Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" by Frederick Turner

It was story. And what was the story he had to tell if not that of June, this endlessly mysterious, darkly compelling creature who had put him through so much? Actually, something akin to this had already occurred to him a few years back when June had deserted him for Jean and Paris. One day as he sat brooding on this humiliating injustice, he’d begun to type, furiously, feverishly, and before the impulse had spent itself he’d turned out some thirty single-spaced pages about her.
    So with June out hustling at the Pepper Pot, Miller turned back to these notes. But in the same way he had been inspired to write Clipped Wings to demolish the Alger story, now in the manuscript he was calling Lovely Lesbians he began not to immortalize June but instead to ruthlessly expose her layers of lies, her cruel treatment of him. The characters of June (Hildred) and Jean (Vanya) arethus depicted as the enemies of the gelded husband, Tony Bring, callously neglecting him and even psychologically torturing him with their mutual obsession and their bizarre ambition to create a gang of puppets like Count Bruga. Even their occasional concern for poor Tony is negatively portrayed, as when Hildred and Vanya together minister to his hemorrhoids. Daily, Miller writes, “they turned him over on his stomach and doctored his rectum. Between times they lubricated his system so thoroughly and conscientiously that if he had been a Linotype machine or a Diesel engine he would have functioned smoothly for a year to come.” Then the women turn back to each other with their incessant chatter and equally incessant hammering as they whack the puppets into shape. This was hardly what June could have had in mind for her literary monument. Even the title, Lovely Lesbians, was bound to offend her because it caricatured a relationship that to her at least had been vitally important and filled with nuances that Miller grimly ignored in favor of cheap comedy and self-pity.
    There is indeed still too much undigested self-pity in these pages and still too much generalized malice of the sort that makes Moloch such hard reading. Yet there are a few sentences here and there and one or two passages where the writer is able to let it rip, where a combustible combination of anger, grief, and despair allows him accessto reaches of his imagination not available to him in Moloch. These are the places where the writer begins to learn how to say—and to mean —”Fuck everything!” Begins to learn how to say it at length and in words no less scabrous but which are stylistically richer.
    And there is a passage near the manuscript’s end that contains one of the keys that eventually would unlock the door that had thus far barred Miller from access to the full range and reach of his talent. In it the broken Tony Bring, whose body is “but a collection of bruises,” thinks to himself that if only he had the necessary solitude and silence, he could reconstruct in exquisite detail every single thing that had ever happened to him, from birth to the present moment. But he doesn’t have either solitude or silence. Instead he has only the hammering and the jawing of the lovely lesbians, busily and brazenly planning their desertion of him for Gay Paree. He will fix them yet, Bring thinks to himself. He will write about them and everything else as well. Writing well and fully will be the ultimate revenge. But not here, not in these pages, where it looks very much as if Miller had exhausted his creative energies, ending the novel with the image, at once bleak and destructive, of all his characters going down in a storm at sea, like the rotten vessels they were.

Exile
    June couldn’t have been happy about the manuscript in whatever version she saw it. But it is possible that her narcissism combined with her drug use to keep her in some sort of touch with her conviction that Val could yet write the great book about her even if Lovely Lesbians wasn’t it. In any case, she was