Chapter 4
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books….
— HENRY MILLER, TROPIC OF CANCER
HENRY MILLER WENT TO Paris in March 1930, hoping to find the freedom to become a writer.
He had always felt constricted in New York, hemmed in because it was his native city and his relatives lived there, hemmed in because of his failed marriage and abandoned child, hemmed in because in New York not to produce money is to be a bum, since New York (the most yang city on earth) measures everyone and everything by the ability to generate money. The artist requires idleness—right-brain dream time. And while idleness is possible in New York, guilt-free idleness is not. Busyness and business are the gods of New York, and art needs other gods: ease, idleness, the ability to receive life as it flows.
Henry Miller’s early novels Moloch and Crazy Cock, written in New York, show a man at war with his surroundings, trying to make the uncompromising asphalt bloom. In Paris he frees his unconscious to dream, his voice to sing, and his body to lead him in recording all the things previously left out of books.
The voice Henry Miller discovers in Paris is full of the exuberance of escape:
It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their places. You can read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other. Nobody dies here….
Why does the American artist feel that nobody dies in Europe when obviously this is not true? What the expatriate artist feels in Europe is a spiritual rebirth: the old self dies; the new self feels immortal.
I have had this feeling myself, writing in Italy—my chosen place—and I have argued with myself about it, much as Miller did. Europe for the American writer means the proximity of culture, a perpetual wanderjahr, a place where one’s family skeletons do not rattle in closets (only other people’s family skeletons do that). Even in the new Europe, one does not have to justify being a writer or artist with bestsellerdom or a prestigious gallery. The pursuit itself is honored—and sex, not money, is in the air.
Exile is necessary to many writers who come from puritanical cultures. Joyce is another example. One cannot imagine him writing Ulysses in Dublin. He had to leave Ireland to see it clearly. This is partly because of the simple need to remove oneself from the X-ray eyes of family in order to discover and utilize one’s gifts. But for the American writer it also means a necessary escape from bourgeois values, from those people who assume that “making a living” is the same as making a life. Henry Miller had to go to Paris to escape the ghost of his father’s tailor shop and the hallucinatory Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. It was that simple.
Why Paris? Because for Miller’s generation and the generation before his, Paris was midwife to the arts. Henry Miller had to dream of Paris. Any would-be would.
What was Paris like when he arrived? If you were a novelist trying to create the Paris of 1930, what details would you pick to distinguish it from the Paris of today? The life of a city, as anyone who has tried to recreate another era knows, dwells in its plumbing and transport, its food and drink, its cafes and theaters and the hours it keeps.
I always think of it as the Paris of petits bleus or pneumatiques—those instant communiqués, the faxes of their time—that crisscrossed the city in vacuum tubes. It was a city of bicycles, of buses, of all-night cafés, of refugees from everywhere in the world. It was a city in which certain districts, Montparnasse, for example, resembled an endless carnival. People who lived in Paris in those years remember its extraordinary Rabelaisian gaiety. Far more than New York, it was a city that never slept, and a stroll on the night boulevard was always an adventure.
Paris in 1930 was utterly hospitable to the artist with no money.
Here is Georges Belmont (one of Henry’s French translators and later mine) speaking about the Montparnasse of 1930:
In Montparnasse, particularly, you had plenty of those people who had absolutely no money, like Henry, and you could sit at a table, have a café crème, and stay there for the whole evening. Nobody would throw you out. Even at five, they wouldn’t expel you but people would go finally because they were exhausted. At La Coupole, for instance, there was dancing upstairs with jazz and downstairs there were different corners. There was the chess corner, the writers’ and painters’ corner. You could see Chagall, and Foujita with his famous lover, Kiki de Montparnasse—a remarkable woman. I met her later when she was Robert Desnos’s mistress. She was very beautiful, small, and had a marvelous face, round with big eyes, a humorous face. From time to time I saw Picasso in La Coupole and plenty of others…. People met and spent hours together, discussing ideas.
It is easy to see why this Paris was so much more congenial to Henry than the New York he had fled—a New York dominated by the crash of 1929, and the decade of mad optimism about business that had preceded it. Here Henry’s inability to keep a job, about which he always had guilt feelings, was the precursor of art. Henry was enough of his mother’s son to wonder whether he was a genius or a ne’er-do-well. In Paris, at least, that question was settled.
Even Georges Belmont (known in those days as Pelorson), a good boy from the Ecole Normale Superiéure, fled both the Sorbonne and the intellectual life and went instead to Montparnasse.
Montparnasse got particularly interesting late. It was after eleven that the real things began. You had the kind of people who didn’t care if they got up at twelve—who had absolutely no positive reason to get up at six o’clock or seven o’clock to go to work. And it’s very difficult to capture this—there was life, there was movement, all the time.
Despite the economic collapse, there were plenty of Americans in Paris “and the Americans were still jolly,” according to Georges. They continued to act as if they were on holiday. “They were important because they still had money and they liked to spend it.”
Paris was also the center of sin. Opposite La Coupole was the Select, a gathering place for homosexuals of both sexes. And there was a kind of tolerance there still unknown in New York. In fact it was the sort of place where one was embarrassed to be straight. Again, in Georges’s description:
It was a kind of zoo. Lots of people didn’t dare enter the place because they didn’t feel at ease. I had a very good homosexual friend whom I had known at school, so I was accepted. My friend lived with one of the queens of the lesbians in Paris—and they were in love. They never made love—but they were in love and they were both terribly jealous. Once I saw a marriage there. Two men got married. One was dressed in a long, white gown, a crown of orange flowers, a veil, everything. They exchanged rings, received a religious blessing from a pseudo-priest. That was the essence of Montparnasse in those days.
“Montparnasse in those days.” A different sense of time. The contrast between the New York of Crazy Cock and Moloch and the Paris of Tropic of Cancer is just this. And it is this different sense of time that creates freedom. Paris breathes freedom into Henry and Henry responds by breathing it into his prose.
