Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

by Frederick Turner

  They went to the hotel they’d stayed at in 1928—and woke up in the morning covered with lice. Within days they’d begun to bicker, then to quarrel, and then to engage in pitched battles. But Val wasn’t Val, she found, no longer the whipped cur she had sent away months ago. He had had a glimpse—fleeting, preliminary—of a new kind of existence here, with some kind of new work at its center. With June there, however, work was out of the question. Being with her was a full-time job, one that exhausted both of them, and after something less than a month she went back to the States for more money. As soon as she left Miller pulled himself together and began to reconstruct his life of severely disciplined poverty, one unencumbered and unclouded by June’s fantasies, which from his new perspective he felt had completely engulfed her like the cigarette smoke she filled their room with each morning when she awakened.

  What he needed now, he obscurely understood, was that bottom-dog clarity he had just begun to sense when she arrived, one where you were compelled to shed, one by one, your old illusions like worn-out items of clothing. Years later, looking back from America, he wrote in The Time of the Assassins, that every “renunciation has but one aim: the attainment of another level.” If we put this later aperéu together with his remark to Emil about realistic literature not being the “highest plane,” it becomes apparent that Miller was experiencing in these months what in religious literature has been called a “turning about in the seat of the soul.” He had been forced to shed and shed, until he could feel the whole world beating against his skin. He still had a long way to go to feel this to such an extent that he could be free to be the artist he dreamed of becoming. But the way was there for him, even if it wasn’t quite clear where it led.

  In the immediate aftermath of June, he was at least clear-eyed enough so that he could tell Emil that he was deriving a savage glee from performing daily vivisections on Crazy Cock, “this novel that I’ve been dragging about from one hotel to another, across the ocean twice, thru bordellos and carnivals, a pillow at night in the movies, and under the bridges of the Seine. Stop! Cut the sentimentality!” Out, out, he went on, not raving now but writing with a ruthless abandon, “out with the apostrophes, the mythological mythies … the vast and pompous learning (which I haven’t got!).” What he was meant to do, he told Emil, what he must do “before blowing out my brains, is to write a few simple sentences in plain Miller-esque language.”

  An Apache

  With June gone Miller might have moved back in with Perlès, but for some reason he didn’t. Instead he moved in with an American, Richard Osborn. Osborn was a Yale Law School graduate working in a Paris bank. He was also an aspiring writer living a double life, his days soberly spent at the bank and his nights consumed with bar-hopping and chasing women in Montparnasse. Eventually this killing routine would catch up with him, but for now he was managing it, though occasionally he’d show up at the bank red of eye and with a rumpled suit. When he happened to meet Miller he was taken with the raffish, streetwise man who not only claimed to be a writer but who actually seemed to be working hard at it. Osborn sensed he had things to learn from Miller, both about writing and about the tougher aspects of the city’s nightlife. He had a large, cold flat on Rue Auguste Bartholdi overlooking the drill grounds of the Ecole Militaire in the Fourteenth and offered Miller a space. In exchange, Miller was to keep a fire going against the raw weather, do a bit of cooking, and clean up around the place. The fire wasn’t a problem, and with his Germanic tidiness the housekeeping wouldn’t have been either—except most mornings there was an awful lot of it to do. He and Os-born brought women home often, and after Osborn had stumbled off to work in the morning, leaving Miller ten francs on the dresser, Miller would have to go to work on what sometimes looked like a shipwreck with bottles and glasses strewn about, ashtrays overflowing, and scraps of food found in odd places. It was a hell of a way to begin his day—even if part of the mess was of his own making—and he thought the stipend Osborn left him was nig-gardly.18

  But the flat was spacious and quiet, and he was working again, still revising Crazy Cock but also working at the new things—the bravely cheerful streetwalker he was calling “Mlle Claude,” the bike races, and the circus. When Os-born returned home at the end of the day, the pockets of his overcoat clinking with bottles of Anjou, Vouvray, Macon, the place was neat as a pin and the windows steamy with heat. Miller was then ready to knock off work, for a while at least, to become Osborn’s enthusiastic companion in the pursuit of women. But, said Osborn, when he himself had at last fallen into bed he could hear the tap-tapping of Miller’s typewriter in the next room.

