Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

by Frederick Turner

  In the summer of 1932 friends put Miller in touch with William A. Bradley, a Paris-based agent who told Miller he would like to see the manuscripts of both Crazy Cock and The Last Book. Having finished the latter to his own satisfaction, Miller was at this point feeling the kind of postpartum depression not uncommon to writers, and hearing from Bradley—who was bound to seem to him an authority figure—further fouled his mood. Nevertheless, he did take the manuscripts to Bradley’s office on the Ile Saint-Louis. As a point of honor he had made few if any cuts in The Last Book, and the stout valise was crammed to its capacity. Bradley replied in short order, telling Miller he would like to discuss the manuscripts with him, particularly The Last Book, which he found “magnificent.” Miller’s mood darkened yet further at this news: what he had really wanted to hear was that it was Crazy Cock that was magnificent and that Bradley would take it on. Instead, when he and Nin met with Bradley the agent dismissed Crazy Cock and said he wanted publisher Jack Ka-hane to see The Last Book. Evidently, Miller blurted out that Crazy Cock was the book he had been meant to write, while The Last Book was vastly inferior to it, was in fact a kind of afterthought. If June could have heard this and appreciated what a profoundly helpless tribute to her it was, she might have been grimly pleased, perhaps especially so since for some weeks thereafter Miller perversely persisted in trying to get both Bradley and Kahane interested in Crazy Cock while talking down The Last Book. Ka-hane hardly heard him. He was almost deliriously happy at the prospect of publishing The Last Book through his Paris-based Obelisk Press, since he regarded the book as a work of astonishing genius. He told both Bradley and Miller he could bring it out in February 1933. Gradually, Miller calmed down enough to sign a contract, though in his heart he still wanted Obelisk to first bring out Crazy Cock. In any event, The Last Book would be first, but it is significant that having signed on for The Last Book, he was reluctant to look at it and instead went to work on what eventually became Tropic of Capricorn, which would tell the story of his life with June in their early days. It is highly likely that had it not been for Nin he never would have done the work on the manuscript necessary to hammer it into the blazing, brilliant book Kahane eventually published, in English, in the autumn of 1934.

  What She Gave

  When in the 1960s the feminist movement in America expanded its consciousness beyond the national borders to embrace pioneering figures of other cultures, it was almost inevitable that Anaiïs Nin would be “discovered” and perhaps exalted beyond even what she might have wished to claim for herself. But like the photographer-journalist Lee Miller, who began as the gorgeous mascot of the Paris Surrealists but emerged as an artist fully as interesting as many of them, Nin was for some decades known more as Henry Miller’s sex kitten than as a formidable literary talent herself. Clearly, she would never for a moment have been willing to settle for that: her ego was as formidable as her talent. Still, for more than two years she did devote much of herself, body and soul, to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer because she saw within its gross disorder a great book. There was, she wrote in her diary at this time, “a splendor in his writing, a splendor that transfigures everything he touches,” and to give this to the world was worth everything she had to go through. It was a lot, but she never lost her belief in the book. The question for her, however, was how she could apply the knife of her intelligence to the savage excesses of his imagination without cutting out what made Cancer completely unique. The task was, in every respect possible, daunting.

  To begin with she had to deal with the seductive, spectral presence of the aboriginal muse, June, who at this most critical point reappeared for the final time. And now the contest between the two women took on a mythological valence, with June trying to kill off the new book and Nin, the new muse, trying to bring it to term—all the while partly sympathizing with June’s position. As for Miller, he was of little help to Nin: June’s untimely return had once again paralyzed him, and he was not to regain his emotional balance or his creative momentum for many months after she had departed for the final time at the end of 1933.

  Years after Tropic of Cancer had at last seen print in September 1934, and at a point when its author appeared to regard it as a somewhat faded phenomenon that might have been the work of someone else, Miller looked back to 1933 as a period of “great fertility, great joy.” It wasn’t.

  It is true that he was working on four literary projects during these months: the beginnings of what would become Tropic of Capricorn; an extended autobiographical meander that would be published as Black Spring; the revisions of Cancer; and a long essay on D. H. Lawrence that threatened to become a book and truly The Last Book—the last Miller would ever write. In addition, he was turning out a great number of primitivistic watercolors. Still, the available evidence indicates that despite this furious activity, his concentration on any of these projects was poor and he kept lurching from one to another in distracted fashion. He knew this, and made numerous programmatic resolves to settle into a more productive routine, but he could not.

  For Nin the Lawrence project was the most worrisome. It was begun at the behest of Kahane, who had developed a big case of the jitters in the aftermath of his joyous acceptance of what Miller was now calling Tropic of Cancer. Cancer was so explosive, Kahane had come to feel, that something had to be done to soften its impact. His solution was for Miller to write something “legitimate” to demonstrate that he was not a pornographic writer—or a gangster author, as Miller had taken to calling himself. If Miller could turn out an extended essay on his old hero Lawrence, it would introduce him to readers as a serious cultural critic while at the same time protecting Kahane against allegations that he was a smut peddler—which in fact he was.

