Volume 5, Number 5 · October 14, 1965
Dry Dreams
By Denis Donoghue
Letters to Anais Nin
by Henry Miller
Putnam, 356 pp., $7.50
Plexus
by Henry Miller
Grove, 640 pp., $1.25
Sexus
by Henry Miller
Grove, 634 pp., $1.25
Nexus
by Henry Miller
Grove, 316 pp., 95 cents
The World of Sex
by Henry Miller
Grove, 125 pp., 75 cents
Quiet Days in Clichy
by Henry Miller
Grove, 154 pp., 75 cents
Henry Miller on Writing
edited by Thomas H. Moore
New Directions, 216 pp., $2.55
There is a passage in Tropic of Cancer in which Henry Miller relishes the plenitude of his inhumanity, the wonder of it. 'Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman' (the italics being his) and the rhetoric wallows on the page with 'skulking skulls,' grinning serpents, and 'ecstasy slimed with excrement.' It is at once magnificent and absurd; magnificent because it challenges absurdity, absurd because it does not survive the encounter. This is Miller's special land: he is sometimes the master and often the slave of a promiscuous rhetoric. A current advertisement for the English rag-newspaper The News of the World reads: All Human Life Is There. This is largely Miller's claim for his oeuvre; and valid at least to this extent, that he keeps on and on, one page spawning another and more where that came from. His books, like his orgasms, beggar description and strain belief.
Review, 2382 words
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