Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

by Frederick Turner

  As if he were watching the world exclusively from the living room window or the steps of the house on Driggs, the small boy’s earliest memories were of the immediate surroundings and the resident odors: the fish house next door; the neatly kept house and yard of the German neighbors on the other side; the tin factory whose smoke-blackened laborers appeared to him as slaves in hell; the smells of the tanyard, the gas mains, and the dung and urine of the workhorses.

  When he went outside it was always in the company of his mother who kept him firmly in hand, a practice that continued well after his contemporaries had graduated to a greater freedom. But inevitably, even a monster of control such as he represented Louise to have been would have to let go, allowing little Henry to begin his own explorations of his Williamsburg world. And if in the beginning that world would have seemed to him exclusively German, he was soon to find that it was in fact a rich and gamy ethnic stew with strong flavorings of Irish, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Syrians, and, increasingly as the century came to a close, eastern European Jews. On street corners and in vacant lots; in vest pocket parks and down at the docks; on the sidewalks outside saloons, butcher shops, the veterinarian’s office, and a burlesque theater known as “The Bum,” where Millie de Leon drove grown men mad, the boy was quickly toughened up. He learned techniques of self-defense, what it took to fit in, taking on the protective coloration of the corner cliques and the neighborhood gangs. He got his first black eye from a tough Mick named Eddie Carney. With a few cronies he caught a glimpse of a little girl’s private parts and watched the vet geld a stallion. Outside the saloons he inhaled the heady perfume of beer, sawdust, and tobacco smoke, and learned what drunkenness looked like.

  Williamsburg was filled with folkloric personalities, and the more colorful they were, the more outrageous, violent, even deranged, the more the boy was drawn to them. There were characters like Apple Annie and Clarence the Cop who were just that—characters who could have no other dimensions to them for the boy. Others he knew better, like Crazy Willie who barked like a dog and masturbated in public. There were also the tough guys—the sports—who swaggered through their world of the “saloon, the race track, bicycles, fast women and trot horses,” as he was later to style it. His personal roster of these folk heroes included Stanley Borowski, Matt Owen, the great Johnny Paul, and Lester Reardon, “who, by the mere act of walking down the street, inspired fear and admiration.” And there were Rob Ramsay and Jack Law-son. Rob Ramsay came back from the war covered with decorations, and then soon enough covered himself with his own drunken vomit until one fine day in an act of supreme herohood he walked off the end of a pier and drowned himself. Of Jack Lawson we know only that when Miller was twelve this best of friends died of some unspecified illness and that Miller was so glad Jack was now out of his misery that he claims he “let a loud fart” right beside the coffin where Jack’s relatives were “bawling like sick monkeys.”

  There were no heroic figures in Miller’s family, but a fair share of mental defectives and misfits, beginning with Lauretta, who never developed intellectually much past the level of a ten-year-old. Louise’s desperate efforts to browbeat an education into her daughter were a continuing source of anguish to Miller, who was often a helpless witness to them. Somewhere in this protracted, painful process he developed a coping technique that would become an essential part of his character: when his mother’s efforts at home-schooling Lauretta would reach a hysterical level and the slapping started, he would make some sort of inward, imaginative escape to a place where the slaps and Lauretta’s frightened outcries weren’t present any longer and the boy was impervious and indifferent to the suffering there in front of him.

  In his maturity he was never able to make these scenes between mother and daughter seem comic, something he was able to do with so much other unpromising family material. But the rest of the family became, quite literally, another story, and in his cruelly hilarious recollections of them we hear the distant echo of such folk figures as Mike Fink asking whether the whiskey cup had been spilled after killing his friend Carpenter. Confronted with what he came to regard as the crowd of freaks and halfwits that made up his family tree, Miller created out of chaos and failure, illness and insanity, a group portrait that is funny in the way the grotesque is funny—at considerable cost. Among those who got together on almost any occasion, he wrote in Black Spring, there was

  cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery, mendacity, buggery, incest, paralysis, tapeworms, abortions, triplets, idiots, drunkards, ne’er-do-wells, fanatics, sailors, tailors, watchmakers, scarlet fever, whooping cough, meningitis, running ears, chorea, stutterers, jailbirds, dreamers, storytellers, bartenders… . The morgue and the insane asylum.

  Despite all, it was amazing how jolly this pitiful group could be, regardless of the weather (whether it was zero or below) or the circumstance (a death, the outbreak of another war, or the tin factory catching fire again). There they were, laughingly gathered around the festive table crammed with “sauerkraut with kartoffelklöze and sour black gravy … with apple sauce and figs from Smyrna, with bananas big as blackjacks,” everything except a finger bowl.

