It is not so much a novel as a classical tragedy grafted onto modern life. A group of men (and a single woman, May, who in the essentially misogynist world of Malraux is barely a sketch, only slightly more clearly defined than Valérie and the courtesans who form part of the background) from different parts of the world face up to a superior enemy in order to, in Kyo’s words, ‘give back dignity’ to those that they are fighting for: the wretched, the defeated, the exploited, the rural and industrial slaves. In this struggle, in which they are defeated and perish, Kyo, Chen and Katow reach a higher moral plane, achieve a greatness that expresses ‘the human condition’ in its most exemplary form.
Life is not like this, and, of course, revolutions are not made up of noble and despicable actions distributed in rectilinear fashion between the combatants of each side. To find such schematic political and ethical concerns in any of the fictions produced by socialist realism would be profoundly tedious. The fact that Man’s Fate convinces us of its truth means that Malraux was capable, like all great creators, of pulling the wool over our eyes, masking his views with the irresistible appearance of reality.
The truth is that flesh-and-blood revolutions are not so clear cut in our own world of greys and shifting tones, nor do revolutionaries shine forth so pure, coherent, brave and self-sacrificing as in the turbulent pages of the novel. Why, then, do we find them so hypnotic? Why are we surprised and why do we suffer when Katow, that silent adventurer, accepts a terrible death as the price of his generous action, or why are we blown apart, with Chen, beneath the car that Chiang Kai-Chek was not travelling in? Why, if these characters are fabrications? Because they embody a universal ideal, the supreme aspiration to perfection and the absolute that resides in every human heart. But, more than this, because the skill of the narrator is so consummate that he manages to persuade us of the intimate truth of these secular angels, of these saints that he has brought down from heaven and turned into common mortals, heroes who appear to be just like any one of us.
The novel is superbly concise. The bare descriptions often emerge from the dialogues and reflections of the characters, rapid sketches that are sufficient to create the depressing urban landscape: teeming Shanghai, bristling with wire fences, swept by the smoke of the factories and the rain, where hunger, promiscuity and the worst cruelties coexist with generosity, fraternity and heroism. Concise, sharp, the style never says too much, always too little. Every episode is like the tip of an iceberg; but they radiate such intensity that the reader’s imagination can reconstruct the totality of the action from this sparse description without difficulty, the place where it occurs as well as the state of mind and secret motivations of the protagonists. This synthetic method gives the novel a great density and an epic breadth. The street action sequences, like the capture of the police post by Chen and his men at the beginning, and the fall of the trench where Katow and the Communists have taken refuge at the end, are small, tense, masterly descriptions that keep the reader in suspense. These and other episodes in Man’s Fate are visually cinematographic, something which Dos Passos also managed to achieve in his best tales in those same years.
An excess of intelligence is often fatal in a novel because it can work against the persuasive power of the fiction. But in Malraux’s novels, intelligence is an atmosphere, it is everywhere, in the narrator and all the characters: the wise Gisors is no less lucid than the policeman Konig, and even the Belgian Hemmelrich, who is presented as a fundamentally mediocre person, reflects on his failures and frustrations with a dazzling mental clarity. Intelligence does not get in the way of verisimilitude in Man’s Fate (by contrast it undermines realism in all Sartre’s novels) because in the novel intelligence is a universal attribute of the living. This is one of the main characteristics of the ‘added element’ in the novel, which gives it sovereignty, its own life that is different to real life.
The great character of the book is not Kyo, as the narrator would have it, as he carefully stresses the discipline, team spirit and submission to leadership of this perfect militant. It is Chen, the anarchist, the individualist, who changes from being an activist to being a terrorist, a superior state, in his view, because by killing and dying he can accelerate history which, for the party revolutionary, is made up of slow collective movements in which the individual counts for little or nothing. In the character of Chen we find a sketch of what over the years would become Malraux’s ideology: the hero who, thanks to his lucidity, force of will and daring, can prevail over the ‘laws’ of history. The fact that he fails – Malraux’s characters are always defeated – is the price that he pays for the eventual triumph of the cause.