  In a kind of frenzy that probably had as much to do with his tangled feelings about Cancer as it did with any authentic enthusiasm for the project itself, Miller plunged into Lawrence, and very quickly the monograph became a monstrously bloated thing, replete with many of the very literary faults he’d told Emil almost three years back he was through with: his aspirations to write great literature in the classic Continental mode; his propensity to vast divagations; his philosophical pretensions; his beer-hall sentimentality. By then June had departed, and in that way at least the field had been cleared a bit, so Nin had Henry to herself. But she had no control over the conditions Kahane had set and Miller had accepted. And so she could do little more than watch from the sidelines while Miller read more and more, receding into the far reaches of the history of the West, creating giant schemas that would explain Lawrence—and everything else as well in the full Spenglerian mode. At last in the summer of ‘33 she told him he wasn’t really a philosopher, an intellectual, a thinker—precisely what Miller had confessed to Emil he knew he wasn’t. Instead, he was a writer, an artist gifted with an extraordinary imagination. That was what he ought to be cultivating and what she wanted to nurture.

  In February 1934, still stalled on all fronts and Kahane still delaying publication, Miller chucked everything and left Clichy to join Nin in Paris’s high-toned Passy neighborhood, where she had taken a flat so she could more conveniently see her psychoanalyst Otto Rank. Apparently it was there that she finally succeeded in convincing Miller that what he needed most to do at this crucial point was to focus all his creative energies on Cancer and that she could help him. She could see how the book might be trimmed and tightened and that the process would not require the sacrifice of the “truth.” During the winter months and on into the spring the two went at it, Miller fighting to preserve all the excesses and meanders and extraneous elements that were to him the dearest things in the manuscript, precisely because they most evidently involved his escape from psychological and esthetic tyranny into anarchical freedom. Already the thing was becoming a stranger to him as he read through the pages of a second and then a third revision, and he found it hard to believe he’d endured such suffering in order to write it. He wrote Emil that he knew he would never write another book like it.25
By the time Kahane had at last put the book in press —without the stalking-horse of the Lawrence project—Miller was pretty well fed up with the whole business and wrote Emil that he got more of a kick out of looking at one of his botched watercolors than at reading his page proofs.

  At summer’s end he learned that an airy, roomy studio until recently occupied by Antonin Artaud in the Villa Seurat was available. It was upstairs from Fraenkel’s former flat. Doubtless with Nin’s financial assistance, Miller jumped at the opportunity to live on the very spot where so many significant realizations had come to him. And even if he was in some inward way estranged now from Cancer, he knew that in taking up residence here he had come a very long way. On the day he took possession of the flat, Kahane appeared at the door with the first copies of the book (perhaps he was afraid to mail it). Walter Lo-wenfels had donated a Victrola and a stack of recordings —jazz, classical music. But what Miller most wanted to listen to in this crowning moment were the sentimental airs of Stephen Foster.

  The day following, Miller and Nin prepared copies for mailing. Beneath the innocuous wrappings, the book’s physical appearance was fully as forbidding as even the “gangster author” himself could have wished: a compact soft-cover item bearing on the front a drawing of Cancer, the zodiacal crab, carrying in its horny claws the body of a woman, either dead or ravished. It was the work of Kahane’s fourteen-year-old son, much later to be Miller’s publisher. Wrapped around it like a preservatif was a two-inch-wide paper band warning,

  FOR SUBSCRIPTION.

  MUST NOT BE TAKEN INTO

  GREAT BRITAIN OR U.S.A.

  The front flap copy compared the book to Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, while the back flap advertised other books available from Obelisk, including three by Kahane, writing under the pseudonym Cecil Barr: Amour French for Love; Bright Pink Youth; and Daffodil, “A young girl’s amorous adventures in the Paris of to-day.” For a writer so militantly anti-establishment and who had said in the book that his aim was to get off the “gold standard of literature,” Miller’s behavior with his brand-new book was fairly conventional, sending copies off to numerous literary luminaries and friends on both sides of the Atlantic. By this point his hatred of America, both social and cultural, had risen to hysterical proportions—but he still wanted to be noticed over there, even if invidiously so.

  1934

  In this year, the self-proclaimed heavyweight champion of American letters, Ernest Hemingway, was putting the finishing touches on a short story collection, Winner Take Nothing. It contained some of Hemingway’s most enduring work—”The Gambler, The Nun, and the Radio,” “The Light of the World,” and especially “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Still, the already legendary tough guy found himself having to make certain unhappy concessions to what was permissible in mainstream American publishing. In the manuscript version of “The Light of the World,” for example, a teenager named Tom says to a bartender who is giving him some trouble, “‘Up your ass.’” In the published version this came out as, “ ‘You know where.’ “ In “A Natural History of the Dead,” an artillery lieutenant says to a field surgeon, “‘Fuck yourself.’” And “ ‘ Fuck your mother. Fuck your sister …’” These were published as “‘F——.’” Hemingway had argued for his originals, but his editor, the eminent Maxwell Perkins, had at last gotten him to listen to reason. Plainly, literary modernism even at its toughest had its cultural limitations. One could write about war with psychological candor, as Hemingway had in the collection’s “A Way You’ll Never Be.” But an unsanitized depiction of the hideousness of war—the same war that had so aroused Surrealist reaction—was in the final reckoning substantially prohibited because the language that would have been fully appropriate to the phenomenon itself was judged offensive—more offensive evidently than the war itself.

