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

short time, but he was completely dependent on a wife who had all but booted him out the door of their apartment into the city’s wintry streets. If she failed to wire funds to the American Express office for him, he would have to panhandle, steal, or starve.
    What then could the lone man do to stave off a paralyzing onslaught of the blues but get out of his room and into the streets with notebook and pen, walking great distances and making notes on virtually anything he happened to see, from the life of the cafes to the carcasses of the newly slaughtered horses hanging from the market stall hooks at Les Halles? With these for subject matter, he could at least reach back across the waters to that world he’d left behind, incorporating his observations in long letters, most of them to Emil Schnellock.
    There was a barely suppressed quality of desperation to these letters, evident not only in their torrential lengths and their reiterative suggestion that Emil drop everythingto join Miller in Paris; but also in their random piling up of impressions and ruminations, as if Miller was really writing to save his soul. As for poor Emil, he could hardly have been equal to the task of being a faithful pen pal—as he was later to observe in a published reminiscence of this time. No one could have. And if his friend had so radically changed his own life, Schnellock had no similar reasons to do likewise: the successful stay at home, as Crèvecoeur had so long ago observed of the phenomenon of expatriation.
    Miller was also writing to June but rarely received more in return than the occasional terse cable, ordering him to hold on, telling him that more money was on the way. She did manage to send him some occasionally, though not enough to keep him from descending steadily through the layers of the city’s populace, moving to ever cheaper hotels, skipping more and more meals, cadging a drink from a friendly stranger, selling his well-cut suits for a fraction of their worth. At the same time back home, the Depression was tightening its hold almost weekly, and June’s line of work was inherently boom-or-bust under the best of circumstances. The entire situation, Miller wrote Emil’s brother Ned, was as depressing as it was baffling. For one thing, he hadn’t imagined how crippling in a daily way his language deficiency would prove, how it would compound his solitude. But the solitude might not havebeen quite so crushing for this garrulous man had it not been that within it he could almost hear the sound of his literary failure. The manuscripts mocked him every time he had to pack them up and then unpack them in another of his forced removes; or when carrying some pages to a café where his hand would pause in puzzlement over this passage or that, wondering what the hell was wrong here.
    “Why does nobody want what I write?” he asked Ned. “Jesus, when I think of being 38, and poor, and unknown, I get furious. I refuse to live this way forever. There must be a way out.” But in an ironic way, his presence here in this unknown world seemed to have made that escape even more difficult to find, not less so. At least home, however hateful, had its familiar sights and sounds. Here there weren’t even the old hatreds to orient him, and so in addition to having been rendered speechless and friendless, he had no emotional compass—except his feet, driven here and there by fear.
    It didn’t help that on the surface at least Paris still looked like Gay Paree. It was true that the Roaring Twenties with their throngs of American tourists and expatriate artists were phenomena of the past. But to a passerby, outside in the darkened street, the cafes still looked as crowded and brilliantly lit as ever. Theaters and concert halls were packed. At her exacting copy of an eighteenth-century palazzo in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, the VicomtesseMarie-Laure de Noailles hosted her salons for the well-born and the talented. And as spring came on,