Tropic Of Cancer — Henry Miller
I have been putting off writing about this book for several weeks, because I’m not sure I can do it justice. To be specific, I think I understand what the book is about, but I don’t know how to explain it. The closest I have been able to come is: this is a book about being alive.
Or perhaps more accurately about feeling alive. It’s autobiographical, about Miller’s time in Paris as quite literally a starving artist. Broke and usually unemployed, a lot of the book is about befriending people in search of free meals. Most of the rest is about boozing and whoring. The writing also tends to mysogyny and racism. And still it’s completley brilliant, because all of it is done with a stunning honesty and enthusiasm. All of it is an exultation of what is, no matter what it is.
Not surprisingly, the book was banned in the United States for almost thirty years after its publication. Miller is vulgar in places, to be sure, but only because he excludes nothing. Sex, drugs, poverty, art, music, writing, philosophy, disease, politics and war are all touched, and he is so honest in his recounting that when we are offended, we have to ask seriously if that isn’t just our own problem, if he hasn’t just cut too close to an uncomfortable truth. That is the virtue of his candor.
Art consists in going the full length.
And art is turned to a lot of uses in this book. The writing itself is beautiful. It has a rhythm and energy to it that makes reading more like listening to music. There are themes and motifs, recurring phrases, tension and resolution. In places it is virtuoso, such as when one character recounts to another the adventures of a third — we discover a story being told from three different points of view simultaneously! Yet there is much more here than technical ability, for the work is also a deep criticism of the world the author found himself in. Perhaps I am beginning to understand a little of the psychology of the “lost generation” which produced so much literature. I think they might be angry at the idiocy of it all, the idiocy that produced the First World War. Sadly, in many respects the world has not much changed since Miller’s time; his writing still stings.
We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over wiht. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms and say, “I’m fed up with it… I’m through.” No, there’s fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about any more and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one’s own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers pick up the mained and bleeding heroes and pin medals to their chest. Then one has the rest of his life to think about the fifteen francs. One hasn’t any eyes or arms or legs, but he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his life about the fifteen francs which everybody has forgotten.
It is not a perfect work, of course. The writing is dense, occasionally veering toward self-indulgence. It is also deeply intellectual, referencing and discussing many of the great thinkers of the era. Geek that I am, I enjoyed this complexity, yet at times I find myself wishing that the work was more accessible, if only because his message would then reach a wider audience. Also, as I have already mentioned, Miller was perhaps not the most tolerant of people. Overall, this is not a book for children, I suppose; but the world needs books for adults too.
Above all, however, this is a book about life. It upholds the grand myth of the individual as a unique human being, each person capable of almost unlimited freedom to choose, if they could only know that. There is beauty in that philosophy, and disaster too, all the beautiful messes that freedom allows. As a writer, this book is very dear to me, because Miller has succeeded in celebrating that fact, in capturing something in words that I can as yet only feel.
Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany — “Fay ce que voludras! … fay ce que vouldras!” Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of thr womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy!
