murder the Murderer," an indictment of
legalized violence as an instrument of policy, along with most other
features of the present scene in international affairs. Among Millerites
this piece seems to have acquired the standing of a great anti-war tract.
It is not great, not anti-war (Miller is all for war as a catalyzer of the
civilization he hates), and less a tract than a stream of semiconsciousness,
a long, loud, and redundant blast of wind, like many let loose by other–
wise able writers to distract from their inadequacy to th demands of
a tough problem. Even a Miller enthusiast writing in the American
number of
Horizon
can find nothing more flattering to say of the intel–
lectual content of this utterance, apart from its courage as an act, than
that "in the simplest terms it said the same thing most radicals had
said five or ten years before."
This brings me to a question which has exercised many of Miller's
critics-the "dated" quality of the views and attitudes expressed in his
American books. What is more stale, in 1947, than "the truth about
American materialism" as told by the Sinclairs and Lewises since 1910,
or the exhilarations of Paris as felt by the Steins and Hemingways in
days that sometimes seem still more remote? Is not the earnest retelling
of these things by Miller a sign of "immaturity," of "protracted
adolescence"? Yes, it is stale and silly, but also
sympathique.
It is some–
thing, after all, to have an American writer who cheerfully admits being
an eternal adolescent (his friends call him an "old soul," he says), and
creates furors in the Hearst press and the pseudo-cultural magazines
simply by being an old-fashioned bohemian. The attitude may be dated,
but Miller's success with it shows that his environment is just as dated,
if not more so. As far as I know, he is the only living American writer
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