Books: Greatest Living Patagonian

“My scrofulous French novel on grey paper with blunt type.”* as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer might well be described, has now turned up in U.S. bookstores clad in a clean collegiate jacket, tailored at $7.50 by Grove Press, intellectual outfitters to the offbeat, the off-color and the off-limits (in 1959 Grove issued the unabridged Lady Chatterley’s Lover). The publishers have so much confidence in Miller’s notoriety that they paid the author $50,000 in advance and dumped a 30,000 printing into hospitable bookstores (Scribner and Doubleday, among others, are holdouts) weeks ahead of the announced publication date. All previous attempts to publish the book in the U.S. have ended in customs or post office bans, and for 26 years Cancer and the other Miller Tropic—Capricorn—have been unknown to Americans, except as tourist and G.I. plain-wrapper souvenirs of Paris.

During that time, one of those mysterious underground (or as Miller would put it, “Chthonian”) movements has been rumbling about the name and personality of Henry Miller, and a committee-sized panel of names has been assembled by the publishers to “welcome Miller among the elect.” The encomiums range in warmth and weight from T. S. Eliot to Kenneth Patchen. He is not only the Buddha of the beatniks, but Lawrence Durrell asserts that ”American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what he has done.” He has been called, or called himself a “saint.” “Caliban,” “a one-man band,” a “Patagonian.” As to what Patagonian means in the Miller context, the only source seems to be Poet Karl Shapiro, who introduces this U.S. edition in the characteristic style of the muddled and ecstatic cultist: “What is a Patagonian? I don’t know, but it is certainly something rare and sui generis. We can call Miller the greatest living Patagonian.”

Ezra Pound’s claims for both Miller and Cancer were most modest. In 1934, when he handed the manuscript to its original Paris publishers, he said: “Here is a dirty book worth reading.”

Paff, Paff, Paff! Whether it is worth reading may remain a matter of debate but dirty it is. The word has no legal status, but as it is commonly used. Cancer is a very dirty book indeed. Saying so, the critic runs the risk of being called an anti-intellectual or, worse yet, a square. But in this case, perhaps, the higher sophistication lies on the side of squareness—in the sense that the most cogent objections to Chatterley were voiced not in court or in the newspapers, which all tried hard to be broadminded, but in the intellectual pages of Encounter, in which Critic Colin Welch maintained, squarely, that the book advocates a return to some sort of dark, druidical pre-Christianity and the substitution of phallus worship for veneration of the Cross. Similarly. Miller in Cancer proposes a new world based on “the omphalos” (navel) as against an “abstract idea nailed to a cross.” Despite the truly epic flow of obscene language, which becomes first dull and then comical, the book’s real shock value is not moral but intellectual: what is baffling is not the sex but the snake oil it is cooked in. Cancer is not pornography in the usual sad style of that genre; it lacks the glum and oleaginous manner, the pseudoanthropological pedantry. Miller sets up obscene tableaux vivants but moves among them like a circus clown with a bladder full of hot air. With the real pornographer, the sex circus is too solemn for comic treatment. Miller’s tone at times suggests that a committee of longshoremen has taken over the management of a bal-musette. The words for the climaxes of love are not Lawrentian evocations of the impossible mysteries of sex but “paff! paff! After that it’s paff, paff, paff!” Miller moves into the most preposterous bedrooms like a voyeur without curiosity—only with a hoarse guffaw and a derisive yet somehow kindly eye for farce and foible.

In the Gutter. Cancer is a picaresque-didactic novel whose hero is a monster of eloquence, a high-spirited low character—Henry Miller. At one level it is a long locker-room anecdote told with unquenchable gusto by a born raconteur, anxious that all should share the grandeurs and miseries of being down and out in Europe, among the Lost Generation who

Worked in Paris for the New York Herald

And nearly had a poem in transition

And learned the Charleston from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Miller himself indeed worked as a proofreader (“a white-collar coolie”) for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, was attached to a little magazine, not transition but Booster, and danced not the Charleston but a fandango along the gutters, in the brothels, bistros and mansards of Montparnasse. In telling about it all. he establishes the hardly original thesis that being broke is very hard work and that panhandling—working as cut-rate gigolo, or becoming valet-pimp to a parsimonious Parsee—can involve more shame and chicanery than the whole career of a Babbitt or a Cash McCall.

Also, he makes clear that a great deal of sexual intercourse of various kinds has always been carried on in Paris, as he recites the squalid life, loves, and even more squalid conversation of the human fauna of Montparnasse: opulent and heavily gartered Tania; Van Norden (now reputedly a New York newspaperman) who loves a poxy and paranoid Russian cryptoprincess; the girls who sit around their brothel parlors scratching themselves “like chimpanzees”; the tortured expatriate Fillmore who cries out the tragicomedy of the Lost Generation: “Sure, I hate those puritanical buggers back home—I hate ’em with all my guts. But I’m one of them myself. I don’t belong here. I’m sick of it.” After all the jokes about bidets, venereal disease, and dramas of nymphomania and perversion, poor Fillmore has a point.

Horse Latitudes. None of this is new. But when Miller moves from the tropics of sex into the horse latitudes of philosophy, something takes over that could hardly be matched by a whole chautauqua of oldtime New Thought charlatans but which nevertheless establishes Miller’s importance—not for what he says but for what he is, a man who, in many different forms, rejects the Western tradition and abdicates its heavy honors. These forms include anarchy and fascism, atheism and religiosity, nihilism and authoritarianism, sex-as-an-act and sex-as-salvation, pacifism and violence, futurism and the cult of the primitive; they are not consistent with each other, but they are consistent with a modern disease and with a type. Says one of Miller’s admirers: “He is not an animal, he is a zoo.”

Miller somehow creates the impression of mixing up Christ and Krishnamurti, Huysmans and Mme. Blavatsky. He can write an outburst such as this—”I would like to penetrate up to the eyes to make them waggle ferociously, dear crazy metallurgical eyes … the radiating light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars”—and mean it as a hymn to Dostoevsky. Actually, it has as much to do with the Russian’s tragic art and exact moral theorems as it has with lepidopterology or philately; the only thing it says is that Miller is excited in the presence of Dostoevsky—or Nietzsche, Nostradamus, Rabelais, et al.—just as some birds become gaga in the presence of ants, put them under their wings and flutter about in some obscure ornithological orgy.

For the adult reader with a strong stomach, the scandalous and scurvy parts are worth reading more than the ornithological thimbleriggery. When Miller assumes the role of atheist-theologian, no such apocalyptic poppycock could be found outside the atelier of a Sunset Strip swami. On encountering words like “Life,” “Love,” “God,” “Art,” etc., a first rule for the reader is to reach ‘for the safety catch of his syllogism. If not armed with this weapon he could try a simpler trick, what might be called the “No Game” of slipping in a negative each time Miller makes a cosmic positive statement, thus: “Whitman is [not] the first [nor] the last poet” or “Let us [not] scrap the past instantly.”

Edited this way, the book will make more sense. It will also make clear that Henry Miller is [not] the greatest writer or “the greatest soul” in America—or Patagonia.

* “Simply glance at it you grovel/Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe,” the monk goes on to say in Robert Browning’s poem, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, about an otherwise unidentified book.