Big Sur-Realism

BIG SUR AND THE ORANGES OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH (404 pp.)--Henry Miller --New Directions ($6.50).

California, said Fred Allen, is all right if you are an orange. Henry (Tropic of Capricorn, Tropic of Cancer) Miller believes that it is even more all right if the oranges are the ones painted by Hieronymus Bosch in his famed Millennium-- enigmatic little cosmological fruit "far more delectable, far more potent, than the Sunkist." For Author Miller is a devotee of the great Dutch painter (c. 1450-1516), who is believed to have been a follower of a heretical order called the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit.

At first sight, Miller's latest book seems less a tract for Free Spirits than a robust piece of promotional prose for some chamber of cultural commerce. Big Sur is an artists' colony near Monterey, and Henry Miller is its leading prophet and pressagent. Like all Miller's books, this one contains great jambalayas of jiggery-pokery about everything under the midnight sun, from atomic stockpiling (anti) to Zulus (pro). But the early passages about Miller at Big Sur--wuffling away at the wild waves, sitting in hot sulphur baths, dragging his groceries a mile and a half in a cart--are attractive to anyone with a notion to get away from it all. Unfortunately, into all such private Edens some pilgrims must come, and the Miller reader knows with a sinking heart that each will be a genius.

Smell of Genius & Sewers. "What a strange lot they were, when I think on it!'' recalls Miller. "Judson Crews of Waco, Texas, one of the first to muscle in, reminded one--because of his shaggy beard and manner of speech--of a latter-day prophet. He lived almost exclusively on peanut butter and wild mustard greens . . ." Some were writers of great books, incomprehensibly without publishers. Another merely "smelled of genius." Another was writing "a chthonian [i.e., from the nether world] drama mirroring the nightmare," etc. Even the man who might put in sewers would do so with a "somnambulistic clairvoyance." Finally there is the zealot nitwit who asks Miller: "What makes the waves go up and down? Can you answer that?"

He cannot, but his one-man band plays on to the rock and roll of the wide Pacific. Amid all the dedicated bores, Miller remains a fascinating character. He is rather proud to find himself an institution of sorts--the No. 1 U.S. Bohemian. One of the most appealing things in his book is his shyly proud report that his correspondence (including a postcard from Mecca) is filed in the special-collections division of the University of Southern California's library, a mass of 10,000 items which must comprise the biggest pile of profound piffle since Greenwich Village's Harvardman Joe Gould compiled his 10 million-word Oral History of Our Time.

Another pleasant thing in the book is the recorded conversation of Miller's children ("You were a thief, weren't you, Dad?" "Well, yes and no. I was a horse thief"). And it should be recorded that the old scourge of the Left Bank weeps when he misses his children and hides marbles lest they swallow them.

Henry the Heretic. What Miller expects his adult readers to swallow could choke a racing camel. Still, the book is a document as well as a preposterous anecdote because it gives a picture (sometimes unconscious) of a recurrent American phenomenon--the Utopian colony. Those at Harmony, Pa. or Oneida, N.Y. were founded by followers of deviate religious sects. These new California sectaries around Miller are no exception. Miller, who rivals Dr. Norman Vincent Peale for thin theology, is preaching a doctrine known along Madison Avenue as togetherness. "The ideal community, in a sense, would be the loose, fluid aggregation of individuals . . . It would be a God-filled community, even if none of its members believed in (a) God. It would be a paradise . . ." Prophet Miller seems to claim precedents in the Essenes, the Albigenses and the heretical underground of Hieronymus Bosch.

It is a fantastic lineage to claim for just another wacky art colony. Nevertheless, a truth is suggested here--a bitter bite from the orange on the tree of knowledge. The vision of an earthly paradise is an ancient delusion. The trouble is not the earth but man. Miller's real estate is magnificent, and the photographs of the Big Sur country are wonderful, but alas, the personnel.

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