TROPIC OF CAPRICORN and its sister novel Tropic of Cancer were first published in France by the Obelisk Press, a daring avant-garde imprint founded by Jack Kahane. Paris in the inter-war years was a city buzzing with intellectuals, artists and famous writers from around the world: Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett all lived there during this period, drawn there by the cultural vibrancy of the city and the existence of small, English-language publishers willing to take risks that larger British and American publishers, constrained by tighter obscenity laws, could not afford to take.
It was while living in Paris in 1931 that Miller met Anaïs Nin. Nin had recently written a book on D.H. Lawrence, whose sexually explicit novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover would, like Miller’s fiction, play an important role in modernizing the British and American obscenity laws in the early 1960s. Miller’s friendship with Nin was complicated by the arrival of Miller’s wife, June. Miller was deeply in love with June, and in Tropic of Capricorn he describes the first time he saw her, in 1923, in the Broadway club where she worked as a dancer: ‘I notice her coming towards me; she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on the long, columnar necak … I could have taken just the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night on a pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, the whole being glowed from them …’
When Miller introduced June to Nin in December 1931, the two women fell in love and began a brief, intense affair – of which Miller was bitterly jealous. After June left Paris in January 1932, Miller and Nin both continued to write about June obsessively, describing their encounters with this evasive, enigmatic woman. In a period that would become perhaps the most productive of his life, Miller began work on Tropic of Capricorn, developing extensive notes he had written in New York ten years earlier.
Although completed in Paris in the 1930s, Tropic of Capricorn provides a scathing social commentary on New York City in the 1920s: a city of great wealth, but also a city of poverty and desperation. It is this dark underbelly of contemporary American society that provided Miller’s prose with such fire, and while Paris gave him the artistic freedom to write and publish the book, ultimately it is America that remains the target of the passionate, almost revolutionary zeal of his writing.
Describing the near-endless stream of beggars who approached him at the Western Union Telegraph Company, seeking employment or just asking for money: ‘I never saw such an aggregation of misery in my life, and I hope I’ll never see it again. Men are poor everywhere – they always have been and they always will be. And beneath the terrible poverty there is a flame, usually so low that it is almost invisible. But it is there and if one has the courage to blow on it, it can become a conflagration.’
Adaptation
Although Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic’ novels are notoriously unfilmable, an adaptation of Tropic of Cancer was directed by Joseph Strick in 1970 – a film that was promptly banned in the UK, and awarded an X rating in the USA.
For anyone curious about the love triangle between Miller, his wife June and Anaïs Nin, there is Philip Kaufman’s 1990 movie Henry and June. Based on Nin’s famous diaries, it is perhaps most notable for starring a young Uma Thurman as June, in one of her first roles.
Read On
Have You Read?
Other titles by Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer
Miller’s first book recounts his experiences of living in Paris.
Black Spring
The third book in the Obelisk trilogy depicts Miller’s Brooklyn childhood, his job in his father’s tailor shop, his reflections on America and his later self-imposed exile in Paris.
Sexus, Plexus, Nexus
In these books, known as the ‘Rosy Crucifixion’ trilogy, Miller recounts the story of his life from his first marriage to his second and a bizarre ménage à trois.
The Books in My Life
Miller lists his own favourite books and recommendations. A fascinating insight into the making of a reader and a writer.
Find Out More
READ
Naked Lunch; Junky
William Burroughs
Ulysses
James Joyce
The Devil at Large
Erica Jong
The Prisoner of Sex
Norman Mailer
Henry Miller
Brassaï, translated by Timothy Bent
Anais Nin
A Million Little Pieces
James Frey
WATCH
Henry and June
(1990) This is the story of Anaïs Nin’s relationship with Henry Miller and his wife June in the Thirties. Stars Uma Thurman, Richard E. Grant and Kevin Spacey. Directed by Philip Kaufman who met Nin in 1962; he also directed The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Tropic of Cancer
(1970) A straight depiction of Miller’s expatriate life and friends in Paris. Stars Rip Torn (more recently seen in Men in Black and Wonder Boys) as Henry Miller.
VISIT
Henry Miller Museum of Art, 2811, Omachi Onsenkyo, Omachi City, Nagano Prefecture, Japan
Miller had his first exhibition of watercolours before he published Tropic of Cancer in 1927. This is a museum dedicated to Miller’s paintings. Accessible online at www.ablegroup.com/henry/henryl.html
Coast Gallery, Highway One, Big Sur, CA 93920
Contains many of Miller’s paintings.
Henry Miller Library, Highway One, Big Sur, CA 93920
Situated in the former house of Miller’s personal assistant Emil White, who founded the library, this is more of a memorial to Miller’s work than a library. It is also an art gallery. Miller himself lived just down the road.
SURF
www.henrymiller.org
The website of the Henry Miller library which is part memorial, part library, part art gallery. Lots of info and links.
http://home.pacbell.net/washley/hmbiblio/millink.html
Tons of links to Miller-abilia including an extensive bibliography.
www.henrymillerart.com
View Miller’s paintings online and/or buy prints of them. Also see Coast Gallery above.
About the Author
Henry Miller was born in 1891 in 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 Brassaï, Artaud and Anaïs 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 banned outside France.
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 counter culture as a prophet of freedom and sexual revolution. With the subsequent unbanning of the rest of his books, Miller’s work was finally available in his own country.
He died on 7 June 1980.
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By the same author
Tropic of Canc
Black Spring
Aller Retour New York
The Cosmological Eye
The Colossus of Maroussi
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Quiet Days in Clichy
Sexus
Plexus
Nexus
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch
The Books in My Life
A Devil in Paradise
The Wisdom of the Heart
My Life and Times
The World of Sex
Crazy Cock
Moloch
Copyright
Harper Press
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Copyright © Henry Miller, 1957
Introduction copyright © Robert Nye 1993
PS section copyright © Daren King 2005 except ‘Miller’s Best Book’ by James Frey © James Frey 2005
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-46254-4
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