6. One version of Quick’s legend has it that when the Indians learned he had died they dug up his corpse, hacked it to pieces, and distributed these among their villages. Alas for them: Quick had died of smallpox, and so in death, he’d gotten his hundred and then some. Here is a specimen of the kind of humor the frontier experience contributed to the national culture.
7. Many years ago when I was on a magazine assignment in Bara-taria Bay a descendant of Nez Coupe Chighizola took me to the old pirate’s crumbling grave. It was really empty now, he confided, because a hurricane had long ago “washed his carcass out to sea.”
8. There is not much that links Miller to Robert Penn Warren, though they were roughly contemporaries. But surely Miller would have agreed with the autobiographical voice of Warren’s poem “American Portrait: Old Style,” where he remarks: “and in that last summer / I was almost ready to learn / What the imagination is—it is only / The lie we must learn to live by, if ever / We mean to live at all.”
9. In his brilliant introductory essay to Grove Press’s first American edition of Tropic of Cancer, Karl Shapiro says Miller remained German to the end. “I have often thought,” Shapiro continues, “that Germans make the best Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans.”
10. To be sure, we can never know precisely the tone and content of the talk of those Brooklyn boys of circa 1900. However, my own experiences of a south Chicago boyhood during World War II and afterward tell me that one of the ways a boy fit in with a neighborhood gang was to learn to use foul language and to sprinkle it liberally over his conversation. Surely the South Side can’t have been unique in this. Not two years ago in my adopted hometown of Santa Fe I jokingly greeted an old friend at the service station one morning. “Go fuck yourself, Pat,” I said as he came through the station door. “Did you hear that?” Pat asked the owner, Mike, without breaking stride. “I heard it,” Mike replied. “That’s nothing. When I was a kid in Astoria [Queens], you didn’t say, ‘Good morning, Pat,’ ‘Good morning, Fred,’ when you saw one of your buddies on your way to the bus. You gave him the finger—way up high like this. And you hollered at him, ‘Fuck you!’ If he didn’t do that back to you, you knew something was wrong and that sooner or later you were gonna have to straighten it out with him.”
11. The ethnic slurs used throughout the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino (2009), while they are doubtless exaggerated for comic as well as thematic effect, are certainly not an unrealistic portrayal of this aspect of our culture.
12. The use of the word “outlaw” and his self-characterization as an “enemy of society” clearly belong to a chronologically later time than the reminiscence as a whole, one when Miller had lived long enough and achieved enough to begin regarding himself as a character, even as a work of art. In 1913 in the orchards of California this singular talent wouldn’t have seemed a problem to him; it would instead have been protective, providing “Yorkie” with a cachet, tender hands, indifferent work habits, and all.
13. One is reminded here of Miller’s artistic predecessor, Twain, who as a boy spied through the keyhole on the postmortem of the dead king, his father, and then much later wrote up a blazing, unsparing account of it. That account hasn’t survived because William Dean Howells, who read it, urged that it be burned. The point here is that Twain’s artistic impulse was to write what he’d seen, but subsequently he was persuaded to destroy it. Miller’s description of his father asleep and snoring with his mummified face and blubbering lips is also unsparing, but he kept it and published it.
14. For a very long time now artists in various media have been trying to find a way back to some imagined Adamic state of spontaneity where no shadow falls between inspiration and execution. In painting, the discovery in the 1940s of decorated Paleolithic caves in France and Spain seemed to authenticate a period in human history where art truly was spontaneous, and the horses and aurochs simply flowed out of the artists’ hands onto the rocky canvases. As we now know, these brilliant representations did not “flow.” In Chinese and Japanese calligraphy where the artist’s hand appears to be working much too rapidly to be guided by conscious thought, it is in fact being guided by a painstakingly acquired knowledge of the way it is done —by tradition, in other words. So, too, technologically sophisticated analysis of the Peche Merle cave in the Dordogne leads to the conclusion that the artists knew how the horses and mammoths ought to look before committing the first stroke. The process is convincingly illustrated in Jeanne-Pierre Baux’s documentary film Prehistoric Art in the Quercy Region (Vanves, France, 1999).
15 . Many months thereafter, when Miller held a part-time job at the paper, Root met him but never knew him well.
16. In a New York Review of Books essay on the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition of Van Gogh’s letters and accompanying illustrations, Richard Dorment makes the salient point for us about Miller’s artistic situation in Paris at the beginning of the ‘30s. “Though the act of creation is highly personal,” he writes, “it rarely happens in isolation… . The unrecognized genius who dies alone in his garret is largely a myth.” The Van Gogh revealed in letters, sketches, and paintings was no solitary madman, Dorment says, but instead a thoughtful artist well aware of art history and what his contemporaries were doing. Many years before, Miller had come to the same conclusion about Van Gogh in The Books in My Life (1952). As for Miller himself, he was far too gregarious to have remained alone in Paris. He made friends, and by the time he left at the outset of World War II he had quite a few of them. But he had very few friends who were writers, none who were trying to do what he was. His path toward Tropic of Cancer was in many significant ways his own, which accounts in part for the singularity of the book’s voice, vision, and imagery. The Parisian avant-garde opened his eyes, but what he saw was singular.
