Mind of an Outlaw (45 page)

So the authors who live best in legend offer personalities we can comprehend like movie stars. Hemingway and Fitzgerald impinge on our psyche with the clarity of Bogart or Cagney. We comprehend them at once. Faulkner bears the same privileged relation to a literary Southerner as Olivier to the London theatergoer. A grand and cultivated presence is enriching the marrow of your life. Nobody wishes to hear a bad story about Olivier or Faulkner.

Henry Miller, however, exists in the same relation to legend that antimatter shows to matter. His life is antipathetic to the idea of legend itself. Where he is complex, he is too complex—we do not feel the resonance of slowly dissolving mystery but the madness of too many knots; where he is simple, he is not attractive—his air is harsh. If he had remained the protagonist by which he first presented himself in
Tropic of Cancer
—the man with iron in his phallus, acid in his mind, and some kind of incomparable relentless freedom in his heart, that paradox of tough misery and keen happiness, that connoisseur of the spectrum of odors between good sewers and bad sewers, that noble rat gnawing on existence and impossible to kill—then he could indeed have been a legend, a species of Parisian Bogart or American Belmondo. Everybody would have wanted to meet this poet-gangster, barbarian-genius. He would have been the American and heterosexual equivalent of Jean Genet.

In fact, he could never have been too near to the character he made of himself in
Tropic of Cancer
. One part never fits. It is obvious he must be more charming than he pretends—how else account for all the free dinners he is invited to, the people he lives on, the whores who love him? There has to be something splendid about him. He may even seem angelic to his friends, or, perish
the word, vulnerable. Anaïs Nin, when describing the apartment in Clichy that Miller kept with Alfred Perlès, made, we remember, the point that Miller was tidying the joint. “Henry keeps house like a Dutch housekeeper. He is very neat and clean. No dirty dishes about. It is all monastic, really, with no trimmings, no decoration.”
^*

These few details are enough to suggest
Tropic of Cancer
is a fiction more than a fact. Which, of course, is not to take away a particle of its worth. Perhaps it becomes even more valuable. After all, we do not write to recapture an experience, we write to come as close to it as we can. Sometimes we are not very close, and yet, paradoxically, are nearer than if we had. Not nearer necessarily to the reality of what happened, but to the mysterious reality of what can happen on a page. Oil paints do not create clouds but the image of clouds; a page of manuscript can only evoke that special kind of reality which lives on the skin of the writing paper, a rainbow on a soap bubble. Miller is forever accused of caricature by people who knew his characters, and any good reader knows enough about personality to sense how much he must be leaving out of his people. Yet what a cumulative reality they give us. His characters make up a Paris more real than its paving stones until a reluctant wonder bursts upon us—no French writer no matter how great, not Rabelais, nor Proust, not Maupassant, Hugo, Huysmans, Zola, or even Balzac, not even Céline, has made Paris more vivid to us. Whenever before has a foreigner described a country better than its native writers? For in
Tropic of Cancer
Miller succeeded in performing one high literary act: he created a tone in prose which caught the tone of a period and a place. If that main character in
Tropic of Cancer
named Henry Miller never existed in life, it hardly matters—he is the voice of a spirit which existed at that time. The spirits of literature may be the nearest we come to historical truth.

For that matter, the great confessions of literature are apart from their authors. Augustine recollecting his sins is not the sinner
but the pieties. Julien Sorel is not Stendhal, nor the Seducer a copy of Kierkegaard.
On the Road
is close to Jack Kerouac, yet he gives a happier Kerouac than the one who died too soon. Proust was not his own narrator, even as homosexuality is not heterosexuality but another land, and if we take
The Sun Also Rises
as the purest example of a book whose innovation in style became the precise air of a time and a place, then even there we come slowly to the realization that Hemingway at the time he wrote it was not the equal of Jake Barnes—he had created a consciousness wiser, drier, purer, more classic, more sophisticated, and more judicial than his own. He was still naïve in relation to his creation.

The difference between Hemingway and Miller is that Hemingway set out thereafter to grow into Jake Barnes and locked himself for better and worse, for enormous fame and eventual destruction, into that character who embodied the spirit of an age. Whereas Miller, eight years older than Hemingway but arriving at publication eight years later, and so sixteen years older in 1934 than Hemingway was in 1926, chose to go in the opposite direction. He proceeded to move away from the first Henry Miller he had created. He was not a character but a soul—he would be various.

He was. Not just a
débrouillard
, but a poet; not just a splenetic vision but a prophet; no mere caricaturist, rather a Daumier of the written line; and finally not just master of one style but the prodigy of a dozen. Miller had only to keep writing
Tropic of Cancer
over and over and refining his own personality to become less and less separate from his book, and he could have entered the American life of legend. There were obstacles in his way, of course, and the first was that he was not publishable in America—the growth of his legend would have taken longer. But he had something to offer which went beyond Hemingway.

The cruelest criticism ever delivered of Henry James is that he had a style so hermetic his pen would have been paralyzed if one of his characters had ever entered a town house, removed his hat, and found crap on his head (a matter, parenthetically, of small moment to Tolstoy let us say, or Dostoyevsky, or Stendhal).
Hemingway would have been bothered more than he liked. Miller would have loved it. How did his host react to the shit? How did our host’s wife? My God, the way she smacked her nostrils over the impact, you can be sure her thighs were in a lather.

In fact, Hemingway would have hated such a scene. He was trying to create a world where mood—which Hemingway saw as the staff of life—could be cultivated by the scrupulosity of the attention you paid to keeping mood aloft through the excellence of your gravity, courage, and diction.

