Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

by Frederick Turner

  What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit.

  Scabrous, yes. Shocking still? Even today this is an image of the End of Days one is unlikely to forget soon. And as with the death of Peckover and the plight of the man in the paddock, this is the same point made in the same way: in some terrible way human beings over eons have collaborated in creating conditions of earthly existence that are truly execrable. From birth to death it is little more than a senseless scramble, sustained only by the hopeless hope that somewhere there will be a miraculous escape from it. “One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy,” the narrator says. And all the roads are

  slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.

  And all of this, he says, is because of the human refusal to accept, or, better, to come to creative terms with, the inescapable conditions of earthly existence: birth, toil, suffering, aging, loss, death.28

  The fundamental conditions of life (read, “shit”) cannot be changed, but the narrator believes that what might be altered is our attitude toward life as it is. It is not, therefore,

  that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if only for one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui —in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render his life tolerable.

  And while all is endured, as with poor Peckover, hung up between the Scylla of home and the Charybdis of the job; or the nameless toiler in the dung heap of his paddock; or the disciple with his aspirations, his secret lusts, his affectations—all this while time is there in the background, “beating away like a meat axe.”

  A New World

  At the very outset of Tropic of Cancer the narrator says that he has been sent to Paris “for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.” Placed thus, the remark seems a trifle obscure, but then, in these opening pages there are more than enough obscurities—who are these people and why are we being told these things about them?—so that it does not seem to merit special attention. By the book’s last pages, though, it has acquired a resonance, for the narrator’s journey, which is in a real sense Henry Miller’s own, is just this process of fathoming, like the leadsman on Twain’s Mississippi who would literally sing out the depths and so mark the boat’s perilous passage along the river’s mighty seaward flow. Miller’s narrator has been sent—in the sense of something forced, necessitous—on an exploration not of the river but of the wilderness of the city: the sinister twists of its ancient streets, which often enough end in culs-de-sac; the sewer-like stretches lined with bars and waiting women, and the bleak boudoirs of the hotels where the joyless transaction is completed in an exchange of money; human dump heaps like the Cite Nortier; desolate spots like l’Estrapade that give off the air of never having been inhabited at all; and, coursing through this, the great river, offering its oozy depths as a way one could end it all. The man sent here has no guides, no maps, no plans, no tools or weapons, no friends—except the streets, as he says. Jail and deportation are daily threats, and so is syphilis, of which he is reminded every time he visits a public toilet where the death’s-head government posters warn that at his level of activity sex equals death. The fear of starvation stalks him, mocks him too as he reads the inviting restaurant menus posted in the windows. He does carry with him some fragile, flimsy hopes but finds gradually that hopes are not helps; they are instead only dangerous illusions, precisely because they blind him to the realities, sordid as they are, with which he must learn to live—or die. So, he must shed them, one by one, just as he sheds his tailor-made suits and every other bit of baggage that will hinder him as he plunges ever deeper into the wilderness. He consorts with the natives living close to the marrow of this place—whores, pimps, thieves like the Apaches who work the streets by night. He eats their food, even when it tastes like “the big toe of a cadaver,” as he says of some rancid butter he is offered. The city, he finds, is “filled with poor people—the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth,” and yet they have learned how to live here and to make a kind of gritty, hard triumph of their deprivation. Though he begins to take on their coloration because he finds it protective, his journey is not one of acquisition but instead one of spiritual debridement, the shedding of all those assumptions and unexamined beliefs he’d come here with, above all the hope that something, some event, some person or piece of luck—something extrinsic —will change his life. At last, shorn of everything, he finds himself “naked as a savage,” at which point he becomes a renegade, one of those fearsome figures of frontier history who allegedly succumbed to the dark power of the wilderness and turned unnaturally against their own: the blood-drenched Simon Girty; John Tanner, captured by the Shawnee, then voluntarily living as an Ojibwa until at last he disappeared into the wilderness, a suspect in the murder of a white man. Or Kiowa Dutch. A German boy captured in Texas, Dutch grew into a huge, fierce warrior, riding with the Kiowa against the whites. He had forgotten his own language but had picked up a few obscene English expressions which he would hurl at the intruders in battle. But if Miller’s narrator bears a telling resemblance to Kiowa Dutch, Miller would regard this as exemplary, a triumph of survival and not a surrender, for he has come through to a kind of clearing in what was at the outset only a featureless and bristling wilderness, where many of the weak go under. He, however, has learned through suffering and loss and isolation how to live without hope (which he sees as really illusion) but also without despair. He lives in the moment, in its brilliant specificity, asking nothing more of it than to see it clearly. “I don’t give a fuck any more what’s behind me,” he says, “or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le belaujourd’hui [The beautiful today].”

