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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when Miller's Sexus was published, Durrell cabled him: "SEXUS DISGRACEFULLY BAD WILL COMPLETELY RUIN REPUTATION UNLESS WITHDRAWN REVISED."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.