Having read the Tropics and many other Miller books years ago, this was an interesting return that added a lot of detail not in the books themselves. Worth reading. ( )

When I first discovered Henry Miller for myself in the early 1990s, I was mildly frustrated by the small number of academic works to be found on the author’s books, and on Tropic of Cancer in particular. Naturally, it seemed that Miller was straightforward enough with his intentions in his own novels and essays, but I was confused as to the literary establishment’s seemingly mute response to the American “renegade”. One of my first reactions upon confronting, at age 18, the pure vitality and anti-establishment fearlessness of Tropic of Cancer was: how come nobody ever told me about this guy?

It turned out that Miller was not the secret to the world that he had been to me, yet I still found it hard to locate good academic material about Miller’s book. And frequently when I did I was disappointed; oftentimes I found his biographers simply tweaking or reviewing what Miller himself had already written, and I found the literary essayists approaching too carefully or too obsessively the problematic issues of misogyny, anti-Semitism, obscenity and anti-Americanism in Miller’s works, to the detriment of what I felt Miller really had to offer through his tone, his frustration, and his glorious, reality-confirming conclusions. If Frederick Turner’s Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer had been published in 1991, I would have found it a welcome vindication.

Renegade benefits from its refreshing lack of interest in making justifications or excuses for treating Miller as an American writer worthy of study, as Turner takes for granted that Miller has an important legacy in the pantheon of American writers and artists. After the framing first chapter, Turner undergoes an examination of the America that gave birth to Henry Miller. He traces the tensions of the New World and new country through both its writers (Crèvecoeur, Whitman, Twain) and its expressions (folklore, vulgarity, burlesque), arriving in early 20th century New York to explore the immediate context of Miller’s development. We then follow Miller through his rosy crucifixion days, his move to Paris, and his breakthrough in finally finding his artistic voice. Turner is confident and concise in guiding the reader through Miller’s development and has plenty to say about the artistic context of Tropic of Cancer.

One chapter near the end, “The Grounds of Great Offense”, particularly stands out as exactly what I was looking for when as a teenager I shook the libraries looking for commentary on Tropic. But overall, the entire book is a satisfying explanation of how Miller the artist and Tropic of Cancer came to be. Turner’s voice is objective, academic, and subtly humorous. Despite some of the range of his argument (concerning the relevance of early American folklore and the “liberal profanity” of continent-breaking trailblazers) the book is quite focused. I dare think it may be an interesting book even if one has never read Tropic of Cancer. I no longer read Miller much myself—I exhausted his oeuvre within a few years of encountering him—but reading Renegade was a good reminder of Miller’s most important achievement and the effect Tropic of Cancer has had on American literature—whether America wants to acknowledge it, or not. ( )