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Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer
HENRY MILLER was born on December 26, 1891, in Manhattan and
grew up in Brooklyn. After a string of dreary jobs and a disastrous first
marriage, Miller left for Paris in 1930. Tropic of Cancer, published
when he was forty-three and immediately banned in all English-speaking
countries, is considered his most important book. Miller's works include
Black Spring (1936), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), The
Cosmological Eye (1939), The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), The
Time of the Assassins (1946), The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
(1945), and his autobiographical trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion,
comprised of Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus
(1960). In 1940, Miller returned to America and settled in Big Sur,
California. A lusty romantic. Miller married five times, the last to
Japanese singer Hoki Tokuda.His courageous legal battle against the
censorship of Tropic of Cancer ended with a landmark 1964 Supreme
Court decision, which guaranteed a new freedom of expression to all American
writers. Generous and supportive of other artists throughout his life.
Henry Miller in his final years was surrounded by young admirers and old
friends. Writing, painting, and carrying on a voluminous correspondence
until the very end. Henry Miller died in June, 1980, in the arms of his
housekeeper.
HENRY MILLER
TROPIC OF CANCER
With an Introduction by Louise De SalvoA SIGNET CLASSIC
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"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or
autobiographies -- captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among
what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how
to record truth truly."
--ralph waldo emerson
Introduction to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer by Louise DeSalvo
Henry Miller arrived in Paris on March 4, 1930, to try to become a
successful writer.1 He had ten dollars in his pocket (a loan from
his old friend Emil Schnellock), a trunkful of suits (from his tailor
father), which he knew he could pawn if he ran out of money, and carbon
copies of two novels he had written in New York and hoped to
revise -- Moloch (about his first marriage and his job at Western
Union), and Crazy Cock (about his second marriage to June Miller and
her lesbian love affair, which had tormented him).2 Though he had
been writing seriously for six years, and had published a few small pieces,
Miller hadn't yet published a novel, hadn't yet fulfilled his dream of
becoming a "working-class Proust," the Proust of Brooklyn.3 His
wife, June, had persuaded him that Paris might be where he could perfect his
craft and become financially successful.
What really motivated June to urge her husband to leave New York, though,
was that he had become a burden to her and she wanted him (temporarily) out
of her life while she pursued another of her schemes to make money for both
of them. She was involved in a relationship with an older, wealthy "sugar
daddy," who makes a brief appearance in Tropic of Cancer as the
"fetus with a cigar in its mouth" standing opposite Miller's apartment,
watching him leave for Europe.
Though June had persuaded Miller to quit his job at Western Union to become
a writer, and had supported him through a variety of jobs -- as a hostess, a
waitress, and a prostitute -- she had lost confidence in him. Despite her
efforts, he showed no signs of becoming what she believed he would become:
a writer who would immortalize her in his work, who would extol her
self-sacrifice, who
viii
would reveal her to the world as the semi-mythic femme fatale she
believed herself to be -- a Dostoyevsky heroine, who prowled the streets of
New York City in search of adventure.4
Miller's life with June formed the foundation of all his mature fiction. On
the night of May 21, 1927, in profound despair because June had tied to
Paris with her lover Jean Kronski, Miller outlined a magnum
ïòés that would recount the agony of his life with June. Though
June had kept in touch in her usual desultory way, with a few postcards of
the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and Notre Dame, she hadn't responded
to his letters begging her to come back to him, and he sensed that his
marriage. if not over, would never be the same again.
Desperate with loneliness, and crazy with jealousy. Miller sat at the
typewriter in the office of the Parks Department in Queens where he was
working, to outline a novel that would recount his life with June and her
betrayal. He was thirty-six years old, and living with his parents because
he couldn't afford to live alone. It had been June's idea that he could
become a writer. The truth was, though he had always wanted to become a
writer, he was "afraid"; he didn't think he had the ability. He wasn't rich
or privileged or college educated, though he was extremely well read: he
had attended the City College of New York briefly, but soon left, "disgusted
with the curriculum" after a "hopeless encounter" with Spenser's The
Fairie Queene. As a working-class man, the son of first generation
German-Americans,' who had been born in New York on December 26, 1891,
Miller often said to himself, "Who was I to say Iam a
writer?"6
On that night. Miller began to type out his notes for what would become a
lifelong literary project. The notes came "without effort"; he would
deal with his and his wife's "battles royal, debauches," her lies and
betrayals. He wrote a catalog of the "events and crises" they had endured.
