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

would make comprehensive sense of chaos, calling to mind that strong tradition of Germanic philosophers of history—Immanuel Kant, Wil-helm Dilthey, Theodor Mommsen, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Marx, and especially Oswald Spengler, a high god in Miller’s pantheon. Yet once he had gotten beyond what he characterized as his period of intellectual stammering, a part of Miller turned against his background with a ferocity that tells us how deep it really went with him. “My people were entirely Nordic,” he would write in Tropic of Capricorn, “which is to say, idiots. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank.”
    After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on the shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and then tucked away in drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
    According to her son, this mindless mania for order was the work of his mother. On the other hand, the father, a master tailor who ran his own shop, was in many respects a Good Time Charlie who loved his beer and his boon companions and who over the years of Miller’s adolescence and young manhood became a gentle alcoholic. Whatever her original nature may have been, Louise was quite a different sort by the time Miller was able to remember her behavior. Mental illness ran on her side of the family (Lauretta inherited it), and from an early age it had fallen to Louise to create what semblance of normality there could be in her family’s household. The habit carried over into her marriage, and the couple was badly mismatched, ever more so as Henry Senior slid into alcoholism and began to neglect his business. Miller claimed that it wasn’t until he himself had reached the age of fifty that he was able to summon up a single affectionate thought about Louise, and however this may be, it doesn’t take overmuch psychologizing to wonder whethersome of his treatment of women, both in life and in art, owes something to his attitude toward the brooding shadow of this authoritarian figure. It was she, he once claimed, who planted the demon of rebellion in his soul at an early age, because whatever he might be doing, he always felt her disapproval.
    As if he were watching the world exclusively from the living room window or the steps of the house on Driggs, the small boy’s earliest memories were of the immediate surroundings and the resident odors: the fish house next door; the neatly kept house and yard of the German neighbors on the other side; the tin factory whose smoke-blackened laborers appeared to him as slaves in hell; the smells of the tanyard, the gas mains, and the dung and urine of the workhorses.
    When he went outside it was always in the company of his mother who kept him firmly in hand, a practice that continued well after his contemporaries had graduated to a greater freedom. But inevitably, even a monster of control such as he represented Louise to have been would have to let go, allowing little Henry to begin his own explorations of his Williamsburg world. And if in the beginning that world would have seemed to him exclusively German, he was soon to find that it was in fact a rich and gamy ethnic stew with strong flavorings of Irish, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Syrians, and, increasinglyas the century came to a close, eastern European Jews. On street corners and in vacant lots; in vest pocket parks and down at the docks; on the sidewalks outside saloons, butcher shops, the veterinarian’s office, and a burlesque theater known as “The Bum,” where Millie de Leon drove grown men mad, the boy was quickly toughened up. He learned techniques of self-defense, what it took to fit in, taking on the protective coloration of the corner cliques and the neighborhood gangs. He got his first black eye from a tough Mick named Eddie Carney. With a few cronies he caught a glimpse of a little girl’s private parts and watched the vet geld