The Last Expatriate

THE SMILE AT THE FOOT OF THE LADDER (125 pp.)--Henry Miller--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($5).

When Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer, came out in Paris in 1931, it was greeted with shocked silence, snickers, or the sound of licking lips. Its admirers took its weedy profusion of four-letter words for daring wit and convention-defying "art." Miller became the hero of Bohemian barflies and Greenwich Villagers everywhere.

Actually, there were two Millers: one was a foul-mouthed exhibitionist who admitted his reputation for using "obscene language more freely and abundantly than any other living writer in the English language"; the other was an exuberant writer with a gift for describing the vividly seamy.

Hyperbole & Profanity. Thus waders along the Tropic of Cancer could find some evidence of real talent there: Miller's portraits of all the phonies he knew in Paris--and he knew plenty--were biting and edged with a wild, outrageous humor.

The books that followed Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn exhibited less dirt--and less talent. Miller overwrote for the sheer sake of verbosity; he made hyperbole into a principle of composition. Everything he described was either incredibly glorious or incredibly distasteful. On a visit to Greece he felt "a stillness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of the world beat. . ." Revisiting the cities of America he found "a vast, unorganized lunatic asylum . . . the most horrible place on God's earth." Critic Alfred Kazin once said of him: "Is there anything more American than the picture of this last and most violent of the expatriates, hating America and all its deeds in torrential profanity, yet worshiping Whitman in the slums of Paris?"

"Yourself, Just Yourself." Like most expatriates, Miller finally came home to the land he despised. Now mellowed and middle-aged (56) and married, he lives with his young third wife and two-year-old daughter near Carmel, Calif. His new book is unlike anything he ever wrote before. Decorated with prints by Chagall, Picasso and Rouault, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder contains not one touch of profanity. It is also written with surprising restraint. The Smile is the story of a clown, Auguste, who throws up his career to find true bliss in just being himself. "To be yourself, just yourself, is a great thing . . . You try neither to be one thing nor another, neither great nor small, neither clever nor maladroit . . ." Auguste's search for his true identity is a dangerous quest and it ends fatally, but not before he has discovered that "perhaps he was all right just as he was . . . The mistake he had made was to go beyond his proper bounds."

Now & again this is a touching little story; but ultimately it is wrecked by Miller's longtime habit of trying to hang too heavy a meaning on too slender a frame. The virtues of economy and precision seem to have dawned on the author too late. Henry Miller's contribution, if any, to 20th Century writing may be that he often illustrates the fatal distance between "self-expression" and the hard discipline of art.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.