VARIETY
THOUGHTS OF AN
UNSERIOUS READER
OF EROTICA
In his introduction to the first
American edition of
Tropic of
Cancer,
Karl Shapiro says: "Every
serious reader of erotica has re–
marked about Miller that he is
probably the only author in
his–
tory who writes about such things
with complete ease and natural–
ness." On the grounds that they
write against the background of
religion, Shapiro then dismisses
Rabelais, BoccacciQ, Lawrence and
Joyce-but he is silent about such
men as Aristophanes, Catullus,
Ovid, Petronius, the novelists of
the Olympia Press, John Cleve–
land, and whoever wrote the
Song
of Solomon.
They, of course, are
harder to dismiss, for unless by
"erotica" Shapiro means the use
of dirty words,
Tropic of Cancer
hardly qualifies at all as sexual
literature. (Even
Romeo and Juliet
is more stimulating, and if it ever
gets translated into English,
Shakespeare will have a lot of ex–
plaining to do to the Board of
Education. )
Miller, in fact, never makes his
reader raise more than a blush and,
more often than not, the blush is
for Henry's delusions of grandeur
-as for example when he boasts
to Tania that, having taken on his
six-incher, she will now be able to
take on "stallions, bulls, drakes,
THE DARK COMEDY
by
J.
L. Styan
Much of today's drama defies
the standard labels. Comedy? Trag–
edy?
It
is neither.
It
is the drama of
p ity-tumed-joke and uncleansing
terror, of the uneasy laugh and the
anti-hero.
Mr Styan discusses this dark
paradoxical drama: its fore-shadow–
ings in Shakespeare and Moliere; its
fruition in Ibsen and Chekhov,
in
PirandeIlo, Brecht and Anouilh, in
Beckett, Ionesco, Tennessee Wil–
liams and Pinter. He takes up play
after play, disclosing through them
the techniques, boundaries and aims
of the genre. This is a unique thea–
tre, to be understood and judged on
its own terms. Mr Styan discovers
and illumines the terms, and he gives
the new drama a name, the.
Dark
Comedy.
at your booksellers $5.50
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
32 East 57th St. • New York 22, N. Y.
