Tropic of Capricorn

Henry Miller

Tropic of Capricorn

Henry Miller was born in 1891 in Brooklyn, New York. He had a variety of jobs as a young man, including several years working for the Western Union Telegraph Company. During this time, encouraged by June Mansfield Smith, the second of his five wives. Miller began to write. Aside from articles, stories for pulp magazines and prose poems, Miller worked on his first novels. Crazy Cock and Moloch, and on the copious notes which would eventually transmute into the notorious 'Tropics' books.

In 1930, Miller went to live in Paris. For the next ten years he mingled with impoverished expatriates and bohemian Parisians, including Brassai, Artaud and Anais Nin, with whom he had a much documented affair. His first published book. Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1934 from the Obelisk Press in Paris. It was followed five years later by its sister volume. Tropic of Capricorn. Sexually explicit, these books electrified the European literary avant-garde, received praise from Eliot, Pound, Beckett and Durrell, but were almost universally ba

Miller returned to America in 1940, settling in Big Sur, California. Here, he wrote the 'Rosy Crucifixion' trilogy – Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953) and Nexus (1959) but, regarded by many as a writer of 'dirty books', he was unable to get his major works published in America. In 1961, after an epic legal battle. Tropic of Cancer was finally published in the States (in England in 1963). Miller became a household name, hailed by the Sixties counterculture as a prophet of freedom and sexual revolution. With the subsequent unba

INTRODUCTION

by Robert Nye

Henry Miller's first book. Tropic of Cancer, was published in Paris in 1934 and was immediately ba

When the 'Tropics' were at last made generally available in Britain and America in the Sixties, they were praised as works of sexual liberation. Since then they have sometimes been attacked as works of sexual misogyny. All this seems to me rather to miss the point, as does criticism of the two books for their verbal extravagance and their lack of art. Probably it is no accident that nobody was ever indifferent concerning Henry Miller. There are those who love him and there are those who hate him. His work does not allow of the mild alternatives of liking or disliking. A case could be made that this itself constitutes a fault, but I prefer to find a virtue in such passion, and an important one. The Miller that emerges from the books is, to my mind, an honest and lovable person, splendidly undefeated by experience, a man with an unquenchable appetite for the fundamental realities, and an infinite capacity for being surprised by his own i

Even in the 'Tropics' Miller is, of course, an extraordinarily diffuse and uneven writer. He repeats, paraphrases, and parodies himself with an abandon that in a lesser spirit would be suicidal. He is sometimes brutal, he is often sentimental. But having said that, I have said most of what might be said against him. The best pages here, as in his one other great work. The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), are white-hot and inspired, both fu

On the ovarian trolley. Foreword to Historia Calamitatum (the story of my misfortunes)

Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words. And therefore, because I too have known some consolation from speech had with one who was a witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which have sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is of himself ever a consoler. This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, and so you shall come to bear them more easily.

Peter Abelard

0NCE you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the begi

From the very begi