Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" Read Free

birth and upbringing, and this Miller certainly had in spades. But whathe learned in Paris’s bleakest quarters was that his background, his life and interests, his fund of knowledge of American history, folklore, and popular culture could be for him an inexhaustible source of creativity instead of a soul-withering curse. So, where too often the renegade comes to a violent and isolated end, Henry Miller not only survived, but bloomed into the artist he had so long—and apparently hopelessly—aspired to be. When at last in a foreign land he found his voice it was in a “war whoop,” as he was to put it in Tropic of Cancer. The war whoop’s raw notes were drawn from variegated sources. In part they came from the Yankee pitchman-bunco artist, a tale spinner who used his gift of gab to hoodwink his listeners. Another part of it came from the violently inflated brags of boatmen on the mighty rivers of the continental interior. There entered into it as well the bloody prints of the legends of deer slayers, buffalo hunters, backwoodsmen, Indian killers, and outlaws of the hinterlands and urban slums. Beneath all of these there was the brooding fact of discovery, the discovery of a vast, unexpected land mass that might have been an even greater opportunity to right the wrongs of the Old World’s blood-wracked history—but was not. The war whoop that Miller sounds in Tropic of Cancer is fundamentally about this once-only chance. It consistently asks us in its rawness, its chaotic violence, its painful comedy, “What if?” Whitman, whose work he’dcarried to France, had characterized his own belated breakthrough out of silence and stammering as a “barbaric yawp.” That barbaric yawp had changed the national literature. Miller’s war whoop was to do so again.

Slaughterhouse
    If, as Miller claimed, America had become a slaughterhouse, this condition had been centuries in the making, ever since, in fact, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas had first dropped anchor in 1492. Miller knew this, and his works are impressively studded with references to what began in that moment when Columbus’s anchor hissed downward through unsullied waters. Miller recognized and was deeply affected by the tragically short arc there was between discovery and destruction, and far from the New World in the years of his exile the manifold consequences of this came into ever sharper relief. The great missed, unrepeatable opportunity that America had fleetingly been was eventually to become a major theme in Tropic of Cancer.
    It is probably impossible to overestimate the profound implications of Columbus’s accidental finding of the New World. This, of course, has been the subject of an uncounted number of books, and since the story is still being written in its unfolding chapters, the subject may truly be inexhaustible. Here it will have to suffice to observe that the admiral’s epic blunder completely cracked open the mind of Western civilization, because in 1492 Christian cosmology posited a divinely created Island of the Earth surrounded by empty seas. If there were islands anywhere else—which most of the European continent’s prominent thinkers doubted—these were bound to be tiny in size and uninhabited. The news, once disseminated, destroyed this portion of the myth, although the admiral himself stubbornly clung to the more comforting notion that what he had stumbled on was part of the Island of the Earth. 1 By around 1510 successive voyages by Alonso de Ojeda, Vicente Yáñez Pinzon, Rodrigo de Bastidas, and others had pretty well established that what Columbus had found was not a part of the Island of the Earth, at least as it had been anciently imagined, but was in fact another world, a New World, one that would somehow have to be accounted for and accepted.
    But that acceptance came hard, very hard, and looking back over the more than five hundred years since Columbus made landfall it is difficult to ignore the feeling thatin the wake of