Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (12 page)

But his own circumstances were desperate enough and certain of his daily routines as apparently hopeless as theirs: his daily tramps over the river to the Right Bank, for instance, on his way to the American Express office where almost invariably he would be turned away.
Nothing for you this morning, sir.
He foresaw the looming possibility that if things went on this way, any sort of lodging would be beyond his reach, and he would have to camp out under bridges, in the bushes of parks, in crannies or alleyways: he saw people now so reduced. Already, he claimed to Emil, people were beginning to nudge each other when they saw him approaching, as if he were a
clochard,
a beggar. He wasn’t that yet, and he would not become one,
mostly because he proved to be a first-rate improviser with the guts of a second-story burglar.

For a while he arranged with a Russian emigre to sleep in the manager’s office of the Cinema Vanves. But even though the roof over his head was free, the air within its tiny, boarded-up confines wasn’t: Miller felt more entombed than sheltered. He stood it as long as he could, then left: better to die in the open than to suffocate. He found food and lodging with another Russian in exchange for English lessons. (How his broad Brooklynese might have sounded issuing from Serge’s mouth makes one pause.) But here again he found the domestic atmosphere very close and abruptly left. He found an expatriate painter from Brooklyn who had a studio he would let Miller sleep in for a few weeks. He ran into an East Indian he’d known from his Cosmodemonic days, a pearl merchant now somewhat down on his luck. And this man, too, took him in, not quite for old times’ sake, but in exchange for Miller’s services as his immediate body servant. The work was unpleasant, even slightly disgusting to this German-American, and what was worse was the food, which Miller found meager and profoundly unappetizing.

Then his fortunes changed when he chanced into Alfred Perlès, an Austrian writer he’d met through June. Perlès had a job on the
Chicago Tribune’s
Paris edition and
was working on a Surrealist novel. The two men hit it off, and soon Miller had a new place to sleep when Perlès began slipping him past the concierge at his hotel in the Fourteenth. The neighborhood was an intensely interesting one for Miller, sitting behind Boulevard Montpar-nasse and its famous cafes. There was a lively outdoor market along Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, a street that ran past the entrance to the Cimetiere du Montparnasse, within which was the tomb of Baudelaire. He too had been down-and-out here, writing of his rooms with their broken furniture covered in spittle and of the filthy windows down which the rain traced deep furrows.

Then there were the streetwalkers, some of whom brought their customers back to the hotel from Montpar-nasse, and Miller formed a friendship with one of them and began making extensive notes on her. In brief, life as a stowaway with Perlès was beginning to take on a sort of shape even if outwardly it looked as desperate as ever. He was after all still penniless and without prospects for any improvement in his situation. He had made no real headway on the revisions of his novels, though he had sent
Moloch
to a German publishing house and continued to work on
Crazy Cock,
which he had decided had a better chance at eventual publication. But he was now writing new things: about his streetwalker, the six-day bike races, and the Cirque Medrano. Eventually, his stories on these
subjects would be published, giving him a certain small cachet.

Most important perhaps, he was learning how much he could do without, how one might organize a life stripped to its barest bones. Years back, Beatrice had given him a copy of Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger,
a novel in which a nameless young writer comes to a city where he determinedly sets out to discover the outermost limits of suffering, how much of it he could bear. By the choices he makes he sinks into a ragged poverty, a starveling who stalks the streets with his intestines curling inside him like snakes. Hamsun refuses to tell us the why of all this, but now that he found himself in somewhat similar circumstances, Miller may well have begun to think of his life as a sort of experiment in creative deprivation instead of a ghastly accident. Maybe if you got all the way down and there wasn’t anywhere else to go—except to the bottom of the Seine—then a kind of clarity might come to you, all choices having been removed from possibility.

Then June arrived on the first of her four disastrous visits. This was in September. He had warned her not to come without money, telling her (and Emil as well) that he couldn’t possibly support the two of them. But she cabled some money and announced that she herself would soon follow. Clownishly, he missed her at the train station but then happened upon her at a cafe on Montparnasse, nonchalantly sipping a Pernod: June, with her incessant demands, her impossible expectations, her slovenly habits and maddening inconsistencies: here at last she was, grasping Val to her and breathily telling him she would never again allow him to suffer so. He fell for her all over again.

