I am so thoroughly healthy and empty. No dreams, no desires. I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten. Henry MillerThe first thing, if you are lucky, that you discover about Henry Miller is that you shouldn't introduce him to your wife, your sister, your mother or any other female that you care to leave unsullied. He is like a bloodhound once he catches the scent of a female that he has not had carnal knowledge with. It wasn't that Henry made the best of first impressions, but give him time, give him an evening with a nun, and she'll be at the altar the next morning, still trembling from a night of degradation, renouncing or reaffirming her vows. Henry fought with his wife, the first wife, the one with the shovel face, like two piranhas caught in a barrel. If you have read any of Henry's books you know that he shares his life, everything, even the stuff that makes him look like a lout."When I got home my wife was awake and sore as hell because I had stayed out so long. We had a hot discussion and finally I lost my temper and I clouted her and she fell on the floor and began to weep and sob. The girl upstairs came running down to see what was the matter. She was in her kimono and her hair was hanging down her back. In the excitement she got close to me and things happened without either of us intending anything to happen. (I didn't believe that part for a second.) We put the wife to bed with a wet towel around her forehead and the while the girl upstairs was bending over her I stood behind her and lifting her kimono. I got it into her and she stood there a long time talking a lot of foolish soothing nonsense. Finally I climbed into bed with the wife and to my utter amazement she began to cuddle up to me and without saying a word we locked horns and we stayed that way until dawn. I should have been worn out but instead I was wide awake, and I lay there beside her planning to take the day off and look up the whore with the beautiful fur whom I was talking to earlier in the day. After that I began to think about another woman, the wife of one of my friends. Henry is a man that is never satiated. One conquest launches him on a quest for the next one. With a clap on my shoulder and a squeeze Henry always has a new story that has me shaking my head. By comparison, I feel like my life is as boring as a Methodist sermon. Henry is living for all of us. Like every other fool I know...I've lent Henry money. Lent, that is rich, I'm still deluding myself. He doesn't repay a loan. He makes you forget you lent it to him in the first place. I remember one night when a mutual friend of ours explained the circumstances with Henry. "If you need a little money I'll raise it for you. It's like throwing it down a sewer, I know, but I'll do it for you just the same. The truth is, Henry, I like you a hell of a lot. I've taken more from you than I would from anybody in the world." Henry just grinned as our friend's hat passed around, and even people that had known him less than an hour tossed in a bit of green. It wasn't until we were leaving, weaving our own snake trail out the door, that my friend discovered that along with the money, Henry had also absconded with his hat.I was with Henry the night he met the nymphomaniac Paula. "She has the loose jaunty swing and perch of the doubled-barreled sex, all her movements radiating from the groin, always in equilibrium, always ready to flow, to wind and twist, and clutch, the eyes going tic-toc, the toes twitching and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a lake furrowed by a breeze. This is the incarnation of the hallucination of sex, the sea nymph squirming in the maniac's arms.", Needless to say I left by myself, but not before Henry touched me for a Jackson. I have never figured out if Henry is a coward or the bravest of the brave. He rejects the life that I spend so much of each day trying to build for myself. He didn't tell me this, but I found it in one of his books. "I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am-the need I have for people, conversation, books, theatre, music, cafes, drinks, and so forth. It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be civilized is to have complicated needs, And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn't need a thing." The thing of it is Henry couldn't be Henry except for the existence of people like myself who are always willing to buy him a drink and marvel at his stories. He is living off the efforts of "civilized" men and women. He doesn't have to own anything, because someone will always give him what he needs. "He had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy. About the big issues he was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life he was bewildered." The Nasty GeniusThe thing of it is, despite his best efforts, Henry Miller became a useful member of society. He published books describing a life so unencumbered that even those of us perfectly satisfied with our soft lives, eking out a possession laden life of soulless corporate kowtowing, have doubts that we have chosen our lives wisely. Henry met this woman named June who hauled him off to Paris. JuneI don't get to hear his stories first hand anymore. I have to buy his books to find out what he has been up to. I miss Henry. He had me gaze upon the greener pastures on the other side of the fence, but he couldn't convince me to jump over and stay over. Every so often, despite his better financial circumstances, I still get a note from him with a plea for a few dollars for old time's sake. I, the dutiful enabling friend, always send him what I can spare. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Many books have the sort of impact that changes your life at the time you read them, but only a few impart that very special feeling of knowing that a book is changing your life as it is doing so. Most books change us as a gradual rippling effect that travels through our lives. Even the most banal, pulpy fiction has the capability to alter your autonomic and subconscious perspective on the world. But when a book comes through with a voice powerful enough to change your life as you are reading it, and let you know it - that's a sort of virtuoso voice which is lacking from our present malady called "Literary Fiction" (as opposed to literature).Miller isn't literary fiction, he's Literature, and if you love the contemporary genre of literary fiction with its stagnant, post-Updike burden of clear and lucid prose (which allows for no pioneerism of language) and stories that appeal only to primarily well-bred sorts who dislike reading anything too terribly challenging, rather they enjoy stories that are quite exciting and could be made into movies - if you're one of these, then of course you need to read Henry Miller in order to blow your mind and blow your concepts wide open of what a book could be. Miller belongs to the same literary ancestry as I do: like Anais Nin, we trace our bloodline of ideas back through our literary father, D.H. Lawrence. (Another Literary Bloodline that I belong to is with Allen Ginsberg, who like me traced his roots back to the visionary