Tropic of Capricorn (42 page)

I look out again at the sun – my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on the roof-tops. Everything above the horizon is dear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the god – the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendour while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the Maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow …

September 1938
Villa Seurat, Paris.

Biography

Did You Know?

Miller’s Best Book by James Frey

What Makes This a Classic?

Critical Verdict: The Debate about Sex in Henry Miller’s Fiction

The Social Context

Adaptation

Have You Read

Find Out More

HENRY VALENTINE MILLER was born on 26 December 1891 in Manhattan, New York. During the first year of his life his German-speaking parents moved the family to Brooklyn, where Miller would spend the remainder of a difficult childhood: his mother was a domineering woman, and young Henry began school barely able to speak English.

When Miller graduated from high school in 1909 he enrolled at City College of New York, only to leave after just two months, unable to bear the demands of an academic routine. Instead he tried a variety of jobs, from working in his father’s tailor shop to driving cabs, and in 1917 married his first wife, Beatrice Sylvas Wickens – with whose mother he subsequently conducted a brief affair. After landing a job as a messenger for the Western Union Telegraph Company, Miller began to write his first book,
Clipped Wings.
More importantly, however, the job brought him into contact with the grinding poverty that lay beneath the American dream of the 1920s – an epiphany which would greatly affect his philosophy on life, and provide much of the material for
Tropic of Capricorn.

In 1924 Miller divorced Beatrice to marry a Broadway dancer named June Smith, and left Western Union to devote all his energies to writing. It was June who gave Miller his first glimpse of what he considered a more civilized life in Paris, when she took him to Europe on money given to her by an admirer. In 1930 he returned to Paris alone and threw himself into a life of bohemian squalor, sleeping where he could, indulging in casual sexual encounters and walking the bustling streets of Paris with his great friend, the photographer Brassaï. It was also there that Miller embarked on a passionate relationship with the French writer Anaïs Nin, whose infamous diaries later made celebrities of them both. As Miller would write in
Tropic of Cancer
, summing up his time in Paris: ‘I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.’

Miller and June divorced in 1934 – after June herself had had an affair with Anaïs Nin – and the same year saw the first publication, in France, of
Tropic of Cancer.
While some heralded it as a joyous, bawdy celebration of life, British and American censors were less sure of its merits, thanks largely to its graphic descriptions of sex. Along with its sister novel,
Tropic of Capricorn
(1939), it consequently remained banned in all English-speaking countries for almost thirty years.

Miller’s reputation continued to grow in Europe and in underground literary circles, and in 1957 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Following a landmark obscenity trial which proved a watershed in the history of English-language publishing,
Tropic of Cancer
was finally published in the USA in 1961 (and in the UK in 1963), after which the Sixties counterculture hailed Miller as one of the fathers of the sexual revolution. Miller spent the remainder of his life in California, where he wrote his admired ‘Rosy Crucifixion’ trilogy of novels
(Sexus, Plexus
and
Nexus)
and exhibited watercolour paintings. He died on 7 June 1980.

MILLER’S DECISION TO quit City College after just two months was prompted by his dislike of Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene.
As he wrote in
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
(1962): ‘To think that this huge epic is still considered indispensable reading in any college curriculum! Only the other day I dipped into it again, to reassure myself that I had not made a grave error of judgment. Let me confess that today it seems even more insane to me than when I was a lad of eighteen.’

Miller married five times. Two of his wives, June Smith and Hiroko Tokuda, were dancers. Hiroko, who was more than forty years his junior (and whom he divorced after she refused to have sex with him), later ran a nightclub in Tokyo called Tropic of Cancer.

Miller sometimes wrote pornographic literature to order, often for private collectors. One such book,
Under the Roofs of Paris,
was not published commercially until 1983, three years after Miller’s death.

Miller was also a successful painter. He produced more than 2,000 pieces in his lifetime, and in 1996 the Henry Miller Museum of Art was opened in Omachi City, in Nagano.

By James Frey

TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
is Henry Miller’s best book.
Tropic of Cancer
is his most famous, the books of the Rosy Crucifixion sell more copies,
Quiet Days in Clichy
and
Under the Roofs of Paris
are funnier, but
Capricorn
is the best.

I read
Cancer
first. Over the course of a month, I read it four times. I would finish it, open it at the beginning, start again.

I had never read anything like it. Never read about anyone like Henry Miller. There were shades of him in Whitman, Lao Tsu and Celine, whom I had already read, but where Whitman and Lao Tsu were blissfully enlightened, and seemingly without rage or bitterness, and Celine was overwhelmed by bitterness and rage, Henry Miller seemed somehow enlightened by his bitterness and rage. He cared about writing, love, art and friendship. His greatest joys were a book, a walk, a meal, a good lay, a drink and a laugh. He didn’t care about money or status, didn’t care if he lived in a lice-ridden hovel, didn’t care that his clothes were falling to pieces. At the same time, he spoke of spitting in the face of God and society, burning down cities and starting over, about the ugliness, futility and artificiality of modern life. As I read
Cancer,
over and over and over, I kept asking myself – how the fuck did he end up like this?

