Young Master Surpasses His Idol

The Durrell Miller Letters 1935-80.  Edited by Ian S. MacNiven.  New Directions.  528 pp. ****1/2

In 1935, 23-year-old Lawrence Durrell wrote Henry Miller a fan letter about his novel Tropic of Cancer, which he had either found discarded in a public lavatory (the story he told) or was lent by a friend.  “It strikes me as the only really man-sized piece of work which this century can really boast of.  It’s a howling triumph from the word go; and not only is it a literary and artistic smack on the bell for everyone, but it really gets down on paper the blood and bowels of our time.”  He was writing to a 44-year-old man who up to then had had no literary success whatsoever, and whose book would be banned in his own country for many more years.  He was also writing to one of the great letter writers of his day.

I read in one Miller biography, in fact, that Miller began his writing day with letters, then moved on to literary work, as if the letters were primary.  Actually, in a way, all of Miller’s work is letters, long anguished or euphoric letters to the world talking about how things are for him now or how they were many years ago.  I’ve read various volumes of his correspondence, and much of his published work, and it’s pretty much all of a piece, just Henry Miller talking.  The man could talk to anyone.

There was an earlier volume of Miller-Durrell letters, published when both men were alive; I vividly remember finding and checking it out from the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh when I was a teenager (mid-sixties) and Miller’s banned books were just being published.  He was famous by that time, and would soon be rich (though neither Miller nor Durrell ever seemed to feel rich; they always talked poor, even when they weren’t).  I checked the book out and didn’t read most of the Durrell letters.  I just wanted to read Miller, who was one of my heroes.

Actually, Durrell was the true artist and the real novelist, though he started as a poet and took years to find his voice.  As early as 1937, he was talking about a project that he called The Book of the Dead (he had an early connection with Tibet, having been born near the Himalayas).  He kept giving reasons why he couldn’t begin it, though they sounded spurious.  He sounded like one of the legions of people who talk about a book but never get around to doing it, but that wasn’t the case.  He was a compulsive scribbler who somehow knew the project wasn’t ripe.  Finally, in his early forties, he wrote the book, which became four novels, The Alexandria Quartet.  It made him famous.  And though Henry Miller was a one of a kind person in the world of letters, and knocked down the barriers to a certain kind of unbridled (and often obscene) writing, the Quartet was greater than anything he ever did.

(In those early days when I was such a Miller fan, I went off to Duke University and met Professor Wallace Fowlie, who would be a huge influence on my life.  He’s mentioned in the Miller Durrell letters, and in Miller’s letters to Anais Nin, because he was the man who had opened English speakers to the world of Rimbaud, with both his criticism and translations.  On the first night we had dinner—he was the old fashioned kind of professor, who got to know his students—he took me back to his tiny apartment and showed me his correspondence from Miller, some of which included Miller’s photograph in the letterhead.  “If I survive him, I hope to publish these some day,” he said.  And he did.[1])

It is somehow amazing to me that now, fifty years later, I’ve stumbled into reading The Alexandria Quartet, and am reading the letters with the opposite emphasis.  I love Henry Miller’s letters, but feel as if I’ve read them all before.  I focused on Durrell, looking for clues about his great work.

The creative energy of these men leaps off the page.  Jim Harrison used to say that he read Henry Miller when he needed a jolt of life force (I’ve often read Harrison for the same reason) and this correspondence gives us such a jolt, especially in these times that seem so unprecedented and perilous.  Both men lived through difficult times themselves (we can forget, or just not know, what it was like to live through the Second World War and the Cold War that followed), but they continued to create.  They had fertile and fallow times, but external circumstances never stopped them.

They were great fans of each other’s work, but did sometimes disagree.  The most famous time came rather early, before Durrell had achieved any kind of notoriety; he saw the proofs of Sexus and believed the book would ruin Miller’s career.  (That was the book that brought me to Miller.  After spending my whole youth reading about sex in the tepid crap that had been produced in the fifties—John O’Hara was my go-to guy—to see Henry Miller throw over the traces and write about it in hugely obscene detail, as if he actually enjoyed it, was liberating.[2])  Durrell first wrote a long letter, then a telegram.  SEXUS DISGRACEFULLY BAD WILL COMPLETELY RUIN REPUTATION UNLESS WITHDRAWN REVISED.

Remarkably—the man had an ego as big as the Ritz—Miller was fine with his young friend’s opinion.  He was actually fine with the possibility that Durrell was right.  He wanted to write about that part of his life and would do it even if it did ruin his reputation (what reputation, he might have asked).  He was writing about the Rosy Crucifixion—his torrid relationship with June Miller—that produced his eventual resurrection, when he fled Brooklyn for Paris and wrote Tropic of Cancer, his most original book.

In a way Miller paid Durrell back years later with his reaction—utterly bewildering to me—to Clea.  He had never warmed to Pursewarden, whom I eventually saw as the central character of the Quartet.  He didn’t find him convincing as a great writer, thought Darley and Keats (?) were the real writers.  He loved Nessim, and Narouz, and Leila, who hardly appear in Clea.  I felt he missed the whole point.

The two men also have a hilarious disagreement about Jack Kerouac, Miller pro and Durrell con.  More than anything they write to each other, this disagreement spells out their aesthetic differences.  Durrell thought Kerouac was hdiarrhea on the page.  Miller probably saw in the man his literary nephew, freewheeling and open.

The book they disagreed about, interestingly, was Dharma Bums.  Both men had a thing for the East, Durrell because he had encountered Tibetan culture in his birthplace, Miller who all his life had had a spiritual bent despite the obscenity, who maintained all along that he was writing not about sex but about liberation, and who in later years became a kind of Big Sur guru, abandoning his taboo-breaking obscenity.  There are many fascinating asides in these letters about spiritual subjects, including the fact that Durrell recommended yoga to the insomniac Miller and said that he practiced himself for an hour every day (and could do a headstand with his legs in the lotus position.  Picture that, all you Durrell fans).  Spiritual and religious concerns penetrate Durrell’s work, though not in a conventional way.  That’s one reason his work fascinates me.

Miller—twenty years his senior—was unfortunately in poor health toward the end of this volume, constantly complaining of various ailments (but still full of life force).  Finally the men had plenty of money but Miller couldn’t travel comfortably, so they didn’t see each other as much as they might have.  The two men went through a dizzying number of wives through the years, especially Miller.  He had a proclivity for falling in love; Durrell kept say, that doesn’t mean you have to marry her!  But the old man wouldn’t listen.

The final letter in the volume, fittingly, is Miller to Durrell.  He dictates because he can no longer write, knows he’s dying and says as much.  He doesn’t believe death is the end; any number of his spiritual heroes had told him as much, especially Marie Corelli (Queen Victoria’s favorite novelist), whom he kept reading at the end.  Durrell may have been away, because he never replied to that missive.  Miller died about a month later.

The correspondence they left behind is a treasure.  Writers will turn to it for inspiration for years.

[1] He didn’t actually wait until Miller died.  Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie 1943-1972.  Grove Press.

[2] At the same time, I understand later feminist objections to his work.  Miller actually adored women, but was a man of his times.  The MeToo movement would tear both of these men to shreds.