He listed the manuscripts in his possession he could cannibalize, letters he
had written that he could mine for details. Everything he had lived,
everything he had written, would become the source for his art. When he
finished, early the next morning, he had a stack of thirty-two closely typed
pages, which he labeled "June."
ix
He had sketched the basis for much of his life's work, for Crazy Cock,
portions of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Rosy
Crucifixion. More importantly, he had fastened upon the intensely
autobiographical form that his life's work would take. From now on, he would
be both the author and subject of his life's work. He would live his life as
if it were the raw material for art; then he would turn the life he had lived
into art.7
When Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930, the city, like New York, was in
the midst of the Depression. His Paris was not the Paris of Ernest Hemingway
or of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Miller, because of his self-imposed poverty,
could describe a side of Paris that tourists (and even the expatriates who
lived there before him) never saw. It was a Paris not of exquisite meals,
but of hunger, of rancid butter and moldy cheese, of cheap hotels with
tattered wallpaper and bloodstained gray sheets crawling with bedbugs, of
old women sleeping in doorways, of whores with wooden stumps, of full slop
pails, of "angoisse and tristesse."Tropic of Cancer recounts the story of Henry Miller's first two years
in Paris. It is perhaps the first novel that redefines the creative process
for the working-class writer. It is an (un)American, ungenteel, uneducated
(but not unlettered), no-holds-barred, middle-aged-man's version of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (a writer whom
Miller despised, calling him a "pedagogic sadist,"8 but whom he
consciously emulated), or of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel
Proust (a writer whom Miller adored). It is a meditation on both the profane
and divine aspects of an art that has its source in both lust and longing.
Many critics have commented upon the precedent-shattering descriptions of
sexuality in the novel. Yet another subject of Tropic of Cancer is
even more revolutionary: It shows what a working-class man must go through
to live the creative life, and how he must redefine himself to develop the
courage to write a novel about his own experiences in his own voice. "A year
ago, six months ago," the narrator tells us, "I thought that I was an
artist. I no longer think about it, I am." It is a work
xii
work-in-progrcss to remind himself of what still had to be written. Or he
consulted the lists of words he had copied from his dictionary that he
wanted to include in his novel He could work even when other people were
present. Of ten, he typed and talked simultaneously. (It is likely that at
limes he typed these conversations into the novel.) Sometimes "in the middle
of his work he would put on a record and listen to a piece of music. Or he
would burst into song himself. His work was done singing."13
After, he would go on long walks, taking his notebook with him. He would
find new streets to describe, new sights to incorporate, new denizens of the
street to include in his work. The "more squalid parts of Paris''14
fascinated him -- the Cite Nortier, for example, near the Place du
Combat, with a courtyard bordered by rotting buildings, its flagstones
slippery with slime, a "human dump-heap" filled with garbage. Or he would
take a bicycle ride to the outlying parts of Paris.
After dinner (again, at the expense of friends). Miller would often go back
to work.
Though he was still married to June Miller throughout the composition of
Tropic of Cancer, this period was also the heyday of Miller's love
affair with Anais Nin, who was married to the banker Hugh Guiler. Miller was
introduced to AnaTs Nin in December 1931 through his friend Richard
Osbom.15
Miller came into Nin's life when she was ripe for sexual experimentation,
soon after she had published a book on D. H. Lawrence. Miller himself had
just published a review of Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or, and was working
on yet another revision of his novel Crazy Cock, about the adverse
effect of his wife's lesbian love affair upon his sanity.16 When
they met, Nin wrote into her diary: "I saw a man I liked. In his writing he
is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes
drunk, I thought. He is like me."17
At first, the two met to talk about their work, and to exchange ideas. But
when Nin met Miller's wife, June. the relationship became immediately
complicated. Nin fell in love with June, replicating the love triangle that
had caused Miller so much pain.
xiii
After June returned to the United States, Nin and Miller became lovers.
