Landscapes into Fish

Novelist Henry Miller, a Paris expatriate when the going was good, is famed for his ability to write obscenities that are disgusting rather than pornographic. Last week in broadminded Paris, his onetime refuge, an anti-vice organization was trying to ban his books. And in Monterey, Calif., where he now finds the going better, a less familiar Miller talent was on display: his watercolors.

Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare), who looks like a bald Irish politician, has been puttering at watercolors for 20 years, but privily. He first displayed his stuff in a Greenwich Village bar, more recently in Santa Barbara, Calif., in London and at Yale.

Since he moved to the Big Sur country near Carmel, Calif, in 1943, he has become the hero of a group of neo-bohemians who live in tents and huts along the nearby highways, talking and practicing Freud and D. H. Lawrence, and letting their willing women keep house and hold jobs. In Harper's Magazine this month, Mildred Edie Brady calls the Miller devotees "the new cult of sex and anarchy"; their bible, says she, is a book by Wilhelm Reich entitled Function of the Orgasm (says Henry Miller, who claims no responsibility for the cult: "A boring, deadly book"). When they can find the time, most of the cultists paint, whether they can or not.

Miller's own watercolors are full of gabled doors, heavenly bodies (he believes in astrology), female sex symbols, eyes("I'm not perverse, but the idea of looking through a keyhole . . . fascinates me"), and echoes of Paul Klee and Abraham Rattner.

Except for convinced members of the Miller coterie, most of the 600 visitors to the Miller art show felt that Henry's latest nightmares were badly in need of airconditioning. Only seven pictures were sold. Among those who did not consider the exhibition very good: Henry Miller. "When I paint I have a lot of fun," he explained, "but I feel I'm on a tight rope. I'm jittery. Sometimes when I start out vaguely to do a landscape I end up with a fish. I worried about this until other painters said they do the same thing."

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