Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (14 page)

One was Wambly Bald, who turned out a daily column, “La Vie de Boheme,” about the city’s café life, one installment of which had in fact featured Miller, whom
Bald depicted as a sort of literary clochard whose only earthly care was to find a way to brush his teeth once in a while. Bald was a sour cynic with a broad streak of cruelty to his character. When Miller would put the touch on him—which happened often enough when Bald, Miller, and Perlès had knocked off work for the night—he might fling a few coins into the gutter for the pleasure of watching Miller retrieve them like a dog. He was equally cruel —and relentless—in his treatment of women, and after sating his cold lust on one of them he would detail the encounter to his companions, complete with unsparing characterizations of the meaninglessness of these experiences, how apt a metaphor they all were for the whole of life itself. Miller didn’t appear to mind Bald’s treatment of him any more than he minded Bald’s treatment of women or his job: it was all grist for his mill now, as almost everything else was as well. He had become convinced that he could write, that he was in fact a real, honest-to-god writer, one who had an unshakeable hold on his subject: his life here and now on these desperate, crime-spattered streets. And so to dive into their gutters for a couple of centimes or to go up to Bald’s flat to shine his shoes was fine. These experiences would find their ways into the Paris book and give it their gamy, gritty flavoring, like biting into a bit of buckshot in a savory rabbit stew.

He was still stalked by his fear of starvation and would
remain so for some time to come, but even here he had learned how to manage it and had recently improvised a scheme that in the short term anyway would supply some reassuring predictability to the eating problem. He had drawn up a list of friends and written to each of them, asking if they would be willing to give him a meal once a week, just one. Surely, he argued, this wasn’t too much to ask. As it turned out, it was not, his friends being entirely willing, and so now Miller not only had his dinners taken care of, he also had yet another juicy piece of material to write up, joining it in a deliberately haphazard fashion to all the others he was piling up in those early morning hours when he and Perlès had at last arrived back at the Hotel Central while the market was beginning to wind down at Les Halles, the worn prostitutes might be meeting up with their
maquereaux,
their pimps, to settle accounts, and dawn was spreading itself over the roofs and chimney pots and spectral spires of the city.

At the end of September, June returned to Paris, and to Miller she appeared almost completely captive to her fantasies, which included a book she claimed to have just written called
Happier Days.
She was thinner, her clothes, too, and her skin was ashen. And to her Val was even more changed than she had found him on her previous visit, evidently no longer interested in
Crazy Cock,
which was to
have been her monument, but talking excitedly instead of a new book about his life here. She instinctively disliked the sound of it. Val was also talking of a woman who he said might have potential as a patroness, but what he said about Anais Nin seemed to have more to do with ardor than art.
²³

It was Richard Osborn who had introduced Miller to Nin. Osborn worked in the same bank as Nin’s husband, Hugh (Hugo) Guiler, and had done some legal work for Nin in connection with her recently completed study of D. H. Lawrence. Hugo began coming home with Os-born’s tales of his picaresque companion who, so Osborn claimed, was destined for literary fame if he didn’t die first. Nin had an appetite for the offbeat and the exotic, both of which she herself was, and soon enough she invited Osborn and his friend to the home the couple had at Louveciennes just outside the city. That evening she found Miller’s behavior and manners a satisfying match for Os-born’s colorful descriptions: he seemed to her a sort of genial savage with an astonishing lust for everything—food, wine, furnishings, the grass in the garden. In the diary she had been keeping since girlhood, she noted that Miller was “writing a book one thousand pages long which has everything in it that is left out of other novels.” Shortly after this, when she had a chance to read something of his—on Buñuel—she found the writing “flamboyant,
torrential, chaotic, treacherous, and dangerous.” Profoundly perceptive from an early age, Nin may well have sensed this early that in Miller she had come across the archetypal American her hero Lawrence had written about, in his brilliant
Studies in Classic American Literature,
whose soul was “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Here was a man who had somehow escaped the common delusions of his native culture, the man who, so Lawrence had prophesied, would one day write something genuinely new, explosive. From what he told her, Nin knew that Miller wasn’t just talk, that he was even then attempting the perilous passage between literature as he had known it and a literature that so far as he knew had yet to be written—chaotic, treacherous, dangerous, savage. For her to be in the company of such a man was thrilling. She was, for all her rich and largely unsuspected interior life, living both literally and metaphorically on the outskirts of the great city where the artistic action was, to all appearances the suburban housewife. And here, courtesy of the dissolute Osborn, was a real renegade, dropped into her garden. Showing him around it, she found herself wanting nothing so much as to assist him in his passage, to give him things—money, a place to work. And she might also have been thinking that here was a man who could inspire her as well, who was emotionally prepared to understand her own artistic aspirations and help her to realize them.

