Sunday After the War

By 1944 Miller was in California, broke as ever, and New Directions kept the flame with miscellanies like this one — a Sunday drawer of the war years. Most of it is the familiar mix: portraits, polemics, pages on art and peace written while the world burned. But the reason the book survives is 'Reunion in Brooklyn': in 1940, back from Europe, Miller returned to his parents' house in the Fourteenth Ward — the failing father he had mocked in print, the implacable mother, the damaged sister — and wrote down what a decade of distance let him finally see. No performance, no doctrine; just the exile standing in the old parlor, measuring what his freedom had cost the people who stayed.

The volume also printed excerpts from the vast autobiographical project Miller had been circling for years — the first public glimpses of what would surface in Paris in 1949 as Sexus. Read now, the collection is a core sample of the in-between Miller: after Paris, before Big Sur, holding the pieces of a life mid-air.

A wartime gathering: 'Reunion in Brooklyn,' the long homecoming essay that anchors the book; portraits and appreciations from the California years; meditations on art, war, and peace; and excerpts from the unpublished Rosy Crucifixion — the June-and-New-York epic Miller had been building since Paris, here breaking the surface for the first time.

Come for 'Reunion in Brooklyn'; it stands with anything he wrote. The rest is the workshop floor of the middle years — uneven by design, alive in flashes.