Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer
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I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer
morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned
over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged
your tongue to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you
held my feet.
To his great credit, Thoreau fought past his squeamish-ness to recognize the poet’s singular power and authenticity, that what Whitman was writing pointed the way the literature of a democracy would have to go, even if he couldn’t go there himself. He was profoundly in the American grain—but always somehow a little bit above it: he would not write of the city’s wharves and docks and crowds, nor yet of tipsy prostitutes with pimpled necks or of bloody suicides sprawled in some tenement room with the pistol beside the body. He did want to see the Great West and write about it, but he didn’t live long enough.
It took American writers about sixty years to begin to appreciate what Whitman had done in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass, and even well after that Henry Miller could with real justice refer to Whitman as that “rude hieroglyphic,” so astonishingly modern was his work. But the literary impact of Mark Twain was immediately apparent. Here in ink and on paper and available at polite levels of the culture was America talking —not writing—in the outsized, colorful monologue mode that had been a century and more in the making. After Twain’s long career had come to an end, his old friend the novelist and editor William Dean Howells called him the “Lincoln of our literature.” The tribute stuck, though it is not clear just what Howells meant by it. Many things maybe. Clearly he meant that his friend was unlike any writer who’d come before him—“sole, incomparable.” Maybe he also meant to draw comparisons between the two men from the heartland who had known the great rivers, their life and lore. And just as Lincoln had drawn on the jokes and stories of that region for his own jokes, illustrative comparisons, and metaphors, so for everything that was best in his writing Twain drew from frontier, folk-based materials. It is also possible that Howells may have been thinking that as Lincoln had freed the slaves, so Twain had freed American literature from its slavish devotion to Anglo-European models and taught it to admire the sound of its own voice, endlessly gabbing and tale-spinning.
When Twain got up on his hind legs in The Innocents Abroad (1869), having swiftly outgrown his reputation as merely a western funny man, it was clear that his was a voice that defiantly spoke American lingo and wasn’t shy about making fun of the Old World and everything that went with it. That the fun was as ignorant as it was crude was what in fact made it so funny to his countrymen, with their well-established bias against culture as effeminate foolishness. Twain played to this audience relentlessly in Innocents, portraying himself and his fellow travelers “galloping” through the Louvre, the Pitti, and all the rest of the continent’s great museums, glancing quickly at the “modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, Rome, or any where we found it, and we praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn’t we said we preferred the wooden Indian in front of the cigar stores of America.”
Then there were the Old World’s heaps of religious relics, which proved to be a mother lode of laughs for an American armed with Twain’s savage sense of humor, about the verbal equivalent of a six-shooter:
We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one, also in Notre Dame. And as for the bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him, if necessary.
There is something very democratic—in one sense of the term—about the broad-gauge scale of the slander here: everything gets it. Everyone gets it as well: Portuguese, Italians, North Africans, the French, Turks, even some California Indians when Twain can’t find any handier targets. Comparing Italy’s Lake Como with California’s Lake Tahoe, Twain is reminded that “Tahoe”
means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup. It is Indian and suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute—possibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers—those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with tar, and “gaum” it thick all over their heads and foreheads and ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning.
Such sentiments as these make it easy enough to understand how it came to pass that in 1911 that lone “wild” Indian in Oroville could have been regarded as such an anachronistic curiosity.
Twain’s great subject, of course, was the river on the banks of which he grew up. When he turned back to it imaginatively in the summer of 1874, he had entered his major phase, the one that did so much to make him the Lincoln of our literature. Two years thereafter he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which along with Life on the Mississippi (1883) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) constitute his finest work. In these books Twain was able to portray, brilliantly, American culture in all its cantankerous vitality in a way that hadn’t been done before: not by the regionalists like Seba Smith or Johnson J. Hooper or George Washington Harris; nor by the greats of the American Renaissance, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Herman Melville. Whitman came very close, but after the first three editions of Leaves, he unaccountably began to veer off toward Literature with a capital L, as if he felt he had stuck his neck out too far, been too radically American, and now had to retreat in the direction of safer models.
Twain, on the other hand, was closer than any of his illustrious predecessors to the oral traditions that had grown up with the country. They were in some important sense all the education he would ever need, but like many of his countrymen he held a wide variety of jobs where he picked up additional imaginative capital: printer’s devil, river pilot, Civil War recruit, prospector, journalist, and lecturer. In these guises he’d encountered a broad spectrum of certain American realities that earlier important authors hadn’t—or else had decided to ignore. Only Melville’s wealth of experience comes anywhere close.