According to Nin's testimony, he was a wonderful lover, who awakened her
sensuality; he was passionate yet considerate, and he satisfied her in ways
she had never imagined possible. According to his testimony, she supported
him financially, and gave him the peace of mind and the courage to begin
Tropic of Cancer, the most important novel of his life. She
convinced him that his work was more important than Joyce's, and that he
should be as explosive and provocative in his work as he was in his talk.
She provided the secure base from which Miller felt free to experiment.
Nin and Miller remained lovers for years, spoke of marriage, shared a studio
apartment at the Villa Seurat, and conceived a child together (which Nin
aborted). Yet Nin never seriously considered leaving her husband for Miller,
though she urged Miller to leave June, and helped end his marriage by
letting June know that she and Miller were lovers. For one thing, it was
Nin's husband's money that financed her freewheeling lifestyle. She realized
that Miller could not be counted upon to support a wife. For another,
neither Nin nor Miller was inclined to monogamy. During their affair, Nin
was sexually involved, not only with Miller, but with her husband, her
cousin Eduardo Sanchez, and two of her analysts (Rene Allendy and Otto
Rank); Miller continued his dalliances with prostitutes. Though Miller
seemed accepting of Nin's behavior, Nin was often angry with Miller for
his.
Reading Nin's descriptions of Miller's behavior as a lover and as a man, in
her unexpurgated diaries (published as Henry and June and
Incest), and in her fiction (in Cities of the Interior)
against Miller's description of himself in Tropic of Cancer is
instructive. It illuminates the distance between the "real" Henry Miller,
and the persona Miller created for himself in his work. In Miller's
self-portrait, he presents himself as sexually rapacious, rough, tough,
woman hating, though he longs for his wife, Mona. In Nin's work, though.
Miller is a passionate and tender lover, respectful of her womanhood, though
timid, weak, and vulnerable as a man. Her portrait is nothing like the
tough-minded persona of Cancer, and suggests that Miller's creation
was largely compensatory.
xiv
Miller was, as Nin put it, "a child in need, ... a victim [of women] seeking
solace, ... a weakling seeking sustenance."18
Henry Miller developed the narrative of Tropic of Cancer from his
letters from Paris to his friend Emil Schnellock and those to Anais Nin
(especially the ones from Dijon describing his wretched teaching
experience),19 from the notes he made as he prowled the streets
of Paris, and from his conversations with friends about literature,
psychoanalysis (with Anai's Nin), sex (with Wambly Bald, the Parisian
columnist, who appears in the novel as the sex-obsessed Van Norden), death
(with Michael Fraenkel), and war. For the first time in his fiction, he
used what he called the "first person spectacular."20 It was a
point of view he had studiously avoided in his earlier attempts at fiction,
yet it suited him, for he was a magnetic teller and reteller of stories.
In one sense. Tropic of Cancer is about the healing of the damaged
self through stories, which magnify and mythicize his own and his friends'
escapades. Anai's Nin believed that Miller's work illuminated the workings
of the psyche more profoundly than James Joyce's and, in one important
sense, she was right. For as James Joyce records the contents of
consciousness. Miller's work shows the process by which the contents of
consciousness are created by the storytelling self. Miller's avowed aim, as
he states it in Cancer, is "to put down everything that goes on in my
noodle" without self-censorship. Miller shows how, by choosing the way you
describe your life, you can create the consciousness that you desire.
Without waiting for the world to change, you can change who you are by the
stories you tell yourself and others about who you are.
But his stories are not only healing, they are entertaining. Miller adopted
the pose of a modem-day jongleur, who turned self-display into an art
form, into a carnival performance, using a narrative voice uniquely and
authentically his, one that had not yet been written down.
Though in his novel Moloch, Miller wrote that no successful work of
literature could be located in Brooklyn, or have Brooklyn as its subject.
Tropic of Cancer is written
xv
in the voice of the Brooklyn boy. It is the voice of the wise-ass street
kid, who hangs out on the corner with his friends, who trades stories with
them about his exploits, and who uses one-upsmanship to gain status. It is
the voice of the man who hides his pain behind a string of curse words, who
vulgarizes women because it is unmanly to admit how much he needs them, and
who exaggerates how callous and tough he is so that he will not be
victimized. But his longing for Mona (his wife, June) is tenderly and
poignantly described, and it forms the emotional core of Cancer
against which his posture of viciousness toward women must be read. In
expressing his disgust at the cunt-obsessed Van Norden, the narrator
concludes that having sex without passion is like living in a state of war.
