I'm usually quite a fan of zeitgeist crystallization in literature. Here is a true account/fiction which places a smudgy magnifying glass to the underbelly of a famed city. Paris has NEVER been described THIS ugly!

The protagonist is Mr. Miller, and he lives in absolute poverty, which enhances his artist's eye. He transcends the tangibility and heaviness of matter...

Anyway, I know this was controversial and even banned for decades because of the sexual depictions and language. This is from the 30's! Miller is a vagabond, like I said, whose adventures pretty much resemble those of Marcello Mastrioanni from the F. Fellini films-- that is, much sex, confusion, some self awareness & a lack of self control. Does this type of behavior mark every age? every generation?

There is much to think about however. Miller is more poet than cohesive storyteller, sure. The ambiance is masterfully established. Though somewhat different (this one is about writers in Paris, the other about journalists in San Juan, Puerto Rico), I prefer and can say more about "The Rum Diary" by Hunter S. Thompson than this one.

Poor, talented (or, worse, talentless) people of the paper and pen!

می‌خواستم ببینم چرا در جهان ممنوع بوده، شروع کردم، حوصله‌م سر رفت، رها کردم‌.
البته موقعیت مرگ و کثافت و بدبختی هم بود و ذره‌ای تمرکز بر واژه‌ها نداشتم.
فلذا شاید بعداً دوباره.
شاید هم نه.

“One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even without money…One can live in Paris – I discovered that! – on just grief and anguish…”
-tHenry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Get yourself a gallon of milk. Wait until it has been expired for a month. Next, take that expired milk to Phoenix in July, and place it on an unshaded sidewalk. Leave it there for a week. Now, open up that jug and take a long, deep swallow.

What you’ve just consumed has aged better than Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

The hero of Tropic of Cancer is a pompous blowhard who manages, through sheer willpower, to display a streak of just about every prejudice that exists. He is a bit of a racist, a homophobe, an anti-Semite, and an agist. Towering above that all, though, is his truly extraordinary misogyny, which he displays by occasionally groping women, having sex with women who are unconscious, and referring to half the human population with a vulgar reference to their genitals (it rhymes with “runt,” if you must know).

The kicker is that much of it is true, this being a semi-autobiographical novel.

In a time in which sexual predators are being unmasked, prosecuted, and convicted, and in which toxic masculinity is being confronted with more vigor than perhaps ever before, it is an odd experience to read a book in which the protagonist not only presents himself as an anti-hero, but the coolest sort of anti-hero imaginable: the American expatriate in Paris.

Here’s the thing, though. This was written in the 1930s, when Miller’s attitudes were not only prevalent, but probably bordered on conventional wisdom. It is offensive, yes, but it is not enough to simply be offended. Instead of trying to judge or justify across the span of nearly ninety years, I’m going to approach this book on its merits.

On its merits, I found Tropic of Cancer to be sort of awful.

***

The controversy over Tropic of Cancer has, in a way, served as a distraction from its content. Published in France in 1934, the novel was long banned as obscene in America, due to its language and sexual references (both of which, in the fullness of time, feel rather tame today). The back cover of my 1987 paperback edition, which has been sitting on various bookshelves in various houses for years, has nothing to say about the actual substance of the book, and much to say about its role in the censorship laws of the United States. I always knew I wanted to read Tropic of Cancer, if only because of its outré reputation. At the same time, I hesitated, since I had no idea what it was about.

Now I know what it’s about. It’s mostly about nothing.

The thinly fictionalized Miller of Tropic of Cancer is a penniless mooch with wild delusions of grandeur, a writer working on a project to upend the world, which he humbly calls The Last Book. Most of his time is spent dunning the people in his life – I hesitate to call them “characters” because they are really just names – for a few centimes to get a drink, to sleep with a prostitute, or both. Written in the first person, most of this book’s interminable three-hundred plus pages represents a repetition of this theme.

This is an essentially plotless novel that skips through time, occasionally loses itself in long stream-of-conscious passages that might have wowed me in a different life – a life in which I was perpetually eighteen and an English major – and that somehow manages to make Paris seem like one of the ugliest, dreariest places on earth. People walk into and out of the story without leaving the faintest impression. There are a couple sex scenes, but mostly there is talk about sex, and most of this talk seems to consist of men telling each other lies.

