Malraux was like that throughout his life: a spectacle, that he himself prepared, directed and performed, with great skill and with due attention to the smallest detail. He knew that he was intelligent and brilliant and, despite this, he did not become an idiot. He was also very courageous; he did not fear death, and, because of that, even though death stalked him on many occasions, he was able to embark on all those risky undertakings that marked his existence. But he was also, thankfully, rather histrionic and narcissistic, a high-flying exhibitionist (a Baron Clappique), and that made him human, brought him down from those heights that his intelligence — that had so amazed Gide — had taken him to, down to our level, the level of simple mortals. Most of the writers I admire would have failed the Pantheon test; or their presence there, in that monument to official memory, would have seemed intolerable, an insult to their memory. How could a Flaubert, a Baudelaire, a Rimbaud have entered the Pantheon? But Malraux is not out of place there, nor do his works or his image become impoverished among those marbles. Because one of the innumerable facets of this symphonic man was that he loved showiness and theatricality, triumphal arches, flags, hymns, those symbols invented to cover over the existential void and feed our human vanity.
London, March 1999
Tropic of Cancer
The Happy Nihilist
I remember very clearly how I read Tropic of Cancer for the first time, thirty years ago: very quickly, overexcited, in the course of just one night. A Spanish friend had got hold of a French version of this maudit book about which so many stories were circulating in Lima, and when he saw how anxious I was to read it, he lent it to me for a few hours. It was a strange experience, completely different to what I had imagined, because the book was not scandalous, as was being said, because of its erotic scenes, but rather because of its vulgarity and its cheerful nihilism. It reminded me of Céline, in whose novels swearwords and filth also become poetry, and Breton’s Nadja, because, in Nadja and in Tropic of Cancer, the most everyday reality suddenly becomes transformed into dream-like images and unsettling nightmares.
The book impressed me, but I don’t think that I liked it. I had then — and I still have — a prejudice that novels should tell stories that begin and end, that they had an obligation to oppose the chaos of life with an artificial, tidy and persuasive order. Tropic of Cancer — like all Miller’s subsequent books — is chaos in pure form, effervescent anarchy, a great, romantic, coarse, firework display, from which the reader emerges somewhat nauseous, disturbed and rather more pessimistic about human existence than before the show. The risk with this type of loose, formless literature is that it can become just clever showmanship, and Henry Miller, like another of his maudit contemporaries, Jean Genet, often fell into this trap. But Tropic of Cancer, his first novel, fortunately avoided this danger. It is, without doubt, the best book that he wrote, one of the great literary creations of the inter-war period, and within the œuvre of Miller, the work that is closest to being a masterpiece.
I have reread it now with real pleasure. Time and the bad habits of our era have diminished its violence and what seemed to be its rhetorical daring; we now know that farts and gonorrhoea can also be aesthetic. But time has not impoverished the sorcery of his prose or lessened its impact. On the contrary, it has added to it both serenity and a sort of maturity. When it appeared in 1934, in a semi-clandestine edition, in linguistic exile, a victim of prohibitions and edifying attacks, what was praised or disparaged in the book was its iconoclasm, the insolence with which, in its sentences, the worst, most offensive, words displaced those considered as being in good taste, as well as its obsession with eschatology. Today this aspect of the novel shocks very few readers, since modern literature has adopted these elements that Miller introduced with Tropic of Cancer, to such an extent that in many ways they have become a platitude, like talking about the geometry of passions in the eighteenth century, or reviling the bourgeoisie in the Romantic era, or becoming historically committed at the time of existentialism. Rude words lost their rudeness some time ago, and sex and its ceremonies have been popularised to the point of tedium. All this has its downside, of course, but one of the clear advantages is that now we can finally judge if Henry Miller, as well as being an explosive writer and an erotic novelist, was also a genuine artist.
He was, without any doubt. He was a genuine creator, with his own world and vision of humanity and literature that clearly singled him out from other writers of his generation. He represented, in our time, like Céline or Genet, that satanic tradition of iconoclasts, of very different temperaments, for whom writing has throughout history signified defying the conventions of the age, spoiling the party of social harmony, bringing out into the light all the brutishness and filth that society — sometimes with good reason, at other times for no good reason — insists on repressing. This is one of the important functions of literature: to remind men and women that however firm the ground that they walk on appears to be, and however brightly the city that they live in shines, there are demons lurking everywhere that, at any moment, can cause a violent upheaval.
Cataclysm, apocalypse, are words that come immediately to mind when talking about Tropic of Cancer, despite the fact that in its pages the only blood spilled is in a few drunken brawls and the only war is the (always belligerent) fornication of its characters. But a premonition of imminent catastrophe haunts its pages, the intuition that everything that is being narrated is about to disappear in a holocaust. This intuition causes the novel’s picturesque and promiscuous characters to live in such a dissolute frenzy. Theirs is a world that is ending, that is disintegrating morally and socially in a hysterical spree, waiting for the arrival of the plague and death, as in the terrifying fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch. In historical terms, all this is rigorously accurate. Miller wrote the novel in Paris between 1931 and 1933, at a time leading up to the great conflagration that would sweep through Europe some years later. These were years of bonanza and partying, of happy thoughtlessness and splendid creativity. All the aesthetic vanguard movements flourished, and the Surrealists enchanted modern-minded people with their poetic imagination and their ‘provocation spectacles’. Paris was the capital of the artistic world and of human happiness.
In Tropic of Cancer we see the flip side of this story. Its world is Parisian, but it is light years away from that society of winners and prosperous optimists: it is made up of pariahs, pseudo-painters, pseudo-writers, drop-outs and parasites who live on the margins of the city, not participating in the feast, fighting over the scraps. Expatriates who have lost the intimate link with their country of origin — the United States, Russia — who have not taken root in Paris and live in a kind of cultural limbo. Its geographical reference points are brothels, bars, run-down hotels, sordid rooms, dreadful restaurants, and the parks, squares and streets that attract tramps. In order to survive in this difficult country, everything goes: from a mind-numbing job — correcting proofs in a newspaper — to scrounging, pimping or conning. Many use vague ideas about art to justify themselves — I have to write the important novel, to paint redemptive pictures, etc. — but in fact the only seriousness the group displays is their lack of seriousness, their promiscuity, their passive indifference and their slow disintegration.