Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

by Frederick Turner

  The express rattled perilously on. Pauline became pregnant, and Miller, by now sated, watched this development at some unknowable remove, perhaps like that he’d earlier developed while witnessing the hopeless conflict between Louise and Lauretta. One evening when he returned home from work he found Pauline had aborted what he callously called the “seven-month toothache,” the dead fetus enshrouded in a towel in a dresser drawer.

  The event—whether natural or induced—appeared to have solved part of his predicament, how to rid himself of the Pauline problem. But not all of it. For that he would have to find somewhere to go, somewhere far beyond the suddenly too-tight confines of Brooklyn. So, he did what so many had before him: in 1913 he fled into the anonymity of the West, fetching up at the continent’s end, California, where he found work as an agricultural laborer. The work was rough, and though he’d made himself into something of a physical culture nut back in Brooklyn, he wasn’t prepared for stoop labor, and his hands were tender. The boys razzed him a bit about this, but as had happened years earlier when he’d been thrown into Bush-wick’s boyhood briar patch, so here Miller made his way, not with his muscles but with his mouth. “Yorkie,” as the boys called him, could talk. He was a tale spinner.

  Talk

  He’d always been able to do it, but never consistently. There were often enough times when to his friends he seemed a tongue-tied, timid stammerer, awed by some stranger of supposedly greater learning or presence. But then, suddenly, something voltaic would surge through him and he would begin talking in torrents, long rushing streams of images, anecdotes, narrative fragments, wildly adventurous associations, startling and bizarre metaphors, lies so outrageous they strangely compelled a kind of belief. So now, in the fruit orchards of San Pedro and Chula Vista, working his generously proportioned mouth that appeared to have been constructed precisely for this purpose, he could render his rough audience speechless, as if he were an avatar of those folk monologists of another era, assembling out of the brilliant air worlds unimaginable to his listeners. He did the work they did—though it is easy enough to imagine he was never the most industrious among them; he went with them to whorehouses on weekends; drank with them and laughed at the crude jokes they passed around. But in this singular sense he was a man apart. “When I wished to,” he remembered,

  when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism, which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable.

  Sooner or later, he continued, he was bound to say something that would carve out an instant chasm between the spellbinder and his audience:

  The turn of a phrase, the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the facility with which the words came to my lips, the allusions to subjects which were taboo—everything conspired to set me off as an outlaw, as an enemy of society.12

  There were other spellbinders abroad in California and elsewhere in these last prewar days, famous ones who could draw huge crowds when the authorities allowed Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, John Reed, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and other radicals to appear. The phonograph was yet in its infancy, and the age of radio was just dawning. But public speaking was a highly developed art, and Miller was drawn to it, as much perhaps because of the sheer spectacle of the phenomenon as the speakers’ specific messages. One weekend afternoon he and a fellow worker were on their way to a San Diego whorehouse when they happened to see a notice that Goldman would be speaking in the city that day. The two men changed their plans and went to hear her, something that Miller more than half a century later was still calling a life-altering event. It’s a good story, combining as it does two anti-establishment bugaboos—sex-for-pay and red radicalism—and it does not matter that much if Miller actually heard Goldman on that occasion (he may not have), because the fact is that subsequently he read about her and read some of her writings. By the time he returned to Brooklyn in 1914 he was a convert to the trade unionism movement, to free love, and to philosophical anarchism and began attending mass rallies where these causes were championed.

  What drew him to these and kindred causes was that they ran militantly against the American mainstream. The America Miller had come to know had forsaken its radical idealism, he believed, and had instead become enslaved to the sordid, soul-killing idea of Progress, Progress in every aspect of life, Progress at all costs. Everything, even the private relations between a man and a woman in the darkness of a bedroom or in the bushes of a public park, was subject to this one great end: forward. In the first days of the Great War only the so-called lunatic fringe in America was asking probing questions about the human costs of this, the spiritual toll of this worship of a god who demanded such extravagant sacrifices.