17. Over the nine years he spent in France, Miller gradually acquired a substantial knowledge of French history and culture and learned to speak and write the language passably. But his understanding of France never remotely approached his astonishing grasp of his native culture.
18. Customarily, he spent it on cigarettes, coffee, wine, postage, and the metro.
19. Years later, he remembered his audience to have been the American painter John Nichols, one of the regulars at the Auguste Bartholdi flat, who was working on a portrait of Miller that depicted him as a savage being.
20. In recent years a spirited debate has been joined about exactly what constitutes the purely documentary in still photography and cinematography, some of it centering on the work of two of America’s finest documentarians, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The great Robert Doisneau sometimes posed his human subjects in his documentary photographs of Paris, something Brassaϊ appears not to have done in his nighttime shots of the city’s life.
21. Le Zeyer is still there and still dishing out choucroute and seafood.
22. One version of Miller at Villa Seurat in the summer of ‘31 has him typing on the versos of the manuscript of Crazy Cock. If a story is really good, someone cynically said, it probably isn’t true. Still …
23 . Like a good many other episodes in Miller’s life, much of the June-Henry-Anais menage, which begins here, remains murky, probably permanently so. The ménage has, of course, generated a good deal more heat than light and inevitably more of both of these than on its effect on Tropic of Cancer. We don’t know just when June arrived, for starters. If she was already in Paris when Nin invited Miller to dinner, how was that arranged? We don’t know how or why June showed up for the second dinner invitation or what Nin’s motivation may have been for beginning a dalliance with her and whether it ever became physical. We don’t know what Miller’s attitude toward the women’s relationship was, whether it was to him an awful reminder of the June-Jean affair; or whether he was in some sense attracted to its possibilities for him, sexually and artistically, or both at once. My treatment of it here tries—perhaps not completely successfully—to concentrate on its implications for the composit
ion of Tropic of Cancer.
24. Surviving photographs of June do not capture the remarkable impression she made on those meeting her for the first time. Miller’s rapturous recollection has been mentioned earlier and might be discounted for obvious reasons. But there is this one from Nin and Brassaϊ’s as well. When Miller introduced them, Brassaϊ recalled that what struck him was a “neck as long as a swan’s emerging from a tight black velour dress, a neck out of a Modigliani painting.” Baudelaire, he went on, “who loved the art and artifice of a woman’s face, would have swooned at the feet of this creature.”
25 . He never did. Tropic of Capricorn bears closest comparison, but it is a more polished piece of literature, whereas Cancer, for all its revisions, retains the raw quality of a vivisection.
26. Miller himself wasn’t thrilled by Rosset’s hard-won victory (the result of more than sixty separate legal proceedings). He had never been keen on having Cancer published in America, precisely because its continued status as an outlawed book confirmed his own status as a renegade, as well as his view of America as a brainless, bloated, anti-life monster, hell-bent on warping the rest of the world into its own image. Rosset’s win, he felt, had the effect of making him seem a part of the grand march of American freedom and of transmogrifying his public image from renegade to celebrity.
27. “Literature is news that STAYS news,” said Ezra Pound, who immediately appreciated Miller’s achievement in Cancer.
28. Miller is in distinguished company here. The first of the Four Noble Truths taught by the Buddha is commonly translated as “suffering,” but more loosely and more accurately as a dissatisfaction with the inevitable conditions of our existence. In Buddhist thought this is regarded as the gateway to the Dharma. Similarly, Freud regarded life’s inevitable demands as “too hard for us.” We are always in need, therefore, he argued in Civilization and Its Discontents, of various “palliative remedies.” These range from religion to intoxicating substances —anything that numbs us to the otherwise unbearable.
Selected Bibliography
Allen, Robert G. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Asbury, Herbert. The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld. New York: Ballantine, 1974.
——. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998.
Bakeless, John. The Eyes of Discovery: The Pageant of North America as Seen by the First Explorers. New York: Dover, 1961.
Bernier, Olivier. Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.
Blair, Walter. Native American Humor, 1800-1900. New York: American Book Company, 1937.
Brassa’i. Henry Miller: The Paris Years. Translated by Timothy Bent. New York: Arcade, 1995.
——. The Secret Paris of the ‘30s. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Pantheon, 1976.
Coates, Robert M. The Outlaw Years: The History of the Land Pirates of the Natchez Trace. New York: Literary Guild of America, 1930.
Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer. Bedford, Massachusetts: Applewood, n.d.
Dearborn, Mary V. The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Dorment, Richard. “The Passions of Vincent van Gogh.” New York Review of Books 57, no. 5 (March 25, 2010): 16-18.
Ferguson, Robert. Henry Miller: A Life. New York: W. W Norton, 1991.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by Joan Riviere. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958.
De Haan, Panda, and Ludo Van Halem. “Miró in Holland: The Dutch Interiors, 1928.” Rijksmuseum Bulletin 38 (2010): 211-245.
Hamsun, Knut. Hunger. Translated by Robert Bly. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Hutchinson, E. R. Tropic of Cancer on Trial: A Case History of Censorship. New York: Grove, 1969.
