Henry Miller: Three Decades of Criticism ed. by Edward B. Mitchell (review)

REVIEWS Mitchell, Edward B., ed. Henry Miller: Three Decades of Criticism. New York U. Press, 1971. 216 pp. Paper: $2.95. A judicious and thorough assessment of Henry Miller's work is certainly overdue. For this reason, collections of essays about Miller as carefully planned as Edward MitcheU's Three Decades of Criticism contribute significantly toward the serious appraisal of America's literary "rebel-buffoon," as Kingsley Widmer called him. To those already familiar with Miller criticism, however, the coUection inevitably invites comparison with George Wickes' earlier and perhaps livelier Henry Miller andthe Critics. BecauseMitchell chose to organize his book by decades, and in so doing reflect a progress of sorts in Miller studies, he finds himself covering some of the ground already substantially covered by Wickes, especially in his section from the forties. Two importantselections, onebyGeorge Orwell, the other by PhilUp Rahv, appear in both coUections. But if it is part of MitcheU's purpose to isolate in the forties importantissues thatbegin to appear in Miller criticism, one wonders about some of his exclusions. Other overlappings between the two books occur, but the differences between Mitchell's purposes and Wickes' begin to make the contribution of the fourteen essays in Three Decades look somewhat more substantial. Frederick J. Hoffman, for example, is represented in Mitchell's coUection by a longer, better developedselectionthat introduces an early "Freudian" view of MiUer's achievement. Aldous Huxley's "Death and the Baroque," however, only touches on MiUer as an example of a writer who forces us toknow ourselves by the "truthful and penetrating expression in art of . . . thefacts ofsex" (p. 54) and thereby experience a necessary and desolating "knowledgeof theprivate self" (p. 59). Mitchell himself recognizes that this essay is not especially helpful in our assessment of Müler although he believes its inclusion is justified because it is one of the few essays that "links Miller's work with something more than a narrowly literary cult or ism" (p. 4) and points toward an explanation of the "ambivalence and discomfort which Miller's work seems so often to arouse" (p. 5). Whatits inclusion confesses is thatthe ambivalence toward his work is still insufficiently understood. Among the more important assessments of Miller in the fifties is Frank Kermode's "Henry Miller and John Betjeman," representing the considered evaluation of a major critic and outlining a number of tasks the Miller critic musteventually confront. Like other essays in this collection, Kermode poses questions that are a longway from beingsettled in the seventies, although his first, "whether Miller has any significance outside the cult," begins to receive answers in the"reassessment of the sixties" criticism represented in Three Decades. Nevertheless, MiUer's relationship to literary traditions such as the fabliau, the tall story, and the Rabelasian fantasy, the "continental" influences on his work, and the quality of his individual books are problems pointed to by Kermode in the fifties but that remain largely unsolved today. In fact, Kermode's assessment ofMilleras a minorwriter is itself still open to challenge. Drawing our attention to the "Miller problems" is the principal value of MitcheU's collection, a contribution far more important than any sense the reader might acquire of the representative views of any decade. To this end MicheU's own essay, "Artists and Artists: The 'Aesthetics' of Henry Miller," and the selection from William Gordon's The Mind and Art of Henry Miller, have much to recommend them. Both make it possible to 226Reviews speak seriously of Miller's "aesthetics" and his "art" in the seventies. Mitchell does not attempt, as he warns us, to make MiUer into a systematic thinker, but he is concerned to isolate Miller's view of the nature and function of art as these views establish Miller in a particular tradition of "artist-seer." The direction of this inquiry is certainly one that should be continued. The selection from Gordon, which concludes the collection, points at last to an interest in Miller's form, a problem too seldom confronted. Renewed critical interest in such questions as the nature of literary "character" and the nature ofnarrative shouldhave more to say about these problems in the future. But the readers of Three Decades...