Though a habitue of the streets, a literary clochard, Miller's
narrator cannot manage to hide how learned he is. In Cancer, besides
drawing upon his experiences, Miller self-consciously used such models and
sources as Knut Hamsun's, D. H. Lawrence's, and Marcel Proust's
fiction,21 Shakespeare's and James Joyce's soliloquies, Francois
Rabelais' bawdy humor,22 Japanese shunga's and Indian sculpture's
explicitly profane yet sacred depiction of sex, Walt Whitman's celebratory
lists, Brassai's photography, Picasso's nudes, Anais Nin's self-reflective
diaries, and the techniques of the surrealists (including
assemblage),23 to name but a few. He describes how literature
and art can enrich the lives of the members of the working class, of people
without university degrees.
Tropic of Cancer was published in a small edition in Paris on
September 1, 1934, by Jack Kahane at the Obelisk Press with money provided
by Anais Nin, given to her by Otto Rank.24 Obscenity laws in
England and the United States prohibited publication, but "potentially
'obscene' books could be published in France if they were in
English."25 The cover of the first edition was designed by
Kahane's sixteen-year-old son to save money. It showed "a crab crushing a
nude female in its claws,"26 and Miller thought it was
"horrible." The jacket carried a warning to booksellers that Cancer
"must not be displayed in the window."27
Notes
1. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, ed. by George Wickes (New York: New
Directions, 1989), p. 15.
2. Erica Jong, The Devil at Large (New York: Turtle Bay, 1993), p.
21; see J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993).
3. Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright (Santa Barbara: Capra Press,
1978), p. 139: Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 14^; Mary V. Dearborn, Henry Miller (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 108; and the account in Louise DeSalvo,
Conceived with Malice (New York: Dutton, 1994).
4. Ferguson, p. 81.
5. Jong, p. 55.
6. Martin, p. 18, p. 129; Dearborn, pp. 100-1; Henry Miller, My Life and
Times (New York: Playboy Press, n.d.), p. 33.
7. For accounts of this event, see Martin, p. 520; Dearborn, p. 323; Miller,
My Life and Times, p. 50.
8. Henry Miller, Moloch (New York: Grove Press, 1992), p. 8.
9. Ferguson, p. 208.
10. Alfred Perles, My Friend Henry Miller (New York: John Day, 1956),
p. 70; Wambly Bald quoted in Ferguson, pp. 210-11.
11. See the account in Perles.
12. Perles, pp. 70-1.
13. Perles, p. 70.
14. Perles, p. 72.
15. See Noel Riley Fitch, "The Literate Passion of Anais Nin & Henry
Miller," in Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds..
Significant Others (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), pp. 155-72.
16. Fitch, p. 155; see the account of Miller's writing Crazy Cock in
DeSalvo.
17. Anais Nin, Henry and June (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1986), p. 6.
18. Anais Nin, Ladders to Fire, in Cities of the Interior
(Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1959, 1975), p. 48.
19. See Dearborn, p. 128, ò. 149.
xx
20. Miller, Moloch, p. 65.
21. Ferguson, p. 69.
22. Perles, p. 112.
23. Ferguson, p. 181.
24. Martin, p. 303; Dearborn, p. 175.
25. Jong, p. 132.
26. Martin, p. 303.
27. Perles, p. 104.
28. Martin, p. 303.
29. Perles, p. 104; Dearborn, p. 173.
30. Perles, p. 142; Cendrars's review is provided in George Wickes, ed..
Henry Miller and the Critics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1963).
31. Perles, p. 171; Ferguson, p. 346.
32. Dearborn, p. 241.
33. Perles, pp. 205-6.
34. Ferguson, p. 344.
35. Ferguson, p. 345.
36. Ferguson, p. 348.
37. Ferguson, p. 350.
38. Millett quoted in Jong, p. 29.
39. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin: 1931-1934, Volume One. ed. and
with an Introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1966), p. 66.
