Word: tropical
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week publishers' trade papers announced that New Directions of Norfolk, Conn, would soon publish Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. This was sensational news, since publishing Henry Miller is a task that might well make any publisher blanch. Brought out in Paris four years ago, Tropic of Cancer has a bigger subterranean reputation than any recent book, based partly on the extravagant praise of critics like T. S. Eliot, partly on the difficulty of buying smuggled copies, but mostly because it is a low book, "the lowest book," in the words of Edmund Wilson, "I can ever...
Announcement of the U. S. publication of Tropic of Cancer was surprising literary news not only because of its underground reputation. It revealed the recent revival of interest in the neglected field of experimental writing-that cloudy area of modern letters with its little magazines, obscure poems, defiant manifestoes, communications from Ezra Pound. In Manhattan a plump, handsome periodical, Twice a Year, took up where The Dial left off a decade ago. In Paris appeared The Black Book, a novel by Lawrence Durrell, who gave promise of outdoing Henry Miller in the form that admirers call the dithyrambic novel...
...Tropic of Cancer. How New Directions will get around the obstacles that have previously prevented publication of Tropic of Cancer in the U. S. is still unclear. This strange book is the work of a 47-year-old expatriate who was born in New York, worked as a tailor, personnel manager, ranchman in California, newspaperman, six-day bicycle racer, concert pianist and who settled in Paris "to study vice." Short, bald, shrewd and bespectacled, with something of the air of a country editor, Henry Miller says he wants to go off the gold standard of literature, to write the things...
...Tropic of Cancer he deals primarily with matters which, while not exactly left out of modern books, are usually slurred over, and in his pages four-letter words are as common as the things they stand for. Narrator of the story is a penniless, sex-obsessed writer living in Paris, who encounters an extraordinary crew of neurotics, prostitutes, perverts, poets and painters, with many of whom he has sexual relations, meanwhile borrowing money, cadging drinks and exploding into hysterical laughter at the misfortunes of his friends. Miller's prose, with its queer combination of unrestrained rhetoric and dry Yankee...
...Black Book. With an underground reputation like Miller's, Lawrence Durrell writes less of the subject that has kept Tropic of Cancer out of the U. S. But he puts in enough words to prevent The Black Book from being published anywhere except in Paris. Less shocking than Tropic of Cancer, The Black Book follows a similar pattern, with realistic scenes giving way to tumultuous passages of invective and bitter rhapsody...