As well as being brave, tragic and intelligent, Malraux’s characters are usually cultured: appreciative of beauty, well versed in art and philosophy, enthusiastic about exotic cultures. In Man’s Fate, the emblematic figure in this respect is old Gisors; but Clappique is made of the same stuff, for behind his bragging exhibitionism, there is a subtle man with an exquisite taste for aesthetic objects. Baron Clappique is an irruption of fantasy, absurdity, freedom and humour in this grave, logical, lugubrious and violent world of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. He is there to lighten, with a blast of irresponsibility and madness, that rarefied hell of suffering and cruelty. He also reminds us, contrary to what Kyo, Chen and Katow think, that life is made up not just of reason and collective values, but also of madness, instinct and individual passions that contradict and sometimes destroy these values.
Malraux’s creative impetus was not confined to his novels. It also suffuses his essays and autobiographical works, some of which – like the Anti-Mémoires or Les Chênes qu’on abat (Felled Oaks: Conversations with De Gaulle) – have such an overwhelming persuasive force, due to the bewitching nature of the prose, the fascination of his stories and rounded way in which the characters are described, that they do not seem to be accounts of events and people from real life but rather the fantasies of a conjurer, adept at the art of persuasion. I set out to read the last of these books, which narrates a conversation with De Gaulle at Colombey-les-deux-Églises on 11 December 1969, feeling rather hostile: it was political hagiography, a genre I detest, and I was sure that it would mythify and embellish nationalism, which is just as obtuse in France as it is in any other country. However, despite my firm decision, taken in advance, to detest the book completely, this dialogue between two monuments, who speak as only people in great books speak, with unremitting coherence and brilliance, broke down my defences, engrossed me in its delirious egotism and made me believe, as I read, the prophetic nonsense with which these two brilliant interlocutors consoled themselves: that, without De Gaulle, Europe would break up and that France, in the hands of the mediocre politicians that had come after him, would also go into decline. It seduced me, not convinced me, and now I try to explain it by saying that Felled Oaks is a magnificent, detestable book.
There is no one like a great writer to make us see mirages. Malraux could do this not only when he wrote, but also when he talked. This was another of his original gifts, one which, I believe, had no precursors or successors. Oratory is a minor art, superficial, full of mere sonorous and visual effects, usually devoid of thought, performed by and for garrulous people. But Malraux was an outstanding orator, as one can see from his Oraisons funèbres (Funerary Orations), capable of endowing a speech with a host of fresh and stimulating ideas, and clothing it with images of great rhetorical beauty. Some of these texts, like those that he read in the Pantheon over the coffin of the French resistance hero, Jean Moulin, and over the coffin of Le Corbusier, in the courtyard of the Louvre, are beautiful literary pieces, and those of us who heard him declaim them, with his thunderous voice, the necessary dramatic pauses and his visionary gaze, will never forget the spectacle (I heard them at a great distance, in the press pack, but I still went into a cold sweat and was very moved).
Malraux was like that throughout his life: a spectacle, that he himself prepared, directed and performed,
with great skill and with due attention to the smallest detail. He knew that he was intelligent and brilliant and, despite this, he did not become an idiot. He was also very courageous; he did not fear death, and, because of that, even though death stalked him on many occasions, he was able to embark on all those risky undertakings that marked his existence. But he was also, thankfully, rather histrionic and narcissistic, a high-flying exhibitionist (a Baron Clappique), and that made him human, brought him down from those heights that his intelligence – that had so amazed Gide – had taken him to, down to our level, the level of simple mortals. Most of the writers I admire would have failed the Pantheon test; or their presence there, in that monument to official memory, would have seemed intolerable, an insult to their memory. How could a Flaubert, a Baudelaire, a Rimbaud have entered the Pantheon? But Malraux is not out of place there, nor do his works or his image become impoverished among those marbles. Because one of the innumerable facets of this symphonic man was that he loved showiness and theatricality, triumphal arches, flags, hymns, those symbols invented to cover over the existential void and feed our human vanity.
