Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (7 page)

In 1909 higher education was hardly the automatic next step for high school graduates, especially not for children of Henry Miller’s socioeconomic class. After high school most such kids picked up a lunch pail or began punching a time clock. But because of his superior academic performance Miller seemed like a good candidate for college, and his German instructor recommended he try for a scholarship at Cornell. When he didn’t get it he made a half-hearted try at the City College of New York but soon dropped out. By 1910 he was punching a clock, just like every boy he’d associated with in high school, commuting
across the river to lower Manhattan where he was a file clerk for a cement company. Such a development might well have meant that the world would never hear the name Henry Miller. But Miller was cut from a different cloth, stubbornly unwilling to do what was then popularly referred to as “the world’s work.” So Miller, the failed Ivy Leaguer, the college dropout, the time-server working in literature’s mortuary—filing dead records for a cement company—refused to submit to his cultural and personal fate. Instead, he embarked on a daring, audacious course, one that defied all the conventions of his background: he began a lifelong career as a sexual adventurer; and at the same time he determined that, despite what college faculties might think, he would continue his self-directed studies, reinventing himself as a man of culture, able to converse on a wide variety of subjects like his heroes, Spengler and Arthur Schopenhauer.

The sexual adventures began in a manner then common enough: he became one of a group of young men who found courage in numbers when they paid their occasional visits to the numerous whorehouses in Manhattan’s Herald Square area. His initiation into the mysterious world of sex thus came at a price—several actually. There was, of course, the entrance fee. And then there followed the almost inevitable doses of gonorrhea—though these were regarded as a badge of initiation into the secret order of full manhood and as such could be boasted about at the office, the bar, the sports arena. And then, the final, most lasting price: that conflicted attitude toward women and sex that was also contracted in the houses, a combination
of assumed male superiority, crass usage, and genuine affection for the girls that had at its base a substantial something of the son’s worshipful regard for the mother figure.

Quickly, he graduated to a more involved sexual relationship when he took up with a woman he met while giving ham-handed piano lessons in Brooklyn for thirty-five cents an hour. Pauline Chouteau, as she was then calling herself, was old enough to have a grown son of her own, but she found “Harry,” as she called him, irresistibly attractive, and as for Miller, he found the daily sex she provided a marvelous antidote to his deadening job. Soon enough, however, he grew alarmed at the frequency and violence of their coupling: on the floor, in the bathtub, on the piano stool—wherever the frenzy found them. This was so constant that he began to keep a kind of calendar of their carnality, checking off the days when he’d had sex. But then, finding no blank spaces on it that would indicate abstinence, he abandoned the shameful record. Even with her son in the next room where he lay dying of tuberculosis, Pauline herself was delighted to stay aboard this sexual express. And if Miller had his private misgivings, they weren’t enough to cause him to get off, either, and so when his parents gave him the tuition money to enter Cornell, he took it to Pauline’s—only a few blocks down
Decatur—and hid out there until he’d gone through it all, at which point he shamefacedly returned to his parents’ house and confessed all. They already knew, his comings and goings at Pauline’s having been reported by the neighbors.

The express rattled perilously on. Pauline became pregnant, and Miller, by now sated, watched this development at some unknowable remove, perhaps like that he’d earlier developed while witnessing the hopeless conflict between Louise and Lauretta. One evening when he returned home from work he found Pauline had aborted what he callously called the “seven-month toothache,” the dead fetus enshrouded in a towel in a dresser drawer.

The event—whether natural or induced—appeared to have solved part of his predicament, how to rid himself of the Pauline problem. But not all of it. For that he would have to find somewhere to go, somewhere far beyond the suddenly too-tight confines of Brooklyn. So, he did what so many had before him: in 1913 he fled into the anonymity of the West, fetching up at the continent’s end, California, where he found work as an agricultural laborer. The work was rough, and though he’d made himself into something of a physical culture nut back in Brooklyn, he wasn’t prepared for stoop labor, and his hands were tender. The boys razzed him a bit about this, but as had
happened years earlier when he’d been thrown into Bush-wick’s boyhood briar patch, so here Miller made his way, not with his muscles but with his mouth. “Yorkie,” as the boys called him, could talk. He was a tale spinner.

