Vidal considers the literary friendship between Lawrence Durrell (Justine) and Henry Miller (Sexus) as outlined in The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80 first by focusing on the dust jacket photo of Durrell, Miller and "Henry Miller's numinous cock." The last of these three "looks slightly exhausted and rather smaller than one recalls it from literature; and yet even in its fragile state one senses that humming hydraulic energy which made it the stuff of legend in the first place."
The two writers first met in Paris in 1937 when Miller, already-acclaimed author of Tropic of Cancer, was 46 and Durrell 25. Dissimilar in background, they were also very different as artists. Miller was, according to Vidal, an American proletarian "who had somehow discovered literature and then, in a.....
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