Tropic of Capricorn

by Henry Miller

  Things take place instantaneously, but there’s a long process to be gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens according to law – and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night, hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn’t seem to make much difference whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set. Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several years. We hadn’t seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an important day in my life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I had often dreamed about but never hoped to see. I remember vividly that we were standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street towards dusk. I remember it because it seemed utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about Mt. Aetna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th St., Manhattan. I remember the way he looked about as he talked, like a man who hadn’t quite realized what he was in for but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in returning. His eyes seemed to be saying all the time – this has no value, no value whatever. He didn’t say that, however, but just this over and over: “I’m sure you’d like it! I’m sure it’s just the place for you.” When he left me I was in a daze. I couldn’t get hold of him again quickly enough. I wanted to hear it all over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend’s own lips. It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends – and because he knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had travelled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself, drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future. O’Mara, yes, he had travelled a bit, almost all over the world – but as a bum, or else in the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met whom I could truly say had travelled. And he knew how to talk about his experiences.

  As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby. What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real. Sometimes after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacré Coeur, through the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight. Just a Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my being here to-day. Most of the places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them in our rambles through the park.

  Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of Lawrence’s work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence’s ideas. Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence’s words. Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it did. Most of us live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open my eyes wide and full and clear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was only because I had renounced America, renounced my past.

  My friend Kronski used to twit me about my “euphorias”. It was a sly way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety, of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree. In the latter mood, for instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolleycar. Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in one of my states of “euphoria”.

  We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn Bridge to go to some flat in Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were waiting to receive us. Hymie had started to talk to me in his usual way about his wife’s ovaries. In the first place he didn‘t know precisely what ovaries meant and so I was explaining it to him in crude and simple fashion. In the midst of my explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and ridiculous that Hymie shouldn’t know what ovaries were that I became drunk, as drunk I mean as if I had a quart of whisky under my belt. From the idea of diseased ovaries there germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of tropical growth made up of the most heterogeneous assortment of odds and ends in the midst of which, securely lodged, tenaciously lodged, I might say, were Dante and Shakespeare. At the same instant I also suddenly recalled my whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word “ovaries” had broken. I realized that everything Hymie had said up till the word “ovaries”, had sieved through me like sand. What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, usually when walking to my father’s shop, a performance which was repeated day in and day out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours, of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious activity. Not for years had I thought of this book which I used to write every day on my way from Delancey Street to Murray Hill. But going over the bridge the sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the remembrance of the past set in … remembrance of going back and forth over the bridge, going to a job which was death, returning to a home which was a morgue, memorizing Faust looking down into the cemetery, spitting into the cemetery from the elevated train, the same guard on the platform every morning, an imbecile, the other imbeciles reading their newspapers, new skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in and die in, the boats passing below, the Fall River Line, the Albany Day Line, why am I going to work, what will I do to-night, the warm cunt beside me and can I work my knuckles into her groin, run away and become a cowboy, try Alaska, the gold mines, get off and turn around, don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud, legs free, fish will come and bite, to-morrow a new life, where, anywhere, why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death is the solution, but don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new friend, millions of chances, you’re too young yet, you’re melancholy, you don’t die yet, wait
another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants, crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts crawling out the same way … Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic, above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to take it in, to announce myself; anyway each time I passed on high I was truly alone, and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself, screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered, the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never admitted. If this then was the true self it was marvellous, and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen in the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking at Hymie and thinking of that strange word “ovaries”, now stranger than any word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and Hymie sitting beside me was a bull-frog, absolutely a bull-frog and nothing more. I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze, the legs clear and waiting for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through the heavens, through the solid core of the earth, head down and ramming through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was walking again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above him a man was sitting in an aeroplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky. The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails formed on every finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toe nail, the tiniest toe nail imaginable and you could break your head over it, trying to figure it out. On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodge-podge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn’t disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toe nails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The bull-frog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat; they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary without benefit of lucubration; lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of non-comprehension swept clear by gales of laughter. From the hub of the bull-frog’s eye radiated dean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bull-frog was an ovarian spud generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes exterminated; for him the twin cities had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge, the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the anaesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the big Bertha which could destroy what the eye could not see; for him the molecule was broken down and the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night the stars were swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all movement, be it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets, expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the high priests of the depossessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same time. I could see it going on after death, like hair growing on a corpse, people saying “death” but the hair still testifying to life, and finally no death but this life of hair and nails, the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something still alive, expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement. Through love this night happen, or sorrow, or being born with a club foot; the cause nothing, the event everything. In the beginning was the Word … Whatever this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words – for him who had become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only that which expressed itself in beginning and end. So, on the ovarian trolley there was this voyage of man and bull-frog composed of identical stuff, neither better nor less than Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely the meaning of anything, the other knowing too precisely the meaning of everything, hence both lost and confused through beginnings and endings, finally to be deposited at Java or India Street, Greenpoint, there to be carried back into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of sawdust molls with twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety.