Tropic of Capricorn [Paperback]

Henry Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 13, 1994

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn’s ethnic neighborhoods and Miller’s outrageous sexual exploits, The Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"There is nothing like Henry Miller when he gets rolling. . . . One has to take the language back to Marlowe and Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity.” –Norman Mailer

“There is an eager vitality and exuberance to the writing . . . we watchfully hear the language skip, whoop and wheel across Miller’s pages.” —William H. Gass

“The most enthralling and hilarious explosions are the sexual ones.” —Newsweek

“A superb entertainment that brings in jeremiads, casual lyrics, and sudden reaches toward the spiritual core of life . . .” —The New York Times Book Review

“Miller has once and for all blasted away the very foundation of human hypocrisy—moral, social, and political. . . . The grandest passages are the scenes of lovemaking. They join in a grand paean to all that is still joyous, healthy, happy, and affirmative.” —The Nation

“American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done.” –Lawrence Durell

About the Author

Henry Valentine Miller was born in 1891 in New York City and spent most of his life in Brooklyn, Paris, and Big Sur, California. His books include Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus), Black Spring, and Crazy Cock. He died in 1980.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; Reprint edition (January 13, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802151825
• ISBN-13: 978-0802151827
• Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 5.5 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #393,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

HENRY MILLER (1891-1980) was an American writer and painter infamous for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are "Tropic of Cancer," "Tropic of Capricorn," and "Black Spring." His books were banned in the United States for their lewd content until 1964 when a court ruling overturned this order, acknowledging Miller's work as literature in what became one of the most celebrated victories of the sexual revolution.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Capricorn: Beyond Cancer June 6, 2001

By George

Format:Paperback

Tropic of Capricorn is the gretest book I have ever read. I read Tropic of Cancer first, and was interested and intrigued by it, but not until I read Capricorn would I truly call Miller one of the greatest American writers. Also banned from the U.S for 30 years, Capricorn goes beyong the sexuality and bitterness of one who has "given up" and lived for themselves as Cancer outlines autobiographically of Millers days in Paris. In Capricorn Miller looks to the roots of his childhood and life in New York and examines what made him the man he is and brought on his great change to "a new way of life". It has elements similar to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio, which may be its greatest moments, as it tells small "grotesque" character studies of the people that shaped his life. Miller combines ideas of Eastern mysticism with the chaos of an ever industrializing world. Capricorn goes beyond linear writing to pursue a dreamlike atmosphere: one of admitted Surrealist and Dadsist influence, whose influence in turn can be seen in the later beat writing of Kerouac and Burroughs among others.

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars THE MOST HONEST AND REVEALING NOVEL ABOUT HUMANITY. January 22, 1999

By [e-mail]

Format:Paperback

I first read this book when I was 16. Today, I'm 30 but I still manage to read it every two or three years to remind myself to be true to my feelings. Miller's writings, in general, are autobiographical. Some of the events have actually occurred while some are his dreams/visions. However, all are real to the man and real to most anyone who truly knows themself. There's no candy-coating here. Some reviewers see only the sexuality of the book. While that's certainly a great portion of the book it isn't what the book is about. It's about being who we want to be and freeing ourselves from the reigns of "normality" and confinement. That's why it's so disturbing. He expresses himself through his character and the characters around him. He mocks society and himself simultaneously. He is truly "human". My one desire, if I should ever be able to fulfill it, would be to write a novel that's worth ten percent of what this one is. Miller is the best friend one could possibly want to have because he doesn't cover-up his intentions.

47 of 55 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Inward Journey to the Self: The Importance of Miller's TROPIC OF CAPRICORN August 5, 2005

By Edward J. Carvalho

Format:Paperback

"For there is only one great adventure and that is inward, toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor deeds even matter" (4).

Miller's two tropics - CANCER AND CAPRICORN- are essentially manuals for the creative life. They present Miller's transformation from lay-schmuck working in the belly of the beast that is the American economy - jobs such as his position with the Western Union Telegraph company, which he refers to as the "Cosmococcic / Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company" - to his evolution as en expatriate writer living in Paris. The books are really designed to be read together to magnify the metamorphosis, the rite of passage. While CANCER chronicles the latter portion of Miller's experience abroad, the prequel, CAPRICORN, written five years later in 1939, is the more developed and more seminal of the two and elucidates with much greater detail the affects of his epiphany.