  Neither in his extended family nor in the little unit of it living on Driggs were there any who were actively involved in the arts, though Louise had once played a couple of musical instruments, and Henry himself learned to play the piano passably. Paintings were scarce around the house as were books, except in Henry’s room. Very early he showed a bookish inclination that his parents indulged with gifts of Robinson Crusoe, G. A. Henty—the boys’ favorite of that era—H. Rider Haggard, and The Adventures of Pinocchio, whose besetting sin was his chronic lying. But if neither Henry Senior nor Louise were readers, museum-goers, or much interested in serious theater, still they had an Old World respect for culture. The arts were a good thing, and they knew that many great writers had written in their native tongue, even if they themselves had never read them. They knew also how important it was that they themselves master the new tongue of their world, and in their household they had the example of Grandpa Nieting, who spoke the beautiful English he’d learned in London on his way to America. Because of this he was a respected member of Brooklyn’s German-American community.

  As for little Henry, once he had been sprung from the household with its German language and customs, he quickly became adept at the gutter talk of Williamsburg. This must have been pretty rough stuff, because when an older girl happened to hear him using it she was so shocked she collared him and dragged him off to the police station. This might have been the first time his use of language got him in trouble with the law, though it certainly was not the last.10

  Beginning the Streets of Sorrow

  These early years, Miller was to recall ever afterward, were ones in which he was having a grand time because he “really didn’t give a fuck about anything.” By this he apparently meant that he was yet young enough that no one expected him to have a goal in life. But the interesting thing here is that what Miller recalled of himself at about the age of eight was really what he said of himself near the end of his life when he was a living legend who could say that if his fame had permitted it, he would do nothing, “and I mean absolutely nothing.” While his sister remained forever locked in early childhood by her mental illness, Miller himself, though quite bright, remained forever in certain important respects a kind of Huck Finn character whose goal in life was to avoid growing up, to avoid as much as possible what the world called “work” and “responsibility,” so that he might live a life of anarchical freedom in some mental territory beyond the reaches of civilization. He never saw himself “getting ahead,” laboriously climbing the steep way to success as his world commonly measured it. Instead he wanted to follow his own path, and that path led always away from the beaten one, the one that America had cut with such fabulous speed and energy and now was hell-bent on pointing out to the rest of the world.

  This sort of indolent insouciance becam
e harder for the boy to carry off when he was only nine, at which point his family decided Williamsburg was changing for the worse with the steady influx of Italians and eastern European Jews. His parents wanted to find a more stable, homogeneous German-American neighborhood and found it in Brooklyn’s Bushwick section in 1900. Here was a body blow to little Henry, ending what he always felt was an urban idyll he would have been happy to have lived endlessly. The new neighborhood represented new challenges for him and new gangs whose tribal rituals he would have to learn, beginning on the day a kid placed a chip on the newcomer’s shoulder, meaning he would have to fight or be ostracized. Instead, Miller told the other kids that he knew none of them and therefore had nothing against them. There was nothing for him to fight about, he said. Apparently his stance was sufficiently peculiar to buy him amnesty, and he was accepted as an eccentric—precisely the sort of character that appealed to Miller himself. This, however, didn’t affect his homesickness for Williamsburg; he missed the old neighborhood with a deep poignancy and would always refer to the new house on Decatur Street as the “street of early sorrows.”

  At P.S. 85 he was regarded as a good student, though often bored and therefore mischievous. He didn’t have to work hard at all to master the rote learning he was assigned and had plenty of time to continue his own unsu-pervised reading. He made a close friend of Emil Schnel-lock, whose draftsmanship everyone admired, including the teacher who often asked Emil to come forward to draw on the blackboard. Here was a form of distinction new to Miller: maybe you didn’t have to be a tough guy, a rock thrower, a street fighter, to stand out. Maybe you could use your imagination. Yet when it came time to move on to high school, Miller chose to leave Emil and the others behind, going back to Williamsburg and its Eastern District High.

  He found the old neighborhood much changed, just as his family had feared. There were now a great many more Jews than he’d remembered, so many in fact that he and his kind were outnumbered, an unpleasant situation for him that gave rise to a persistent, virulent anti-Semitism that later he would try to disguise as a form of envy, even going so far as to suggest that there must have been Jewish blood in his own lineage. To an extent, however, Miller’s anti-Semitism needs to be seen in a larger cultural context. What now might be regarded as bigotry and unacceptable ethnic slurring was then a common and historic fact of American life, and if it was not present at the very outset of the American experiment, this was only because immigration from places other than the British Isles was not yet the huge phenomenon it was to become. “Mick,” “kraut,” “dago,” “polack,” “chink,” and so on were casually employed by adults and their children. “Nigger” and “kike” were used as well, but these latter terms, while they continued to be common at the street level, gradually dropped from acceptable usage.11 Miller continued to use “nigger” in his work at least until World War II, apparently regarding the term as no more offensive than “fuck” and “cunt.” Compared to his published remarks about Jews, however, “nigger” seems almost offhand, and the boy who felt out of place in his old neighborhood grew up to write an early novel, Moloch, or, This Gentile World, in large part to ruminate on what was for him the insidious mystery ofJewishness.

