Miller was a writer that was very interesting to me as a young man. That make sense, because he’s one of those writers that is best encountered in late adolescence or early adulthood. He’s crass, immature, and sophomoric - yet strangely, his most famous books were all written when he was already well over 30 years old. This particular book finds him a little bit more down to earth than what I remember about his Paris books from the 20s, then again he was just about 50 years old when it was published.

I will say, Miller’s off the cuff, free-wheeling style was light years ahead of its time, so much so that you sometimes have to remind yourself that the events of this book took place at the outset of WWII and written by an author who was born in the 1800s. The character that Miller plays in his writing, the kind of acerbic, sneering self-styled “idiot” who clearly thinks he’s smarter than everyone around him, who boasts of his willful ignorance towards the canonical style/literature that your usual early 20th century writer would be immersed in, this type of guy seems like he is way more common in 2023 than it was back then. In that way, Miller frog hopped over even the Beats, who apparently loved him and were most 30 or 40 years his junior.

For better or worse, it’s always his “ecstatic” moments that stick out for me when I read Miller. He usually starts a scene in the most earthy of realms (he writes about shitting his pants in this book) and almost before you know it, he’s unaccountably rocketed off in the stratosphere, lost in the most abstract, incoherent ramblings about god knows what. It seems to me that his goal is to poke about until he finds someway to launch into this realm - but these parts of his books have always been the most awkward and forced in my opinion. He seems to have a brain jumbled with a hodgepodge of avant-garde critiques of modern man and the modern world that can hardly be said to coalesce, and they read like the confused ramblings of a schizo. One of the worst passages I’ve read in a book in a long time happens like this in Colossus of Marousi, when Miller, for some strange and inexplicable reason decides to launch off into a way too long paean to the popular jazz musicians of that time, written in a kind of literary black face. Definitely could have left that out.

Despite these memorable passages of “transcendance”, Miller is an extremely negative writer, quick to sharply criticize everyone and everything about him that rubs him the wrong way. Now it’s no rare thing that a famous writer is given to a bit of pessimism every now and then; in fact it’s more often the case than not. But something about the way Miller unleashes his disdain just feels catty and mean and worst of all, sort of inarticulate. I sense no real love for other people in him, which is no crime, but he seems to take a perverse pride in this enmity for his fellow man.

All that said, he’s a cool hang when he’s in a good and funny mood. The parts of this book that are pure travelogue are worth admission alone. Good travel writing recounts not only the physical peregrinations of the author but the mental as well. Miller is acutely aware of the fact that he is not only traversing the Greek landscape, he’s also wandering across the Greece he holds in his mind. ( )

OK, this is The Revelation of Henry Miller (in Greece), but don't judge and go along for the ride. You'll want to see that Aegean light and the bloody rocks for yourself.

This edition has a great intro by Will Self who describes Miller as "a compulsive expositor and deranged didact". Hard to argue with that when Miller expounds on Homer while admitting that he's never read a line of the Iliad. The weird part is that the exposition works.

But don't believe me, here is Miller from the last page of the book: "The Greek earth opens before me like the Book of Revelation. I never knew the earth contains so much; I had walked blindfolded, with faltering, hesitant steps; I was proud and arrogant, content to live the false, restricted life of the city man. The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being." ( )

Every time I pick up a Henry Miller book through-out my life it is like meeting up with an old buddy for a long stroll and a gabber. One of the few authors I know well enough to be able to have an internal dialogue with as I’m reading. Just like a conversation over time The Colossus of Maroussi is alive with contradictions and Miller’s flare for embellishing each moment, his literary company is indeed after a few minutes like being “embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the dream which the practiced dreamer slips into like a bone into its socket”. In this book we discover Miller escaping the impending second world war by taking a holiday in Greece. Miller writes that it is his first real vacation in twenty years and that on it he would not do a stroke of work, yet The Colossus of Maroussi was born from that workless period. Miller absorbs everything and so a workless time for him is purely intention and not action. The vacation also allowed Miller some time with his fellow writing pal Lawrence Durrell author of many books, “The Black Book” being the one of greatest interest to me.

So Miller explores Greece, the people and the ancient municipalities and landscape. He is thinking of the Greek people all the time, and of civilisation itself. This being the core of the work, but it is also a reflective piece on humankind and the nature of industrialisation and war. Some wonderful Miller observations like “We have but to melt, to dissolve, to swim in the solution. We are soluble fish and the world is an aquarium” and “It’s good to be just plain happy; it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it”.

One interesting moment was Miller’s visit to a soothsayer who told him that he wouldn’t die but vanish into the light. The forecast and Miller’s last hours are eerily copulative as Miller went back to Paris in the 1930s in his mind and perhaps really did just vanish into the light; his mind anyway.

Colossus of Maroussi is also a ramble on the many characters Henry encounters, and the legendary Greek places that bore the early triumphs of contemporary thoughts. There are a few classic Henry moments pertaining to his perverse wit but it is a book of potential fear, singular emotion and enormous transition from a writer's inner and outer world.
( )

Hardly anyone I have ever met, unless they are a serious Henry Miller devotee or an avid reader of Greek travelogues, has heard of this book.

It's a wild ride, demonstrating both the liveliness of the author, but also how alive the Greece and Greeks he knew were. My memory of it has faded over the something like 30 years (!) since I read it, but I still have a strong impression of light, of dancing, of the castigation of Germans, Americans, and Britons in favor of a more alive southern European type. (Ironically, or perhaps simply pointedly, Miller was 100% German-American.) ( )

Apparently I read torrent of bullshit back in my early 20s; the book is littered with my underlinings and exclamations. That said, i had no recollection of the book, more precisely, there isn't anything to distinguish it from the other open sewers of Miller's ouevre. The entire second section of the book should be purged by the Miller estate. I only (re)read this as it was selected by my friend Roger. ( )