'THE HAPPIEST MAN ALIVE'

Of two biographies of Henry Miller to be published in the same month (see Robert Ferguson's Henry Miller, below), this is the easier, more flowing read, though not necessarily the better book. Both Dearborn and Ferguson will the same story from the same sympathetic viewpoint, with Ferguson giving greater detail, a denser page, and more cultural scene-setting. One might fear that Dearborn (Love in the Promised Land, 1988; Pocahontas's Daughters, 1985) will do a feminist hatchet job on the freewheeling satyr whose novels shooed in the sexual revolution (at least in print), but she remains open-spirited about Miller's seeing women in his novels—aside from his second wife, June—as so many vaginas. Dearborn indeed makes clear that Miller suffered heavily from a domineering Nordic mother and wives who victimized him, so much so that he barely knew a woman who wasn't a towering sneak or double-dealer. We follow him through his Brooklyn childhood and early failures as an unpublished novelist; his famed five years as a hiring-and-firing manager for Western Union; the explosively bloody crucifixion of his marriage to June ``Smith'' (born Juliet Edith Smerth); his bottom-dog decade of poverty in Paris that produced his greatest works (aside from Plexus), the shift of real-life, sex-hungry Henry Miller into his novels' fantasy hero, the endlessly priapic ``Henry Miller''; his years of begging in the wilderness of California's Big Sur country; the belated publication of his Tropic novels, banned in the States for 25 years after their first printings in Paris; his fight against being known as the ``King of Smut''—and his hopeless ties with later wives and man-eaters. Dearborn aptly compares Miller's literary life to Walt Whitman's, thinks that sex was an element in his writing that was ``a red herring that misled his readers for years. The theme of his greatest books is survival.'' Smooth, warm, and commendable.