Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

by Frederick Turner

  Fraenkel’s flat was at the end of Villa Seurat, a short impasse in a neighborhood of the Fourteenth that had become popular with artists. (Just behind Villa Seurat, there was a street called Rue des Artistes.) Dali, Andre Derain, Antonin Artaud, and Tsuguharu Foujita had lived hereabouts, though, characteristically, while he stayed with Fraenkel Miller evidently had little if any contact with them. The area was seedy but just short of rough-and-tumble, a good place for meditative walks and with a brightly lit, capacious Alsatian brasserie nearby—just the sort of place Miller loved to work in.21

  While he stayed with Fraenkel, Miller’s duties were substantially those he’d had at Osborn’s: to clean, to cook a bit, and to do some typing for Fraenkel. Also, to listen to Fraenkel, whose elaborate “death philosophy” Miller had drilled into him on a daily basis. Miller evidently didn’t mind the philosophizing, and indeed a remnant of it eventually provided him with the opening lines of Tropic of Cancer: it was well worth it for a stable place to live and work, and during the daytime the place was quiet. But in addition to giving the impoverished transient a roof for a time, Fraenkel provided some other valuable services as well. For one thing, he read enough of Crazy Cock to confirm what its author had by now strongly suspected: that it was indeed vile crap. Fraenkel told Miller he should waste no more time trying to rescue it. His other service was more oblique but of greater importance.

  Fraenkel was something of a people collector, one reason why Lowenfels had brought Miller to his attention. Fraenkel found the American an authentic character and remarkably representative of his culture, and in various ways he let him know this. Fraenkel may have been a crackpot, one-note philosopher, and later Miller would make savage fun of him. But at this delicately poised moment in Miller’s artistic development, the cranky admiration this deeply cultured man had for him was highly important because it was a validation of what Miller himself had been moving toward in his letters home: that he was in truth an original, probably even an aboriginal. You are your own best subject, Fraenkel in essence told his guest: forget philosophy, forget being a thinker, forget the conventions of the novel. Just be yourself and write out of that.

  For a while now Miller had been writing up his notes on Paris. At Fraenkel’s, these scattered, random pieces began to take on shape and an idiosyncratic kind of coherency as Miller sensed they might make some kind of a book. He spent more time at the typewriter, less time wandering about, and still less time fussing over Crazy Cock.

  When he was at the machine, he hammered at it with a ferocity that startled the visitors who dropped by at day’s end to smoke, drink, and talk philosophy with Fraenkel. There in the midst of it all sat Miller at the machine, a cigarette in his mouth, a glass of wine at his elbow, typing away just as if he were in some tranquil setting—and perhaps for him now this was a species of tranquility. Alfred Perlés, who came around often, thought Miller might have been the fastest typist he’d ever seen, and Perlès had worked in a number of newsrooms. The painter Roger Klein recalled to Brassaϊ that Miller typing sounded like a machine gun, a simile that would have pleased the typist himself if Klein had repeated it to him. In another description, Klein said Miller reminded him of a “secretary practicing scales at a speed-typing competition.” And the sheets that flew from the machine, Klein exclaimed to Brassaϊ: “Did you ever look closely at them? Not one erasure or type-over!” The stuff just poured out as if Miller had hooked a tap right up to the source. At that time when he felt he might very well be hot on the trail of something new, dangerous, and fearfully exciting, Miller might have been composing in the mode later made famous by Jack Kerouac and the Beats—”First thought, best thought.” But despite what Roger Klein might have believed at that time, Brassaϊ knew that later his friend would spend many hours revising those pages that seemed to fly out of his typewriter.22 For now, however, in Villa Seurat, Miller was in no mood for revisions. They could wait. When Fraenkel told him he was going to sublet the apartment, Miller moved back in with Perlès at the Hotel Central, and it was from there that he exultantly wrote to Emil: “I start tomorrow on the Paris book: first person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!”

