EJAC 29 (3) pp.

197215 Intellect Ltd 2010

European Journal of American Culture Volume 29 Number 3

Intellect Ltd 2010. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.29.3.197_1

SARAH GARLAND University of East Anglia

The dearest of cemeteries: European intertexts in Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer

ABSTRACT
This essay reads Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer (1934) as the trace of a belated expatriate moment that forms an American literary nexus by drawing together a number of provocative European artistic contexts. Millers relationship to the rhetoric of the manifesto is discussed, as is the creation of a powerful literary persona and narrating voice from the traces of a tissue of intertextual quotations. Miller draws on contemporary tropes of death, decadence and last things, and in the process, I argue, brings late Romantic and early twentieth-century texts from Nietzsche, Spengler, Strindberg, Goethe, Joyce, lie Faure and Giovanni Papini together to articulate a late apocalyptic modernism.

KEYWORDS
Henry Miller modernism European literature intertextuality avant-garde apocalyptism

The expatriate American traveller has always seen Europe through the tints of the American experience; as Malcolm Cowley argued back in 1934, the country of our childhood survives, if only in our minds, and retains our loyalty even when casting us into exile; we carry its image from city to city as our most essential baggage (1994: 14). Through Henry Millers overspilling devotion to what he calls the artists life, European and American elements are brought together in Tropic of Cancer ([1934] 1993a) to create a complex and compelling

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tissue of quotations from various, and often contradictory, centres of modernity. Miller comes to Paris and to modernism after the fact, as a reader and as an enthusiast, and it is in this late intertextual aesthetic where the most interesting facets of his modernity and of his relationship to the international avant-garde can be settled. Arriving in Paris after the Crash in 1930, when transition was winding down and the money was drying up, the 41-year-old Miller had missed the American expatriate moment as George Orwell put it, the slump descended like another Ice Age, the cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished, and the huge Montparnasse cafs which only ten years ago were lled till the small hours by hordes of shrieking poseurs have turned into darkened tombs in which there are not even any ghosts (Orwell 2000: 493) and so, whilst Miller happily takes the aming torch of the anti-modern from theorists of decline like Spengler, Nietzsche, Yeats and Lawrence and Europhiles like Eliot and Pound, his approach is often parodic and syncretic. In joyfully cannibalizing what he calls a Paris of literature (Wickes 1990: 27) for his own literary Baedeker, Millers intertextual tapestry undoes modernisms high seriousness and symbolic intricacy whilst backhandedly canonizing its other stylistic signatures. Coming out of the less-written American expatriate community of the 1930s, Tropic of Cancer moves the focus of the transatlantic literary narrative from boom to bust, into the shadow of World War II, and into a reworking of the earlier experimental and apocalyptic modernist avant-garde. Millers Tropic of Cancer goes on to become one of the classic texts of expatriation, I would argue, because he inaugurates a narrative voice and persona that rudely juxtaposes low American and high European registers; Millers Brooklyn vernacular and self-characterization as perpetual amateur, enthusiast and booster place him at the centre of an American imaginary, whilst, magpie-like, his writing assimilates the stylistic motifs of Joyce, Nietzsche, Giovanni Papini and Elie Faure, Blaise Cendrars, Strindberg and Spengler (amongst others) in blank pastiche, and, at one point (as I discuss below), direct plagiarism, whilst stealing re from the formal idiosyncrasies of the avant-garde manifesto. Indeed, Millers books can be read as a mosaic of borrowings from iconoclasts; hence, Spengler becomes important to Miller for his prophecies of decay and downfall, Nietzsche for his consuming rhetoric of re and brimstone and his ght against acquiescence and Jung and Freud for their psychological reversion to primal mythology, the archetypal and the irrational. For all these proselytizing writers the intention is to seek out like-minded souls as much as to epater les bourgeois, and Miller speaks through these tirades to summon forth authority, in both senses of the word. The kinds of textual excesses involved in the appropriation of these experimentalists and iconoclasts (as well as in Millers pornographic and mystical excursions) mean that aside from chapters in John Tytells Passionate Lives (1995), Thomas Ferraros Ethnic Passages (1993) and J. Gerald Kennedys Imagining Paris (1993) Miller has generally remained outside of recent scholarly discussions of modernism and modernity he is generally read either through one of his intertexts (see the works by Caroline Blinder (1999), Paul Jashan (2001), and Gay Louise Balliet on Miller and surrealism (1996); Maria Bloshteyns The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Millers Dostoevsky (2007); or Gilles

