trivialities are so engrossing? Simply because the whole atmosphere is
deeply familiar, because you have all the while the feeling that these
things are happening to YOU. And you have this feeling because somebody
has chosen to drop the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the
REAL-POLITIK of the inner mind into the open. In Miller's case it is not
so much a question of exploring the mechanisms of the mind as of owning
up to everyday facts and everyday emotions. For the truth is that many
ordinary people, perhaps an actual majority, do speak and behave in just
the way that is recorded here. The callous coarseness with which the
characters in TROPIC OF CANCER talk is very rare in fiction, but it is
extremely common in real life; again and again I have heard just such
conversations from people who were not even aware that they were talking
coarsely. It is worth noticing that TROPIC OF CANCER is not a young man's
book. Miller was in his forties when it was published, and though since
then he has produced three or four others, it is obvious that this first
book had been lived with for years. It is one of those books that are
slowly matured in poverty and obscurity, by people who know what they
have got to do and therefore are able to wait. The prose is astonishing,
and in parts of BLACK SPRING is even better. Unfortunately I cannot
quote; unprintable words occur almost everywhere. But get hold of TROPIC
OF CANCER, get hold of BLACK SPRING and read especially the first hundred
pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late
date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken
language, but spoken WITHOUT FEAR, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of
the unusual or poetical word. The adjective has come back, after its ten
years' exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in
it, something quite different from the flat cautious statements and
snack-bar dialects that are now in fashion.
When a book like TROPIC OF CANCER appears, it is only natural that the
first thing people notice should be its obscenity. Given our current
notions of literary decency, it is not at all easy to approach an
unprintable book with detachment. Either one is shocked and disgusted, or
one is morbidly thrilled, or one is determined above all else not to be
impressed. The last is probably the commonest reaction, with the result
that unprintable books often get less attention than they deserve. It is
rather the fashion to say that nothing is easier than to write an obscene
book, that people only do it in order to get themselves talked about and
make money, etc., etc. What makes it obvious that this is not the case is
that books which are obscene in the police-court sense are distinctly
uncommon. If there were easy money to be made out of dirty words, a lot
more people would be making it. But, because 'obscene' books do not
appear very frequently, there is a tendency to lump them together, as a
rule quite unjustifiably. TROPIC OF CANCER has been vaguely associated
with two other books, ULYSSES and VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, but in
neither case is there much resemblance. What Miller has in common with
Joyce is a willingness to mention the inane, squalid facts of everyday
life. Putting aside differences of technique, the funeral scene in
ULYSSES, for instance, would fit into TROPIC OF CANCER; the whole chapter
is a sort of confession, an expos? of the frightful inner callousness of
the human being. But there the resemblance ends. As a novel, TROPIC OF
CANCER is far inferior to ULYSSES. Joyce is an artist, in a sense in
which Miller is not and probably would not wish to be, and in any case he
is attempting much more. He is exploring different states of
consciousness, dream, reverie (the 'bronze-by-gold' chapter),
drunkenness, etc., and dovetailing them all into a huge complex pattern,
almost like a Victorian 'plot'. Miller is simply a hard-boiled person
talking about life, an ordinary American businessman with intellectual
courage and a gift for words. It is perhaps significant that he looks
exactly like everyone's idea of an American businessman. As for the
comparison with VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, it is even further from the
point. Both books, use unprintable words, both are in some sense
autobiographical, but that is all. VOYAGE AU BEUT DE LA NUIT is a
book-with-a-purpose, and its purpose is to protest against the horror and
meaninglessness of modern life--actually, indeed, of LIFE. It is a cry
of unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool. TROPIC OF CANCER is
almost exactly the opposite. The thing has become so unusual as to seem
almost anomalous, but it is the book of a man who is happy. So is BLACK
SPRING, though slightly less so, because tinged in places with nostalgia.
With years of lumpen-proletarian life behind him, hunger, vagabondage,
dirt, failure, nights in the open, battles with immigration officers,
endless struggles for a bit of cash, Miller finds that he is enjoying
himself. Exactly the aspects of life that feel C?line with horror are the
ones that appeal to him. So far from protesting, he is ACCEPTING. And the
very word 'acceptance' calls up his real affinity, another American, Walt
Whitman.
