Banned Books Week, in which we celebrate novels which have excited the legal system, has come and gone. The commemoration always reminds me of the singular moment in my life when, grazing the bookcases in my parents’ bedroom, I found Henry Miller’s much-banned Tropic of Cancer.
My father was an immunologist who studied cancer at the National Institutes of Health (and this was the heyday of Nixon’s War on Cancer), so maybe I initially assumed I was looking at a technical book. But something in its stark blue/black Grove Press binding drove me further, and I cracked it open, immediately discovering a use of the word crack with which I had been unfamiliar.
I’d opened Tropic to one of Van Norden’s notorious, hilarious rants about women, failure, and the dirt in his belly.
“All I ask of life,” he says, “is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt. … The trouble is, you see, I can’t fall in love, I’m too much of an egoist… You sort of rot here [Like Tropic‘s narrator, Henry Miller, Van Norden is an American living in Paris.] Would you believe it, I’ve never been to the Louvre – nor the Comedie Francaise. Is it worth going to those joints? Still, it sort of takes your mind off things, I suppose. What do you do with yourself all day? Don’t you get bored? … You go queer over here… all these cheap shits sitting on their ass all day bragging about their work and none of them is worth a stinking damn. They’re all failures – that’s why they come over here… I’m a neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself…. Ah, well, shit! I’m going to take a walk… wash the dirt out of my belly…”
Transfixed, I lowered myself to the bedroom floor and began at the beginning.
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Inside the Whale George Orwell called his essay about Miller, and that’s just it. Tropic had brought me inside the vast dark unfettered head, a place where immersed thoughts swam mightily up and broke the surface. I badly wanted access to this disreputable underworld, and here it was.
The social reality outside Miller’s whale was ‘twenties Paris, a world, wrote Orwell, of
bug-ridden rooms in working-men’s hotels, of fights, drinking bouts, cheap brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary jobs. [These were] the poor quarters of Paris as a foreigner sees them — the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens …
This is Henry’s setting, and in it his thoughts reel back and forth from rage and despair at a cancerous world, a world where meaning and beauty and energy are all used up, to ecstasy at rare unbidden moments of meaning and beauty and energy that continue, somehow, to survive the deadness. By chance in a foul dark Metro station Henry finds a ticket to a Ravel concert one night; the stepped-on, rubbed-out, grubby ticket is Henry’s ticket to one of the most complete experiences of aesthetic bliss UD has ever read. The very neglect and chanciness of that ticket seem to generate the spectacular responses Henry has in the concert hall. Art needs something to transform, and the more deeply you’ve taken in the cancerous world, the more intense your receptivity to its transfiguration. The stronger the artist (here, Ravel), the more fulsome the embrace – and transfiguration – of the cancerous.
There’s nothing escapist or ephemeral about this transition from death to life – the point is that the art sweeps up all of the suffering degraded reality outside the concert hall and makes it art, just the way Miller’s novel itself takes in with such capacious, nervy, fascination “the imbecilities of the inner mind… the real-politik of the inner mind,” as Orwell calls them, that he ends up glorifying this stuff.
[T]he truth is [writes Orwell] that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit. [Walt] Whitman himself ‘accepted’ a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the ‘grey sick faces of onanists’, etc.,etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
Henry puts himself in the way of decay, every day. Decayed streets, people, buildings. He revels in urinous medieval Paris and detests the fake shininess of new American cities. In giving words to this descent into the truth of everyday horrors, Miller offers us a known, though rarely exhibited, social and psychological reality. As Orwell notes, there’s nothing edifying here; Tropic doesn’t end, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentimental story Babylon Revisited (which has the same time and setting and expatriate American narrator) does, with an assurance that the character will eventually reverse his losses. There’s only a primer on how to remain human and alive in corrosive times.
[I]n 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and a sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of Prufrock than The First Hundred Thousand or Horatio Bottomley’s Letters to the Boys in the Trenches. I should have felt, like [E.M.] Forster, that by simply standing aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was carrying on the human heritage. [Hence] the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel. Once again it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a friendly American voice, ‘innocent of public-spiritedness’. No sermons, merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently, it is still possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an edifying novel, but a novel worth reading and likely to be remembered after it is read… [Henry Miller] is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.
No, our moment is not 1917; and no, not all novels have to rub our noses in horror and imbecility. But there will always be high value in capturing and recording the human undercurrent – its stuttering resentments and rages and bewilderments and obscenities. For this – along with our delicacy, hopefulness, and high-mindedness – is our subjective reality, and we are right to ask from our artists the peculiar mix of reportage and transcendence the best of them bring to it.