Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" by Frederick Turner Read Free Book Online Page A

Theexercise is rather a pathetic one, both inherently and considering the schoolboy glee with which it was received, praised, and passed around by Twain’s circle of socially prominent male friends. If it has any virtue, it is that it serves to suggest the power of the regnant literary prohibitions and beneath these the force of that current of sub-literary reality that had been flowing through American life for more than a century.
    It is in this context that the last notebook entry Twain ever made takes on resonance. It is the single word, “Talk.” And it was a certain sort of talk—rough, uncensored, a brilliantly sustained monologue—that would have to await utterance until the obscure advent of another literary outlaw, a renegade really, willing to risk everything to talk about life as he saw it in language that adequately expressed his vision. One had to go back to Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, Norman Mailer wrote of Henry Miller, to find a writer of such startling intensity, of such artistic audacity.

Just a Brooklyn Boy
    For a writer who was so compulsively autobiographical and who for the last half century of his life saved or made copies of much of what he wrote, it is surprising how many facts of Miller’s life are either unknown or in dispute. We are not even certain of the original spelling of the family name—whether in the Old World the paternal line had it Müeller or Muller or Muller before Anglicizing it to Miller on coming to America.
    The major problem here is Miller himself, who was as compulsive a mythologizer as he was autobiographical, incessantly and even gleefully inventing competing versions of events and further elaborating on some of these, so that what he left behind at his death was a vast palimpsestpresenting biographers and critics with a plethora of problems that can never be definitively solved. The problems are particularly acute for the pre-Paris years, where we have little really substantial to go on except Miller. Here one is forced to the hazardous expedient of using his later reconstructions of characters and events, knowing full well that these are reconstructions—when they are not pure inventions. At least, however, we are here in the realm of imaginative truth, which for Miller himself was truer than true. 8
    This much at least is certain: Heinrich (later Henry) Miller and Louise Nieting were both children of German immigrants who had two children of their own, Henry (1891) and Lauretta (1895). When Henry was less than a year old the family moved from Yorkville in Manhattan across the river to the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, the Fourteenth Ward, which Miller would later recall with an intensity that produced some of his most colorful work. These earliest years were passed inside the kind of her-metical immigrant enclosure possible in those days before the mass media, mass transit, and mass production had combined to homogenize the national culture. In the Miller-Nieting household on Driggs Avenue the child heard mostly German and spoke his first words in that language. The food was German, the next-door neighbors were German, and the large frame of daily referencewas Germany, not America. And despite a determinedly vagabond existence and the global range of his interests and enthusiasms, there were certain things about Miller that remained forever German. 9 When his personal circumstances permitted, for example, he preferred the neat and orderly household of his childhood, one where things were put away after they were used, where floors were swept and counters wiped clean. In his Paris days, when he could afford a substantial meal, he was likely to seek out a German restaurant or at least an Alsatian one like Zeyer or Wepler in the Place de Clichy. There were less obvious preferences, too, that bespoke his ethnic heritage. Behind the helter-skelter, improvisational nature of his maturity there was a dogged search for some ordering, synthesizing principle that