Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

by Frederick Turner

  Just about the only thing in these pages that retrospectively would suggest the Henry Miller of only three years later is the cruelty of the humor, a bequest to him from American culture’s bedrock. If Clipped Wings was, as he later claimed, bad enough to stiffen his backbone and put sulphur in his blood, Moloch by such logic should have made him feel as if he were sitting on top of the world. It was another very bad book, to be sure, as maybe even he would then have known. But, after all, he had now written an actual, full-length novel under unimaginable pressure. And the payoff was a trip to the legendary Old World, a trip that would take him and his wife far away from her faceless and unnumbered admirers. The fact that June was supposed to have written it and that the money the Millers would use to visit France, Belgium, and eastern Europe had come from a man who was bedding her might not have seemed in that moment of much importance to a man living almost completely within a garish illusion that was beginning to take on distinct aspects of a nightmare.

  Not much is known about the European escape. For a man who’d been dreaming of just such an opportunity for years—tracing Paris’s streets with his dreaming fingers and devouring heaping helpings of Europe’s writers and thinkers—Miller was oddly silent about it once they had come back to Brooklyn, mostly complaining to friends about the hygienic hardships an American faced over there where an indoor toilet seemed something of a novelty. This sounds a bit like the ultra-fastidious Innocents Abroad —published sixty years earlier by a man who wore white suits to visually separate himself from the world’s nastiness.

  The couple found a flat on Brooklyn’s Clinton Street and settled again into what appeared to be the old routine, with June going back to a restaurant where she’d worked before while Miller stayed home to write another novel. Actually, though, there were differences, and what the Millers now began to enact was a dark reconfiguration of a fairy tale in which Beauty goes out to service her bestial customers while the Unpromising Hero is condemned to a tower cell until he can spin the chaff of their life into a story that rescues Beauty from her sexual servitude. This wasn’t, however, the way the tale ultimately turned out. June went back to the Pepper Pot as before, and as before she went to bed with certain of her customers, particularly an insurance man with money to spend on her. Pop, too, was in the picture but not so centrally. By this time June’s drug use, which before had been casual, was deepening toward true dependency, and her behavior, always dramatic and eccentric, had become occasionally very erratic. At the same time, her attitude toward Val’s writing had narrowed to a narcissistic obsession: he must write a novel about her and thus ensure her immortality. Nothing short of this would make her sacrifices worthwhile. This, she apparently felt, was the great book Miller had in him, that vital spark she had intuited the first night in the dance hall. Moloch had served its purpose, but it was after all an apprentice work.

  Miller probably had learned a few valuable lessons in writing it. He’d learned that bigotry, while it was simple enough to express, wasn’t sufficient to sustain an extended work of fiction. You had to have something else going on to engage readers over hundreds of pages. Fiction, at least as he understood it then, was not finally argument. It was story. And what was the story he had to tell if not that of June, this endlessly mysterious, darkly compelling creature who had put him through so much? Actually, something akin to this had already occurred to him a few years back when June had deserted him for Jean and Paris. One day as he sat brooding on this humiliating injustice, he’d begun to type, furiously, feverishly, and before the impulse had spent itself he’d turned out some thirty single-spaced pages about her.

  So with June out hustling at the Pepper Pot, Miller turned back to these notes. But in the same way he had been inspired to write Clipped Wings to demolish the Alger story, now in the manuscript he was calling Lovely Lesbians he began not to immortalize June but instead to ruthlessly expose her layers of lies, her cruel treatment of him. The characters of June (Hildred) and Jean (Vanya) are thus depicted as the enemies of the gelded husband, Tony Bring, callously neglecting him and even psychologically torturing him with their mutual obsession and their bizarre ambition to create a gang of puppets like Count Bruga. Even their occasional concern for poor Tony is negatively portrayed, as when Hildred and Vanya together minister to his hemorrhoids. Daily, Miller writes, “they turned him over on his stomach and doctored his rectum. Between times they lubricated his system so thoroughly and conscientiously that if he had been a Linotype machine or a Diesel engine he would have functioned smoothly for a year to come.” Then the women turn back to each other with their incessant chatter and equally incessant hammering as they whack the puppets into shape. This was hardly what June could have had in mind for her literary monument. Even the title, Lovely Lesbians, was bound to offend her because it caricatured a relationship that to her at least had been vitally important and filled with nuances that Miller grimly ignored in favor of cheap comedy and self-pity.

