While I liked reading "Tropic of Cancer" and getting a sense as to who Henry Miller was during his sojourn in Paris in the 1930s, it largely came across to me as the rantings of a dissolute American living in the depths of Parisian poverty.   And yet, he also offers from time to time some really profound insights on sex, sexuality, and life.

 

I enjoy to read about bohemian types. Thompson's evocation of Horatio Alger at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is pretty spot on. My adventure novels involve  irresponsible artist types blowing all their money on drugs and women in exotic locales. I am not especially proud of this but a dose of conviction is important in a form that leans heavily toward introspection.

 

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is particularly good in this realm because he makes you look at the outcast life for its ugliness as well as its appeal. He doesn't have Kerouac's interesting friend's or Thompson's budget to make things colorful and interesting. He has wild nights but he also has STIs, he has problems securing lodging and food at points, when he does have money he spends it on money and sex workers -- he calls women cunts throughout the novel so its no surprise that he hardly finds any woman to go to bed with him that does not demand payment.

 

It was mostly good reading as well. He gets carried away at times and can be hard to follow, but largely I enjoyed it. You probably won't love him if you are particularly formal but if you are that hung up on language you will probably be put off by his profanity and willingness to go into detail about anatomy in a less-than-scientific manner.

 

For all its harshness, I greatly enjoyed the book and would not be surprised if I come back to it again someday. 

I think I was a virgin when I read it (officially I still am), but he still comes across as a Californian who travelled all the way to Paris just to meet 1 or 2 loose women. I also read it on a very peaceful ferry ride and remember thinking the ferry ride was more of a genuine adventure than most of his book.

The book is perhaps summed up best by one of its characters:

…I’ll lay myself down on the operating table and I’ll expose my whole guts … every goddamned thing. Has anyone ever done that before?—What the hell are you smiling at? Does it sound naïf?

It exposes. It hadn’t been done before (well, not in the same way). It is comic. It is naïf. It gives the growing legions of 'dead white men' haters plenty of ammo. Someone like Miller even loads the gun for them, and helps zero the sights. 

With Henry Miller’s bizarre and incongruous existence in his time and place, there’s a kind of sense of loss, that something was lost after him, that an opportunity slipped us by. He represents a fork in the road, and it’s a fork that was never really taken. Instead, he can be easily reduced to a series of issue based identity-political dot points. Easily, that is, by those that…

…live among the hard facts of life, reality, as it is called. It is the reality of a swamp and they are the frogs who have nothing better to do than to croak. The more they croak the more real life becomes.

The same sort of people that can look at this book, even the first thirty pages or so, even if that’s all they read and threw the mouldy paperback down in disgust and reproach, and then croak on about ‘narcissism’, about ‘dead white men’, about ‘misogyny’ about all the stinking murky depths of the swamp that they’re paddling in. 

So, all the croaking aside, what is Miller’s project? He takes Walt Whitman by the end of his beard and drags him along behind him through the streets of 1930s Paris and all the humanity around him, the world of men and women, and goes the full length, he starts with drums and ends with dynamite, he makes the world more endurable in his own sight, he throttles all the birds in creation, he tries to look earnest and looks pathetic, he finds himself again naked as a savage, he makes pages explode, he disregards existent principles, he contradicts and paralyzes, he makes lists of experience, he lives a life rendered down to cunts and stomachs.


This is not fifty shades of fucking grey. This is not a series of banal-titillations made to feel extreme and naughty while you keep warmly rolling in the swamp, wrapped up in a bunch of ideas that’ll keep you moist enough to pass inspection. There is no comfort here, unless it is the comfort of understanding that there is no comfort. Perhaps you have to be hungry and desperate to get to that point? You have to be that to make ‘the guinea pigs squeal’. To know where to put ‘the live wire of sex’, to know…

…that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals.

Is Miller above all this crap? Looking down like a Titan? If he’s part Titan, he’s also part goat. He’s below it. He’s burrowing underneath like he’s a haemorrhaging mole. You’re not meant to love him. Or like him. Or respect him. He asks for nothing from you. He doesn’t ask for you to review his book, since the book is a failure, it's not even a book, because it has to be a failure or else it fails completely; and since reviewing it is just further croaking in the every-spreading swamp of reality. Looking up a picture to slot into the coding so that someone might Like it and say, hey, yeah, nice review man, I liked that book too, lots of fucking, gave me a boner; or no, I disagree, this only got printed coz it gave guys boners and this book was a waste of my precious time when I could be reading the latest Miles Franklin shortlist from onetofive or something exceedingly more contemporary andslashor relevant, or that currently has a film version out with [insert some cunt] in it. I mean there’s only one review that counts and, bang-oh, you start writing the book out word-for-word in all its glorious lack-of-glory and all its primal failure that then bleeds into that time when you were living at the Villa Borghese, and maybe it wasn’t lice, and maybe it wasn’t cunt, or books or dreams you were asking from life, but there was shit happening that you might not want to put down on a piece of paper, since it would certainly be inappropriate and revealing even if you shook it really hard and laughed and covered it in irony since there’s actually nothing appropriate going on down there, under the carapace, where all you might need is to have a rosebush thrust under your nose.

Here a cunt, there a cunt, everywhere a cunt cunt

""Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite."

But if you begin with masturbation, you don't necessarily end with sex.

Here's a guy who exemplifies the stream-of-consciousness mode of writing; he joins in the most-modern movement and he refuses to let anything be too dirty for him to explain - one time I heard someone ask of Star Wars, "But when does anyone go to the bathroom?" Here is a novel that covers when people go to the bathroom. I appreciate what he's doing. Unfortunately he does it very badly.

There are books you have to read at a certain age. There are others that are ageless, and those are better. This should be read when you're young and stupid. Are you young and stupid now? Read this and hate me. Are you older? Then don't.

It's not a very good book. Neither is On The Road. Rebellion is wonderful, and there have been some great rebel books. This is bullshit. It's self-indulgent. It's not good writing. Fuck it all.