40. Dearborn, p. 34.
41. Jong, p. 26.
42. Jong, p. 26.
TROPIC OF CANCER
* * *
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere,
nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits
and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful
place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so
intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The
weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more
death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The
cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are
killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must
get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape.
The weather will not change.
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason
I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A
year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think
about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me.
There are no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of
character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is
a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to
God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will. I am going to sing
for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you
croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse....
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a
little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a
guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song.
I am singing.
It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better,
more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen
to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang
too beautifully, or not beautifully enough.
It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep track of the date.
Would you say -- my dream of the 14th November last? There are intervals, but
they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The
world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The
world is a cancer eating itself away.... I am thinking that when the great
silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When
into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored
and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my
chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying. shedding
the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write
upon.
Dozing off. The physiology of love. The whale with his six foot penis, in
repose. The bat -- penis libre. Animals with a bone in the penis.
Hence, a bone on. ... "Happily," says Gourmont, "the bony structure
is lost in man." Happily? Yes, happily. Think of the human race walking
around with a bone on. The kangaroo has a double penis -- one for weekdays
and one for holidays. Dozing. A letter from a female asking if I have found
a title for my book. Title? To be sure: "Lovely Lesbians."
Your anecdotal life! A phrase of M. Borowski's. It is on Wednesdays
that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who is a dried-up cow,
officiates. She is studying English now -- her favourite word is "filthy." You
can see immediately what a pain in the ass the Borowskis are. But wait. ...
Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion. An invincible
combination, especially when you consider that he is not a bad artist. He
puts on that he is a Pole, but he is not, of course. He is a Jew, Borowski,
and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is
Jewish, or half Jewish, which is worse. There's Carl and Paula, and
Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf and Lucille. All
except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned out to be a Jew also. Louis
Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden and Cherie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a
Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am
writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important
to understand.
Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would become
a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew.
Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
Twilight hour. Indian blue water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent.
The rails fall away into the canal at Jaures. The long caterpillar with
lacquered sides dips like a roller-coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney
Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central
America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black, webby, not ordered
by the engineer but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the
polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.
Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this beautiful Villa
Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence of food. It is positively
appalling at times. I have asked Boris time and again to order bread for
breakfast, but he always forgets. He goes out for breakfast, it seems. And
when he comes back he is picking his teeth and there is a little egg hanging
from his goatee. He eats in the restaurant, out of consideration for me. He
says it hurts to eat a big meal and have me watch him.
I like Van Norden but I do not share his opinion of himself. I do not agree,
for instance, that he is a philosopher, or a thinker. He is cunt-struck,
that's all. And he will never be a writer. Nor will Sylvester ever be a
writer, though his name blaze in 50,000 candle power red lights. The only
writers about me for whom I have any respect, at present, arc Carl and
Boris. They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a white name. They are
mad and tone deaf. They are sufferers.
Moldorf, on the other hand, who suffers too in his peculiar way, is not
mad. Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or blood-vessels, no heart or
kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable drawers and in the
drawers are labels written out in white ink, brown ink, red ink, blue ink,
vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot, turquoise, onyx, Anjou,
herring. Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola... .
I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I can see myself in the
mirror as I write.
Tania is like Irene. She expects fat letters. But there is another Tania, a
Tania like a big seed, who scatters pollen everywhere -- or, let us say, a
little bit of Tolstoi, a stable scene in which the foetus is dug up. Tania
is a fever. too -- les votes urinaires. Cafe de la Liberte, Place des
Vosges, bright neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark bathrooms, Porto
Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata pathetique, aural
amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt sienna breasts, heavy garters, what
time is it, golden pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffeta fingers,
vaporish twilights turning to ilex, acromegaly, cancer and delirium, warm
veils, poker chips, carpets of blood and soft thighs. Tania says so that
every one may hear: "I love him!" And while Boris scalds himself with whisky
she says: "Sit down here! O Boris ... Russia ... what'll I do? I'm
bursting with it!"
At night when I look at Boris' goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical.
O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters,
those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I
will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send
you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned
inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know
how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your
ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels
something, does he? He feels
the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider, I have
ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams,
drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You
can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am
fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of
being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs
from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin. I will bite into your clitoris
and spit out two franc pieces....
Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended,
their black boughs gesticulating like a sleep-walker. Sombre, spectral
trees, their trunks pale as dear ash. A silence supreme and altogether
European. Shutters drawn, shops barred. A red glow here and there to mark a
tryst. Brusque the facades, almost forbidding; immaculate except for the
splotches of shadow cast by the trees. Passing by the Orangerie I am reminded
of another Paris, the Paris of Maugham, of Gauguin, Paris of George Moore. I
think of that terrible Spaniard who was then startling the world with his
acrobatic leaps from style to style. I think of Spengler and of his terrible
pronunciamentos, and I wonder if style, style in the grand manner, is done
for. I say that my mind is occupied with these thoughts, but it is not true;
it is only later, after I have crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me
the carnival of lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For
the moment I can think of nothing -- except that I am a sentient being
stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All
along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the
wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears
and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I
can communicate even a fraction of my feelings....
The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants
fat letters to shove in her valise. Immense, avec des choses inouies.
Liona now, she had a cunt. I know because she sent us some hairs from down
below. Liona -- a wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On every high
hill she played the harlot -- and
sometimes in telephone booths and toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol
and a shaving mug with his initials on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road
with her dress pulled up and fingered herself. She used candles, Roman
candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the land big enough for her ...
not one. Men went inside her and curled up. She wanted extension
pricks, self-exploding rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote.
She would cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave her
permission. One cunt out of a million, Llona! A laboratory cunt and no
litmus paper that could take her color. She was a liar, too, this Liona. She
never bought a bed for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whiskey bottle
and her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Pool Carol, he could only
curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath and he fell out -- like a dead
clam.
Enormous, fat letters, avec des choses inouies. A valise without
straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian
ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to
the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the
Porte de la Villette. You dropped your sweetbreads into the tumbrils -- red
tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and
Mame, where the water sluices through the dykes and lies like glass under
the bridges. Liona is lying there now and the canal is full of glass and
splinters; the mimosas weep, and there is a wet, foggy fart on the
windowpanes. One cunt out of a million Liona! All cunt and a glass ass in
which you can read the history of the Middle Ages.
It is the caricature of a man which Moldorf first presents. Thyroid eyes.
Michelin lips. Voice like pea-soup. Under his vest he carries a little pear.
However you look at him it is always the same panorama; netsuke snuffbox,
ivory handle, chess piece, fan, temple motif. He has fermented so long now
that he is amorphous. Yeast despoiled of its vitamins. Vase without a
rubber plant.
The females were sired twice in the 9th century, and again during the
Renaissance. He was carried through the great dispersions under yellow
bellies and white. Long before the Exodus a Tatar spat in his blood.
His dilemma is that of the dwarf. With his pineal eye he sees in silhouette
projected on a screen of incommensurable size. His voice, synchronized to
the shadow of a pinhead, intoxicates him. He hears a roar where others hear
only a squeak.
There is his mind. It is an amphitheatre in which the actor gives a protean
performance. Moldorf, multiform and unerring, goes through his roles -- clown,
juggler, contortionist, priest, lecher, mountebank. The amphitheatre is too
small. He puts dynamite to it. The audience is drugged. He scotches it.
I am trying ineffectually to approach Moldorf. It is like trying to approach
God, for Moldorf is God -- he has never been anything else. I am merely
putting down words....
I have had opinions about him which I have discarded; I have had other
opinions which I am revising. I have pinned him down only to find that it
was not a dung-beetle I had in my hands, but a dragonfly. He has offended
me by his coarseness and then overwhelmed me with his delicacy. He has been
voluble to the point of suffocation, then quiet as the Jordan.
When I see him trotting forward to greet me, his little paws outstretched,
his eyes perspiring, I feel that I am meeting.... No, this is not the way to
go about it!
"Comme un oeuf dansant sur un jet d'eau."
He has only one cane -- a mediocre one. In his pocket scraps of paper
containing prescriptions for Weltschmerz. He is cured now, and the little
German girl who washed his feet is breaking her heart. It is like Mr.
Nonentity toting his Gujurati dictionary everywhere. "Inevitable for
every one" -- meaning, no doubt, indispensable. Borowski would find
all this incomprehensible. Borowski has a different cane for each day in
the week, and one for Easter.
