Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (17 page)

Nor was this tone confined to sexual matters. Almost any subject could be treated similarly, such as the case of poor Peckover, a miserable proofreader at a newspaper who falls down an elevator shaft at the plant and dies of his injuries—but not before blindly groping about on broken knees searching for his new set of false teeth. The news of the death of their colleague is subsequently related to the narrator and Van Norden in a bar by one of the paper’s big shots, an “upstairs man,” who spares none of the details. When he has finally finished and wandered off with his drink, the narrator and Van Norden laugh themselves silly over the false teeth.

No matter what we said about the poor devil, and we said some good things about him too, we always came back to the false teeth. There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going. And since we didn’t have to put on a false front we could laugh about the incident to our heart’s
content. We laughed all night about it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine fellow and that his death was a catastrophe. All sorts of funny recollections came to our minds—the semicolons that he overlooked and for which they bawled the piss out of him. They made his life miserable with their fucking little semicolons and the fractions which he always got wrong. They were even going to fire him once because he came to work with a boozy breath. They despised him because he always looked so miserable and because he had eczema and dandruff. He was just a nobody, as far as they were concerned, but, now that he was dead, they would all chip in lustily and buy him a huge wreath and they’d put his name in big type in the obituary column. Anything to throw a little reflection on themselves; they’d make him out to be a
big
shit if they could. But unfortunately, with Peckover, there was little they could invent about him. He was a zero, and even the fact that he was dead wouldn’t add a cipher to his name.

Of this and many kindred episodes it might merely be observed that we are confronted here with examples of that peculiar brand of cruel humor spawned in America by the
repetitive hardships of subduing a wilderness continent—the kind exemplified by Mike Fink’s blank-faced question after he’d murdered his friend, Carpenter, “Is the whiskey spilt?” And this would be true. It would also be true that Miller himself was personally inclined toward humor of a crude and violent sort and had been laughing at dirty jokes, dirty words, stories of gruesome deaths, pratfalls, burlesque, and the like for most of his forty-three years. But something more is involved here, something that leads us into the heart of the book.

When we give the Peckover episode a bit of reflection, we find that what is truly shocking about it is not the manner of his death. Nor is it even his erstwhile colleagues’ hysterical laughter over the circumstances—the false teeth and so on. No, what is shocking, what STAYS shocking, is Peckover’s
life,
the daily humiliations of it, the inhumanity of it—his coat held together with pins; his termagant wife terrified of what will become of them if he lost his job; the daily loads of shit he had to put up with to keep it (availing ourselves here of the narrator’s diction): this is what is shocking. This and the fact that such a life is not even unusual, is in fact awfully ordinary, for Peck-over is only a solitary case we happen to hear of out of the many millions just like it. This is what earthly existence has become for most of us in the world we have made. In this cosmic overview Progress appears to be a cruel hoax
because the demeaning, hazardous conditions of human existence never truly change, whether we live in skyscrapers with central heating or hovels warmed with the dried dung of ruminants; whether we communicate across a great city by
pneumatique
or by barefoot traders bearing goods and messages between villages; whether we travel by horseback or jet. In the narrator’s view these difference are incidental, for we are all versions of poor Peckover who has to put up with so much shit before he has the good fortune to fall down an elevator shaft and find a sort of release at the bottom of it. “For the man in the paddock,” Miller’s narrator says, changing only the circumstance, “whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.”

Why is this awful irony so? Why are Peckover and the man in the paddock with his rake and shovel and wheelbarrow willing to put up with so much shit? The answer Miller supplies in these pages is that they are willing because they believe that somewhere down the miserable road they call their lives there lies an exit, a way out, something or other that will redeem all their sufferings and make of life a glorious thing at last.

This point is made in another episode of equal pungency in which the narrator takes a young Hindu to a whorehouse at the young man’s request. He is in Paris on his way to England to spread the gospel of Gandhi, and the ascetic robes have begun to hang very heavily on his youthful frame. Up in the room with the girl, the young man mistakes the bidet for a toilet and deposits into it “two enormous turds.” The girl is aghast, the madam furious, the young man mortified. But the narrator remains coolly observant and is able to calm everyone down—a lamentable mistake, perhaps some extra money for the girl, some more for the maid… . Days later, the narrator is guiding the same young man around the city when another moment of cosmic clarity overcomes him as he thinks back on the incident: what if after everything is said and done human existence should come down to just those “two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the
bidet.
”

What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit.

Scabrous, yes. Shocking still? Even today this is an image of the End of Days one is unlikely to forget soon. And as
with the death of Peckover and the plight of the man in the paddock, this is the same point made in the same way: in some terrible way human beings over eons have collaborated in creating conditions of earthly existence that are truly execrable. From birth to death it is little more than a senseless scramble, sustained only by the hopeless hope that somewhere there will be a miraculous escape from it. “One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy,” the narrator says. And all the roads are

slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.

And all of this, he says, is because of the human refusal to accept, or, better, to come to creative terms with, the inescapable conditions of earthly existence: birth, toil, suffering, aging, loss, death.
²⁸

The fundamental conditions of life (read, “shit”) cannot be changed, but the narrator believes that what might be altered is our attitude toward life as it is. It is not, therefore,

that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should
want
roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if only for one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime,
ennui
—in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render his life tolerable.

