I discovered Miller’s prose in 2001, thanks to my mother who’s got a knack for *discovering* things. On her way home from work she bought three books by him – Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn. I vividly remember that I was sleeping when she came home, because when I woke up I saw my mother reading one of the books. I enquired. She was reading Tropic of Capricorn, but quickly admitted that she wouldn’t be able to read it in full. I think I was reading something else at the moment (it was Maugham, probably), so I suggested she’d give the books to my granny, who was always an avid reader.
We expected a fiasco, and we had it. Usually not avert on using an occasional strong word, my granny was deeply offended to read all sorts of four- and five-letter obscenities and their derivatives in the text of Tropic of Cancer. She literally threw the books back to me, and I had no choice but to finish off with Maugham as quickly as possible, so as to start reading this horribly offensive Henry Miller.
The fact that it’s a “dirty” and “filthy” narrative cannot be refuted. But what about the context of the work? Miller was leading a life of an ex-pat in mid-war Paris, most of the time literally from hand to mouth, trying to see through the mist of people and events. That Paris was no longer strictly “bourgeois”, but the imminence of another war was palpable, which made people hide behind chimeric hopes and images. That mid-war reality needed a new language, neither too complicated, nor too refined. The swearing words have always been used in the literary works to create a certain impression or effect, but on my then memory they have never been used so beautifully, sumptuously and ruthlessly as in Tropics. Miller used slang as a living language, which in Russian translation was subjected to all relevant grammar rules. And that made me adore the books and the author ever more, because for all its “filth” the book was marked by an unrivalled artistic taste.
As I was still a student, I was reading the book mostly on the bus and on the metro, sometimes standing in a crowd during the rush hour, sometimes sitting between two men, almost always squeezed, which meant that anyone with a habit of reading over the shoulder would have read all those “dirty” words. What would they think of me? Did I honestly care? No.
If anything else, Tropics must have been the ultimate books that taught me a lesson of the necessity to delve deeper into the narrative, instead of being instantly offended by its exterior. The first lesson was definitely in the reading the works of marquis de Sade, especially 120 Days of Sodom. From the point of ‘offensivity’, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn simply took de Sade’s initiative further.
One thing, however, I feel some readers may be missing about Tropic of Cancer is that it was written in the 1930s Paris, which was the Mecca for all innovative tendencies in art, especially surrealism. The book in fact carries a strong spell of surrealism. Some readers observe that the book has no structure, but by the time he embarked on it, Miller was already able to use the modernist technique of ‘stream of consciousness‘ and the surrealist technique of automatic writing. Throughout the book he is preoccupied, among others, with the topics of sex and death, Eros and Tanathos, which again were deeply explored by surrealists. And the breakneck speed of the narrative, when everything seems to be happening at the same time, strangely reminds one of the simultaneity of events in medieval paintings, from which surrealism had often taken its inspiration. In this light, the sumptuous, disturbing and revelatory descriptions and passages in Tropic of Cancer are very much like the otherworldly panoptical visions of Hieronimus Bosch.
I devoured Tropics and Black Spring, then I read The Time of the Assassins: The Study of Rimbaud, and shortly before I came to England I started The Rosy Crucifixion. I still haven’t finished it. Partly, I didn’t have much time for it because of everything I had to do before leaving for another country. In part, however, it had to do with my coming across another book, much smaller in size, which presented Miller from a totally different angle. It was The Colossus of Maroussi, and, God knows, it is probably one of my favourite travel books, if not the favourite.
As for my granny, after a year and a half of my paeans to Henry Miller, she finally gave in and agreed to have another go. I saw her one summer day in 2003, fallen asleep, but keeping a page of the book with her finger. When she was half-way through Tropic of Cancer, I carefully asked her opinion.
‘Well, my girl’, she said, ‘there’s nothing that he writes about that I didn’t know, but, of course, he’s a good writer’.
And I know she liked The Colossus of Maroussi.
More on Henry Miller – http://www.henrymiller.org/
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