Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (11 page)

When he took a table with his manuscripts at one of the old hangouts of the expatriates—the Dome, for instance, or Hemingway’s local, La Closerie des Lilas—he
was being a bit of a poseur, and part of him knew that. Yet there was something else going on there as he sat, carefully nursing a coffee or a glass of wine, something he may not have known about himself, but which was proof against his many poses, his masks and disguises, his evasions and indecisions and prevarications. And this was a tough, knotty core of artistic integrity that made him show up for work before he even understood what the “work” was—way back there in Brooklyn when he had answered an obscure prompting and hauled his antediluvian desk from the tailor shop to his apartment, if only to sit at it in a kind of pre-artistic paralysis, wondering how it was that the dross of life could be transmogrified into imperishable passages of literature. It was this same core of integrity that was to save him in Paris, that kept him roving the city, taking his notes, and writing those letters bristling with arcana, autobiographical excursions, great slabs hacked out of books he found intriguing, as if he himself were an epistolary version of one of Les Forts, toting his raw learning, his needs and aspirations, on his back. It was this that saved him from surrendering to despair. And it was what saved him as well from becoming just another of those dreary dregs of the old expat scene, the ones you saw on the terrace of Le Dôme or the Lilas, talking endlessly, hopelessly of the great novel they were going to write, the great picture they were going to paint. Waverly
Root, an expat himself who wrote for the Paris edition of Colonel Robert McCormick’s
Chicago Tribune,
passed by these types on his way to work at the outset of the 1930s. They were always going to do great things, he said, just as soon as they finished their beer. “Unfortunately,” Root observed dryly, “the beer never ran out.”
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This was not to be Henry Miller’s fate, any more than it was to become just another worn cog in the American economic meat grinder.

Later, after he’d broken into a clearing out of that wilderness the Old World had been for him, he would look back down the path he’d cut and find a dark, cautionary moral in the life and early death of Arthur Rimbaud, one of his prime literary heroes. Rimbaud’s “vile fate,” Miller wrote in
The Time of the Assassins,
had been to fatally mistake a pose for authenticity. He had been stunningly innovative while he was a
literary
outlaw, Miller said, but had become incurably false to himself when he adopted and lived out the pose of an actual outlaw, a common gunrunner. The lesson for Miller was both simple and stark: never mistake any pose you may choose to adopt at a given moment for the real thing, the actual work, the solitary encounter with your material, however humble.
Never
give up your art, not for anything. Sitting at a window table with his manuscript piled in front of him at La Closerie des Lilas and looking across to the Bal Bullier, Miller
might well have been unable to articulate any of this. Nevertheless, it was there, deep within him. It was what kept him, however obscurely, lugging his hopeless manuscripts here and there about the city of his old dreams.

It was what prompted him one day to do something that on its surface seemed escapist but was not: he went to the movies. The choice of film provides a clue to the deeper motivation: it was the Luis Buñuel-Salvador Dalí collaboration
Un Chien Andalou.
What he’d heard about the film in advance is not known, but he must have known at least that it was modernist in some way, and so his decision to attend a showing of it must be seen as an effort to make some sort of contact with the current artistic life of the city, even if it was only to sit in a darkened room watching apparently disconnected images flit across a screen. What he made of the film at the time is likewise unknowable. When he wrote Emil about it, he said he didn’t know what to make of it, “except subconsciously.” But since the film made such a lasting impact on him, we might guess that he was intrigued by its formlessness, its sudden, jolting scenes of cruelty, which felt as if the artists were mysteriously
inflicting
these on audiences conditioned to regard movies as a passive form of entertainment. Subsequently, he made efforts at contacting Buñuel, Jean Cocteau (who had written an essay on the film), and the novelist Maurice Dekobra. He wrote these men letters—doubtless
in English—and though he got no replies, he told Emil they were nonetheless good letters, especially the one to Buñuel, which he claimed was even crazier than
Chien
itself. At the same time his ramblings about the city began to take on a new purpose as he hunted for bookshops, galleries, and exhibition spaces where the work of avant-garde artists was publicly available.