But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the
nineteen-thirties. It is not certain that if Whitman himself were alive
at the moment he would write anything in the least degree resembling
LEAVES OF GRASS. For what he is saying, after all, is 'I accept', and
there is a radical difference between acceptance now and acceptance then.
Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled prosperity, but more than
that, he was writing in a country where freedom was something more than a
word. The democracy, equality, and comradeship that he is always talking
about arc not remote ideals, but something that existed in front of his
eyes. In mid-nineteenth-century America men felt themselves free and
equal, WERE free and equal, so far as that is possible outside-a society
of pure communism. There was poverty and there were even class
distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently
submerged class. Everyone had inside him, like a kind of core, the
knowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it without
bootlicking. When you read about Mark Twain's Mississippi raftsmen and
pilots, or Bret Harte's Western gold-miners, they seem more remote than
the cannibals of the Stone Age. The reason is simply that they are free
human beings. But it is the same even with the peaceful domesticated
America of the Eastern states, the America of the LITTLE WOMEN, HELEN'S
BABIES, and RIDING DOWN FROM BANGOR. Life has a buoyant, carefree quality
that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your belly.
If is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very
badly, because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to
feel instead of making you feel it. Luckily for his beliefs, perhaps, he
died too early to see the deterioration in American life that came with
the rise of la
rge-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap immigrant
labour.
Millers outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and nearly everyone
who has read him has remarked on this. TROPIC OF CANCER ends with an
especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the lecheries, the
swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the imbecilities, he simply
sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical
acceptance of thing-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first
place, not America, but the ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every
grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not
an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and
regimentation. To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say that
you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs,
aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux
belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, PROVOCATEURS, press censorship,
secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders. Not
only those things, of course, but, those things among-others. And on the
whole this is Henry Miller's attitude. Not quite always, because at
moments he shows signs of a fairly ordinary kind of literary nostalgia.
There is a long passage in the earlier part of BLACK SPRING, in praise of
the Middle Ages, which as prose must be one of the most remarkable pieces
of writing in recent years, but which displays an attitude not very
different from that of Chesterton. In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there
is an attack on modern American civilization (breakfast cereals,
cellophane, etc.) from the usual angle of the literary man who hates
industrialism. But in general the attitude is 'Let's swallow it whole'.
And hence the seeming preoccupation with indecency and with the
dirty-handkerchief side of life. It is only seeming, for the truth is
that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than
writers of fiction usually care to admit. Whitman himself 'accepted' a
great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not
only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes
the shattered skull of the suicide, the 'grey sick faces of onanists',
etc, etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe,
is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was
writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a SHRINKING world. The 'democratic
vistas' have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and
growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and
more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as
it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous
attitude and become a passive attitude--even 'decadent', if that word
means anything.
But precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience. Miller
is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more
purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also passive. Within a narrow
circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or local politics) he
feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as
helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence
the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. During the
past ten years literature has involved itself more and more deeply in
politics, with the result that there is now less room in it for the
ordinary man than at any time during the past two centuries. One can see
the change in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books
written about the Spanish civil war with those written about the war of
1914-18. The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at
any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and
badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them,
right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure
partisans telling you what to think, whereas the books about the Great
War were written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even
pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books like ALL
QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, LE FEU, A FAREWELL TO ARMS, DEATH OF A HERO,
GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT, MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER, and A SUBALTERN ON
THE SOMME were written not by propagandists but by VICTIMS. They are
saying in effect, 'What the hell is all this about? God knows. All we can
do is to endure.' And though he is not writing about war, nor, on the
whole, about unhappiness, this is nearer to Miller's attitude than the
omniscience which is now fashionable. The BOOSTER, a short-lived
periodical of which he was part-editor, used to describe itself in its
advertisements as 'non-political, non-educational, non-progressive,
non-co-operative, non-ethical, non-literary, non-consistent,
non-contemporary', and Miller's own work could be described in nearly the
same terms. It is a voice from the crowd, from the underling, from the
third-class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political, non-moral,
passive man.
