Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer Read online

  Perhaps Miller’s most significant connection to his culture was his unquenchable zest for adventure and improvisation, for it was this that had gone into exploration and settlement here; into technological innovation; into social experimentation on the grandest of scales; and into blues and jazz, those quintessential American art forms, which Miller sometimes emulated in his finest flights of prose. America, Miller believed, was improvisation itself writ large, and it was only when the nation turned away from that and began to calcify into a tyrannous orthodoxy that it betrayed its bright promise for the human race.

  Aboard the Bremen, plowing eastward into the historic past, Miller felt himself in flight from all this—or as much of it as he could have been conscious of. America was now a “slaughterhouse” where millions were ground to gristle to feed the devouring maw of Progress. But over the ensuing months that would lengthen into years Miller was to learn that, while he might have escaped the slaughterhouse, he had not escaped the man America had shaped. In one of his letters to Schnellock he would claim that he was no longer an American, even if he wasn’t a Frenchman and never would be. He was, he said with some justice, an expatriate. More precisely, though, what Miller had become was a renegade of a special sort.

  The renegade of frontier history and folklore is driven by his hatred of the circumstances of his birth and upbringing, and this Miller certainly had in spades. But what he learned in Paris’s bleakest quarters was that his background, his life and interests, his fund of knowledge of American history, folklore, and popular culture could be for him an inexhaustible source of creativity instead of a soul-withering curse. So, where too often the renegade comes to a violent and isolated end, Henry Miller not only survived, but bloomed into the artist he had so long—and apparently hopelessly—aspired to be. When at last in a foreign land he found his voice it was in a “war whoop,” as he was to put it in Tropic of Cancer. The war whoop’s raw notes were drawn from variegated sources. In part they came from the Yankee pitchman-bunco artist, a tale spinner who used his gift of gab to hoodwink his listeners. Another part of it came from the violently inflated brags of boatmen on the mighty rivers of the continental interior. There entered into it as well the bloody prints of the legends of deer slayers, buffalo hunters, backwoodsmen, Indian killers, and outlaws of the hinterlands and urban slums. Beneath all of these there was the brooding fact of discovery, the discovery of a vast, unexpected land mass that might have been an even greater opportunity to right the wrongs of the Old World’s blood-wracked history—but was not. The war whoop that Miller sounds in Tropic of Cancer is fundamentally about this once-only chance. It consistently asks us in its rawness, its chaotic violence, its painful comedy, “What if?” Whitman, whose work he’d carried to France, had characterized his own belated breakthrough out of silence and stammering as a “barbaric yawp.” That barbaric yawp had changed the national literature. Miller’s war whoop was to do so again.

  Slaughterhouse

  If, as Miller claimed, America had become a slaughterhouse, this condition had been centuries in the making, ever since, in fact, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas had first dropped anchor in 1492. Miller knew this, and his works are impressively studded with references to what began in that moment when Columbus’s anchor hissed downward through unsullied waters. Miller recognized and was deeply affected by the tragically short arc there was between discovery and destruction, and far from the New World in the years of his exile the manifold consequences of this came into ever sharper relief. The great missed, unrepeatable opportunity that America had fleetingly been was eventually to become a major theme in Tropic of Cancer.

  It is probably impossible to overestimate the profound implications of Columbus’s accidental finding of the New World. This, of course, has been the subject of an uncounted number of books, and since the story is still being written in its unfolding chapters, the subject may truly be inexhaustible. Here it will have to suffice to observe that the admiral’s epic blunder completely cracked open the mind of Western civilization, because in 1492 Christian cosmology posited a divinely created Island of the Earth surrounded by empty seas. If there were islands anywhere else—which most of the European continent’s prominent thinkers doubted—these were bound to be tiny in size and uninhabited. The news, once disseminated, destroyed this portion of the myth, although the admiral himself stubbornly clung to the more comforting notion that what he had stumbled on was part of the Island of the Earth.1 By around 1510 successive voyages by Alonso de Ojeda, Vicente Yáñez Pinzon, Rodrigo de Bastidas, and others had pretty well established that what Columbus had found was not a part of the Island of the Earth, at least as it had been anciently imagined, but was in fact another world, a New World, one that would somehow have to be accounted for and accepted.