I am not a stranger to disturbing content. However, I want that content to be in service to the story. Because of Tropic of Cancer’s lack of a narrative through-line, however, I mostly found the nastiness here to be in service to itself. It represents the imperious preening of a man who has Raskolnikov’s sense of self-worth, Holden Caulfield’s whininess, and Harvey Weinstein’s view of women.

***

Leaving aside its dispiriting ingredients, I found Tropic of Cancer to be a bit of a slog. The nonlinearity makes it difficult to know where you are in time, and because you have no idea where anything is going, it takes forever to get there.

Miller does provide some benchmarks – such as his job at a newspaper – that prove helpful in orienting yourself. More than that, Miller occasionally takes you through a lucid narrative arc, some of which are effective. Asked to say one nice thing about Tropic of Cancer, I would say that the ending scenes of the novel, in which Miller helps a friend leave the country to escape a poisonous relationship, are pretty good. In presenting his closing thoughts, Miller writes of humankind:

Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time.

If nothing else, Miller certainly proves that thesis: that up close, humans are ugly and malicious.

***

The interesting thing about the many Tropic of Cancer reviews is that they appear to be in dialogue with each other. The people who love it are quite certain that the prose is genius (“This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art…”), the form is groundbreaking, and that any detractors are either squeamish pearl-clutching snowflakes, or are philistines who simply don’t get it. On the other hand, the people who hate it seem to find it morally reprehensible, that reprehensibility overwhelming all other facets. Then, there is some middle ground, with people who seemed to not like the book, but maybe don’t want to say it, because Tropic of Cancer’s reputation is so exalted.

In that spirit, I feel I should stake out my position. First, I should say I am not squeamish. I worked as a defense attorney for many years, interviewing people who’d done terrible things, viewing full color, high-resolution crime scene photos of murders, and generally forming an understanding of how bad it can get. To that end, no mere words – especially not the naughty-little-boy cursing of Tropic of Cancer – are going to dictate my reaction.

Second, this is not a novel I didn’t “get.” I get that this is another in a long line of navel-gazing books by an author consumed by the purported tortures of writing. I get that Miller is trying to say something about the human condition, and that with himself as a standard, he finds the human condition to be precarious.

There is also a scene in this all-time classic in which Miller goes to a brothel with a man from India, and this man defecates into a bidet, and there is a big hubbub about this. To repeat: in one of Tropic of Cancer’s rare set pieces, a man poops in a bidet.

I get it.

***

Not every book is for everyone. I don’t think it’s crazy that some people love Tropic of Cancer, just as I find it reasonable that others would not even bother after the first handful of pages.

Having been vastly underwhelmed, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of Tropic of Cancer’s literary fame came from the fact that it was banned. There is something absolutely compelling about a thing that is forbidden. Undoubtedly, the lack of supply created demand, bolstered by samizdat editions that floated around, in defiance of U.S. law. I’m guessing that Miller ultimately benefited from being suppressed, as though he were speaking a truth the powers-that-be could not allow to be heard.

In any event, I am grateful for the role Tropic of Cancer played in helping destroy the puritanical obscenity laws in America. I don’t recommend it as something to be read, but I am certainly strongly in favor of it being available to read.

Tropic of Cancer first published in 1934 in France, but this edition was banned in the United States until 1961.

Tropic of Cancer is one of the most important and beautiful pieces of prose in the history of English literature, It isn't an ordinary novel, it's Miller's life in pairs, how he sees his friends, how he thinks about human being's big questions. What Miller is doing only is searching for food and if he finds it then he can give a "lay" and write some pages in his novel.

In this beautiful prose we can't imagine completely his friends but we clearly know how Miller saw them, Many of his discussions are almost a nonsense except when he talking about literature, and his idea about becoming an inhuman instead of a human was the most brilliant one.

This novel is a good example of the real literature which starts and ends with the language, It isn't possible to read a great novel which isn't written in a beautiful language, classic or modern or post-modern, realistic or surreal, love, action or thriller novel, the language is the most important thing.

Talking about the language and the literature, i want to refer to a remarkable cross-purposes use of a word in two novels, in atonement we read the word "c***" for one time and the use of this word was the key of the whole plot of the novel, and the reader is suppose to feel its vulgarity. Here in tropic of cancer we read it hundreds of time, it's even means women in Miller's language and the reader suppose to feel it as an ordinary word.

