Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer'

As a book, Tropic of Cancer is a soup, a whirlpool perhaps even a sewer. To make different order out of it is intensely difficult for the week-stomached, it is impossible. Characters and scenes float in and out of the with a wonderfully picaresque irregularity of Rabelaisian humor are broken off unexpectedly by passages approaching the drunken, frenzied poetry of a Rimbaud. Obscurity and philosophy, squalor and rhapsody are juxtaposed, crammed together, torn apart and tossed wildly, as if the book were the mixing bowl in which Miller, the mad chef, were preparing a salad -- to fling in the face of the diners. But not even in obscenity or nihilistic frenzy do we find a bit of solid ground. Obsence protests are continually undercut by a laugh, despair by a ray of happy contentedness; even the ferocious prophecies of the impending consummation of decay give off a strange feeling of hopeful

To form any clear view of the book from many of its various parts taken separately is impossible, but it seems almost equally so when they are taken together. To comprehend just realize that Tropic is hardly a book at all, but a personality. Quite simply, the incidents and the monologues are the author's life (metaphorically if not literally) and are designed only to reveal him. Miller's personality is the sum and essence of his book. It is a terribly vivid personality. And if we give up the vain attempt to shove his book similiar pigeon-hole labelled "nihilist" or "ash-can school," we find that he is a most and profound man.

Henry Miller is a man of serious concerns as a writer, serious enough to find all lesser concerns humorous. In a civilization in which artists have taken over from religious leaders the function of conscience to the world, one of the prophets. He belongs with a number of great modern thinkers such as Joyce, Nietzsche, Camus, and Malraux, who aim at the very center of human experience: his subject is the value of life. His attack is similar to that levelled by these, and numerical men. It is an outcry against the world with its mad race for material and improvement; with its growing callousness among men caught in the machinery of personal economic forces. Throughout the world, he finds a dismal tedium, a loss of purpose and enjoyment. This is nothing new, nor is the irony that man's great material progress as a solution to his difficulties is only an illusion, leading man still deeper into the prison of his own devices.

But Miller does not linger tediously on these points. He is not a social reformer; his concern is with the individual soul. Modern civilization is, of necessity, his antagonist; but his interest is not a topical one. He knows too well the illusion of political and cultural utopias for which men will sacrifice anything, especially each other, while remaining imprisoned within their same old self-defeating view of life. The problem of value is an eternal one, and Miller knows it.

Although his tirades at our modern world can leave no doubt as to his opinion of it, Miller's tone is not one of bitter malice. He does not use his book as a revenge on the world; he is not reduced to cursing it in impotent rage. He is too much of a man for that; despite his disgust, he has not given up on life. There is still that which makes his existence worthwhile, and he would communicate it to the world, even if that world should hardly deserve the news.

THERE is much destructiveness in Tropic, but Miller manages to avoid the tediousness and peevishness which gives so much of modern literature an unsavory reputation. The wealth of his language is immense, and beneath it, one hears a tone of voice that is much too positive to ever lose itself in the squalor and pain it deals with. Miller would destroy modern culture, yes; but he is in control of the destruction, and not vice versa. The images of cancer, of decay, that run through the book convey the point very well. The world is falling apart, getting even worse than ever; but Miller's voice is almost exultant:

Soft as a lion-pad I heard the gun-carriages turn, saw them vomit and drool; the firmament sagged and all the stars turned black. Black ocean bleeding and the brooding stars breeding chunks of fresh-swelled flesh while overhead the birds wheeled and out of the hallucinated sky fell the balance with mortar and pestle and the bandaged eyes of justice. All that is here related moves with imaginary feet along the parallels of dead orbs; all that is seen with the empty sockets bursts like flowering grass. Out of the nothingness arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spiral slowly sinks the gaping hole. The land and the water make numbers joined, a poem written with flesh and stronger than steel or granite. Through endless night the earth whirls towards a creation unknown....