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Maynes 1993 study of Miller and Bataille) or as a cosmos of one (James M. Deckers 2005 Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity), even though it is precisely through these assimilative, hyperbolic, apocalyptic and primitivist tendencies that his texts might usefully be taken as a fascinating crossing-point for the wider anti-modern avant-garde. The most expansive and historically specic recent approach, Thomas Nesbits Henry Miller and Religion (2007), places Miller at the centre of early late nineteenthand twentieth-century negations of tradition, gnosis and the occult, but a detailed discussion of the way that this locks Miller into a modernist aesthetic remains outside of Nesbits remit. As all his later books make clear, for Miller crossing to Europe was crossing into artistic tradition, both ancient and recent. Millers sense of himself as on the lam from the infernal and grotesque universe of early twentieth-century New York means that his new life in Paris can be read as a direct refusal of the movement of American urban progress and the authority of modern culture. As he reminisces in Plexus: The Decline of the West! I can never forget the thrill which ran up my spine when I rst heard this title. It was like Ivan Karamazov saying I want to go to Europe. Maybe I know that I shall go only to a cemetery, but it will be to the dearest of cemeteries (1993c: 446). This kind of deathly imagery is also present in other sources from the 1930s that document the cultural and political threats of the time and a perceived dilution, if not a agging, of revolutionary artistic impulses. Whilst dissolution always makes good copy (especially in the age of the journalist as debunker), there is a genuine and widespread sense of loss present in better known expatriate texts, like Fitzgeralds Echoes of the Jazz Age ([1931] 1945) or George Orwells Inside the Whale([1940] 2000), that is also reected in earlier journalistic pieces like E. E. Cummings Conicting Aspects of Paris ([1926] 1966) and Hemingways American Bohemians in Paris ([1922] 1985). The feeling that this dissolution is distinctly post-World War I, distinctly modern and distinctly American is evident throughout, so that, for Orwell the expatriate cafes were tombs, and in 1933 Wambly Bald was able to moan in his Paris column for the Chicago Tribune that the whole lively difference that brought about the colony had collapsed: Montparnasse is Main Street, and the plastic moderns have won their battle against clich. Even automobiles and furniture are going Picasso. The staunch army may disband. Gertrude Stein has crashed (of all things) The Atlantic Monthly and her autobiography is accepted for publication by the Book-of-the-Month Club. (Franklin 1987: 142) As Frank Kermode writes in The Sense of An Ending, eschatology is nothing new even in times of war each era denes and moves past its own imagined ends but what is particularly marked in the Paris of the early twentieth century is the way that art takes on this vocabulary of death, militarism and Armageddon so that a relentless commitment to the new and the revolutionary is felt as perpetual violence and schism (Kermode 2000: 100). Millers step across the Atlantic into the avant-garde tradition is a step into a steady stream of apocalyptic prophecies and rhetoric. By the time he gets to actually leave America, years of trying to support himself as an unpublished writer outside of this system has shifted Millers focus from the industrial exploitation of his life in New York, to the more personal effects of the plight of the artist manqu under industrial capitalism. Miller sails to France to nd freedom from American dedication to progress in a continent
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steadied and sustained by the past, even as the mythical mirage of that past was evaporating in a democratized, industrialized and touristic present (and even as his own cultural tourism added its own fuel to the re). Nevertheless, Miller makes it clear that for him the premodern myths are the sustaining ones: Once we reached Europe I would grow a new body and a new soul. What were the sufferings of a Brooklyn boy to the inheritors of the Black Plague, the Hundred Years War, the extermination of the Albigensians, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Huguenots, the French Revolution, the never ending persecution of the Jews, the invasions of the Huns, the coming of the Turks, the rains of frogs and locusts [. . .]. You will have no cause to envy our fresh new bodies, our rich red blood. Have pity on us who are so raw, so brittle, so vulnerable, so blisteringly new and untarnished! We wither fast[. . .]. (Miller 1993d: 30203) American expatriate modernists felt the crisis of modernity acutely perhaps, as Cowley suggests in Exile s Return, because they encountered its collapse in World War I as soldiers and ambulance drivers, but also because their own responses to industrial capitalism had prompted them to reject modernity in its American forms and to seek the ancient bone-heap of Europe; Europe may be troped as a cemetery, but it is the dearest of cemeteries. These physical and literary journeys away from the States can be read as forms of apophasis; historic Paris (and later, in Colossus of Maroussi, Greece) acts for Miller as an ideal that points back to the industrial and cultural conditions of America in the early twentieth century. His main symbol for American modernity, worked through at length in Tropic of Cancer and his Rosy Crucixion trilogy (194960), is the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of America, a hyperbolized skit on the New York branches of Western Union which explodes into a comic, infernal version of the newly industrialized American dream. Millers rst book, written in 1922 in three weeks of allotted vacation from his post as employment manager there, was an inverse Horatio Alger tale called Clipped Wings that chronicled the crushing emotional and physical decline of twelve of the thousands of poor, mainly immigrant, messengers Miller claimed to have hired in his ve-year period with the company. Most of the manuscript has been lost, although its impetus is documented in Tropic of Capricorn (in cadences which may well feed, later on, into Allen Ginsbergs) when he speaks of the degradation of these messengers with the anaphora of biblical Revelation: I saw the army of men, women and children that had passed through my hands, saw them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming, threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways, the freight trains lying on the oor, the parents in rags, the coal box empty, the sink running over, the walls sweating and between the cold beads of sweat the cockroaches running like mad, You shits, I said to myself, I will give you the picture of twelve little men, zeros without decimals, ciphers, digits, the twelve uncrushable worms who are hollowing out the base of your rotten edice. I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared away. (Miller 1993b: 29)

