Drawing up the book lists for 2009 and 2010 has given me the chance to confront prejudices that I’ve toted around about certain authors and books probably for decades. I’ve already written about my avoidance to TC Boyle given the promotional pictures on the back of his books that seemed to present an occasion of sin to me. Other contemporary American authors also seemed verboten: Saul Bellow; any more of Philip Roth after complaining Portnoy. Similarly, maybe as a vestige of the Legion of Decency, I steered clear of Henry Miller, odd because in my mid-20s I devoured all of Anais Nin’s diaries.
I rapidly consumed Tropic of Cancer in a couple of days, yet at the same time, relishing entire pages of Miller’s images of Paris and literature. Parts reminded me of Breakfast in Babylon if only to contrast how squalor and hard times affect the main characters so differently. Maybe it's because his Parisians are not addicted en masse to illegal drugs and because he does occasionally manage to find a job. He describes being a newspaper proofreader thus: "This life which, if I were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degradation, I welcome now, as an invalid welcomes death. It's a negative reality, just like death -- a sort of heaven without pain and terror of dying. In this chthonian (on of my favorite words used often by my classics scholar son) world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation." What a perfect counterpoise for Miller's urge to create something of beauty and worth: "... as I ruminated, it began to grow clear to me, the mystery of ... pilgrimage, the flight which the poet makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he had been ordained to re-enact a lost drama, the heroic descent to the very bowels of the earth, the dark and fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody struggle to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a bright, gory sun god cast up on an alien shore."
Miller as a picaro has artistic tumult as his quest. His ruminations declaim the sterility and quashing of creativity found in a capitalist society. He values personal freedom and personal “morality” above economic, political or religious dictates. Again: "When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears."
My avoidance of ToC stemmed from associating it with Grove Press and all the sordid pornography it reputedly published. I don’t know anyone who has read ToC, basically because I was too embarrassed to ask. And there is plenty of sex in the novel. Sex is not couched in parody nor is it pejorative or gratuitous or extraneous to the plot. Women are not maligned; men are not drawn up as debauched. Sex is lust, therapy, an aperitif, the basis of all things human and inspirational. Sort of like Miller's Paris.
Maybe some day I'll come back to this review and score it higher on my picaresque scale, but I can't score it high enough on my "must read" list.
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