These first, blunt-edged efforts in this direction amount to an acknowledgment that since he had evidently failed as a writer in the conventional mode, he might as well explore unconventional possibilities. Here personal history and national character intersected with a strong cultural trend in western Europe. Miller’s nature was rebellious from childhood—whether this was really his mother’s fault or not. He had stubbornly sought his own way intellectually while still a schoolboy; had been drawn to radical politics and the occult as a young man; and he had behind him a highly unconventional history of sexual adventures. Who then could have been more disposed to the artistically unconventional, the radical, the determinedly offbeat than this American outcast? For America’s soul at its center, so Miller believed, was originally all of these. Rebellious at the core, ungovernable, lawless, and given to odd passions, America was truest to itself when it listened to the inmost promptings of these impulses.

True, he could not yet bring himself to ditch
Moloch
or the manuscript he was now calling
Crazy Cock,
and in fact he continued to slash and hack intermittently at the latter for more than a year before finally admitting to himself that it was the “vilest crap that ever was.” But in
Un Chien Andalou
he had both literally and figuratively seen something new, and in his subsequent investigations of Dada and its militant successor, Surrealism, he discovered that here in France there existed artists who had rebelled against all received esthetic conventions to create works that were vital, daring, and unsettling.

The French avant-garde had in fact survived the war in ways many other aspects of the culture had not. By 1930 the avant-garde was arguably more influential than it had
ever been, and at the glittering salons in her palazzo the Vicomtesse de Noailles not only entertained the city’s
gratin
but also played the enthusiastic hostess to Buñuel, Dali, Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. Also to Joan Miro.

It was Miró, the renegade Spaniard, who had most boldly articulated the anti-art impulse that united the avant-garde across all mediums and national boundaries. He wanted, he declared, to “assassinate painting.” This was in 1927, by which point he was an accomplished artist much admired by his colleagues for the way he put paint on the canvas. But painting, he felt—all painting, including that of the modernists—had become soiled, corrupted by its chummy relationships with bourgeois society. It was time, therefore, to strike out into uncharted territory, creating paintings, drawings, collages that were so daring, so aggressively unconventional that they were bound to look hideous to the eye: raw, apparently haphazard, heedless of any recognized esthetics, and owing absolutely nothing to yesterday. In 1928 Miró exhibited his daring new work in Paris and successfully so. But he was hardly cheered by this. Writing to a friend, he said, “Right from the beginning of the exhibition I understood the danger of success and felt that, rather than dully exploiting it, I must launch into new ventures. . . . I feel a great desire to put off those who believe in me.” And he did
precisely that, traveling up to the Netherlands to view the work of the great Dutch masters and subsequently deconstructing some of them in his “Dutch Interiors.” These paintings took apart works by Hendrick Martensz Sorgh and Jan Havicksz Steen and reassembled them in hilarious, erotic compositions. Later in his career Miró was at some pains to profess his reverence for the Dutch masters. It is impossible, however, to avoid seeing in his “Dutch Interiors” the spirit of a joyful artistic anarchy.

While he was influenced to some significant extent by Dada and Surrealism, Miró was far too much the radical iconoclast to own membership in any school or movement. Still, he couldn’t escape the fact that he was part of an artistic avant-garde forty years and more in the making, whatever one wanted to call it. Beginning in the 1880s and based on philosophical and esthetic anarchism, artists of all kinds attempted the destruction of painting and sculpture as these had been known; of music and dance; of drama and poetry; and finally of film. The front line of this attack was Paris. There were the plays of Alfred Jarry (which presaged the “happenings” of the American 1960s) as well as his poetry, his polemics, and his destructive public behavior. The musical compositions of Erik Satie wickedly mocked classical form in their jarring juxtapositions of the stately and the comic. Henri Rousseau’s paintings in their flat primitivism were defiant
abrogations of centuries of artistic efforts in the direction of mimesis. Then there were Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems that in their sometimes playful ambiguity teased the expectations of readers. André Breton was the self-anointed high priest of Surrealism, issuing manifestos and proclamations about what it was and wasn’t. In his own work, the thrust was basically retrograde: trying to write out of some preconscious state, some place of dream or earliest childhood before calculation could mar the freshness of first perceptions.