Blake). In this Literary family tree of D.H. Lawrence, there seems to be a family curse of getting your books banned, having your content be called pornographic, and saying true things that generally keep oneself solemnly in a state of censure. D.H. Lawrence often got very upset about this reaction to his work, and in his posthumous papers we can read his acerbic writings against pornography and masturbation. They are the words of the angry, indignant, and misunderstood author of Lady Chatterley's Lover, one of the most misread books of all time and by that virtue one of the greatest. When you read Lady Chatterley's Lover and understand it, you feel as though you've understood something that none of the fools did who called it pornography and who came before you. It feels like a triumph against all the false institutions. Anais Nin's reaction to the banning of her work seemed to be more regal. She kept writing brilliant erotica and talking with the youth of the world. I own a copy of her final diary, and have seen in it photographs of her as an old woman in a Kimono smiling and posing like a dancer in Japan. She never let the public get her down.A review of a book by Miller wouldn't be complete without mention of these other writers. Because if Lawrence got twisted up and bedeviled by the misinterpretation to his work, and if Nin got not bothered by it at all - then Miller got laid, and laughed a lot. He's the perennial old man coming out of the shower and feeling up a naked Japanese girl. There's plenty of videotapes out there showing him doing this to some young trembling 20something Japanese girl, and smiling and laughing like Buddha. His reaction to the world's reception of his work was a sort of enlightenment. He always seemed to be getting enlightened. Tropic of Capricorn turns the volume up on this side of him. I was never able to get through his masterpiece Tropic of Cancer, I always get lost in the hijinx which made that book famous - but during college I picked up a copy of Tropic of Capricorn and it absorbed me. I sat in the back of English Lectures reading it, ignoring class. It kind of blew up everything for me. It's profound, erotic, Rabelaisian, scatalogical, existential, funny. Like Zarathustra, Miller (who narrates this book in first person) goes down first to come up: he's self-effacing, self-abnegating, self-destructive, self-loathing. This allows him to hate all else, and blow up every idea, thought institution, custom, class, race, system, religion, school, home, and mind that stands in his path. Because he himself is a nihilistic-nonentity, he is allowed to say anything he wants about anything at all - and he does. Nothing is holy to him. He leaves no stone of the human condition unturned. He finds everything and talks about it then blows it up in your face and then shows you there was a flower inside of it all alone. To go along on Miller's trip is to have your world destroyed by the truth and then reborn by your own creation - because something about Miller makes you want to create your own world and be responsible for it just as you love and are responsible for others. Behind his nightly philandering, cheating, sleeping around, getting caught, and daily meeting every living human in New York City in his capacity as a Human Resources manager at a messenger firm - behind the story is a love for creation. Sometimes Miller hates its forms, but he always loves the substance of creation. He blows up the forms to show you the substance, and it is a glowing substance, most sparkling and glimmering to behold, like that briefcase in Pulp Fiction. That's the magic of Tropic of Capricorn to me. And it's the magic of most of Miller's writing because his body of work is very consistent and written in one naturalistic voice.
What do You think about Tropic Of Capricorn (1994)?
His clarity of vision is at times startling. I can imagine there being two camps when it comes to Henry Miller, those who find his accepting and passive (in a sense) attitude amoral, and those who find it enlightened and at times profound. I fall into the latter camp. Maybe if choosing a world without evil was possible it would be the best choice, maybe not. Maybe our concept of evil has become too cartoonish and overly simplified and life comes in shades. Shades and shadows in which strange crustaceans may dwell.
—Alexm
Miller is either a sheer genius or a madman; perhaps both. This is the companion work to Tropic of Cancer, and actually predates it in chronological time line. Miller exhibits an extra-ordinary ego, an inability to focus on much anything beyond sex and money both of which he seems to feel entitled, without commitment. There is certainly a bit of the pedagog in him, and he displays it often and distractingly.I read these two works because they are considered benchmark works in American Literature. This book and its content and language are not for everybody. As he says in this book there is nothing between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn but an imaginary line. Perhaps a bookmark?Three star rating includes a star for the stature of the work on both of these.
—Charly
This is his (Miller's) second novel but instead of continuing his accounts of Europe and making any kind of saga extending from Tropic of Cancer, he puts it in reverse and gives a retrospective of life in New York city, both his formative years in Brooklyn and the years he worked a grueling job at a Telegraph company as a hiring clerk in Manhattan. Like Cancer it's full of sex and food(both two of his favorite subjects) but the overall dialogue with his characters is more compelling and seems (somewhat) less embellished than before. He loses whatever pithy, journalistic fashion of writing that may have been dominant in Cancer, delving much deeper into singular characters whether ex co-workers or lovers. It's still very muscular and fast paced like his debut but it's also very lyrical and tends not to rely as much on shocking rants and cynical diatribes. in truth though there is still much to be had in that way but one of the great things about reading early or late Miller is that no matter how vitriolic or pejorative he gets, he always manages to come back to the surface and sometimes fly above with grand epiphanies and elation as if he had just been purged of all the ugliness that he was just on about..by way of going on about it. Very inspiring.The best parts of the book to me are the little surreal flights he subsequently takes on the page apropos some memory of walking around Brooklyn or times square. These show what a bizarre and vivid poetic imagination he has not to mention a good deal of insight into what went on his mind all those years ago. As a real critic said 'there's nothing like him when he gets on a roll'. Really incomparable. When he starts contemplating God, existence on earth, himself etc etc, he can really be quite brilliant and mesmerizing. This is why I'm more prone to cite him as my favorite philosopher rather than my favorite non fiction writer.Anyways, I'm not much for critiques...but this shit is worth every penny you pay for and more.
—Will Ridenour