I think few of us in the world of the nineties are aware of how much we have lost now that such leisure has gone. Most of us are imprisoned in our own schedules, our days broken into half-hour fragments like the rulings in our Filofaxes. It is almost as if our notebooks rule us, rather than us ruling them. The life of the cafés, of talk, of walk, of leisure, of dolce far niente seems an indulgence to us, as does reading, dreaming, sleeping. There are “successful” people in our world who boast of how little sleep they get, who compete at being busy. But the truth is that all creativity takes idleness; when we lose it, we lose our ability to invent the next phase of problem-solving for the human race.
There was a vast difference between prewar and postwar days in Paris. World War I had turned Europe upside down and left an unparalleled despair in the writers and intellectuals who flocked to Paris in its wake. Inner and outer weather had changed—as had fashions. Bowler hats, celluloid collars, gas lamps, and horses had disappeared. Women had finally been liberated from whalebone and now wore comfortable clothes—what would later be called a unisex look. The Jazz Age had liberated both bodies and minds.
Now, suddenly, the boom atmosphere of twenties’ Paris was gone, and with it the superfluity of parasites (designers, art dealers, courtesans) who live on the reverberations of boom.
The change between 1928 and 1930 was abrupt—suddenly hard times arrived. But, as the metamorphosis from the fat 1980s to the lean 1990s in our own era has shown us, this can happen breathlessly fast.
Paris in 1930 was a city on the edge of an abyss. There would soon be thirty million unemployed in the world (four million in Germany alone) and by 1933 the planet would have a new would-be master in Adolf Hitler. But for Henry, who had been poor and dishonored in America, poverty with honor in Paris felt like release. Freedom breathes through the prose of Tropic of Cancer—the story of a man learning how to breathe. Or, as he describes it in one of his remarkable letters to his friend Emil Schnellock, “The Paris book: first person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!”
Henry found his exuberant new voice, the voice of Tropic of Cancer, primarily in his letters to Emil Schnellock, his painter pal from his old Brooklyn neighborhood who lent him the ten dollars that was in his pocket when he sailed to Europe in 1930. Henry’s Letters to Emil (collected and edited in 1989 by George Wickes) constitute an amazing record of how a writer discovers his sound. The transition from the tortured prose of the two fledgling books to the explosive simplicity of Tropic of Cancer is all there. We hear the explosion. We see the contrail streak across the sky.
Henry Miller’s writing odyssey is an object lesson for anyone who wants to learn to be a writer. How do you go from self-consciousness to unself-consciousness? How do you come to sound on paper as natural as you sound in speech? Crazy Cock and Molochwill show you the first parts of a journey. Tropic of Cancer is the destination.
In between come Letters to Emil. These letters are crucial because they are written to someone who accepts Henry completely and with whom he can be wholly himself. In them, he tests the voice that will revolutionize the world in Tropic of Cancer. It is the voice of the New York writer revolting against New York. And it is the voice of the weary pίcaro—weary of flopping from pillar to post:
Two years of vagabondage has taken a lot out of me. Given me a lot, too, but I need a little peace now, a little security in which to work. In fact, I ought to stop living for a long while and just work. I’m sick of gathering experiences. There’ll be a lot to tell when I get back to New York. Enough for many a wintry night. But immediately I think of N.Y. I get frightened. I hate the thought of seeing that grim skyline, the crowds, the sad Jewish faces, the automats, the dollars so hard to get, the swell cars, the beautiful clothes, the efficient businessmen, the doll faces, the cheap movies, the hullabaloo, the grind, the noise, the dirt, the vacuity and sterility, the death of everything sensitive …
Emil gave Henry the strength to embrace his freedom:
I will explode in the Paris book. The hell with form, style, expression and all those pseudo-paramount things which beguile the critics. I want to get myself across this time—and direct as a knife-thrust.
Emil freed Henry by being the perfect audience:
You see, Emil, this book (which I call, tentatively, “The Last Book”) is like that beautiful big valise of yours, of stout leather, that expands or collapses, that you throw things into pell-mell regardless of whether they are starched or pressed or stained or not stained…. I’ve gotten over the idea of writing literature, if you can understand what I mean by that…. Almost from the day I arrived I sensed something different in the air, in my air…. New York always gave me a sinking feeling when I came back…. Paris is smiling—she welcomes you without distinction of race, creed or color. Her vegetables look brighter, her women gayer, her workers more industrious, her cops more intelligent. She is aged but not careworn. The roofs are so wonderful—all those fucking chimney pots, the black of them, the slanting studio windows, the walls with their traces of rooms which no longer exist, the bridges, each one like a poem…. Well, it’s like my home now, though I remain a foreigner and always will be. But whenever I make a journey, it will always be Paris that I want to think of coming back to—not New York. New York belongs in a finished past, a past like some evil dream….
Brassaï also records the transformation that came over Miller in Paris: “In France, his brow smoothed out, he became happy, smiling. An irrepressible optimism irradiated his whole being.”
This optimism, among other things, creates the unique sound of Tropic of Cancer:
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
Compare this open, direct song to the reader with the fustiness of Crazy Cock, which Miller began in New York in the late twenties as Lovely Lesbians. The voice of Miller in Crazy Cock is third person, stilted, dusty. Henry appears to be ventriloquising a Literary Voice—with a capital L.
The writer who invented first person, present tense exuberance for the twentieth century is writing in the third person! And it doesn’t suit him. It makes him use words like “wondrous,” “totteringly,” “blabberingly,” and “abashed.” Here is Henry the Victorian, the reader of Marie Corelli, writing in a pastiche of Victorian romance and Dreiserian realism.
