Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

The timing gives the book its flavor: assembled just as the Grove edition of Tropic of Cancer was fighting through the American courts, it presented the scandalous author in his actual late voice — the Big Sur essayist, nearer Thoreau than to the pornographer of the prosecutors' imagination. The Thoreau piece makes the kinship explicit: Miller claims the Concord refusenik as an ancestor in the great American art of declining to participate, and the whole collection elaborates the theme — against schooling that deadens, money that measures nothing, wars and the mentality that supplies them.

The other current is succession. By the early sixties the generation raised on smuggled Tropics had become the Beats, and the collection catches the handoff — most directly in Miller's preface to Kerouac's The Subterraneans, the elder anarch blessing the younger. The title essay distills what the heirs actually inherited: not the sex but the stance — the hummingbird's trick of total intensity without hurry, the busy world declined in favor of the vivid one. Uneven as every late-Miller gathering is, it is the best single window on what the long rebellion had settled into: something very close to serenity, still beating its wings.

Essays and occasions from the forties and fifties: the title meditation on stillness-in-motion; 'Henry David Thoreau,' the ancestor claimed; the preface written for Kerouac's The Subterraneans; pieces on children and education, money, censorship and the fate of books, war and the arts of peace — the late doctrine applied across the American scene, with the autobiographical flashes that keep even his polemics personal.

A browser's book, like all the gatherings: start with the title essay and the Thoreau, and let the rest come as moods.