Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

by Frederick Turner

  This is in fact what Miller does in Tropic of Cancer, and far more than the reiterative use of such words as “cunt” and “fuck,” it is what keeps the book vibrant and fresh, even in an age as jaded as our own.27 Art, Miller had come passionately to believe in the crucible of his Paris apprenticeship, “consists in going the full length.” As he worked on The Last Book, at first in fumbling fashion and then with an increasing confidence that became finally the folk-loric boatman’s boastful bravado, he looked over his shoulder at his old literary heroes and found that the things he had most loved in them were their excesses—structural, stylistic, moral. “When I think,” he writes midway through Cancer, “of their deformities, of the monstrous styles they chose, of the flatulence and tediousness of their works, of the obstacles they heaped up about them, I feel an exaltation.” Their terrible excessiveness, he continues, “is the sign of struggle, it is the struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit.” These were the “great and imperfect ones” whose very confusion and incoherence were divine music to those like himself who had ears to hear. The true artist, the one who throws himself at the target when his last arrow is spent, “must stand up on a high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails.” Any art that fails to go this last full measure, that falls short of this “frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating is not art.”

  The standard Miller sets himself here is, to be sure, heroic and heroically impossible, as his own language makes clear in this passage. It is what we hear in the best of jazz, America’s classical music, when it roars deliberately into dissonance. And yet. And yet Miller comes astonishingly close: Tropic of Cancer goes the full length. And whatever may be thought about the range of its language, its passages of tediousness and incoherence and a density that comes close to an impenetrable obscurity, it was unprecedented in its own time and is still challenging in our own.

  It begins with talk of body lice, with insults to the reader, and with an obscene love song to a woman named Tania. It ends with the narrator down by the banks of the Seine, contentedly counting out the money he has stolen from a friend. In between there are:

  —Non-sequential fragments of life at the Villa Borghese, which turns out not to be the papal pile in the hills outside Rome but an apartment in a seedy section of Paris occupied by a gang of characters not identified in any meaningful way. Life here seems to be coming to an end—the flat is to be sublet. But this may be a metaphor for life in the whole of Western civilization itself: the cancer of time and internal rot is eating the West away.

  —The narrator’s notes on a wandering, impoverished life in Paris. What keeps him going is the writing of a book that he intends to be scandalous in the extreme, a “prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art.” He has a wife, but she is out of his life now, and he feels completely free to pursue numerous sexual adventures, a few of which are treated with considerable tenderness but the vast majority played for their crudely comic potential.

  —Slices, served up here and there, of continental history: the Black Death; the ghastly circumstances of the life of Charles VI, Charles the Mad, a verminous prisoner within his own walls where he played cards with his only companion, the base-born Odette Champdivers.

  —Intimate encounters with the Parisian demimonde, the hookers, their maquereaux, and their customers; their cafe hangouts and behavior; the streets, alleyways, and impasses where the women lie in wait for their johns. The intersection, for instance, of Pasteur-Wagner and Rue Amelot, “which hides behind the boulevard like a slumbering lizard.”

  Here at the neck of the bottle … there were always a cluster of vultures who croaked and flapped their dirty wings, who reached out with sharp talons and plucked you into a doorway. Jolly, rapacious devils who didn’t even give you time to button your pants when it was over. Led you into a little room without a window usually, and, sitting on the edge of the bed with skirts tucked up gave you a quick inspection, spat on your cock, and placed it for you.

  —Portraits of the narrator’s companions: Carl (Alfred Perlés); Van Norden (Wambly Bald); Fillmore (Richard Osborn); Boris (Michael Fraenkel); Cronstadt (Walter Lowenfels); Marlowe (Samuel Putnam, an expatriate publisher); Tania (Bertha Schrank, wife of a playwright); and Mark Swift (American painter John Nichols). Anaiïs Nin is nowhere even alluded to, for very practical reasons. For the most part the portraits are hardly flattering, the narrator observing these people through that hard photographic lens of which Nin had written. Many of them are funny in the morally and emotionally costly way traditional American humor can be.

  —Also, portraits of individuals the wandering narrator crosses paths with and who provide him with food, shelter, temporary employment, or simply literary material: Eugene, an emigre Russian piano player in a cinema (Eugene Pachoutinsky); Serge, another Russian emigre, who delivers disinfectant to commercial establishments (not otherwise identified); Nanantatee, an Indian pearl merchant (N. P. Nanavati); an unnamed photographer who takes pornographic photos to be sold in Germany that the narrator poses for (Brassai); Macha, an alleged Russian princess who lives for a time in a flat with Fillmore and the narrator (a woman variously remembered as either Sonya or Irene).

