Why has it taken me so long to read Henry Miller‘s Tropic of Cancer? And now that I’ve read it, what am I to make of it?
The expat Yank living in Paris in the late 20’s and early 30’s. The oblique references to an American wife named Mona who has sent him off to Paris without a care for his sexual proclivities. The plotless meandering. The indiscriminate drinking and fucking. The largely useless attempts to write a novel. The regular (and disappointing) visits to the American Express office hoping for money from America. The panhandling and mooching. More drinking and fucking.
Is there any sense to it?
And can we make anything more of it 75 years after its publication?
The Gnostic Henry Miller
My first thought is that Henry Miller is a member of a gnostic literary sect. He pits himself against a literary orthodoxy that regards the text as the product of an educated mind. A work of art will support an exegesis the same way a passage of scripture will encourage the good Christian theologian to utter hyper-intellectualized mumbo jumbo. These are the products of mental abstraction. They belong in the brain. But the brain is the least and the last of our organs likely to be engaged on the front lines of human experience.
The high priest of this orthodoxy—the literary world’s first bishop of Rome—is none other than Réné Descartes who said the mind’s operations should exist in a chaste sphere, never to be tainted by the operations of the body. I suspect Miller was deeply opposed to such a view. Had he been a religious man instead of a writer (not that the two are mutually exclusive), he would have advocated that priests fuck regularly and often. In fact, he would have said that priests have nothing useful to contribute to the human condition if they don’t fuck regularly and often—not the secretive pathological fucking of the pederast—but the full-on fucking that engages all the senses and all the being.
In the same way, work that bears the label “art” or “literature” ought to be challenged as false if it claims for itself an intellectual tradition divorced from its gritty context and restricts its access to those people with the correct analytical tools — what Miller calls “a fog of book learning.” If Miller were to see today how literary fiction has become professionalized, he would piss on MFA programs and the universities that sponsor them and would mock agents who are mesmerized by institutional qualifications. Maybe this is the “bright awning” he speaks of when he notes “what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation though we try to cover the two with a bright awning.”
Miller might say that the simple act of delving into a text in search of its deeper meanings is an act of violence no different than the example Descartes provided when he ripped the mind from the body. Nevertheless, with all that fucking, it’s tempting to scrutinize Miller’s writing through the lens of a Freudian analysis. Maybe Tropic of Cancer is Miller’s Id at play without a Censor. Miller might answer: so what? Freud’s hierarchy of consciousness—Id, Ego, Superego—is all about what happens inside the brain and so bears no relation to the practical experience of real people — an experience which includes the body.
Whether it’s priests or academics or psychiatrists, they do their interpreting in the realm of ideas and Miller stands as a passionate corrective to this lopsided view of human experience:
“All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.”
This also accounts for Miller’s affinity for Walt Whitman, whom he mentions on several occasions. Like Miller, Whitman was a great gnostic, celebrating the primacy of the body in human experience. In fact, George Orwell calls Miller a “Whitman among the corpses.”
Henry Miller and the Aesthetic of Shit
My second thought is that Henry Miller beat Milan Kundera to the punch by 55 years. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera argued that without the acknowledgment of shit, what we pass off as art is in fact nothing more than kitsch. Miller doesn’t say as much, but Kundera’s words serve as a useful explanation of Miller’s methods.
Miller writes:
“It’s good to have a fresh warm body beside you when you wake up in the morning. It gives you a clean feeling. You get spiritual like … until they start pulling that mushy crap about love et cetera. Why do all these cunts talk about love so much, can you tell me that? A good lay isn’t enough for them apparently … they want your soul too….”
Love, or at least romantic love, or at least the love we hear about on top 40 radio play, is all feeling with no shit. It is kitsch. In Tropic of Cancer, all the fucking happens against a backdrop of fear. Behind everything is a fear of disease. There’s the dose, the clap, syphilis and gonorrhea, references to the Black Death, a religious pun on the flaming bush, chancerous cocks, pus, a shapely whore who turns around to reveal a pox-eaten face. Even the title speaks of disease. It isn’t a line on a map, but a meridian of terminal illness that runs through all our lives.
“Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.”
Alongside disease are references to excrement. Miller does Kundera one better when it writes: “… the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.” This is one slice of bread for a sandwich with the “dirty fat cockroach of a priest” (cited above) for the filling. For the other slice we have an incident involving two turds in a bidet. Miller speculates that the miracle to which the cockroach of a priest attends will turn out to be no more than these two turds. There is a recurring image of the universe as something that has been “pooped out.” And “the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth.” It’s important to note that Miller’s rant about “muck and filth” isn’t a rant about moral filth. He enjoys himself too much for that. It’s more that he’s engaged in the challenge of exposing muck and filth as somehow necessary.
Paris and America
“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.
I returned to Paris …”
That is how it goes for Miller. He holds a certain contempt for his adopted home, but he can’t tear himself away.
America holds something altogether different for Miller, and it is more intense for being an ocean away. Perhaps the difference lies in aesthetic sensibility. The America of Walt Whitman has disappeared in the kind of efficiencies that delivered the Gatling gun and indoor plumbing. Writing in the 30’s Miller was of the view that such a world was unsustainable—not unsustainable in the environmental sense we’ve grown accustomed to, but unsustainable perhaps as a philosophy or as an aesthetic.
“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.”
While I agree with Miller that the American sensibility is unsustainable, I think Miller underestimated the extent to which the tattered wallpaper could be pasted over with additional layers and so refurbished year after year.
He writes of a Hindu man he meets, an emissary from Gandhi who is working to garner support for the anti-Colonial movement. Writing more than a decade before India’s independence, Miller’s words sound prophetic, but they speak not to an India of 1947, but to an India of 2010:
“The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to America and he has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc., etc. His ideal would be to Americanize India. He is not at all pleased with Gandhi’s retrogressive mania. Forward, he says, just like a YMCA man. As I listen to his tales of America I see how absurd it is to expect of Gandhi that miracle which will deroute the trend of destiny. 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.”
I wonder what Miller would think if he could see now the consumable growth of kitsch that is America, spreading like a cancer over the world.
On Miller’s own account of the American aesthetic, it is understandable why he would have to wait thirty years for the American ban to be lifted on his works, and why it would require a court (rather than ordinary people exercising common sense) to declare that his works are art and not pornography.