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Although Millers main quarrel is with a thoroughgoing alienation that ts all the Marxist patterns, he does not just see it as a matter of labour, urbanization and the scramble for the top. Miller was a suitably ad hoc philosophical anarchist (meeting Emma Goldman was what nally convinced him to become a scholar, a reader, and a writer, rather than a cowboy, he maintains that, and bad eyesight (Kersnowski and Hughes 1994: 213)) and so the problem, as Miller sees it, is the whole homogenizing and dehumanizing structure of modern American society. As Seth Moglen has eloquently argued recently in Mourning Modernity, American modernists grieved for the loss of love and they perceived that the psychic experience of alienation was itself rooted in the pervasive and varied social crises that attended modernization (2007: 14). America is coded as the geography of modernity throughout Millers writing, as well as more broadly throughout the period. Harold Stearns 1922 edited collection, Civilization in the United States, offers a detailed and multifaceted deconstruction of the modern, the tone of which is consistently condemnatory, and frequently atavistic. J. E. Spingarns piece on the state of scholarship and criticism is characteristic: We are all cocksure but bewildered children in a world we cannot understand. We are all parvenus parvenus on a new continent, on the fringes of which some have lived a little longer than others, but the whole of which has been encompassed by none of us for more than two or three generations; parvenus in a new world of steam and electricity, wireless and aeroplane, machinery and industry, which none of us has yet been able to subdue to a mould that satises our deepest cravings; parvenus in our culture, which still seems like a borrowed garment instead of esh of our esh and bone of our bone. What is the good of all the instruments that our hands have moulded if we have neither the will nor the imagination to wield them for the uses of the soul? (Stearns 1922: 106) As Samuel Putnam tells it in Paris Was Our Mistress, it was no accident that Civilization in the United States was published on the day Stearns set sail for Paris. (Stearns ended up as Peter Pickum, the racing correspondent for the Paris Tribune, a drunk and broken man. Even when he had returned to America, Stearns, Putnam argues, remained in perpetual spiritual exile (Putnam 1947: 27).) Comically enough, Miller undertakes his journey to Paris in much the same spirit as Gauguin setting out for Tahiti, despite the fact that modernity, in the form of modern warfare, travel and commerce had already come to Europe. Most of the 50-odd manifestos of the Italian futurists were published between 1909 and Italys entrance into the war in 1915, BLAST! is similarly galvanized by the Great War, and the Dada manifestoes are 1916 and 1918 (Perloff 1986: 90). Most of the other major isms are over by the time Miller lands in Paris because as Marjorie Perloff argues much of the pro-war and prorevolutionary rhetoric of these pieces rang hollow after the actual experience of the Great War. In many places Miller, then, is reading the European modernists contrary-wise. Where Russian and Italian futurism came out of economically backward countries that were experiencing rapid industrialization to express a brief, utopian faith in dynamism and national expansion associated with capitalism in its early phase (Perloff 1986: 36), Miller abstrusely uses the rhetoric of these manifestos to blast modernity and the kinds of programmatic political commitments that lead to war in the rst place.