  Perhaps for Miller these costs were the more real and appalling because of what was happening in his own household, where he watched his father falling farther and farther behind in the rat race, neglecting his business, and retreating into a boozy sentimentalism, as if in his own way he too wished to rebel against what this New World required of a man. Louise, her son felt, was at the same time becoming more and more a slave driver, the in-house personification of the tyrannous spirit of the age. With the menial labor he’d done in California fresh in his mind he was increasingly drawn to the notion that there must be more to human existence than the brutish necessity of earning your bread by the sweat of your brow until at last you keeled over and croaked. And here even the radical politics of Goldman and Haywood didn’t seem adequate to him for all its talk about the dignity of all work and the moral necessity of giving the workingman a fair shake. That wasn’t enough for him. He didn’t want a fair shake; he wanted something else altogether, though he couldn’t yet call its name. Thus, while he considered himself a political radical (and always would), he was increasingly drawn to thinkers who suggested there was another plane of existence beyond politics, one that had little to do with political movements or Progress or personal economic advancement. Madame Helena Blavatsky for one, a cloudy yet compelling mystagogue whose studies in Oriental religions led her to posit the existence of a realm of being that had nothing to do with the moneygrubbing of the modern world. The Welsh writer and philosopher John Cowper Powys, a hawk-faced man who Miller thought was “all flame, all spirit,” was another and even more significant influence—a powerhouse lecturer with an attachment to the natural world that was an antidote to the soullessness of the city and much else of modern living. Benjamin Fay Mills was another influence, a reformed Christian evangelist who had made something akin to Emerson’s conversion eighty years earlier, from a strict orthodoxy to a more mystical worship in which Christ was only one of the gateways to salvation. Miller was enough taken with what he took to be Mills’s message that he volunteered his services as an usher and alms collector at Mills’s appearances in the New York area.

  Meanwhile, the slaughterhouse of daily, meaningless drudgery loomed ever closer as Louise insisted with increasing urgency that he join his father at the tailor shop and so save the family from ruin. Only Henry, she wailed, now stood between the family and starvation.

  Entering the Slaughterhouse

  To Miller the tailor shop seemed somehow a particularly degrading form of work, as if he were being condemned to spend the rest of his days pressing out the farts the customers had left in their pants, as he so pungently put it. Nonetheless, he could see nothing else possible under the circumstances and knuckled under to his mother’s demands. His father had new business forms made up, reading “Henry Miller & Son,” which must have looked to that son like the official stamp and seal of his fate. No escape now, only the weary commute to the Bowery stop where he would get off so that at least he might get some exercise in the walk uptown. At that morning hour the place was filled with others on foot, some of them stumbling and shuffling—pimps and coke-heads, Mi
ller said, “beggars, touts, gunmen, chinks, wops, drunken micks. All gaga for a bit of food and a place to flop.” Miller himself possessed these necessities, of course, and a job to go to, but spiritually he felt as much on the streets as these men in the Bowery, homeless and alone.

  The shop itself was no better. If anything, it might be worse than the streets, where at least there was a kind of freedom, even if it was only the freedom to starve. At the shop his immediate associates were the three Jewish men in the busheling room to whom he felt an instant aversion. But he couldn’t be around them for very long without privately coming to realize that each of them had a fund of personal culture far richer than his own. They could talk about philosophy, music, and literature with an assurance he lacked, despite his frenzied, unsponsored reading. Yet here they were, wage slaves, as he saw it, working away in a back room to cut and shape cloth for men who in too many instances were not their intellectual equals. The longer he was forced to look down their road, the same one he was traveling, the bleaker it looked, the pavement each day harder, the steel-and-concrete canyons narrower, more inescapable, the “new world eating into me, expropriating me.” Soon, he began imagining, he would be swallowed whole, just another nameless sacrifice.

