The Tedious Tropic of Cancer

I first heard about the book Tropic of Cancer way back in high school or college when I learned that it was a book that was banned from being imported into the United States because it was obscene. When it was finally published in the United States in 1961, a series of obscenity lawsuits were brought against stores selling it. The lower court rulings were all over the place, the best being (as noted in that ever-valuable resource Wikipedia!) a court opinion in Pennsylvania that Tropic of Cancer is“not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” The US Supreme Court eventually ruled the book was not obscene, so you are now free to read it at will.

I was never tempted to read it.

There I was blissfully unaware that reading this book was in my future, when on a trip to the California Coast with the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator we stumbled upon a quirky place in Big Sur. Right off the highway, there is a sign for The Henry Miller Memorial Library. Having nothing better to do than explore quirky places, we stopped, and discovered it is the Platonic Ideal of quirky places to stop. One part bookstore, one part event space, and one part bizarre art exhibit of that type of art which involves throwing a bunch of random items in a small space and pretending it all means something. (Look a broken typewriter next to a broken piano!) The books for sale aren’t just on shelves; many of them are bagged and hanging on buildings and trees. Describing this place is hopeless. Fortunately, you can visit their website and click on the video which is appropriately amateur-hour in quality and filled with lots of high-falutin voice-overs. Go ahead, and look. I’ll wait until you get back.

Amazingly weird, right? If you are ever in the area, you really need to stop; it is truly worth a bit of time to admire the oddity of the place. Once you are visiting a place like that, you just have to buy a book to bring the visit to fruition and if you are going to buy a book from the Henry Miller Memorial Library, I suppose it really should be Tropic of Cancer. And then once you bought a book to memorialize the visit, it really needs to be read. So, I tossed it on my “Six Books I Have Never Read but I Solemnly Swear to Myself that I Will Read This Year” List.

I have now read Tropic of Cancer so that you don’t have to.

First off, you can freely ignore all that obscenity talk. It is not surprising that once upon a time in these United States a book like this would have been considered obscene. Now? The latest pop fiction thriller has more sex than Tropic of Cancer. Way more. The average rom-com is far more sex-infused that this book. The only way I can imagine anyone thinking this book is particular obscene is if you only approve of sex scenes in which the participants have bathed in the last year. I suppose if you don’t like to see naughty words being tiresomely repeatedly deployed for shock value, the book is also obscene.

Second, you don’t read this book for the plot. A bunch of grungy people hanging out in Paris. Because nobody does anything productive, and alcohol is clearly the primary product need, they sometimes have a hard time getting food or shelter. “Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odor of the germicide stifles me. A pungent, acrid odor that seems to invade every pore of my body.” “’Oh, you,’ says Bessie. ‘You’re just a worn-out satyr. You don’t know the meaning of passion. When you get an erection you think you’re passionate.’” “But about the smell of rancid butter….There are good associations too.” And so on, ad nauseam.

So how does a book like this get Karl Shapiro calling Miller “The Greatest Living Artist” and Bob Dylan listing it among books he really likes and all the other similar accolades from all the Beautiful People?

It’s all about the Author Message. You have to wade through 238 pages of senseless aimless drivel to get to the chapter where Miller unfolds his Theory on Life. That is undoubtedly the chapter which causes all that weak-kneed swooning. It’s deep, man. Really Deep.

Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium.

And this:

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

How much more of this would you, Dear Reader, like to read?

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity—I  belong to the earth!

I will give Miller this much: decades before all those 1950s Beat Writers plied their trade, Miller had already perfected the literary style. You can just imagine reading this while strung out on your drug of choice and saying, “Groovy, man. That’s deep. I want to be inhuman too.”

To what end does all this proceed? Miller wants to tell you how important his book is.

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

Now that is an admirable remark. The book is 318 pages long, and if 317 pages are complete drivel, the book may still be a masterpiece because of that one great page. Surely you are not going to claim that there is nothing in those 318 pages, not a single scrap, fragment, or toenail (??) that is great. You need to read this book for that one great moment, buried deep in this book. Alas, Your Humble Narrator’s mining skills are not refined enough to have uncovered that one great page.

Poor Henry Miller. There is literally nothing in this book that Thoreau didn’t do better, much better, in Walden. There is nothing in this book that ever rises to the poetic heights of Whitman’s best lines. Tropic of Cancer is tired book rehashing Thoreau and Whitman, with a bunch of naughty words tossed in to shock the rubes.

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