Whatever the precise nature of Miller’s second dinner invitation may have been, when he came his wife came with him. “Henry came to Louveciennes with June,” Nin wrote in her diary, and as June materialized out of the gloom of the garden, Nin said she “saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes.”
²⁴
Yet by the end of the evening June’s erratic behavior, her obvious mendacity, had turned Nin away—but only temporarily. Shortly after this dinner, June returned to America, most likely to get additional funds from her admirers. But soon she was back, and the two women entered into a smoldering relationship that, if it never became physical, certainly went right up to the borderline. In an eerie reprise of what had drawn Miller to June, Nin was intrigued as much by the other woman’s layers of disguise and mystery as by her unearthly beauty. She wondered whether what June really wanted most from the relationship was for Nin to write about her and so supply a corrective to what June feared would be Miller’s slanderous fabrications in the new book he was so excited about.
Crazy Cock
had been disappointing enough. But whatever it was she was after and whoever she might be, June was a “superb and inspiring character,” Nin felt, “one who makes every other woman insipid.”

Once she understood that June was all artifice, one layer atop the next, Nin was free to surrender to her remarkable seductiveness without attempting to find the “truth” about the woman—a psychological maneuver Miller himself could never make. June was always talking, riddling, conspiring, her voice rich and breathless, her eyes drugged. By February 1932, with Miller down in Dijon with a miserable teaching job but continuing his courtship of Nin in voluminous letters and June once again back in the States, Nin could admit that she was trapped “between the beauty of June and the genius of Henry.” In differing ways she found herself devoted to both of them, but “I love June madly, unreasonably. Henry gives me life, June gives me death. I must choose, and I cannot.”

She was still feeling this way when Miller asked her for train fare back to Paris at the end of the month: he’d heard from Perlès that there was a full-time job waiting for him at the
Tribune,
and he was desperate to leave dreary Dijon for Paris and Nin. She sent him what he needed. Miller abruptly, unceremoniously left his teaching post, moved back into the Central, and took up his duties at the paper, working a night shift in the financial department. Within days of his return he and Nin were lovers.

The sexual part of the relationship bore certain resemblances to Miller’s previous ones. But the sexual adventurer
who had begun somewhat tentatively with the older Pauline Chouteau was by now well seasoned and knew what he wanted from a woman: plenty of action; acrobatics that might have provided useful additions to the
Kama Sutra;
and all of this accompanied by a steady stream of dirty talk that Nin for all her sophistication had not heard before. Certainly she had not heard it from her somewhat staid banker husband. It was shocking, something of an aphrodisiac, and psychologically soiling in its relentless-ness. One afternoon after attending a concert by herself in the city, Nin felt cleansed by the experience, freed for the moment from Miller’s world of “shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch …” Yet she was to willingly continue to be a denizen of that verbal and artistic underworld for another couple of years. It was as if she was compelled to live out the fictional career of Severine Serizy, the wealthy Parisian housewife in Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel,
Belle de Jour,
who takes a perverse pleasure in the sadomasochistic tricks she turns by day in a whorehouse before returning each evening to her sedate marriage. The examples Nin records of Miller’s talk leave nothing to the imagination. Neither does her description of a sexual encounter with him in the garden at Louveciennes where he suddenly attacked her, throwing her to the ground and making violent love to her. Miller the writer often wore the guise of
civilized humanity, she wrote, but “that day I was fucked by a cannibal.”

Throughout the relationship there were, of course, moments of great tenderness and trust as well as an artistic coupling that was productive for them both. But early on Nin doubted she truly loved Henry and thought she never would. Even her sexual climaxes with him felt somehow short of the high peak she so ardently sought. There was something in her lover that unsettled her in her soul, as if he really was a savage and not a human of her world. Maybe it was that his fierce, lonely struggles to make himself into a writer had stripped him not only of his pretensions and illusions but also of his basic humanity, leaving him
all
writer,
all
artist. Without his writing, she wrote in the fall of 1933,

I don’t know what Henry would be… . People who know him as gentle, wonder at the writing. Yet sometimes I have the feeling that this gentleness is not entirely genuine. It is his way of charming. Of disarming. It allows his entry anywhere, he is trusted. It is like a disguise of the observant, the critical, the accusing man within. His severity is disguised. His hatreds and his rebellions. They are not apparent, or acted out. It is always a shock to others. I am aware at
times, while he speaks in a mellow way to others, of that small, round, hard photographic lens in his blue eyes.

