Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (16 page)
Read Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" Online
Authors: Frederick Turner
Tags: #Genre.Biographies and Autobiographies, #Author; Editor; Journalist; Publisher
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, as 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.
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.
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.
