It was another Henry who put me on to Miller: Henry Rollins. I was reading his journal of being in Black Flag, Get in the Van, and if I remember correctly, he was talking about reading Miller’s Black Spring. I read Tropic of Cancer soon thereafter, and then Black Spring.
Tropic of Cancer has loomed large in my mind as the first “serious” book I read. It was by no means the first book that I chose for myself and read that I enjoyed, but it was certainly the first of its kind: Tropic of Cancer isn’t a novel in the classic sense of the word; there’s not a plot or characters contrived to symbolize ordinate human types or exemplars. Or is it? It’s just Miller, free in Paris, having cast off the shackles of quotidian responsibility, living a kind of beat existence before there was a name for the thing. So while I held up Catcher in the Rye as an example of literature that wasn’t handed to me by a teacher, Tropic was a choice I made, a book that I wanted to experience.
If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.
As with Dune, I re-read Tropic of Cancer again, perhaps for the third time. I was maybe 20 when I read it the first time; I’ve lived more than half of my life since then. And as with Dune, it didn’t hold up in my mind the way I remembered it, although unlike with Dune, I remembered very clearly what I liked and what I didn’t.
Someone once wrote, “There’s nothing like Miller when he gets rolling,” and that’s absolutely true. When he’s railing against the diminution of the human spirit by some human contrivance–medical science, impersonal bureaucracy, or the affectations of personal preference–he is likely to fashion an immense list of the beloved barnacles of thought and action that we loll about in our mouths and minds without much thought. These are hysterical moments in his writing.
One thing I’ve always marveled about Miller: the no-fucks-given sense of self-ownership, of being free. In Tropic , he’s often wandering, looking for the next meal or drink, penniless, without a plan. Free, but broke. It’s hard for me to consider life like this, but that’s the point of reading, isn’t it?
Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.
It’s not that Miller didn’t express worry about money, or find himself doing things expressly to make a living: he writes about teaching and editing copy, both of which are temporary arrangements that he only engages long enough to stave off deprivation. But there’s never a sense that his existence tracks closely to a profession. It’s a diversion that funds other diversions.
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” –Kurt Vonnegut
Tropic of Cancer is existential: Henry Miller is living his life, and has some boundaries around how much of it he’ll sell off to do so. His avocations are certainly writing and painting, but carousing is a big part of it, too.
Miller’s rampant sexism is hard to read, too, and I always found this to be the case. Growing up in the early to mid-nineties, “PC” was a word that people were fighting against in the way “woke” is today cast as pejorative. I don’t think I was being “PC” in eschewing some of his most indelicate, selfish passages; that’s a value matter to me. The calculus you have to make with a book such as Tropic of Cancer is whether you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater–is there anything of value here that demands our attention, objections notwithstanding?
I’m not going to answer that question here. I still found some of those passages skippable, not because they appeal to the prurient interest, but because I don’t think people should think of each other that way, that objectively, as means by which to satisfy ourselves. Again, values.
I was a psych major trying not to be one. I was a lapsed catholic looking for a new organizing principle outside of a punitive god. I needed a new immortality.
With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it. -The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on Growing Old, the Perils of Success, and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart
Two Henries
Reading Tropic of Cancer, you realize there are two Millers: there is the joyful poet, busking, yes, beside the smoldering ash heap that is modern civilization, who yet yawps and celebrates life. The other Miller, tangled up antithetically with Whitman , is the harbinger of decay, a chronicler of all the ways humanity has screwed itself: this is nihilist Miller. The only escape is another flood, or an ice age, or something that will render asunder the decadence we’ve allowed to ruin us… until the paragraph ends. Both Millers are consonant with his taciturn soul, the mercurial writer who alternately celebrates life and castigates the machine we’ve created.
My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium…
Poet Miller loves us all and edges us towards art, towards defining our own values, towards bringing into a totality those fragments and elements of our perfect, if fragmented, souls. Nihilist Miller has thrown up his hands, paddled out onto an island big enough for just himself, and hurls Molotov cocktails at the culture.
The earth is parched and cracked. Men and women come together like broods of vultures over a stinking carcass, to mate and fly apart again. Vultures who drop from the clouds like heavy stones. Talons and beak, that’s what we are!
It’s a Novel and He Could Have Done the Easy Thing
As I hinted above, Tropic of Cancer may, in fact, be a novel. Norman Mailer sagely observes that of course this is so. And it would have been easy for Miller to do it again.
These few details are enough to suggest Tropic of Cancer is a fiction more than a fact. Which, of course, is not to take away a particle of its worth. Perhaps it becomes even more valuable. After all, we do not write to recapture an experience, we write to come as close to it as we can. Sometimes we are not very close, and yet, paradoxically, are nearer than if we had. Not nearer necessarily to the reality of what happened, but to the mysterious reality of what can happen on a page. Oil paints do not create clouds but the image of clouds; a page of manuscript can only evoke that special kind of reality which lives on the skin of the writing paper, a rainbow on a soap bubble. Miller is forever accused of caricature by people who knew his characters, and any good reader knows enough about personality to sense how much he must be leaving out of his people. Yet, what a cumulative reality they give us. His characters make up a Paris more real than Its paving stones until a reluctant wonder bursts upon us.