The entry is remarkable in several ways. To begin with, it is remarkably perceptive, especially when considered in context, for here, after all, was a woman with a substantial emotional involvement with this man, yet capable of drawing back to see him in pitilessly sharp detail. Clearly, she too had that photographic lens in her own eye. Then, her description of his hidden detachment gives us a glimpse of the Miller who had learned how to become a ruthless truth-teller, who had transmogrified himself from the self-indulgent, self-sorry literary oaf of
Moloch
and
Crazy Cock,
capable now of looking on scenes of bottomless depravity and despair without flinching or turning his head aside. Finally, Nin’s snapshot of the merciless observer behind the mask of the New World rube reminds us of that broad, dark-hued swath of American folklore in which the isolate killer Lawrence had written about hides behind the laconic jokes of the Yankee, the robust jollity of the boatman, the comic qualities of Mose, the Bowery B’hoy.

The job at the
Tribune
didn’t last long, but for once Miller didn’t lose it because of his own negligence; instead he was a victim of the deepening Depression. However, he
now had Nin who was happy to supply him with periodic cash gifts. These were sufficient to allow him and Perlès to move into a flat in the working-class district of Clichy. To Miller who had learned to love Paris’s most sordid quarters the new neighborhood was dull, but Perlès loved it because to him it was wonderfully modern, and their apartment had comforts like separate bedrooms and up-to-date bathroom fixtures.

From Avenue Anatole France Miller once again trained his epistolary guns on Emil, writing that he now had solid financial assistance from a source he must not disclose and that this was allowing him to work full bore on what he was calling
The Last Book.
The manuscript, he said, rather resembled Emil’s great accordion-like leather valise and into it he was throwing all manner of things, whether clean or soiled, ironed or pressed, tender or terrible. The order—or the disorder—was his to decide, and he had discovered that recklessness was his best artistic virtue. He would employ it to the utmost, even if it should ultimately cause him to be expelled from this country he had come to love. “I will never become a European,” he said, “but thank God, I am no longer an American. I am one of those things you call an ‘expatriate,’ a voluntary exile. I have no country, no frontiers, no taxes to pay, no army to fight for.” This last line in its defiant tone, its philosophical anarchism, as well as its cadence would survive
all the versions of
The Last Book
to appear in the opening passage of
Tropic of Cancer,
though some of the wording would change. He was, he told his old friend, going for broke now, and when he had thrown everything that came to him into the valise—and broken all the rules—he would consider the thing finished and would dedicate it to Buñuel who had opened his eyes.

In the summer of 1932 friends put Miller in touch with William A. Bradley, a Paris-based agent who told Miller he would like to see the manuscripts of both
Crazy Cock
and
The Last Book.
Having finished the latter to his own satisfaction, Miller was at this point feeling the kind of postpartum depression not uncommon to writers, and hearing from Bradley—who was bound to seem to him an authority figure—further fouled his mood. Nevertheless, he did take the manuscripts to Bradley’s office on the Ile Saint-Louis. As a point of honor he had made few if any cuts in
The Last Book,
and the stout valise was crammed to its capacity. Bradley replied in short order, telling Miller he would like to discuss the manuscripts with him, particularly
The Last Book,
which he found “magnificent.” Miller’s mood darkened yet further at this news: what he had really wanted to hear was that it was
Crazy Cock
that was magnificent and that Bradley would take it on. Instead, when he and Nin met with Bradley the agent dismissed
Crazy Cock
and said he wanted publisher Jack Ka-hane to see
The Last Book.
Evidently, Miller blurted out that
Crazy Cock
was the book he had been meant to write, while
The Last Book
was vastly inferior to it, was in fact a kind of afterthought. If June could have heard this and appreciated what a profoundly helpless tribute to her it was, she might have been grimly pleased, perhaps especially so since for some weeks thereafter Miller perversely persisted in trying to get both Bradley and Kahane interested in
Crazy Cock
while talking down
The Last Book.
Ka-hane hardly heard him. He was almost deliriously happy at the prospect of publishing
The Last Book
through his Paris-based Obelisk Press, since he regarded the book as a work of astonishing genius. He told both Bradley and Miller he could bring it out in February 1933. Gradually, Miller calmed down enough to sign a contract, though in his heart he still wanted Obelisk to first bring out
Crazy Cock.
In any event,
The Last Book
would be first, but it is significant that having signed on for
The Last Book,
he was reluctant to look at it and instead went to work on what eventually became
Tropic of Capricorn,
which would tell the story of his life with June in their early days. It is highly likely that had it not been for Nin he never would have done the work on the manuscript necessary to hammer it into the blazing, brilliant book Kahane eventually published, in English, in the autumn of 1934.