Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (18 page)

After all its years as an outlaw book whose salacious passages were read to tatters by GIs and panting teenagers and tourists who wanted an imaginative stroll on the wild side, it might seem oxymoronic to speak of
Tropic of Cancer
as having a “moral.” But when stripped of its rhetorical excesses, its comic boasts, its wild contradictions and coprolalia, it does have this spiritual arc. Maybe only an American, one exiled to the Old World against the tidal force of history, could have written it.

The story of Fillmore and his designing hooker that ends the book is microcosmic. And here, where it is to some
extent at least possible to separate fact from fiction, the differences are instructive.

Richard Osborn did indeed like Fillmore suffer a mental breakdown, and for a time was institutionalized outside the city. He had been living with a younger French woman named Jeanne and somehow had become convinced he’d gotten her pregnant. At the same time as he keenly felt his obligation to Jeanne he was desperate to escape France for his own people in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Whether or not she was in fact pregnant, a professional, or merely an opportunist is questionable. But there is not much doubt that when Miller bumped into him outside a bank Osborn wanted nothing more out of life than to somehow escape the sorry mess he’d made of everything here in what for him was hardly “Gay Paree” any longer. For whatever reason—maybe merely for old times’ sake—Miller decided to help him. He took the man in hand, went to the bank, the consulate, and then the station where he saw him aboard the boat train for Cherbourg and London. When he had done that he mailed Jeanne the money Osborn had provided for her—but not quite all of it, keeping about one hundred twenty-five dollars for himself.

What he made of this episode in
Tropic of Cancer
is distinctly rougher and harder on all concerned, most especially on his narrator, who is here depicted as a remorseless
thief. Ginnette (Jeanne) comes off as a heartless whore and Fillmore as a spineless sort, willing enough to let his American friend clean up after him. Yet here again, beneath the fiction’s shock value there lies Miller’s grand theme, for Fillmore in his dissolute behavior in Paris and his subsequent flight over the sea to the New World replicates the whole sorry saga of the West that had covered the known world with blood and tyranny, making existence a mortal trial for the masses—and then had sailed away to repeat the saga in a place that ought to have been an unrepeatable opportunity to begin anew. And all of this for the same old reason: the refusal (or is it the inability?) to look at life’s realities and be equal to their challenges and their opportunities. As long as France was wine, women, and money in his pocket, Fillmore was happy there, the narrator thinks. “And then, when he had had his fling, when the tent top flew off and he had a good look at the sky, he saw it wasn’t a circus but an arena, just like everywhere. And a damned grim one.” And so, off again he had gone on the same hopeless flight from reality to disillusionment.

As for the narrator, sitting there at bankside in the setting sun with a wad of bills in his pocket, it suddenly occurs to him that he too could now follow Fillmore, if he wished. He too could flee his parlous existence here. He could go back to his wife, could hear once again the sound
of his native tongue, walk amidst the familiar sights of his old world. And yet, as he thinks of that old world—its realities as he had at some cost come to know them—he feels instantaneously how barren for him the prospect of America actually is: the spectral skyscrapers and beneath them the streets “choked with ants.” He had been an ant once himself. That had been no circus, either, but a damned grim arena.

Beyond the few days the stolen cash would carry him his prospects here are not particularly bright, except for this: he is free at last of illusions, and he has made a place for himself,
here.
Just here. He has before him the remains of this day, this singular, unrepeatable moment of
Le bel aujourd’hui.
Paris has never looked better.

The writing of
Tropic of Cancer
probably gave Henry Miller the most intense artistic satisfaction of his life because it vindicated him in his conviction of who he was. Jack Kahane’s publication of it, however, was something of an anticlimax for him, and maybe at that moment Anaiïs Nin cared more about the book than its author did. By this point Miller was already furiously at work on
Tropic of Capricorn,
which was to be the story of Henry and June and thus was the return of the original muse. The writing of it doubtless contributed to the growing distance between Miller and the new muse Nin had become. Nin, however, continued to supply Miller with occasional cash gifts, but by the time Kahane published
Capricorn
in 1939
the Henry-Anaiïs romance was really over, though neither would quite admit this. As for June, she had obtained a Mexican divorce from Miller the year
Cancer
was published in Paris. Not that much is known about her life after Henry except that it was bleak, a descending spiral of disasters that included electroshock therapy in the course of which she suffered a fall that conclusively broke her health. Miller managed to send her small sums of money in the 1940s, and they had one brief meeting in the fall of 1961 that was apparently unhappy for both of them. At some point thereafter June left the New York area for Arizona where a brother was living. It is believed that she died there, though the date of her death and the place of her burial are unknown.

