The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller

Joy is at the core of all of Miller's major works. In all his works, he repeats the same anti-bourgeoisie refrain: I am poor as a tramp, I have no possessions, no responsibilities, no job, no assurance of anything, and - because of that - I am the happiest man alive. These tend to make the reader happy as well it certainly makes us wish we were there with him. There are serene passages about wandering the streets, broke and happy. his love affair with all things French: the food, the wine, the bums, the streets, the doorways, the art, the hunger, the angers, the loves, the senses. For he jammed all his raucous lust in those earlier books because he jammed in everything else as well.

Miller was so infamous for his earlier works that people continually missed the point. It's not only Miller's misanthropic picture of Christmas that does it, it's the lavish piling on of adjectives that gives such a fine twist to his style. To me at least it was really beginning to look like Christmas - that is to say, sour, moth-eaten, bilious, crapulous, worm-eaten, mildewed, imbecilic, pusillanimous and completely gaga. But the lights were splendiferous! In fact, the illumination was so brilliant that the food began to look hallucinatingly enticing.'

This is his tale of a Christmas dinner in Athens: 'The food was abominable. When gets in on one of his riffs, you feel like a puppy that has been picked up by the scruff, tossed this way and that until the gods finally decide to put you down. 'Tis a pity because Miller was and remains an extraordinary writer.

They were so deliriously inflamed with indelicate passages that they were banned in America and England for over thirty years, appearing only in France through the 'Traveller's Companion' series out of Paris, sold under-the-counter and to me just before I came back to America, where my malfeasance was discovered by a vigilant customs agent, who roundly scolded me for my 'taste in literature.'

Henry Miller probably shot himself in the foot with his earliest (and possibly greatest) books, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. New York City (where he grew up), Paris (where he lived for twenty years), California (where he died.) Only in the frantic disorder of his beloved Greece. What he sought and found on the Greek Isles could never be possible anywhere else. mostly by reviling America of the 1930s and 1940s. Henry Miller was the master stylist, but he kept himself out of style.

The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller