The Obelisk Trilogy: Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring

Black Spring is definitely the best of all. Need to re-read/

Henry Miller is a genius! His observations remind me of a composer. He is hearing the entire symphony. I never have so many words dancing around in my head, but do so far as senses go. Amazing writer!

My copies are part of a matching set printed by Grove Press, inc. New York; Capricorn and Cancer both printed in 1961, Black Spring in 1963. These are handsome volumes with moderate quality paper and without dust jackets.

It is difficult to describe these books or to articulate, even to myself, what I think and how I feel about them. I will duck and cringe because of course I am not in favor of censorship, but never-the-less I can understand why these books had been banned. (The wikipedia article about ToC is addresses the trials of publishing these in the U.S. and is particularly interesting about these volumes currently in my possession.) Reading them, I could not believe some of the garbage which spilled across the page like so much vomit and offal. I was not sure I would even finish the first one I had started, which was Tropic of Capricorn. And yet, there were some beautiful, sublime, and poetic passages and the hint of some underlying point or expression of experience which seduced me to keep going.

Also of interest to me were references and descriptions of France - mostly Paris and the perceptions and contrasts of an the American in Parisian French culture, the interior and exterior life of a writer, and some philosophical, perhaps existential, themes. I found very quickly that I could only read these books when already in the grips of the darkest of moods; I found reading this material was almost soothing then. (This came to be a bit of a joke with a friend, if I texted him that I was reading Henry Miller, he would ask me if I was o.k. or call to check up on me.) Otherwise, I found the text intolerable and harmful to my sense of well-being. Conversely, another positive I got out of the experience of reading Miller was the thought that if THIS guy, and THIS material could be published and even receive some critical acclaim, then perhaps there was hope for me and my moldering writerly ambitions yet!

Yet another reason which spurred me to keep reading, aside from my characteristic stubbornness to finish whatever book I have started - to give it a chance to redeem itself and myself a chance to confront something challenging, was the desire to discover what all the hubbub was about. I wanted to understand why this author was at once both so vehemently condemned and also highly acclaimed. I had hoped to discover something about American cultural history and something about the times in which he wrote and lived. I had also looked forward to discussing this author and so much touching on the materials with a dear friend and artist, but sadly that chance has past. Instead I am left to look to Karl Shapiro's essay "The Greatest Living Author" to illuminate something of the significance of Miller and his works in time and in the greater literary and artistic cannon.

Here is an excerpt from the aforementioned essay:
"All of this is about modern America and the high cost of security. Do we really have a high standard of living? Miller says not, as most poets do. If living means appreciation of life we have the lowest standard of living in the world, in spite of the fact that it costs more to live in America that in any country in the world. Milleer says "the cost is not only in dollars and cents but in sweat and blood, in frustration, ennui, broken homes, smashed ideals, illness and insanity. We have the most wonderful hospitals, the most fabulous prisons, the best equipped and highest paid army and navy, the speediest bombers, the largest stockpile of atom bombs, yet never enough of any of these items to satisfy the demand. Our manual workers are the highest paid in the world; our poets the worst..."

Interesting how much of these reflections are still valid and contemporary! (I believe Shapiro is actually quoting Miller in the above.) On balance, I do think confronting Miller was a worthwhile experience, in spite of the serious problems along the lines of rampant misogyny and the like. In fact, I cannot help but wonder if the bigger reason for the ban had more to do with politics and criticism of American ideals than the convenient, though truly objectionable, obscenity. I had the fantasy of someday purchasing paperback copies of these books and then highlighting or underlining everything I found worthwhile but in fact I may find it very difficult to tease apart the threads of the ideal and the deplorable. I wouldn't dream of attempting it until our children are grown and out of the house anyway. In the meantime I seek to relocate these volumes to a more proper home, perhaps one in which it can share shelf space with Palahniuk.

I may change my rating from 2 to 3 stars, not to say that I actually 'liked it' but to indicate that I grudgingly found it 'worthwhile.'

When I first read Henry Miller, I put it down in disgust, unwilling to believe that a man could be saying anything important while wallowing in the gutter, both in language and figuratively in his writing. Still later I picked it up for some unknown reason, perhaps curiosity or boredom, after watching the movie Henry and June.
I was curious as to whether abnormal pleasures really did kill the taste for normal ones.
Miller was expanding our depth of field as human beings, without question. Today by comparison, his writing seems somewhat mild but I admire the tremendous passion with which he writes. What I discovered from reading The Tropic of Cancer is that Miller is,in a sense, putting us on. You see all the sex and the dirt and you are immediately repulsed... but then there is a glimmer of the distillation behind all of that. Ultimately, to look at Miller's books for their sex alone is to miss the point entirely: one must remove the mask, so to speak, of the ugly dregs of life to see what is behind the curtain. When one does that, the whole story pops out as plain as day. Miller uses the sexuality of his novels and writings essentially to keep those away who cannot see beyond that existence of sexual beings and into the insides of them.
I learned to understand people a great deal more from reading Miller, not just the essence, but how to understand people from the inside out. Miller practically begs you to come and look at humanity by taking away all of that which is arguably moral and immoral, and just understand how we seem to work.
Still, by the end of both Tropics, (and I preferred Cancer to Capricorn as did George Orwell who thought it the best book of the generation) I wasn't sure if I should end up like Anais Nin, should I have married a banker. Alas I decided the sacrifice to my immediate sanity would have been too great. I have so far avoided that abnormal pleasure too.

This edition is not recommended because it is riddled with typos. For example, nearly every instance of "corner" is set as "comer" in the type and it is infuriating. Lots of other kerning issues, like it was a shitty OCR scan that nobody bothered to give a thorough proofreading. There is no excuse for the number of errors, probably about two dozen in just in *Tropic Cancer* and not including the other 2/3 of this edition.

Couldn't stomach Black Spring anymore. I'll postpone it indefinitely.

Now, Miller's style is definitely intriguing: the man has found his own voice, his own niche, and his own path. He's not afraid to flaunt his perversities, nor is he too proud to demonstrate his own frailties. He's not didactic in any way, even if he believes in what he says 100%. He also hasn't got all the answers, but kind of tests his theorems and weeds out the useless bits of them. All in all, both Tropics were a trip to the mind of Henry Miller, made solely for Henry Miller. Why? Because he clearly doesn't care one whit whether anyone follows him to the end, or tumbles off mid-way.

Miller's narration can be very colourful and poetic, but at the same time it can get very crass and mundane. His words are tainted by his two main obsessions: food and sex. All this serves to make the novels very meandering, repetitive, quasi-philosophical, and wantonly perverse. I'm sure Miller wanted to portray humans as he actually saw them: animalistic wretches grovelling before the altar of mechanical life. But his portrayal of humans can get very one-sided, and even dull, if you, like me, don't really agree with him at any point. I'm used to disagreeing with literary characters, and it's even fun to read about the musings of a completely different mind, but this time I failed to maintain interest towards the work. The highfalutin epiphanic dilations were dreadfully boring, albeit rich in imagery. But they felt haphazardly constructed, or at the very least done in such a fashion that Miller couldn't care whether anyone understood what he was about. The endless carnal voyages felt superfluous in the extreme, even if they were sometimes rather hilarious. I know that there wasn't really supposed to be a conventional point to these books, so I'm not feeling all that depressed in making the concession that I didn't derive much from it, even aesthetically.

On the other hand, I can easily understand why people would love this kind of thing. Miller is clearly someone else. He bombards you with allusions, obscenities, French phrases, and nonsensical vignettes with a vengeance, and the best you can do is to give in and surrender your mind to his artistic artillery-fire. He's even strangely tolerant towards his fellow men, regardless of race, sex or sexuality, in his nihilistic way. But if the substance is weak, the metaphors and similes all-too far-fetched and hyperbolic, then this reader is not going to buy it. Even if I may have maintained an erection at some point!

Read Tropic of Capricorn. Very funny, very rude, sometimes sexist, sometimes rambles, spot on about how other groups/races are treated. Great stuff! Will get around to reading others. Do read!

Read "Tropic Of Cancer" several times over the last two decades. Still my favorite book. The other two are also fantastic reads. Series broken into sections more by tone than chronology.