London, March 1999
Tropic of Cancer
The Happy Nihilist
I remember very clearly how I read Tropic of Cancer for the first time, thirty years ago: very quickly, overexcited, in the course of just one night. A Spanish friend had got hold of a French version of this maudit book about which so many stories were circulating in Lima, and when he saw how anxious I was to read it, he lent it to me for a few hours. It was a strange experience, completely different to what I had imagined, because the book was not scandalous, as was being said, because of its erotic scenes, but rather because of its vulgarity and its cheerful nihilism. It reminded me of Céline, in whose novels swearwords and filth also become poetry, and Breton’s Nadja, because, in Nadja and in Tropic of Cancer, the most everyday reality suddenly becomes transformed into dream-like images and unsettling nightmares.
The book impressed me, but I don’t think that I liked it. I had then – and I still have – a prejudice that novels should tell stories that begin and end, that they had an obligation to oppose the chaos of life with an artificial, tidy and persuasive order. Tropic of Cancer – like all Miller’s subsequent books – is chaos in pure form, effervescent anarchy, a great, romantic, coarse, firework display, from which the reader emerges somewhat nauseous, disturbed and rather more pessimistic about human existence than before the show. The risk with this type of loose, formless literature is that it can become just clever showmanship, and Henry Miller, like another of his maudit contemporaries, Jean Genet, often fell into this trap. But Tropic of Cancer, his first novel, fortunately avoided this danger. It is, without doubt, the best book that he wrote, one of the great literary creations of the inter-war period, and within the œuvre of Miller, the work that is closest to being a masterpiece.
I have reread it now with real pleasure. Time and the bad habits of our era have diminished its violence and what seemed to be its rhetorical daring; we now know that farts and gonorrhoea can also be aesthetic. But time has not impoverished the sorcery of his prose or lessened its impact. On the contrary, it has added to it both serenity and a sort of maturity. When it appeared in 1934, in a semi-clandestine edition, in linguistic exile, a victim of prohibitions and edifying attacks, what was praised or disparaged in the book was its iconoclasm, the insolence with which, in its sentences, the worst, most offensive, words displaced those considered as being in good taste, as well as its obsession with eschatology. Today this aspect of the novel shocks very few readers, since modern literature has adopted these elements that Miller introduced with Tropic of Cancer, to such an extent that in many ways they have become a platitude, like talking about the geometry of passions in the eighteenth century, or reviling the bourgeoisie in the Romantic era, or becoming historically committed at the time of existentialism. Rude words lost their rudeness some time ago, and sex and its ceremonies have been popularised to the point of tedium. All this has its downside, of course, but one of the clear advantages is that now we can finally judge if Henry Miller, as well as being an explosive writer and an erotic novelist, was also a genuine artist.
He was, without any doubt. He was a genuine creator, with his own world and vision of humanity and literature that clearly singled him out from other writers of his generation. He represented, in our time, like Céline or Genet, that satanic tradition of iconoclasts, of very different temperaments, for whom writing has throughout history signified defying the conventions of the age, spoiling the party of social harmony, bringing out into the light all the brutishness and filth that society – sometimes with good reason, at other times for no good reason – insists on repressing. This is one of the important functions of literature: to remind men and women that however firm the ground that they walk on appears to be, and however brightly the city that they live in shines, there are demons lurking everywhere that, at any moment, can cause a violent upheaval.
Cataclysm, apocalypse, are words that come immediately to mind when talking about Tropic of Cancer, despite the fact that in its pages the only blood spilled is in a few drunken brawls and the only war is the (always belligerent) fornication of its characters. But a premonition of imminent catastrophe haunts its pages, the intuition that everything that is being narrated is about to disappear in a holocaust. This intuition causes the novel’s picturesque and promiscuous characters to live in such a dissolute frenzy. Theirs is a world that is ending, that is disintegrating morally and socially in a hysterical spree, waiting for the arrival of the plague and death, as in the terrifying fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch. In historical terms, all this is rigorously accurate. Miller wrote the novel in Paris between 1931 and 1933, at a time leading up to the great conflagration that would sweep through Europe some years later. These were years of bonanza and partying, of happy thoughtlessness and splendid creativity. All the aesthetic vanguard movements flourished, and the Surrealists enchanted modern-minded people with their poetic imagination and their ‘provocation spectacles’. Paris was the capital of the artistic world and of human happiness.
