Source of book: I own this
This was my selection for Banned Books Week. Just as a reminder, I use the week to read books which have been banned, which means that a government has outlawed sale, publication, or possession of the book. I do not count challenged books - those which citizens or parents have sought to keep out of school curricula or libraries. This isn’t because I think challenges are uninteresting, but because I wanted to focus my once-a-year project on those where the power of the state was employed in censorship. I believe that is a different level from a challenge. After all, any library has limited space and budget, and decisions must be made. (Personally, I would have preferred an extra - and local - copy of The Rest is Noise rather than one of the 20ish copies of Eat, Pray, Love.) Likewise, students can only study so many books, and the choice of which to study is a judgment call.
Here are my past selections, plus the introduction to Banned Books Week.
Areopagitica by John Milton (2011)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (2012)
The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf (2013)
Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz (2014)
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (2015)
July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (2016)
Into the River by Ted Dawe (2017)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (2018)
Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith (2019)
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (2020)
***
As I have mentioned in previous posts about banned books, they tend to be banned for one of two reasons. Sometimes, it is because of alleged “obscenity” - that is, sexual content. This is a fairly new phenomenon, connected with the neo-Puritianism that arose in the 19th Century and culminated in the jihad against all things sexual by Anthony Comstock. Furthermore, the definition of “obscenity” has changed over time and place, and is a moving target at best.
On the other hand, the second reason books are banned has been popular since books were invented: politics. Dictators from time immemorial have been unable to handle criticism, preferring to be treated as gods, and have thus banned books that failed to offer the desired level of worship.
This book is in the first category, deemed “obscene” by American authorities, and banned from import for thirty years after its first publication in France in 1934.
I first discovered this book in law school, as it was part of a series of cases on “obscenity” and free speech. The history is rather fascinating. Miller published first in France, where laws have always been far more permissive. (In fact, in the Western world, it is really the Puritan-dominated United States and England that has consistently gotten their panties in a knot over sex.)
First, the US Customs department deemed the book obscene and refused to let it be imported. Naturally, this meant that it was smuggled in instead. The seller was sued but not criminally charged. The smugglers, to my knowledge, were never caught. Next, Jacob Brussel, a bookseller and publisher, printed an edition in the US, claiming it was actually printed in Mexico. In addition to the obscenity issue, Brussel also violated copyright law by stealing the work and not paying royalties. He spent three years in prison over the book.
In 1950, the ACLU set up a case by having a director attempt to import the book. In the subsequent trial, the ACLU offered declarations from no fewer than 19 experts as to the literary merit of the book. They still lost.
In 1961, sensing that the winds of change were blowing, Grove Press took a risk and published the book. Immediately, over 60 lawsuits across the US were filed against the booksellers who carried it. This blew up into a huge kerfuffle, with court rulings all over the map as to whether the book qualified as “obscene” or not. One of these cases resulted in a rather purple dissenting opinion by Justice Musmanno - one of the most colorful characters to sit on the bench. More about him in a note at the end, including choice quotes from the opinion.
Finally, in 1964, the US Supreme Court put an end to the chaos and declared that the book was constitutionally protected as part of a series of cases published simultaneously that established that sexuality does not itself make a work obscene - of the work has artistic merit, it is not obscene, and is protected by the first amendment.
So, a fascinating history. Also interesting is how many authors really liked the book, and considered it important in the history of literature. There were plenty who disliked it as well, of course, although even they tended to grant that it had merit and should never have been banned.
***
So much for the legal history. What about the book itself?
Having read it, I can say in good faith that anyone who finds this book to be a turn-on is either a bit depraved, or has no idea what good sex looks like. Because the last thing this book made me want to do was have sex. Particularly not sex with a never-ending sequence of Parisian prostitutes, other men’s wives, or gold digging (and probably mentally ill) women. Or, for that matter, with underaged girls.