  There is indeed still too much undigested self-pity in these pages and still too much generalized malice of the sort that makes Moloch such hard reading. Yet there are a few sentences here and there and one or two passages where the writer is able to let it rip, where a combustible combination of anger, grief, and despair allows him access to reaches of his imagination not available to him in Moloch. These are the places where the writer begins to learn how to say—and to mean —”Fuck everything!” Begins to learn how to say it at length and in words no less scabrous but which are stylistically richer.

  And there is a passage near the manuscript’s end that contains one of the keys that eventually would unlock the door that had thus far barred Miller from access to the full range and reach of his talent. In it the broken Tony Bring, whose body is “but a collection of bruises,” thinks to himself that if only he had the necessary solitude and silence, he could reconstruct in exquisite detail every single thing that had ever happened to him, from birth to the present moment. But he doesn’t have either solitude or silence. Instead he has only the hammering and the jawing of the lovely lesbians, busily and brazenly planning their desertion of him for Gay Paree. He will fix them yet, Bring thinks to himself. He will write about them and everything else as well. Writing well and fully will be the ultimate revenge. But not here, not in these pages, where it looks very much as if Miller had exhausted his creative energies, ending the novel with the image, at once bleak and destructive, of all his characters going down in a storm at sea, like the rotten vessels they were.

  Exile

  June couldn’t have been happy about the manuscript in whatever version she saw it. But it is possible that her narcissism combined with her drug use to keep her in some sort of touch with her conviction that Val could yet write the great book about her even if Lovely Lesbians wasn’t it. In any case, she was straight in her mind about one thing: Val had to go. She couldn’t operate with him around the apartment all day. (She might have wanted to use it for business purposes.) And she might also have thought that Miller really could profit by a radical change of scenery that might spark off renewed creativity, whereas here he had sunk into an apathy that kept him in bed much of the day. Having finished his novel and sunk all his characters to the bottom of the sea, he seemed to have lost interest in almost everything except trying to keep tabs on her. The situation was intolerable.

  In the same way she and Jean had begun a conversational promotion of their own escape to Paris in ’27, now in late 1929 she began to promote Europe to Val, talking up Paris and Madrid as creative hot spots. In comparison, New York seemed sterile and gloomy, especially lately: there had been an ominous crash on Wall Street in October, and though things had stabilized somewhat, the country seemed to have gotten a bad case of the jitters. Her question wasn’t so much Why not go to Europe? as it was Why would you stay here? June promised him she could get the money together for passage, and then, somehow, she would periodically wire him funds to keep him going. Soon enough, she would join him, and life would bec
ome authentic in a way it couldn’t be here. It was a hard sell, for Miller was immobilized by June’s web of intrigue—Old World, New World, what the hell difference did it make? When June thrust his steamship ticket on him one day in early 1930 he accepted it much as his beaten Tony Bring might have. And when she further informed him that for unspecified reasons it wouldn’t be convenient for him to spend his last night at home he didn’t put up a fight, only submissively trudged off down the street with his heavy luggage.

  He spent that night walking from one place to another on the East Side, then made his way to Emil Schnellock’s studio in the morning for comfort, for courage, and for the ten bucks his old pal had on hand to see him across the sea. Schnellock went with him down to the docks and saw him aboard the ship in falling snow. From the deck Miller watched America sliding away from him, the world he had once loved, then learned to loathe. To him this was the old world, the known, in all its contradictions, its vulgarity, its untamed landscape, its mindless devotion to what he would call the money god. Ahead, ironically, was a new world about which he knew almost nothing except the high-flown words of its philosophers and writers. While the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic” (as Melville had written of the “Pequod” in Moby-Dick) the lone man went below to his bunk and wept.

  Part Two

  Where the Writers Went

  He was thirty-eight and must have felt twice that, dragging the heavy baggage of his past to a shabby hotel on the Left Bank: the suits the Jewish tailors had cut in his father’s shop; his copy of Leaves of Grass by another Brooklyn guy who’d gotten a late start; and the manuscripts of his two unpublished novels which he couldn’t bear to leave behind but which he must have known made poor bona fides for his literary pretensions.

  No one in the great city was expecting him. He’d met a few people there back in ‘28 with June, but really he hadn‘t a single friend, and, trapped within his primitive French, his chances of making any were slim. He had no papers that would permit him to apply for even the most menial work, and he was here for quite another purpose than to land an odd job like so many of those he’d had in America. In any case, from the perspective of a French employer, a look at his resume would hardly have proved impressive. True, in America a man might have to play many roles on his way up, but Miller’s sole distinction was that he had failed in every one of his. He was, in short, essentially unemployable. If he was very careful he had just enough money to get by for a short time, but he was completely dependent on a wife who had all but booted him out the door of their apartment into the city’s wintry streets. If she failed to wire funds to the American Express office for him, he would have to panhandle, steal, or starve.

  What then could the lone man do to stave off a paralyzing onslaught of the blues but get out of his room and into the streets with notebook and pen, walking great distances and making notes on virtually anything he happened to see, from the life of the cafes to the carcasses of the newly slaughtered horses hanging from the market stall hooks at Les Halles? With these for subject matter, he could at least reach back across the waters to that world he’d left behind, incorporating his observations in long letters, most of them to Emil Schnellock.

  There was a barely suppressed quality of desperation to these letters, evident not only in their torrential lengths and their reiterative suggestion that Emil drop everything to join Miller in Paris; but also in their random piling up of impressions and ruminations, as if Miller was really writing to save his soul. As for poor Emil, he could hardly have been equal to the task of being a faithful pen pal—as he was later to observe in a published reminiscence of this time. No one could have. And if his friend had so radically changed his own life, Schnellock had no similar reasons to do likewise: the successful stay at home, as Crèvecoeur had so long ago observed of the phenomenon of expatriation.

  Miller was also writing to June but rarely received more in return than the occasional terse cable, ordering him to hold on, telling him that more money was on the way. She did manage to send him some occasionally, though not enough to keep him from descending steadily through the layers of the city’s populace, moving to ever cheaper hotels, skipping more and more meals, cadging a drink from a friendly stranger, selling his well-cut suits for a fraction of their worth. At the same time back home, the Depression was tightening its hold almost weekly, and June’s line of work was inherently boom-or-bust under the best of circumstances. The entire situation, Miller wrote Emil’s brother Ned, was as depressing as it was baffling. For one thing, he hadn’t imagined how crippling in a daily way his language deficiency would prove, how it would compound his solitude. But the solitude might not have been quite so crushing for this garrulous man had it not been that within it he could almost hear the sound of his literary failure. The manuscripts mocked him every time he had to pack them up and then unpack them in another of his forced removes; or when carrying some pages to a café where his hand would pause in puzzlement over this passage or that, wondering what the hell was wrong here.

  “Why does nobody want what I write?” he asked Ned. “Jesus, when I think of being 38, and poor, and unknown, I get furious. I refuse to live this way forever. There must be a way out.” But in an ironic way, his presence here in this unknown world seemed to have made that escape even more difficult to find, not less so. At least home, however hateful, had its familiar sights and sounds. Here there weren’t even the old hatreds to orient him, and so in addition to having been rendered speechless and friendless, he had no emotional compass—except his feet, driven here and there by fear.