The images of disintegration have a double significance; they depict the destructive wheels of modern civilization, grinding man further and further into physical fear and spiritual slavery. But they represent simultaneously the destructive mind of the artist--the man who tears down illusions -- exposing the world to men's eyes that he might be born again. The two processes are not combined accidentally; it is only because civilization is decaying that man is brought face to face with his greatest challenge; only the experience of a chaotic world forces man away from his naive comforts, leaving him with the choice: bigger illusions, or a total regeneration.

WHAT are the values that Miller would have us rediscover, beneath our civilized facades? His book is itself these values. This certainly does not mean that art, as a diversion from life, will provide the missing purpose and fulfillment. The book is Miller's value because it is a portion of life from which he has forced a value in his own personal struggle. He would have us enter into the artistic experience itself, to live life in the kind of ecstasy with which the artistic consciousness perceives it. Like Joyce, Durrell, and others, Miller wants his audience to emulate him: not as a professional, or even an amateur writer, nor in any specific activities, but in the ecstatic experience of life without its restricting illusions. He would resurrect the body and the soul, the tiny pleasures and the grandest visions; but for either of these purposes, the illusions must be destroyed that seduce man away from himself. Hope of any salvation from some external event is the greatest of these illusions; only out of an absolute nihilism can spring the immediate values and joys of life. When man has given up his hopes, he is at last thrown back upon himself, upon the source from which all values must flow.

This hardly means that Miller is merely a sensualist. The flesh is as great an illusion as any. Sought as an escape, it becomes as purposeless and mechanical as anything in modern civilization. Miller works through this point in the course of the book; underneath the chaos of episodes, his spiritual journey winds on past illusion after illusion, towards a greater value. By the end, he has attained consciousness of the value of human sympathy, which had gotten lost in the moral swamps of the early chapters:

Towards the end of each meal in the evening the veilleur de nuit drops in for his bit of cheer.... He is a nobody. He carries a lantern and a bunch of keys. He makes the rounds through the night, stiff as an automaton... In the scheme of things he's not worth the brine to pickle a herring. He's just a piece of live manure and he knows it. When he looks around after his drink and smiles at us, the world seems to be falling to pieces. It's a smile thrown across an abyss. The whole stinking civilization lies like quagmire at the bottom of the pit, and over it, like a mirage, hovers this wavering smile....

THE message is a powerful and significant one. But it is almost lost in the unparalleled wealth of obscenity that surrounds and even infiltrates it. Is the obscenity just a quirk that must be overlooked if one does not like it? Miller projects it with considerable vigor, and it seems rooted deeply in his personality. But again, it is not a debauched degeneracy; nor does he use it in a spirit of scorn and repudiation. It is of life generally, a matter of humor, neither malicious nor perverted. It is included because this too is a part of life that he would redeem. Miller has a great and wonderfully positive enjoyment of the senses, but he is unlike his characters who try to use sex as a narcotic. He wants to redeem degraded sex, too, to encompass the dank and foul-smelling underworld of existence into his vision, and to draw forth whatever ecstasy can be found even there. His sympathy extends to all of human life; even what he hates must be redeemed.

One wonders just how far he has succeeded. Miller is struggling in a world in which man's attitude is all, and the external factors count for nothing. Perhaps his book has done what he wants as far as his own life is concerned; unfortunately, the communication of such an experience to others is always difficult. It is virtually impossible in the case of a mass audience containing so many individuals who have not the desire, the ability, nor the strength to undergo the book as an experience like that out of which it was written. As always happens, the message is largely lost. The redemption of the depths of the world is not likely to take place in the souls of many readers, if indeed it is possible at all. But an author cannot be blamed for aiming too high.

Tropic of Cancer remains an extremely difficult book to fathom. The personality in back of it has unsounded depths. To even glance at them may get the reader lost in disgust or chaos. But Miller has written an apology as eloquent as any:

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after if it has only one great page in it; we must search for fragments, splinters, toe-nails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.

For the reader who does not mind being splattered in the encounter with Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer is a book very much to be sought after