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On one level, as Jay Bochner points out in an article examining the way Miller uses the work of French modernist Blaise Cendrars, there is a perversity to the way that Miller begins Tropic of Cancer by declaring this new writers life in Europe as a gob of spit in the face of Art and then proclaiming himself an artist and alluding successively to Whitman, Goethe, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Rabelais, Emerson and Milton (Bochner 2003), but seen in the light of a search for a society that rejects the modernizing present, Millers roll call makes far more sense. As Peter Brger demonstrates in Theory of the AvantGarde, this opposition from within the sphere of art is an inherited avant-garde stance generated by the separation of art and life, and is born of a self-reexivity about the institution of art, rather than out of a simple rejection. The manifesto as a form, as Mary Ann Caws writes, is an act of going past what is thought of as proper, sane and literary (Caws 2001: xx) that nonetheless remains within the world of art, writing and ideas; even the BLAST! manifesto (ironically enough given their use of the feminine as an insult) asks the suffragettes to LEAVE WORKS OF ART ALONE (Lewis 1914: 151). Manifestoes are corrections to society and descriptions of movement, better considered as explosive reactions than as well-directed plans. The contribution of the traditions of the European avant-garde to Tropic of Cancer can be seen even more clearly since the publication in 2007 of a spoof manifesto entitled The New Instinctivism (A Duet in Creative Violence) that Miller and Perls drafted in 1931 for an issue of Putnams New Review. The manifesto remains in draft because Putnam was not happy with the way that Miller and Perlss editing of the magazine involved throwing out material from Robert McAlmon and replacing it with their own, but it is nevertheless useful. Orend argues in his notes to the manifesto that the attack on McAlmon was part of an ongoing grudge held because June, Millers estranged wife (the Mona of Tropic of Cancer), rated McAlmon highly, but the manifesto can also be seen as a larger-scale example of Millers complex relationship with and emulation of his peers. Miller and Perls reversion to violent impulse and wit is absolutely in keeping with the hyper-masculine stance of the Futurists and the Vorticists: Miller and Perls reversion to violent impulse and wit is absolutely in keeping with the hyper-masculine stance of the Futurists and the Vorticists: the New Instinctivism is nothing more and nothing less than being FOR or AGAINST instinctively. A NEW instinctivism because mans original instincts have been murdered, because every time an instinct threatens to be born again, civilization with its sterilized, nickelplated instruments and its superannuated obstetrical buggery slaughters it, even though the kinds of modern society both the Futurists and the Vorticists clamored for would be read by Miller as decadent (and viceversa, I suspect). Instinctively, they decry, tongue rmly in cheek, we are even against the New Instinctivism (2007, p.3). The schematic and schismatic qualities of the better known modernists are also sent up in Tropic of Cancer in the conversations between Millers narrator and Sylvester, the dramatist: I am just reading the Manifesto. And Tania says Whose? (1993a: 36), Really, you write quite well. Lets see, youre a Surrealist, arent you?, My next play will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe. Revolving drums with calcium lights. ONeill is dead (1993a: 6465). This, like most parody, is also a self-implicating in-joke Boris and the Henry Miller gure are themselves working an avant-garde project they refer to as The Last
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Book, a a new Bible intended both as a bomb on the model of the surrealists, dadaists and futurists, and a gesture to top theirs: All those who have anything to say will say it here anonymously. We will exhaust the age. After us not another book not for a generation, at least. [. . .] For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grce, it needs to be blown to smithereens. (1993a: 33) This manifesto, The Last Book, becomes the working title for Tropic of Cancer, and the connection of the modernism of the manifestos with Millers writing is strengthened further when we nd bits of what will become Tropic of Cancer in this parody manifesto. Most interestingly, the rst few words of The New Instinctivism, as Orend points out in his notes, parallel the famous opening tirade of Tropic of Cancer: 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. (1993a: 10) The New Instinctivism begins with a proclamation of rebellion against the puerilities in the arts and literature, a manifesto of disgust, a gob of spit in the cuspidor of post-war conceits and a healthy crap in the cradle of stillborn deities. (Miller and Perls 2007: 3) Even if The New Instinctivism is taken in the joking spirit both Miller and Perls claim for it, the anti-manifesto itself has a precedent in the Dada manifestos, and, unwittingly or otherwise, Millers desire to demolish what has come before itself has echoes of Tristan Tzaras own attack on the manifesto as a need that has aged into a naive Idontgiveadamnism, sign with no cause, eeting and positive: To proclaim a manifesto you have to want: A.B.C., thunder against 1, 2, 3, lose your patience and sharpen your wings to conquer and spread as, bs, cs little and big, sign, scream, swear, arrange the prose in a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, prove your non-plus-ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest appearance of a whore proves the essence of God. (Caws 2001: 297) Because the gure of the writer is given such a privileged position the act of quotation in Tropic of Cancer is magical in itself, the invocation of a fetish or a relic containing the masters power, and even Millers giant-killing moments might be thought of as a tribute to the way that these writers have a powerful place in his consciousness. This assimilative reading is such that in Millers

