Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel

The story, in more detail

Themes and analysis

These readings discuss events throughout the book, including its ending.

A book first addressed to one friend

Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel began as a manuscript written and illustrated for the painter Hans Reichel in 1937–1938. Reichel was part of Miller’s Paris artistic circle. The address to a particular friend gives the work a more intimate starting point than a public treatise explaining art to an anonymous audience.

The mixture of writing and drawing is integral to that address. Miller does not appear only as a novelist borrowing a painter’s reputation: he is also making a visual object for someone with whom artistic practice is a shared concern.

Manuscript, facsimile, and added material

UCLA’s Miller papers preserve evidence of the original work and the later publication process. The finding aid identifies a typescript containing the original text, a postscript, and a French section. It also records the photocopy of the manuscript used for the Loujon edition.

This matters because the published book has more than one historical layer. Its Paris origin belongs to the 1930s; its elaborate small-press presentation and Lawrence Durrell’s introduction belong to the 1960s. Durrell is a contributor to that later framing, not the recipient of Miller’s original manuscript.

Loujon’s interpretation of the manuscript

Loujon Press published the book in Tucson in 1966. Its material design makes the distinction between manuscript and ordinary typeset text unusually visible. Reproductions of handwriting and drawings preserve aspects of the gift that a plain transcription would lose.

The publication can therefore be approached both as a record of friendship and as an example of ambitious independent bookmaking. Its title should not be reduced to a promise of a systematic philosophical argument. The object itself puts different forms of expression together: private address, image, retrospective additions, and an introduction by another writer.

Learning to live

A passage reproduced by the University of Puget Sound's library turns an expected opposition inside out. Miller treats death as something people have learned to accommodate, then asks why living fully remains so difficult. The reversal shifts attention from fear of an ending to the habits that limit life before that ending. It is a provocation within the tribute, not evidence that death is easy or a settled philosophy of how to live.

The same excerpt moves from claims about people in general to questions addressed to a single 'you'. The change of address matters in a work first made for Reichel: a private gift can put a question to later readers without ceasing to be personal. Miller ends the reproduced passage by asking who that addressee is. Its unanswered turn interrupts his pronouncements, leaving identity less orderly than the earlier assertions sound.

Why we recommend it

1. 1

   Friendship as criticism

   Miller’s knowledge of Reichel’s life gives the paintings emotional and philosophical context.

2. 2

   A Loujon landmark

   The press made the tribute one of Miller’s most distinctive physical books.

3. 3

   A friendship preserved in book design

   The illustrated Loujon edition carries the personal tribute into the book’s physical presentation, making its form part of the reading experience.

What this book explores

• The craftWriting about writing — one true sentence at a time.
• Friendship & rivalryMentors, protégés, and the knives that come out in memoirs.
• FreedomLiberty won, withheld, or paid for.
• Culture & literary institutionsPublishers, theatres, prizes, salons and the apparatus that decides what a culture reads.

The people in its pages

• 

  Hans Reichel

  The German painter and Paris friend whose intimate abstractions are the book’s subject.