Word: miller
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that revolution is all but over: there is no aspect of sex, however recondite, that is not portrayed at length in novels published by respectable U.S. houses and sold freely in bookstores (TIME Essay, April 16). Doggedly, Grove Press continues to issue Miller's novels, long available only abroad or under the counter...
...quality of self-admitted buffoonery; inexhaustible potency and insatiable partners are not part of the real world. It is also horrendous in its details, all relentlessly chronicled in the most basic English. To say that it is monumentally tasteless is to say the obvious; that was clearly Miller's intention. But at least, unlike so much current pornography, it is not homosexual or death-ridden. Many of its 40-odd sexual encounters are just splashings in Miller's warm-bathtub world of woozy friendship...
...Miller's hero, as usual, is called Henry Miller. As usual, he works by day hiring messengers for the Cosmococcic Telegraph Co., while by night, he foozles about Manhattan. He meets Mara, the beautiful dance-hall girl. Zap. He weaves home to his wife. Zap. Back to Mara. Zap, zap, zap. An old girl friend and her roommate. Certainly. Then a girl in a restaurant. And so it zaps, until the reader wishes that either Writer Miller or Hero Miller had spent an occasional evening playing bridge...
Sadist of Clowns. Miller's books alternate between pornography and preachment, sex and soda water; every bed sooner or later seems exposed to an icy draft from The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. He is a comical windbag, but unexpectedly the reader has the opportunity to see which part is comedy and which is windbag. The emphasis shifts away from sex in Plexus and Nexus. Without his fake phallus, Miller is a clown-the sadist of clowns...
Giving him all his due and a bit more, it is clear now that Miller sacrificed himself to the dirty-word revolution. He learned to be an effective pornographer, and for a while this obscured the fact that he had never learned to be a competent novelist or philosopher. Readers do owe Miller a debt; in part because of his writings, it is now possible for an author to ignore sex. What readers do not owe him is a reading. That would be asking too much. While he may no longer be unprintable, he is largely unreadable...