Money and How It Gets That Way

The question from Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound asked Miller whether he had thought about money and how it acquired its power. Miller responded with a comic essay that adopts the manner of a learned explanation. The surviving typescript is dated 1 November 1936; the first Paris edition appeared in 1938.

The connection with Pound explains the occasion and the dedication. It does not make Miller’s essay a statement of agreement with all Pound’s economic or political beliefs. The humor needs to be read as Miller’s response to the question.

A parody of expert explanation

The essay makes fun of a style of reasoning that seems to explain a subject while repeatedly circling back to its starting point. A passage on money’s existence, for example, turns an obvious proposition into elaborate argument. The authority of the explanation becomes part of the joke.

This matters because a literal reading can misidentify the book’s purpose. Miller is not presenting a workable monetary system. He uses the language of expertise to expose how confidently people talk about something they pursue, depend on, and often understand poorly.

In the passage reproduced by Maria Popova, Miller’s explanation of money’s forms moves from hydrogen and oxygen to a comparison with God. The account grows grander as it becomes less testable: what it claims to explain ends up beyond any particular manifestation. Read as comic prose, this escalation exposes the pose of mastery rather than supplying it. Scientific and theological language lends authority to an explanation that keeps moving its subject out of reach.

Another excerpt in Popova’s article climbs from a Ford to a Packard, a Rolls Royce and an aeroplane, then from worker to factory owner to financier. Each apparent destination becomes the starting point for another desire. The financier’s wish to escape the whole arrangement reverses the direction of this ascent: the person at the top wants out. Repeated sentence patterns make dissatisfaction seem mechanical, while the final reversal punctures the promise that the next promotion will settle it.

Money in Miller’s other writing

In Miller’s autobiographical books, money usually appears as a concrete problem: paying rent, finding food, taking a job, or relying on a friend. This essay shifts from those situations to the language used to explain money itself.

Read beside Tropic of Capricorn, the difference is useful. The novel gives employment and economic dependence a lived setting. The essay performs its argument through comic explanation. One should not be mistaken for a factual commentary that settles the meaning of the other.

The small-press edition and the collected essay

Booster Publications issued the sixty-four-page first edition in Paris in a small print run. Later American publication brought the essay into Miller’s network of independent presses. UCLA preserves proofs and correspondence concerning a subsequent edition.

Readers do not need a rare first edition to encounter the essay. It also appears in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird. That collection places its financial comedy beside Miller’s writing on art, censorship, and other authors, making its relationship to his broader concerns easier to follow.