  At this point, Osborn later recalled, Miller himself was ablaze like the stove, talking incessantly, brilliantly of the new literature that he was to be a part of, a literature that would be violently anti-literary, cracking apart all the old forms of expression. Through Miller’s impassioned words, Osborn was brought to understand that his old gods—Conrad, Dostoyevsky—were already dated, “though still heroic landmarks.” And Miller was talking this same way in his letters to Emil, telling him in mid-February 1931 that on a recent evening he’d brought home a copy of Mann’s Death in Venice to bedazzle Osborn by reading it to him.19 “And lo and behold! to my own absolute astonishment, I saw that Thomas Mann was dead … finished … for me.” Thus, he continued, he was positively afraid to approach The Magic Mountain because he still believed in it and wasn’t ready to shed that illusion too. Joyce also had lost his charm, and even his hero D. H. Lawrence now seemed oddly quaint with all his twaddle about social conditions in his novels when what he ought to have stuck to was simply “warmhearted fucking all the way through.” There remained only Proust and Spengler, a volume of whose works, so he told Emil, he had stolen from the American Library.

  Another significant event of this winter was the development of a close, productive friendship with Brassaϊ. Gyula Halász had been a painter and journalist in his native Hungary before coming to Paris, where he took up photography under the name of his native village. Brassaï recalled that when they were introduced in December 1930, Miller’s French was primitive while he himself had almost no English. But this didn’t make any difference once Miller understood what the photographer was up to in his work, for here finally was someone who could understand—language or no—what he, Miller, was reaching toward but hadn’t yet articulated. What Brassai had embarked upon, Miller found, was a singular, solitary, immensely imaginative project: to document the city’s secret life by night. Working by himself, he lugged his cumbersome equipment into the most recondite, forbidden, and sometimes actively dangerous corners of Paris to reveal what went on where most Parisians—including policemen —wouldn’t dream of going, except in nightmare. Whereas Eugène Atget had famously documented the remnant architecture of an older Paris quickly passing away, and Brassaϊ’s fellow Hungarian André Kertész had become an important member of the avant-garde, Brassaϊ was unlike either of these artists. Atget’s focus was on the past, Ker-tész’s on the future. Brassaϊ was interested in the now, the often brutal facts of daily life. He sought out the clochards who lived in the open in all kinds of weather. He followed the foul and dangerous work of the shit-pumpers. He hung out with the apaches, those roving gangs of pickpockets, burglars, strong-arm robbers, and street fighters. He haunted the emptied parks, the back streets, bals musette and pissoirs, the bridges and barges shrouded by night and fog. He got into whorehouses, lesbian clubs, homosexual ones, opium dens, the bell tower of Notre Dame at midnight. Several times he was physically threatened, had his equipment damaged, plates stolen. All of which endeared him to Miller, who wanted to learn what Brassaϊ had to teach him of those layers lying even beneath those he himself had experienced, those hidden infernos of vice and depravity and endless suffering. Brassaϊ showed him some of these, with Miller occasionally helping to carry the equipment. And there were a few areas of the city that the American had roved through, like the Thirteenth, that he was eager to have the photogr
apher see. Looking at Brassaϊ’s work made all these places come alive for the writer in a special way, for once the negatives had been developed in Brassaϊ’s studio, blooming to life in the darkroom, suddenly they were art, an art he could aspire to equal in his own medium. Here the dark images of an underworld so filled with despair gave him instead both hope and heart.

