Tropic of Corn

Harry has deserted his girl Jeanie after arranging an abortion for her; he has become the pimp-lover of a whore; and now he is choking and robbing a blind beggar. "God will punish you!" cries the beggar. "God, huh?" says Harry. "Ask God to give you a new pair of eyes."

Harry is the hero of Henry Miller's first and only play, Just Wild About Harry, written in three days in 1960 and given its world premiere last week in Spoleto at Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds. The play is standard, consistent Miller all the way; that is to say, it is a show of dirty drivel.

Harry's new girl friend tells him that she may be falling in love with a young poet, pale and philosophic. "Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, David Hume, Paracelsus, Bishop Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, Descartes and Pico della Mirandola," says Harry, proving himself the young man's intellectual peer. This Harry is a versatile man with words as well as ideas. When a street singer ambles past him, he tells the street singer in Anglo-Saxon syllables to go copulate with a duck.

In rare moments, Miller is funny. When Harry's ex-girl seeks him out in the prostitute's apartment, Harry snarls at her: "Are ya tryin' to break up a home?" But mainly the dialogue is dull and dead. In the end, Harry is dead too, and gone to limbo, where he tries hopelessly to ignite the stage with a flaming speech: "I don't belong. I don't want to belong. I don't want to kill anybody to save the world. It's not my problem. I got bigger problems. I got personal problems." Someone has.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.