Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (19 page)

15
. Many months thereafter, when Miller held a part-time job at the paper, Root met him but never knew him well.

16
. In a
New York Review of Books
essay on the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition of Van Gogh’s letters and accompanying illustrations, Richard Dorment makes the salient point for us about Miller’s artistic situation in Paris at the beginning of the ‘30s. “Though the act of creation is highly personal,” he writes, “it rarely happens in isolation… . The unrecognized genius who dies alone in his garret is largely a myth.” The Van Gogh revealed in letters, sketches, and paintings was no solitary madman,
Dorment says, but instead a thoughtful artist well aware of art history and what his contemporaries were doing. Many years before, Miller had come to the same conclusion about Van Gogh in
The Books in My Life
(1952). As for Miller himself, he was far too gregarious to have remained alone in Paris. He made friends, and by the time he left at the outset of World War II he had quite a few of them. But he had very few friends who were writers, none who were trying to do what he was. His path toward
Tropic of Cancer
was in many significant ways his own, which accounts in part for the singularity of the book’s voice, vision, and imagery. The Parisian avant-garde opened his eyes, but what he saw was singular.

17
. Over the nine years he spent in France, Miller gradually acquired a substantial knowledge of French history and culture and learned to speak and write the language passably. But his understanding of France never remotely approached his astonishing grasp of his native culture.

18
. Customarily, he spent it on cigarettes, coffee, wine, postage, and the
metro.

19
. Years later, he remembered his audience to have been the American painter John Nichols, one of the regulars at the Auguste Bartholdi flat, who was working on a portrait of Miller that depicted him as a savage being.

20
. In recent years a spirited debate has been joined about exactly what constitutes the purely documentary in still photography and cinematography, some of it centering on the work of two of America’s finest documentarians, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The great Robert Doisneau sometimes posed his human subjects in his documentary photographs of Paris, something Brassaϊ appears not to have done in his nighttime shots of the city’s life.

21
. Le Zeyer is still there and still dishing out
choucroute
and seafood.

22
. One version of Miller at Villa Seurat in the summer of ‘31 has him typing on the versos of the manuscript of
Crazy Cock.
If a story is really good, someone cynically said, it probably isn’t true. Still …

23
. Like a good many other episodes in Miller’s life, much of the
June-Henry-Anais menage, which begins here, remains murky, probably permanently so. The ménage has, of course, generated a good deal more heat than light and inevitably more of both of these than on its effect on
Tropic of Cancer.
We don’t know just when June arrived, for starters. If she was already in Paris when Nin invited Miller to dinner, how was that arranged? We don’t know how or why June showed up for the second dinner invitation or what Nin’s motivation may have been for beginning a dalliance with her and whether it ever became physical. We don’t know what Miller’s attitude toward the women’s relationship was, whether it was to him an awful reminder of the June-Jean affair; or whether he was in some sense attracted to its possibilities for him, sexually and artistically, or both at once. My treatment of it here tries—perhaps not completely successfully—to concentrate on its implications for the composition of
Tropic of Cancer.

24
. Surviving photographs of June do not capture the remarkable impression she made on those meeting her for the first time. Miller’s rapturous recollection has been mentioned earlier and might be discounted for obvious reasons. But there is this one from Nin and Brassaϊ’s as well. When Miller introduced them, Brassaϊ recalled that what struck him was a “neck as long as a swan’s emerging from a tight black velour dress, a neck out of a Modigliani painting.” Baudelaire, he went on, “who loved the art and artifice of a woman’s face, would have swooned at the feet of this creature.”

25
. He never did.
Tropic of Capricorn
bears closest comparison, but it is a more polished piece of literature, whereas
Cancer,
for all its revisions, retains the raw quality of a vivisection.

26
. Miller himself wasn’t thrilled by Rosset’s hard-won victory (the result of more than sixty separate legal proceedings). He had never been keen on having
Cancer
published in America, precisely because its continued status as an outlawed book confirmed his own status as a renegade, as well as his view of America as a brainless, bloated, anti-life monster, hell-bent on warping the rest of the world into its own image. Rosset’s win, he felt, had the effect of making him seem a part of the grand march of American
freedom and of transmogrifying his public image from renegade to celebrity.

27
. “Literature is news that STAYS news,” said Ezra Pound, who immediately appreciated Miller’s achievement in
Cancer.

28
. Miller is in distinguished company here. The first of the Four Noble Truths taught by the Buddha is commonly translated as “suffering,” but more loosely and more accurately as a dissatisfaction with the inevitable conditions of our existence. In Buddhist thought this is regarded as the gateway to the Dharma. Similarly, Freud regarded life’s inevitable demands as “too hard for us.” We are always in need, therefore, he argued in
Civilization and Its Discontents,
of various “palliative remedies.” These range from religion to intoxicating substances
—anything
that numbs us to the otherwise unbearable.

Allen, Robert G.
Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Asbury, Herbert.
The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld.
New York: Ballantine, 1974.

——.
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld.
New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998.

Bakeless, John.
The Eyes of Discovery: The Pageant of North America as Seen by the First Explorers.
New York: Dover, 1961.

Bernier, Olivier.
Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

Blair, Walter.
Native American Humor, 1800-1900.
New York: American Book Company, 1937.

Brassa’i.
Henry Miller: The Paris Years.
Translated by Timothy Bent. New York: Arcade, 1995.

——.
The Secret Paris of the ‘30s.
Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Pantheon, 1976.

Coates, Robert M.
The Outlaw Years: The History of the Land Pirates of the Natchez Trace.
New York: Literary Guild of America, 1930.

Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de.
Letters from an American Farmer.
Bedford, Massachusetts: Applewood, n.d.

Dearborn, Mary V.
The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Dorment, Richard. “The Passions of Vincent van Gogh.”
New York Review of Books
57, no. 5 (March 25, 2010): 16-18.

Ferguson, Robert.
Henry Miller: A Life.
New York: W. W Norton, 1991.

Freud, Sigmund.
Civilization and Its Discontents.
Translated by Joan Riviere. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958.

De Haan, Panda, and Ludo Van Halem. “Miró in Holland: The Dutch Interiors, 1928.”
Rijksmuseum Bulletin
38 (2010): 211-245.

Hamsun, Knut.
Hunger.
Translated by Robert Bly. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Hutchinson, E. R.
Tropic of Cancer on Trial: A Case History of Censorship.
New York: Grove, 1969.

Kenny, Kevin.
Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Kessel, Joseph.
Belle de Jour.
Translated by Geoffrey Wagner. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007.

Lawrence, D. H.
Studies in Classic American Literature.
New York: Penguin, 1977.

Mailer, Norman.
Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller.
New York: Grove, 1976.

Martin, Jay.
Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller.
Santa Barbara: Capra; London: Sheldon, 1979.

Matthiessen, Peter.
Wildlife in America.
New York: Viking, 1975.

Melly, George.
Paris and the Surrealists.
New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Miller, Henry.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
New York: New Directions, 1970.

——.
Black Spring.
New York: Grove, 1989.

——.
The Books in My Life.
New York: New Directions, n.d.

——.
Crazy Cock.
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

——.
Letters to Emil.
Edited by George Wickens. New York: New Directions, 1989.

——.
Moloch, or, This Gentile World.
New York: Grove, 1992.

——.
My Life and Times.
New York: Gemini Smith, n.d.

——.
Remember to Remember.
New York: New Directions, 1947.

——.
The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud.
New York: New Directions, 1962.

——.
Tropic of Cancer.
Shelton, Connecticut: First Edition Library, n.d.

——.
Tropic of Capricorn.
New York: Grove, 1965.

Nin, Ana’is.
The Diary of Anais Nin.
Volume one, 1931-1934. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. San Diego: Harcourt, 1994.

——.
Henry and June.
From
A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1932.
Orlando: Harcourt, 1993.

O’Gorman, Edmundo.
The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961.

Porter, Bern, ed.
The Happy Rock: A Book About Henry Miller.
Berkeley: Packard, 1945.

Ray, Man.
Self-Portrait.
Boston: Bullfinch Press, Little, Brown, 1999.

Reynolds, Michael.
Hemingway in the 1930s.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Richardson, Robert D.
First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009.

Roche, Charlotte.
Wetlands.
Translated by Tim Mohr. New York: Grove, 2009.

Root, Waverly.
The Paris Edition: The Autobiography of Waverly Root, 1927-1934.
San Francisco: North Point, 1987.

Rourke, Constance.
American Humor: A Study of the National Culture.
New York: New York Review, 2004.

Sayag, Alain, and Annick Lionel-Marie, eds.
Brassai, The Monograph.
Boston: Bullfinch Press, Little, Brown, 2000.

Shattuck, Roger.
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant- Garde in France, 1885 to World War I.
New York: Vintage, 1968.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll.
This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Snyder, Robert.
This Is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn: Conversations with the Author from “The Henry Miller Odyssey”
Los Angeles: Nash, 1974.

Tanner, John.
A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner During Thirty Years Residence Among the Indians of the Interior of North America.
Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1994.

Turner, Frederick.
Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness.
New York: Viking, 1980.

——, ed.
The Portable North American Indian Reader.
New York: Viking, 1974.

Vidal, Gore.
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I am indebted to the following friends for advice, encouragement, technical assistance, and the gift or loan of relevant books: Glenn Bokhof, Kay Carlson, Eudice Daly, Les Daly, Kai Erickson, Fitch Himmelright, Joyce Idema, Phillip King, Dierdre Ling, Dana Newmann, Eugene Newmann, Nicholas Potter, Steve Reed, Ileene Smith, Robin Straus, Aaron Turner.

Note: The abbreviation HM in subheadings refers to Henry Miller

Adams, John, 21,
23

Alger, Horatio,
96
-97,
112

American culture: and adventure,
13
-14; and burlesque,
71
-72; and cruel humor,
44
,
109
; HM’s attitude toward,
8
-9,
12
,
17
,
80
-81,
91
,
96
-97,
101
,
117
,
124
,
180
,
224
n26; HM’s knowledge of,
106
,
130
,
159
,
223
n17; and idealism,
23
-25; and mainstream,
9
,
80
-81; and national character,
20
,
26
-27 ,
28
,
29
,
71
,
72
,
220
n6; and Twain,
49

American folklore: in American literature,
41
,
42
-43; and backwoodsmen,
15
,
28
,
29
,
30
-33; and boatmen,
15
,
28
,
36
-37,
155
,
188
; dark-hued swath of,
170
; effect of print on,
36
; folk heroes,
20
,
28
,
29
,
62
-63; and gambling,
36
,
37
-38,
39
; gangs of New York,
39
-40; and HM’s childhood,
62
-63; and humor,
28
,
33
,
41
,
42
,
47
,
170
; and Indian killers,
32
,
220
n6; and Lafitte,
37
; and Natchez Trace land;
pirates,
33
-35; and national character,
20
,
28
,
29
; and outlaws,
15
,
28
,