  But that acceptance came hard, very hard, and looking back over the more than five hundred years since Columbus made landfall it is difficult to ignore the feeling that in the wake of that fateful October day it was as if an asylum in the Old World had been thrown open and hordes of vengeful madmen had been loosed upon the New. Here on these shores were men slashing and hacking at the natives, at the landscape, at each other with a frenzy that cannot be adequately explained by greed alone, though there was certainly plenty of that. Something more seemed at work, something that fueled the desire to almost instantaneously transform an inconvenient New World into a recognizable replica of the old one. Both the speed and the scale of the conquest were—and remain—astonishing and can never be replicated, on this planet, anyway, the Europeans swiftly overrunning and obliterating the native cultures, beginning with the empires of the Aztecs and Incas; then on to the seaboard tribes of North America; then the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the Five Civilized Tribes of the Old Southwest, the Plains tribes; and then on to the virtual extirpation of the California natives, down to the last, tiny remnant bands. In 1911, when the last “wild” California Indian emerged as a dazed, skeletal wanderer near Oroville in the north-central part of that state, some onlookers might well have wondered how it had all come down to just this; others, though, might just as easily have asked, “How did we miss this guy?

  What was true of the assault on the natives was true as well of the New World’s flora and fauna: forests leveled, streams desiccated, rivers diverted and dammed, animal habitats destroyed and whole species driven into extinction. All of this was most extravagantly apparent in North America, where there was a grim glee about the wholesale destruction, evident in successful communal efforts to wipe out wolves, mountain lions, the woods buffalo, martens, raccoons … Out of this history a spectral species of folk hero emerged in the figures of hunters who had racked up prodigious kill counts of this species or that. Buffalo Bill was the last and most famous of these figures but by no means the first. By his time his predecessors had long been forgotten (who remembers the celebrated panther killer, Aaron Hall?), but their deeds transformed a continent and left their bloody imprint on the American character. By 1911 when that lone Indian staggered into Oroville, the tribes had been transformed into beggars on reservations, and the once limitless herds of Plains buffalo had been pruned to an endangered few in Yellowstone Park, where they were hungrily eyed by hunters too young to have gotten in on all the fun. A continent, millennia in the making, had been transformed in four centuries.

  A Great Beast

  It could hardly be expected that a people capable of so astounding and reckless a transformation of the national landscape would prove solid, law-loving citizens of the fledgling democratic republic that emerged out of the American Revolution, and indeed they did not. From the end of the war to the simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on Independence Day, 1826, the new nation was severely tested by threatened secessions; the anarchical tendencies of backwoods settlers and local militias who marched under the tattered standards of the “Wild Yankees,” “Ely’s Rebels,” the “Paxton Boys,” the “Black Boys,” and the “Green Mountain Boys”; by numerous riots and lync
hings; and by the rampant corruption of the democratic system. Surveying the political landscape in late 1786, George Washington told James Madison he thought the entire grand experiment might degenerate into “anarchy and confusion.” And when the delegates from the states met in Philadelphia the following May for the Constitutional Convention they did so in the ominous shadow cast by Shays’s Rebellion, which had come within an ace of success had the mutinous farmers taken the federal arsenal at Springfield. Not long thereafter new trouble bubbled up in Pennsylvania, eventually erupting in the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, a more serious threat than Shays’s Rebellion and with good reason: pioneer Americans drank whiskey all day long at a per capita rate of five gallons a year and would not brook an excise tax on what was for them meat and drink and a form of money.

