He stood before the temple of money and raised the flag of happiness. Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer (1934) provides a unique modernist representation of the economic warfare of the Great Depression, as evident in Millers. Before Kerouac, before Burroughs, Miller disputed all the imperatives of capitalism. This fall marks the half-century anniversary of the first Grove Press paperback of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the edition through which that notorious dirty book, first published in Paris. until 1961, where it set off an obscenity trial that is still one of the great episodes in the history of free speech. Tropic of Cancer was not published in the U.S. He’s the thinking man’s slacker, but his prose is a force multiplier-lucid, honest and unhampered by neurotic self-loathing.
It’s impossible to outdo George Orwell’s wonderfully overstated appraisal of Miller in 1940 -”the only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races in some time”-but it’s hard not to agree. Miller discourses on his life and lowlife in Paris, fashioning his experiences, reflections, orgasms and philosophizing into a shambling narrative. In other words, it’s a bum’s manifesto, the greatest imaginable. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…” That was Miller. For us though, the apex of his work seems to boil down to Tropic of Cancer (Paris, 1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (Paris, 1939).
“This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word.
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