Frederick Turner - Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer

Renegade

Henry Miller
and the Making of
Tropic of Cancer

Frederick Turner

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN & LONDON

Copyright 2011 by Frederick Turner.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Janson type by Integrated Publishing Solutions.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Turner, Frederick W., 1937
Renegade : Henry Miller and the making of Tropic of Cancer/
Frederick Turner.
p. cm. (Icons of America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-14949-4 (hardback)
1. Miller, Henry, 1891-1980.Criticism and interpretation.
2. Miller, Henry, 1891-1980. Tropic of cancer. 3. Politics and
literatureUnited StatesHistory20th century. 4. Authors
and publishersUnited StatesHistory20th century.
5. Publishers and publishingUnited StatesHistory20th
century. 6. CensorshipUnited StatesHistory20th
century. I. Title.
PS3525.I5454Z8557 2012
813.52dc22

2011019531

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

Icons of Americais a series of short works written by leading scholars, critics, and writers, each of whom tells a new and innovative story about American history and culture through the lens of a single iconic individual, event, object, or cultural phenomenon.

The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon LEO BRAUDY

Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil JEROME CHARYN

The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison STEPHEN COX

Andy Warhol ARTHUR C. DANTO

Our Hero: Superman on Earth TOM DE HAVEN

Fred Astaire JOSEPH EPSTEIN

Wall Street: Americas Dream Palace STEVE FRASER

No Such Thing as Silence: John Cages433KYLE GANN

Frankly, My Dear:Gone with the Wind Revisited MOLLY HASKELL

Alger Hiss and the Battle for History SUSAN JACOBY

Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams MARK KINGWELL

Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex JAMES LEDBETTER

The Liberty Bell GARY NASH

The Hamburger: A History JOSH OZERSKY

Gypsy: The Art of the Tease RACHEL SHTEIR

Kings Dream ERIC J. SUNDQUIST

Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson GORE VIDAL

Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown DAVID YAFFE

Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory
JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN

For
Jim Harrison

Contents

At the end of August 1931, Henry Miller posted a letter from Paris to his Brooklyn boyhood pal, Emil Schnellock. He wrote as if he were some explorer, poised to plunge alone and unarmed into a wilderness. I start tomorrow on the Paris book: First person, uncensored, formlessfuck everything! he exclaimed.

As a telegraphic prcis of what would three years later become Tropic of Cancer, the concluding six words of this brag are an astonishingly accurate prediction of the book Miller had somehow discovered he must write. When it was published in Paris in September 1934 by a man who dealt in what today would be called soft pornography, it completely fulfilled the bravado of Millers proclamation, especially in its sustained tone of savage abandonfuck everything!

The expression is, of course, street-corner argot for the defiant impulse to hurl aside all considerations, conventions, and costs and to strike out recklessly into uncharted territory and there achieve personally unprecedented successor a final failure. Defiant though it is, the impulse must ultimately come from a profound sense of failure, of having been balked and defeated at every turn so that at last there is nothing left to lose. The successful dont have to say, Fuck everything! Failures might, and in that deadness of late August in Depression-era Paris Henry Miller definitely belonged in the latter category: hed apparently lost everything, nationality, job, wife, even his language, which he couldnt use in this foreign place.

On a more literal plane, the book Miller was about to embark on was one in which the narrator and his lawless companions do indeed try to fuck everything, even perhaps so unlikely a target as the one-legged hooker Miller mentions in telling detail as he used to pass her nightly stand in the Place de Clichy:

After midnight she stands there in her black rig rooted to the spot. Back of her is the little alleyway that blazes like an inferno. Passing her now with a light heart she reminds me somehow of a goose tied to a stake, a goose with a diseased liver, so that the world may have its pat de fois gras. Must be strange taking that wooden stump to bed with you. One imagines all sorts of thingssplinters, etc. However, each man to his taste.

It was passages like this in which a profoundly forbidden form of sex is described with a cruel humor that prompted American tourists in Paris to smuggle home copies of the banned book soon after Jack Kahanes Obelisk Press published it. They kept on doing so until the war interrupted travel to the continent. At the wars end Gls discovered the book, and then eventually the tourists returned to guiltily and gleefully carry it back to the States wrapped in shirts or shawls. By the 1950s Tropic of Cancer had acquired a folkloric status while its author wore with an increasing unease the shadowy reputation as a writer of truly dirty booksor, as he occasionally styled himself with some bitterness, a gangster author.

Something of this reputation clings to Miller still, like smoke, though he is long dead. And yet over the years since 1934, and particularly since Barney Rossets Grove Press triumphed over the censors and published an American edition of Cancer in 1961, a simultaneous process has been at work. In it Millers purely literary reputation has steadily risen so that now he is generallyif somewhat grudginglyacknowledged to be a major American writer, maybe even a great one. And Tropic of Cancer, his first published novel, has risen from smuggled dirty book to American classic, a work that belongs on a select shelf of works that best tell us who we are, for better or worse.

Emil Schnellock might well have been pardoned had he reacted to his friends proclamation with a heavy dollop of skepticism. Theyd known each other since they attended P.S. 85 in Brooklyns Bushwick section some thirty years back, and for much of that time, it seemed, Miller had been jawing about becoming a writer. But after all the impassioned, profanity-spattered talk, some of it brilliant and colored with various violent prejudices; after his furious work on three extended pieces of fiction; after hed left his first wife because a second one believed in his dreamafter all this he had perilously little to show for it. The fictions remained unpublished and were perhaps unpublishable, and only a clutch of his shorter pieces had seen print in obscure places. Meanwhile, Schnellock, from a similar background and harboring his own artistic aspirations, had become a successful illustrator with a studio in Manhattan. What now could he have thought of his old friend, starving over there in Paris, except that once again Henry had failed? Maybe he also felt a little guilty, because it was he who had been partially responsible for Millers last-ditch, desperate decision to ship out for Paris in the winter of 1930, hoping the fabled city would somehow crack open that volcano of creative energy he felt he had within him. For Schnellock had seen Paris and the continents other great cities and had for years been filling Miller with exquisitely detailed descriptions of those places and of that deep humus of art and culture so abundantly available there. Without quite meaning to he had encouraged in his friend a conviction amounting to a lifelong mania that America was hostile to artists, whereas the Old World was unfailingly nurturing. And when the desperate Miller, facing the death of his dream, and having really nowhere else to go, had decided it had to be Paris or bust, it had been Schnellock that he turned to, not his second wife June, who couldnt wait to be rid of him. Schnellock had put some steel in his spine and ten dollars in his pocket for the trip across the dark Atlantic and then down at the docks had seen him off.