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work it becomes a form of writing where there is comparatively little imaginative distance between Millers frenzied annotation of other peoples books, the lists of strange words and phrases pinned to his study wall and the devouring of quotations and voices from their work. Ten years before writing Tropic of Cancer, Miller tells Emil of his joy in writing out of the words of others (and here you get a snatch of Millers vernacular before the apocalyptic overtones were developed, although Millers characteristically exultant use of the list is already in place): Say, many thousands of thanks to you for introducing me to Ezra Loomis Pound. I have him and the whole tribe of modern poetasters on my desk. Eight volumes of modern poetry all at once [. . .] Boy, I can swallow it like Home Brew. And whats more, I can understand it, thats the mystery! Sounds like stuff I say to myself all day long. He continues Man, Ill quote you so full of quotations you wont know plop from zowie. I ask myself: Is it for this I have read Haeckel, Darwin, Spencer, Freud, Huxley, Weininger, Rolland, Dewey, Andreyev, France, DAnnunzio, Havelock Ellis, Forel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, Gorki, Mencken? I ask you as a friend to tell me it is not true! (Wickes 1990: 5) Millers lateness is partly because of those years at Western Union where he was a consumer rather than an instigator of experimental writing, but his use of ideologically and contextually contrary texts to provide him with a rhetoric to argue against the march of history and progress is also indicative of some of the wider syncretic tendencies of writers and artists responding to modernity. For example, Millers wide-ranging fascination with various occult and eastern paradigms (astrology, theosophy, taosim and esoteric Buddhism in particular) is absolutely of its time, as well as being part of a general cultural Orientalism. As Leon Surette demonstrates in The Birth of Modernism, experimentalist writers like Pound, Eliot, Lawrence and Yeats were steeped in versions of the occult. Indeed, Surette argues, the occult underpinned everything designated symbolism, philosophy, romanticism, aestheticism, or a little more obscurely visionary , and was so ubiquitous in n de siecle Europe and America that, unless it reached the heights of Yatess speculations, an interest in occultism was hardly worth remarking upon (Surette 1994: 36). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century lay philosophers and rebel clerisy often went on lecture tours around the States, and Miller had indeed seen many American representatives of these heretic writers while his prose and his persona were forming. James Nesbitt writes of how Miller was deeply attentive to mystical strains of Bergsonianism, to the teachings of Benjamin Fay Mills, Keyserling, Gurdjieff, Annie Besant and H.P. Blavatsky, and in Paris, on more than one occasion, to the occultist Aleister Crowley (see Nesbit 2007). (In Fire: A Journal of Love, Anas Nin tells how Miller alienated Crowley by borrowing money from him (Nin 1996: 146).) As Surette points out, chaotic and confused combinations of these visionary tendencies were the order of the day. By the time he reaches the early 1930s Miller seems to have a slightly greater sense of irony about this kind of consumptive desire, dramatizing it through an

