Who’re You Talking To, Henry Miller?

For The Sunday Salon

 

A topic I wish I’d studied more when I was teaching is reader response theory. I think the work that readers do to make sense of stories and the efforts they undertake to cast their lot in with the characters on the page are quite fascinating. Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, as a woman living in a post-feminist era, it’s inevitable I start thinking about the relationship I’m obliged to have with him as his reader, closeted intimately with his thought between the pages of his bawdy, shocking, squalid, darkly humorous, exquisitely well-written tale. Now, the truth is that in real life, I like men to have manners, and I think I’m probably too easily offended by the kind of display of male indifference that borders on contempt. I abhor being patronized, for instance, and men do so at their own risk. But as a reader, I couldn’t help but be amused to note that I didn’t care in the least that Miller’s portrayal of women was about as misogynistic and contemptuous as I have ever come across, and I’ll tell you the detailed answer why in a moment. But fundamentally, I never thought for one moment that he was talking to me. I’ve often wondered whether our identifications with books are what make or break them for us, the extent to which, in other words, we step into the shoes of the characters who are familiar to us (uncomfortably or otherwise). So it’s not the book for you if your readerly sensibilities match up to your real life principles, but if you can put political correctness to one side, this is an extraordinary narrative journey.

 

So here’s the set up: Henry Miller is living in Paris in the 1920s, a struggling writer with no money, no future, and only his shameless ability to scrounge off others standing between him and starvation. What makes the situation bearable is that he has a lot of company among the other exiles, low-lifes and no-hopers that Paris clasps snug in its filthy quartiers. What makes the situation positively enjoyable for him is its comparison with the world he’s escaping. Paris is a paradise of cultural benevolence for Miller, a place of bountiful beauty, freely given, without any demand for a return. Miller says: ‘A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people – the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth, it seems to me. And yet they give the illusion of being at home.’ Paris is a place you can squat in, it’s a place where you can sprawl in undignified postures, it’s a place oblivious to the power of achievement, having a far greater interest in encouraging its inhabitants to have a really good time. Here, Miller has found a little niche where he can fail in peace and contentment, if also in depravation and squalor. Continental squalor is in any case more romantically exotic. I won’t cite any of the passages in which Miller describes Paris although they are quite extraordinary pieces of writing. Influenced by the Surrealists, filtered through his own brand of modernist abjection, they are breathtaking and often utterly revolting at the same time. I felt Miller to be an American update of the 19^th century French poet, Baudelaire, a city flâneur who perceived the beauty in the tawdry, the poor, the ugly, and who was equally obsessed with mankind (and both wrote addressing just the one sex – men) as endlessly oscillating between his excessive appetites and his unavoidable apathy. Miller brought that particular sensibility into the twentieth century for me, pushing Baudelaire’s ambivalence about women to its logical conclusion, too.

 

All of which begs the question of what Miller was leaving behind him. I’ll let Miller tell you: ‘When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment but it might just as well be going on in a test tube.’ I couldn’t help but read into this an opposition between the two cities as good and bad mothers: Paris, warm and welcoming, smiling indulgently on its children as they loll in the mud. New York, demanding and sterile, perpetually casting a gaze of disappointment and disapproval over its hapless inhabitants. What Paris allows Miller to do is reach a kind of ecstatic failure, a triumphant point of rock bottom. ‘Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. […] I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer.’ So Miller’s relationship to Paris, exquisitely rendered in his novel, provides him with a working philosophy, one that is a kind of glorification of the survival instinct, one that gives him a certain bravado and swagger in the face of catastrophe, but one that means he needn’t take anything seriously, least of all what we might call the sanctity of life.

 

And so he sets out, with a colorful band of reprobates and shysters, to tramp the cobblestones of Paris in search of any sucker who’ll give him a square meal. This hard-won attitude of perfect indifference is something that Miller-as-narrator applies to everything, to every man, woman or beast (on the understanding that men and women are fundamentally beasts) he encounters. To give him his credit, he does so rather splendidly, with a lightness of hand and brilliance of description that often prevent the reader from fully realizing the callousness of his attitude. Or else realizing and laughing nevertheless. There’s an anecdote that sticks in my mind about the accidental death of a proof-reader at the newspaper offices his friend Van Norder works for. At first Van Norden is shocked, but when he finds out who has died, (an Englishman called Peckover), he is relieved: ‘ “The poor bastard,” he says, “he’s better off dead than alive. He just got his false teeth the other day, too…”’. It turns out that despite having broken both legs and his ribs, the man managed to somehow grope about searching for the teeth that the fall had dislodged and continued to appeal for them in the ambulance. This story sets off the kind of counter-tragic hilarity that Miller does well and that hovers uncomfortably between a pure and factual acceptance of humanity and revolting emotional brutality. ‘There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity – you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going.’ It’s an attitude that undeniably constitutes part of the human condition, and Miller manages to raise it to the level of the sublime. No one in his stories gets to keep their pretensions, their self-respect, the esteem of their peers; at the level of survival we all pan out into creatures who simply need to assuage our basic human needs and the rest is pomp and hypocrisy.

 

Miller, then, makes something of a song and dance about his freedom from conventional attitudes, from prissy politeness, from a freezing denial of the body. It’s the spirit of oppressive Puritanism that Miller most wants to escape, but when I found the feminist critic Kate Millett’s hilarious and perceptive hatchet job on Miller’s sexual politics, her major accusation is that he’s carried it across the Atlantic with him. Far from being the spirit of sexual liberation, Millett suggests that he produces a ‘compendium of American sexual neuroses’, and that ‘What Miller did articulate was the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence, and the sense of filth with which our culture, or more specifically, its masculine sensibility, surrounds sexuality.’ It is undeniably true that the representation of women is a problem in Miller’s narrative. The men in his stories are obsessed with sleeping with women, but have no interest, no tenderness whatsoever for them. I can’t quite find the words to express the excessive impersonality in which the act is steeped, coated, and left out to dry. His account of heterosexual relations is truly obscene, in the sense of the word ob-scene, what would be better left out of the picture, in the wings. Miller is nothing if not truthful about the worse instincts of mankind, and the desire to have a woman without needing the slightest entanglement in her reality is one that undoubtedly lurks in the silt at the bottom of the male psyche. But not every man chooses to think through the muck. In fact, for me, the very excessiveness of Miller’s stance was the clue. To need to block women out to that extent is indication not of indifference but of terrible, threatening passion. And Miller shows his hand, if we care to look for it and not fall for his smokescreen of shock tactics. Throughout the narrative runs the thread of the woman he did love and who has returned to America without him: Mona. ‘I couldn’t allow myself to think about her very long,’ Miller confesses, ‘if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. […] When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.’ Small wonder, then, that Miller is so careful to keep his feelings out of subsequent sexual encounters, to use and be used joyfully, recklessly, brutally. Just as the bad mother that is America must be evaded, so too the abandoning lover must be recompensed in vengeful sexual abandon.

 

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, but it is deservedly a classic. How you respond to Miller’s brutality is an intriguing question but one that can only be resolved with absolute honesty. If you’re going to be offended, be offended right to the very marrow of your soul. Rage and rant and rip the book into tiny shreds, stamping them underfoot, and then sit back in your chair and laugh and laugh. I think Henry would have appreciated that.