In Tropic of Cancer we see the flip side of this story. Its world is Parisian, but it is light years away from that society of winners and prosperous optimists: it is made up of pariahs, pseudo-painters, pseudo-writers, drop-outs and parasites who live on the margins of the city, not participating in the feast, fighting over the scraps. Expatriates who have lost the intimate link with their country of origin – the United States, Russia – who have not taken root in Paris and live in a kind of cultural limbo. Its geographical reference points are brothels, bars, run-down hotels, sordid rooms, dreadful restaurants, and the parks, squares and streets that attract tramps. In order to survive in this difficult country, everything goes: from a mind-numbing job – correcting proofs in a newspaper – to scrounging, pimping or conning. Many use vague ideas about art to justify themselves – I have to write the important novel, to paint redemptive pictures, etc. – but in fact the only seriousness the group displays is their lack of seriousness, their promiscuity, their passive indifference and their slow disintegration.
This is a world – or rather an underworld – that I got to know at the end of the fifties, and I am sure that it was not very different to the one Miller frequented – and which inspired Tropic of Cancer – twenty years earlier. I was horrified by the slow, useless death of that bohemian Paris and I only got in touch with it out of necessity, when there was no other alternative. For that reason, I really can appreciate the feat of transforming this milieu into literature, of transforming these people, these rituals and all this asphyxiating mediocrity, into the dramatic and heroic characters that appear in the novel. But what is perhaps most noteworthy is that in this milieu, that was eaten away by inertia and defeatism, it was possible to conceive and complete a creative project as ambitious as Tropic of Cancer. (The book was rewritten three times and reduced by a third in its final version.)
Because
the book is a creation rather than a testimony, its documentary value is indisputable, but what has been added by Miller’s fantasy and obsessions is more important than the historical material, and it is what gives Tropic of Cancer its literary status. What is autobiographical in the book is a semblance rather than a reality, a narrative strategy to give an appearance of trustworthiness to what is a fiction. This inevitably happens in a novel, whatever the intention of the author. Perhaps Miller wanted to put himself into his story, to offer himself as a spectacle, in a great exhibitionist display of total nakedness. But the result was identical to that of a novelist who carefully retreats from his or her narrative world and tries to depersonalise it as much as possible. The ‘Henry’ of Tropic of Cancer is an invention who gains our sympathy or dislike through actions and attitudes that unfold in an autonomous way, from within the confines of the fiction: in order to believe in him – to see him, feel him and, above all, hear him – it is not necessary to compare him to the living model that supposedly inspired the creation. Between the author and the narrator of a novel there is always a distance; the author always creates a narrator, be it an invisible narrator, or one who is involved in the story, be it an all-powerful god who is not open to appeal and who knows everything, or someone who lives as a character among the other characters and has as limited and subjective a vision as that of any of his fictitious fellow humans. The narrator is, in every case, the first person that is imagined by that distiller of fantasies that we call a novelist.
The narrator-character of Tropic of Cancer is the great creation of the novel, the supreme achievement of Miller as a novelist. This obscene narcissist ‘Henry’, who despises the world, caring only for his phallus and his guts, has, above all, an unmistakable tone, a Rabelaisian vitality for changing crudeness and dirt into art, for spiritualising, with his great poetic voice, physiological functions, pettiness and squalor, for giving aesthetic dignity to vulgarity. What is most remarkable is not the freedom and naturalness with which he describes sex or fantasises about it, reaching extremes of explicitness that have no precedent in modern literature, but rather his moral attitude. Or would it be more precise, perhaps, to talk about his amorality? I don’t think so. Because, although the behaviour of the narrator and his opinions defy established morality – or rather, established moralities – it would be unjust to argue that he is indifferent to this issue. His way of acting and thinking is coherent: his contempt for conventions is a response to a deep conviction, a certain vision of man, society and culture which, albeit in a somewhat confused way, is clearly shown throughout the novel.
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