Word: sexus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SEXUS by Henry Miller. 634 pages Grove...
There is something to be said (but not much) for any writer who can think up titles like Sexus, Plexus and Nexus. The names chime like a singing commercial piped by Priapean elves, all trying to jolly the reader into putting up once more with that old boudoir Bolshevik, Henry Miller, the Lenin of the dirty-word revolution...
Warm Bathtub. Sexus has a 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...
...into the man who could write the intricately lyrical Alexandria Quartet novels. Miller admires Durrell generously, but learns nothing from him and remains his own adolescent. The young Durrell revised The Black Book for the fourth time in a manful effort to "demillerise it." But when Miller's Sexus was published, Durrell cabled him: "SEXUS DISGRACEFULLY BAD WILL COMPLETELY RUIN REPUTATION UNLESS WITHDRAWN REVISED." In an accompanying letter, he scolded his master: "The moral vulgarity of so much of it is artistically painful . . . The new mystical outlines are lost, lost ... in this shower of lavatory filth which no longer...
...soiled laundry. But he is also the author most often skipped. That is to say, the almost unvarying gait for getting through one of Miller's books is: read four pages, skip four pages. Cynics will suggest that this is because the dirty passages in the Tropics or Sexus, Nexus and Plexus come at four-page intervals. This is shallow thinking. Actually the canny reader skips through Miller not so much to concentrate on naughtiness as to avoid what comes between. What does is ill-written blather on one of two subjects: 1) the downtrodden state of artists...