Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (2 page)

Even though his earliest associations were strongly flavored by his German ethnicity, once he had been loosed from his mother’s apron strings he plunged headlong into the culture of his time and place, absorbing—almost helplessly it seems—its sights, sounds, smells, the rough roll of its urban rhythms, its prejudices and stunning contradictions. He was a great “noticer” of even the most minute details of quotidian life and could remember them years afterward. Much later he would elevate this talent to the status of a moral obligation. Thinking back to an old friend from the Paris days, Alfred Perlés, Miller invoked his injunction that the “mission of man on earth is to remember. To remember to remember.” This is a great talent for a writer to have, of course, Marcel Proust being the prime example. Yet ungoverned it can become the enemy of coherence and form, leading him or her into
distracting divagations and structural cul-de-sacs as well as endless back alleys of almost free association. Never one to deny himself the prompting of an instinct or the prospect of a pleasure, Miller characteristically followed whatever caught his interest, even if this was only fleet-ingly. “There was a child went forth every day,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1855,

And the first object he looked upon and received with
wonder or pity or
love or dread, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or
a certain part of the
day … or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

This was Henry Miller, who by 1930 had interested himself in various physical culture fads, burlesque theater, boxing, six-day bicycle races, professional wrestling, the production of chewing gum, the trade union movement, and radical politics; the cranks and toughs and petty criminals of his Brooklyn neighborhood; esoteric religious cults like theosophy; debating, tabloid journalism, the movies, and magicians. Also:

American Can, American Tel. & Tel., Atlantic & Pacific, Standard Oil, United Cigars, Father John, Sacco & Vanzetti, Uneeda Biscuit, Seaboard Air Line,
Sapolio, Nick Carter, Trixie Friganza, Foxy Grandpa, the Gold Dust Twins, Tom Sharkey, Valeska Suratt, Commodore Schley, Millie de Leon, Theda Bara, Robert E. Lee, Little Nemo, Lydia Pinkham, Jesse James, Annie Oakley, Diamond Jim Brady, Schlitz-Milwaukee, Hemp St. Louis, Daniel Boone, Mark Hanna, Alexander Dowie, Carrie Nation, Mary Baker Eddy, Pocahontas, Fatty Arbuckle, Ruth Snyder, Lillian Russell, Sliding Billy Watson, Olga Nether-sole, Billy Sunday, Mark Twain, Freeman & Clarke, Joseph Smith, Battling Nelson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Horace Greeley …

In
Black Spring
this list of public figures, place names, and commercial products continues on until it reaches almost two hundred. Such recollections of phenomena, however, do not add up to artistic accomplishment. They are only the potential raw materials of it. Still, the person on whom little is lost (to use a variation of Henry James’s notion of the exemplary human being) is admirably positioned to make creative use of what others have ignored or else have regarded as the inevitable detritus of daily life.

This same omnivorousness had also played a role in the lengthy list of occupations Miller had tried his hand at by the time of his exile. He had been a file clerk, an agricultural laborer, a worker in a tailor shop—though he had
not actually been a tailor. For a brief time he worked in a bank, had taught piano, and had a stint as an editor at a mail-order catalog outfit. He ran a speakeasy with his second wife, June, and had been a handyman at a YMCA—though hazardously unhandy. He had sold encyclopedias door-to-door and chocolates to diners in Manhattan restaurants. For several years he had been an employment officer for Western Union. Most significantly from his point of view, he had tried writing, both as a freelance journalist and as an unsponsored freehand novelist whose models were the greats of continental literature.

