The Cosmological Eye

By 1939 Miller was famous in America mostly as a rumor — the author of books you had to smuggle past customs. James Laughlin, the Harvard student who had founded New Directions three years earlier on Ezra Pound's advice, solved the problem sideways: gather the legally printable Miller — pieces from Black Spring and the Obelisk collection Max and the White Phagocytes — into one volume and let the country meet the voice, if not yet the novels.

The gathering is the Paris workshop in cross-section: 'Max,' the story of a desperate Jewish refugee Miller half helps and half studies, and can't shake; 'Via Dieppe-Newhaven,' the deadpan account of being turned back from England as an undesirable; and the title essay, a portrait of his Villa Seurat neighbor, the painter Hans Reichel, whose watercolors seemed to Miller to look at the world with a cosmological eye. It stayed in print while the Tropics stayed banned — for two decades, for most American readers, this book was Henry Miller.

Stories, essays, and portraits from the Paris decade, arranged like a night of Villa Seurat talk. The anchors: 'Max,' Miller's unsettling, self-indicting story of a refugee he befriends in Montparnasse; 'Via Dieppe-Newhaven,' the comic-humiliating tale of his failed channel crossing, refused at the English border with francs in his pocket and no good answers; 'The Tailor Shop,' Brooklyn boyhood among his father's cutters and pressers; and the title essay on the painter Hans Reichel. Around them, shorter pieces — dream texts, polemics, an autobiographical note — that read like the novels with the plot removed and the voltage kept.

It asks to be read the way collections of this era do: not straight through, but a piece a night. 'Max' first, if you want the strongest dose.