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account he gives of an autobiographical novel from Italian avant-garde writer Papini, Un uomo nito / A Man Finished [1912], published in America in 1928 as The Failure. In Tropic of Cancer Miller writes: The books he read at eighteen! Not only Homer, Dante, Goethe, not only Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, not only Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, not only Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Villon, Carducci, Manzoni, Lope de Vega, not only Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley not only these but all the small fry in between. This on page 18. Alors, on page 232 he breaks down and confesses. I know nothing, he admits. I know the titles, I have compiled bibliographies, I have written critical essays, I have maligned and defamed [. . .] I can talk for ve minutes or for ve days, but then I give out, I am squeezed dry. (1993a: 71) Interestingly though, Papinis version is not a confession of fraud as much as a record of an exasperated feeling that no matter how much he tries he cannot seem to get to the core of the writers he reads, nor can he satisfy his own desire for them. The feeling of fraud comes from Millers text, not Papinis; the Italian is condemning the dilettantism that Miller still nds elating, despite (or perhaps because of) his marvel at its excesses. Miller has not quite come to terms with the sense of diminishing returns in Papinis autobiographical ction, and it is worth quoting the Italian writer at length to show just what kinds of indictments Miller has sublimated or denied: I have read many books, books innumerable, too many books perhaps, yet I may say that I have never read at all. In my mind are stored a vast number of names, hordes of titles, a very arsenal of notes, but the books I really know inside and out, in their words and in their spirit, because I have read them again and again, have pondered and absorbed them, are very few in number, and of this fact I am ashamed, although I am by no means the only wretched being who wastes his time tracing words upon the sand for the winds to carry away. The one-book man is forbidding and funereal, but the man of too many books is like a sewer that retains only the worst and the outside of what passes through it. Such a man am I. Mea culpa. (Papini 1928: 244) Aside from the half-attering accusation that Miller and Papini might both be men of too many books, what attracts Tropic of Cancers narrator to Papinis is Millers sense that what is inside a book might matter less than the sense of having connected them in a person and a voice. Indeed, this throughgoing dismemberment of other texts is such that it does not matter to Miller whether Papini is a chauvinist, a little Christer, or a nearsighted pedant or a fascist, we might add Papini, as a failure, is marvelous because of the incredible mad charisma of his rst-person narration (1993a: 71). Millers lateness, his decontextualization, mockery and reversal of the positions of the European avant-garde and his assimilation of the varied voices of fascists, occultists and pseudo-prophets are possible because they all share this seam of belief in modernity as deathly decadence, but also (and this is part of what makes reading Miller both so exhilarating and so exhausting) because his is a verbal,

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textual borrowing of these highly affective registers Miller is forming a patchwork out of their rhetoric, imagery and cadences, not synthesizing their logical structures. So, although stylistically Millers monologues remain outside of the kinds of careful self-referential linguistic experimentation that characterizes canonical high modernism, in other respects his Tropic-era writings full entirely the kinds of emotional and ideological responses to modernity recent cultural commentators have begun to explore. In the convincing model, Roger Grifn lays out in Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of A Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler, the threats of western modernity to the community and to the self were such that they were widely troped by the intellectual communities, especially those coming after Marx and Nietzsche, as decadent, and often as apocalyptic. This sense of crisis precipitated movements for renewal across the political spectrum, stretching to the extremes of political left and right. In Grifns denition modernism can take one of two broad forms, it can assume an exclusively artistic expression, often involving extreme experimentation with new aesthetic forms conceived to express glimpses of a higher reality that throw into relief the anomy and spiritual bankruptcy of contemporary history (epiphanic modernism), or, alternatively, it can focus on the creation of a new world, either through the capacity of art and thought to formulate a vision capable of revolutionizing society as a whole, or through the creation of new ways of living or a new socio-political culture and praxis that will ultimately transform not just art but humankind itself, or at least a chosen segment of it (programmatic modernism). (Grifn 2007: 116) Millers high-toned, often ecstatic narrative style ts as well into the epiphanic model of modernism as it does into the modern quest for new ways of living, just as his contradictory and chaotic synthesis of various contrary sources, styles and ideologies can be read as a voracious version of the kinds of pragmatic and home-spun responses to modernity that Grifn sees happening across Europe where conicting values and principles, sometimes drawn from quite different spheres of society and history, are combined in the search for the founding principles and constitutive values needed for a new world to be constructed out of the decadence or collapse of the old one. (Grifn 2007: 117) Seven out of the nine turns Richard Sheppard isolates in ModernismDada Postmodernism as responses to the perceived crisis of the modern are also there in Millers consistently lurid rhetoric, even if they are not all political or personal positions Miller actually stood rmly by: the ultrapessimistic or nihilistic response(2000: 72), a relief by means of ecstatic experience (73), the turn to a wide range of mystical or quasi-mystical sources in an attempt to transcend their sense of entrapment (75), an aestheticist response (77) and a desire to turn ones back on the modern age (78), and the use of Non-European, premodern, or popular cultures as a form of escape and inspiration (81). Although Miller does not adopt what Sheppard calls the Vorticists and the Futurists