Though apparently from youth somewhat bookish, Twain knew how strong the anti-literary strain was in the culture, and it appears in his best books where the authorial stance is one in which the writer implicitly says to the reader, “Listen: I’m not a writer like those other fellows. I’m a tale-teller, and my books are really yarns.” In Huckleberry Finn, his finest achievement, this stance is made explicit when Twain adopts the literary persona of an ignorant boy who disowns the man who had written about him in Tom Sawyer because that man was a writer, and writers can’t tell the truth. The truth Huck tells us is of a voyage down the country’s main artery into its violent heart, a home to criminals and child abusers, blood feuds and mob violence, and to the historic trafficking in human flesh. At the end of that voyage—which is also a yarn—the boy who has seen it all tells us that he’s seen enough, that he wants to light out for the Territory “ahead of the rest.” This impulse, as Crèvecoeur had earlier observed, was the American story, the yarn the country itself had spun and had permanently captivated itself in the spinning of it.
Huck tells us he’s told the truth here. But had he, or had his creator prevented him from telling all that he had seen, all that he had heard? Was there yet another layer of truth that had been left unsaid?
In writing Life on the Mississippi from recollections, personal notes, news clippings, source books, old timetables, Twain also appropriated a passage from a manuscript he had shelved some years before and used it as the basis for a chapter he called “Frescoes from the Past.” The shelved manuscript was Huckleberry Finn, and what Twain now saw was that he could put it to use here to give his readers the full flavor of the Mississippi’s life as he had come to know it as a boy, a cub pilot, and at last as a fully fledged pilot himse
lf. To set it up, he gives us this description of the men of the Mike Fink era:
rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of their trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous.
The steamboat, Twain continues, put such men out of business, forcing them to become deckhands or else raftsmen on the huge pine-board carriers that swept past riverfront hamlets like Hannibal in mighty procession, “all managed by hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been trying to describe.” It is a telling remark, this effort to describe such rough characters. In the social and literary culture of the East to which he had so successfully laid siege, Twain now found himself faced with the task of somehow rendering in print “the rude ways and the tremendous talk” of the crews, “the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or a third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride.” Then comes the passage lifted from Huckleberry Finn in which Twain gives us a sample of that “tremendous talk” where a man might advertise his dangerous character by claiming to be
the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing!
Brilliant stuff here in which the writer packs into this formulaic comic boast not only Mississippi River lore but really a century of the American experience with its violence, its color, its astonishing vitality.
But Twain sets himself an even greater challenge when two chapters later he tries to reproduce the daily language of the men who worked the gaudy steamboats. Formulaic comic boasts were one thing, but the ordinary language of a workday spent on the docks and decks under all kinds of conditions was another, for these men were the cultural descendants of those Twain had said were the coarse, foul-witted, profane frolickers who haunted the river’s “moral sties.” He remembered—or claimed to—a particular mate from his own days as a cub pilot, a great, stormy fellow with a blue woman tattooed on one arm and a red one on the other and who was a genuine artist in his command of profanity. When this man gave an order, Twain tells us, “he discharged it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of profanity thundering after it.” For example: “‘Aft again! aft again! Don’t you hear me? Dash it to dash … !’” And, “‘you dash-dash-dash-dashed split between a tired mud-turtle and a crippled hearse horse!’” This leaves a considerably less pungent impression than do the comic boasts, because here the attempt to portray the everyday realities of river life runs aground on the social and literary realities Twain had come to know so well. There were many things that simply couldn’t be written in literature, even if they were the commonplace realities of American life.
It could well be argued—and doubtless has been—that literature is the better for these prohibitions, that there is nothing artful at all in giving readers the real words the tattooed mate might have used on his deckhands, because such words could only be the crude verbal clubs such a man would have had at hand, as a man in a brawl might grab whatever weapons there were—hatchet, cudgel, bottle. But we are obliged to remember here Twain’s strong anti-literary, anti-establishment bias, plus the fact that in writing about the river he was writing about the thing he loved more than anything else in life, except possibly his family.
First and last, Twain’s literary persona and thus his financial success depended on the popular perception of him as a kind of outlaw who had—somehow—learned to wear a cravat and to read and write. And this wasn’t all a pose, either: there were several notable instances in which Sam Clemens went far out of his way to antagonize members of the so-called “Genteel Tradition,” as when he savagely mocked Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as they sat at the head table at the birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier in 1877. And as for the river and its life, what Twain must surely have yearned to do was to give his readers the authentic, one-hundred-proof, forty-rod stuff he knew—language, behavior, and all. We need to take him seriously when he says after attempting to reproduce the tattooed mate’s profane outburst, “I wished I could talk like that.” He could—in private—up in his dressing room, in the bathroom, or down at the billiards table where a missing shirt button, a dull razor, or a bad shot would cause him to break out his own formidable arsenal of words and expressions he’d picked up on the river.
