Two Pal Joeys

MY FRIEND HENRY MILLER (255 pp.) --Alfred Perles--John Day ($4).

This book will be read devoutly by the thin cult of aging Americans for whom Henry Miller was the big name in a bohemian pantheon of goofy godlets. For others it has interest as the life record of a literary anarchist of boundless charm and talent but limited good sense, the loosest member of the Lost Generation, who, now 64. has lived these twelve years past as a sage emeritus in an arty enclave at Big Sur, Calif.

Miller's fame rests on Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, jubilantly riotous narratives whose sometimes hilarious smut made them contraband barracks-bag souvenirs of France for countless G.I.s. Tropic of Cancer went off like a time bomb in the literary world of 1934. A generation wearied of polite fiction was offered great gobs of something called Life. Just as history seemed to be jostling Europe to a new war, the author of Tropic offered to abolish history. The book displayed life as a perpetual riot of gabble and rut in which Narrator Miller kept a bouncer's hard eye for anyone likely to break up the party. Its explosion was timely, but the shock wave passed quickly. Now Miller seems as drably dated as one of his favorite writers, H. Rider (She) Haggard, another man who "wrote at the top of his voice."

The King & I. Unfortunately, the same lack of inhibition that lent the gusto of irresponsibility to a natural raconteur has made nonsense of the notion that Miller is a philosopher and a sage. Not to all, however. There are those to whom state ments such as "In America, the artist is ever an outcast, a pariah" do not read like something misprinted on a card given out in a gypsy tearoom. Indeed, there are those--and Alfred Perles. is determined not to be the least--to whom such words, from Miller's larynx, "make one think of cathedral bells."

In this manner, Perles, a Vienna-born writer, makes his bid to be an official court jester and chronologer to the King of Bohemia; he spent five months in his prize panjandrum's presence at Big Sur to put finishing touches to the only autobiography of Henry Miller not written by Henry Miller.

Perles was working for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune when the conjunction took place. With all the avuncular patronage of Dr. Johnson being kind for once to Boswell, Miller says kind things of the first meeting with "my good friend Alf." But like Boswell's initial confrontation with Johnson, it was not a success. "There was no click," Perles confesses sadly. Yet, "was I already under the spell of that personality which was later to manifest itself in his epoch-making books?" Two years later the question was answered. He was--even though Miller "talked through his hat, like an inspired lunatic."

By then Miller was "already a past master in the art of living by his wits." At the Dome and Coupole, Montparnasse haunts of the U.S. expatriate, he talked about death and Dostoevsky and was already veering toward the sort of grandiloquent occultism that today qualifies Miller for a career as a Los Angeles swami, should he tire of Big Sur. Perles lovingly records every drink.

Lost in an Igloo. They made an odd pair. They called each other "Joey"--the Australian word for an infant kangaroo--but there was never doubt as to who was in whose pouch. Perles used to put his name to Miller's early essays for the feature page of the Chicago Tribune--possibly the strangest newspaper collaboration since Marx used to sign Engels' pieces for the New York Tribune. Perles set Miller up to meals and a hotel room, and thus, Perles announces grandly, "the stage was set for the Tropic of Cancer"

Funniest episode: the two Pal Joeys get hold of a magazine called The Booster from a trusting U.S. businessman. Under Perles and Miller, the sheet's literary editors included William Saroyan, and it boasted a Department of Metaphysics and Metempsychosis. The new Booster's second and last issue contained a story of a man who completely vanished inside a beautiful girl in an igloo.

Despite Booster Perles' overpraise. Miller comes through the recital of his preposterous pilgrimage as a lovable figure of intellectual fun.

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