  Meanwhile, in the front room where his father greeted such customers as there still were he saw how truly hopeless his true task here was—to save his father. Those remaining customers were for the most part his father’s cronies, drinking partners who paid—tardily, if ever—for the expertly tailored suits the Jewish cutters in back turned out. These were men who needed to keep up the appearances they could no longer afford, men who felt they must positively sparkle when they walked across the avenue to the Wolcott Hotel for their eleven o’clock drinks, and in Henry Miller, Senior, they had a man who understood this, for their needs were his own. They were all like Paul Dexter, a “ten-thousand-dollar-a-year-man,” a brilliant monologist, but who was always temporarily between positions and who frequently disappeared on week-long bats. Or else they had some tarnished Old World background like the penniless baron who had fallen on hard times in this New World where he had contracted syphilis like some conquistador out of the age of exploration. Somewhere along the road they had all lost their way and now were reduced to trading as best they could on the appearances Henry Senior provided on credit. In their boozy bonhomie at the Wolcott bar and the other bars along Fifth Avenue they could forget for a few hours how lost they were. And sometimes they could extend that forget-fulness, that alcoholic anodyne, into the evening, because Miller’s father might bring one or another of them home to Decatur Street, thrusting them into Louise’s baleful presence. Only for a meal maybe, or an overnight stay, just until a temporary financial inconvenience had been straightened out. Once, so Miller claimed, his father even took one of these guests to bed with him. However that may have been, it is certainly believable that often enough Miller had to go to his own bed with the Nachtmusik of his mother raging at her sodden husband whose need for male friendship was hurtling his business toward a financial abyss.

  While bearing passive witness to this process Miller began to court a pianist named Beatrice Wickens. Pauline was still in the picture but now very much in its background. Beatrice was about Miller’s own age, whereas Pauline was considerably older, and besides, the younger woman had an active interest in the arts and could discuss with Miller some of the books he was tearing through—Spengler, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, the Greek dramatists, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. For a brief time Miller saw both women, but Pauline clearly belonged to the past and Beatrice to the future.

  One thing remained the same in the new relationship, and this was the frantic, acrobatic, improvisational nature of the couple’s lovemaking, as if Miller required this form of aphrodisiac. But there was now as well a new quality and a complication, for Beatrice had had a very traditional Catholic upbringing and carried within her a profound ambivalence about the pleasures of the body. The more fun she had in one of their torrid encounters, Miller claimed, the deeper her subsequent torment. Nothing could have been more calculated to excite Miller’s anger and ferocious contempt, though at the time he might not have been able to say just why. But for a man who claimed his mother had so early instilled the spirit of rebellion in his heart, all his combative energies were strongly stirred by what he regarded as a pious and ultimately cankered denial of the body and its perfectly natural needs. So here, Beatrice’s post-coital fits of remorse provoked Miller’s most inventive cruelty. Still, they continued to have sex, Miller perhaps perversely spurred on to more incessant demands by the prospect of Beatrice’s anguished tears. What else could they then do but marry? And this they unhappily did in 1917, and then quickly set to work building their respective redoubts, she the shrewish, humiliated wife, and he the feckless, henpecked husband. By the time their daughter Barbara was born in 1919, Miller was staying away from home as much as possible, and when he did venture back, often enough he had in tow one or another of his cronies, a reprise of the situation in his parents’ household.

  By then, though, Miller’s father had drifted beyond even that sad state and was sleeping away ever larger stretches of his days in simple avoidance technique. Remembering this period, his son would eventually describe the old man snoring away in his Morris chair, “dead as a crater,” or—in an even more invidious metaphor—“like a dodo which buries its head in the sand and whistles out of its ass-hole.”13 Clearly, his continuance at the tailor shop had become pointless, and Miller gladly quit for a bewildering succession of temporary jobs, all of which he speedily dropped, much to his wife’s distress and mounting contempt. Nothing suited her Henry—nothing useful at any rate—because by now it had occurred to him that what he really wanted to do was to become a writer.

