Walter Wells
For all the complaints it has engendered over the years, and the effrontery, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer has withstood –indeed, it has quite easily passed—the test of time. Three-quarters of a century after its first, unheralded publication in the troubled 1930s, the book today provides both a valuable, refractory look at its own moment in western history and the twentieth-century updating of a timeless myth. This in addition to being a cracking (if more than occasionally vulgar) good read.
George Orwell was right to see in the book the work of a remarkable literary stylist, a prose writer writing in the spirit, and with the expansive rhythms, of Whitmanian free verse. But Orwell was even more astute in noting that there was “something rather curious in being Whitman in the nineteen-thirties.” Whitman’s nineteenth century was a time of democratic ascendancy, of widening prosperity and, for whites at least, of freedom for economic striving. Whitman's language is a language of acceptance, of embrace. In his time and place, he heard “America singing.”
Miller’s 1930s, however, were an altogether different time. His prose, like Whitman’s verse, is also a language of embrace and acceptance. Only now (asks Orwell),
What is he accepting? In the first place, not America, but the ancient
boneheap of Europe. . . . [and] not an epoch of expansion and liberty,
but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and regimentation. To say “I accept” in
an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps,
rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, . . . gas masks, submarines, spies,
provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons. . . .
George Orwell. "What is he accepting?" Unlike Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night (a lurid depiction of the 1930s to which Miller’s book was often compared), Tropic of Cancer is, as Orwell says, “almost exactly the opposite.” Both books “use unprintable words, both are in some sense autobiographical.” However, while Céline’s view of modern life amounts to “a cry of unbearable disgust, [e]xactly the aspects of life that fill Céline with horror are the ones that appeal to [Miller].”
Somehow, writes Miller about midway in his book,
the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect
on me. . . . [I]nspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I
felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my
shoulders. . . . 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.
Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to
destroy me; nothing had been destroyed but my illusions. I myself
was intact.
Miller’s protagonist, superficially himself, is actually that same self writ large, himself as prototype of the successful voyager through “the quiet dawn of a new day.” In a time and place “giddy with crime and distress,” he turns himself into the quintessential survivor who aims, in his lyrical labors, to show us the way.
Had one single element of man’s nature been 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. . . .
On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour.
Conventional spirituality has become vacuous. “God. . . has been picked clean: he is a skeleton." As his own protagonist, Henry Miller has found Him, but finds Him “insufficient” for the age. Miller deems himself, like his fellow survivors, “spiritually dead.”
"An epoch of fear, tyranny, regimentation." To accept, much less embrace, such overwhelming obstacles to freedom as prevail in Europe in the 1930s, one had to challenge, even (in a sense) threaten, the age however he could –as indeed Miller seems to have threatened many readers ever since, even in less blighted times. His first and most obvious threat is to decorum. If spiritually dead in the face of those obstacles, why worry about threatening anyone with rude language or raw sexuality? They’re part of the fightback.
Paris, 1934 Miller swaggers through the book, singing in Devil-may-care defiance of those conventional mores that have led to a worldwide morass. Like Spengler, he bears witness –with the leer of a brash-phallused and most unsettling clown—to the impending ruin of western civilization. Flouting the traditional notion that beauty manifests itself as wholeness and harmony, Tropic of Cancer offers a counter-aesthetic, one of disintegration, chaos, and ugliness. As one critic has put it, the book’s prevailing metaphor of disease, epitomized by cancer, conveys the grotesquely moribund condition of “modern life.” Miller’s images of decay, says another, “burst into apocalyptic visions.” And amidst it, this retributively vulgar, blustering, sexual adventurer, this bargain-basement Don Juan, will not only survive, but find contentment.
As his merrily twisted, lightly surrealistic adventure ends, he sits outside watching the Seine flow past. More than a moving current, the river signifies, as rivers in literature will, the archetypal passage of time and history. And as this average Everyman watches, a “great peace” comes over him.
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. . . .
After brief digression on the strangeness and perversity of human beings, he concludes:
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through –its past, its ancient
soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course
is fixed.
Several years after Tropic of Cancer was published (engendering praise from the cognoscenti, appreciable backstreet notoriety, and polite revulsion), Henry Miller met George Orwell in Paris as the latter traveled to Spain to join the anti-fascist struggle there. Orwell later remembered Miller telling him
in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an
idiot. . . . [M]y ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy,
etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept
away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely
regard it as human –a prospect that did not bother him.
In Tropic of Cancer --which Orwell had read-- Miller had already likened his own enthusiasm for soldiering to his feeling for a fifteen-franc Parisian whore:
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. . . . 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. . . . My mind is on the peace treaty all the time.
When asked in a magazine survey of writers to express his attitude on war, Miller replied (again, as Orwell recalls it)
in terms of extreme pacifism, an individual refusal to fight, with no
apparent wish to convert others to the same opinion –practically, in
fact, a declaration of irresponsibility. . . . He is fiddling while Rome is
burning [but], unlike the enormous majority of people who do this,
fiddling with his face toward the flames.
"The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through. . ." Orwell’s lengthy and perceptive essay on Miller is entitled, “Inside the Whale.” For all of Miller’s verbal fireworks, Orwell sees his literary strategy as one of “quietism –robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale –or rather admit that you are inside it (for you are, of course).” Miller had also written an essay that, in passing, cites a remark Aldous Huxley made about the paintings of El Greco. Huxley claimed that the people in those paintings always look as though they are in the bellies of whales, and that there was something horrible about being in a “visceral prison.” Miller disagreed: he found the idea rather attractive. With Tropic of Cancer, Miller is embracing a myth, and we feel its force. It’s the biblical myth of Jonah, with its powerful hold on the collective imagination. Let's recall the myth as set out in the Book of Jonah’s first three chapters:
God comes to Jonah and instructs him to go unto Ninevah, the wicked city, and to raise a cry there against its wickedness. But Jonah wants no part of the assignment and tries to escape God's command. He finds a ship bound for Tarshish, pays his fare, and boards it.
Once the ship is seabound, however, God (who knows plain well what Jonah is up to) whips up a mighty storm. Terrified, the crew all begin praying to God, except Jonah who, still determined to evade God's mandate, sneaks below and goes to sleep.
The shipmaster, also terrified of the storm, goes below, rousts Jonah, and commands him to return up top and pray with the rest of them, which he does.
Desperate, they all decide, lest the storm tear them apart, to draw lots to determine whose fault the tempest is, to see who has so caused God's disfavor. The draw points to Jonah.
Why, they all ask him, is God's wrath so upon him, and hence upon them as well? Jonah confesses the reason. They sympathize, sort of, but nonetheless implore him to do something --anything-- to turn God's wrath from them so they won't break up in the storm.
Resigned now to God's will, Jonah instructs the others to cast him into the sea. Compassionately, they try first to navigate toward safe harbor, but it proves impossible. So they throw Jonah into the raging sea.
And lo, the storm subsides. The sea becomes calm. Jonah, meanwhile, thrashing frightfully in the water, is swallowed up by a great whale whom God has sent for the task.
"And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." Strangely enough, he's happy in there. It isn't the greatest place he's ever lived but, considering the alternative, it isn't bad. After all, he's been saved.
"And lo, the Lord made the whale to regurgitate. . ." Gratefully, he prays to God: O Lord, I cried to be saved, and You did save me. The sea flooded in over me, yet You let me not drown. Thou hast brought up my life from corruption, O Lord. And so, if I ever get free from this fish, I will sacrifice unto Thee with the voice of thanksgiving.
And lo, the Lord made the whale to regurgitate and throw up Jonah onto dry land. Having saved him, God again assigns Jonah to the task: "Go ye unto Ninevah and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee."
This time, Jonah, who's no fool, complies.
Henry Miller What meaning resides in the myth of Jonah? That a man, having come (like all of us) from human belly, lives, and becomes corrupt. Once circumstance forces him to realize his error, he has himself cast onto treacherous waters. He should have died, but instead is saved: saved by re-entering a surrogate belly (a feminine, maternal archetype), which Miller’s selfsame protagonist does with promiscuous frequency in the book, and there, so to speak, realizes the nature of his salvation. He is reborn into a new, re-dedicated life, a life now liberated from error and false ways.
This is indeed, at least in broad outline, the story in Tropic of Cancer. Its mythic dimension is resonant: a myth that embodies the human attraction to freedom at a time when freedom was most grievously under threat. If Miller’s freedom in these pages is here and there more licentious than yours or mine might be, it’s the price –an inexpensive one at that—for the contemporary myth he’s given us. It's a gift really, a bit soiled, but valuable nonetheless.
Novelist Erica Jong is right, I think, to see Miller’s writing as
full of imperfection, bombast, humbug. Sometimes its very
slovenliness makes it hard to defend. But the purity of his example,
his heart, his openness, makes him unique among writers. He will
surely draw new generations of readers to him.
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WALTER WELLS is Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities at the California State University, Dominguez Hills, where he taught American literature for over thirty years. Now living in London, he is founding editor of The Fickle Grey Beast. Various links of interest about Henry Miller can be found on www.henrymiller.org/hminfodirectory.html#University