Context
Excursus on War
Marguerite Young
Neither the publisher nor the printer is responsible for or subscribes to, we are warned, the statements made by Henry Miller. Miller’s book is that of an impassioned pacifist and humanist, and it was published while the nations were still engaged in a more tangible war than that which now confronts them, the old war against evil. A year hence, or even now, Miller’s book might well be published with no denial of responsibility from the publisher or the printer. Immediately after a war, a wave of conscientious objection seems always to start. Only the courageous soul can dare to voice his conscientious objection when patriotism and slogan-making fill the atmosphere with a white heat. There is nothing in the least immoral in what Miller has to say on the subject of war and peace. There is nothing even very startling about his statements. Only for the mentality of "Remember Pearl Harbor"—a mentality from which all other complexities had seemingly dropped away—could Miller’s arguments come as a shock. Very few readers will agree with him in all his highly involuted, highly personalized statements. Very few thoughtful readers can deny, however, his basic theme, the cruel, brutal, and meaningless paradoxes of wars and war machineries. The most ardent militarist must be even more acutely aware of these than Miller is.
Murder the Murderer is, if anything, an egregiously idealistic statement, one such as Whitman would have approved of. The book is prefaced by a rhapsodic excerpt from Tagore’s speech in Tokyo, beginning, "In a little flower there is a living power hidden in beauty, which is more potent than a Maxim gun. I believe that in the bird’s notes Nature expresses herself with a force which is greater than that revealed in the deafening roar of the cannonade. I believe that there is an ideal hovering over the earth—an ideal of that Paradise which is not the mere outcome of imagination, but of the ultimate reality towards which all things are moving." And so following. Could even the most old-fashioned idealist, the most old-fashioned optimist ask for more? A teleology thus is given in nature. A plan is set up. We have here an attitude characteristic of the most religious, the most humanistic seers, the belief that design is apparent or ends are immanent in nature, especially nature as a whole—in fact, the vitalist belief that the processes of life—are not exclusively governed by merely mechanical causes and that they are directed toward certain normal entelechies or wholes. As, for example, every acorn wishes to be an oak. Miller, quoting Tagore, does seem to accept Tagore’s mystical pattern of a given universe and, to judge by his later chapters, man’s responsibility for approximating that aboriginal, perhaps divine harmony. So that, with all his apparent radicalism, Miller is a good deal less radical and less thoughtful than Alex Comfort shows himself to be in, for example, The Power House, which is, among other things, the death of the given universe, the death of superreality, the death of that romantic individualism which projects itself among the stars. As between Murder the Murderer and The Power House, the latter is a far more revolutionary document, though written so subtly its publishers perhaps did not understand it well enough to apologize for it. The skeptic’s novel, however, is as enlightening in its own way as J. S. Mill’s essay On Liberty. Miller’s essay, with its basic assumption of unity God-given in nature, is more confused than Comfort’s novel, which assumes no unity. Perhaps the one fault of Miller’s essay is, in fact, its romantic individualism, which also blows trumpets and waves flags.
The first part of Miller’s Murder the Murderer is presented as an "Open Letter to Private Albert Perles," in which Miller expresses his objections to war as he, perhaps an ivory towerist, sees it in the making. The ivory towerist—using the reviewer’s tag, not his own—decides to retire to an ivory bomb shelter for the duration or longer. The second part is entitled more explicitly "Murder the Murderer." That title bears, of course, the profoundest investigation—it is ironical, paradoxical, tragicomic, self-defeated, Swiftian, and perhaps if it had been chosen instead of "Remember Pearl Harbor," we might have had, ideologically speaking, a more enlightened war. In section two, Miller predicts the swat bomb which seems to make all further developments of science a foregone conclusion. Somewhere, in section one or two, he predicts, less accurately, that after the tumult and shouting, cherubic Churchill and Roosevelt, war partners, will make a tour of the graves of our fallen, placing wreaths of roses on their crosses while Pathe News Service grind their many cameras. He was not mistaken about the swat bomb which will eradicate us all, but he was mistaken about Churchill and Roosevelt—and, one cannot help thinking, naive in his attribution of guilt to them or to any other warlord.
Alex Comfort, a man who splits fleas’ eyebrows in his search for the most complex truth, never would retire into name-calling. In his context, not even Hitler is an important name. The Power House—not cited here as a title, but as a symbol of our mechanistic civilization—that is the important name, conditioning us all in all our responses. Those glib reviewers who supposed Comfort was deliberately dealing with the "little" people of depraved France who could assume no responsibility—they gravely misread his meaning, which is, in fact, the death of individualism. Miller, if less romantic, less imbued with the idea that the superman is guilty or even exists and the little men are guiltless, would throw fewer stink bombs in his war against war, his murdering of the murderer. He would realize that his expenditure of emotion is rather wasted—that reason is required, positive, forceful, such as occupies the mind of Alex Comfort at a moment in The Power House more insane, more irrational than Miller’s wildest dreams.
This review of Henry Miller’s Murder the Murderer first appeared in 1945 in the Conscientious Objector. It is collected in Young’s Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews.
