Monday, November 3, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 59 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 59

Tropic of Cancer

by Henry Miller (1934)

The US novelist’s debut revelled in a Paris underworld of seedy sex and changed the course of the novel – though not without a fight with the censors

Robert McCrum

Monday 3 November 2014

hen the English, later the American, novel began in the late 17th century, it was profoundly associated with transgression. John Bunyan (No 1 in this series) wrote in prison. Daniel Defoe (No 2) was put in the stocks. Writers of all sorts were seen (and saw themselves) as outsiders, renegades and troublemakers, an important theme in the history of the English novel. The more professional novelists became, with audiences to please, the further they moved from their reprobate origins. So it’s good, as we move deeper into the 20th century, to find a writer such as Henry Miller disrupting the still waters of convention with shock and outrage.

In American literature, the renegade strand had found its richest expression in the genius Mark Twain, who went out of his way to oppose the “genteel tradition” of Emerson and Longfellow. By the 20th century, however, the renegade frontier was to be found not in the wild west, but in Paris. Miller, the down-and-out literary enragé, revelled in a new frontier of seedy desperation, where there were “prostitutes like wilted flowers and pissoirs filled with piss-soaked bread”. He and his muse Anaïs Nin flourished here – resolute, isolated and stoical in pursuit of their new aesthetic. Nin memorably recalled that, while her lover was mellow in his speech, there was always a “small, round, hard photographic lens in his blue eyes”.The shabby, 38-year-old American with unblinking camera vision who arrived on the Left Bank of Paris in 1930 was the quintessence of abject failure. All he had going for him was creative rage, mixed with the artistic vision of the truly avant garde. “I start tomorrow on the Paris book,” wrote Henry Miller. “First person, uncensored, formless – fuck everything!”

Henry Miller
Photo by Brassaï

Miller was as good as his word, within the opening pages of the novel whose working title was “Crazy Cock”, he was celebrating Tania’s “warm cunt”, declaring that he “will ream out every wrinkle” with his “prick six inches long”. His obsessive reporting of his sexual exploits, and his low-life rootlessness, is the novel’s subject (there is no plot), a merciless assault on convention. Next to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and even Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Miller’s visceral candour was off the charts of contemporary taste, in tone as much as language. Miller’s delight in rubbing the reader’s face in filth was intoxicating and influential. His “fuck everything” would inspire Kerouac, Genet, Burroughs, Mailer and Ginsberg, among others. Not bad for a man who had once written: “Why does nobody want what I write?”

A note on the text

Miller’s sprawling masterpiece was launched by the Obelisk Press, a French publisher of soft pornography as Tropic of Cancer, with a cover by Maurice Girodias, who would later become famous as the leading French publisher of erotic literature. Wrapped in an explicit warning (“Not to be imported into Great Britain or USA”), it set a new gold standard for graphic language and explicit sexuality. From the outset, Miller’s “barbaric yawp” shook US censorship and inflamed American literary sensibility to its core. Tropic would remain banned for a generation, by which time it had become part of postwar cultural folklore, smuggled into the US wrapped in scarves and underwear. Rarely has a book had such thrilling and desperate underground beginnings.

The outsider status of Miller’s novel combined with its subject (life and love at the extremes of existence) recommended the book to writers like Orwell and Beckett. In his essay Inside the Whale (1940), Orwell wrote: “I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least Tropic of Cancer. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory ... Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.”

For his part Samuel Beckett described it as “a momentous event in the history of modern writing”. In the US, as an outright challenge to the censor, Edmund Wilson noted that “The tone of the book is undoubtedly low. Tropic of Cancer... is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I ever remember to have read.”

Miller’s vision prevailed, in the end. Finally, in 1961, the year after Lady Chatterley’s Lover secured the right to be published in the UK, Tropic of Cancer triumphed in its battle with the US censor and was published by the Grove Press. The timing of this landmark verdict did not favour the ageing iconoclast. At first, his book was treated as the fruit of Miller’s complex relationship with Anaïs Nin, who was an object of veneration within the American feminist movement. Later, feminists like Kate Millett denounced Miller as a male chauvinist, while Jeanette Winterson asked, perceptively: “Why do men revel in the degradation of women?” This question still hangs over the pages of Tropic like a rebuke, but (with a few misgivings) I’m still going to add it to this series.