Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

I have just finished rereading Henry Miller’s first published book, Tropic of Cancer. About 50 years ago, the first time I read the Tropic of Cancer I skipped around, looking for the “good parts.” Actually, there are very few “good parts” and those that exist are very tame in comparison with today’s literature.

Henry Miller, 1933

This time I read Tropic of Cancer all the way through. Henry Miller was an excellent writer, bringing to life time (late 1920s) and place (Paris) with color and remarkable insights. Today, for me, Miller’s words and remarkable insights are the “good parts.”

Henry Miller, like Jack Kerouac, writes about what he sees, what he hears, and what he experiences. He writes about the Paris where he lived for 10 years—years during which the Great Depression began. For much of that time he had no income, only what he earned from small writing assignments. For much of that time, he depended on friends to survive.

The Paris in which Miller lives is not a beautiful place. There is wretchedness and poverty with which he became well acquainted. He does not attack this wretchedness, but reports it and accepts it. Only on occasion—such as the last passage I quote in this blog post—does Henry Miller play off severe poverty with the cold-heartedness of the bourgeoisie.

So, without further words, I should like to share just a few of the remarkable insights I discovered during my second reading of Tropic of Cancer:

It is now my second full year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources. I am the happiest man alive. 

Up to that time nothing very terrible at all of me, though I had already lost all my worldly possessions and had known what it was like to walk the streets in hunger and in fear of the police. 

One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non. One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. I had time and sentiment enough to spare to peep into other people’s lives, to dally with the dead stuff of romance which, however morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between the covers of a  book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous. 

My world of human beings perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the street spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort. 

An eternal city, Paris! More eternal than Rome, more splendid than Nineveh. The varying navel of the world to which, like a blind and faltering idiot, one crawled back on hands and needs. And like a cork that has drifted to the dead center of the ocean, one floats here in this scum and the wrack of the seas, listless, hopeless, heedless even to a passing Columbus. The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world, the charnel house in which the stinking wombs can find their bloody packages of flesh and bone. 

The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand the glamour of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them, until he has become a straw that is tossed here and there by every specter that blows. 

… these filthy beggars lying in the rain, what purpose do they serve? What good can they do us? They make us bleed for five minutes, that’s all. Oh, well, these are night thoughts produced by walking in the rain after two thousand years of Christianity. At least now the birds are well provided for, and the cats and dogs…. At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love—just enough to feed the birds. 

Henry Miller. c 1958

Today (now yesterday)

I created this post at intervals throughout the day.

I sit here shirtless as I write this post. It’s almost 96° outside and over 80° inside. This morning I got quite ill from the heat. More about that later in this post.

Today is the 12^th day of June—a day that for three fourths of my life has been a high point of every year. It was on this date in 1971 that my oldest son, Nicholas Lawrence Temple III, was born in Würtzburg, Germany.

Marienburg fortress/castle, Wurtzberg, Germany with Main River in foreground

It was on this date in 1975 that my youngest son, Robert Lawrence Temple II, was born in Louisville, Kentucky.

Louisville night skyline from the Indiana shore of the Ohio River

I still celebrate this day, in a way, although not with the grandness that I once did, since now I am estranged—not by my desire—from both of my sons. Yesterday I created these graphic images that I posted on Facebook to celebrate Nick and Rob’s birthday:

I don’t expect a response.

Recently I have been reading books written by two giants of train-of-thought literature, HenryMiller and Jack Kerouac. I wonder if reading their words has in any way influenced my own writing—probably not since I am so attuned to punctuation that I have don’t think I could create a run on sentence even if I tried. I have discovered that there is quite a similarity between their styles perhaps because both Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and Kerouac’s road novels are autobiographical nature, something I hope to address in a future blog post.

This morning things began extremely well. I awakened at my normal 3 AM and decided to get some chores done. Part of that was to drive all of the garbage down to the dempsty dumpster so that I could dispose of it before it got too hot. It really didn’t work out very well because it was already 2 o’clock when I started out. By the time I was at the dumpster and throwing the garbage bags into it the heat had me nauseated and gasping for breath. I ended up vomiting on myself on one of the new shirts that my mother sent me as a Father’s Day present since we both realize I shall receive no acknowledgment of Father’s Day from my sons.

One of the 4 shirts Mom sent me for Father's Day

At the moment any writing is difficult for me with this cat not only in my face but also trying to lick clean.  Little girl has been quite demanding recently—no matter where I am seems that she wants to be also. Maybe that has something to do with my discovering that her belly is quite hard and her nipples swollen so maybe the Kitty Kids population may explode soon!

I hope that you all had a good June 12 –i.e., yesterday.