  There was another tax revolt in that same state in 1799. More serious still in its potential implications was Aaron Burr’s murky plot that may have aimed ultimately at the dissolution of the Union. At the outset of the War of 1812 there were numerous antiwar protests, as well as violent demonstrations in support of it, including one in Baltimore where in June a mob destroyed the offices of the antiwar Federal Republican. When the paper tried to resume publication from a private house, that place was also attacked by superpatriots. On this occasion, Light Horse Harry Lee, hero of the Revolution (who had also fought against the insurgents in the Whiskey Rebellion) and who was defending the paper’s right to publish, was so severely beaten by the mob that he eventually died of his injuries. More civil but more serious was the dissension evident at the Hartford Convention of 1815, which among other things challenged the very notion of a federal system that could appropriate customs money collected by the constituent states.

  This turbulent history helps explain why Washington, Adams, Benjamin Rush, Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, and others of the founding fathers viewed the American people as volatile and unruly, and why Hamilton is said to have called them a “great beast.” Whether he actually said this or not, there is little doubt that he viewed his fellow citizens with alarm. At the Constitutional Convention he observed that the masses “are turbulent and changing: they seldom judge or determine right.” Therefore, it was necessary that they be “sternly governed by the rich & wellborn”—not exactly a ringing endorsement of a democratic republic.

  Perhaps no document surviving from the republic’s early moments better preserves the striking contradictions between the radical idealism that fueled the founding of the nation and the violent, anarchical, racist tendencies lying beneath this than J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. Well known in its author’s lifetime, the book has enjoyed a sustained popularity ever since as a classic example of American idealism seen at its formative, generative roots. Here were stories of nameless immigrants who had come to these shores with nothing but pluck and who had swiftly prospered. Here were the fisherfolk of New England, bearing their hardships with a ruddy fortitude. Here were the yeoman farmers—God’s chosen, as Jefferson had remarked—living lives of admirable simplicity and daily gratitude. And here too was that “fresh, green breast of the new world” (as F. Scott Fitzgerald was to put it in The Great Gatsby), a place of such inexhaustible plentitude as to seem positively para-disal to the newcomers. The American, Crèvecoeur writes in letter three, is in fact a new man, Adamaic in an unspoiled world and destined to carry the arts of industry ever westward, toward the gilded East that Columbus had vainly sought, and so complete the circle of human destiny.

  It is true that the sustained popularity of Letters rests on Crèvecoeur’s almost ecstatic evocation of America in the shining hour of its infancy. But there are darker tones here as well that speak of that baffled incredulity and vengeance that were the consequences of the unlooked-for finding of the New World, and Crèvecoeur had seen too much and was too honest to write only in praise. In the American South where he was received by the gentry he saw the “peculiar institution” of slavery at work, and in the woods of South Carolina he stumbled upon a shocking scene—the punishment of an insubordinate slave—that called into the gravest question those egalitarian ideals that had gone into the making of the American Adam.2 At that point in time the long-term consequences of this deep national contradiction could hardly, of course, have been apparent. But the contradiction itself was clear enough, and Crèvecoeur spoke it.

  But more significant to him perhaps was the drama he knew firsthand, and this was the relentless advance of European-style civilization into the wilderness and what the implications of this might be. Thus, the most ringing, resonant sentence in Letters isn’t the oft-anthologized one that begins, “He is an American, who leaving behind him,” but instead the one that descends dramatically from the cloud-land of the philosophes to the American earth and the meeting of the furrowed with the forest: “Now we arrive near the great woods …”

