Word: tropical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...through the scrub, guerrilla riflemen made short, sharp little raids against government outposts. In & out of the piny mountain country on Nicaragua's northern flank, armed, machete-toting men filtered mysteriously. In Guatemala and Costa Rica dusty little companies, in faded denim and khaki, marked time in the tropic heat...
...rivers, of which the Amazon proper is the best example, carry silt, and when they overflow, leave rich deposits on the land. The black rivers are stagnant and so acid that even fish cannot live in them. The white rivers have ceased to serve as anything but drainage canals. Tropic downpours have long since washed away all fertility from their valleys...
...books that followed Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn exhibited less dirt-and less talent. Miller overwrote for the sheer sake of verbosity; he made hyperbole into a principle of composition. Everything he described was either incredibly glorious or incredibly distasteful. On a visit to Greece he felt "a stillness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of the world beat. . ." Revisiting the cities of America he found "a vast, unorganized lunatic asylum . . . the most horrible place on God's earth." Critic Alfred Kazin once said of him: "Is there anything...
Hyperbole & Profanity. Thus waders along the Tropic of Cancer could find some evidence of real talent there: Miller's portraits of all the phonies he knew in Paris-and he knew plenty-were biting and edged with a wild, outrageous humor...
When Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer, came out in Paris in 1931, it was greeted with shocked silence, snickers, or the sound of licking lips. Its admirers took its weedy profusion of four-letter words for daring wit and convention-defying "art." Miller became the hero of Bohemian barflies and Greenwich Villagers everywhere...