For one thing, the sex sounds deeply unpleasant, unfulfilling, and not even really desired. For another, if Henry Miller and his bohemian buddies were like this in real life, I doubt they ever in their lives left a woman feeling satisfied afterward. These bros were terrible in bed, and not just because they treated women like meat, or because they were usually drunk, or because they didn’t care about anyone they slept with. They also seem incompetent and not particularly eager to learn anything about women or sex. I’m pretty sure I did better my first time than they did after a year of fucking their way across Paris.
Fortunately, while there is plenty of sex and sexual language in this book - Miller particularly likes saying “cunt” apparently - there is more to the book.
I wouldn’t say that the book has a plot. Rather, there are episodes that have a bit of an arc. But in between are stream-of-consciousness sections, philosophical musings, pessimistic reflections, and, occasionally, something to tie it together.
How much of the book is truly autobiographical and how much is fiction is not clear. The characters were based on real people, most of whom have been identified. The basic action is from Miller’s life. He left his estranged wife and fled to Paris during the Depression. He and his friends struggled to support himself, particularly since unemployment was high and growing. At one point, he was homeless and starving, and some of these passages are pretty harrowing. At the same time, he wants to write a book. And, like so many authors, he wants it to be more “real” and less constrained by form. It was an era.
I was fairly strongly reminded of Kerouac, who wrote in somewhat the same basic style a couple decades later. There are differences, of course, but the blending of autobiography and fiction, the stream of consciousness, the search for enlightenment, the picaresque episodes - it really matches up pretty well. I think I prefer Kerouac, for two reasons. The first is just style: I like his writing better. Second, though, is that instead of the incessant sex and misogyny, Kerouac tends to just drink himself into a stupor. Don’t get me wrong, Kerouac is pretty bad with women too, but the thrust (sorry) of his books aren’t primarily about sex.
As far as the writing, I have mixed feelings. On several occasions, I finished a passage and thought, “wow, that was really great and evocative and moving.” After others, I felt like the prose was far too purple for my taste. And after still others, I couldn’t decide if it was good or too much. I’m not sure “uneven” is the right way to put it. The writing is right on the edge of overwrought, and occasionally spills over. (And the same can be said of Kerouac…and plenty of others.)
What there should be no question of is that the book has significant artistic and literary merit. It is definitely not pornography, and isn’t nearly as graphic as it could have been. Mostly, you get a lot of “cunt” and descriptions that are better described as “frank” than “explicit.” So, you find out, for example, that Miller hates shaved vulvas, and prefers his women to be a bit thicker than average. And you also learn a bit about how businesslike prostitutes are. This is not a turn on for either Miller or the reader. But the descriptions do make the squalor of his circumstances come to life.
Here is an example of some of the language:
At the Cité Nortier, somewhere near the Place du Combat, I pause a few minutes to drink in the full squalor of the scene. It is a rectangular court like may another which one glimpses through the low passageways that flank the old arteries of Paris. In the middle of the court is a clump of decrepit buildings which have so rotted away that they have collapsed on one another and formed a sort of intestinal embrace. The ground is uneven, the flagging slippery with slime. A sort of human dump heap which has been filled in with cinders and dry garbage. The sun is setting fast. The colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. Here and there a lopsided monster stands in the window blinking like an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the forceps. A fetid odor seeps from the walls, the odor of a mildewed mattress. Europe - medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol.
It’s a good bit of writing, but also a bit over the top. It is also not the Paris of the tourist areas, to say the least.
Here is another memorable line, applied to one of the various artist sorts that flits in and out of the book. (This one isn’t tied to a real-life person that I can find.)
It seems to me that Papini misses something by a hair’s breadth when he talks of the need to be alone. It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Probably the best example of the casual misogyny of the group of bros comes from Carl, who is patterned after the writer Alfred Perles. Carl is the one who sleeps with an underaged girl later in the book, and essentially pays the girl’s dad off afterward. Before that, he is sleeping with an older and wealthy woman, and then complaining about it to Miller.
Listen, Joe, she’d be all right if she were just a little younger. You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn’t have to have any brains. They’re better without brains. But an old cult, even if she is brilliant, even if she is the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn’t put meat on their arms or juice between the legs.
