Book Review

Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller

R. D. Kushner

 

As a guide book to Paris, Tropic of Cancer has many rivals; but as a guidebook to the exigency for life, it is without equal. Though it offers only the vaguest amount of cartographic and historical information about Paris, it fills the reader with the kind of frenzied excitement that a travel guide to this city can't even approach. Even if one has already had the good fortune of visiting the city of Paris, Miller's prose can accurately render an image of Parisian life that will surpass even the memory of the most vigilant urban tourist or cultural photographer. To admire Paris, Florence, London, Rio de Janiero, Hong Kong, or New York, is to admire the artistry of a writer like Miller who can bring these places alive, and tease the gamut of emotions from the reader's mind.

Half way through the novel the narrator, a struggling writer, reflects on a conversation he had with his wife in Paris, before she returned to America. It is here that Miller gives the narrator a voice with which he informs the reader of Miller's authoring task:

Walking down the Rue Lhomond one night in a fit of unusual anguish and desolation, certain things were revealed to me with poignant clarity. Whether it was that I had so often walked this street in bitterness and despair or whether it was the remembrance of a phrase which she had dropped one night as we stood at the Place Lucien-Herr I do not know. "Why don't you show me that Paris," she said, "that you have written about?" One thing I know, that at the recollection of these words I suddenly realized the impossibility of ever revealing to her that Paris which I had gotten to know, the Paris whose arrondissements are undefined, a Paris that has never existed except by virtue of my loneliness, my hunger for her. Such a huge Paris! It would take a lifetime to explore it again...

... it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it. [179]

In a direct contradiction to the narrator's statement above, is Miller's belligerent accomplishment of exactly what the narrator deems impossible. By the sheer will of Miller's mind, the narrator proceeds to render a portrait of Parisian life that is so meticulously and tortuously delivered that it is possible for the reader to experience the narrator's life through their own mind; yet the reader cannot accomplish this without becoming a partner in the narrator's suffering and bliss. The book must be read with the same spirit in which the narrator's life is being lived; and this feat reveals a facet of Miller's profound artistry.

Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorry, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy! [252]

Tropic of Cancer is nothing short of a true reflection of life, caught fugaciously through the written word; and this is a monumental and heroic accomplishment. Very rarely can the mind be fooled into mistaking a representation for the real thing. But the convulsive energy and tangential musings of the mind, created by Miller, invoke life as a total work of art; and at times this story tickles the mind more deeply than actual corporeal experience.

Through a series of chapters where the story seems to alternate between bewildering and extraneous, Miller dissects a few years of Parisian life into a series of both temporally disparate and emotionally kindred events which he weaves into a chronicle that is at once both beautiful and ugly. The energy is relentless. The confusion and emotions are exhausting. The passion and the desire are enthralling. There is an unsparing indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh; which are always accompanied by moments of artistic clarity and vision - as if the engagement in carnal delights and creative meditation were linked in a brazen dance of debauchery. There is no bodily orifice or bodily function beyond reproach; and no language or act too vile for indulgence or inspection. The narrator's life is lithe and limber and every experience seems to circumscribe a justifiable and poetic artistic act.

It is a true look into the human mind. To be sure, it is a look into the mind of Henry Miller; but more importantly it is Miller's benevolent offering to the hungry souls of those kindred spirits who dare to live life wholly and unafraid. It is the tale of one life, and of the intermingling of cohorts and emotions; but it is also the tale of every life. If all life was nurtured and exposed so beautifully and so horribly, so greedily and so forgivingly, and so dangerously and so carefully, the world would engender a culture of art and beauty that would truly exemplify the most wondrous capabilities of the human mind.