The Devil at Large (14 page)

I maintain that it is passages like this that many people find more obnoxious than the sexual passages. Miller dares to equate shit with illumination! Miller dares not to believe in progress! He dares not to believe the twenties’ bromide: “Every day, in every way I feel better and better.” He dares not to believe in “positive thinking.” He is un-American! Even if he were writing today, these attitudes would make him a pariah.

Yes—the sex is also abundant, and it is unvarnished by romanticism. But always, if you read it in context (which is not the way most readers—even intellectual ones—read it), the sex is about this same demystification process. Miller strips the power from the mystery of cunt, which heretofore has held him in such thrall.

This is Van Norden in
Tropic of Cancer
, but the need to demystify the female organ could well be Henry’s:

“Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It’s repulsive, ain’t it? And it’s funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn’t look like a twat any more: it’s like a dead clam or something.” He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. “I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me … it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You’d imagine I’d never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue—that was by Rodin. You ought to see it some time … she has her legs spread wide apart…. I don’t think there was any head on it. Just a cunt you might say. Jesus, It looked ghastly. The thing is this—they all look alike. When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things: you give them an individuality like, which they haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between the legs and you get all steamed up about it—you don’t even look at it half the time. You know it’s there and all you think about is getting your ramrod inside; it’s as though your penis did the thinking for you. It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing … about a crack with hair on it, or without hair. It’s so absolutely meaningless that it fascinated me to look at it. I must have studied it for ten minutes or more. When you look at it that way, sort of detached like, you get funny notions in your head. All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—just a blank. Wouldn’t it be funny if you found a harmonica inside … or a calendar? But there’s nothing there … nothing at all. It’s disgusting. It almost drove me mad…. Listen, do you know what I did afterwards? I gave her a quick lay and then I turned my back on her. Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book … but a cunt, it’s just sheer loss of time….”

If cunt is “sheer loss of time,” then what is the sexual act? When we look closely at Henry’s descriptions of sex, we see that he makes sex analogous to carnage and war. His descriptions of the sexual battlefield are remarkably similar to those of Andrea Dworkin in
Intercourse
or
Mercy:

We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say “I’m fed up with it … I’m through.” No, there’s fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about any more and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one’s own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bear-ers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest. Then one has the rest of his life to think about the fifteen francs. One hasn’t any eyes or arms or legs, but he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his days about the fifteen francs which everybody has forgotten.

It’s exactly like a state of war—I can’t get it out of my head. The way she works over me, to blow a spark of passion into me, makes me think what a damned poor soldier I’d be if I was ever silly enough to be trapped like this and dragged to the front. I know for my part that I’d surrender everything, honor included, in order to get out of the mess. I haven’t any stomach for it, and that’s all there is to it. But she’s got her mind set on the fifteen francs and if I don’t want to fight about it she’s going to make me fight. But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind. My mind is on the peace treaty all the time. I can’t forget that it was the fifteen francs which started all the trouble. Fifteen francs! What does fifteen francs mean to me, particularly since it’s not my fifteen francs?

Ironically, Miller seems offensive to many feminists because his perception is sited inside a man’s head, but these same perceptions of sex fill feminist literature: loveless sex is war, brutal and bloody. In a way Henry’s antiromanticism is very close to that of feminist literature. Henry has the same need to destroy romantic illusions and see the violence at the heart of heterosexual “love.” He writes of demystified cunt and demystified sex in the same tone in which he writes of racism—as a madness to be blown away with humor:

A special feature in American skulls, I was reading the other day, is the presence of the epactal bone, or
os Incae,
in the occiput. The presence of this bone, so the savant went on to say, is due to a persistence of the transverse occipital suture which is usually closed in fetal life. Hence it is a sign of arrested development and indicative of an inferior race. “The average cubical capacity of the American skull,” so he went on to say, “falls below that of the white, and rises above that of the black race. Taking both sexes, the Parisians of today have a cranial capacity of 1,448 cubic centimeters; the Negroes 1,344 centimeters; the American Indians, 1,376.” From all of which I deduce nothing because I am an American and not an Indian. But it’s cute to explain things that way, by a bone, an
os Incae
, for example. It doesn’t disturb his theory at all to admit that single examples of Indian skulls have yielded the extraordinary capacity of 1,920 cubic centimeters, a cranial capacity not exceeded in any other race. What I note with satisfaction is that the Parisians, of both sexes, seem to have a normal cranial capacity. The transverse occipital suture is evidently not so persistent with them. They know how to enjoy an
apéritif
and they don’t worry if the houses are unpainted. There’s nothing extraordinary about their skulls, so far as cranial indices go. There must be some other explanation for the art of living which they have brought to such a degree of perfection.

Henry hated all racism, especially racism dignified with scientific theory—much in the air in the twenties and thirties, preparing the way for Hitler’s Nazi doctors, “experimenting” on Jews. His scorn is obvious in this passage.

How can Miller have called Jews
kikes
and yet hate institutionalized racism? Easy. He hates all self-important rationalizations, and what could be more self-important than rationalizing racism by measuring skulls? When he makes fun of racists, of Jews, of Germans, of Frenchmen, of women, of himself, he shows no mercy. He punctures all pretension—including the favorite Jewish pretention that Jewish suffering is somehow sanctified above all other. Henry would be unforgivable if he didn’t spread his satire around equally against all groups. But he makes fun of gentiles no less than Jews, of cocks no less than cunts. Van Norden in
Tropic of Cancer
is a walking cock as much as Tania is a walking cunt. Gandhi’s Hindu disciple is reduced to two lumps of shit in a bidet.