  —Philosophical excursions, some occasioned by the narrator’s picaresque misadventures, others by inner promptings. Some border on the hallucinatory while others are scabrous. And some are both of these at once. Such is the case with one provoked by a drunken carouse at Fillmore’s flat with two streetwalkers who are performing naked acrobatics on the living room floor. When one of the women turns a somersault and almost lands in the narrator’s face suddenly the orgy becomes a moment of cosmic clarity for him in which a “cunt” is seen as an awful metaphor for the universal debasement we call life. “When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore,” the narrator says, “I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper’s skull. If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on.” Here is the monstrous condition the eons of human existence have brought us to: two drunken men and with them two desperate women who are literally turning tricks for a few francs—the moral equivalent of the biblical thirty pieces of silver. And it is not simply this foursome that is so lost; the whole world is sliding toward doom and someone has to have the guts to say so:

  It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!

  —Numerous Paris street scenes, the products of the narrator’s necessarily nomadic existence, bounced from one shabby hotel to an even shabbier one; from one free room—often enough merely the floor for a bed—to the next; walking the night-shrouded streets, some of which remind him of nothing less than a big “chancrous cock laid open longitudinally,” with his empty guts growling:

  wandering along the Seine at night, wandering and wandering, and going mad with the beauty of it, the trees leaning to, the broken images in the water, the rush of the current under the bloody lights of the bridges, the women sleeping in doorways, sleeping on newspapers, sleeping in the rain; everywhere the musty porches of the cathedrals and beggars and lice and old hags full of St. Vitus’ dance; pushcarts stacked up like wine barrels in the side streets, the smell of berries in the market place and the old church surrounded with vegetables and blue arc lights, the gutters slippery with garbage and women in satin pumps staggering through the filth and vermin at the end of an all-night souse. The Place St. Sulpice, so quiet and deserted, where toward midnight there came every night the woman with
the busted umbrella and the crazy veil; every night she slept there on a bench under her torn umbrella, the ribs hanging down, her dress turning green, her bony fingers and the odor of decay oozing from her body.

  —An excursion to teach at a lycee in Dijon, a position and a town the narrator finds more desolate than even the most hopeless quarters of Paris, the whole place stinking of mustard that is “turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and cute-looking little jars.” The school itself appears to be an “inverted mountain that pointed down toward the center of the earth where God or the Devil works always in a straitjacket grinding grist for that paradise which is always a wet dream.” Here is hardly an escape from the precariousness of Paris, only another kind of purgatory.

  —A final extended vignette of the American expatriate Fillmore, who has fallen into the clutches of a violently possessive hooker who convinces him he has gotten her pregnant. The narrator is hardly a good Samaritan, but he smells a rat here and persuades Fillmore to withdraw all his money from the bank and do what he so desperately desires—run away to America. Fillmore finally agrees on the condition that the narrator promises to deliver to the girl the substantial payoff Fillmore hands him. The narrator does promise, but as soon as Fillmore totters aboard the train, the narrator pockets the cash and takes a leisurely cab ride to the side of the Seine, where he sits down to muse on his ill-gotten gain and on the great river, flowing always past just this spot, onward toward the sea.

  The Grounds of Great Offense

  This is to be sure a great, bloody sprawl of a book, as Miller himself surely knew, even after three extensive rewrites. When in these pages he imagines a bewildered reader of Whitman exclaiming, “Holy Mother of God, what does this crap mean?” he might well have been talking about Tropic of Cancer.

  He knew that it was an assault on received notions of structure and plot, an assault on the taste, the patience, and the expectations of even the most adventurous of readers. But then, he’d never wanted it to be a novel, nor even a book really. (In effect he’d settled for the physical form it had to take—papers bound together.) Instead, he had wanted it to be an event that wounded and scarred, that was in every possible respect a profound and continuing offense for which no forgiveness was possible. The fact that the book remained outlawed for more than a quarter century was to be a continuous source of satisfaction to him.

  It was of course the language that gave greatest offense. But it wasn’t only the language. It was also the tone of the thing, the fact that the most outrageous, even criminal behavior was related with a certain cheerfulness that compounded the offense of the obscene language. A slavering pornographer by comparison looked better: such perverts must be punished, of course, but after all they were fairly easily identified and marginalized. This was different. This seemed not to titillate so much as to take a fiendish delight in rubbing the reader’s face in filth just for the pleasure of it. What after all could be said of a writer who detailed with evident relish the ins and outs of the sex trade? How could a man of considerable learning describe with such pleasure the one-legged whore standing watch on her wooden stump at the entrance to a hellish alleyway and then cap so pathetic a scene with a crude joke about the danger of getting splinters when taking her to bed? What sort of writer would devote several pages to the ghastly spectacle of his friend’s prolonged, passionless assault on a streetwalker, even to the point of getting down on hands and knees behind him to witness its most intimate details while tickling his friend’s rear end from time to time? All this was beyond pornography. This was positively inhuman, bestial—a characterization that the narrator in fact joyfully anticipates and accepts.