I have been using the phrase 'ordinary man' rather loosely, and I have
taken it for granted that the 'ordinary man' exists, a thing now denied
by some people. I do not mean that the people Miller is writing about
constitute a majority, still less that he is writing about proletarians.
No English or American novelist has as yet seriously attempted that. And
again, the people in TROPIC OF CANCER fall short of being ordinary to the
extent that they are idle, disreputable, and more or less 'artistic'. As
I have said already, this a pity, but it is the necessary result of
expatriation. Miller's 'ordinary man' is neither the manual worker nor
the suburban householder, but the derelict, the D?CLASS?, the adventurer,
the American intellectual without roots and without money. Still, the
experiences even of this type overlap fairly widely with those of more
normal people. Milter has been able to get the most out of his rather
limited material because he has had the courage to identify with it. The
ordinary man, the 'average sensual man', has been given the power of
speech, like Balaam's ass.
It will be seen that this is something out of date, or at any rate out of
fashion. The average sensual man is out of fashion. Preoccupation with
sex and truthfulness about the inner life are out of fashion. American
Paris is out of fashion. A book like TROPIC OF CANCER, published at such
a time, must be either a tedious preciosity or something unusual, and I
think a majority of the people who have read it would agree that it is
not the first. It is worth trying to discover just what, this escape from
the current literary fashion means. But to do that one has got to see it
against its background--that is, against the general development of
English literature in the twenty years since the Great War.
II
When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means
that he is admired by people under thirty. At the beginning of
the period
I am speaking of, the years during and immediately after the war, the
writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young was almost
certainly Housman. Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25,
Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy
to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the
whole of the SHROPSHIRE LAD by heart. I wonder how much impression the
SHROPSHIRE LAD makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and more or
less the same cast of mind? No doubt he has heard of it and even glanced
into it; it might strike him as cheaply clever--probably that would be
about all. Yet these are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to
recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy, just as earlier
generations had recited Meredith's 'Love in a Valley', Swinburne's
'Garden of Proserpine' etc., etc.
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a roselipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The roselipt girls arc sleeping
In fields Where roses fade.
It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the
bubble always burst? To answer that question one has to take account of
the EXTERNAL conditions that make certain writers popular at certain
times. Housman's poems had not attracted much notice when they were first
published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single
generation, the generation born round about 1900?
In the first place, Housman is a 'country' poet. His poems are full of
the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and
Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, 'on Wenlock Edge', 'in summer time on
Bredon', thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies, the wild jonquils in
the pastures, the 'blue, remembered hills'. War poems apart, English
verse of the 1910-25 period is mostly 'country'. The reason no doubt was
that the RENTIER-professional class was ceasing once and for all to have
any real relationship with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed
then, far more than now, a kind of snobbism of belonging to the country
and despising the town. England at that time was hardly more an
agricultural country than it is now, but before the light industries
began to spread themselves it was easier to think of it as one. Most
middle-class boys grew up within sight of a farm, and naturally it was
the picturesque side of farm life that appealed to them--the ploughing,
harvesting, stack-thrashing and so forth. Unless he has to do it himself
a boy is not likely to notice the horrible drudgery of hoeing turnip,
milking cows with chapped teats at four o'clock in the morning, etc.,
etc. Just before, just after, and for that matter, during the war was the
great age of the 'Nature poet', the heyday of Richard Jefferies and W. H.
Hudson. Rupert Brooke's 'Grantchester', the star poem of 1913, is nothing
but an enormous gush of 'country' sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit
from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem
'Grantchester' is something worse than worthless, but as an illustration
of what the thinking middle-class young of that period FELT it is a
valuable document.
Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the
week-ending spirit of Brooke and the others. The 'country' motif is there
all the time, but mainly as a background. Most of the poems have a
quasi-human subject, a kind of idealized rustic, in reality Strephon or
Corydon brought up to date. This in itself had a deep appeal. Experience
shows that overcivilized people enjoy reading about rustics (key-phrase,
'close to the soil') because they imagine them to be more primitive and
passionate than themselves. Hence the 'dark earth' novel of Sheila
Kaye-Smith, etc. And at that time a middle-class boy, with his 'country'