But Crazy Cock is fascinating for what it tells us about Henry’s literary roots. Henry Miller was born heir to the Victorian age—even in the seventies, when I knew him, he used to rave to me about Marie Corelli—and Crazy Cock shows us what Henry had to overcome to find his writer’s voice:
More wondrous than ever was her beauty now. Like a mask long withheld. Mask or mask of a mask? mask or prism? Protective or deflective? Fragments of questions racing through his mind whilst he arranged harmoniously the disharmony of her being….
Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him, peering at him from behind the mask. And all the riddles that had perplexed and tormented him fell away. A rapport such as the living establish with the dying. Like a queen advancing to her throne she approached. He rose totteringly, his limbs quaking. In his heart there was a tumult. A wave of gratitude, and abasement, engulfed him. A desire seized him to fling himself on his knees, to thank her blabberingly for deigning to notice him.
Blabberingly indeed.
That blabbering voice was the one Henry brought to Paris. What he came home with was the sound of his native speech rediscovered.
How did this transformation occur? Can we trace the steps?
When Henry first arrived in Europe in February 1930, on the American Banker, he debarked in London. By mutual consent, he had left June, who had promised to send him money, in New York. He endured a grim, dreary time in London, staying in the cheapest digs he could find, walking the streets, and exploring the British Museum. He caught the boat train for Paris the moment some cash arrived from June at American Express.
As he said to Emil, he was at the time “thirty-eight, poor and unknown.” He had the carbons of Moloch and Crazy Cock with him; clearly he had still not given up hope on these early hopeless works. He had better clothes than he’d ever need in Bohemian Paris—clothes from his father, the failed master tailor—which in time he would have no choice but to sell. And he was cut off from friends and family for the first time in his middle-aged but still unfledged life.
He stayed in a series of cheap Left Bank hotels, marked up his maps of Paris, and walked the streets, looking for literary echoes. His final destination was always the American Express office at 11 rue Scribe, and always there was the desperate hope of news and money from June. Paris was feeding Henry’s heart, but not his stomach. As March turned to April, he had received no more cash from June—only promises. He was on the point of utter destitution when Alfred Perlès, an Austrian writer who worked at the Chicago Tribune (and whom he had met in Paris in 1928 with June and the “lovely lesbian” Jean Kronski) turned up. Perlès was to become Henry’s master of revels. He immediately invited Henry to share his modest room for a time, and began to teach him how to live by his wits. Perlès—or Fred or Alf or Joey as Henry called him—was to be an important friend for the rest of Henry’s life, but he was never as important as during those early days when Henry was destitute in a new country, lonely for June yet also glad to be rid of her.
“Only get desperate enough and everything will turn out well” was Henry’s Paris mantra. And he proved it true. Tropic of Cancer could not be written until Henry let go of literature, of New York, of all his ties to the tailor shop and his mother. It was to be “the last book,” a book by “the last man on earth,” a book to end all books. And it still feels that way.
Henry lived with Perlès in various cheap hotels, even slept in cinemas at times. He ran into an Indian messenger from the Cosmodemonic who gave him a job as houseman, which became a funny episode in Cancer. He hocked his beautifully tailored suits, the last vestiges of his patrimony; he cadged money and drinks from other expatriates. Finally, when June arrived on the Majestic in September 1930, Henry was so overwrought that he missed meeting her boat train. They went back to the Hôtel de Paris (where they had stayed in 1928) and for a short time were blissfully reunited. June promised everything, as usual, but it soon became obvious that she had really come with the hope of landing a movie job. Henry had written to her about meeting a woman director, Germaine Dulac, who might employ her, and June, ever the spinner of daydreams, had taken Henry’s promises literally. When the dreams did not materialize, Henry and June began to battle hideously again. In a month or so, June sailed back to New York on borrowed money. Henry very nearly went with her, but once that impulse passed, he felt freed by her departure.
He began to work at his French, which, to the end, he spoke with a heavy Brooklyn accent. When the weather got wretched in Paris in November, he thought again of going home, but just couldn’t raise the money. He was forced to stay on, to cultivate his friends, his notebooks, his letters—and eventually his luck began to change.
A pivotal event late in 1930 was his meeting with Richard Osborn, who would eventually be his link to Anaïs Nin. Osborn was an upper-class WASP Yale graduate from Connecticut who wanted to be a writer. Generous, crazy, intent on having a good time, Osborn was employed as a lawyer at the Paris office of the National City Bank, where Hugh Guiler, Anaïs Nin’s husband, was also employed, supporting his wife’s elegant bohemian life in Louviciennes. Dick Osborn, who loved bohemians and wanted to be one, impulsively invited Henry to live with him at 2 rue Auguste-Bartholdi, a smallish, pretty street of apartments and little shops not far from the Tour Eiffel and the Champs de Mars. Rue Auguste-Bartholdi still has an authentic turn-of-the-century bar on the corner and looks as it must have done in the thirties. Henry was to find his first happiness in Paris there, on a street named for the creator of the Statue of Liberty!
Given a free place to live, fancier than anything Perlès could offer, Henry could work at ease and walk the streets for inspiration. He went on compulsively reworking the already overworked Crazy Cock, but he also began to write some pieces in his newfound voice. The story “Mademoiselle Claude” dates from this time, and it signals the birth of the new Henry Miller. “If Mlle Claude is a whore, then what name shall I find for the other women I know?” he asks. The direct first-person voice is beginning to assert itself.
By the time Henry had been in Paris a year, he was surrounded by friends such as Dick Osborn, Alfred Perlès, and Wambly Bald (who wrote a column, La Vie Bohème, for the Chicago Tribune and gave Henry his first newspaper publicity). Perlès got Henry work writing articles for the Tribune, which gave him some much-needed confidence. He began filling the wall above his desk with huge sprawling charts and diagrams of the unwritten books that teemed in his brain. He was seething with inspiration.
On the last day of 1930, Henry had a near collision with mortality, which must have convinced him of divine protection. His taxi flipped over, but he walked away totally unharmed. Divine protection was to be abundant in the next year of his life—1931 was to prove for Henry what 1819 was for Keats: the anno mirabilis.
It was in 1931 that Henry began to find intellectual peers: Walter Lowenfels, the poet and critic, as bitter a satirist of America as Henry; and Michael Fraenkel, a publisher, philosopher, and writer. Fraenkel, the inspiration for Boris in Tropic of Cancer, believed that all current civilization was a celebration of the power of death. In order to combat this death force, a writer had to work anonymously, creating for the sake of creativity, not for the sake of reputation. Michael Fraenkel had collaborated with Walter Lowenfels on a pamphlet called “Anonymous: The Need for Anonymity,” which expounded this theory, and Henry was very much under its influence for a time.
It is fascinating to me that Henry began Tropic of Cancer thinking he would publish the book anonymously. Anonymity is a great liberator—even if one later changes one’s mind and acknowledges the book. I have often tricked myself into writing with candor by promising myself either not to publish or to publish under a pseudonym. Freed of modesty, freed of self-judgment, one can write with maximum passion.
“The cancer of time is eating us away,” Henry declares at the beginning of Tropic of Cancer.
Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
Clearly the passionate life force of Tropic of Cancer was partly provoked into being by Henry’s desire to escape the prison of death. And anonymity was for a time his key.
During this critical period in Henry’s writing life, June was mainly in New York. This was lucky, because Henry was still obsessed with her and she tended to be a difficult muse. During the early stages of the composition of both Moloch and Crazy Cock, she had demanded of Henry countless revisions to make herself look good. Of course no writer can function that way. With June gone, Henry was at last free to write.
Anaïs Nin came to supply Henry with the acceptance he needed. She became a beneficent mother-surrogate and perhaps his greatest love. Nin’s passionate belief in Henry (not to mention her financial support) made this creative blossoming possible. Her journals, particularly the unexpurgated versions of their liaison, Henry and June and Incest, describe this period vividly and describe Henry better than he describes himself. Henry’s own books about these Paris years—Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Quiet Days in Clichy—deliberately omit his romance with the married Nin (and Nin’s infatuation with June) and therefore only tell one side of what must have been one of the most extraordinary triangles in literary history.
Henry kept his promise to Anaïs Nin: he would not jeopardize her marriage in print. For a writer whose stock-in-trade was his own odyssey, this was a powerful renunciation and one that demonstrates how much Nin meant to him. Even years later, when their relationship turned hostile, he did not go back on his word.
Because of Henry’s loyalty, we hear of the romance only from Anaïs’s own pen:
I’ve met Henry Miller.
He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult for my D.H. Lawrence book.
When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He’s a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.
Anaïs Nin immediately captures the essence of Henry, the exuberant life force coupled with the dreamy pensiveness:
In the middle of lunch, when we were seriously discussing books, and Richard had sailed off on a long tirade, Henry began to laugh. He said, “I’m not laughing at you, Richard, but I just can’t help myself. I don’t care a bit, not a bit who’s right. I’m too happy. I’m just so happy right this moment with all the colors around me, the wine, the whole moment is so wonderful, so wonderful.” He was laughing almost to tears. He was drunk. I was drunk, too, quite. I felt warm and dizzy and happy.
We talked for hours. Henry said the truest and deepest things, and he has a way of saying “hmmmm” while trailing off on his own introspective journey.
Henry is intrigued and attracted. He wonders if maybe she is “the kind of woman who doesn’t hurt a man”—which indicates how scarred June had left him. Anaïs reports, in Henry and June, liking “his fierceness,” but rejects “his desire, pointing at me … like a sword” because, as she says, “for me it can’t be without love.”
A few days later she discovers “that he knows the technique of kissing better than anyone I’ve met,” and her “curiosity for sensuality is stirred.” Yet when he offers his penis to her mouth, she is stricken: “I get up as if struck by a whip.” She claims inexperience, which he immediately disputes. On some level he knows that he is to play Mellors to her Lady Chatterley. After all, they are both lovers of Lawrence and know only too well the roles they will be assigned by fate.
Within days, her husband, Hugo is worried: “You fall in love with people’s minds. I’m going to lose you to Henry.”
Henry’s “animal feeling for life” attracts Anaïs even as she rationalizes that Hugo is “finer than any man I know.” She presents Henry with little gifts—books, money, railway tickets. She longs to give him a home and an income, so he can write.
Bored with Hugo’s tepid sexuality, she is intrigued with animal Henry. He seems the initiator into the life force. Then, all at once, June Mansfield Miller arrives, becoming at once Anaïs’s rival, inamorata, and muse.
Anaïs captured June more vividly than Henry ever did, for Henry’s writing, even at its best, is only ever about Henry. The complete solipsist cannot describe another person. To Anaïs, June is “the most beautiful woman on earth.” She has “a startlingly white face, burning eyes.”
Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her, I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded.
Anaïs Nin falls in love with June “like a man.” She knows that Henry has no choice but to be besotted by her. Now Nin is besotted too. Henry and June is a remarkable document because of the vividness of its description of a woman’s emotions while involved in a passionate love triangle:
June. At night I dreamed of her, as if she were very small, very frail, and I loved her. I loved a smallness which had appeared to me in her talk: the disproportionate pride, a hurt pride. She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others’ eyes. She does not dare to be herself. There is no June Mansfield. She knows it. The more she is loved, the more she knows it….
A startlingly white face retreating into the darkness of the garden. She poses for me as she leaves. I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.
Anaïs, June, and Henry begin a strange three-way flirtation, which is also a flirtation with literature—a ménage a trois of three married lovers who lard their relationship with lies. Every betrayal is forgiven if it provokes art, and Anaïs is the most artful dissimulator of all. Even in her notebooks, she seems to be dramatising herself for posterity. And yet she tells the story of a woman’s sexuality more honestly than any writer who ever lived.