Tropic of Capricorn
holds the answers to that question. It is a book about Miller’s life in Brooklyn and Manhattan before he left for Paris in 1930. When the book starts, he is unemployed, unhappily married, has a small child, is completely miserable. He hates everything about himself and his existence. He feels trapped in his marriage, trapped in some sort of quest for material and financial responsibility, trapped by society’s expectations for adult men in his position, trapped by his inability to do anything about that position. He doesn’t dream because he doesn’t believe dreams can come true. He doesn’t have ambition because he believes ambition is futile, that regardless of what he does he’ll just end up as another cog in an evil and idiotic machine. He yearns for something else, and believes that it awaits him, but he doesn’t know what it is or how to find it.

Succumbing to his wife’s pressure, he gets a job, a job he feels is worthy of degenerates and fools, a job as messenger for the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. He couldn’t care less about the job, about doing it well, about anything but the measly pay it provided him. On the fake résumé he used to get the job, he lied and wrote that he possessed a PhD from Columbia University. Thinking that Henry was an educated man, one day his boss suggested he write a Horatio Alger-style book about the lives of messengers. Miller hated the boss and to spite him he wrote a book about twelve messengers, more along the lines of Dostoyevsky than Alger, in which every story ended in either a murder, a suicide or both.

Even though the messenger book was awful, it provided Miller with an experience that changed his life. Shortly after completing it he met June Smith, who was to become the second of his five wives, at a dancehall where she was working as a dancer, which at the time was akin to being a stripper today. The rest of
Capricorn
is about Henry and June, and Miller’s efforts to extricate himself from his suffocating first marriage and to become a writer. It’s a ridiculous book, a joyous book, a book about one man’s struggle to liberate himself, to fulfil himself, to change his life so that it is something that satisfies him. It’s a book full of pain and love, sex and debauchery, it’s a book about literature and writing, and most of all, it’s a book about change.

At its end, Henry Miller sets out for Paris. There, a changed man, he set about changing the way we think, the way we read and write, the way we live. There, a changed man, he changed the world.

James Frey is the author of
A Million Little Pieces
and
My Friend Leonard.
He is originally from Cleveland. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.

THE MODERN READER lives in a very different world from that inhabited by the book-buying public of the early 1930s. With pornographic images instantly available to anyone capable of using an internet search engine, sexually explicit prose has lost much of its ability to shock, and in such a world, it can be difficult to appreciate why the initial publication of Millers work met with such controversy.

Yet Miller’s literary voice was truly revolutionary for its time: chaotic, joyful, unflinching: paradoxically both direct and evasive, both beautifully poetic and brutally frank. He wrote his ‘Tropic’ novels not just to entertain or inform but to liberate, to free literature from the constraints of intellectual theory and expose every taboo to the clear light of day. The two novels venture into the darkest recesses both of society and of the human mind, and do so in a language intentionally designed to shock, to offend and to overwhelm our preconceptions. As Miller himself claims in the opening chapter of his first book
Tropic of Cancer,
it is ‘not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word’, but ‘a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty …’

Miller’s fiction may have lost much of its ability to shock, but reading his ‘Tropic’ novels for the first time is still an unsettling experience. The ‘pornographic’ passages are driven more by anger than by lust; the images are too ugly, too violent to provide much in the way of titillation, and both novels use the language of pornography not to excite but to confront. We are disturbed not by the sexual references themselves but by the force with which they are thrust upon us, and the fact of what is being said is secondary to the author’s ability and willingness to say it. Miller has always been castigated for his negative portrayals of women, but to dismiss him as a misogynist is perhaps overly simplistic. If Miller portrayed his women as a collection of disconnected body parts, he did so to communicate his own incompleteness, his inability to empathize – the consequence, surely, of being raised in a society which frowned on openness about sex and sexuality.

For American novelist Norman Mailer, writing his analysis of the Women’s Liberation movement
The Prisoner of Sex
in 1971, Miller was nothing less than a sexual revolutionary. Mailer describes him as ‘an archetype of the man of the Twenties’, a decade during which ‘man emerged from the long medieval night of Victorian sex with its perversions, hypocrisies, and brothel dispensations, and set out to explore not the world, but himself … which meant that one followed the line of one’s sexual impulse without a backward look at what was moral, responsible, or remotely desirable for society …’

No longer shocked by its sexually explicit content, the modern reader is able to judge Miller’s ‘Tropic’ novels with an open mind. Whatever one may think of the works themselves – and some critics do still question their literary value – no one can deny their place in history, both literary and legal. Along with D.H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch,
Millers work actively challenged the archaic censorship laws of the early 1960s, and in doing so irreversibly altered society’s view of what makes for an accepted work of literature.

