Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (13 page)

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
Crazy 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.

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.

Fraenkel’s flat was at the end of Villa Seurat, a short
impasse
in a neighborhood of the Fourteenth that had
become popular with artists. (Just behind Villa Seurat, there was a street called Rue des Artistes.) Dali, Andre Derain, Antonin Artaud, and Tsuguharu Foujita had lived hereabouts, though, characteristically, while he stayed with Fraenkel Miller evidently had little if any contact with them. The area was seedy but just short of rough-and-tumble, a good place for meditative walks and with a brightly lit, capacious Alsatian brasserie nearby—just the sort of place Miller loved to work in.
²¹

While he stayed with Fraenkel, Miller’s duties were substantially those he’d had at Osborn’s: to clean, to cook a bit, and to do some typing for Fraenkel. Also, to listen to Fraenkel, whose elaborate “death philosophy” Miller had drilled into him on a daily basis. Miller evidently didn’t mind the philosophizing, and indeed a remnant of it eventually provided him with the opening lines of
Tropic of Cancer:
it was well worth it for a stable place to live and work, and during the daytime the place was quiet. But in addition to giving the impoverished transient a roof for a time, Fraenkel provided some other valuable services as well. For one thing, he read enough of
Crazy Cock
to confirm what its author had by now strongly suspected: that it was indeed vile crap. Fraenkel told Miller he should waste no more time trying to rescue it. His other service was more oblique but of greater importance.

Fraenkel was something of a people collector, one reason
why Lowenfels had brought Miller to his attention. Fraenkel found the American an authentic character and remarkably representative of his culture, and in various ways he let him know this. Fraenkel may have been a crackpot, one-note philosopher, and later Miller would make savage fun of him. But at this delicately poised moment in Miller’s artistic development, the cranky admiration this deeply cultured man had for him was highly important because it was a validation of what Miller himself had been moving toward in his letters home: that he was in truth an original, probably even an aboriginal.
You
are your own best subject, Fraenkel in essence told his guest: forget philosophy, forget being a thinker, forget the conventions of the novel. Just be yourself and write out of that.

For a while now Miller had been writing up his notes on Paris. At Fraenkel’s, these scattered, random pieces began to take on shape and an idiosyncratic kind of coherency as Miller sensed they might make some kind of a book. He spent more time at the typewriter, less time wandering about, and still less time fussing over
Crazy Cock.

When he was at the machine, he hammered at it with a ferocity that startled the visitors who dropped by at day’s end to smoke, drink, and talk philosophy with Fraenkel. There in the midst of it all sat Miller at the machine, a cigarette in his mouth, a glass of wine at his elbow, typing
away just as if he were in some tranquil setting—and perhaps for him now this was a species of tranquility. Alfred Perlés, who came around often, thought Miller might have been the fastest typist he’d ever seen, and Perlès had worked in a number of newsrooms. The painter Roger Klein recalled to Brassaϊ that Miller typing sounded like a machine gun, a simile that would have pleased the typist himself if Klein had repeated it to him. In another description, Klein said Miller reminded him of a “secretary practicing scales at a speed-typing competition.” And the sheets that flew from the machine, Klein exclaimed to Brassaϊ: “Did you ever look closely at them? Not one erasure or type-over!” The stuff just poured out as if Miller had hooked a tap right up to the source. At that time when he felt he might very well be hot on the trail of something new, dangerous, and fearfully exciting, Miller might have been composing in the mode later made famous by Jack Kerouac and the Beats—”First thought, best thought.” But despite what Roger Klein might have believed at that time, Brassaϊ knew that later his friend would spend many hours revising those pages that seemed to fly out of his typewriter.
²²
For now, however, in Villa Seurat, Miller was in no mood for revisions. They could wait. When Fraenkel told him he was going to sublet the apartment, Miller moved back in with Perlès at the Hotel Central, and it was from there that he exultantly wrote to
Emil: “I start tomorrow on the Paris book: first person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!”

Perlès came to Miller’s rescue yet again at the end of that summer—someone was always there for him now it seemed—getting him part-time work at the
Tribune.
Working out of the basement of the paper’s Right Bank building, Miller proofread stock market quotations. The paper was the poorest paying of the three English language dailies in Paris, and the work itself wasn’t that much better than being a file clerk for the cement company in New York. Yet rather than being enraged by his evident lack of progress, Miller found that on the whole he rather enjoyed the job. For one thing, though the pay was meager, it was better than begging or feeling beholden in a daily way to someone, as he had been to Osborn. It gave him some walking-around money, and his needs remained minimal. Then too the work was almost completely mindless, leaving him the occasional odd moment to invent something in his head or to remember some detail, some incident of his life that he could potentially use. There were as well some interesting characters to hang out with after hours.