Anaïs practiced a sexual freedom which makes that of our own age seem timid. Open to her own bisexuality, adventurous in her open marriage, Anaïs presents herself as the true pίcara of sex despite—or perhaps because of—her comfortable alliance with her husband, Hugh Guiler. She admits that she is Donna Giovanna, desperate to seduce and abandon men, to wreak her revenge on a father who abandoned her. Henry was far more at home, whatever his reputation, with serial monogamy in the American fashion.
Henry’s dependency on Anaïs appears to have been far greater than hers on him. For all his fictional boasting of his sexual exploits, his other partners appear to have been casual, sometimes paid, while she was deeply involved with a variety of men, including her husband and her two psychiatrists, René Allendy and Otto Rank. She was also, for a time, incestuously involved with her own father, a period she describes with great vividness in Incest. Nowhere before, to my knowledge, has a woman written so candidly of breaking the final oedipal taboo.
Before reading this document, I thought that Anaïs had what might be called the European aristocratic view of sex: now her sexual adventures seem utterly transformed. She was acting out her seduction and abandonment by a powerful, erotic father. And she lived what most women cannot even admit they dream. For all their self-boosting, her unexpurgated diaries constitute one of the landmarks in twentieth-century literature. Both as literary history and as the history of female sexuality, the diaries fulfill Henry’s predictions that they would eventually be seen as one of the great works of our age. Perhaps unwittingly they show how much freer a woman’s sexuality can be than a man’s. While Henry and Hugo pined for Anaïs and wished to possess her, Anaïs was capable of juggling several men with minimal guilt.
In Henry and June, she chronicles the immense power June had over Henry. She understood his masochism and how it fired his work:
And what does she do to Henry? She humiliates him, she starves him, she breaks his health, she torments him—and he thrives; he writes his book.
His book. There is more to say about his book. Why was it such an explosion? Why did it change the world?
Early in Tropic of Cancer, Henry gives us the key, the secret of its revolutionary charge:
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation …
Remember where the world was in 1931 and 1932, when Henry was writing this “last book.” The Great Depression was spreading through America and Europe. The Great War had left a generation of corpses and mutilés. Those who were not mutilated in body were mutilated in spirit or in pocketbook. National income had dropped 33 percent in the U.S. between 1929 and 1931. “Brother, can you spare a dime?” was on the airwaves, and the suicide rate was soaring as the employment rate was plummeting. For Henry, down but not out in Paris, the world was just now experiencing what he had been experiencing all along. Art would not suffice. What was needed was something stronger: a revolution in consciousness, the eternal truth that is omitted from books.
What was the nature of this truth? And why did Henry have to relate his picaresque journey through the Paris underworld to illuminate it? Because he had to go to the end of the night in order to explode with the truth he discovered there: that all freedom comes only with total surrender. Henry discovers in Paris that it is only when man has died in the world that he can begin to live in the spirit. When his back is to the wall, he bursts free of repression. At the bottom, he begins his ascent.
Henry’s greatest philosophic insight follows that amusing episode in Tropic of Cancer in which he guides a young Hindu (a disciple of Gandhi) to a Paris brothel. The Hindu commits a terrible gaffe. He takes a shit in a bidet, mortifying himself before the madame and all her girls. The Hindu’s mortification becomes Henry’s epiphany. He remembers that
For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.
What burden is this? The burden of hope:
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me…. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself.
Once Henry gives up hope, once he frees himself from expectation, he can see the truth:
Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man’s nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.
In Tropic of Cancer, Henry is writing of the life that comes after one has been declared dead, of the illumination that comes in the darkness of the pit, of the abundance that comes in the midst of deprivation. A man must go to the bottom and become a clochardto find the truth about life and death. Henry’s message is not so different from Dante’s or, for that matter, from that of any shamanic vision quest. Semistarvation in Paris equals forty days in the desert; the free meal is his manna; cunt is his illumination; God is dead; Miller is alive.
If Tropic of Cancer is Miller’s Inferno, then Capricorn is his Purgatorio and The Colossus of Maroussi is his Paradiso. In an age when the average man has been reduced to a beggar-vagabond for his idiotic belief in Progress, Miller shows the way for the average man to endure his life, even to triumph over it.
The incessant march of history has come to this: starvation and the collective back to the wall. And what does Henry find? That if to live is the paramount thing, then he will live, even as a cannibal. And the cannibal finds God by feeding on his fellow man—and woman.
A rough message for rough times: what is left out of books. With your back to the wall, you either live or die. Perhaps the reason Henry loved the Paris episodes in Fear of Flying was because Isadora found there what Henry himself had found: totally humiliated, she found herself. She hit bottom and became free.
Why is hitting bottom necessary? Ask any recovering alcoholic. Only at the absolute bottom can illumination be found. Only at the bottom can you decide whether to live or die. Miller had been half alive for his first forty years. Now he decided to go whole hog. He decided to live.
It was no accident that he turned forty in that miraculous year he wrote Tropic of Cancer. It is only at forty that homo adolescens—the late-maturing man of the modern world—finally comes to grips with the live-or-die imperative that mortality imposes on all of us. Miller’s eternal boyishness—a sort of sexual Peter Pan in Paris—has irritated many who are, in truth, as boyish as he. Readers tend either to passionately identify or passionately denounce. Either they are inspired by his surrender and the freedom it brings or they feel compelled to denounce it.
There is a curious parallel between Henry Miller’s Paris hegira (and his eventual surrender) and the male initiatory ritual Robert Bly describes in Iron John: A Book About Men. To become his own man, Bly’s uninitiated boy must go away on the shoulders of the wild man—a shaman covered in animal skins, a Robin Hood-Pan figure, an initiator into male mysteries—and partake of the secrets of the Wild Wood. There, men initiate boys into manhood. There, boys separate from their mothers so that they can eventually love them again—but differently, as grown men, not as children. There, boys gain the confidence, through the detachment from Mother, to become mature.
