Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

Some time ago I posted a review of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. It was a cautionary post that suggested the content, and especially its treatment of women – while always wrong – was now so far beyond the norms of decency that his approach and his writing might be justifiably dismissed. It’s misogynistic, often horrifically so. Yet because of the nature of the novel and its structure, along with so many examples of outstanding prose, and the range of philosophy and psychology it touches, I do believe serious writers should read it.

The same advice goes for Tropic of Capricorn which I just finished. This novel was written a few years after Cancer, but is a prequel to Cancer, capturing a fictional-near-biography of Miller’s time in New York in the 1920s, before his time in Paris in the 1930s. Much of the book has the same curse of seeing women as mere sexual pawns in the writer’s life and in society overall. Yet from a writerly perspective, Capricorn has its own victories in prose and philosophy with existential, empirical, and phenomenological aspects being the main elements of philosophy one can find amid what at times feels chaotic, unplanned, and plotless. Of interest to writers, at times it does take direction while at the same time remaining nihilistic. I.E., it’s a lot like Tropic of Cancer.

Both books are also undeniable examinations of the psychological even though we wonder at just what the human psyche really amounts to when so clearly driven by the id.

So let’s entertain some of the noteworthy prose. While the number of examples is legion, here are some that struck me.

“And this in the black frenzied nothingness of the hollow of absence leaves a gloomy feeling of saturated despondency not unlike the topmost tip of desperation which is only the gay juvenile maggot of death’s exquisite rupture with life.” (P.109 of the Grove Press Edition, 1961.) One might perceive a master’s degree thesis that could be built around this example.

On self: “This is not the self about which books are written, but the ageless self which has been farmed out through millenary ages to men with names and dates, the self which begins and ends as a worm, which is the worm in the cheese called the world.” P. 206. He then says, “the slightest breeze can set a vast forest in motion…” P. 207. The first quote give me little to value of the impact one life can have, and yet one can take hope in creating that “slightest breeze.”

On philosophy: “Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible.” P. 333. Somewhere, Hegel smiles.

Finally, and perhaps more subtly, he includes a poem by Apollinaire, written just before he died, which happened just before the armistice in WWI. The part that interests me is:

Maybe I go too far, but is Miller asking for his own forgiveness given his writing is clearly on the frontier, if not the front lines, of the literary?

So ends my journey into Henry Miller. I have not given a moment to Capricorn’s plot or character-building, nor to its overall value in today’s literary universe. Yet I take much from its brilliance, even if holding my nose for pages at the time.

Compassion for errors and sins?

I leave that decision to you.