Thus—and inevitably, as it must seem to us now—by 1930 Miller had willy-nilly absorbed so much of American culture, both past and present, that he could hardly have successfully escaped his nationality even had he fetched up somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Everything important about him reflected aspects of that very culture he never tired of disparaging. Like so many of his countrymen he was a shape-shifter, altering occupations, addresses, and personae as circumstances dictated. In a culture that historically had regarded a certain kind of lawlessness as a necessary virtue, Miller evidently felt more at home inhabiting a kind of murky fringe-land between a strict fidelity to the law and actual illegality, as if to be an outlaw of sorts was to be truest to the anarchical spirit that had gone into the making of a new nation. He was a tall-talker
in a country that loved such talk and forgave a man much if only he had the “gift of gab.” He was a man of pronounced, deeply held prejudices who, despite his parents’ immigrant background, feared and disliked “foreign” newcomers as well as those who looked different from him. Seemingly almost from birth he believed in the natural superiority of men to women while remaining bewildered by the allegedly inferior gender’s mysterious ability to reduce men to blobs of emotional jelly. While developing an authentic appreciation of the seven lively arts at their higher levels, Miller had a lot in common with those many Americans who spat on culture and hooted at its effeminate pretensions. Often for his profoundest pleasure he retreated to the crude humor of the barroom and the clubhouse, to literature at the level of the
Police Gazette,
and to burlesque, which was built on the mockery of high art. There was in him a broad comic streak, but as with so much of American humor there was almost always a shot of cruelty thrown in—sometimes a double. This special mixture—the American Grotesque—where laughter coexists with fear and suffering, high spirits with black despond—also characterizes Miller’s personal temperament, which could veer from hilarity and cosmic optimism to the real blues and even suicidal despair.

Perhaps Miller’s most significant connection to his culture was his unquenchable zest for adventure and improvisation,
for it was this that had gone into exploration and settlement here; into technological innovation; into social experimentation on the grandest of scales; and into blues and jazz, those quintessential American art forms, which Miller sometimes emulated in his finest flights of prose. America, Miller believed, was improvisation itself writ large, and it was only when the nation turned away from that and began to calcify into a tyrannous orthodoxy that it betrayed its bright promise for the human race.

Aboard the
Bremen,
plowing eastward into the historic past, Miller felt himself in flight from all this—or as much of it as he could have been conscious of. America was now a “slaughterhouse” where millions were ground to gristle to feed the devouring maw of Progress. But over the ensuing months that would lengthen into years Miller was to learn that, while he might have escaped the slaughterhouse, he had not escaped the man America had shaped. In one of his letters to Schnellock he would claim that he was no longer an American, even if he wasn’t a Frenchman and never would be. He was, he said with some justice, an expatriate. More precisely, though, what Miller had become was a renegade of a special sort.

The renegade of frontier history and folklore is driven by his hatred of the circumstances of his birth and upbringing, and this Miller certainly had in spades. But what
he learned in Paris’s bleakest quarters was that his background, his life and interests, his fund of knowledge of American history, folklore, and popular culture could be for him an inexhaustible source of creativity instead of a soul-withering curse. So, where too often the renegade comes to a violent and isolated end, Henry Miller not only survived, but bloomed into the artist he had so long—and apparently hopelessly—aspired to be. When at last in a foreign land he found his voice it was in a “war whoop,” as he was to put it in
Tropic of Cancer.
The war whoop’s raw notes were drawn from variegated sources. In part they came from the Yankee pitchman-bunco artist, a tale spinner who used his gift of gab to hoodwink his listeners. Another part of it came from the violently inflated brags of boatmen on the mighty rivers of the continental interior. There entered into it as well the bloody prints of the legends of deer slayers, buffalo hunters, backwoodsmen, Indian killers, and outlaws of the hinterlands and urban slums. Beneath all of these there was the brooding fact of discovery, the discovery of a vast, unexpected land mass that might have been an even greater opportunity to right the wrongs of the Old World’s blood-wracked history—but was not. The war whoop that Miller sounds in
Tropic of Cancer
is fundamentally about this once-only chance. It consistently asks us in its rawness, its chaotic violence, its painful comedy, “What if?” Whitman, whose work he’d
carried to France, had characterized his own belated breakthrough out of silence and stammering as a “barbaric yawp.” That barbaric yawp had changed the national literature. Miller’s war whoop was to do so again.

If, as Miller claimed, America had become a slaughterhouse, this condition had been centuries in the making, ever since, in fact, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas had first dropped anchor in 1492. Miller knew this, and his works are impressively studded with references to what began in that moment when Columbus’s anchor hissed downward through unsullied waters. Miller recognized and was deeply affected by the tragically short arc there was between discovery and destruction, and far from the New World in the years of his exile the manifold consequences of this came into ever sharper relief. The great missed, unrepeatable opportunity that America had fleetingly been was eventually to become a major theme in
Tropic of Cancer.