The war had made Miller an exile from his beloved France in 1940. Back in America, he led a nomadic, hand-to-mouth existence for the next four years that replicated the one he had endured before he understood in Paris what his mission truly was. With this major difference, however: he now knew that he was a writer, an artist, and that he would be remembered even if his finest works, the
Tropics
and
Black Spring,
should remain forever banned in America. This made his hardships bearable, indeed even honorable to him, as a martyr’s are. He tried writing pornography (Nin was doing the same). He set up as an astrologer. He turned out primitivistic watercolors in vast
quantities and sold them for what he could get. He sent out what he called “begging letters” to friends, acquaintances, and institutions. He appears to have regarded these as a kind of literary genre. In 1942 he moved to the Los Angeles area and tried screenwriting. Two years later he moved to the isolated area of Big Sur, where he lived for the next nine years, in the course of which time fame found Henry Miller at last with the American publication of
Cancer.
It was an instant bestseller, as was
Capricorn
(1962). Now virtually anything of his, whether new, old, or recycled, found an enthusiastic audience, and he belatedly became a wealthy man. He also found himself enshrined as the somewhat aged satyr-king of unbridled sexuality. To an extent he had already been trading on this image for several years in his relationships with a succession of younger women, three of whom he married. The image gained validity in an ironic way when Nin published the portion of her diaries dealing with their affair: ironic because years before she had made him promise he would never draw on their relationship for literary capital. He never had. Yet now that he was a celebrity, Nin saw that she might capitalize on it and did.

In part to escape his fans and his fame, to which he had come to feel a profound ambivalence, Miller moved down to Pacific Palisades in 1963. He brought with him his entourage, his gofers, gatekeepers, and caregivers. But there
was an anonymity there that he deeply craved now in these last days. A man, he said frequently, deserved to be let alone when he’d said everything he had to say, and Miller had. He died in his sleep on June 7, 1980.

1
. In his poem “Voyage West,” Archibald MacLeish has an outmoded, disgraced Columbus lamenting that “once the maps have all been made / A man were better dead than find new continents.”

2
. The truth of the horrific passage describing this episode has been questioned (but then, so for a couple of centuries were the rumors of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hem-mings). When Crèvecoeur wrote, the literary tradition of travelers’ tales was long established in Europe, the Near East, and the Orient. Crèvecoeur was occasionally in error about one thing and another, perhaps especially about the realities of Native American life, but these are
errors,
not a traveler’s inventions, and the distinction is crucial. The tone of the passage is entirely consistent with the rest of his book, and I find little reason to believe he invented the encounter.

3
. It is entirely possible that Crèvecoeur knew of a particularly shocking instance of frontier lawlessness, since it occurred in Pennsylvania and had been described by his friend Benjamin Franklin. This was the massacre of some peaceful Conestoga Indians in December 1763. At dawn on December 14, Irish
immigrant militiamen attacked a settlement of peaceful Cones-togas near Lancaster, killing all six they found there and burning down the buildings. The Paxton Boys—as they came to be called—had wanted the Indians’ land, land given them by William Penn as part of his “Holy Experiment.” But there remained fourteen Conestogas left who might still make some claim on the land the Paxton Boys coveted. Therefore, on December 27, the Paxton Boys rode again, this time against the workhouse at Lancaster where the Conestoga refugees were housed. This time they finished the job and then settled on the conquered land. No charges were ever brought, and the Paxton Boys then decided to march on Philadelphia but were persuaded to turn back by a committee headed by Franklin.

4
. In
Israel Potter
Herman Melville wrote thus of the Protean Ben Franklin: “Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit:—Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—the type and genius of his land.”

5
. Another Tennessee tall-talker once described for me what it was like hunting through a laurel thicket: “Son, it’s like walking through a room full of rocking chairs at midnight.”

