The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) by Henry Miller: A blissful travelogue

How can one escape the gloom and dejection that dominate modern literature? Why, by reading Henry Miller of course. We are told that happiness writes white and perhaps it does, but isn Miller’s case it’s a supernal, brilliant white and I could use more of it. As the second World War erupted, pushing 50 and fancying a break after two decades of writing, Miller travelled to Greece to visit his young friend Lawrence Durrell. The luminous, blissful book that resulted from his transformative time there was Miller’s favourite of his own works and it may be mine too.

I’ve never read a book with so much light in it, wherein dazzle and radiance become theme and narrative. The light “is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy”. The Colossus of Maroussi is a travelogue penned when the planet still was lonely, or at least not yet black with Instagrammers, and one could encounter a place virginally so that it might even inspire a spiritual rebirth. The landscapes that overwhelm Miller’s senses are ultimately emotional and metaphysical. His vision of Greece is generous to the point of sentimentalism, but he idealises it so as to denounce by contrast the sick American way of life he could see debasing the world in its own image. (“I can’t stand this idea, which is rooted in the minds of little peoples, that America is the hope of the world.”)

Miller had an Olympian sense of himself, but in its sweetness and light Maroussi bears less of the mystic-surrealist bombast to which he was prone. He liked himself a great deal, and persuades us to like him too – we want to keep travelling, drinking, swimming, laughing in his company. After a climactic visit to an ego-boosting Armenian soothsayer in Athens, Miller determines that he will transcend the art that was was only ever training for his true masterpiece: life. Maroussi is his ode to joy and panegyric to generosity: from here on in he would use his immense, Whitmanian self for good.

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