Renegade
Renegade
Henry Miller
and the Making of
Tropic of Cancer
Frederick Turner
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN & LONDON
Copyright © 2011 by Frederick Turner.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Set in Janson type by Integrated Publishing Solutions.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turner, Frederick W., 1937-
Renegade : Henry Miller and the making of Tropic of Cancer/
Frederick Turner.
p. cm. — (Icons of America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-14949-4 (hardback)
1. Miller, Henry, 1891-1980.—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Miller, Henry, 1891-1980. Tropic of cancer. 3. Politics and
literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. Authors
and publishers—United States—History—20th century.
5. Publishers and publishing—United States—History—20th
century. 6. Censorship—United States—History—20th
century. I. Title.
PS3525.I5454Z8557 2012
813’.52—dc22
2011019531
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
ICONS OF AMERICA
Icons of Americais a series of short works written by leading scholars, critics, and writers, each of whom tells a new and innovative story about American history and culture through the lens of a single iconic individual, event, object, or cultural phenomenon.
The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon LEO BRAUDY
Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil JEROME CHARYN
The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison STEPHEN COX
Andy Warhol ARTHUR C. DANTO
Our Hero: Superman on Earth TOM DE HAVEN
Fred Astaire JOSEPH EPSTEIN
Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace STEVE FRASER
No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s4’33”KYLE GANN
Frankly, My Dear:Gone with the Wind Revisited MOLLY HASKELL
Alger Hiss and the Battle for History SUSAN JACOBY
Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams MARK KINGWELL
Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex JAMES LEDBETTER
The Liberty Bell GARY NASH
The Hamburger: A History JOSH OZERSKY
Gypsy: The Art of the Tease RACHEL SHTEIR
King’s Dream ERIC J. SUNDQUIST
Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson GORE VIDAL
Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown DAVID YAFFE
Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory
JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
For
Jim Harrison
Contents
PART ONE
“Fuck Everything!”
Slaughterhouse
A Great Beast
Folklore of the Conquest
Twain
Just a Brooklyn Boy
Beginning the Streets of Sorrow
The World of Sex
Talk
Entering the Slaughterhouse
Manhattan Monologist
Cosmodemonic
She
Exile
PART TWO
Where the Writers Went
The Avant-Garde
Hunger
June
An Apache
Villa Seurat
What She Gave
1934
Form
The Grounds of Great Offense
A New World
Coda
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Part One
“Fuck Everything!”
At the end of August 1931, Henry Miller posted a letter from Paris to his Brooklyn boyhood pal, Emil Schnellock. He wrote as if he were some explorer, poised to plunge alone and unarmed into a wilderness. “I start tomorrow on the Paris book: First person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!” he exclaimed.
As a telegraphic précis of what would three years later become Tropic of Cancer, the concluding six words of this brag are an astonishingly accurate prediction of the book Miller had somehow discovered he must write. When it was published in Paris in September 1934 by a man who dealt in what today would be called “soft pornography,” it completely fulfilled the bravado of Miller’s proclamation, especially in its sustained tone of savage abandon—“fuck everything!”
The expression is, of course, street-corner argot for the defiant impulse to hurl aside all considerations, conventions, and costs and to strike out recklessly into uncharted territory and there achieve personally unprecedented success—or a final failure. Defiant though it is, the impulse must ultimately come from a profound sense of failure, of having been balked and defeated at every turn so that at last there is nothing left to lose. The successful don’t have to say, “Fuck everything!” Failures might, and in that deadness of late August in Depression-era Paris Henry Miller definitely belonged in the latter category: he’d apparently lost everything, nationality, job, wife, even his language, which he couldn’t use in this foreign place.
On a more literal plane, the book Miller was about to embark on was one in which the narrator and his lawless companions do indeed try to “fuck everything,” even perhaps so unlikely a target as the one-legged hooker Miller mentions in telling detail as he used to pass her nightly stand in the Place de Clichy:
After midnight she stands there in her black rig rooted to the spot. Back of her is the little alleyway that blazes like an inferno. Passing her now with a light heart she reminds me somehow of a goose tied to a stake, a goose with a diseased liver, so that the world may have its paté de fois gras. Must be strange taking that wooden stump to bed with you. One imagines all sorts of things—splinters, etc. However, each man to his taste.