Not in print, though, with the single exception of the privately circulated story “1601,” which purported to be an account of conversation around Queen Elizabeth’s fireside in which Her Majesty endeavors to learn who it was among Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others who had blown a terrific fart. The exercise is rather a pathetic one, both inherently and considering the schoolboy glee with which it was received, praised, and passed around by Twain’s circle of socially prominent male friends. If it has any virtue, it is that it serves to suggest the power of the regnant literary prohibitions and beneath these the force of that current of sub-literary reality that had been flowing through American life for more than a century.
It is in this context that the last notebook entry Twain ever made takes on resonance. It is the single word, “Talk.” And it was a certain sort of talk—rough, uncensored, a brilliantly sustained monologue—that would have to await utterance until the obscure advent of another literary outlaw, a renegade really, willing to risk everything to talk about life as he saw it in language that adequately expressed his vision. One had to go back to Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, Norman Mailer wrote of Henry Miller, to find a writer of such startling intensity, of such artistic audacity.
Just a Brooklyn Boy
For a writer who was so compulsively autobiographical and who for the last half century of his life saved or made copies of much of what he wrote, it is surprising how many facts of Miller’s life are either unknown or in dispute. We are not even certain of the original spelling of the family name—whether in the Old World the paternal line had it Müeller or Muller or Muller before Anglicizing it to Miller on coming to America.
The major problem here is Miller himself, who was as compulsive a mythologizer as he was autobiographical, incessantly and even gleefully inventing competing versions of events and further elaborating on some of these, so that what he left behind at his death was a vast palimpsest presenting biographers and critics with a plethora of problems that can never be definitively solved. The problems are particularly acute for the pre-Paris years, where we have little really substantial to go on except Miller. Here one is forced to the hazardous expedient of using his later reconstructions of characters and events, knowing full well that these are reconstructions—when they are not pure inventions. At least, however, we are here in the realm of imaginative truth, which for Miller himself was truer than true.8
This much at least is certain: Heinrich (later Henry) Miller and Louise Nieting were both children of German immigrants who had two children of their own, Henry (1891) and Lauretta (1895). When Henry was less than a year old the family moved from Yorkville in Manhattan across the river to the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, the Fourteenth Ward, which Miller would later recall with an intensity that produced some of his most colorful work. These earliest years were passed inside the kind of her-metical immigrant enclosure possible in those days before the mass media, mass transit, and mass production had combined to homogenize the national
culture. In the Miller-Nieting household on Driggs Avenue the child heard mostly German and spoke his first words in that language. The food was German, the next-door neighbors were German, and the large frame of daily reference was Germany, not America. And despite a determinedly vagabond existence and the global range of his interests and enthusiasms, there were certain things about Miller that remained forever German.9 When his personal circumstances permitted, for example, he preferred the neat and orderly household of his childhood, one where things were put away after they were used, where floors were swept and counters wiped clean. In his Paris days, when he could afford a substantial meal, he was likely to seek out a German restaurant or at least an Alsatian one like Zeyer or Wepler in the Place de Clichy. There were less obvious preferences, too, that bespoke his ethnic heritage. Behind the helter-skelter, improvisational nature of his maturity there was a dogged search for some ordering, synthesizing principle that would make comprehensive sense of chaos, calling to mind that strong tradition of Germanic philosophers of history—Immanuel Kant, Wil-helm Dilthey, Theodor Mommsen, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Marx, and especially Oswald Spengler, a high god in Miller’s pantheon. Yet once he had gotten beyond what he characterized as his period of intellectual stammering, a part of Miller turned against his background with a ferocity that tells us how deep it really went with him. “My people were entirely Nordic,” he would write in Tropic of Capricorn, “which is to say, idiots. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank.”
After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on the shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and then tucked away in drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
According to her son, this mindless mania for order was the work of his mother. On the other hand, the father, a master tailor who ran his own shop, was in many respects a Good Time Charlie who loved his beer and his boon companions and who over the years of Miller’s adolescence and young manhood became a gentle alcoholic. Whatever her original nature may have been, Louise was quite a different sort by the time Miller was able to remember her behavior. Mental illness ran on her side of the family (Lauretta inherited it), and from an early age it had fallen to Louise to create what semblance of normality there could be in her family’s household. The habit carried over into her marriage, and the couple was badly mismatched, ever more so as Henry Senior slid into alcoholism and began to neglect his business. Miller claimed that it wasn’t until he himself had reached the age of fifty that he was able to summon up a single affectionate thought about Louise, and however this may be, it doesn’t take overmuch psychologizing to wonder whether some of his treatment of women, both in life and in art, owes something to his attitude toward the brooding shadow of this authoritarian figure. It was she, he once claimed, who planted the demon of rebellion in his soul at an early age, because whatever he might be doing, he always felt her disapproval.