  What is this if not the spiritual drama of the New World as it might have been? And what if such salvation were yet available? What if, after the plundering of the planet and the exploitation of its farthest reaches, its geographical and moral antipodes; after the extirpation of uncountable numbers of plants and animals and indigenous cultures: after all this, what if it should become clear at last that there will be no miracle that saves us from life itself? That there will be no mythy Isles of the Blessed, no terrestrial (or extra-terrestrial) paradise where ripe fruit never falls (to borrow from Wallace Stevens), no transcendental salvation? None of these. What if at last we should come somehow to the saving realization that there will only be this —whatever it is, roses and dung heap both—right here, right now? What if, like Miller’s nameless picaro, we understood at the crater’s rim that we are meant to live in this world as it is, to dig our hands into the mucky soil of its realities, to embrace it, to learn how to love it? This would not be the discovery of the hidden passage to the riches of Cathay but instead the inner discovery of that secret pass leading to true freedom, the freedom of the individual soul. At the same time, this would be an authentic escape—from the hopeless search for a way out of the inescapable conditions of human existence. And who knows? it might even ameliorate these just a bit.

  After all its years as an outlaw book whose salacious passages were read to tatters by GIs and panting teenagers and tourists who wanted a
n imaginative stroll on the wild side, it might seem oxymoronic to speak of Tropic of Cancer as having a “moral.” But when stripped of its rhetorical excesses, its comic boasts, its wild contradictions and coprolalia, it does have this spiritual arc. Maybe only an American, one exiled to the Old World against the tidal force of history, could have written it.

  The story of Fillmore and his designing hooker that ends the book is microcosmic. And here, where it is to some extent at least possible to separate fact from fiction, the differences are instructive.

  Richard Osborn did indeed like Fillmore suffer a mental breakdown, and for a time was institutionalized outside the city. He had been living with a younger French woman named Jeanne and somehow had become convinced he’d gotten her pregnant. At the same time as he keenly felt his obligation to Jeanne he was desperate to escape France for his own people in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Whether or not she was in fact pregnant, a professional, or merely an opportunist is questionable. But there is not much doubt that when Miller bumped into him outside a bank Osborn wanted nothing more out of life than to somehow escape the sorry mess he’d made of everything here in what for him was hardly “Gay Paree” any longer. For whatever reason—maybe merely for old times’ sake—Miller decided to help him. He took the man in hand, went to the bank, the consulate, and then the station where he saw him aboard the boat train for Cherbourg and London. When he had done that he mailed Jeanne the money Osborn had provided for her—but not quite all of it, keeping about one hundred twenty-five dollars for himself.

  What he made of this episode in Tropic of Cancer is distinctly rougher and harder on all concerned, most especially on his narrator, who is here depicted as a remorseless thief. Ginnette (Jeanne) comes off as a heartless whore and Fillmore as a spineless sort, willing enough to let his American friend clean up after him. Yet here again, beneath the fiction’s shock value there lies Miller’s grand theme, for Fillmore in his dissolute behavior in Paris and his subsequent flight over the sea to the New World replicates the whole sorry saga of the West that had covered the known world with blood and tyranny, making existence a mortal trial for the masses—and then had sailed away to repeat the saga in a place that ought to have been an unrepeatable opportunity to begin anew. And all of this for the same old reason: the refusal (or is it the inability?) to look at life’s realities and be equal to their challenges and their opportunities. As long as France was wine, women, and money in his pocket, Fillmore was happy there, the narrator thinks. “And then, when he had had his fling, when the tent top flew off and he had a good look at the sky, he saw it wasn’t a circus but an arena, just like everywhere. And a damned grim one.” And so, off again he had gone on the same hopeless flight from reality to disillusionment.

  As for the narrator, sitting there at bankside in the setting sun with a wad of bills in his pocket, it suddenly occurs to him that he too could now follow Fillmore, if he wished. He too could flee his parlous existence here. He could go back to his wife, could hear once again the sound of his native tongue, walk amidst the familiar sights of his old world. And yet, as he thinks of that old world—its realities as he had at some cost come to know them—he feels instantaneously how barren for him the prospect of America actually is: the spectral skyscrapers and beneath them the streets “choked with ants.” He had been an ant once himself. That had been no circus, either, but a damned grim arena.

  Beyond the few days the stolen cash would carry him his prospects here are not particularly bright, except for this: he is free at last of illusions, and he has made a place for himself, here. Just here. He has before him the remains of this day, this singular, unrepeatable moment of Le bel aujourd’hui. Paris has never looked better.