Kenny, Kevin. Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Kessel, Joseph. Belle de Jour. Translated by Geoffrey Wagner. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Mailer, Norman. Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller. New York: Grove, 1976.
Martin, Jay. Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller. Santa Barbara: Capra; London: Sheldon, 1979.
Matthiessen, Peter. Wildlife in America. New York: Viking, 1975.
Melly, George. Paris and the Surrealists. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991.
Miller, Henry. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions, 1970.
——. Black Spring. New York: Grove, 1989.
——. The Books in My Life. New York: New Directions, n.d.
——. Crazy Cock. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.
——. Letters to Emil. Edited by George Wickens. New York: New Directions, 1989.
——. Moloch, or, This Gentile World. New York: Grove, 1992.
——. My Life and Times. New York: Gemini Smith, n.d.
——. Remember to Remember. New York: New Directions, 1947.
——. The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud. New York: New Directions, 1962.
——. Tropic of Cancer. Shelton, Connecticut: First Edition Library, n.d.
——. Tropic of Capricorn. New York: Grove, 1965.
Nin, Ana’is. The Diary of Anais Nin. Volume one, 1931-1934. Edited by Gunther Stuhlmann. San Diego: Harcourt, 1994.
——. Henry and June. From A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1932. Orlando: Harcourt, 1993.
O’Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961.
Porter, Bern, ed. The Happy Rock: A Book About Henry Miller. Berkeley: Packard, 1945.
Ray, Man. Self-Portrait. Boston: Bullfinch Press, Little, Brown, 1999.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway in the 1930s. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Richardson, Robert D. First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009.
Roche, Charlotte. Wetlands. Translated by Tim Mohr. New York: Grove, 2009.
Root, Waverly. The Paris Edition: The Autobiography of Waverly Root, 1927-1934. San Francisco: North Point, 1987.
Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Culture. New York: New York Review, 2004.
Sayag, Alain, and Annick Lionel-Marie, eds. Brassai, The Monograph. Boston: Bullfinch Press, Little, Brown, 2000.
Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant- Garde in France, 1885 to World War I. New York: Vintage, 1968.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Snyder, Robert. This Is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn: Conversations with the Author from “The Henry Miller Odyssey” Los Angeles: Nash, 1974.
Tanner, John. A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner During Thirty Years Residence Among the Indians of the Interior of North America. Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1994.
Turner, Frederick. Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness. New York: Viking, 1980.
——, ed. The Portable North American Indian Reader. New York: Viking, 1974.
Vidal, Gore. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition. New York: Viking, 1973.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the following friends for advice, encouragement, technical assistance, and the gift or loan of relevant books: Glenn Bokhof, Kay Carlson, Eudice Daly, Les Daly, Kai Erickson, Fitch Himmelright, Joyce Id
ema, Phillip King, Dierdre Ling, Dana Newmann, Eugene Newmann, Nicholas Potter, Steve Reed, Ileene Smith, Robin Straus, Aaron Turner.
Index
Note: The abbreviation HM in subheadings refers to Henry Miller
Adams, John, 21, 23
Alger, Horatio, 96-97, 112
American culture: and adventure, 13-14; and burlesque, 71-72; and cruel humor, 44, 109; HM’s attitude toward, 8-9, 12, 17, 80-81, 91, 96-97, 101, 117, 124, 180, 224n26; HM’s knowledge of, 106, 130, 159, 223n17; and idealism, 23-25; and mainstream, 9, 80-81; and national character, 20, 26-27 , 28, 29, 71, 72, 220n6; and Twain, 49
American folklore: in American literature, 41, 42-43; and backwoodsmen, 15, 28, 29, 30-33; and boatmen, 15, 28, 36-37, 155, 188; dark-hued swath of, 170; effect of print on, 36; folk heroes, 20, 28, 29, 62-63; and gambling, 36, 37-38, 39; gangs of New York, 39-40; and HM’s childhood, 62-63; and humor, 28, 33, 41, 42, 47, 170; and Indian killers, 32, 220n6; and Lafitte, 37; and Natchez Trace land; pirates, 33-35; and national character, 20, 28, 29; and outlaws, 15, 28,
29, 34-35, 36, 38-39; and talk, 28, 31, 46, 52-53, 78-79, 155, 22on5; and Twain, 47, 50, 52; and Yankees, 28-29, 170
American Grotesque, 13, 44
American literature: and democracy, 46; folklore in, 41, 42-43; subliterary reality, 56; Twain’s impact on, 41, 46-47; and vernacular, 41-42, 44, 46-47, 53-54; Whitman’s impact on, 16
American people: as “great beast”, 23-27, 30; and hardships, 24, 26; and national character, 20, 26-27, 28, 29, 71, 72, 220n6
American tourists, 5, 124, 210
American vernacular, 41-42, 44, 46-47, 53-54
Ames, Fisher, 23
Anarchism, 12, 21-23, 80, 33, 171:72, 178
Anderson, Sherwood, 97
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 134
Arno, Peter, 108
Art, definition of, 104
Artaud, Antonin, 158, 179
Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer Page 15