The eye of every dream Hemingway ever had must have looked down the long vista of his future suicide—so he had a legitimate fear of chaos. He never wrote about the river—he contented himself, better, he created a quintessentially American aesthetic by writing about the camp he set up each night by the side of the river—that was the night we made camp at the foot of the cliffs just after the place where the rapids were bad.

Miller is the other half of literature. He is without fear of his end, a literary athlete at ease in earth, air, or water. I am the river, he is always ready to say, I am the rapids and the placids, I’m the froth and the scum and twigs—what a roar as I go over the falls. Who gives a fart. Let others camp where they may. I am the river and there is nothing I can’t join.

Hemingway’s world was doomed to collapse so soon as the forces of the century pushed life into a technological tunnel; mood to Hemingway, being a royal grace, could not survive grinding gears, surrealist manners—here’s shit in your hat!—and electric machines which offered static, but Miller took off at the place where Hemingway ended. In
Tropic of Cancer
he was saying—and it is the force of the book—I am obliged to live in that place where mood is in the meat grinder, so I know more about it. I know all of the spectrum which runs from good mood to bad mood, and can tell you that a stinking mood is better than no mood. Life has also been designed to run in the stink.

Miller bounces in the stink. We read
Tropic of Cancer
, that book of horrors, and feel happy. It is because there is honor in the horror, and metaphor in the hideous. How, we cannot even begin to say. Maybe it is that mood is vastly more various, self-regenerative,
hearty, and sly than Hemingway ever guessed. Maybe mood is not a lavender lady, but a barmaid with full visions of heaven in the full corruption of her beer breath, and an old drunk’s vomit is a clarion call to some mutants of the cosmos just now squeezing around the bend. It is as if without courage, or militancy, or the serious cultivation of strength, without stoicism or good taste, or even a nose for the nicety of good guts under terrible pressure, Miller is still living closer to death than Hemingway, certainly he is closer if the sewer is nearer to our end than the wound.

History proved to be on Miller’s side. Twentieth-century life was leaving the world of individual effort, liquor, and tragic wounds for the big-city garbage can of bruises, migraines, static, mood chemicals, amnesia, absurd relations, and cancer. Down in the sewers of existence where the cancer was being cooked, Miller was cavorting. Look, he was forever saying, you do not have to die of this crud. You can breathe it, eat it, suck it, fuck it, and still bounce up for the next day. There is something inestimable in us if we can stand the smell.

Considering where the world was going—right into the World-Wide Sewer of the Concentration Camps—Miller had a message which gave more life than Hemingway. “One reason why I have stressed so much the immoral, the wicked, the ugly, the cruel in my work is because I wanted others to know how valuable these are, how equally if not more important than the good things.… I was getting the poison out of my system. Curiously enough, this poison had a tonic effect for others. It was as if I had given them some kind of immunity.”
^†

The legend, however, was never to develop. With his fingers and his nose and his toenails, he had gotten into the excrements of cancerland—he had to do no more than stay there, a dry sardonic demon, tough as nails, bright as radium. But he had had a life after all before this, tragic, twisted, near to atrophied in some of its vital parts, he was closer to the crud himself than he ever
allowed. So he had to write himself out of his own dungeons and did in all the work which would follow
Tropic of Cancer
and some of the secrets of his unique, mysterious, and absolutely special personality are in his later work and we will yet live with him there, and try to comprehend him—a vital search. We would all know more if we could find him.

But for now let us take on the pleasure of
Tropic of Cancer
. Much of the first half is reprinted here.

PLAINS WAS DIFFERENT
from what one expected. Maybe it was the name, but anticipation had been of a dry and dusty town with barren vistas, ramshackle warehouses, and timeless, fly-buzzing, sun-baked afternoons. Instead, Plains was green. As one approached, the fields were green and the trees were tall. The heat of southern Georgia was as hot in summertime as it promised to be, but there was shade under the elms, the pecan trees, and the oaks, and if the streets were wide, the foliage was rich enough to come together overhead. A surprising number of houses were big and white and wooden and looked to be fifty years old or more. Some were a hundred years old. They had porches and trees in the front yard, and lawns ran a good distance from the front door to the sidewalk while the grass to the rear of the house meandered leisurely into the backyard of the house on the street behind. Some homes might be newly painted, and some were shabby, but the town was pleasant and spread out for a population of 683 inhabitants. By comparison with meaner-looking places with a gas station, barbecue shack, general store, junkyard, empty lots, and spilled gasoline, a redneck redolence of dried ketchup and hamburger napkins splayed around thin-shanked,
dusty trees, Plains felt peaceful and prosperous. It had the sweet deep green of an old-fashioned town that America has all but lost to the interstates and the ranch houses, the mobile homes and the condominiums, the neon strips of hotted-up truck stops and the static pall of shopping centers. Plains had an antiques store on the main street that must have been a hundred feet deep, and it was owned by Alton Carter, Jimmy Carter’s uncle; Plains had a railroad running through the middle of the main street and a depot that was not more than twice as long as a tinker’s wagon: Plains had an arcade one block long (the length of the main street), and all the stores were in the shade under the arcade, including a brand-new restaurant called the Back Porch with white tin ceilings fifteen feet high, four-blade propeller fan turning overhead, and chicken salad sandwiches with a touch of pineapple and a touch of pepper—tasty. Plains was that part of America which hitherto had been separate from the media, the part that offered a fundamental clue to the nature of establishment itself. One could pass through a hundred small towns in a state, and twenty or thirty might be part of a taproot for the establishment of its capital to draw upon. A place like Plains could be modest by the measure of its income and yet offer an unmistakable well-ordered patina, a promise that the mysterious gentility of American life was present, that there were still people interested in running things without showing the traces, that the small-town establishment remained a factor to be taken account of among all the other factors like exhaust roar and sewage slick and those plastic toylands stretching to the American horizon.