  Perlès came to Miller’s rescue yet again at the end of that summer—someone was always there for him now it seemed—getting him part-time work at the Tribune. Working out of the basement of the paper’s Right Bank building, Miller proofread stock market quotations. The paper was the poorest paying of the three English language dailies in Paris, and the work itself wasn’t that much better than being a file clerk for the cement company in New York. Yet rather than being enraged by his evident lack of progress, Miller found that on the whole he rather enjoyed the job. For one thing, though the pay was meager, it was better than begging or feeling beholden in a daily way to someone, as he had been to Osborn. It gave him some walking-around money, and his needs remained minimal. Then too the work was almost completely mindless, leaving him the occasional odd moment to invent something in his head or to remember some detail, some incident of his life that he could potentially use. There were as well some interesting characters to hang out with after hours.

  One was Wambly Bald, who turned out a daily column, “La Vie de Boheme,” about the city’s café life, one installment of which had in fact featured Miller, whom Bald depicted as a sort of literary clochard whose only earthly care was to find a way to brush his teeth once in a while. Bald was a sour cynic with a broad streak of cruelty to his character. When Miller would put the touch on him—which happened often enough when Bald, Miller, and Perlès had knocked off work for the night—he might fling a few coins into the gutter for the pleasure of watching Miller retrieve them like a dog. He was equally cruel —and relentless—in his treatment of women, and after sating his cold lust on one of them he would detail the encounter to his companions, complete with unsparing characterizations of the meaninglessness of these experiences, how apt a metaphor they all were for the whole of life itself. Miller didn’t appear to mind Bald’s treatment of him any more than he minded Bald’s treatment of women or his job: it was all grist for his mill now, as almost everything else was as well. He had become convinced that he could write, that he was in fact a real, honest-to-god writer, one who had an unshakeable hold on his subject: his life here and now on these desperate, crime-spattered streets. And so to dive into their gutters for a couple of centimes or to go up to Bald’s flat to shine his shoes was fine. These experiences would find their ways into the Paris book and give it their gamy, gritty flavoring, like biting into a bit of buckshot in a savory rabbit stew.

  He was still stalked by his fear of starvation and would remain so for some time to come, but even here he had learned how to manage it and had recently improvised a scheme that in the short term anyway would supply some reassuring predictability to the eating problem. He had drawn up a list of friends and written to each of them, asking if they would be willing to give him a meal once a week, just one. Surely, he argued, this wasn’t too much to ask. As it turned out, it was not, his friends being entirely willing, and so now Miller not only had his dinners taken care of, he also had yet another juicy piece of material to write up, joining it in a deliberately haphazard fashion to all the others he was piling up in those early morning hours when he and Perlès had at last arrived back at the Hotel Central while the market was beginning to wind down at Les Halles, the worn prostitutes might be meeting up with their maquereaux, their pimps, to settle accounts, and dawn was spreading itself over the roofs and chimney pots and spectral spires of the city.

  At the end of September, June returned to Paris, and to Miller she appeared almost completely captive to her fantasies, which included a book she claimed to have just written called Happier Days. She was thinner, her clothes, too, and her skin was ashen. And to her Val was even more changed than she had found him on her previous visit, evidently no longer interested in Crazy Cock, which was to have been her monument, but talking excitedly instead of a new book about his life here. She instinctivel
y disliked the sound of it. Val was also talking of a woman who he said might have potential as a patroness, but what he said about Anais Nin seemed to have more to do with ardor than art.23

