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U. S. Expatriate Henry Miller (TIME, Nov. 21, 1938). It did not do so. The book had been published in Paris in 1934 and was considered by severe critics to be, even in its fantasies, of extraordinary documentary power. It was also known to a number of readers as a piece of uproarious pornography. Rather than invite another legal battle like that over Joyce's Ulysses, Publisher Laughlin last month brought out The Cosmological Eye, a book of more or less castrated selections from Miller's writing. By doing this much, New Directions called attention to Miller's latest long book, Tropic of Capricorn, published in Paris this year.
Tropic of Cancer was a dizzying personal record of sexual adventure, straycat poverty and street wanderings in Paris, formless and plotless in any classical sense, savagely anti-artistic. Its end-of-the-rope eloquence was, however, apprentice work compared with Tropic of Capricorn, which deals with Miller's jobholding and job-avoiding life in Manhattan and Brooklyn before he went to Paris. Written in a naked language not of literature but of a man's talking, unquotable except by the page, Tropic of Capricorn would mean plenty to countless men-in-the-street. The "dithyrambic prose" which excited avant-garde blurbists in Tropic of Cancer—and which was frequently tiresome—has been kept in hand by a new sense of structure —a better interplay of narrative and reminiscence.
Nearest approach in The Cosmological Eye to Miller's cumulative power is a nightmare section building up to a bloody, fecund millennium in which a menagerie breaks loose, animals, vegetables and Indians run wild, and there are "no pale white faces, thanks be to Christ!" For the rest, its often funny short pieces are as mild compared to the two novels as they are wild, and fresh, relative to the bulk—and much of the best—of U. S. writing.
Twice to Once. First published in autumn 1938, Twice A Year has established itself as a distinguished periodical, more original in essence if less "experimental" in a literary way than the New Directions annual. Combining autumn 1939 and spring 1940 in a fat third number, the current Twice A Year temporarily assumes annual status. It is edited, designed, published and supported by a calm, brown-eyed, well brought up Philadelphian named Dorothy Norman who takes literature and liberalism both together and equally seriously.
In its first number Twice A Year published 34 pages of moderately pithy pontification by Alfred Stieglitz; a gustier and guttier five-page blast on aesthetics by e. e. cummings; some subtle war-time letters (1914-19) of the great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke; excerpts from Andre Malraux and Franz Kafka among others; the studied, furious oration in which individualist Henry David Thoreau in 1859 defended individualist John Brown. Its "Civil Liberties Section" contained Roger Baldwin's On Being a Conscientious Objector (1918-1913)—plus the judge's decision that in 1918 sent Baldwin to jail.