FROM YOUR CAPRICORN FRIEND

During the last three years of his life, an often-bitter but raunchily vigorous Henry Miller (in California) wrote some affectionate, hyperbolic letters to old New York friend Irving Stettner, editor of the tiny avant-garde magazine Stroker—along with a few prose pieces for the shoestring, Dada-ish publication. In the letters gathered here Miller reports on his eye and heart trouble ("I think it's psychosomatic because I am in the throes of deep love"); he calls up memories of Stettner's Second Ave. neighborhood; he rails against the literary establishment, ponders I. B. Singer's Nobel acceptance speech (as for HM's own Nobel chances, "I'll probably be fucked again"), and salutes the favorite books of his childhood (including Pierre Loti); mostly, however, he encourages Stettner about the magazine—with lavish praise for his poems and water-colors. As for the essays and stories, they're a spotty, mixed handful. A piece called "Memory and Forgettery" has a flicker of Saroyanesque, free-associative charm. ("You can forget Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but not the guy who got you out of a scrape or saved your life with a little chicken feed.") A few childhood reminiscences—especially about theatergoing in Brooklyn circa 1905—are diverting. But the others are Miller at his most self-indulgent: a tribute to friend Tommy Trantino's Lock the Lock ("a huge, a gargantuan piece of shit coming straight from a genius, from his mouth and from his ass-hole"); a wretched short story of male-female relations (men want "cunt," women want love); and a 1968 diatribe against the violence in Bonnie and Clyde—calling instead for "a rash of erotic, pornographic, or obscene films." Minor Miller, to put it generously—but intriguing evidence, nonetheless, of his late-octogenarian zest and warmth.