The novel not suitable for the morally conservative readers.

الترجمة العربية للرواية - قرأتها منذ عدة أعوام - بواسطة أسامة منزلجي جيدة على مستوى نقل روح العمل إلى حد كبير ولكنها بالطبع لا تنقل جمال لغة ميللر.

الرواية غير مناسبة للقراء المؤمنين بمفهوم الأدب النظيف بتاتاً, فميللر يستخدم الكلمات الواقعية التي قد تثير حفيظة القارىء أحياناً, خاصة عند نقلها للعربية.

Trópico de cáncer es la descripción de la vida, la perpetuidad de la miseria, la búsqueda del sentido mismo desde el vacío o desde la vacuidad, no reconforta, no alaba, reluce la herrumbre, pero
¿Quien me dice a mi que no está bien incomodarme y asquearme cuando son las emociones de la vida misma?
El poder de las palabras como medio de escapatoria cuando todo finalmente se reduce a resistir la cotidianidad.

This is not for the faint of heart. Many books that were once scandalous for their sexual content, such as Lady Chatterly’s Lover, are tame by modern standards, but Tropic of Cancer still has the power to make you wince. Henry Miller pulls no punches and recognizes no limits. The sexuality is almost feral; there is no joy or intimacy, but only animal appetites, and the women are not just whores but c*nts, a word that he uses many times (and there is no asterisk when he uses it).

So why read it? For one thing he is one of the few writers who can pull off an extended stream-of-consciousness writing style. Everything he sees, hears, thinks, touches, and smells is presented to the reader in its rawest form. For another, he came to epitomize the Lost Generation of writers and artists living in Paris after World War One. The war had destroyed all notions of justice, decency, meaning, or purpose, had exposed the lying mendacity of governments and the dung heap at the heart of a civilization stripped of its illusions. All that was left was the intensity of personal experience, which was at its most real in the animal couplings of sex as physical release and nothing else.

Finally, Miller is amazing at describing for the reader what it was like to live a Bohemian life in Paris in the 20s, careless and care free but also deeply impoverished and never knowing where his next meal was coming from. His writing is vivid, and his characters so well drawn that the reader is pulled into the narrative in a way that few authors can manage. When he describes walking along the Seine in wintertime, with the bare tree branches swaying in the wind under leaden skies, you can feel the chill in the air.

There is no story per se, only a series of episodes and incidents that are not even obviously in chronological order. He has friends, and occasional jobs, and tries to write, and buys women whenever he gets a little money. People in this book do not discuss philosophy, or history, or ethics, and laugh at anyone who does. The Great War destroyed any illusions about life, and nihilism pervades the times, “Chaos is the score upon which reality is written,” he says. He recognizes no morality, because morality and the other associated lies that go along with it had left ten million dead on the battlefields.

He is not ashamed of his life, his thoughts, or his actions, because nothing he does, nothing he is capable of doing, is as terrible as what the governments had recently done to their own citizens. “Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.” Anyone mouthing pious platitudes is either selling something or is an idiot. Those people pass like shadows through the narrative; their existence immaterial to him and his life, for they are still caught up in the vain illusions of society. If he cared enough to spare them even three words, all he would say is “Go fuck yourself.”

The book is a classic, but it is not perfect. Not caring about anything or anyone is fine in small doses, but it’s no way to go through life. The self-hatred in it is palpable at times, as when he has to humiliate himself before people he loathes just on the chance that they will buy him dinner. And sometimes he just comes off as whiny, as if resentful that other people don’t take better care of him since, after all, he is condescending to spend time with them.

The book is vulgar from start to finish, but that was because Miller wasn’t writing it for you, or me, or, basically, for anyone else. It is, nevertheless, powerful and engaging, an intense portrait of a life lived holding nothing back. It helped kick start Modernism in literature and was vastly influential. That influence was probably enhanced by its forbidden fruit quality, since the United States banned it for twenty-five years. Nevertheless, if you have the stomach for it, this is a book you will never forget.

GoodReads Memorial Plot Summary (Pages 1 - 30) (Warning: Contains Spoilers) (Sponsor: Grove Press)

We are living in Montparnasse/at the Villa Borghese/in Rue Bonaparte.