It was passages like this in which a profoundly forbidden form of sex is described with a cruel humor that prompted American tourists in Paris to smuggle home copies of the banned book soon after Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press published it. They kept on doing so until the war interrupted travel to the continent. At the war’s end Gls discovered the book, and then eventually the tourists returned to guiltily and gleefully carry it back to the States wrapped in shirts or shawls. By the 1950s Tropic of Cancer had acquired a folkloric status while its author wore with an increasing unease the shadowy reputation as a writer of truly “dirty books”—or, as he occasionally styled himself with some bitterness, a “gangster author.”
Something of this reputation clings to Miller still, like smoke, though he is long dead. And yet over the years since 1934, and particularly since Barney Rosset’s Grove Press triumphed over the censors and published an American edition of Cancer in 1961, a simultaneous process has been at work. In it Miller’s purely literary reputation has steadily risen so that now he is generally—if somewhat grudgingly
—acknowledged to be a major American writer, maybe even a great one. And Tropic of Cancer, his first published novel, has risen from smuggled dirty book to American classic, a work that belongs on a select shelf of works that best tell us who we are, for better or worse.
Emil Schnellock might well have been pardoned had he reacted to his friend’s proclamation with a heavy dollop of skepticism. They’d known each other since they attended P.S. 85 in Brooklyn’s Bushwick section some thirty years back, and for much of that time, it seemed, Miller had been jawing about becoming a writer. But after all the impassioned, profanity-spattered talk, some of it brilliant and colored with various violent prejudices; after his furious work on three extended pieces of fiction; after he’d left his first wife because a second one believed in his dream—after all this he had perilously little to show for it. The fictions remained unpublished and were perhaps unpublishable, and only a clutch of his shorter pieces had seen print in obscure places. Meanwhile, Schnellock, from a similar background and harboring his own artistic aspirations, had become a successful illustrator with a studio in Manhattan. What now could he have thought of his old friend, starving over there in Paris, except that once again Henry had failed? Maybe he also felt a little guilty, because it was he who had been partially responsible for Miller’s last-ditch, desperate decision to ship out for Paris in the winter of 1930, hoping the fabled city would somehow crack open that volcano of creative energy he felt he had within him. For Schnellock had seen Paris and the continent’s other great cities and had for years been filling Miller with exquisitely detailed descriptions of those places and of that deep humus of art and culture so abundantly available there. Without quite meaning to he had encouraged in his friend a conviction amounting to a lifelong mania that America was hostile to artists, whereas the Old World was unfailingly nurturing. And when the desperate Miller, facing the death of his dream, and having really nowhere else to go, had decided it had to be Paris or bust, it had been Schnellock that he turned to, not his second wife June, who couldn’t wait to be rid of him. Schnellock had put some steel in his spine and ten dollars in his pocket for the trip across the dark Atlantic and then down at the docks had seen him off.
Besides his ticket and Schnellock’s tenner, Miller shipped with two valises and a trunk. In these he had some suits made by his tailor father, the drafts of two of the failed novels, and a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But within him, buried beneath the accumulated detritus of a random and crudely assembled self-education, Miller was carrying a great deal more than these meager effects. In the lengthening years of his exile it became evident to him that his task was to discover through deprivation and doubt and often intense loneliness what this was that he carried and to learn how to make creative use of it.
From young manhood he had hated what his native land had become: more mercenary than the meanest whore and viciously intolerant of real or suspected deviations from the national norm. Such a phase in intellectual development, of course, is hardly unusual in young people in America and elsewhere in the developed world. But in Miller’s case what he came to believe at so early an age he still believed on the last day he drew breath. Perhaps somewhat inchoate in his schoolboy years, this habit of mind was well established by the time he joined the workforce out of high school. By the time he shipped for Paris it was a pillar of his personality, a way of explaining where he now found himself, and the longer he was away from America, the more he hated it until the hatred became a hysteria that spattered the pages of his interminable letters to Emil Schnellock. When the war exiled him once again—back to America—he found his old home as hateful as ever and poured his feelings about it into such books as The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and its sequel, Remember to Remember, which invidiously compares America to la belle France. But if in 1930 he had imagined that Paris (and more generally the Old World) offered an authentic escape from the coarseness and heartlessness of America, he was wrong. Wrong about Henry Miller, anyway, because no one could have been in a certain sense more ineradicably American than the man who had left it on that wintry February morning. To be sure, he was definitely not a mainstream American, but still he belonged to a strong, colorful countervailing tradition of cranks, crooks, tall-talkers, hucksters, adventurers, outlaws, and utopian dreamers that had its roots deep in the American experience.
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 jour
nalist 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.
Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer Page 1