Yeesh. That’s harsh, and reveals the general approach Carl (and the rest, unfortunately) have toward women. Pieces of flesh. Better to be without brains. I am the complete opposite of that - I would rather have an intelligent woman, and no level of beauty would ever overcome stupidity. Also, Benjamin Franklin had much more intelligent things to say about sex with older women. (And also with a better sense of humor than Carl.)
I also have to quote another instance of purple prose, this one a description of Matisse. I think it is evocative, although I think my experience of Matisse is a bit different, perhaps.
In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle of human flesh which refused the consummation of death. The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into hungry seeing mouths. By whatever vision one passes there is the odor and the sound of voyage. It is impossible to gaze at even a corner of his dreams without feeling the lift of the wave and the cool of flying spray. He stands at the helm peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio of time. Into what distant corners has he not thrown his long, slanting gaze? Looking down the vast promontory of his nose he has beheld everything - the Cordilleras falling away into the Pacific, the history of the Diaspora done in vellum, shutters fluting the froufrou of the beach, the piano curving like a conch, corollas giving out diapasons of light, chameleons squirming under the book press, seraglios expiring in oceans of dust, music issuing like fire from the hidden chromosphere of pain, spore and madrepore fructifying the earth, navels vomiting their bright spawn of anguish…He is a bright sage, a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the brush, removes the ugly scaffold to which the body of a man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life.
And it goes on for another page.
The description of homelessness could have been written in our own time. He sees Paris as a place where everyone - even the roaches are snuggly inside - while those outside freeze. Later in the passage, he recounts trying to get a place to sleep in Florida from various churches, and being turned away by all of them. (Jewish and Christian both…)
If you haven’t a sou why just take a few old newspapers and make yourself a bed on the steps of a cathedral. The doors are well bolted and there will be no draughts to disturb you. Better still is to sleep outside the Metro doors; there you will have company. Look at them on a rainy night, lying together and protected by the newspapers against spittle and the vermin that walks without legs. Look at them under the bridges or under the market sheds. How vile they look in comparison with the clean, bright vegetables stacked up like jewels. Even the dead horses and the cows and sheep hanging from the greasy hooks look more inviting. At leas we will earth these tomorrow and even the intestines will serve a purpose. But 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.
It’s a decidedly bitter reflection, from one who literally lived it. I can’t blame him for seeing Christianity (the dominant religion in the West, after all) as primarily responsible for the wreckage of lives during the Great Depression, and the callous disregard that the destitute were treated with. And, honestly, most of the white Evangelicals I grew up around still hate FDR for the New Deal. Here is a bit more, from a visit a drunken Miller and a friend pay to a cathedral.
All over Christendom, at certain stipulated hours, people in black are groveling before the altar where the priest stands up with a little book in one hand and a dinner bell or atomizer in the other and mumbles to them in a language which, even if it were comprehensible, no longer contains a shred of meaning. Blessing them, most likely. Blessing the country, blessing the ruler, blessing the firearms and the battleships and the ammunition and the hand grenades.
Miller also expresses his disgust with Americans who think of France as somehow exotic and different, rather than just another human civilization. I think this sums up the Ugly American pretty well - and Miller is indicting himself too.
I never saw a man who was so infatuated with a country, who was so happy under a foreign sky. It wasn’t natural. When he said France it meant wine, women, money in the pocket, easy come, easy go. It meant being a bad boy, being on a holiday.
But that’s the way humans are. We glorify some place, whether that is another country, our own, the rural, the urban, whatever. But wherever we go, there we are.
There are other episodes that were interesting. The one where he takes a temporary job teaching - for room and board only, no pay - is a reminder of what happens without government regulation of wages, particularly in times of hardship. His description of the constant tension between the needs of survival, and the needs of the human spirit is compelling. Through it all, his indictment of a decadent and soulless culture seems even more relevant today.
My particular copy of this book is from the first (legal) US edition from Grove Press. I inherited it from a legal colleague and friend who was downsizing. I believe he purchased it used prior to that. It contains the original introductory material - an introduction by Karl Shapiro, and a Anaïs Nin, friend and lover of Miller and later “Carl,” and who is probably a character in the book.