  Winter waned but the parties went on in Osborn’s flat. An end of them was in sight, though, with the return of the owner in March. And so Miller would have to move yet again, but before that happened he would maximize his remaining days here—and hope he didn’t die first or go blind from venereal disease: Osborn had picked up an alleged Russian countess and brought her home to live with them, but once there she announced she had the clap. Miller had been terrified of venereal disease by the public warnings about it he’d seen in his first days in the city—death’s-head illustrations posted by the authorities in public bathrooms and pissoirs. Now with the countess’s presence in the flat and her careless personal habits he was reminded of those grinning skulls. One day he made the ghastly discovery that he had used the countess’s towel by mistake. She cheerfully assured him he couldn’t go blind from that kind of contact, because if you could, she said, she would have lost her eyesight years ago.

  So maybe it was just as well that the menage a trois broke apart in March when Miller went to flop for a while in the studio of an American painter near the Cimetière du Montparnasse, his former neighborhood. He was hanging around a good deal with artists these days, he told Emil—Fred Kann, John Nichols, Sandy Calder—and finding the associations enriching. Yes, life was still as precarious as ever, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter so much, and sometimes it didn’t seem to matter at all. He felt, he told Emil in a March 10th letter, “exactly as all the great vagabond artists must have felt—absolutely reckless, childish, irresponsible, unscrupulous, and overflowing with carnal vitality.” He didn’t know where he’d have to go next, and he was missing quite a few meals. But life was rich in the things that really mattered, so much so that if he were told he must hang tomorrow, “I would say O.K. I’ve seen the show. And fuck you, Jack!”

  Then this burst, not unbidden now but earned, even if it and the others that were to follow over the years would remain in some true sense mysterious:

  Cafés, cemeteries, bistros in an orange light shedding a medieval aura of sanctity over the rubber black pavements. Prostitutes like wilted flowers and society dames glowing like gardenias. Pissoirs filled with piss-soaked bread and feuilletons of futile journalists sweating in cold garrets. Beyond the portes the “cold mournful perspective of the suburbs[“]—by Utrillo, bastard son of Suzanne Valadon. The Seine running like a twisted knife between the Right and the Left Banks. Sacré Coeur white in the night of Montmar-tre. Belgian steeds prancing with all their testicles thru the empty streets of midnight. Lesbians at the Dôme working off their excess lust in charcoal and ambergris. The Boulevard Jules Ferry still as a murderer’s heart, emptying into the Abattoir de la Vil-lette. Cold Greenland women at the Viking blazing under polar ice, their blonde wigs refulgent with exotic heat. A whore opposite me smiling lasciviously and scratching herself under the table. At the Ro-tonde, after three A.M., they lift up their dresses at the bar and run their fingers thru dark rose-bushes.

  Superficially seen, the language here is not so different from that of Miller’s earliest Paris letters in its piling up of disparate images. But those letters had been written in desperation, with a schoolboy’s helter-skelter of, “I saw this and then I saw that and then I went home.” This was not desperation (though surely the conditions described were desperate enough); this was artistic daring, the deliberate taking of risks to create an improvisation that would lift the writer and the reader above the quotidian Where and What to the existential Why. True, it was not yet a polished passage. But Miller wasn’t after polish here—or thereafter for that matter. He was after words that when put together would hit the reader like a bullet or a bomb or, as he would say much later, like a “poisoned arrow.” The passage does indeed make an impact even though it is a bit self-conscious in its use of words like “refulgent”; in its alliterations (“feuilletons of futile journalists”). Also, the influence of Whitman with his famous lists of urban sights and sounds and that of the Surrealists with their provocative metaphors feel a bit as if they are stuck on, applied.

  Still, this is unquestionably new for Miller, in its language, its subject matter, and its tone and timbre. Here is the city’s underbelly as he had come to know it, its armpits and groin and crotch—all evoked with a mixture of empathy as well as a merciless detachment. One is reminded again of Brassaϊ and his famous sequence, A Man Dies in the Street (1932), where the photographer, high above a rain-slick street, trains his camera on the scene below, where a man has dropped dead almost in the gutter. Brassaϊ keeps shooting as a crowd gathers, some under the shrouds of their umbrellas. They watch as the body is scooped up and loaded into an ambulance. And then they move on, leaving the scene as if nothing of moment had ever happened there. Brassaϊ invents nothing here, except the final selection of an eight-shot sequence from what may well have been a good many more than that. His aim, as in the nighttime photos of Paris, is acutely documentary in nature.20