They went to the hotel they’d stayed at in 1928—and woke up in the morning covered with lice. Within days
they’d begun to bicker, then to quarrel, and then to engage in pitched battles. But Val wasn’t Val, she found, no longer the whipped cur she had sent away months ago. He had had a glimpse—fleeting, preliminary—of a new kind of existence here, with some kind of new work at its center. With June there, however, work was out of the question. Being with her was a full-time job, one that exhausted both of them, and after something less than a month she went back to the States for more money. As soon as she left Miller pulled himself together and began to reconstruct his life of severely disciplined poverty, one unencumbered and unclouded by June’s fantasies, which from his new perspective he felt had completely engulfed her like the cigarette smoke she filled their room with each morning when she awakened.

What he needed now, he obscurely understood, was that bottom-dog clarity he had just begun to sense when she arrived, one where you were compelled to shed, one by one, your old illusions like worn-out items of clothing. Years later, looking back from America, he wrote in
The Time of the Assassins,
that every “renunciation has but one aim: the attainment of another level.” If we put this later aperéu together with his remark to Emil about realistic literature not being the “highest plane,” it becomes apparent that Miller was experiencing in these months what in religious literature has been called a “turning about
in the seat of the soul.” He had been forced to shed and shed, until he could feel the whole world beating against his skin. He still had a long way to go to feel this to such an extent that he could be free to be the artist he dreamed of becoming. But the way was there for him, even if it wasn’t quite clear where it led.

In the immediate aftermath of June, he was at least clear-eyed enough so that he could tell Emil that he was deriving a savage glee from performing daily vivisections on
Crazy Cock,
“this novel that I’ve been dragging about from one hotel to another, across the ocean twice, thru bordellos and carnivals, a pillow at night in the movies, and under the bridges of the Seine. Stop! Cut the sentimentality!” Out, out, he went on, not raving now but writing with a ruthless abandon, “out with the apostrophes, the mythological mythies … the vast and pompous learning (which I haven’t got!).” What he was meant to do, he told Emil, what he must do “before blowing out my brains, is to write a few simple sentences in plain Miller-esque language.”

With June gone Miller might have moved back in with Perlès, but for some reason he didn’t. Instead he moved in with an American, Richard Osborn. Osborn was a Yale Law School graduate working in a Paris bank. He was also an aspiring writer living a double life, his days soberly spent at the bank and his nights consumed with bar-hopping and chasing women in Montparnasse. Eventually this killing routine would catch up with him, but for now he was managing it, though occasionally he’d show up at the bank red of eye and with a rumpled suit. When he happened to meet Miller he was taken with the raffish, streetwise man who not only claimed to be a writer but who actually seemed to be working hard at it. Osborn sensed he had things to learn from Miller, both about
writing and about the tougher aspects of the city’s nightlife. He had a large, cold flat on Rue Auguste Bartholdi overlooking the drill grounds of the Ecole Militaire in the Fourteenth and offered Miller a space. In exchange, Miller was to keep a fire going against the raw weather, do a bit of cooking, and clean up around the place. The fire wasn’t a problem, and with his Germanic tidiness the housekeeping wouldn’t have been either—except most mornings there was an awful lot of it to do. He and Os-born brought women home often, and after Osborn had stumbled off to work in the morning, leaving Miller ten francs on the dresser, Miller would have to go to work on what sometimes looked like a shipwreck with bottles and glasses strewn about, ashtrays overflowing, and scraps of food found in odd places. It was a hell of a way to begin his day—even if part of the mess was of his own making—and he thought the stipend Osborn left him was nig-gardly.
¹⁸

But the flat was spacious and quiet, and he was working again, still revising
Crazy Cock
but also working at the new things—the bravely cheerful streetwalker he was calling “Mlle Claude,” the bike races, and the circus. When Os-born returned home at the end of the day, the pockets of his overcoat clinking with bottles of Anjou, Vouvray, Macon, the place was neat as a pin and the windows steamy
with heat. Miller was then ready to knock off work, for a while at least, to become Osborn’s enthusiastic companion in the pursuit of women. But, said Osborn, when he himself had at last fallen into bed he could hear the tap-tapping of Miller’s typewriter in the next room.

