Black Spring
by Henry Miller
Ten hallucinatory riffs between Brooklyn's 14th Ward and the Paris streets — Miller at his most purely musical.
- 1936
- 243
About Henry Miller
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeLess a narrative than a set of prose arias, Black Spring swings between a Brooklyn boyhood among tailors and saloons and the Paris present of the writing desk — with detours through dreams, Dijon, and a defense of the water closet as literature's true home. It is the Miller book critics most often call his best-written: the scandal quieter, the sentences louder.
The story, in more detail
Between the two Tropics, Miller wrote his tenderest book. Black Spring (Obelisk Press, 1936, dedicated to Anaïs Nin) drops the Paris present for ten self-standing pieces, half of them time machines: back to the Fourteenth Ward of Brooklyn where he was a boy among tailors, undertakers, and street heroes, before America — as he saw it — went wrong.
It is also his most experimental book: surrealist riffs, a tour of his method ('The Angel Is My Watermark' watches him make a watercolor, step by deranged step), dream sequences, rants that turn into arias. The sex that made Cancer infamous largely sits this one out, which lets the other Miller — the remembering, grieving, hymn-writing one — hold the page alone.
Like its siblings it was banned in the English-speaking world for decades, reaching American readers legally only in 1963 via Grove Press, after Cancer had broken the dam. Connoisseurs regularly name it his best writing sentence for sentence; Miller himself often agreed. The Brooklyn elegies are the proof that the scandalous expatriate was, underneath, a homesick lyric poet.
What's inside
Ten self-contained pieces, and the tenderest door into Miller. The anchor is memory: 'The Fourteenth Ward' returns to the Brooklyn streets where he was a boy among tailors, veterans, and neighborhood gods, written with an ache that surprises readers who arrive expecting only scandal. Around the Brooklyn elegies the book ranges freely — a day in the life of a Paris street, a burlesque of French plumbing, a tour through the tailor shop of his father's failing trade.
The experimental pieces are the wildest writing he ever published: 'The Angel Is My Watermark' documents, step by step, the deranged creation of a watercolor; dream sequences slide into surrealist free-fall; rants become arias and come back. There is no plot to spoil — the book is a sequence of performances — and connoisseurs of Miller routinely name it his best, the one where the memoirist, the comedian, and the visionary all hold the stage at once.
Why we recommend it
'The Fourteenth Ward'
The opening Brooklyn chapter is the tenderest thing Miller ever wrote — immigrant streets recalled with a love that makes the later rage legible.
The style at full orchestra
Freed from even Cancer's loose diary shape, the sentences go where they want — surrealist catalogs, dream sequences, sudden aphorisms. This is the book to read aloud.
The bridge book
Between Cancer's Paris present and Capricorn's New York past, Black Spring is the span — and the clearest view of what Miller was actually building across the trilogy.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Jabberwhorl Cronstadt
An American poet in Paris who pays for the household by letting apartments to strangers. He hosts the long, drunken dinner that fills the piece named after him, and he talks through all of it.
Jill
Jabberwhorl Cronstadt's wife, who runs the dinner, counts her husband's drinks and supplies the words he cannot remember. She is expecting a child, which he mentions in passing.
The narrator's father
A New York merchant tailor, called "the old man" on nearly every page. He drinks with his customers, cannot collect his bills, and employs his son in the shop. Miller's own father.
Also in the book
Tante Melia
An aunt in the narrator's German-American family in Brooklyn. She loses her mind over the course of the book and ends in a state asylum. "Tante" is German for aunt.
Tom Jordan
A woollen salesman and the old man's drinking companion, forever in the back of the tailor shop having the stains taken out of his trousers.
Bring it to book club
- Which mode of Miller survives best — the Brooklyn elegy, the Paris diary, or the surrealist riff?
- 'I am a patriot—of the Fourteenth Ward, Brooklyn, where I was raised.' How does this hometown loyalty square with the expatriate's flight?
- Does removing most of the sex change what Miller's project actually is?
Timeline
1936
The Obelisk Press publishes it in Paris, dedicated to Anaïs Nin, as ten prose pieces set between the two Tropics.
1963
Grove Press brings it to American readers, after Tropic of Cancer had broken the dam.
Book editions
- Paperback
- Grove Press
- 1963
- 9780802131829
- Ebook
- Grove Press
- 9781555846916
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
Tropic of Capricorn
The successor, which drops back into the New York these chapters remember.
Read our take
Death on the Installment Plan
Céline's childhood book, published the same year — the two talk to each other shelf to shelf.
Read our take
The Cantos
The other kitchen-sink modernist experiment: everything the author ever thought, in one form.
Read our takeBlack Spring: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Black Spring?
Henry Miller. It was published in Paris in 1936, between his two Tropics.
What is Black Spring about?
Less a narrative than a set of prose arias, it swings between a Brooklyn boyhood among tailors and saloons and the Paris present of the writing desk, with detours through dreams and Dijon.
How does Black Spring relate to the Tropics?
It sits between Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and is the Miller book critics most often call his best-written — the scandal quieter, the sentences louder.
Who is Black Spring dedicated to?
Anaïs Nin, Miller's champion and companion through the Paris years.
Where was Black Spring published?
In Paris, by the Obelisk Press, in 1936 — the same house that had published Tropic of Cancer.