  It was Richard Osborn who had introduced Miller to Nin. Osborn worked in the same bank as Nin’s husband, Hugh (Hugo) Guiler, and had done some legal work for Nin in connection with her recently completed study of D. H. Lawrence. Hugo began coming home with Os-born’s tales of his picaresque companion who, so Osborn claimed, was destined for literary fame if he didn’t die first. Nin had an appetite for the offbeat and the exotic, both of which she herself was, and soon enough she invited Osborn and his friend to the home the couple had at Louveciennes just outside the city. That evening she found Miller’s behavior and manners a satisfying match for Os-born’s colorful descriptions: he seemed to her a sort of genial savage with an astonishing lust for everything—food, wine, furnishings, the grass in the garden. In the diary she had been keeping since girlhood, she noted that Miller was “writing a book one thousand pages long which has everything in it that is left out of other novels.” Shortly after this, when she had a chance to read something of his—on Buñuel—she found the writing “flamboyant, torrential, chaotic, treacherous, and dangerous.” Profoundly perceptive from an early age, Nin may well have sensed this early that in Miller she had come across the archetypal American her hero Lawrence had written about, in his brilliant Studies in Classic American Literature, whose soul was “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Here was a man who had somehow escaped the common delusions of his native culture, the man who, so Lawrence had prophesied, would one day write something genuinely new, explosive. From what he told her, Nin knew that Miller wasn’t just talk, that he was even then attempting the perilous passage between literature as he had known it and a literature that so far as he knew had yet to be written—chaotic, treacherous, dangerous, savage. For her to be in the company of such a man was thrilling. She was, for all her rich and largely unsuspected interior life, living both literally and metaphorically on the outskirts of the great city where the artistic action was, to all appearances the suburban housewife. And here, courtesy of the dissolute Osborn, was a real renegade, dropped into her garden. Showing him around it, she found herself wanting nothing so much as to assist him in his passage, to give him things—money, a place to work. And she might also have been thinking that here was a man who could inspire her as well, who was emotionally prepared to understand her own artistic aspirations and help her to realize them.

  Whatever the precise nature of Miller’s second dinner invitation may have been, when he came his wife came with him. “Henry came to Louveciennes with June,” Nin wrote in her diary, and as June materialized out of the gloom of the garden, Nin said she “saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes.”24 Yet by the end of the evening June’s erratic behavior, her obvious mendacity, had turned Nin away—but only temporarily. Shortly after this dinner, June returned to America, most likely to get additional funds from her admirers. But soon she was back, and the two women entered into a smoldering relationship that, if it never became physical, certainly went right up to the borderline. In an eerie reprise of what had drawn Miller to June, Nin was intrigued as much by the other woman’s layers of disguise and mystery as by her unearthly beauty. She wondered whether what June really wanted most from the relationship was for Nin to write about her and so supply a corrective to what June feared would be Miller’s slanderous fabrications in the new book he was so excited about. Crazy Cock had been disappointing enough. But whatever it was she was after and whoever she might be, June was a “superb and inspiring character,” Nin felt, “one who makes every other woman insipid.”

  Once she understood that June was all artifice, one layer atop the next, Nin was free to surrender to her remarkable seductiveness without attempting to find the “truth” about the woman—a psychological maneuver Miller himself could never make. June was always talking, riddling, conspiring, her voice rich and breathless, her eyes drugged. By February 1932, with Miller down in Dijon with a miserable teaching job but continuing his courtship of Nin in voluminous letters and June once again back in the States, Nin could admit that she was trapped “between the beauty of June and the genius of Henry.” In differing ways she found herself devoted to both of them, but “I love June madly, unreasonably. Henry gives me life, June gives me death. I must choose, and I cannot.”

  She was still feeling this way when Miller asked her for train fare back to Paris at the end of the month: he’d heard from Perlès that there was a full-time job waiting for him at the Tribune, and he was desperate to leave dreary Dijon for Paris and Nin. She sent him what he needed. Miller abruptly, unceremoniously left his teaching post, moved back into the Central, and took up his duties at the paper, working a night shift in the financial department. Within days of his return he and Nin were lovers.

  The sexual part of the relationship bore certain resemblances to Miller’s previous ones. But the sexual adventurer who had begun somewhat tentatively with the older Pauline Chouteau was by now well seasoned and knew what he wanted from a woman: plenty of action; acrobatics that might have provided useful additions to the Kama Sutra; and all of this accompanied by a steady stream of dirty talk that Nin for all her sophistication had not heard before. Certainly she had not heard it from her somewhat staid banker husband. It was shocking, something of an aphrodisiac, and psychologically soiling in its relentless-ness. One afternoon after attending a concert by herself in the city, Nin felt cleansed by the experience, freed for the moment from Miller’s world of “shit, cunt, prick, bastard, crotch, bitch …” Yet she was to willingly continue to be a denizen of that verbal and artistic underworld for another couple of years. It was as if she was compelled to live out the fictional career of Severine Serizy, the wealthy Parisian housewife in Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel, Belle de Jour, who takes a perverse pleasure in the sadomasochistic tricks she turns by day in a whorehouse before returning each evening to her sedate marriage. The examples Nin records of Miller’s talk leave nothing to the imagination. Neither does her description of a sexual encounter with him in the garden at Louveciennes where he suddenly attacked her, throwing her to the ground and making violent love to her. Miller the writer often wore the guise of civilized humanity, she wrote, but “that day I was fucked by a cannibal.”