We walk down streets where ZolaBalzacDante/Strindberg lived.

The cancer of the weather/timepovertyanarchy is eating us away.

The atmosphere is saturated with decay/disasterfrustrationfutility.

BorisMoldorfBorowskiSylvester discovers his room is plagued by licecockroachesdungbeatlesdragonflies/bedbugs.

He asks me to scratchshave his armpits.

This journalnovelcollection of fragmentary notes is a prolonged insult tokick in the pants of GodArtManDestinyTimeLove/Beauty.

You, TaniaIreneMonaLlonaElsa are my chaosfeverfirepassion.

I am qunt-struck/ a handful.

I know how to inflamefilliron out every wrinkle inshoot hot bolts into your qunt with my dickputzerection.


The Pornographic Imagination

Henry Miller wrote "Tropic of Cancer" between 1930 and 1934. It was published in France in 1934, though it wasn't published in the United States until 27 years later in 1961.

The importation of the French edition was immediately banned. Only when it was published locally did the Supreme Court determine (in 1964, before the 60’s had truly begun to swing) that the work was not obscene.

The Right Sexual Proportions

The definition of obscenity requires a work to have an undue emphasis on or exploitation of sex.

The word "undue" implies that there is an appropriate level of emphasis or exploitation.

"Tropic of Cancer" is littered with words that, in order not to offend, I will paraphrase as "cocque", "qunt" and "fucque".

Let’s assume that life is 80% tedium (e.g., work) and 20% sex.

Should there be a criminal law that says that 20% sex is OK, but 80% will send you to jail?

Is it wrong that "Tropic of Cancer" might be much closer to the life of the imagination?

I think any subject matter should be fair game in fiction written by adults for adults.

However, regardless, I think "Tropic of Cancer" deserves its place as one of the master works of the twentieth century.

The Truth Told Truly

"Tropic of Cancer" recounts the narrator’s first two years in Paris after leaving New York in 1930.

Nothing is to be gained by denying that the novel is autobiographical.

It contains the following epigraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how to record truth truly."

It’s implicit that Henry Miller’s quest was to tell the truth about his own life "truly".

There is no attempt to self-censor or to beautify. Everything is revealed.

A Fucquing Catalogue

The male characters in "Tropic of Cancer" are largely American expatriates, would be writers or artists, living in Paris, not necessarily gainfully employed, close to destitute, hungry for food and life experience, but with plenty of time on their hands.

Understandably, they spend a lot of their time whoring and fucquing.

It’s arguable that the amount of fucquing in the novel reflects what males would hope to do in similar circumstances. (In my younger days, we called it “college life”.)

From a feminist point of view, the female characters are not presented in the same manner.

None of them is portrayed as financially or emotionally independent. Most of them are the whores who are pursued by the males. Some transform from sex objects to love objects, but only in the short-term. The closest we get is Macha, an ostensible Russian Princess, who avoids sex by claiming to have the clap.

To be fair to Miller, he isn’t the only one doing the fucquing.

The chapters are essentially vignettes of the males, complete with the females who surround them.

While research has identified Miller’s real life inspiration, there is still a possibility that Miller explores some of the options available to him, through these characters.

Miller’s character still expects his wife Mona (June) to join him from New York.

While he indulges in his fair share of whoring, he doesn’t form any close attachments, apart from those to the whore Germaine (who treats him “nobly”) and Tania, who is married to Sylvester (based on the real life characters Bertha Schrank and Joseph Schrank).

Tania

Despite her marital status, Tania is closest to replacing Mona in Miller’s heart and is the true inspiration for the account in the novel:

"It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough."

Tania’s appeal seems to be that she accepts him as he is. In return, Miller must accept her for what she is, married, but available.

Miller’s financial circumstances hardly diminish his sexual braggadocio (for he is an artist):

"O Tania, where now is that warm qunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your qunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a qunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent...I am fucquing you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucqued."

Henry knows or asserts that he is better for Tania than her husband, because of his sexual prowess and his superior writing skills. Well, it’s his story after all and he’s sticking to it.

Miller asks us to judge him by his performance, and his novel, his story-telling, is just as much a part of his performance as his fucquing ability.

This is the most sexually explicit and declamatory that Miller gets in relation to his own affairs. If you can handle this passage, you will have no problem with the rest of the novel.