  It didn’t help that on the surface at least Paris still looked like Gay Paree. It was true that the Roaring Twenties with their throngs of American tourists and expatriate artists were phenomena of the past. But to a passerby, outside in the darkened street, the cafes still looked as crowded and brilliantly lit as ever. Theaters and concert halls were packed. At her exacting copy of an eighteenth-century palazzo in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, the Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles hosted her salons for the well-born and the talented. And as spring came on, lifting clouds and spirits, the grand boulevards began to fill up with flaneurs—those artful strollers whose purpose was to appear bound for nowhere in particular. France, and Paris especially, had apparently handsomely recovered from the Great War.

  Beneath the flossy surfaces, though, the nation was in perilous shape and had not recovered from a war that had largely been fought on French soil. The nation’s infrastructure had been devastated, with railroads, shipping facilities, and more than forty thousand miles of roads badly damaged or destroyed. Eight hundred thousand buildings had been destroyed and razed to the ground. Some of this destruction had been repaired in the years since the armistice, but by no means all of it, and the funds that were to have gone to this gigantic task as reparations from Germany had never amounted to more than a trickle. Within a year of Miller’s arrival Germany’s payments would be permanently suspended.

  In New York and other American cities bread lines and soup kitchens were just becoming features of the national landscape. These weren’t evident in Paris in 1930, but this was mostly because so many of the working men who might have thronged to them were dead or permanently disabled: France had suffered about a million-and-a-half fatalities in the war and another 740,000 severely wounded. Here was a deeper damage to the infrastructure than bridges and rail lines, because it would take a generation and more to repair.

  Very little of this could have been grasped by the newly arrived American for whom the Great War had been at most a great abstraction, a faraway something he wished only to avoid. But the longer he stayed in France, the more the war’s deep-set spiritual consequences became important to him, and eventually they would become literary dynamite like those tons of unexploded ordnance that lay just below the topsoil of the French landscape.

  But here, at the very outset of his explorations, he just walked, took his random notes, wrote his torrential letters home, a
nd scratched at his manuscripts. He poked into alleys and impasses and under the river’s many bridges. He prowled the quarters of the permanently poor—the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Arrondissements. He went to Les Halles at dawn to watch the work of the strongmen—Les Forts —hauling great carcasses on their shoulders. Also, the work of the hookers who hung out in the bars and cafes that ringed Victor Baltard’s vast steel-and-glass marketplace.

  When he took a table with his manuscripts at one of the old hangouts of the expatriates—the Dome, for instance, or Hemingway’s local, La Closerie des Lilas—he was being a bit of a poseur, and part of him knew that. Yet there was something else going on there as he sat, carefully nursing a coffee or a glass of wine, something he may not have known about himself, but which was proof against his many poses, his masks and disguises, his evasions and indecisions and prevarications. And this was a tough, knotty core of artistic integrity that made him show up for work before he even understood what the “work” was—way back there in Brooklyn when he had answered an obscure prompting and hauled his antediluvian desk from the tailor shop to his apartment, if only to sit at it in a kind of pre-artistic paralysis, wondering how it was that the dross of life could be transmogrified into imperishable passages of literature. It was this same core of integrity that was to save him in Paris, that kept him roving the city, taking his notes, and writing those letters bristling with arcana, autobiographical excursions, great slabs hacked out of books he found intriguing, as if he himself were an epistolary version of one of Les Forts, toting his raw learning, his needs and aspirations, on his back. It was this that saved him from surrendering to despair. And it was what saved him as well from becoming just another of those dreary dregs of the old expat scene, the ones you saw on the terrace of Le Dôme or the Lilas, talking endlessly, hopelessly of the great novel they were going to write, the great picture they were going to paint. Waverly Root, an expat himself who wrote for the Paris edition of Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, passed by these types on his way to work at the outset of the 1930s. They were always going to do great things, he said, just as soon as they finished their beer. “Unfortunately,” Root observed dryly, “the beer never ran out.”15 This was not to be Henry Miller’s fate, any more than it was to become just another worn cog in the American economic meat grinder.