  Throughout the relationship there were, of course, moments of great tenderness and trust as well as an artistic coupling that was productive for them both. But early on Nin doubted she truly loved Henry and thought she never would. Even her sexual climaxes with him felt somehow short of the high peak she so ardently sought. There was something in her lover that unsettled her in her soul, as if he really was a savage and not a human of her world. Maybe it was that his fierce, lonely struggles to make himself into a writer had stripped him not only of his pretensions and illusions but also of his basic humanity, leaving him all writer, all artist. Without his writing, she wrote in the fall of 1933,

  I don’t know what Henry would be… . People who know him as gentle, wonder at the writing. Yet sometimes I have the feeling that this gentleness is not entirely genuine. It is his way of charming. Of disarming. It allows his entry anywhere, he is trusted. It is like a disguise of the observant, the critical, the accusing man within. His severity is disguised. His hatreds and his rebellions. They are not apparent, or acted out. It is always a shock to others. I am aware at times, while he speaks in a mellow way to others, of that small, round, hard photographic lens in his blue eyes.

  The entry is remarkable in several ways. To begin with, it is remarkably perceptive, especially when considered in context, for here, after all, was a woman with a substantial emotional involvement with this man, yet capable of drawing back to see him in pitilessly sharp detail. Clearly, she too had that photographic lens in her own eye. Then, her description of his hidden detachment gives
us a glimpse of the Miller who had learned how to become a ruthless truth-teller, who had transmogrified himself from the self-indulgent, self-sorry literary oaf of Moloch and Crazy Cock, capable now of looking on scenes of bottomless depravity and despair without flinching or turning his head aside. Finally, Nin’s snapshot of the merciless observer behind the mask of the New World rube reminds us of that broad, dark-hued swath of American folklore in which the isolate killer Lawrence had written about hides behind the laconic jokes of the Yankee, the robust jollity of the boatman, the comic qualities of Mose, the Bowery B’hoy.

  The job at the Tribune didn’t last long, but for once Miller didn’t lose it because of his own negligence; instead he was a victim of the deepening Depression. However, he now had Nin who was happy to supply him with periodic cash gifts. These were sufficient to allow him and Perlès to move into a flat in the working-class district of Clichy. To Miller who had learned to love Paris’s most sordid quarters the new neighborhood was dull, but Perlès loved it because to him it was wonderfully modern, and their apartment had comforts like separate bedrooms and up-to-date bathroom fixtures.

  From Avenue Anatole France Miller once again trained his epistolary guns on Emil, writing that he now had solid financial assistance from a source he must not disclose and that this was allowing him to work full bore on what he was calling The Last Book. The manuscript, he said, rather resembled Emil’s great accordion-like leather valise and into it he was throwing all manner of things, whether clean or soiled, ironed or pressed, tender or terrible. The order—or the disorder—was his to decide, and he had discovered that recklessness was his best artistic virtue. He would employ it to the utmost, even if it should ultimately cause him to be expelled from this country he had come to love. “I will never become a European,” he said, “but thank God, I am no longer an American. I am one of those things you call an ‘expatriate,’ a voluntary exile. I have no country, no frontiers, no taxes to pay, no army to fight for.” This last line in its defiant tone, its philosophical anarchism, as well as its cadence would survive all the versions of The Last Book to appear in the opening passage of Tropic of Cancer, though some of the wording would change. He was, he told his old friend, going for broke now, and when he had thrown everything that came to him into the valise—and broken all the rules—he would consider the thing finished and would dedicate it to Buñuel who had opened his eyes.