The first edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer comes with a small notice lining the bottom of the cover: “Not to be imported into Great Britain or U.S.A.” A national uproar and legal ban were not sufficient, alas, to stop a steady trickle of copies from the Obelisk Press in Paris from seeping into the literary underground throughout the country—including the Advocate’s own offices in Cambridge, Mass. Advocate editors in 1934 were evidently more intrigued than deterred by accusations of “pornography” and “decadence” in Miller’s novel. Intrigued enough, indeed, to publish a story of Miller’s, “Glittering Pie,” in the Advocate’s September 1935 issue.
To the modern reader, inured to the wardrobe malfunction, saturated with the ever-more-nearly-bare female body, the story might seem tame. Today it’s more Miller’s exuberance, his italics and exclamations and energy, that animate the piece; “Glittering Pie” seems to be written in a single breath:
Still, though, one can see where all the fuss came from in lines such as this one: “When she opens her trap you see that she is a half-wit; when she dances you see that she is a nymphomaniac; when you go to bed with her you see that she is syphilitic.” The Advocate editors who published “Glittering Pie” immediately faced an outcry from local papers. Some were forced to resign. But Miller, once Grove Press finally published Tropic of Cancer in 1961, exchanged a criminal reputation for one of merely malicious glee.
By Victoria Baena ’14
