Books: Aphrodite Ascending

THE HAPPY ROCK: A BOOK ABOUT HENRY MILLER—Published by Bern Porter ($5).

THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE (Volume I)—Henry Miller—New Directions ($3.50).

In The Happy Rock, which is printed on pink, orange, blue and saffron paper, 30 intellectuals, of whom most people never heard, pay tribute to a U.S. writer, whom most people have never read. The subject of their encomiums is ex-expatriate Author Henry Miller.

One of Miller's admirers likens him to Lord Nelson, another to a "sledgehammer." "When I say that [he] is a saint." says one, "I do not mean, of course, that he is a saint unilaterally." Other effusions: "He is not just one animal but the whole zoo"; "He is the common denominator of man"; "When he goes to sleep, it is like . . . Aphrodite ascending"; "He has returned to the womb bearing great gifts." A surrealist mingles caution with admiration: "To Henry Miller. . . . Don't let the amphibious wife strangle you with a nightgown. It isn't decent with an orange."

Born (1891) in Yorkville (Manhattan's Sudetenland), and raised in Brooklyn, Henry Miller spent his young manhood being an employe of Atlas Portland Cement Co., a theosophist, a tailor's helper (in his father's shop), a mail sorter, a Western Union messenger, a speakeasy operator. In Paris, where he settled in 1930 "to study vice," he worked at panhandling and slept on park benches. He also wrote his best work, a swatch of unabashed autobiographical writings (Tropic of Cancer; Tropic of Capricorn and others), and several volumes of second-rate philosophy with first-rate titles (What Are You Going to Do About Alf? ; Money and How It Gets that Way; Max and the White Phagocytes).

Most of these books fell afoul of U.S. obscenity laws. But pirated editions ap peared in the more literate U.S. drawing rooms. Soon, not only a band of hysterical disciples and a handful of choosy intellectuals (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Osbert Sitwell, Edmund Wilson) regarded Miller as a talented writer with a flair for outrageous humor. Said the sobersided Satur day Review of Literature: Miller is "the largest force lately risen on the horizon of American letters."

Ferocious & Funny. Readers of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare may wonder what all the shouting is about. The book reports Miller's recent tour of the U.S.

As in most of his books, the prime beef is liberally pieced out with baloney. But the observation is often keen and clinical, the virulence both ferocious and funny.

Miller's U.S. tour began in 1940, when he landed at Boston ("A vast jumbled waste created by prehuman or subhuman monsters in a delirium of greed. ... It was a bad beginning"). In New York City ("the most horrible place on God's earth"), Miller bought a car, drove through the Holland Tunnel ("that damned hole") on "the beginning of the endless nightmare."