Henry’s Paris was just such a descent into the wood of the wild man. It was his initiation, his break from Louise and June, his search for (and bonding with) wild men (Perlès, Frankel, Bald) who would help him sever the tie to his powerful mother and to overcome the meekness of his drunken father.
In Paris, Henry finally grew up. That was how he was able to find the voice of Tropic of Cancer. Rough, hairy, the voice of the wild man, Tropic of Cancer delights even as it disgusts. It is strong meat. It is like drinking sperm.
At night when I look at Boris’ goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical. O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider, I have ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces….
After passages as rough as this, Henry moves into a surreal flow of images:
Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended, their black boughs gesticulating like a sleepwalker. Somber, spectral trees, their trunks pale as cigar ash. A silence supreme and altogether European. Shutters drawn, shops barred. A red glow here and there to mark a tryst. Brusque the facades, almost forbidding; immaculate except for the splotches of shadow cast by the trees. Passing by the Orangerie I am reminded of another Paris, the Paris of Maugham, of Gauguin, Paris of George Moore. I think of that terrible Spaniard who was then startling the world with his acrobatic leaps from style to style. I think of Spengler and his terrible pronunciamentos, and I wonder if style, style in the grand manner, is done for. I say that my mind is occupied with these thoughts, but it is not true; it is only later, after I have crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me the carnival of lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For the moment I can think of nothing—except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings….
And then, without even a beat, Henry goes from surreal poetry back to cunts:
The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise. Immense, avec des choses inouïes. Llona now, she had a cunt. I know because she sent us some hairs from down below. Llona—a wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On every high hill she played the harlot—and sometimes in telephone booths and toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol and a shaving mug with his initials on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road with her dress pulled up and fingered herself. She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the land big enough for her … not one. Men went inside her and curled up. She wanted extension pricks, self-exploding rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote. She would cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave her permission. One cunt out of a million, Llona! A laboratory cunt and no litmus paper that could take her color. She was a liar, too, this Llona. She never bought a bed for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whisky bottle and her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Poor Carol, he could only curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath and he fell out—like a dead clam.
First flesh, then vision, then flesh again. That is man’s life as Henry sees it.
There is another important element in Tropic of Cancer that is always overlooked by its humorless critics—its wild humor. People have gazed so intently at the four-letter words that they have missed the laughs. And they have also missed the source of this humor: the outsideness of the outsider, the laserlike vision of the man or woman who has seen the world and knows that all it amounts to is two lumps of shit in a bidet.
In Crazy Cock and Moloch, Miller was still buying into literary myth. In Tropic of Cancer, he freed himself to see the absurdity of the world stripped of all myth and of all illusion. This totally irreverent angle of vision allows Henry to see things that nobody else would see until decades later.
Russia, for example, in the bloom of communism, he recognizes is just like America in the bloom of capitalism:
They don’t want to see sad faces in Russia; they want you to be cheerful, enthusiastic, light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America to me. I wasn’t born with this kind of enthusiasm.
India, he understands, is threatened not by England, but by America:
India’s enemy is not England, but America. India’s enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.
America wants mindless enthusiasm; so does Russia; India, with her great spiritual culture, is about to be dragged into this fake ideal of progress which ends only in the slaughter of wars to end all wars.
Henry rejected belief in progress, belief in war, belief in meliorism. He opened himself to a more primal enthusiasm, an enthusiasm for admitting the light, since “only those who can admit the light into their gizzards can translate what is there in the heart.”
All of Tropic of Cancer is a digression against death. The artists Miller admires—Matisse, Proust—are those in whom he also sees a great antideath spirit.
In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle of human flesh which refused the consummation of death. The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into hungry seeing mouths.
Because he is “immersed in the very plexus of life,” because he is seeing life with the wild irreverence of one who has abandoned the quiet desperation of the proper breadwinning spouse, the useless anger of the disappointed believer in progress, Miller can cut straight to its core.
And what does he see? That man is a bag of guts, hungering, a chancred prick seeking a diseased cunt; that all human life comes down to shit. And out of shit comes philosophy.
What does he do with this vision of humanity, stripped of illusion? Does he despair, like Celine? Does he invent Utopias and dystopias, like Huxley? No—he laughs a great, hearty Rabelaisian laugh and finds in the rotting matter at the heart of things a spiritual illumination!
And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. 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.
I maintain that it is passages like this that many people find more obnoxious than the sexual passages. Miller dares to equate shit with illumination! Miller dares not to believe in progress! He dares not to believe the twenties’ bromide: “Every day, in every way I feel better and better.” He dares not to believe in “positive thinking.” He is un-American! Even if he were writing today, these attitudes would make him a pariah.
Yes—the sex is also abundant, and it is unvarnished by romanticism. But always, if you read it in context (which is not the way most readers—even intellectual ones—read it), the sex is about this same demystification process. Miller strips the power from the mystery of cunt, which heretofore has held him in such thrall.
This is Van Norden in Tropic of Cancer, but the need to demystify the female organ could well be Henry’s:
“Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It’s repulsive, ain’t it? And it’s funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn’t look like a twat any more: it’s like a dead clam or something.” He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. “I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me … it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You’d imagine I’d never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue—that was by Rodin. You ought to see it some time … she has her legs spread wide apart…. I don’t think there was any head on it. Just a cunt you might say. Jesus, It looked ghastly. The thing is this—they all look alike. When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things: you give them an individuality like, which they haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between the legs and you get all steamed up about it—you don’t even look at it half the time. You know it’s there and all you think about is getting your ramrod inside; it’s as though your penis did the thinking for you. It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing … about a crack with hair on it, or without hair. It’s so absolutely meaningless that it fascinated me to look at it. I must have studied it for ten minutes or more. When you look at it that way, sort of detached like, you get funny notions in your head. All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—just a blank. Wouldn’t it be funny if you found a harmonica inside … or a calendar? But there’s nothing there … nothing at all. It’s disgusting. It almost drove me mad…. Listen, do you know what I did afterwards? I gave her a quick lay and then I turned my back on her. Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book … but a cunt, it’s just sheer loss of time….”