This Dry, Fucqued Out, Lucked Out World in Which We’re Living

Miller was writing at a time when the First World War had just occurred and the Second World War was fast approaching.

Miller was not a particularly political person, in the sense of party political or ideological commitment to Left or Right. In 1936, he would tell George Orwell that to go to Spain at the time of the Spanish Civil War, would be "the act of an idiot".

However, Miller believed that there were problems affecting the roots of civilization.

The West was in decline. It was gazing into an abyss. In Miller’s words, it was "fucqued out".

Initially, he realises this while whoring:

"When I look down into this fucqued-out qunt of a whore, I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper’s skull...

"The world is pooped out: there isn't a dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos?

"If anyone knew what it meant to read the riddle of that thing which today is called a "crack" or a "hole," if anyone had the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are labeled "obscene," this world would crack asunder.

"It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater."

The Topic of Cancer

Miller describes the eschatological in terms of the scatological and then in terms of cancer:

"No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.

"The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away…

"[It] grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it."

Miller even explained the name of the novel in these terms:

"It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch."

The Estrangement of the Machine

At the heart of Miller’s diagnosis are industrialization and the machine.

At a personal level, his machine was his typewriter, with which he had a harmonious relationship:

"I am a writing machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows. Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I am the machine…"

In contrast, he refers to a "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…a mass of bones and collar buttons…"

Industrialisation relies on the division of labour and conformity.

Citing Walt Whitman, he asserts:

"The future belongs to the machine, to the robots."

We have been deprived of our humanity by mechanization.

Paradoxically, Miller associates the word "human" with this new de-humanised human being:

"Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity."

"I Am Inhuman!"

Something new is required, what Miller calls "inhuman".

Miller doesn’t recognise any obligation to define himself or his vision in traditional liberal, humanist terms.

Again, he embraces imagery that recalls "Hamlet" and William Blake:

"I belong to the earth! ... I am inhuman!

"I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on.

"Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement.

"And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness; my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh.

"All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race."

Miller is content to join (Blakean) ecstasy with shit and slime and vomit and madness.

Creative Spirits and Mothers of the Race

Miller believes that civilization has become a "crater", a "great yawning gulf of nothingness":

"The dry, fucqued-out crater is obscene. More obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis."

Nothingness must be confronted by something vital, dynamic and exuberant.

This is the role of sex and of creativity, but it is also the role of womanhood in Miller’s vision.

The problem of, and the response to, nothingness is carried between the legs of "the creative spirits and mothers of the race," the latter being the "tenderest parts" of womanhood.

"The Inhuman Ones"

The "inhuman ones" are "artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song."

It is the role of artists to transcend life and lifelessness by:

"…ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals..."

"The Womb of Time"

The other response to nothingness is womanhood.

Miller has a complicated relationship with womanhood, which needs to be approached with some skepticism, because that was the response of his contemporaries.

Womanhood for Miller represents the womb, the origin of life and a comfort zone and a source of sustenance during gestation (as in George Orwell’s essay, the experience of being "inside the whale").

Womanhood represents a contrast to the order of industrialization and mechanization. It represents chaos:

"When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn, chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

"You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing.

"It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon."

Miller’s Boner Fides

Obviously, the womb or uterus is a discrete part of a female’s genitalia from which males derive pleasure.

Miller seeks to exalt or deify a woman’s vagina or qunt, by virtue of its association with the metaphorical significance of the womb.

This is the foundation upon which Miller builds an entire sexual and worldly philosophy.

The question is: is this philosophy sincere or authentic, or is he simply dressing up his sexual appetite into something that is ostensibly more profound?

Lust for Life

For Miller, sex is the measure of the man, right down, in his case at least (or at most), to his length in inches.

However, his sexual exuberance is symbolic, in turn, of his lust or zest for life.

This zest necessarily takes him, a male, into the arms and womb of womanhood.

What Miller seeks from the relationship between male and female is joy, "the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns":

"Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips…Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy."

Feel Flows

Miller incorporates this vitality into a theory about the flow of life from birth to death, from womb to tomb:

"I love everything that flows…rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag...

"I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco…

"I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund."

Again, Miller’s vision incorporates both positive and negative, semen and menstrual blood, fecund and unfecund.

In language that adverts to Proust, Miller continues:

"I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution.

