Books: Greatest Living Patagonian

"My scrofulous French novel on grey paper with blunt type."* as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer might well be described, has now turned up in U.S. bookstores clad in a clean collegiate jacket, tailored at $7.50 by Grove Press, intellectual outfitters to the offbeat, the off-color and the off-limits (in 1959 Grove issued the unabridged Lady Chatterley's Lover). The publishers have so much confidence in Miller's notoriety that they paid the author $50,000 in advance and dumped a 30,000 printing into hospitable bookstores (Scribner and Doubleday, among others, are holdouts) weeks ahead of the announced publication date. All previous attempts to publish the book in the U.S. have ended in customs or post office bans, and for 26 years Cancer and the other Miller Tropic—Capricorn—have been unknown to Americans, except as tourist and G.I. plain-wrapper souvenirs of Paris.

During that time, one of those mysterious underground (or as Miller would put it, "Chthonian") movements has been rumbling about the name and personality of Henry Miller, and a committee-sized panel of names has been assembled by the publishers to "welcome Miller among the elect." The encomiums range in warmth and weight from T. S. Eliot to Kenneth Patchen. He is not only the Buddha of the beatniks, but Lawrence Durrell asserts that ''American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what he has done." He has been called, or called himself a "saint." "Caliban," "a one-man band," a "Patagonian." As to what Patagonian means in the Miller context, the only source seems to be Poet Karl Shapiro, who introduces this U.S. edition in the characteristic style of the muddled and ecstatic cultist: "What is a Patagonian? I don't know, but it is certainly something rare and sui generis. We can call Miller the greatest living Patagonian."

Ezra Pound's claims for both Miller and Cancer were most modest. In 1934, when he handed the manuscript to its original Paris publishers, he said: "Here is a dirty book worth reading."