Larry & Henry

LAWRENCE DURRELL AND HENEY MILLER, A PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE (400 pp.)--Dutton ($6.95).

It is not given to every young man to be told by any credible source that he is "a stinking genius."

This heady information was contained in a letter to Lawrence Durrell, when, at 24 and yet unknown to fame, he was a lonely and industrious apprentice novelist on the island of Corfu. What made him keep opening the letter and reading it again and again in the rain was the fact that it was from that self-acknowledged genius Henry Miller, 21 years older and not yet world-famous but already a coterie colossus dangerously engaged in living his autobiography in Paris. Indeed, the younger man regarded Miller as so great that he was "furious that people haven't simply burst in on your privacy and carried you off to found American literature at home." Compared with Tropic of Cancer, wrote Durrell to Miller, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Joyce's Ulysses and Wyndham Lewis' Tarr were "feeble, smudgy rough drafts."

Starting with the first exchange of fan letters in 1935, a correspondence flourished between the two men for almost 25 years. This lively, well-weeded (but unbowdlerized) selection by Editor George Wickes will gratify members of the Miller cult and place the talents of Durrell in the scenes in which they flourished--Corfu, Belgrade, Alexandria and Provence.

The Lowdown. In the early letters, the bombast is most conspicuous. "Skoal to the stanchless flux," young Durrell ends one letter. ''Shakespeare lack'd art" and "wrote from the waist down," he proclaims. Soon, however, it can be learned that Durrell is on to his avuncular admirer. Durrell exhorts Miller to read the Elizabethans for his own good, and Miller in turn--partly because he is writing a 1,000-page exegesis on Hamlet--is humbly asking Durrell for "the lowdown on Hamlet ... I can't bring myself to read the damned thing. But I am very eager to get some penetrative interpretations of it." Durrell obliged, but Hamlet sort of disappeared when Miller wrote about him; it was really Miller on Miller. Durrell might have expected that from a man who admitted: "I am against knowledge. I abhor it. I loathe it. I want to become more and more ignorant, more quiet, more vegetative, more ruminative, more omnivorous, carnivorous, herbivorous. I want to stand still and dance inside ..."

In his own way, Miller has an almost parental concern for his younger friend. He worries that Durrell always seems to have to "work" (which Miller puts in quotation marks as if it were otherwise unprintable)--for a while as British press officer in Belgrade, later in Cairo. "Don't buy any more shoes for baby," Miller pleads. But Durrell's own working contact with the world and reality subtly changes his relationship with Miller so that before long he seems the elder. Silence from Miller is all that Durrell gets when he criticizes left-wing intellectuals who turn up in Yugoslavia and tell their Communist hosts about the decadence of their own countries and cannot see that they are sympathizing with a tyranny "a 100 times worse than Caligula."

Lost Outline. In fact, Durrell learns from both Miller and living, as he develops into the man who could write the intricately lyrical Alexandria Quartet novels. Miller admires Durrell generously, but learns nothing from him and remains his own adolescent. The young Durrell revised The Black Book for the fourth time in a manful effort to "demillerise it." But when Miller's Sexus was published, Durrell cabled him: "SEXUS DISGRACEFULLY BAD WILL COMPLETELY RUIN REPUTATION UNLESS WITHDRAWN REVISED." In an accompanying letter, he scolded his master: "The moral vulgarity of so much of it is artistically painful . . . The new mystical outlines are lost, lost ... in this shower of lavatory filth which no longer seems tonic and bracing, just excrementitious and sad."

With the advent of the U.S. beats, Miller hailed them as his own offspring and sent Durrell a Kerouac novel, observing: "It's good, very good, surpassingly good . .. Kerouac, you see, is just up my street. He swings. Doesn't worry. Good, bad, indifferent .. . Something comes through, writing this way." Durrell can't see it. "Really corny and deeply embarrassing ... and worst of all pretentious," he wrote, and added that he cannot abide "the emptiness of this generation of self-pitying crybabies .. . God or Zen is simply a catchword, as Freud was in our time."

The first flush of mutual admiration survived despite (or because of) 20 years' separation. In the 1950s, Durrell is still telling Miller that he will be "the homegrown doyen of Yankee litcheratewer yet, mark my word," that "the surf-thunder of your prose is the biggest experience of my inner man." But Durrell is also warning: "Beware of cowboy evangelism and Loving Everything and Everybody Everywhere! Or you'll be doing a Carl Sandburg with a portable harp!"

There is little in the exchange that could be called mere gossip. When Durrell's wife leaves him, the fact is briefly noted; and he soon replaces her in the country house in Provence with a French-Alexandrian girl able to type 10,000 words a day. From Big Sur, Miller dryly mentions "Lepska has decamped," but soon he too is being well looked after. Both live their lives of authentic dedication to writing; there is no unpleasant whine about its disciplinary austerities such as disfigure the correspondence of D.H. Lawrence or even the tougher but litigious Joyce.

The letters might have been just an exchange of bombast between a couple of literary bums but for the fact that each man is more than a bit right about the other. Each is touched by genius, each sees literature as a personal manifesto against a hostile world. They are not merely correspondents but confederates.

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