Nor were these anti-art efforts simply that—against conventional notions of what constituted art. They aimed well beyond that, for whether in poetry or film, these artists wanted to inflict wounds on the collective psyche of contemporary culture, wounds that would bring to consciousness the rottenness of the modern world. Nothing better illustrated that rottenness than the ghastly waste of the Great War, the mendacity of its statesmen. Jarry, Rousseau, and others who lived in the prewar years had not seen what modern war could do. Those like Apol-linaire, Satie, and the German painter George Grosz lived to learn it firsthand. To these artists only new and violently anti-art creations could possibly prove equal to the realities of the war and the cutthroat capitalism that came in its wake. Neither politics nor economics nor organized religion nor state educational systems reached deep enough
to awaken humans to the world they had been prodded into as if at bayonet point.

If he hadn’t gotten what
Un Chien Andalou
was all about—who had?—Miller did get the general thrust of the avant-garde movement, and references to it quickly began to crop up in his correspondence. In one of the Whitman-esque lists of sights and sounds he sent Emil (the Muslim section of Pere Lachaise, pissoirs, Charlemagne’s chess pieces), there is this:

Kandinsky, Lurcat, Miró, Czóbel, Dufresne Surrealism—2nd Manifesto (Aragon, Breton, Soup-ault, et alia)

Then, a few days later, he told Emil that when he finished his revisions on
Crazy Cock,
he thought he might also be finished with realistic literature. “I don’t think it is the highest plane,” he said.

What exactly the higher plane or planes might be and how to gain them would have to be for him a matter of personal investigation, experiment, and improvisation rather than through personal contact with avant-garde artists themselves and the possible cross-fertilization and inspiration that might have come out of that.
¹⁶
His one significant contact with a modernist in these early months, a visit to the studio of the Russian-French sculptor Ossip
Zadkine, had been pretty much a bust. He’d met Zadkine with June back in ’28 but didn’t really care much for him. Their second meeting went no better, with the sculptor and his other visitors chattering away in Russian, French, German, and Hungarian and only once in a while throwing the American the bone of an English word or two. So, even if he had chanced to be in the mood for one of his spontaneous monologues—and the setting was hardly right for that—the opportunity wasn’t there for him: Miller was so radically American and still so very much the raw newcomer in France that his range of references would doubtless have been as incomprehensible to Zadkine and his friends as their languages were to him.
¹⁷
So, once again, he was reduced to being just a Brooklyn boy.

The encounter proved formative, and although it doesn’t fully explain Miller’s singular choice of comrades in Paris (or, later, in California, for that matter), it does help to explain why he made so very few really important artistic friends in France, while other American expatriates made many. The multimedia artist Man Ray (who also had a Brooklyn background), for example, knew just about everyone of any consequence in the arts during the ‘20s and ‘30s—Picasso, Matisse, Breton, Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Eluard. He photographed Proust on his deathbed. He even got to know Henry Miller.

So he was alone as far as artistic contacts were concerned. Instead he began to hang out a bit with streetwalkers of the seedier sort, the ones with rundown heels and rents in their stockings and bad teeth. He began taking notes on them, including dialogue. At first it may not have been evident to him that this could be literary material. What American writer of stature, after all, had written about whores, except Stephen Crane? And even there the writer hadn’t really gotten close to how they worked and lived. At the outset, then, it may well have seemed more a matter of circumstance: he was drifting steadily downward to the point where it would have been natural, even inevitable, that he would encounter others in similarly hard-pressed circumstances.

He found things that were admirable in some of these women, especially their courage in a line of work more hazardous than that of Les Forts at Les Halles, more malodorous than that of the men who toiled through the night pumping the shit from the city’s sewers and cesspools. The work of these women was not only hard and desperate, it was also hopeless, he found, and so once in a great while if he happened to have a couple of francs jingling in his pocket, he would treat one of them to a decent meal and a bottle of wine. It made him feel good to see some genuine color bloom in their cheeks, beneath the paint.