We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a
cracked mirror.
I have been looking over my manuscripts, pages scrawled with revisions.
Pages of literature. This frightens me a little. It is so much like
Moldorf. Only I am a gentile, and gentiles have a different way of
suffering. They suffer without neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a
man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning
of suffering.
I recall distinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like taking a cub to
bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you -- and then you really were
frightened. Ordinarily you had no fear -- you could always turn him loose, or
chop his head off.
There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with wild
beasts and be mangled. They go in even without revolver or whip. Fear makes
them fearless. .. For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts.
The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is
so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner. The spectators
applaud but he does not hear. The drama, he thinks, is going on inside the
cage. The cage, he thinks, is the world. Standing there alone and helpless,
the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand his language. Not
one lion has ever heard of Spinoza. Spinoza? Why they can't even get their
teeth into him. "Give us meat!" they roar, while he stands there petrified,
his ideas frozen, his Weltanschauung a trapeze out of reach. A
single blow of the lion's paw and his cosmogony is smashed.
The lions, too, are disappointed. They expected blood, bones, gristle,
sinews. They chew and chew, but the words are chicle and chicle is
indigestible. Chicle is a base over which you sprinkle sugar, pepsin, thyme,
licorice. Chicle, when it is gathered by chicleros, is O. K. The chicleros
came over on the ridge of a sunken continent. They brought with them an
algebraic language. In the Arizona desert they met the Mongols of the North,
glazed like eggplants. Time shortly after the earth had taken its gyroscopic
lean -- when the Gulf Stream was parting ways with the Japanese current. In
the heart of the soil they found tufa rock. They embroidered the very bowels
of the earth with their language. They ate one another's entrails and the
forest closed in on them, on their bones and skulls, on their lace tufa.
Their language was lost. Here and there one still finds the remnants of a
menagerie, a brain plate covered with figures.
x x x
What has all this to do with you, Moldorf? The word in your mouth is
anarchy. Say it, Moldorf, I am waiting for it. Nobody knows, when we shake
hands, the rivers that pour through our sweat Whilst you are framing your
words, your lips half-parted, the saliva gurgling in your cheeks, I have
jumped halfway across Asia. Were I to take your cane, mediocre as it is,
and poke a lime hole in your side, I could collect enough material to fill
the British Museum. We stand on five minutes and devour centuries. You are
the sieve through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words.
Behind the word is chaos. Each word a stripe, a bar, but there are not and
never will be enough bars to make the mesh.
In my absence the window-curtains have been hung. They have the appearance
of Tyrolian tablecloths dipped in lysol. The room sparkles. I sit on the bed
in a daze, thinking about man before his birth. Suddenly bells begin to
toll, a weird, unearthly music, as if I had been translated to the steppes
of Central Asia. Some ring out with a long, lingering roll, some erupt
drunkenly, maudlinly. And now it is quiet again, except for a last note that
barely grazes the silence of the night -- just a faint, high gong snuffed out
like a flame.
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I
write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.
Beside the perfection of Turgeniev I put the perfection of Dostoievski. (Is
there anything more perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in
one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in Van Gogh's
letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of
the individual over art.
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the
recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can
see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and
motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life
some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands
violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are
nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly
exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d'habitude. Nothing is
proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million
lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep
sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more... .
The telephone interrupts this thought which I should never have been able to
complete. Some one is coming to rent the apartment...
It looks as though it were finished, my life at the Villa Borghese. Well,
I'll take up these pages and move on. Things will happen elsewhere. Things
are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are
like lice -- they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch
and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused.
Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his
private tragedy. It's in the blood now -- misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide.
The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch
and scratch -- until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is
exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am
crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander
failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to
scratch himself to death.
So fast and furiously am I compelled to live now that there is scarcely time
to record even these fragmentary notes. After the telephone call, a
gentleman and his wife arrived. I went upstairs to lie down during the
transaction. Lay there wondering what my next move would be. Surely not to
go back to the fairy's bed and toss about all night flicking bread crumbs
with my toes. That puking little bastard! If there's anything worse than
being a fairy it's being a miser. A timid, quaking little bugger who lived
in constant fear of going broke some day -- the 18th of March perhaps, or the
25th of May precisely. Coffee without milk or sugar. Bread without butter.