He’d always been able to do it, but never consistently. There were often enough times when to his friends he seemed a tongue-tied, timid stammerer, awed by some stranger of supposedly greater learning or presence. But then, suddenly, something voltaic would surge through him and he would begin talking in torrents, long rushing streams of images, anecdotes, narrative fragments, wildly adventurous associations, startling and bizarre metaphors, lies so outrageous they strangely compelled a kind of belief. So now, in the fruit orchards of San Pedro and Chula Vista, working his generously proportioned mouth that appeared to have been constructed precisely for this purpose, he could render his rough audience speechless, as if he were an avatar of those folk monologists of another
era, assembling out of the brilliant air worlds unimaginable to his listeners. He did the work they did—though it is easy enough to imagine he was never the most industrious among them; he went with them to whorehouses on weekends; drank with them and laughed at the crude jokes they passed around. But in this singular sense he was a man apart. “When I wished to,” he remembered,

when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism, which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable.

Sooner or later, he continued, he was bound to say something that would carve out an instant chasm between the spellbinder and his audience:

The turn of a phrase, the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the facility with which the words came to my lips, the allusions to subjects which were taboo—everything conspired to set me off as an outlaw, as an enemy of society.
¹²

There were other spellbinders abroad in California and elsewhere in these last prewar days, famous ones who
could draw huge crowds when the authorities allowed Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, John Reed, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and other radicals to appear. The phonograph was yet in its infancy, and the age of radio was just dawning. But public speaking was a highly developed art, and Miller was drawn to it, as much perhaps because of the sheer spectacle of the phenomenon as the speakers’ specific messages. One weekend afternoon he and a fellow worker were on their way to a San Diego whorehouse when they happened to see a notice that Goldman would be speaking in the city that day. The two men changed their plans and went to hear her, something that Miller more than half a century later was still calling a life-altering event. It’s a good story, combining as it does two anti-establishment bugaboos—sex-for-pay and red radicalism—and it does not matter that much if Miller actually heard Goldman on that occasion (he may not have), because the fact is that subsequently he read about her and read some of her writings. By the time he returned to Brooklyn in 1914 he was a convert to the trade unionism movement, to free love, and to philosophical anarchism and began attending mass rallies where these causes were championed.

What drew him to these and kindred causes was that they ran militantly against the American mainstream. The America Miller had come to know had forsaken its radical
idealism, he believed, and had instead become enslaved to the sordid, soul-killing idea of Progress, Progress in every aspect of life, Progress at all costs. Everything, even the private relations between a man and a woman in the darkness of a bedroom or in the bushes of a public park, was subject to this one great end:
forward.
In the first days of the Great War only the so-called lunatic fringe in America was asking probing questions about the human costs of this, the spiritual toll of this worship of a god who demanded such extravagant sacrifices.

Perhaps for Miller these costs were the more real and appalling because of what was happening in his own household, where he watched his father falling farther and farther behind in the rat race, neglecting his business, and retreating into a boozy sentimentalism, as if in his own way he too wished to rebel against what this New World required of a man. Louise, her son felt, was at the same time becoming more and more a slave driver, the in-house personification of the tyrannous spirit of the age. With the menial labor he’d done in California fresh in his mind he was increasingly drawn to the notion that there must be more to human existence than the brutish necessity of earning your bread by the sweat of your brow until at last you keeled over and croaked. And here even the radical politics of Goldman and Haywood didn’t seem adequate to him for all its talk about the dignity of all work and the
moral necessity of giving the workingman a fair shake. That wasn’t enough for him. He didn’t want a fair shake; he wanted something else altogether, though he couldn’t yet call its name. Thus, while he considered himself a political radical (and always would), he was increasingly drawn to thinkers who suggested there was another plane of existence beyond politics, one that had little to do with political movements or Progress or personal economic advancement. Madame Helena Blavatsky for one, a cloudy yet compelling mystagogue whose studies in Oriental religions led her to posit the existence of a realm of being that had nothing to do with the moneygrubbing of the modern world. The Welsh writer and philosopher John Cowper Powys, a hawk-faced man who Miller thought was “all flame, all spirit,” was another and even more significant influence—a powerhouse lecturer with an attachment to the natural world that was an antidote to the soullessness of the city and much else of modern living. Benjamin Fay Mills was another influence, a reformed Christian evangelist who had made something akin to Emerson’s conversion eighty years earlier, from a strict orthodoxy to a more mystical worship in which Christ was only one of the gateways to salvation. Miller was enough taken with what he took to be Mills’s message that he volunteered his services as an usher and alms collector at Mills’s appearances in the New York area.