It is probably impossible to overestimate the profound implications of Columbus’s accidental finding of the New World. This, of course, has been the subject of an uncounted number of books, and since the story is still being written in its unfolding chapters, the subject may truly be inexhaustible. Here it will have to suffice to observe that the admiral’s epic blunder completely cracked open the mind of Western civilization, because in 1492 Christian cosmology posited a divinely created Island of the Earth surrounded by empty seas. If there were islands anywhere else—which most of the European continent’s prominent thinkers doubted—these were bound to be tiny in size and uninhabited. The news, once disseminated, destroyed this portion of the myth, although the admiral himself stubbornly clung to the more comforting notion that what he had stumbled on was part of the Island of the Earth.
¹
By around 1510 successive voyages by Alonso de Ojeda, Vicente Yáñez Pinzon, Rodrigo de Bastidas, and others had pretty well established that what Columbus had found was not a part of the Island of the Earth, at least as it had been anciently imagined, but was in fact another world, a New World, one that would somehow have to be accounted for and accepted.

But that acceptance came hard, very hard, and looking back over the more than five hundred years since Columbus made landfall it is difficult to ignore the feeling that
in the wake of that fateful October day it was as if an asylum in the Old World had been thrown open and hordes of vengeful madmen had been loosed upon the New. Here on these shores were men slashing and hacking at the natives, at the landscape, at each other with a frenzy that cannot be adequately explained by greed alone, though there was certainly plenty of that. Something more seemed at work, something that fueled the desire to almost instantaneously transform an inconvenient New World into a recognizable replica of the old one. Both the speed and the scale of the conquest were—and remain—astonishing and can never be replicated, on this planet, anyway, the Europeans swiftly overrunning and obliterating the native cultures, beginning with the empires of the Aztecs and Incas; then on to the seaboard tribes of North America; then the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the Five Civilized Tribes of the Old Southwest, the Plains tribes; and then on to the virtual extirpation of the California natives, down to the last, tiny remnant bands. In 1911, when the last “wild” California Indian emerged as a dazed, skeletal wanderer near Oroville in the north-central part of that state, some onlookers might well have wondered how it had all come down to just
this;
others, though, might just as easily have asked, “How did we miss this guy?

What was true of the assault on the natives was true as well of the New World’s flora and fauna: forests leveled,
streams desiccated, rivers diverted and dammed, animal habitats destroyed and whole species driven into extinction. All of this was most extravagantly apparent in North America, where there was a grim glee about the wholesale destruction, evident in successful communal efforts to wipe out wolves, mountain lions, the woods buffalo, martens, raccoons … Out of this history a spectral species of folk hero emerged in the figures of hunters who had racked up prodigious kill counts of this species or that. Buffalo Bill was the last and most famous of these figures but by no means the first. By his time his predecessors had long been forgotten (who remembers the celebrated panther killer, Aaron Hall?), but their deeds transformed a continent and left their bloody imprint on the American character. By 1911 when that lone Indian staggered into Oroville, the tribes had been transformed into beggars on reservations, and the once limitless herds of Plains buffalo had been pruned to an endangered few in Yellowstone Park, where they were hungrily eyed by hunters too young to have gotten in on all the fun. A continent, millennia in the making, had been transformed in four centuries.

It could hardly be expected that a people capable of so astounding and reckless a transformation of the national landscape would prove solid, law-loving citizens of the fledgling democratic republic that emerged out of the American Revolution, and indeed they did not. From the end of the war to the simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on Independence Day, 1826, the new nation was severely tested by threatened secessions; the anarchical tendencies of backwoods settlers and local militias who marched under the tattered standards of the “Wild Yankees,” “Ely’s Rebels,” the “Paxton Boys,” the “Black Boys,” and the “Green Mountain Boys”; by numerous riots and lynchings; and by the rampant corruption of the democratic system. Surveying the political
landscape in late 1786, George Washington told James Madison he thought the entire grand experiment might degenerate into “anarchy and confusion.” And when the delegates from the states met in Philadelphia the following May for the Constitutional Convention they did so in the ominous shadow cast by Shays’s Rebellion, which had come within an ace of success had the mutinous farmers taken the federal arsenal at Springfield. Not long thereafter new trouble bubbled up in Pennsylvania, eventually erupting in the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, a more serious threat than Shays’s Rebellion and with good reason: pioneer Americans drank whiskey all day long at a per capita rate of five gallons a year and would not brook an excise tax on what was for them meat and drink and a form of money.