  The high school in the old neighborhood was probably no better academically than the one Schnellock and the others attended in Bushwick. Miller most keenly felt the lack of cultural context in the presentation of subject matter: facts and events were taught rather as if they were Platonic absolutes instead of living, interrelated aspects of the human story. Still, he had his own private curriculum, anchored in a complete set of the Harvard Classics his parents had given him, and he supplemented this with an enthusiastic engagement with the popular entertainments of his time and place: six-day bicycle races; wrestling and boxing matches; and the theater, especially burlesque, which he fell hard for with his first exposure to it around the age of fifteen.

  Though the origins of the form lie in Old World folk performances and folk-based forms like commedia dell’arte that made fun of class distinctions, burlesque in America achieved unprecedented popularity, especially in New York in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The reasons for this lie mainly in the character of the country, for burlesque as it evolved in America played to deeply ingrained predilections. It was crude and violent in its “dramaturgy.” It shamelessly catered to the endemic bigotry of the national culture. It savagely mocked high art, particularly music and literature. It also made fun of all kinds of misfortune, from physical deformity to poverty. Finally and increasingly it was sexually suggestive—bawdy, intensely teasing, while stopping just short of being pornographic. The Brooklyn boy loved it in all its tawdriness, its cruel humor, its prejudices, its sexuality. In the darkness of the hall and the focused lights of the stage, in the deliberate thinness of the make-believe, things otherwise off-limits were not simply allowed, they were celebrated. Here the masks were joyfully hurled aside and the knock-down power of a frontier-formed culture was in plain view. Here, Miller felt, were American realities, indeed deeply human ones, and it is possible that there never was for him another form of entertainment as satisfying on so many fronts. He learned to love high art and the culture of the Old World and the Orient. But burlesque wasn’t art; it was life itself, in the raw, and this was what one day he would aspire to reproduce in his own writing.

  In 1909 higher education was hardly the automatic next step for high school graduates, especially not for children of Henry Miller’s socioeconomic class. After high school most such kids picked up a lunch pail or began punching a time clock. But because of his superior academic performance Miller seemed like a good candidate for college, and his German instructor recommended he try for a scholarship at Cornell. When he didn’t get it he made a half-hearted try at the City College of New York but soon dropped out. By 1910 he was punching a clock, just like every boy he’d associated with in high school, commuting across the river to lower Manhattan where he was a file clerk for a cement company. Such a development might well have meant that the world would never hear the name Henry Miller. But Miller was cut from a different cloth, stubbornly unwilling to do what was then popularly referred to as “the world’s work.” So Miller, the failed Ivy Leaguer, the college dropout, the time-server working in literature’s mortuary—filing dead records for a cement company—refused to submit to his cultural and personal fate. Instead, he embarked on a daring, audacious course, one that defied all the conventions of his background: he began a lifelong career as a sexual adventurer; and at the same time he determined that, despite what college faculties might think, he would continue his self-directed studies, reinventing himself as a man of culture, able to converse on a wide variety of subjects like his heroes, Spengler and Arthur Schopenhauer.

  The World of Sex

  The sexual adventures began in a manner then common enough: he became one of a group of young men who found courage in numbers when they paid their occasional visits to the numerous whorehouses in Manhattan’s Herald Square area. His initiation into the mysterious world of sex thus came at a price—several actually. There was, of course, the entrance fee. And then there followed the almost inevitable doses of gonorrhea—though these were regarded as a badge of initiation into the secret order of full manhood and as such could be boasted about at the office, the bar, the sports arena. And then, the final, most lasting price: that conflicted attitude toward women and sex that was also contracted in the houses, a combination of assumed male superiority, crass usage, and genuine affection for the girls that had at its base a substantial something of the son’s worshipful regard for the mother figure.

  Quickly, he graduated to a more involved sexual relationship when he took up with a woman he met while giving ham-handed piano lessons in Brooklyn for thirty-five cents an hour. Pauline Chouteau, as she was then calling herself, was old enough to have a grown son of her own, but she found “Harry,” as she called him, irresistibly attractive, and as for Miller, he found the daily sex she provid
ed a marvelous antidote to his deadening job. Soon enough, however, he grew alarmed at the frequency and violence of their coupling: on the floor, in the bathtub, on the piano stool—wherever the frenzy found them. This was so constant that he began to keep a kind of calendar of their carnality, checking off the days when he’d had sex. But then, finding no blank spaces on it that would indicate abstinence, he abandoned the shameful record. Even with her son in the next room where he lay dying of tuberculosis, Pauline herself was delighted to stay aboard this sexual express. And if Miller had his private misgivings, they weren’t enough to cause him to get off, either, and so when his parents gave him the tuition money to enter Cornell, he took it to Pauline’s—only a few blocks down Decatur—and hid out there until he’d gone through it all, at which point he shamefacedly returned to his parents’ house and confessed all. They already knew, his comings and goings at Pauline’s having been reported by the neighbors.