From Your Capricorn Friend

“It makes me feel good to know there is a comparatively unknown little magazine in the heart of Second Avenue (ghetto to the world) in which l am granted full freedom of speech,” wrote Henry Miller to his friend Irving Stettner, editor of Stroker. In 1978-80, the last three years of his life, Miller generously contributed letters, drawings, and various prose pieces for this magazine’s use, both previously unpublished works from an earlier date and, of special interest, much that was newly written. Presented here are the best of these Miller pieces, including letters he wrote to Stettner in which the author remarks on anything and everything: painting, Brooklyn, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, books and writers, his daily doings. Among the prose selections are pieces on the theatre, “Memory and Forgettery,” “America, America,” “A Few Chaotic Recollections,” and a short story, “Vienna and Back.” His “Toccata for Half-Wits,” an essay on the movie Bonnie and Clyde written in 1968, is the only exception to the concept of this book as a presentation of the fruits of Miller’s very last years. “Squeeze all the color out of the tubes,” Miller advises a young painter friend. As this collection indeed testifies, “Brother Henry,” as he sometimes signed himself, did just that as the end of his life approached.