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modernolatry (82), he certainly uses their stance. The only stance we do not see Miller take, in writing at least, is the new sobering of post-World War I movements like Neoplasticism, Constructivism and the second phase of the Bauhaus with their modest, ambiguous and ironic attitudes to the complexities of modernity (84) and the ludic, detached response Sheppard sees in Dada, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the writing of James Joyce, where these modernists accept that modernity is in crisis but refuse to succumb to despair, mindless irrationalism, or nostalgia; who afrm modernity but reject modernolatry and the desire for closure; and who situate the wellspring of human nature in its subrational faculties while believing and this is crucial that in the complete, polyphonic human personality there should be a creative interplay between critical and instrumental reason and its other, equally important faculties (Sheppard 2000: 86). Ever the mystic, Millers response found James Joyces response deadeningly cerebral, even if the Dadaists and the mimes appealed to his anarchic and stoic foundations. As the biographies of Pound, Artaud, Nietzsche and Strindberg suggest, one cannot step in and out of this portentous rhetoric without repercussions for the self; there is a kind of hubris that haunts eschatological language when it is secularized. The language of the apocalypse puts the writer in a double bind: modernity and industrial society are felt as devastating to the self, but these almost superhuman efforts to galvanize the self in opposition are also potentially devastating. Through this will to power the rst-person narrative becomes a kind of Faustian bargain, and it is striking how many of the intertexts for Tropic of Cancer are megalomaniac at some point in their narratives, and how many of the accounts Miller touches on bring their own rst-person narrators to the point where they attempt to wield great and demonic forces fascism, the subconscious and the occult included. Millers American heroes, Whitman, Thoreau and John Brown, are relatively public-spirited versions of this romantic self; the later European voices Miller draws on are, like Papini and Marinetti, much less democratically inclined. Strindbergs autobiographical narrator in his Inferno, a gure who Miller refers to many times in Cancer, writes of telepathy and witchcraft, and a point where, he says, I believed myself in the possession of unlimited strength, and pride inspired me with the wild idea of seeing whether I could perform a miracle (Strindberg 1912: 31). Nietzsche famously places the prophetic I at the centre of discourses of power, and the late, raving Nietzsche lends many of the declamatory cadences of his voice to Millers narrator: I am not a man, I am dynamite, I am the rst immoralist: I am therewith the destroyer par excellence he says in Ecce Homo (1992: 97). The autobiographical rst-person narrator of Papinis Failure also has a period of religious fervour where Papinis narrators artistic will merges with a more conventionally delusional one: Before crossing the Atlantic as the prophet of the new kingdom I must be, really and actually be, what I had dreamed of for myself during the long period of vigil, and what I had proposed that others should also become a saint, a guide, a demi-god. [. . .] My immediate purpose was one only to increase the power of my will to the innite; to enable my spirit to command men and things without need of outward action. In other words, to perform miracles. Only that! (Papini 1928: 205)