Meat without gravy, or no meat at all. Without this and without that! The
dirty little miser! Open the bureau drawer one day and find money hidden
away in a sock. Over two thousand francs -- and checks that he hadn't even
cashed. Even that I wouldn't have minded so much if there weren't always
coffee grounds in my beret and garbage on the floor, to say nothing of the
cold cream jars and the greasy towels and the sink always stopped up. I tell
you, the little bastard he smelled bad -- except when he doused himself with
cologne. His ears were dirty, his eyes were dirty, his ass was dirty. He was
double-jointed, asthmatic, lousy, picayune, morbid. I could have forgiven him
everything if only he had handed me a decent breakfast! But a man who has two
thousand francs hidden away in a dirty sock and refuses to wear a clean shirt
or smear a little butter over his bread, such a man is not just a fairy, nor
even just a miser -- he's an imbecile!
But that's neither here nor mere, about the fairy. I'm keeping an ear open
as to what's going on downstairs. It's a Mr. Wren and his wife who have
called to look at the apartment. They're talking about taking it. Only
talking about it, thank God. Mrs. Wren has a loose laugh --
complications ahead. Now Mister Wren is talking. His voice is
raucous, scraping, booming, a heavy blunt weapon that wedges its way through
flesh and bone and cartilage.
Boris calls me down to be introduced. He is rubbing his hands, like a
pawnbroker. They are talking about a story Mr. Wren wrote, a story about a
spavined horse.
"But I thought Mr. Wren was a painter?"
"To be sure," says Boris, with a twinkle in his eye, "but in the wintertime
he writes. And he writes well ... remarkably well."
I try to induce Mr. Wren to talk, to say something, anything, to talk about
the spavined horse, if necessary. But Mr. Wren is almost inarticulate. When
he essays to speak of those dreary months with the pen he becomes
unintelligible. Months and months he spends before setting a word to paper.
(And there are only three months of winter!) What does he cogitate all those
months and months of winter? So help me God, I can't see this guy as a
writer. Yet Mrs. Wren says that when he sits down to it the stuff just
pours out.
The talk drifts. It is difficult to follow Mr. Wren's mind because he says
nothing. He thinks as he goes along -- so Mrs. Wren puts it. Mrs. Wren
puts everything about Mr. Wren in the loveliest light. "He thinks as he goes
along" -- very charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but really
very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing but a spavined horse.
Boris hands me money to buy liquor. Going for the liquor I am already
intoxicated. I know just how I'll begin when I get back to the house.
Walking down the street it commences, the grand speech inside me that's
gurgling like Mrs. Wren's loose laugh. Seems to me she had a slight edge on
already. Listens beautifully when she's tight. Coming out of the wine-shop I
hear the urinal gurgling. Everything is loose and splashy. I want Mrs. Wren
to listen ...
Boris is rubbing his hands again. Mr. Wren is still stuttering and
spluttering. I have a bottle between my legs and I'm shoving the corkscrew
in. Mrs. Wren has her mouth parted expectantly. The wine is splashing
between my legs, the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my
veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy things that commence
to gush out of me now pell-mell. I'm telling them everything that comes to
mind, everything that was bottled up inside me and which Mrs. Wren's loose
laugh has somehow released. With that bottle between my legs and the sun
splashing through the window I experience once again the splendor of those
miserable days when I first arrived in Paris, a bewildered, poverty-stricken
individual who haunted the streets like a ghost at a banquet. Everything
comes back to me in a rush -- the toilets that wouldn't work, the prince who
shined my shoes, the Cinema Splendide where I slept on the patron's
overcoat, the bars in the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat
cockroaches, the drinking and carousing that went on between times. Rose
Cannaque and Naples dying in the sunlight. Dancing the streets on an empty
belly and now and then calling on strange people -- Madame Delorme, for
instance. How I ever got to Madame Delorme's, I can't imagine any more. But
I got there, got inside somehow, past the butler, past the maid with her
little white apron, got right inside the palace with my corduroy trousers