And while all is endured, as with poor Peckover, hung up between the Scylla of home and the Charybdis of the job; or the nameless toiler in the dung heap of his paddock; or the disciple with his aspirations, his secret lusts, his affectations—all this while time is there in the background, “beating away like a meat axe.”

At the very outset of
Tropic of Cancer
the narrator says that he has been sent to Paris “for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.” Placed thus, the remark seems a trifle obscure, but then, in these opening pages there are more than enough obscurities—who
are
these people and why are we being told these things about them?—so that it does not seem to merit special attention. By the book’s last pages, though, it has acquired a resonance, for the narrator’s journey, which is in a real sense Henry Miller’s own, is just this process of fathoming, like the leadsman on Twain’s Mississippi who would literally sing out the depths and so mark the boat’s perilous passage along the river’s mighty seaward flow. Miller’s narrator has been sent—in the sense of something forced, necessitous—on
an exploration not of the river but of the wilderness of the city: the sinister twists of its ancient streets, which often enough end in culs-de-sac; the sewer-like stretches lined with bars and waiting women, and the bleak boudoirs of the hotels where the joyless transaction is completed in an exchange of money; human dump heaps like the Cite Nortier; desolate spots like l’Estrapade that give off the air of never having been inhabited at all; and, coursing through this, the great river, offering its oozy depths as a way one could end it all. The man sent here has no guides, no maps, no plans, no tools or weapons, no friends—except the streets, as he says. Jail and deportation are daily threats, and so is syphilis, of which he is reminded every time he visits a public toilet where the death’s-head government posters warn that at his level of activity sex equals death. The fear of starvation stalks him, mocks him too as he reads the inviting restaurant menus posted in the windows. He does carry with him some fragile, flimsy hopes but finds gradually that hopes are not helps; they are instead only dangerous illusions, precisely because they blind him to the realities, sordid as they are, with which he must learn to live—or die. So, he must shed them, one by one, just as he sheds his tailor-made suits and every other bit of baggage that will hinder him as he plunges ever deeper into the wilderness. He consorts with the natives living close to the marrow of this place—whores, pimps,
thieves like the Apaches who work the streets by night. He eats their food, even when it tastes like “the big toe of a cadaver,” as he says of some rancid butter he is offered. The city, he finds, is “filled with poor people—the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth,” and yet they have learned how to live here and to make a kind of gritty, hard triumph of their deprivation. Though he begins to take on their coloration because he finds it protective, his journey is not one of acquisition but instead one of spiritual debridement, the shedding of all those assumptions and unexamined beliefs he’d come here with, above all the hope that something, some event, some person or piece of luck—something
extrinsic
—will change his life. At last, shorn of everything, he finds himself “naked as a savage,” at which point he becomes a renegade, one of those fearsome figures of frontier history who allegedly succumbed to the dark power of the wilderness and turned unnaturally against their own: the blood-drenched Simon Girty; John Tanner, captured by the Shawnee, then voluntarily living as an Ojibwa until at last he disappeared into the wilderness, a suspect in the murder of a white man. Or Kiowa Dutch. A German boy captured in Texas, Dutch grew into a huge, fierce warrior, riding with the Kiowa against the whites. He had forgotten his own language but had picked up a few obscene English expressions which he would hurl at the intruders in battle. But
if Miller’s narrator bears a telling resemblance to Kiowa Dutch, Miller would regard this as exemplary, a triumph of survival and not a surrender, for he has come through to a kind of clearing in what was at the outset only a featureless and bristling wilderness, where many of the weak go under. He, however, has learned through suffering and loss and isolation how to live without hope (which he sees as really illusion) but also without despair. He lives in the moment, in its brilliant specificity, asking nothing more of it than to see it clearly. “I don’t give a fuck any more what’s behind me,” he says, “or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today!
Le belaujourd’hui
[The beautiful today].”

What is this if not the spiritual drama of the New World as it might have been? And what if such salvation were yet available? What if, after the plundering of the planet and the exploitation of its farthest reaches, its geographical and moral antipodes; after the extirpation of uncountable numbers of plants and animals and indigenous cultures: after all this, what if it should become clear at last that there will be no miracle that saves us from life itself? That there will be no mythy Isles of the Blessed, no terrestrial (or extra-terrestrial) paradise where ripe fruit never falls (to borrow from Wallace Stevens), no transcendental
salvation? None of these. What if at last we should come somehow to the saving realization that there will only be
this
—whatever it is, roses and dung heap both—right here, right now? What if, like Miller’s nameless picaro, we understood at the crater’s rim that we are meant to live in this world as it is, to dig our hands into the mucky soil of its realities, to embrace it, to learn how to love it? This would not be the discovery of the hidden passage to the riches of Cathay but instead the inner discovery of that secret pass leading to true freedom, the freedom of the individual soul. At the same time, this would be an authentic escape—from the hopeless search for a way out of the inescapable conditions of human existence. And who knows? it might even ameliorate these just a bit.