  Nor was this tone confined to sexual matters. Almost any subject could be treated similarly, such as the case of poor Peckover, a miserable proofreader at a newspaper who falls down an elevator shaft at the plant and dies of his injuries—but not before blindly groping about on broken knees searching for his new set of false teeth. The news of the death of their colleague is subsequently related to the narrator and Van Norden in a bar by one of the paper’s big shots, an “upstairs man,” who spares none of the details. When he has finally finished and wandered off with his drink, the narrator and Van Norden laugh themselves silly over the false teeth.

  No matter what we said about the poor devil, and we said some good things about him too, we always came back to the false teeth. There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going. And since we didn’t have to put on a false front we could laugh about the incident to our heart’s content. We laughed all night about it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine fellow and that his death was a catastrophe. All sorts of funny recollections came to our minds—the semicolons that he overlooked and for which they bawled the piss out of him. They made his life miserable with their fucking little semicolons and the fractions which he always got wrong. They were even going to fire him once because he came to work with a boozy breath. They despised him because he always looked so miserable and because he had eczema and dandruff. He was just a nobody, as far as they were concerned, but, now that he was dead, they would all chip in lustily and buy him a huge wreath and they’d put his name in big type in the obituary column. Anything to throw a little reflection on themselves; they’d make him out to be a big shit if they could. But unfortunately, with Peckover, there was little they could invent about him. He was a zero, and even the fact that he was dead wouldn’t add a cipher to his name.

  Of this and many kindred episodes it might merely be observed that we are confronted here with examples of that peculiar brand of cruel humor spawned in America by the repetitive hardships of subduing a wilderness continent—the kind exemplified by Mike Fink’s blank-faced question after he’d murdered his friend, Carpenter, “Is the whiskey spilt?” And this would be true. It would also be true that Miller himself was personally inclined toward humor of a crude and violent sort and had been laughing at dirty jokes, dirty words, stories of gruesome deaths, pratfalls, burlesque, and the like for most of his forty-three years. But something more is involved here, something that leads us into the heart of the book.

  When we give the Peckover episode a bit of reflection, we find that what is truly shocking about it is not the manner of his death. Nor is it even his erstwhile colleagues’ hysterical laughter over the circumstances—the false teeth and so on. No, what is shocking, what STAYS shocking, is Peckover’s life, the daily humiliations of it, the inhumanity of it—his coat held together with pins; his termagant wife terrified of what will become of them if he lost his job; the daily loads of shit he had to put up with to keep it (availing ourselves here of the narrator’s diction): this is what is shocking. This and the fact that such a life is not even unusual, is in fact awfully ordinary, for Peck-over is only a solitary case we happen to hear of out of the many millions just like it. This is what earthly existence has become for most of us in the world we have made. In this cosmic overview Progress appears to be a cruel hoax because the demeaning, hazardous conditions of human existence never truly change, whether we live in skyscrapers with central heating or hovels warmed with the dried dung of ruminants; whether we communicate across a great city by pneumatique or by barefoot traders bearing goods and messages between villages; whether we travel by horseback or jet. In the narrator’s view these difference are incidental, for we are all versions of poor Peckover who has to put up with so much shit before he has the good fortune to fall down an elevator shaft and find a sort of release at the bottom of it. “For the man in the paddock,” Miller’s narrator says, changing only the circumstance, “whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibil
ity of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.”

  Why is this awful irony so? Why are Peckover and the man in the paddock with his rake and shovel and wheelbarrow willing to put up with so much shit? The answer Miller supplies in these pages is that they are willing because they believe that somewhere down the miserable road they call their lives there lies an exit, a way out, something or other that will redeem all their sufferings and make of life a glorious thing at last.

  This point is made in another episode of equal pungency in which the narrator takes a young Hindu to a whorehouse at the young man’s request. He is in Paris on his way to England to spread the gospel of Gandhi, and the ascetic robes have begun to hang very heavily on his youthful frame. Up in the room with the girl, the young man mistakes the bidet for a toilet and deposits into it “two enormous turds.” The girl is aghast, the madam furious, the young man mortified. But the narrator remains coolly observant and is able to calm everyone down—a lamentable mistake, perhaps some extra money for the girl, some more for the maid… . Days later, the narrator is guiding the same young man around the city when another moment of cosmic clarity overcomes him as he thinks back on the incident: what if after everything is said and done human existence should come down to just those “two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. ”