Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller. COVID-19 Recreational Reading

Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller. COVID-19 Recreational Reading 

“It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” -- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Where to begin when discussing Henry Miller? The misogyny? The obscenity? The challenging nature of the work? Browsing bookstores in my youth, I would always see the rows of Miller’s work on the shelves. Tropic of Cancer (1934), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), and the The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus/Plexus/Nexus, 1949-60). Just down the shelves, were the works of the author most associated with him, Anaïs Nin (Delta of Venus, 1977, and her published diaries).

I was never quite intrigued enough at the time to read Miller. Finally, many many years later, I took the plunge. And what did I find did take on Miller? That is the story of this post … and to get to that story, I need to make a diversion to George Orwell. Orwell’s 1940 essay, “Inside the Whale Inside the Whale” is a discourse on the art of Miller with a focus on Tropic of Cancer (well, part 1, part 2 is on A.E. Houseman). Tropic of Cancer is a monologue by an American expatriate in Paris in the late 1920s, early 1930s. The narrator is, in Orwell’s phrase, “down and out”. He doesn’t move in the refined salons of Gertrude Stein. Indeed, as Orwell notes, “Miller is writing about the man in the street, and it is incidentally rather a pity that it should be a street full of brothels.” The narrator (Miller?) is crude, coarse, and unlikable. Again, as Orwell notes, “Miller is simply a hard-boiled person talking about life , an ordinary American businessman with intellectual courage and a gift for words.” And this may be true, but for me, the “talking about life” rarely rises above reportage. It is, too often as Truman Capote famously said, “not writing; that’s just typewriting.” 

Other works come to mind when analyzing Tropic of Cancer. Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce and Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov. All three were initially banned (Joyce, Nabokov, and Miller were all first published in Paris) and all are now hailed (in various quarters) as literary landmarks. Leaving aside Lolita (which has many other issues), both Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer are, in the words of Judge Woolsey (in the Ulysses obscenity case) considered to be “undoubtedly … somewhat emetic, [but] nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac” (Wikipedia). In the same vein, Naked Lunch (1959) by William S. Burroughs (another Parisian imprint, which, like Lolita, was published by the Olympia Press), in my opinion the closest in terms of language and topics to Tropic of Cancer, but with more visceral impact. 

But, stripped of the narrative, Miller does create an evocative portrait of Paris and insights into the mind of the American expatriate. He also exposes, in those raptures interspersed between his typewriting, passages worthy of his muse, Walt Whitman:

“Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It’s in the blood now —misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch—until there’s no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.”  -- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

• Read May 26, 2020 | Buy on Kindle

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.