Powysian Currents in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

I recently finished reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934). It's a novel notorious for its pornographic detail and casual misogyny, yet underneath (and, to an extent, undergirding) this is a vital and engaging work, an easy and confident prose style that ripples with electricity. I think Miller will play a large role in my project, it is he who helped steer surrealism in a more anarchistic direction through his correspondence with Herbert Read. In his youth, Miller had also witnessed first-hand one of John Cowper Powys's highly-charged, idiosyncratic lectures in the US; a performance he came away “elated and fascinated” by, and must have surely inspired his writing style in some way.

This connection is interesting, because much of my thinking recently has been centred around Powys's lectures. From descriptions of them, they appear to be both very personal but also shamanic, often expounding his own personal interpretations of literature whilst channelling some evangelical, stage-show quality. Powys brought the world of culture and ideas to people as something of a performer and an entertainer. In this way, he tore down boundaries between high and low culture, whilst also lecturing for an audiences from mixed-class backgrounds. In this way Powys democratises culture, simultaneously debasing it to a purer form of innate creativity, but also elevating it to the universal and, for lack of better term, the divine. In this way, Powys doesn't consider himself an “artist” but a magician, an “actor in ideas,” revolutionising the role of the writer and their relationship to society.

I make this point because there is a similar lack of boundaries in Tropic of Cancer. Much like Powys's work it is intensely personal, and can metamorphose from the basest feelings and most banal sentiments to moments of absolute beauty and epiphany. In its stream of consciousness, peripatetic style, Miller will drift from discussing art, to sex, to ideas, to squalor, to food, drifting quite organically from abjection to ecstasy. It is often characterised as being “formless,” but its prose is perhaps better described as being organic. Here is his description of what the book is:

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse...

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

(Miller, 2)

Right at the outset of the book, the sentiment comes across as both vulgar and vulnerable, somehow base and revolutionary. Describing his work as a song, albeit one that is “a little off key perhaps,” conjures notions of performance, and brings to my mind Powys's characterisation of himself as a magician rather than an artist. Regarding his literary output, Jerome McGann describes Powys as seeking a “form of writing where failure stalks in every word” (McGann, 2006), and this chimes exactly with the Miller's “off key” song. This focus on imperfection, perhaps even the direct invocation of imperfection, demonstrates that the performance both writers seek to put on is one that is intensely personal. As such, though, it is only through such a subjective and personal mode of writing that both writers can reach their moments of true epiphany. Whilst I don't wish to defend the book's misogyny, the fact that it does reflect, somewhat, who Miller was as a person, necessitates its inclusion. Only in its honesty can the book succeed. To channel the spirits, to reach those moments of real transcendence, it is necessary to go through the imperfect, sordid body, “You must have a pair of lungs, and little knowledge of music”. In this way it can be intensely vulnerable, but I think for Miller it becomes its own form of elitism, as this passage shows,

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls. I saw it was a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on. Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. 

Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.

(Miller, 254-255)

It is here, with the characterisation of the artists as someone who must “stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails,” which first brought Powys to my mind. However, whereas I see Powys as a far more democratic and egalitarian author, writing what were essentially self-help books, lecturing to the masses, and imbuing each of the characters in his novels with psychic depths and complexity regardless of their social status, Miller reserves these qualities for an elite, “inhuman” race of artists. For me, this was an unfortunate drawback of Miller's work. At least Powys's Stirnerite/Nietzschean egotism is geared towards genuinely revolutionary, egalitarian ends. Whereas I see Miller's egotism as reinforcing a separation between artist and society. 

Works referenced:

McGann, J. (2006) '"The Grand Heretics of Modern Fiction": Laura Riding, John Cowper Powys, and the Subjective Correlative', Modernism/Modernity, 13(2): 309-323. 

Miller, H. (1963) Tropic of Cancer, London: John Calder.