"The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now."

The positive and the negative are the yin and the yang, two sides of the same coin, parts of a cyclical continuum from birth to death to rebirth in some lesser or higher form.

Miller felt unable to write literature like Proust, as if it had ceased to be relevant to the time, as if Proust was a force that needed an equal and opposite reaction:

"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive...

"I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me…

"This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…what you will."

The Body Electric

Perhaps the greatest literary influence on Miller was Walt Whitman.

In many ways, Miller is a personification of Whitman’s worldview, which cannot be found in Europe:

"Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN… Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning."

What appeals to Miller about Whitman was his emphasis on the body, sex and vitality:

"Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living..."

Equally, Miller’s life and work must be authentic and true:

"I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing…

"To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing. It is to you, Tania, that I am singing."

Anais Nin

Anais Nin said that "Tropic of Cancer" was "a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes…it is blood and flesh which are given us.

"Drink, food, laughter, desire, passion, curiosity, the simple realities which nourish the roots of our highest and vaguest creations."

It is to her enormous credit that, not only did she provide this preface for Miller’s work, but that she borrowed a substantial amount of money to fund its publishing costs.

For much of the time that Miller was writing the novel, she also had a passionate sexual relationship with him. There is even some suspicion that aspects of their relationship are reflected in the character of Tania, even though there is evidence of the primary inspiration for that character.

Regardless of whether she features in the novel, we must be grateful to Nin that "Tropic of Cancer", a work of unrivalled sexual exuberance and exaltation, survives today in a world that is often unimaginative, uninspired, mundane and tedious.

Злиденний гід по Парижу 30-х від головного блогера того часу — Генрі Міллера. Суміш зухвалої еротики, тонкої стилістики і неповторної міллерівської вітальності, яка смакує так легко і добре, як анжуйське рожеве вино.

Don't really have the enthusiasm to review this in depth, so will be brief. This was my second buddy-read, reading a chapter per week, the fact Paris was the setting got the thumbs up from me before even turning a page, and I have to admit, I was at first dazzled by Miller's writing, the whole bohemian lifestyle scene was quite extraordinary, if a little exaggerated. But over time, I started to drastically lose interest, everything just became a little too childish for my liking, in the way he continually tried to be controversial just for the sake of it. He was like a rabid dog that needed the snip. I don't mind books being raunchy and erotic, but for characters I didn't really give a monkey's ass about all that nauseating sex to me just felt empty. It's the sort of novel that would feel at home in a filthy toilet cubicle with lots of dirty words scribbled on the sides, rather than a nice Mahogany bookshelf. I'm now off to try and scrub away Miller and his obnoxious cronies with a nice hot shower.
Good riddance, Mr. Miller.

nourriture, le vin , et la chatte

The worship around this book, and around Miller himself, can be kind of hard to grasp over 80 years after it was published.

Tropic of Cancer, more than any other book I've read, really develops the romantic, libidinous idea of the starving, expat artist bumming around abroad, confronting staid social values while trying to create something of their own (not to mention drinking and whoring their brains out).

The idea of the artist as a ruthless outsider, as a militant seeking something fleshy and essential which the rest of humanity is only too happy to ignore is not exactly new. But in Miller's richly imagistic, sensuous prose, he brings it kicking and screaming definitively into the modern age. At it's best, this is like reading Celine of Baudillare, it's like he's talking (really, cursing) directly at you.

With its confrontational, body-fluid filled reveries, Tropic of Cancer feels like the linkage between early 20th century french prose, with its descriptive decadence and its misanthropy, and the subsequent work of Beats, exiles, expatriates, and just plain old grumps. There were several times when I felt less like I was reading Miller's novel, and more like I was reading cut out sections from the work of Allen Ginsburg, or William S. Burroughs, or Thomas Bernhard, or Roberto Bolano or Charles Bukowski...etc. Whether you 'like' Tropic of Cancer or not, there's no denying that a powerful lineage comes out of it.

Henry Miller performs a cunning stunt. There is no odious P.C. here, which one must deplore. This faux-memoir isnt "sexy," but it is a vomit of hilarity. I long for the Baz Luhrmann musical version. Meantime, plunge in, whacckkk it, and then slurp a gonarrhea cocktail. Btw, don't eat the ham sandwich in the bidet.