Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" by Frederick Turner Page A
Authors: Frederick Turner
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straight in her mind about one thing: Val had to go. She couldn’t operate with him around the apartment all day. (She might have wanted to use it for business purposes.) And she might also have thought that Miller really could profit by a radical change of scenery that might spark off renewed creativity, whereas here he had sunk into an apathy that kept him in bed much of the day. Having finished his novel and sunk all his characters to the bottom of the sea, he seemed to have lost interestin almost everything except trying to keep tabs on her. The situation was intolerable.
In the same way she and Jean had begun a conversational promotion of their own escape to Paris in ’27, now in late 1929 she began to promote Europe to Val, talking up Paris and Madrid as creative hot spots. In comparison, New York seemed sterile and gloomy, especially lately: there had been an ominous crash on Wall Street in October, and though things had stabilized somewhat, the country seemed to have gotten a bad case of the jitters. Her question wasn’t so much Why not go to Europe? as it was Why would you stay here? June promised him she could get the money together for passage, and then, somehow, she would periodically wire him funds to keep him going. Soon enough, she would join him, and life would become authentic in a way it couldn’t be here. It was a hard sell, for Miller was immobilized by June’s web of intrigue—Old World, New World, what the hell difference did it make? When June thrust his steamship ticket on him one day in early 1930 he accepted it much as his beaten Tony Bring might have. And when she further informed him that for unspecified reasons it wouldn’t be convenient for him to spend his last night at home he didn’t put up a fight, only submissively trudged off down the street with his heavy luggage.
He spent that night walking from one place to anotheron the East Side, then made his way to Emil Schnellock’s studio in the morning for comfort, for courage, and for the ten bucks his old pal had on hand to see him across the sea. Schnellock went with him down to the docks and saw him aboard the ship in falling snow. From the deck Miller watched America sliding away from him, the world he had once loved, then learned to loathe. To him this was the old world, the known, in all its contradictions, its vulgarity, its untamed landscape, its mindless devotion to what he would call the money god. Ahead, ironically, was a new world about which he knew almost nothing except the high-flown words of its philosophers and writers. While the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic” (as Melville had written of the “Pequod” in Moby-Dick) the lone man went below to his bunk and wept.
Part Two
Where the Writers Went
He was thirty-eight and must have felt twice that, dragging the heavy baggage of his past to a shabby hotel on the Left Bank: the suits the Jewish tailors had cut in his father’s shop; his copy of Leaves of Grass by another Brooklyn guy who’d gotten a late start; and the manuscripts of his two unpublished novels which he couldn’t bear to leave behind but which he must have known made poor bona fides for his literary pretensions.
No one in the great city was expecting him. He’d met a few people there back in ‘28 with June, but really he hadn‘t a single friend, and, trapped within his primitive French, his chances of making any were slim. He had no papers that would permit him to apply for even the most menial work, and he was here for quite another purposethan to land an odd job like so many of those he’d had in America. In any case, from the perspective of a French employer, a look at his resume would hardly have proved impressive. True, in America a man might have to play many roles on his way up, but Miller’s sole distinction was that he had failed in every one of his. He was, in short, essentially unemployable. If he was very careful he had just enough money to get by for a
In the same way she and Jean had begun a conversational promotion of their own escape to Paris in ’27, now in late 1929 she began to promote Europe to Val, talking up Paris and Madrid as creative hot spots. In comparison, New York seemed sterile and gloomy, especially lately: there had been an ominous crash on Wall Street in October, and though things had stabilized somewhat, the country seemed to have gotten a bad case of the jitters. Her question wasn’t so much Why not go to Europe? as it was Why would you stay here? June promised him she could get the money together for passage, and then, somehow, she would periodically wire him funds to keep him going. Soon enough, she would join him, and life would become authentic in a way it couldn’t be here. It was a hard sell, for Miller was immobilized by June’s web of intrigue—Old World, New World, what the hell difference did it make? When June thrust his steamship ticket on him one day in early 1930 he accepted it much as his beaten Tony Bring might have. And when she further informed him that for unspecified reasons it wouldn’t be convenient for him to spend his last night at home he didn’t put up a fight, only submissively trudged off down the street with his heavy luggage.
He spent that night walking from one place to anotheron the East Side, then made his way to Emil Schnellock’s studio in the morning for comfort, for courage, and for the ten bucks his old pal had on hand to see him across the sea. Schnellock went with him down to the docks and saw him aboard the ship in falling snow. From the deck Miller watched America sliding away from him, the world he had once loved, then learned to loathe. To him this was the old world, the known, in all its contradictions, its vulgarity, its untamed landscape, its mindless devotion to what he would call the money god. Ahead, ironically, was a new world about which he knew almost nothing except the high-flown words of its philosophers and writers. While the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic” (as Melville had written of the “Pequod” in Moby-Dick) the lone man went below to his bunk and wept.
Part Two
Where the Writers Went
He was thirty-eight and must have felt twice that, dragging the heavy baggage of his past to a shabby hotel on the Left Bank: the suits the Jewish tailors had cut in his father’s shop; his copy of Leaves of Grass by another Brooklyn guy who’d gotten a late start; and the manuscripts of his two unpublished novels which he couldn’t bear to leave behind but which he must have known made poor bona fides for his literary pretensions.
No one in the great city was expecting him. He’d met a few people there back in ‘28 with June, but really he hadn‘t a single friend, and, trapped within his primitive French, his chances of making any were slim. He had no papers that would permit him to apply for even the most menial work, and he was here for quite another purposethan to land an odd job like so many of those he’d had in America. In any case, from the perspective of a French employer, a look at his resume would hardly have proved impressive. True, in America a man might have to play many roles on his way up, but Miller’s sole distinction was that he had failed in every one of his. He was, in short, essentially unemployable. If he was very careful he had just enough money to get by for a
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