At this point, Osborn later recalled, Miller himself was ablaze like the stove, talking incessantly, brilliantly of the new literature that he was to be a part of, a literature that would be violently anti-literary, cracking apart all the old forms of expression. Through Miller’s impassioned words, Osborn was brought to understand that his old gods—Conrad, Dostoyevsky—were already dated, “though still heroic landmarks.” And Miller was talking this same way in his letters to Emil, telling him in mid-February 1931 that on a recent evening he’d brought home a copy of Mann’s
Death in Venice
to bedazzle Osborn by reading it to him.
¹⁹
“And lo and behold! to my own absolute astonishment, I saw that Thomas Mann was dead … finished …
for me.”
Thus, he continued, he was positively afraid to approach
The Magic Mountain
because he still believed in it and wasn’t ready to shed that illusion too. Joyce also had lost his charm, and even his hero D. H. Lawrence now seemed oddly quaint with all his twaddle about social conditions in his novels when what he ought to have stuck to was simply “warmhearted fucking all the way through.”
There remained only Proust and Spengler, a volume of whose works, so he told Emil, he had stolen from the American Library.

Another significant event of this winter was the development of a close, productive friendship with Brassaϊ. Gyula Halász had been a painter and journalist in his native Hungary before coming to Paris, where he took up photography under the name of his native village. Brassaï recalled that when they were introduced in December 1930, Miller’s French was primitive while he himself had almost no English. But this didn’t make any difference once Miller understood what the photographer was up to in his work, for here finally was someone who could understand—language or no—what he, Miller, was reaching toward but hadn’t yet articulated. What Brassai had embarked upon, Miller found, was a singular, solitary, immensely imaginative project: to document the city’s secret life by night. Working by himself, he lugged his cumbersome equipment into the most recondite, forbidden, and sometimes actively dangerous corners of Paris to reveal what went on where most Parisians—including policemen —wouldn’t dream of going, except in nightmare. Whereas Eugène Atget had famously documented the remnant architecture of an older Paris quickly passing away, and Brassaϊ’s fellow Hungarian André Kertész had become an
important member of the avant-garde, Brassaϊ was unlike either of these artists. Atget’s focus was on the past, Ker-tész’s on the future. Brassaϊ was interested in the now, the often brutal facts of daily life. He sought out the clochards who lived in the open in all kinds of weather. He followed the foul and dangerous work of the shit-pumpers. He hung out with the
apaches,
those roving gangs of pickpockets, burglars, strong-arm robbers, and street fighters. He haunted the emptied parks, the back streets,
bals musette
and pissoirs, the bridges and barges shrouded by night and fog. He got into whorehouses, lesbian clubs, homosexual ones, opium dens, the bell tower of Notre Dame at midnight. Several times he was physically threatened, had his equipment damaged, plates stolen. All of which endeared him to Miller, who wanted to learn what Brassaϊ had to teach him of those layers lying even beneath those he himself had experienced, those hidden infernos of vice and depravity and endless suffering. Brassaϊ showed him some of these, with Miller occasionally helping to carry the equipment. And there were a few areas of the city that the American had roved through, like the Thirteenth, that he was eager to have the photographer see. Looking at Brassaϊ’s work made all these places come alive for the writer in a special way, for once the negatives had been developed in Brassaϊ’s studio, blooming to life in the darkroom, suddenly they were
art,
an art he could aspire to
equal in his own medium. Here the dark images of an underworld so filled with despair gave him instead both hope and heart.

Winter waned but the parties went on in Osborn’s flat. An end of them was in sight, though, with the return of the owner in March. And so Miller would have to move yet again, but before that happened he would maximize his remaining days here—and hope he didn’t die first or go blind from venereal disease: Osborn had picked up an alleged Russian countess and brought her home to live with them, but once there she announced she had the clap. Miller had been terrified of venereal disease by the public warnings about it he’d seen in his first days in the city—death’s-head illustrations posted by the authorities in public bathrooms and pissoirs. Now with the countess’s presence in the flat and her careless personal habits he was reminded of those grinning skulls. One day he made the ghastly discovery that he had used the countess’s towel by mistake. She cheerfully assured him he couldn’t go blind from that kind of contact, because if you could, she said, she would have lost her eyesight years ago.