Most artists will immediately recognize the struggle Miller endures. Married to the "wrong" woman and with a young child in tow - a relationship which he finds stifling to his creative development - Miller faces tenable employment situations to support this life. Those jobs he does find do little to allow him to prosper; rather he finds himself as a cog on a wheel of Hell. His transformation from the morass of what society deems sound and true is painful. Anyone who has ever made such sacrifices to pursue the unspoken dreams to create from what grows inside of them will sympathize with Miller's dilemma. To pursue a life of an artist is frightening enough: to do it behind the rancorous veil of the American dream is horrifying. Miller recognizes the banal existence of modern America with its machines, its backward corporate policies, its worship of the unthinking and mechanical and he also knows he must break from its fetters.

Part of Miller's disenchantment with America is organic to his being just as much as it is experiential. As a child, Miller feels a unique disassociation with his peers and even his family. This self-possessed knowledge of his unique intelligence leaves Miller with a feeling of disorientation. As an adolescent, he sees his drunken father convert to piety when wooed by the charisma of a local minister. Miller, Sr. then falls from grace when the minister is called to another location and as a result of this perceived abandonment, cycles back to his earlier state of crapulousness. The event seems to have intimated to Miller the importance of being self-reliant upon a constant wellspring of inspiration so that disappointment in other people does not interrupt the flow of creativity.

Miller describes the evolution of the artist as riding "on the ovarian trolley." In fact, those very words are what preface CAPRICORN. For Miller there are really two births the artist experiences before his final descent into a world riddled with isolation, hunger and anticipation. Of course, there is the physical birth but this is more a symbolic representation than Miller's actual recognition of his square-peg, round-hole emotional relationship with the world at large: this is the first stage of birth. The second stage comes years later out of the "Land of F@ck" as Miller coins it, the place where the "spermatozoon reigns supreme" (198). These phrases, as they would first seem (and were seen for many years that the book was banned from U.S. publication), are not some sordid and gratuitous account of Miller's perceptions of the world or his conquests. Rather, he uses the extended metaphors and kennings to give the reader an understanding to the visceral almost primordial conditions from whence the artist arises. For Miller, spiritual ascension is a process biologic as well as intellectual.

"Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair. At the very bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of bliss at the top, chez God. God is the summation of all the spermatozoa come to full consciousness. Between the bottom and the top there is no stop, no halfway station" (199).

There is an almost funereal quality about Miller's cognizance here: this idea of exploring one's complete "ANNIHILATON" before metaphysical resurrection. Miller understands the need for an eradication of the former self before the rebirth of the artist as he moves from the "terra firma" to the "terra vague." Along with this laying waste of the individual comes the erasure of connections to the self: friends, family, lovers - all abandoned to pursue the freedom to express unhindered utterance*. To this point, Miller's use of "Tropic of" in the titles of CANCER and CAPRICORN now begins to make more sense as he asserts himself to be on the boundary between this land of the physical and the spiritual; the place where men aspire to be God for a period of time just before the flash-point of creative impulse.

He brings the idea of the "ovarian trolley" full circle when he talks about the importance of discovering Dostoevsky - this being the first glimpse of a man's soul - and then later in a book called CREATIVE EVOLUTION by Henri Bergson. He carries the latter book with him everywhere and extols its virtue upon any man or woman who would hear the new standard version on the gospel of solitude.

TROPIC OF CAPRICORN should be standard reading for anyone in the arts, for any artist who has ever felt the pang of isolation, who truly believes in the necessity of sacrifice, a higher calling and commitment to one's creative endeavors. Miller's importance to world literature is vastly underrated and in many cases. Writers are simply too intimidated to face the truth in what he espouses. Miller operates as an Overman and as such, it is right that he should pose a certain condition of tremulousness in his readership: he has forged his own society, he has forged his own being into something closer to what history had intended for him since his first phone call into the horn of the fallopian. This is discomfiting for most and is intended to show how the application of introspection for an artist can lead to becoming an acolyte of unconventional philosophy: how a writer emerges as "e pluribus unum." Henry Miller's doctrine is reserved for the initiate, the mad few who choose separation from the masses as a means for creative growth. Miller's epitaph should simply be, "My name? Why just call me God - God the embryo."

© 2005-06 Edward J. Carvalho

NOTES:
* A phrase I have incorporated from listening to many extemporaneous speeches of creative rebellion from Squawk Coffeehouse co-founder, Lee Kidd.

WORKS CITED:

1.Miller, Henry. Tropic of Capricorn. New York: Grove Press, 1961.