Even more dismaying for his biographer, he declared: "I object in principle to biographies of artists, since I do not believe that knowledge of their private lives sheds any significant light upon their works." In his poem on Henry James, Auden noted that "there are many whose works/ Are in better taste than their lives", and the same might well be said of Auden, much of whose life was lived in a state of extraordinary disarray dominated by his addictions to fags and uppers, boys and booze, and lived out in a state of legendary personal untidiness. "BIOGRAPHIES of writers, whether by themselves or others, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste," wrote W H Auden. Happy birthday, Art.! 'Plain Girl' is published by Methuen, pounds 10; 'I Don't Need You Any More' is published by Minerva, pounds 5.99. It's a start, or anyway a comeback, and now Miller says he has "the feeling I may be able to do some more stories" At 80, he's got a zing in his tail.

At 50 pages, it's barely even a novella, let alone the "novel" the publishers call it on the cover. It's an odd choice to mark the birthday of a man whose career has been notable for its adventure, largeness of spirit and tough realism Never mind. "An entirely utilitarian exercise," he says, but one that taught him an invaluable lesson. Even Timebends, at 600 pages, reads rather sparely.All this may help explain why Plain Girl is so minimalist.

The stuff I like now has the feeling of being intensely edited - like Genesis or the story of Cain and Abel. I'd love to be able to hit the nail on the head like that." Miller once wrote too long, and for drafts of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman used poetry - "verse, anyway" - as a way of paring down. William Trevor, Pritchett and Cheever are best at stories, too. "I haven't kept up with the whole parade," he says, but he mentions "Bellow, Styron, Phil Roth".

(Not Norman Mailer, whose Marilyn he hated for its "grinning vengefulness"). He disapproves of the pressure on fiction-writers to produce monsters: "I like a book you can put in your pocket. Hemingway's short stories are better than any big book he wrote. The woman in "Please Don't Kill Anything" sounds a lot like Marilyn. In these stories written during his middle age, only "Misfits" (later a film starring Marilyn, who killed herself shortly after its completion) seems to be truly thrown free.Miller's taste in fiction, as in drama, is for realism, which he feels has become respectable again. "Fame" recounts a chance meeting between a Jewish writer who's had a big Salesman-like hit and an old schoolfriend.

"Fitter's Night" is set in Brooklyn's naval yard during the war (where Miller then worked, repairing ships). The title- story of I Don't Need You Any More describes a boy who resembles the boy Miller (like Timebends it speaks of sticking-out ears), with a mother as neurotically frustrated as his mother, in a family home not dissimilar to his own. Whereas theatre is a vulgar art, which is its attraction: it has to appeal to the great unwashed. Novelists have a tendency both to look down on and to envy it."Stories can be the more revealing of the author, too, quietly blurting out the truth rather than striking large heroic gestures: "Chekhov lets himself into his stories more than into his plays, and is funnier and more amiable because he's wandering round the countryside rather than having to get to a curtain line." Miller, too, lets himself into his fiction, or raids his life for material, even more than in his plays.