  He had, however, absolutely no idea how this ambition could be realized. Already, he’d turned over half a library, reading through the works of the great. And in the tailor shop he had met an honest-to-god living, working writer, Frank Harris. Reading was fine in its way; certainly a writer must be well read. And Harris’s colorful personality was attractive: it was grand indeed to be able to sail into a tailor shop to be fitted out for a yachting costume. Still, neither reading nor Harris’s literary status showed the way into the actual, solitary act of composing. Maybe it was a matter of the right materials. So he bought pens and a notebook, but they were dead things in his hands. Then somehow he got a monstrous desk out of the tailor shop and into his Brooklyn flat where it squatted, square in the midst of the living room. Yet when he sat down to it with his proper materials nothing happened. He himself was as dead as a crater, sitting there, staring at the unforgiving blankness of the page. He refused to believe he had nothing to say because for some years now he had been composing in his head dialogue, scenes, character sketches, vignettes as he shuttled to and from his menial jobs. What then was the trick, the hidden spring, the magic formula that would release interior invention, turning thought or conversation into words written on a waiting page?

  Manhattan Monologist

  Maybe he’d been born in the wrong place—Brooklyn, USA—at the wrong time, this soulless modern age of Progress? He asked his old friend Emil this question many times on his visits to Schnellock’s Fiftieth Street studio. He would come bounding up the stairs to the studio, filled with an electric vigor, clad in his studiously shabby army shirt and battered felt hat, brimming with new stories and observations gleaned from his voracious reading. But then, the question: was it merely his bad luck to be only an American instead of a European? Perhaps to find an answer by way of context, he would pump Emil for reminiscences of his time abroad, using Schnellock’s mounted wall map of the Continent as a constant point of reference. But what really riveted him was a large map of Paris. He studied that as if it were a kind of code he was meant to crack, tracing with his fingers the archaic meander of its streets, the grand arc the river made through the city’s heart.

  All of this of course was when it was just
the two of them. In the company of others, men with some artistic or intellectual cachet, Miller would be mostly silent, almost mute. It infuriated his host because, better than anyone, Schnellock knew how Miller could talk when the fit was on him. Yet in the presence of these prestigious strangers his old friend seemed cowed, suddenly and quite literally just a Brooklyn boy. In more comfortable company it could be quite different. Then, maybe, something said—the expression of some bit of vanity, a piety, the mindless repetition of a reigning shibboleth—would set him off on verbal flights that transfixed and transformed his listeners with what Schnellock recalled as Miller’s “magnificent life-giving words, words that seemed to restore to us what life had robbed us of. Truth, lies, fantasy, drama, invention”—and a sidesplitting humor so overwhelming it hurt. And there were a very few occasions when Miller could do this in the presence of those strangers he appeared to regard as his betters. On these occasions it was as if he’d suddenly said to himself, “Fuck everything,” and then would “sweep away all barriers and take the company by storm,” as Schnellock put it.

  In the aftermath of such a performance Schnellock would find himself besieged with requests for Miller’s address or phone number. How could they get hold of this guy? When was Emil going to invite him back, and couldn’t they please be included? Yet if Schnellock did arrange such an occasion, Miller might well arrive wrapped in an impenetrable silence. After one of these aggravating non-performances and as Emil was berating him, Miller flew into a rage in the course of which and in an apparent reference to the brilliance of his talk and its very occasional nature, he uttered the warning words, “That’s totem and taboo!” The proximate reference here, of course, would have been to Freud’s controversial book on exogamy and other taboos of primitive cultures. But what could the retort have meant in this context? It might have meant simply that Miller wasn’t a trained seal, a trick pony who could perform on demand. That would be consistent with his characteristic tendency to work always against the grain, whatever the grain was at a given time or situation. But maybe it meant something more as well. Maybe it meant that Miller himself didn’t really know where the improvised flights came from and wasn’t able to summon them at will. Maybe he was both baffled and troubled, too, by the very unpredictability of this talent. Was it even a talent, or was it instead the recrudescence of that broad strand of craziness in his family line, the taboo of his tribe? If it was this, no wonder a conversational consideration of it was off limits, both for himself and for his closest friend.