Meanwhile, the slaughterhouse of daily, meaningless drudgery loomed ever closer as Louise insisted with increasing urgency that he join his father at the tailor shop and so save the family from ruin. Only Henry, she wailed, now stood between the family and starvation.

To Miller the tailor shop seemed somehow a particularly degrading form of work, as if he were being condemned to spend the rest of his days pressing out the farts the customers had left in their pants, as he so pungently put it. Nonetheless, he could see nothing else possible under the circumstances and knuckled under to his mother’s demands. His father had new business forms made up, reading “Henry Miller & Son,” which must have looked to that son like the official stamp and seal of his fate. No escape now, only the weary commute to the Bowery stop where he would get off so that at least he might get some exercise in the walk uptown. At that morning hour the place was filled with others on foot, some of them stumbling and shuffling—pimps and coke-heads, Miller said,
“beggars, touts, gunmen, chinks, wops, drunken micks. All gaga for a bit of food and a place to flop.” Miller himself possessed these necessities, of course, and a job to go to, but spiritually he felt as much on the streets as these men in the Bowery, homeless and alone.

The shop itself was no better. If anything, it might be worse than the streets, where at least there was a kind of freedom, even if it was only the freedom to starve. At the shop his immediate associates were the three Jewish men in the busheling room to whom he felt an instant aversion. But he couldn’t be around them for very long without privately coming to realize that each of them had a fund of personal culture far richer than his own. They could talk about philosophy, music, and literature with an assurance he lacked, despite his frenzied, unsponsored reading. Yet here they were, wage slaves, as he saw it, working away in a back room to cut and shape cloth for men who in too many instances were not their intellectual equals. The longer he was forced to look down their road, the same one he was traveling, the bleaker it looked, the pavement each day harder, the steel-and-concrete canyons narrower, more inescapable, the “new world eating into me, expropriating me.” Soon, he began imagining, he would be swallowed whole, just another nameless sacrifice.

Meanwhile, in the front room where his father greeted
such customers as there still were he saw how truly hopeless his true task here was—to save his father. Those remaining customers were for the most part his father’s cronies, drinking partners who paid—tardily, if ever—for the expertly tailored suits the Jewish cutters in back turned out. These were men who needed to keep up the appearances they could no longer afford, men who felt they must positively sparkle when they walked across the avenue to the Wolcott Hotel for their eleven o’clock drinks, and in Henry Miller, Senior, they had a man who understood this, for their needs were his own. They were all like Paul Dexter, a “ten-thousand-dollar-a-year-man,” a brilliant monologist, but who was always temporarily between positions and who frequently disappeared on week-long bats. Or else they had some tarnished Old World background like the penniless baron who had fallen on hard times in this New World where he had contracted syphilis like some conquistador out of the age of exploration. Somewhere along the road they had all lost their way and now were reduced to trading as best they could on the appearances Henry Senior provided on credit. In their boozy bonhomie at the Wolcott bar and the other bars along Fifth Avenue they could forget for a few hours how lost they were. And sometimes they could extend that forget-fulness, that alcoholic anodyne, into the evening, because Miller’s father might bring one or another of them home
to Decatur Street, thrusting them into Louise’s baleful presence. Only for a meal maybe, or an overnight stay, just until a temporary financial inconvenience had been straightened out. Once, so Miller claimed, his father even took one of these guests to bed with him. However that may have been, it is certainly believable that often enough Miller had to go to his own bed with the
Nachtmusik
of his mother raging at her sodden husband whose need for male friendship was hurtling his business toward a financial abyss.