I read "Tropic of Cancer" because it's one of those books on all the "Best" lists. I was not expecting hundreds of pages of drunken, lecherous misogyny. The first half of the book makes it clear that the protagonist is not supposed to be likable -- it's the mostly internal ramblings of a 30-something young man who is let off the leash in a big, attractive European city.
Not just any city - but Paris! Things are always different, better and more fun in some other big city. Around the time the events in the novel take place, there was a huge shift in norms and mores. Not just in terms of sexuality but the idea of "single" people or unattached people having recreational sex and living alone or with roommates (not family of origin nor their own family).
Miller and his friends live in hotels because what was available for single people. He spends the first half of the book getting drunk and getting laid, or thinking about getting laid -- and not thinking very highly of himself or all the people around him.
About midway through, he gets a job as a proofreader. He starts to figure out how to fake it, and realizes that there are advantages to his position there:
"The world is brought right under my nose and all that is requested of me is to punctuate the calamities."(page 146)
"It is the reality of a swamp and they are the frogs who have nothing better to do than to croak. The more they croak the more real life becomes." (page 146)
"They have a wonderful therapeutic effect upon me, these catastrophes which I proofread. Imagine a state of perfect immunity, a charmed existence, a life of absolute security in the midst of poison bacilli. Nothing touches me, neither earthquakes nor explosions nor riots nor famine nor collisions nor wars nor revolutions." (page 147)
"I am inoculated against every disease, every calamity, every sorrow and misery. It's the culmination of a life of fortitude." (page 147)
"A good proofreader is a little like God Almighty, he's in the world but not of it. He's for Sundays only. Sunday is his night off. On Sundays he steps down from his pedestal and shows his ass to the faithful." (page 147)
"It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right. Everything is on one level, whether it be the latest fashion for evening gowns, a new battleship, a plague, a high explosive, an astronomic discovery, a bank run, a railroad wreck, a bull market, a hundred-to-one shot, an execution, a stick-up, an assassination, or what. " (page 148)
"Nothing escapes the proofreader's eye, but nothing penetrates his bulletproof vest" (page 148)
If you haven't figured it out yet -- the entire book is satirical and meant to be goddamned funny, so laugh, goddammit! It's dark, certainly, and ghastly but it's meant to be comedy.
"But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here. Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows." (page 150)
"Above all, never despair. Il ne faut jamais désespérer."
"A world without hope, but no despair. It's though I had been converted to a new religion..." (page 151)
This distance from the world around him makes him feel as though he's above all the things that are going on in the world around him -- he builds up his armor against the injustices of the world.
"I'm not American any more, nor a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian. I haven't any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I'm neither for nor against. I'm a neutral." (page 153)
The income, and the wee bit of distance, have begun to have an effect on the young debauched author. He's not just railing against consumerism and peasantry and pedantry like he did earlier in the book -- but now it's the cities that are part of the predatory process of capitalism:
"I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine -- the martyrs of modern progress. " (page 162)
Nonetheless, he tries to find a balance, and even makes himself vomit after a night of drinking so he can still do his job passably:
“It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma than to epitomize Nietzsche’s philosophy. You can be brilliant sometimes, when you’re drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proofreading department.” (page 175)
"Dates, fractions, semicolons — these are the things that count. And these are the things that are most difficult to track down when your mind is all ablaze. Now and then I made some bad lenders, and if it weren’t that I had learned how to kiss the bosses ass, I would have been fired, that’s certain." (page 175)
Our protagonist shuffles around to stay with other friends, finds himself in a more sedate neighborhood, where the street scenes beg the comparison to capitalism to the military barracks:
"When the sun comes out, any spot in Paris can look beautiful; and if there is a bistro with an awning rolled down, a few tables on the sidewalk and colored drinks in the glasses, then people look altogether human. and they are human -- the finest people in the world when the sun shines! So intelligent, so indolent, so carefree. It's a crime to herd such people into barracks, to put them through exercises..." (page 222)
Just before he accepts a boring, unpaid job for room and board teaching English in the suburb of Dijon, he reflects on writing and offers the following as an excuse for the book the reader holds in their hands:
"What is called their "over-elaboration" is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit." (page 253)
"When I reflect the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears."(page 253)
"I see that behind the daily annoyances and intrusions, behind the cheap, glittering malice of the feeble and inert, there stands the symbol of life's frustrating power, and that he who would create order, he would sow strife and discord, because he is imbued with will, such a man must go again and again to the stake and the gibbet. " (page 253)
"I see that behind the nobility of his gestures there lurks the specter of the ridiculousness of it all - that he is not only sublime, but absurd." (page 253)
On Christmas Eve, he goes out drinking with a friend and they crash a midnight mass -- never having done so before -- and is in awe of the impact that the experience has on him. While admitting that he felt a bit of the power that might lure people in, he has low regard for priests who live well above the standards of their parishioners (there's a story about being broke and asking for a handout from a priest who told him to go back to Paris):
"In the street one meets with all forms of dementia and the priest is by no means the most striking. Two thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it."
The late part of the book is devoted to two final stories: the boredom of being stuck in Dijon and escaping when he heard there was a room available. Then, the story of his poor friend Fillmore who hit rock bottom, spent some time in "the bug house" and agreed to marry a woman he may have impregnated and who may have given him a dose of the clap.
The whole comedy of Fillmore and Ginette's interactions seen through the lens of our protagonist is like an Abbott & Costello or "The Three Stooges" skit. In the end, our "hero" helps his friend make a break back to the US, pockets a wad of his friend's cash and then takes a taxi ride around Paris, never intending to deliver the cash to the pregnant girlfriend. The end.
Is it deserving of the best novel list? Maybe to some people, sure, I could see why if you take into consideration the historical context and don't take Miller's grandiose and surreal "over-elaborations" too seriously. It's a picaresque -- which is defined by a repugnant cast of characters who live their lives in a way that is not "proper" and against most conventions or morals. They aren't even really having fun, most of the time, and neither are the readers of such novels.
REVIEW: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
RATING: 4-stars