  In his travels—which took him as far west as the Great Lakes—Crèvecoeur had seen the ragged edges where the advance guard of white civilization met the wilderness and then camped uneasily there, and his extensive experiences conferred on him a unique understanding of the profound wildness that beat at the heart of the American experiment. Few knew how vast the country actually was or understood that the hardships of settling the eastern seaboard would have to be replicated in region after region in the westward push. What Crèvecoeur saw was that these hardships would become an enduring part of the national character, not merely a developmental stage. If you want to know what America is like (and what it will be like in future years), he writes, you “must visit our extended line of frontiers” where tiny settlements and solitary huts gave some shelter but little comfort to de-falcators and drunkards, escaped criminals, runaway servants and slaves, half-hearted husbandmen who preferred the chase to the daily toil of cultivation, half-breeds and—worse—renegades who unnaturally turned against their own kind. Writing of the frontiersmen whom subsequent generations would deify, Crèvecoeur uses words like “hideous,” “ferocious,” “gloomy,” “mongrel,” and “half-savage”—and shudders to think of the consequences for America when such as these would serve as its pioneers and pass on to their children their violent and indolent habits. These people had quite naturally dreaded the inequities of the law in the Old World, he observed. But here in the New World where the law allegedly favored no class, they continued their anti-law habits of thought and behavior.3 The best that could be hoped for was that in some long evolutionary process their sort would eventually disappear before the honest yeoman, as the sunlight of the plowed field replaced the gloom of the primeval forest.

  Folklore of the Conquest

  Out of the conquest of the continent and the subsequent growth of towns and cities there arose a folklore that, if it was not entirely indigenous, was strongly flavored by the national experience and the national character shaped by that. This was a folklore that celebrated the New England Yankee, the backwoodsman, boatmen of the heartland rivers; practical jokers, mighty liars, petty criminals and outlaws of the Old Southwest; and finally, legendary figures arising out of the shadows and slums of the cities.

  The Yankee of folklore was essentially comic in nature, a dry-witted, slab-sided talker who, when he had risen from his oral origins to the almanac and the stage, was given to monologue. His wit cut sharply and was invariably at the expense of others, and before anybody could figure out who he was and what he was up to, he had vanished. His ability to change identities reflected something essential in the American experience and was not therefore ultimately limited to New England, for in this wooly, unformed New World a man might be required to play many roles.4 He might have to change his name a few times, too, and when the relentless tide of westward advance had reached the new New World—California—there was a ditty about this particular habit:

  What was your name in the States?

  Was it Brown or Jackson or Bates?

  Did you murder your wife and fly for your life?

  Say, what was your name
in the States?

  The Yankee spun his tales, performed his sleights-of-hand, and changed his name and address, all with a blank, impenetrable mask behind which was—what? Maybe only a cunning collection of personae. He was so spare a figure that if you turned him sideways, he disappeared, leaving behind the puzzled victims who had bought the very last clock he had for sale. How much Miller knew of the doings of this folk figure is in question, but here as with the brawling backwoodsman and the outlaw the influences on him hardly need to have been direct: folk heroes arise because they represent repeated aspects of lived experience. Miller was no seller of clocks, but he had a good bit of the huckster in him and was certainly a changeable character, willing and able to alter guises as he needed to.

  By contrast, the backwoodsman was so broad a character you couldn’t miss him. He was clearly shaped by his hand-to-hand combat with the continent. That battle, as brutal and intimate as the gouging contests and naked knife fights that were his sports, made him boisterous, but also changeful of mood, instantaneously veering from Gargantuan celebration to slobbery sentimentality and then to a black and dangerous depression. You might say his character was humanity writ very large; or you might say he was hardly human at all, more bestial than manlike. This latter characterization would have been more to the character’s own taste: you had to be more than a man to take on America: you had to be half horse, half alligator, as he was fond of describing himself. To an extent Daniel Boone was the historical figure this folk type was based on, a loner much more at home in the soaring solitude of the forest or the ominous density of the canebrakes than in white civilization with its crowdy ways. But the Boone of history was good for only a part of the backwoodsman’s character. Something more was needed for that boisterous, boastful part, and for this the unnamed tale spinners turned to Davy Crockett, whom they embroidered into a high-hearted, heel-cracking hero who in some of his escapades approached a status almost mythic.