  Something of the same situation applied to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, published in the same year, where the root of the heroine’s psychological problems is her incestuous relationship with her father. The attentive reader could be in no doubt as to what had happened between father and daughter, and yet the whole affair and its consequences are handled with a delicacy and remove that makes Nicole Diver’s reactions seem excessive and bizarre rather than tragic and understandable.

  In 1934 William Faulkner was in full creative stride and beginning to ponder with renewed seriousness a theme he had been considering at least since 1931: incest (again) as a metaphor for the entire experience of the American South. But while the threat of incest is the fulcrum of the plot of Absalom, Absalom! published two years later, it remains far more a brooding metaphor than an unspeakable physical fact. Which, to be sure, would not be to say anything germane about the novel’s qualities, for indeed it has a strong claim to being the Great American Novel, that mythic beast. It is to say, however, that Faulkner knew full well the cultural conventions of his time and place and indeed had suffered critically for having violated them in Sanctuary (1931), in which his heroine is raped with a corncob. In Absalom, Absalom! he chooses to leave the brother-sister relationship just short of incest, perhaps as a necessitous tradeoff that would allow him to deal in these pages with the even greater taboo of miscegenation.

  In 1934 Thomas Wolfe was at work on Of Time and the River, a sequel to Look Homeward, Angel, and James T. Far-rell, who had himself endured a year of poverty in Paris in 1931, published a sequel to Young Lonigan as The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. This post-Naturalism novel of lower-class life in Chicago features racial violence, torture, alcoholism, and venereal disease—rough stuff indeed. But in many respects the novel could have been written at the turn of the century, and despite its subject matter neither author nor publisher faced any real threat from the censors or the courts.

  Farrell regarded himself as a rebel, writing against the establishment, and in some respects he was. But not in comparison with Miller in Tropic of Cancer. For in fact, Cancer was artistically far more daring, more uncompromising, more radically American than anything published by Miller’s illustrious contemporaries in that year—and for many years thereafter as well. Even in 1961, the year of its American publication, it still looked amazingly avant-garde, enough so that its appearance through Barney Ros-set’s Grove Press was a cultural sensation felt far beyond the realm of arts and letters. It was in truth one of the first major shots fired in what were to become the cultural wars of that remarkable decade.26

  Half a century and more since that epochal event the book can still hit the unsuspecting reader like a sledgehammer or a bomb or a kick below the belt, and this despite tectonic cultural shifts in the permissible public treatment of sex and sexuality. Movies, television, dance, drama, the lyrics of popular songs—all these now deal with the formerly forbidden in remarkably frank fashion. And at suppertime, televised ads (the province of the artistically thwarted) bring to our living rooms their tiny dramas of rectal ailments and penile malfunctions. Nobody bats an eye at these oddly cheerful depictions of the old-time unmentionables. In literature, writers like Jean Genet, Hubert Selby Jr., William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, J. P. Donleavy, and James Purdy have followed the path Miller blazed in Tropic of Cancer, and more recently an English-born novelist, Charlotte Roche, has achieved a Milleresque notoriety for her Wetlands, which describes in exquisite detail its teenaged heroine’s exploration of her body and how to arouse its most intense erogenous capacities through the use of shower heads, avocado pits, razors, and the like.

  Form

  Emil Schnellock’s accordion-like valise that Miller had invoked in his letter of spring 1932 was only a metaphor of the moment for him as he tried to explain to himself what he was trying to do in Tropic of Cancer: throwing everything into it in the effort to get down on paper for once the fantastic essence of living—”caviar, rain drops, axle grease, vermicelli, liverwurst,” as he eventually was to put it in the novel itself. This wasn’t to be a life, which to him evidently had a finished quality to the very sound of it, a
s if it had been composed in tranquility or even done by somebody other than the subject himself. No, this was to be a book about living, the quick, quivering beat of it. Others had talked of doing this, he knew, and there were certain passages in Whitman that had captured this quality, those where the man had flung aside form and all the current conventions of prosody and had written from the heart’s chambers. Wambly Bald, Miller’s drinking and whoring companion, was always threatening to write a book in which he would fling himself on the operating table and rip open his guts. But somehow he never quite got around to doing so: there was always another book to be consulted, always another beer to finish first, as Wa-verly Root had acerbically observed. It really took something, Miller discovered, to make such an attempt, to take that imaginative leap out into the artistically unknown.

  How much he knew of Emerson at that point is a question. He certainly knew enough to appropriate an Emersonian line as his inscription to Cancer: “These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies—captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.” Much later, as an inscription for The Books in My Life, he made use of another line of Emerson’s: “When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness—he has always the resource to live.” What Miller valued in these lines was the great man’s strong preference for personal experience over artifice, for works that drove headlong toward the heart of living, works that were heedless of form, of artistic convention, of decorum, shapeliness, even common sense. “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.” This line could be Miller’s but is not: it is Emerson’s.