The journey toward self-discovery continues, with Miller stumbling through the Southwest lost, alone, and in need of Hamilton (who has continued seeking his father). He and Miller were good friends for a short period of time, and Miller recalls that time with great admiration for Hamilton, for he enabled Miller to know himself better.

Roy was searching for his biological father, but even in the midst of his familial confusion seemed surefooted, wise in profound ways, a rock in the middle of an ocean. He then jumps forward a few years, to a time in his early twenties when he met a man named Roy Hamilton. Miller reflects on the clarity of childhood, how children seem to cut through to the essence of things, how his conversations at that age were models of lucidity and sanity compared to those of the adults, how something is suppressed and muffled inside us when we grow up. No one found out he was involved in the act, and when he asked Gene about it twenty years later, even Gene seemed to have forgotten about it. He recalls accidentally killing a kid with a rock when he was playing with his cousin Gene one summer afternoon. He also has befriended a seventeen year-old kid from Harlem named Curley who has no ethics and will steal from anybody, and who occasionally supplies Miller with spare change.Īt this point in the novel, Miller dives back into his earlier past, culling through vivid childhood memories. Miller spends many of his nights carousing with his sex-hungry friend MacGregor. Asked to look after the Millers’ child while the wife undergoes an abortion, Valeska and Henry make love surrounded by the dominos they had been using to entertain the kid just an hour before. He is married and has a child, but this doesn’t stop him from having an affair with a coworker named Valeska. Miller describes his first book as terrible, but a necessary step on the way to becoming a writer. He takes his first serious stab at writing around this time, when his boss casually mentions that he’d like to see a Horatio Alger-esque tale concerning the telegraph company. He is swept into the system, and contemplates its crazed and inhumane logic (or lack thereof). He serves as a makeshift employment manager, hiring and firing at a rapid pace. He finally manages to secure a long-term stint at what he calls the “Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America” (in all likelihood his bemused term for the Western Union Telegraph Company). The story proper, such as there is, begins with a young Miller working a series of dead-end day jobs. What will follow, he implies, is a series of loosely linked, ostensibly autobiographical musings or accounts. Miller opens the novel with a burst of philosophy, reflecting on life in general.

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller