This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character… a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will.
No, that’s not an anti-National Endowment for the Arts rant out of Newsmax or the RNC. Those words are from page one of Henry Miller’s “prolonged insult” also known as Tropic of Cancer, a novel centered on Miller’s desire to portray his exuberance for living even if life for him at the time included poverty and failure. Considered shocking when it was published in Paris in 1934, few people today would be appalled by anything in it. But back then it had to be smuggled through U.S. Customs with Jane Eyre covers and started a thirty-year censorship debate that ended with a Supreme Court decision that inadvertently cleared Lenny Bruce of obscenity charges as well.
I didn’t hear of Miller until I was out of college. For good reason I suppose. His stream of consciousness narrations really may be a gob of spit in the face of Art. “Literary” was a word and concept that disgusted him. It wasn’t until I was freed from undergraduate classrooms that I was introduced to Tropic of Cancer and subsequently all of Miller’s other books.
At the time I shared a cabin on a lake in Northwood, New Hampshire. A postcard setting, which will forever mean isolated to me. I was there in retreat from the inner-city grid and grind I’d lived in up until then. That was popular to do in those days. To want to be close to nature. To breathe clean air and hike mountain trails and handsaw cords of wood to feed into the stove that kept the cabin warm. To live deliberately as was Thoreau’s intention at Walden Pond. “To front only the essential facts of life,” he wrote in Walden.
Back to my introduction to Tropic of Cancer, a book as far away literally and atmospherically from Walden and self-sufficient living as could be.
I was in Hamden, Connecticut visiting my cabin mate David’s family. By our third day there we had shared enough of our weed with his four siblings to run our stash dangerously low. With the intention of refreshing our supplies, David drove us across town to the address of a guy he had known since he was a high school junior and a steady supply of pot was needed to get through years of public schooling that were too easy for him. Still in the business, the guy had good stuff at a decent price and that remained the basis of their relationship.
Recently, David reminded me his name was Jeff. Jeff had long hair, a beard and seemed humored by most everything, the metallic snap-pop of a can of beer, a bag of Oreo cookies spilling out on a table. His apartment was a funky hippie pad that might now be seen as a set piece in a stage play about the anti-war movement, campus protests, tuning in, turning on and dropping out. It had the standard props: framed Matisse prints on the walls, a bronze Buddha on the coffee table, head shop items that included bongs and hash pipes, exotic plants hanging in the windows.
We were talking about books when Jeff turned away and went to his bookshelf.
“Take it, take this up there and read it, you’re going to like it,” he said.
I accepted the worn paperback he had two copies of. It was Tropic of Cancer. Our next transaction was costlier, the exchange of our cash for his weed.
In a 1938 review, Edmund Wilson wrote that Tropic of Cancer was historically important. Thirty years later Kate Millett bashed its male chauvinism. I wasn’t aware of any of that. I didn’t know what the book was about or what to expect. At the cabin I was reading everything I could buy for cheap at yard sales and secondhand shops. Everything I’d missed out on during my mostly classical Jesuit university education: revisionist histories, biographies, classic American novels, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Lessing, Pynchon, Solzhenitsyn. I assumed Tropic of Cancer would be an interesting addition to those and that was the reason David’s longtime supplier gave it to me.
Back in Northwood, under the spell of that most excellent weed, I sat on the rocker by the wood stove and read those 300 pages in an afternoon. In fact, being stoned might be the best way to do that for the first time. Whatever. It worked for me. I was intrigued and humored enough by the vulgar and rather depraved escapades of the narrator, a close acquaintance of the author I was sure, that I reread it a few days after that. In that quiet, rural isolation Miller was just the right antidote. So much so I couldn’t keep from imagining myself in Paris living hand to mouth and writing something wildly irreverent of my own.
Over those next months I went back to Tropic of Cancer so often I could quote from it. In fact, I can still bring up a few passages, including this one: “The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.”
Freed from any editorial restraints of the 1930s (its working title was Crazy Cock) Tropic of Cancer was an assault on literary and moral convention and that’s what I was drawn to. It was a prolonged middle finger to authority, prudes, killjoys, decorum, greed, the established order. God was insufficient. War was the only true obscenity. The world was a cancer eating itself away. Our heroes had killed themselves or were killing themselves.
I was entertained enough to set my other reading aside and go out and find Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Plexus, Nexus, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Black Spring. As I was recalling that time in Northwood for other reasons, I found myself thinking how Miller’s books had made the move with me from there to Cambridge but didn’t continue to New York a decade later. As much as I’d relished his wild prose flights and the disreputable underworld his narrators knew so well, away from the cabin and pot smoking their shock and awe wore off. My exuberance for his exuberance fizzled like a punctured balloon. Groveling for meals, fucking prostitutes, and a disregard for the life and death matters going on around him those years stopped appealing to me as entertainment even as the freedom he expressed himself with continued to attract.
I saw how his “ordinary” characters were, as Orwell stated in his essay Inside the Whale, “neither the manual worker nor the suburban householder, but the derelict, the declassé, the adventurer, the American intellectual without roots and without money.” They were neither for nor against. They were neutrals. Which in my thinking at the time was another true obscenity.
Recently, when I considered rereading Tropic of Cancer to find out if that opinion might have changed, it was a thought that didn’t get very far. I’m pretty sure my reaction to it would be hostile. And I’m content to keep the agreeable memories I have about reading it back then in Northwood just as they are.
(2000)
Paul Perilli 