6
. One version of Quick’s legend has it that when the Indians learned he had died they dug up his corpse, hacked it to pieces, and distributed these among their villages. Alas for them: Quick had died of smallpox, and so in death, he’d gotten his hundred and then some. Here is a specimen of the kind of humor the frontier experience contributed to the national culture.

7
. Many years ago when I was on a magazine assignment in Bara-taria Bay a descendant of Nez Coupe Chighizola took me to the old pirate’s crumbling grave. It was really empty now, he confided, because a hurricane had long ago “washed his carcass out to sea.”

8
. There is not much that links Miller to Robert Penn Warren, though they were roughly contemporaries. But surely Miller would have agreed with the autobiographical voice of Warren’s poem “American Portrait: Old Style,” where he remarks: “and
in that last summer / I was almost ready to learn / What the imagination is—it is only / The lie we must learn to live by, if ever / We mean to live at all.”

9
. In his brilliant introductory essay to Grove Press’s first American edition of
Tropic of Cancer,
Karl Shapiro says Miller remained German to the end. “I have often thought,” Shapiro continues, “that Germans make the best Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans.”

10
. To be sure, we can never know precisely the tone and content of the talk of those Brooklyn boys of circa 1900. However, my own experiences of a south Chicago boyhood during World War II and afterward tell me that one of the ways a boy fit in with a neighborhood gang was to learn to use foul language and to sprinkle it liberally over his conversation. Surely the South Side can’t have been unique in this. Not two years ago in my adopted hometown of Santa Fe I jokingly greeted an old friend at the service station one morning. “Go fuck yourself, Pat,” I said as he came through the station door. “Did you hear that?” Pat asked the owner, Mike, without breaking stride. “I heard it,” Mike replied. “That’s nothing. When I was a kid in Astoria [Queens], you didn’t say, ‘Good morning, Pat,’ ‘Good morning, Fred,’ when you saw one of your buddies on your way to the bus. You gave him the finger—way up high like this. And you hollered at him,
‘Fuck you!’
If he didn’t do that back to you, you knew something was wrong and that sooner or later you were gonna have to straighten it out with him.”

11
. The ethnic slurs used throughout the Clint Eastwood film
Gran Torino
(2009), while they are doubtless exaggerated for comic as well as thematic effect, are certainly not an unrealistic portrayal of this aspect of our culture.

12
. The use of the word “outlaw” and his self-characterization as an “enemy of society” clearly belong to a chronologically later time than the reminiscence as a whole, one when Miller had lived long enough and achieved enough to begin regarding himself as a character, even as a work of art. In 1913 in the orchards of California this singular talent wouldn’t have seemed a problem to him; it would instead have been protective, providing “Yorkie” with a cachet, tender hands, indifferent work habits, and all.

13
. One is reminded here of Miller’s artistic predecessor, Twain, who as a boy spied through the keyhole on the postmortem of the dead king, his father, and then much later wrote up a blazing, unsparing account of it. That account hasn’t survived because William Dean Howells, who read it, urged that it be burned. The point here is that Twain’s artistic impulse was to write what he’d seen, but subsequently he was persuaded to destroy it. Miller’s description of his father asleep and snoring with his mummified face and blubbering lips is also unsparing, but he kept it and published it.

14
. For a very long time now artists in various media have been trying to find a way back to some imagined Adamic state of spontaneity where no shadow falls between inspiration and execution. In painting, the discovery in the 1940s of decorated Paleolithic caves in France and Spain seemed to authenticate a period in human history where art truly was spontaneous, and the horses and aurochs simply flowed out of the artists’ hands onto the rocky canvases. As we now know, these brilliant representations did not “flow.” In Chinese and Japanese calligraphy where the artist’s hand appears to be working much too rapidly to be guided by conscious thought, it is in fact being guided by a painstakingly acquired knowledge of
the way it is done
—by tradition, in other words. So, too, technologically sophisticated analysis of the Peche Merle cave in the Dordogne leads to the conclusion that the artists knew how the horses and mammoths ought to look before committing the first stroke. The process is convincingly illustrated in Jeanne-Pierre Baux’s documentary film
Prehistoric Art in the Quercy Region
(Vanves, France, 1999).