If cunt is “sheer loss of time,” then what is the sexual act? When we look closely at Henry’s descriptions of sex, we see that he makes sex analogous to carnage and war. His descriptions of the sexual battlefield are remarkably similar to those of Andrea Dworkin in Intercourse or Mercy:
We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say “I’m fed up with it … I’m through.” No, there’s fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about any more and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one’s own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bear-ers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest. Then one has the rest of his life to think about the fifteen francs. One hasn’t any eyes or arms or legs, but he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his days about the fifteen francs which everybody has forgotten.
It’s exactly like a state of war—I can’t get it out of my head. The way she works over me, to blow a spark of passion into me, makes me think what a damned poor soldier I’d be if I was ever silly enough to be trapped like this and dragged to the front. I know for my part that I’d surrender everything, honor included, in order to get out of the mess. I haven’t any stomach for it, and that’s all there is to it. But she’s got her mind set on the fifteen francs and if I don’t want to fight about it she’s going to make me fight. But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind. My mind is on the peace treaty all the time. I can’t forget that it was the fifteen francs which started all the trouble. Fifteen francs! What does fifteen francs mean to me, particularly since it’s not my fifteen francs?
Ironically, Miller seems offensive to many feminists because his perception is sited inside a man’s head, but these same perceptions of sex fill feminist literature: loveless sex is war, brutal and bloody. In a way Henry’s antiromanticism is very close to that of feminist literature. Henry has the same need to destroy romantic illusions and see the violence at the heart of heterosexual “love.” He writes of demystified cunt and demystified sex in the same tone in which he writes of racism—as a madness to be blown away with humor:
A special feature in American skulls, I was reading the other day, is the presence of the epactal bone, or os Incae, in the occiput. The presence of this bone, so the savant went on to say, is due to a persistence of the transverse occipital suture which is usually closed in fetal life. Hence it is a sign of arrested development and indicative of an inferior race. “The average cubical capacity of the American skull,” so he went on to say, “falls below that of the white, and rises above that of the black race. Taking both sexes, the Parisians of today have a cranial capacity of 1,448 cubic centimeters; the Negroes 1,344 centimeters; the American Indians, 1,376.” From all of which I deduce nothing because I am an American and not an Indian. But it’s cute to explain things that way, by a bone, an os Incae, for example. It doesn’t disturb his theory at all to admit that single examples of Indian skulls have yielded the extraordinary capacity of 1,920 cubic centimeters, a cranial capacity not exceeded in any other race. What I note with satisfaction is that the Parisians, of both sexes, seem to have a normal cranial capacity. The transverse occipital suture is evidently not so persistent with them. They know how to enjoy an apéritif and they don’t worry if the houses are unpainted. There’s nothing extraordinary about their skulls, so far as cranial indices go. There must be some other explanation for the art of living which they have brought to such a degree of perfection.
Henry hated all racism, especially racism dignified with scientific theory—much in the air in the twenties and thirties, preparing the way for Hitler’s Nazi doctors, “experimenting” on Jews. His scorn is obvious in this passage.
How can Miller have called Jews kikes and yet hate institutionalized racism? Easy. He hates all self-important rationalizations, and what could be more self-important than rationalizing racism by measuring skulls? When he makes fun of racists, of Jews, of Germans, of Frenchmen, of women, of himself, he shows no mercy. He punctures all pretension—including the favorite Jewish pretention that Jewish suffering is somehow sanctified above all other. Henry would be unforgivable if he didn’t spread his satire around equally against all groups. But he makes fun of gentiles no less than Jews, of cocks no less than cunts. Van Norden in Tropic of Cancer is a walking cock as much as Tania is a walking cunt. Gandhi’s Hindu disciple is reduced to two lumps of shit in a bidet.
Nor does Miller excuse himself from the general low level of humankind. He is a walking intestine when he’s hungry, a walking cock when he’s horny. He, too, is a mass of instincts that doesn’t deserve to be cloaked in high ideals.
Where have high ideals ever led humanity, anyway? To the trenches of World War I? To the apple sellers on the streets of New York? To the mad pseudoscientific racial theories of the Nazis that promoted genocide? Henry thinks humanity has less to lose by embracing the depths than by pretending to the heights. A bag of guts, a cunt, a cock, has a sort of primal beingness, the honesty of being just what it is. Romanticism and high ideals have only led humanity to slaughter.
Henry, the Victorian, the romantic, the Rousseauist, the Whitmaniac, revolutionizes himself in Tropic of Cancer. He strips down to his essential nature. He admits he is dust, grass, failing flesh—and when illusion is stripped away, illumination comes.
But isn’t a human being more than that? asks the injured romantic in all of us. Of course. We are dust that dreams. And sometimes we dream we are more than dust. But in 1931 it was clear—I maintain it still is today—that we have been more wounded as a species by our misguided idealism than by an acceptance of the physicality at the base of all our lives. Henry’s vision of man as a horny cock, a voracious gullet, is bracing. It still feels real after all these years. His vision of woman reduced to her hungering cunt may offend some feminists—and all those who think we can “rise above” our physical natures—but it also has a primal truth about it. And the truth is always liberating.
At the pivotal moments of our lives—passionate love, childbirth, war, terminal illness—we know that we are captive to our physical natures and that humbling knowledge often brings illumination. The dark secret of oozing intestines is essential to the liberation of our souls.
Henry reduces the world to its basest elements so he can make fire. He strips his own illusions so he can remake his vision and his world:
The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential only that the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the balls in America, is finished. To fathom the new reality it is first necessary to dismantle the drains, to lay open the gangrened ducts which compose the genito-urinary system that supplies the excreta of art. The odor of the day is permanganate and formaldehyde. The drains are clogged with strangled embryos.