Nor does Miller excuse
himself
from the general low level of humankind. He is a walking intestine when he’s hungry, a walking cock when he’s horny. He, too, is a mass of instincts that doesn’t deserve to be cloaked in high ideals.

Where have high ideals ever led humanity, anyway? To the trenches of World War I? To the apple sellers on the streets of New York? To the mad pseudoscientific racial theories of the Nazis that promoted genocide? Henry thinks humanity has less to lose by embracing the depths than by pretending to the heights. A bag of guts, a cunt, a cock, has a sort of primal beingness, the honesty of being just what it is. Romanticism and high ideals have only led humanity to slaughter.

Henry, the Victorian, the romantic, the Rousseauist, the Whitmaniac, revolutionizes
himself
in
Tropic of Cancer.
He strips down to his essential nature. He admits he is dust, grass, failing flesh—and when illusion is stripped away, illumination comes.

But isn’t a human being more than that? asks the injured romantic in all of us. Of course. We are dust that dreams. And sometimes we dream we are more than dust. But in 1931 it was clear—I maintain it still is today—that we have been more wounded as a species by our misguided idealism than by an acceptance of the physicality at the base of all our lives. Henry’s vision of man as a horny cock, a voracious gullet, is bracing. It still feels real after all these years. His vision of woman reduced to her hungering cunt may offend some feminists—and all those who think we can “rise above” our physical natures—but it also has a primal truth about it. And the truth is always liberating.

At the pivotal moments of our lives—passionate love, childbirth, war, terminal illness—we
know
that we are captive to our physical natures and that humbling knowledge often brings illumination. The dark secret of oozing intestines is essential to the liberation of our souls.

Henry reduces the world to its basest elements so he can make fire. He strips his own illusions so he can remake his vision and his world:

The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential only that the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the balls in America, is finished. To fathom the new reality it is first necessary to dismantle the drains, to lay open the gangrened ducts which compose the genito-urinary system that supplies the excreta of art. The odor of the day is permanganate and formaldehyde. The drains are clogged with strangled embryos.

Henry understands that “even as the world goes to smash there is one man who remains at the core, who becomes more solidly fixed and anchored, more centrifugal as the process of disillusion quickens.” That man is the artist. Henry is talking about Matisse here. But it is Henry himself who will come to be a rock in the midst of chaos. By the time he writes
The Colossus of Maroussi
, he will have learned not only how to come back from hell but how to enter paradise.

If you read
Tropic of Cancer
straight through today, you will find another book than the one usually talked and written about. The trouble is that
Tropic of Cancer
is seldom really
read.
Even as careful a reader as John Updike recently wrote to me (when I inquired of the influence, if any, of
Tropic of Cancer
on
Couples
):

Strangely, I don’t believe I read either of the Cancers through … Just a peek inside and the perusal of a paragraph was, well, inflammatory …

In that, Updike, one of the most brilliant writers and readers of our time, was probably like most of us. We opened the book for inspiration and quickly closed it lest we be contaminated!

Tropic of Cancer
is a book blocked off to readers by its incendiary reputation. It is hard to read, partly because of its plotlessness, but also because of our own prejudices. We have to break down our resistance in order to read it fairly.

Is it possible that a book can become so infamous it cannot be read? Absolutely. People dip their toes in and recoil in horror, thinking they have read the book and found it wanting. What is wanting is their own perception of it.

A book—any book—demands total immersion. With
Tropic of Cancer
, for a variety of reasons, such immersion has been impossible. A wall of preconceptions and prejudices surrounds it, prejudices born of years of litigation, years of sneak-reading, years of critical dismissal. For all those reasons, the book has become a sort of terra incognita. I urge you to lose yourself in it and read it straight through. I promise you will find a totally different book from the one you thought was there.

Read it as if you knew nothing whatever about it. Read it as if the four-letter words were as prevalent in literature in 1931–32 (when it was written), or 1934 (when it was first published) as they are today. You will come to realize that books can be banned from your mind even as they remain available on the shelves. You will come to realize that books can be burned without flames.

The judging of books without bothering to read them was to become the nemesis of Henry’s writing life. He was to be dismissed first for his sexual shock therapy, his demystification of sex, then for his supposed New Age Guruism, and finally for his personal life—as if he were a sort of Humbert Humbert of the Pacific Palisades. James Joyce had the good or bad fortune—depending on one’s point of view—to be embraced by academics who saw much to teach in his puzzles and portmanteaus. D.H. Lawrence always had the partisans of paganism on his side, even as the prudes shunned him. Gertrude Stein became our token lesbian and Virginia Woolf our token bisexual neurasthenic. But Henry had three strikes against him from the start. He pressed all America’s buttons: open sexuality, the failure to believe in Progress, the courage to explode all things literary and let his own outrageous vision thrust through. He was punished for these sins by remaining unread by those people best suited to understand him. The books were there, but the will to read them with an open mind had already been tainted.