  His American friend and colleague greatly admired that detachment. But as a writer he wanted something more out of the same scenes Brassaϊ photographed: he wanted to see what was there, all right—the whores, the pissoirs, the cemeteries—but also what might be there, if only one could somehow cast off the blinders conventional culture had put on one. He wanted to see what was implicitly there, if only one could learn how again to use an imagination stunted and stifled by modern life. He didn’t quite know how to do this yet, but this passage shows that he was learning, learning how to talk about what was revealed to him in his new and oftentimes terrifying freedom.

  How he finally learned to do this is simple enough to state: he learned to write as he talked in those transports that sometimes would come upon him like a fit. This could have been the result of having been told often enough that this is what he ought to do, so that finally it sank in. Anecdotal evidence has Emil Schnellock telling him this back in New York when Miller was occasionally lighting up the studio with his brilliant bursts. Miller himself has June giving him substantially the same advice when she told him he’d be better off writing like himself instead of trying to ape his literary heroes. And then here in Paris we have the Lithuanian-born philosopher Michael Fraen-kel repeating it when he heard Miller talking in the summer of 1931. The cumulative advice ought to have sounded good to Miller because he was a man who loved talk, his own and that of others: those tough-talking sports on the street corners of the Fourteenth Ward and those famous stem-winders Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, and others whose cultural image went back to rural monolo-gists and the heroically profane boatmen of the national folklore. Surely, these things went into his learning. But the alchemical process through which advice and example and cultural heritage must pass before these can become personal and therefore precious is rarely direct. Let us grant the importance of these factors and then add one more: his failure. For it was his solitary, heroic confrontation with this that proved decisive in the transformation of the man who called himself “The Failure” into the brilliant success he became with Tropic of Cancer, the most startling, scabrous passage of which is adumbrated in this March 10th letter to Emil.

  For Miller had not come to Paris to find artistic freedom and rub elbows with his fellow artists. That had been the story of the expatriates of the 1920s. He had been exiled here as a failure, a failure as a writer and as a man. The longer he wandered the city’s streets and haunted its poor quarters with their stinking bars and gurgling pis-soirs, the longer he continued to slash at his manuscripts in this cafe and that, the more absolute his failure came to seem. Writing those rambling letters had a cumulative effect of objectifying this for him, forcing him to see how utterly false Moloch and Craz
y Cock were to the man he was, how misguided his literary aspirations had been from the beginning. He had yearned to be a writer and an intellectual in the Old World mode, someone who would be respected anywhere. He was not, he had been furiously insisting for years, your average Joe from Brooklyn. But over these months in Paris, writing with an increasingly naked candor about his life, he came to see that in many ways that was in fact just what he was and that this was a good thing. For if he could capitalize on this, find a way to write out of the center of who he truly was instead of who he thought he ought to be, this would be the way forward for him. The letters helped him see this, for just as the personal letter can form the bridge between autobiographical experience and literature, so Miller’s letters also served as a bridge between his past and his future, which would be the eternal now, this moment that he was living in a city that was anything but a City of Light, that was instead a City of Darkness, of ancient crime and despair and death. And yet, he hadn’t gone under here. Instead, he had acquired a strange buoyancy, like one of those India rubber dolls that always pop back up no matter how hard you hit it.

  Villa Seurat

  The American writer Walter Lowenfels had been around Miller enough by early 1931 to be impressed by his cheerful resiliency, his belief in himself despite his shabby circumstances, his barren prospects. He mentioned Miller to Michael Fraenkel, telling the philosopher and book dealer that Miller might be an interesting example of the modern postmortem man, someone who had contrived a strategy for living creatively within the gigantic mausoleum both Lowenfels and Fraenkel believed Western civilization had become. Fraenkel was intrigued enough to invite Miller to his flat for an inspection, and Miller ended up staying until the middle of the summer.