The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller
Miller leaves Greece for America on 28 December. With the world crashing into war, he draft s The Colossus of Maroussi, a paean to cross-national, multi-lingual friendship, to Greece, to peace. An idealized yet real portrait of Greece and the Greek character. Restlessly, still professing to believe that the war has nothing to do with him, Miller sets out on his year-long tour of the United States with the avowed intention of writing a parallel panegyric to his native land. He is appalled at what he sees, and he sets down his thoughts with blazing honesty. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is a book so vitriolic toward American civilization that Miller withdraws it from publication, even though it was contracted for by New Directions. He does not wish to—or dare to—so criticize his country in the midst of a desperate war. He would write a sequel, Remember to Remember, two years later.
Long before The Air-Conditioned Nightmare finally appeared, Miller had found refuge on Partington Ridge in Big Sur, south of San Francisco, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The man who had lived most of his life in cities, in Brooklyn and in the Fourteenth Arondissement in Paris, the confirmed urban dweller who liked to claim that the soul thrived on garbage cans, now found himself in wild isolation, living in an abandoned convict’s cabin, without heating system, without running water, without close neighbors. It was Greece that enabled him to make this transition. Like the Greek women carrying water up the goat trails from the springs, Miller now had to carry or drag all his supplies up a sand-and-stone trail from the Pacific coastal highway. In hot weather he stripped bare to a thong to do this, like some ancient Hellenic athlete.
Daily from the thin walls of the cabin came the clatter of Miller’s typewriter. Perhaps recalling Durrell’s cry of “Rosicrucian!” on seeing the Pleiades through the powerful telescope in Athens, he launched into his long-promised vast trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion, the Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus volumes. Literary criticism may not have dealt favorably with the trilogy—even Miller’s great friend Durrell urged him to withdraw and revise Sexus—yet in it Miller finally finished writing the June saga, his life with and inspired by her. If she had indeed pointed him in the direction of Delphi and the Rosicrucians, that direction turned out to be nearly the whole of his creative life: after The Rosy Crucifixion, he had neither the energy nor the inspiration for further revelations. And his trip to Greece, climaxing at Delphi, inspired Henry’s greatest non-fiction, The Colossus of Maroussi.
* For a good account read the “Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the U.S., 1922,” published by the Department of State in 1938, Vol. 2.
* Warning to this effect: the public is urgently requested not to display any undue emotion upon the presentation of these horripilating scenes. They might as well have added: remember, these are only Chinese, not French citizens.
Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi
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