‘THE BULK OF my readers, I have often observed, fall into two distinct groups: in the one group those who claim to be repelled or disgusted by the liberal dosage of sex, and in the other those who are delighted to find that this element forms such a large ingredient.’ (Henry Miller,
The World of Sex,
1965)

Critics of Henry Miller’s fiction have always fallen into two diametrically opposed camps. On the one hand there are writers such as Norman Mailer who thrill in what the
New York Times
called ‘an eager vitality and exuberance … as though all the sparkling wines have been uncorked at once’. On the other are critics such as Kate Millett, who in her influential 1970 work
Sexual Politics
sardonically applauded Miller for articulating ‘a compendium of American sexual neuroses’, laying bare for all to see ‘the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence’ associated with sexuality which ‘had never so explicitly been given literary expression before’. In her 1981 publication
Pornography and Silence
Susan Griffin similarly balked at Miller’s treatment of his female characters, considering him to be no better than a pornographer for his descriptions of ‘physical love for women’.

Such critics, then, damn Miller outright as a misogynist, beneath contempt. The novelist Erica Jong, however, in her lively study of Henry Miller,
The Devil at Large,
instead sought to identify
why
Miller chose to write about women in the way that he did: ‘Henry,’ she wrote, ‘was so enthralled by women that he sought to demystify their mysterious parts through the violent magic of his books. The violence is rooted in a sense of self-abnegation and humiliation before them. He is, as Freud would say, counterphobic.’

Whatever spin is put on the argument, most commentators agree that Miller’s ‘misogyny’ – what Kate Millett called his ‘paralysing fear’ of women – stemmed from his troubled relationship with his aggressive, overbearing mother and a series of early, failed affairs. A common view is that Miller overcompensated for such failures, both in his attempts to create a literary apotheosis of his manhood, and above all in the thing for which few critics forgive him: the reduction of women to depersonalized sexual organs, a procession of nameless, faceless ‘cunts’. Yet, as Anais Nin recorded in her diaries, Miller caricatured everyone he met in the same way, male and female – including himself. June told Nin that ‘Henry always makes characters … he made one out of me’, while Nin observed to Miller in 1934 that in
Cancer
‘you were only a sex and a stomach …’

In later life, having reread his early work (as recounted in
Reflections,
1981), Miller professed to having been ‘shocked by my use of language … especially in regards to women and sex’, and he increasingly attempted to challenge the view that his work was primarily about sex. Indeed, as Joshua Glenn pointed out in a perceptive article in the
Idler:
‘Although what Miller is primarily remembered for today is his radically unashamed approach to sex, the truly radical thing about Miller’s writing is his relentless attack on the “cancer” of American-style utilitarianism, the myth of industrial “progress”, and the Protestant work ethic.’ As Miller explained in a letter to his great friend Brassaï, that ‘cancer’ represents ‘the necessity [for society] to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch’. In this sense Miller was an anarchist, but an anarchist who wanted to destroy what he perceived as the cultural wasteland of modern civilization in order to revel in the self and the senses, and to find the freedom to create.

Although the shadow of misogyny continues to hang over his writing, since his death critics have continued to re-evaluate his work, increasingly pointing out his great humour, energy and warmth. Erica Jong summed him up thus: ‘What Henry had that others so resented was wholeness … His exuberance, the happiness that comes across in his work, was visible in him even when he was old and ill. The voice he found expressed the abundance of the man. It was not the sex the puritans hated and feared. It was the abundance.’

TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
and its sister novel
Tropic of Cancer
were first published in France by the Obelisk Press, a daring avant-garde imprint founded by Jack Kahane. Paris in the inter-war years was a city buzzing with intellectuals, artists and famous writers from around the world: Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett all lived there during this period, drawn there by the cultural vibrancy of the city and the existence of small, English-language publishers willing to take risks that larger British and American publishers, constrained by tighter obscenity laws, could not afford to take.

It was while living in Paris in 1931 that Miller met Anaïs Nin. Nin had recently written a book on D.H. Lawrence, whose sexually explicit novel
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
would, like Miller’s fiction, play an important role in modernizing the British and American obscenity laws in the early 1960s. Miller’s friendship with Nin was complicated by the arrival of Miller’s wife, June. Miller was deeply in love with June, and in
Tropic of Capricorn
he describes the first time he saw her, in 1923, in the Broadway club where she worked as a dancer: ‘I notice her coming towards me; she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on the long, columnar necak … I could have taken just the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night on a pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, the whole being glowed from them …’

When Miller introduced June to Nin in December 1931, the two women fell in love and began a brief, intense affair – of which Miller was bitterly jealous. After June left Paris in January 1932, Miller and Nin both continued to write about June obsessively, describing their encounters with this evasive, enigmatic woman. In a period that would become perhaps the most productive of his life, Miller began work on
Tropic of Capricorn,
developing extensive notes he had written in New York ten years earlier.

Although completed in Paris in the 1930s,
Tropic of Capricorn
provides a scathing social commentary on New York City in the 1920s: a city of great wealth, but also a city of poverty and desperation. It is this dark underbelly of contemporary American society that provided Miller’s prose with such fire, and while Paris gave him the artistic freedom to write and publish the book, ultimately it is America that remains the target of the passionate, almost revolutionary zeal of his writing.