Word: tropicalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TROPIC OF CAPRICORN (348 pp.)-Henry Miller-Grove Press...
Whether it will or not, the U.S. has just been saddled with a second Tropic of literary conversation. Tropic A, published in the U.S. for the first time last year, was Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's long-banned wallow in Parisian vice. Tropic B is Tropic of Capricorn, its torrid twin. In the past, when both books had to be smuggled into the U.S., hosts of nonreaders thought of them only as interchangeable smut. Now anyone with a strongish stomach can find out for himself: smut they may be, but interchangeable they...
...fear and grief in a plague-ridden village that must be dynamited hut by hut, aristocratic pride and dignity in a top-hatted native chief who tries to save his rat-ridden palace from Ives's sanitizing torches by playing billiards for it. These scenes, and the hot tropic scenery, are stubbornly convincing. Ives cannot school Hudson to believe in God, perhaps because his own version harbors more fear than love: "Out here in the jungle when a man doesn't believe in God, He pokes him with His finger and makes him squirm...
Henry Miller is still the world's most smuggled author-no Sarah Lawrence girl would think of returning to the temperate zones from her junior year abroad without a copy of his still-banned Tropic of Capricorn or Rosy Crucifixion hidden in the soiled laundry. But he is also the author most often skipped. That is to say, the almost unvarying gait for getting through one of Miller's books is: read four pages, skip four pages. Cynics will suggest that this is because the dirty passages in the Tropics or Sexus, Nexus and Plexus come at four...
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird is a collection of essays written over the last 30 years, dealing with topics 1 and 2 and designed to demonstrate that Miller is really a serious thinker. But it may well ruin Miller's profitably bad reputation in the U.S. (Tropic of Cancer, free from federal restraint since 1961, is selling hugely, thanks in part to the police chiefs in some 60 communities, who hound it with a righteousness usually reserved for bookmakers who do not pay their protection money.) A random sampling produces: "Fresh from Europe, the American scene held about...