Tropic of Capricorn

Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn from, say, page 267 to page 333 (in the 1961 Grove Press edition)--roughly 56 pages--contains some of the most incandescent prose-poetry in the annals of the English language. In these pages, Miller articulates his "Rosy Crucifixionism"--the Whitmanian vision chewed up and spat out by one who, as he avers on the opening page, has "given up the ghost." If Whitman was Christ, then Miller was Paul (Emerson being the Baptist, if not Enoch or Elijah or the Father of All). And like Paul, Henry Miller does not merely pass along the savior's teachings--oh no! He re-invents them for a new time and place; a new people. Having gone in search of the Whitmanian Republic, he discovered only an "air-conditioned nightmare." To his credit, Miller did not attempt to sugar-coat his findings or to pass them off as something other than they were. There is far more of the Jew in Henry Miller than there is of the Christian--as there is far more of the Jew in Paul than has come down to us in sectarian lore. Miller thunders like a prophet--he fumes and fulminates--but this is only one part of an oeuvre which, when taken as a whole, constitutes a kind of wisdom literature.