Aphrodite Ascending

THE HAPPY ROCK: A BOOK ABOUT HENRY MILLER--Published by Bern Porter ($5).

THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE (Volume I)--Henry Miller--New Directions ($3.50).

In The Happy Rock, which is printed on pink, orange, blue and saffron paper, 30 intellectuals, of whom most people never heard, pay tribute to a U.S. writer, whom most people have never read. The subject of their encomiums is ex-expatriate Author Henry Miller.

One of Miller's admirers likens him to Lord Nelson, another to a "sledgehammer." "When I say that [he] is a saint." says one, "I do not mean, of course, that he is a saint unilaterally." Other effusions: "He is not just one animal but the whole zoo"; "He is the common denominator of man"; "When he goes to sleep, it is like . . . Aphrodite ascending"; "He has returned to the womb bearing great gifts." A surrealist mingles caution with admiration: "To Henry Miller. . . . Don't let the amphibious wife strangle you with a nightgown. It isn't decent with an orange."

Born (1891) in Yorkville (Manhattan's Sudetenland), and raised in Brooklyn, Henry Miller spent his young manhood being an employe of Atlas Portland Cement Co., a theosophist, a tailor's helper (in his father's shop), a mail sorter, a Western Union messenger, a speakeasy operator. In Paris, where he settled in 1930 "to study vice," he worked at panhandling and slept on park benches. He also wrote his best work, a swatch of unabashed autobiographical writings (Tropic of Cancer; Tropic of Capricorn and others), and several volumes of second-rate philosophy with first-rate titles (What Are You Going to Do About Alf? ; Money and How It Gets that Way; Max and the White Phagocytes).

Most of these books fell afoul of U.S. obscenity laws. But pirated editions ap peared in the more literate U.S. drawing rooms. Soon, not only a band of hysterical disciples and a handful of choosy intellectuals (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Osbert Sitwell, Edmund Wilson) regarded Miller as a talented writer with a flair for outrageous humor. Said the sobersided Satur day Review of Literature: Miller is "the largest force lately risen on the horizon of American letters."

Ferocious & Funny. Readers of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare may wonder what all the shouting is about. The book reports Miller's recent tour of the U.S.

As in most of his books, the prime beef is liberally pieced out with baloney. But the observation is often keen and clinical, the virulence both ferocious and funny.

Miller's U.S. tour began in 1940, when he landed at Boston ("A vast jumbled waste created by prehuman or subhuman monsters in a delirium of greed. ... It was a bad beginning"). In New York City ("the most horrible place on God's earth"), Miller bought a car, drove through the Holland Tunnel ("that damned hole") on "the beginning of the endless nightmare."

Chicago was "a vast, unorganized lunatic asylum." There Author Miller saw an Indian, in full regalia, selling snake oil in the shadow of "the great monument to chewing-gum lit up by floodlights." On a wall was chalked, in letters ten feet high: GOOD NEWS! GOD IS LOVE! In Milwaukee and St. Louis (where "the true morbidity of the American soul finds its outlet"), the houses "seemed to have been decorated with rust, blood, tears, sweat, bile, rheum and elephant dung." Pittsburgh was "the crucible where all values are reduced to slag." Detroit "can do in a week for the white man what the South couldn't do in 100 years to the Negro." "The most typical American city" was Cleveland. "Possessing all the . . . prerequisites for life, it remains . . . dead."

Ghoulish Sororities. Americans, Author Miller found, were much like their cities. The young men were "mild, bland, pseudo-serious ... as though turned out by a university with the aid of a chain-store cloak and suit house." The middle-aged were "puffy, wattle-faced, [filling] the land with prosperous, restless, empty-headed, idle-handed widows who gang together in ghoulish sororities. . . ." The aged were "horrible living examples of the embalmer's art."

"The most boring group in all communities were the university professors--and their wives." American mural paintings were "even below the esthetic level of the Arrow collar artist." The work of 1941's successful applicants for Guggenheim Fellowships included: "The recording, translating and annotating of the Hudhud, a series of epics chanted as work songs and at death wakes by the Ifugaos, a pagan, terrace-building people of the Philippine Islands"; "A comparative cyto-histological study of the meri-stems of buds and of tropical ferns, gym-nosperms and woody angiosperms"; "A comparative investigation of the neuropsychological determinants of the phenomena of dissociation"; "A spectroscopic study and analysis of gases of the volcano Mauna Loa." Says Miller (who was refused a Guggenheim): "A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life [in the U.S.] than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still."

Ray of Hope. But one section of his native land pleased Miller: the South. There he discovered America's only "characters." No other people of any age, concludes Author Miller, have woven "such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as 'here in America. . . ." But there is a ray of hope: "We have a few years ahead of us, and then . . . the whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. . . . Fires will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble. Then we shall see who has life, the life more abundant."

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