  Coda

  The writing of Tropic of Cancer probably gave Henry Miller the most intense artistic satisfaction of his life because it vindicated him in his conviction of who he was. Jack Kahane’s publication of it, however, was something of an anticlimax for him, and maybe at that moment Anaiïs Nin cared more about the book than its author did. By this point Miller was already furiously at work on Tropic of Capricorn, which was to be the story of Henry and June and thus was the return of the original muse. The writing of it doubtless contributed to the growing distance between Miller and the new muse Nin had become. Nin, however, continued to supply Miller with occasional cash gifts, but by the time Kahane published Capricorn in 1939 the Henry-Anaiïs romance was really over, though neither would quite admit this. As for June, she had obtained a Mexican divorce from Miller the year Cancer was published in Paris. Not that much is known about her life after Henry except that it was bleak, a descending spiral of disasters that included electroshock therapy in the course of which she suffered a fall that conclusively broke her health. Miller managed to send her small sums of money in the 1940s, and they had one brief meeting in the fall of 1961 that was apparently unhappy for both of them. At some point thereafter June left the New York area for Arizona where a brother was living. It is believed that she died there, though the date of her death and the place of her burial are unknown.

  The war had made Miller an exile from his beloved France in 1940. Back in America, he led a nomadic, hand-to-mouth existence for the next four years that replicated the one he had endured before he understood in Paris what his mission truly was. With this major difference, however: he now knew that he was a writer, an artist, and that he would be remembered even if his finest works, the Tropics and Black Spring, should remain forever banned in America. This made his hardships bearable, indeed even honorable to him, as a martyr’s are. He tried writing pornography (Nin was doing the same). He set up as an astrologer. He turned out primitivistic watercolors in vast quantities and sold them for what he could get. He sent out what he called “begging letters” to friends, acquaintances, and institutions. He appears to have regarded these as a kind of literary genre. In 1942 he moved to the Los Angeles area and tried screenwriting. Two years later he moved to the isolated area of Big Sur, where he lived for the next nine years, in the course of which time fame found Henry Miller at last with the American publication of Cancer. It was an instant bestseller, as was Capricorn (1962). Now virtually anything of his, whether new, old, or recycled, found an enthusiastic audience, and he belatedly became a wealthy man. He also found himself enshrined as the somewhat aged satyr-king of unbridled sexuality. To an extent he had already been trading on this image for several years in his relationships with a succession of younger women, three of whom he married. The image gained validity in an ironic way when Nin published the portion of her diaries dealing with their affair: ironic because years before she had made him promise he would never draw on their relationship for literary capital. He never had. Yet now that he was a celebrity, Nin saw that she might capitalize on it and did.

  In part to escape his fans and his fame, to which he had come to feel a profound ambivalence, Miller moved down to Pacific Palisades in 1963. He brought with him his entourage, his gofers, gatekeepers, and caregivers. But there was an anonymity there that he deeply craved now in these last days. A man, he said frequently, deserved to be let alone when he’d said everything he had to say, and Miller had. He died in his sleep on June 7, 1980.

  Notes

  1. In his poem “Voyage West,” Archibald MacLeish has an outmoded, disgraced Columbus lamenting that “once the maps have all been made / A man were better dead than find new continents.”

  2. The truth of the horrific passage describing this episode has been questioned (but then, so for a couple of centuries were the rumors of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hem-mings). When Crèvecoeur wrote, the literary tradition of travelers’ tales was long established in Europe, the Near East, and the Orient. Crèvecoeur was occasionally in error about one thing and another, perhaps especially about the realities of Native American life, but these are errors, not a traveler’s inventions, and the distinction is crucial. The tone of the passage is entirely consistent with the rest of his book, and I find little reason t
o believe he invented the encounter.

  3. It is entirely possible that Crèvecoeur knew of a particularly shocking instance of frontier lawlessness, since it occurred in Pennsylvania and had been described by his friend Benjamin Franklin. This was the massacre of some peaceful Conestoga Indians in December 1763. At dawn on December 14, Irish immigrant militiamen attacked a settlement of peaceful Cones-togas near Lancaster, killing all six they found there and burning down the buildings. The Paxton Boys—as they came to be called—had wanted the Indians’ land, land given them by William Penn as part of his “Holy Experiment.” But there remained fourteen Conestogas left who might still make some claim on the land the Paxton Boys coveted. Therefore, on December 27, the Paxton Boys rode again, this time against the workhouse at Lancaster where the Conestoga refugees were housed. This time they finished the job and then settled on the conquered land. No charges were ever brought, and the Paxton Boys then decided to march on Philadelphia but were persuaded to turn back by a committee headed by Franklin.

  4. In Israel Potter Herman Melville wrote thus of the Protean Ben Franklin: “Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit:—Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of his land.”

  5. Another Tennessee tall-talker once described for me what it was like hunting through a laurel thicket: “Son, it’s like walking through a room full of rocking chairs at midnight.”