Henry understands that “even as the world goes to smash there is one man who remains at the core, who becomes more solidly fixed and anchored, more centrifugal as the process of disillusion quickens.” That man is the artist. Henry is talking about Matisse here. But it is Henry himself who will come to be a rock in the midst of chaos. By the time he writes The Colossus of Maroussi, he will have learned not only how to come back from hell but how to enter paradise.
If you read Tropic of Cancer straight through today, you will find another book than the one usually talked and written about. The trouble is that Tropic of Cancer is seldom really read. Even as careful a reader as John Updike recently wrote to me (when I inquired of the influence, if any, of Tropic of Cancer on Couples):
Strangely, I don’t believe I read either of the Cancers through … Just a peek inside and the perusal of a paragraph was, well, inflammatory …
In that, Updike, one of the most brilliant writers and readers of our time, was probably like most of us. We opened the book for inspiration and quickly closed it lest we be contaminated!
Tropic of Cancer is a book blocked off to readers by its incendiary reputation. It is hard to read, partly because of its plotlessness, but also because of our own prejudices. We have to break down our resistance in order to read it fairly.
Is it possible that a book can become so infamous it cannot be read? Absolutely. People dip their toes in and recoil in horror, thinking they have read the book and found it wanting. What is wanting is their own perception of it.
A book—any book—demands total immersion. With Tropic of Cancer, for a variety of reasons, such immersion has been impossible. A wall of preconceptions and prejudices surrounds it, prejudices born of years of litigation, years of sneak-reading, years of critical dismissal. For all those reasons, the book has become a sort of terra incognita. I urge you to lose yourself in it and read it straight through. I promise you will find a totally different book from the one you thought was there.
Read it as if you knew nothing whatever about it. Read it as if the four-letter words were as prevalent in literature in 1931–32 (when it was written), or 1934 (when it was first published) as they are today. You will come to realize that books can be banned from your mind even as they remain available on the shelves. You will come to realize that books can be burned without flames.
The judging of books without bothering to read them was to become the nemesis of Henry’s writing life. He was to be dismissed first for his sexual shock therapy, his demystification of sex, then for his supposed New Age Guruism, and finally for his personal life—as if he were a sort of Humbert Humbert of the Pacific Palisades. James Joyce had the good or bad fortune—depending on one’s point of view—to be embraced by academics who saw much to teach in his puzzles and portmanteaus. D.H. Lawrence always had the partisans of paganism on his side, even as the prudes shunned him. Gertrude Stein became our token lesbian and Virginia Woolf our token bisexual neurasthenic. But Henry had three strikes against him from the start. He pressed all America’s buttons: open sexuality, the failure to believe in Progress, the courage to explode all things literary and let his own outrageous vision thrust through. He was punished for these sins by remaining unread by those people best suited to understand him. The books were there, but the will to read them with an open mind had already been tainted.
The four-letter words in Cancer distracted everyone but the most diligent from the truth of Miller’s discovery: peace only comes to a mortal creature when he starts to see himself as part of the flow of creation.
The famous last section of Tropic of Cancer, where Henry sits watching the Seine and is finally at one with himself, is a clear statement of a man accepting his unity with the cosmos. The river is within him and without him. Knowing that, his course is fixed:
After everything had quietly sifted through my head a great peace came over me. Here, where the river gently winds through the girdle of hills, lies a soil so saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams one can never detach it from its human background. Christ, before my eyes there shimmered such a golden peace that only a neurotic could dream of turning his head away. So quietly flows the Seine that one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over me it seemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would be able to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.
Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space—space even more than time.
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me—its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.
Henry and June were sundered by the time Cancer came out and they divorced in 1934—by which time Anaïs was the emotional mainstay of Henry’s life.
Tropic of Cancer lay in limbo for two years, waiting to be published. Henry had met Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press through the agent William Aspenwall Bradley in Paris, and Kahane believed in Tropic of Cancer. But as it turned out, he had more admiration than money, and he was frightened of publishing such a dangerous book. Tropic of Cancer only appeared after Anaïs Nin underwrote its printing expenses: It cost her 5000 francs. The money was borrowed from another of her smitten lovers, her second psychoanalyst, Otto Rank.
When Cancer eventually appeared in 1934, it was priced at an exorbitant fifty francs and had the printed caveat “Ce livre ne doit pas être exposé en vitrine” (this book may not be shown in windows) banded around its lurid, crab-festooned cover. To save money, Jack Kahane had let his fourteen-year-old-son, the future Maurice Girodias, design the cover. It shows a woman languishing in the claws of a crab. Girodias, who used his French mother’s name to escape the anti-Semitism of Vichy France, was later to become the founder of Olympia Press and publish such classics as Lolita and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man.
Lurid cover or not, Tropic of Cancer established Henry’s reputation. The responses were slow to come, but Henry was indefatigable in promoting his own work, and eventually Ezra Pound, George Orwell, William Carlos Williams, Aldous Huxley, Edmund Wilson, Blaise Cendrars, John Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot, and Herbert Read all responded enthusiastically. Contemporary women writers like Kay Boyle and Anaïs Nin also saw the book as a breakthrough and did not fault its depiction of women. (Nin’s criticism of Henry’s view of women would come later.)
How did the publication of Tropic of Cancer change Henry’s life? It certainly did not make him financially secure. (He was not to be that until the very end of his life.) But “the last book” consolidated his view of himself as a writer, strengthened his resolve to produce a great oeuvre, and gave him himself in a very basic way. It was as if the various parts of his personality finally came together: the passion of the writing seemed to impart a new strength to his soul. He had been reborn through Tropic of Cancer. Though much in it was a wildly heightened, surreal version of his life in Paris, though he was never as profligate as the narrator seems to imply, he did blast through to a new vision of life. He made peace with the wild man in himself, with his own mortality and his own sexuality. He was never to be the same afterward.