From Nin’s preface, written for the original French publication:
The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes, with bare stretches that taste like brass and leave the full flavor of emptiness. It is beyond optimism or pessimism.
It’s a pretty good description throughout its short three pages.
Shapiro’s introduction was written specifically for the Grove edition in 1961, and has several gems. At the outset, he recommends replacing the Gideon Bibles in hotels with the book, and putting the bibles in the laundry chutes. I may not go that far, but it is an amusing thought.
He also quotes the book, and I thought that quote would go well here.
Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is - the afflictions of Job.
Shapiro also sums up a central issue of modern American life that I think resonates even more in the era we live in, when the common good is no longer considered a worthwhile goal by one of our political parties.
In America it has become impossible, except for a few lucky or wise people, to live one’s own life; consequently the poets and artists tend to move to the fringes of society…The American way of life has become illusory; we lead the lives of prisoners while we boast about free speech, free press, and free religion, none of which we actually do enjoy in full.
Ironically, Tropic of Cancer tears the mask off of American emptiness through a tale set in Paris. The fact that it took three decades for this book to legally make it to American bookstores is evidence that Miller was in fact right. I suspect, in fact, that one of the reasons it was banned was not so much the sex and language, but passages laying out the moral bankruptcy of organized religion at home and abroad, and how society in the 1930s turned away from the death and destruction and crushing poverty it caused and then refused to remedy.
I wouldn’t say this is my favorite book, but I think it is a worthy read. If only Miller could have gotten past the misogyny, I would have found it less tedious in places, and I wonder how the book would have been if he had seen that women were suffering even more than him and his bohemian buddies.
***
Note on Musmanno:
So, Justice Michael Musmanno was quite the character. I am teaching a Wills and Trusts course at our local law school this semester, and one of his other cases (on a question of reciprocal wills) came up. The text gives a sidebar on the man himself, and quotes from his dissent in the Pennsylvania case involving Tropic of Cancer. Here are some choice bits from that opinion:
‘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. And in the center of all this waste and stench, besmearing himself with its foulest defilement, splashes, leaps, cavorts and wallows a bifurcated specimen that responds to the name of Henry Miller. One wonders how the human species could have produced so lecherous, blasphemous, disgusting and amoral a human being as Henry Miller. One wonders why he is received in polite society.
…
Policemen, hunters, constables and foresters could easily and quickly kill a thousand rattlesnakes but the lice, lizards, maggots and gangrenous roaches scurrying out from beneath the covers of ‘The Tropic of Cancer’ will enter into the playground, the study desks, the cloistered confines of children and immature minds to eat away moral resistance and wreak damage and harm which may blight countless lives for years and decades to come.
…
To say that ‘Cancer’ has no social importance is like saying that a gorilla at a lawn party picnic does not contribute to the happiness of the occasion.
…
The defendant would have reason to say that ‘Cancer’ is not hard-core pornography; it is, in fact, Rotten-core pornography. No decomposed apple falling apart because of its rotten core could be more nauseating as an edible than ‘Cancer’ is sickening as food for the ordinary mind. ‘Cancer’ is dirt for dirt’s sake, or, more appropriately, as Justice Frankfurter put it, dirt for money’s sake.
…
Then the defendants say that ‘Cancer’ is entitled to immunity under the First Amendment because court decisions have declared that only worthless trash may be proscribed as obscene. To say that ‘Cancer’ is worthless trash is to pay it a compliment. ‘Cancer’ is the sweepings of the Augean stables, the stagnant bilge of the slimiest mudscow, the putrescent corruption of the most noisome dump pile, the dreggiest filth in the deepest morass of putrefaction.
I take it he was not impressed by the book.
But there is more to his story. An Italian American of devout Catholic faith, he was one of the biggest supporters of the movement to make Columbus Day a holiday. His last notable dissent was in a rape case, where the majority reversed the conviction because the judge told the jury that they would have to answer to God for their decision.
Musmanno disagreed and warned the other judges that they would have to face God on Judgment Day, while he felt he was rather well prepared.
In one of the greatest examples of cosmic irony, he literally dropped dead the next day…on Columbus Day.
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