This is Banned Books Week.

This YouTube will do to explain why Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was banned in the United States until 1964.

A dissenting judge called it “a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.”

George Orwell called it “the most important book of the mid-1930s… [Miller is] the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.”

Tropic is always ranked high among the most important novels in English.

**********************************

Yet Edmund Wilson was right to say

The tone of the book is undoubtedly low; The Tropic of Cancer, in fact, from the point of view both of its happening[s] and of the language in which they are conveyed, is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I have ever… read… [Yet there] is a strange amenity of temper and style which bathes the whole composition even when it is disgusting or tiresome.

Let’s say that another word for strange amenity of temper is genius; let’s say that what Wilson picked up on and couldn’t help admiring, despite the desperate lowness of Tropic, is the peculiar, exhilarating genius of an original and truth-telling and super-charged sensibility. Miller bathes the composition? How about floods it? He floods the page with life; and the reader, excited by the high-pitch of the low and the high throughout the novel, by some of the world’s most gorgeous writing in service to the grubby, is picked up and pitched along, made to feel the weirdly buoyant complication of existence, the gloriousness and the gruesomeness of experience all at once.

In this all-at-onceness, some sort of deep wisdom seems to inhere. It makes us feel, not merely study, Life.

O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses

Henry, hero of Tropic? No, not Henry. Molly Bloom. Might as well be Henry.

When I had her naked and her little middle elevated by pillow – the little narrow lozenge of her cunt, which had such a slight lining of hair, seeming charming, with her rather slender legs and feet extended and drooping wide. — I used to stroke it and caress it with my tongue — it was so pretty it would make me linger and preoccupy me, so that I almost forgot to do anything else.

Henry? No, not Henry. Uh, Edmund Wilson.

Let’s see… Ah. Henry:

All the men she’s been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

How easy it is to make these dizzied-by-the-whirlpool-of-life moments kitschy. You need the combination of removed control and ecstatic engagement that great modern writers like Miller and Joyce have to avoid that.

The same strange amenity of temper that gives us cartloads of cunts in The Tropic of Cancer also gives us this, and there’s absolutely no contradiction.

Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès. The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black, webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.