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Blaise Cendrars Moravagine also begins the book of his name as an asylum inmate with murderous and megalomaniac delusions that his keeper and the novels narrator, Raymond-la-science, comes to share with him. (Moravagine cameos in Tropic of Cancer, travelling down the great ow of the Orinoco. According to Jay Bochner, Cendrars Moravagine was one of the rst books Miller read in French, making his way through it in the Caf de la Libert with a dictionary at his elbow (Bochner 2003).) The exhortative cast and the hyperbole of Cendrars narrator can certainly be seen to feed into the rhetorical explosions of Tropic of Cancer, but so also can the sense that the historical catastrophe animates and exacerbates personal, visionary crises. In Cendrars writing there is a fear that madness haunts both this kind of thought and war itself: War. Now and a thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, its not a question of your country, my German or French friend, or yours, whether youre black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. Its a question of your life. If you want to live, kill. Kill so that you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses at a predetermined day, in honor of certain principles under cover of a ag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive way. Stand alone against them all, young man, kill, kill, you are unique, youre the only man alive, kill until the others cut you short with the guillotine or the cord of the rope, with or without ceremony, in the name of the Community or the King. What a laugh. (Cendrars 1968: 212) The overtones of betrayal in the Faustian myth are potent, and in the time of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and the Great Depression, the idea that humankind might have created its own terrors is not as occult as Millers purportedly ahistorical ravings would at rst suggest; for Cendrars narrator, war is the nest ower of civilisation. As Nietzsche demonstrates in his Anti-Christ, in sharing rhetoric with the diabolic these late Romantic voices seem to summon the catastrophe even as they rail against it. Uniting this outer stain with an inner death binds outer warfare to inner corruption, as Michael Fraenkel argues in Genesis of Tropic of Cancer. Miller, as Karl Orend explains in his introduction to Fraenkels Genesis of Tropic of Cancer, found Fraenkels identication of the outer ferment with an inner spiritual Armageddon compelling, and Fraenkels subsequent farcical appearance in the published version of Cancer as the neurotic and louse-ridden Boris gives a diminished sense of the exchange of ideas between Miller and this devotee of Goethe. In the rst page of an earlier draft of Tropic of Cancer Fraenkel has not yet become Boris and the sense of coming crisis is directly identied with Fraenkels 1931 version of Goethes Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther s Younger Brother: I am living in the Villa Seurat, the guest of Michael Fraenkel. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, not a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead, Michael has just given me a brief summary of his philosophy. He is a meteorologist, a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair and the book of the day is Werthers Younger Brother (Fraenkel 1998: 43). Like Werthers Younger Brother, Tropic of Cancer collapses the cultural crisis into a personal eschatology, and this tendency too, as Bruce Comens explains in an extended exegesis of Ezra Pounds apocalypticsm, can be read as part of a wider response to World War I and to the rumblings of the second. Pound, Comens argues, arrives at the
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literal and historical apocalyptic of his later years through a romantic apocalyptic where the apocalypse consists in a perceptual revolution that can occur at any moment when the ordinary world dissolves in favour of a new, visionary reality, the equivalent of the millennium. In this model the artist has an ominous personal duty as, in Joyces words, a priest of the eternal imagination it is only our lack of vision that condemns us to live in a fallen world, for the (visionary) real world exists now, ahistorically (Comens 1995: 35). This kind of blurring of boundaries between cultural, historical and personal crisis reaches the point in Tropic of Cancer where for Millers narrator the realities of violence and injury left over from World War I have become a part of the wider vocabulary of degeneracy and decadence, which, in turn, becomes part of the message of the artists romantic vocation as visionary. In praising what he sees as French stoicism (as opposed to the disappointments of the American optimism) Millers narration uses the enforced acquiescence of the veteran as an exaggeration: the ag is always at halfmast. You wear a piece of black crepe on your arm, you have a little ribbon in your buttonhole, and, if you are lucky enough to afford it, you buy yourself a pair of articial lightweight limbs, aluminum preferably, and the public toilets reserved for veterans as a bathetic stab at a rich American tourist: The beautiful American woman is inquiring about the toilet. The toilet! Let me show you, you velvet-snooted gazelle! The toilet, you say? Par ici, Madame. N oubliez pas que les places numrotes sont rserves aux mutils de la guerre (1993a: 38, 155). Comens, like Grifn, argues that in 1915 war would have saturated consciousness to such an extent that the very casualness of Pounds use of the apocalyptic, coupled with the urgency and purpose of the prose it is embedded in, can be taken as an indication of the pervasiveness of the apocalyptic narrative (1995: 29). This seems also to be true in 1931, in the looming shadow of World War II. Miller never writes of the war, instead he writes around it and through it, using the apocalyptic voice to try to devour and absorb the power of death, disease and conict. The exclamation marks give his jeremiad an aura of immunity, perhaps deriving in a large part from Millers status as expatriate (and ex-patriot) exile: Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog-biscuits, more lawn-mowers, more ball-bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more tooth-paste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums. Forward! Time presses. [ . . . ] Forward! Forward without pity, without compassion, without love, without forgiveness. Ask no quarter and give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines! More and more of it until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with it! (1993a: 268) Unlike Pound however, although he stood behind his declamation of the modern, Miller never supported an actual war or summoned the fascists as cleansing re. For Miller the vocabulary of destruction is used more as

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hyperbole and global, eschatological prophecy, rather than a call for political revolution. The sheer absurd giantism of some of Millers rhetoric is also born from an exuberant reworking of some of these more epic sources (in conjunction with a thorough digestion of Rabelais and Whitman). Two of the central inspirations and models for the I of Millers soaring jeremiads, Oswald Spenglers Decline of the West ([1918] 1961) and lie Faures Histoire d art ([1919] 1924), are monumental metahistorical undertakings that attempt to chart the movement of a whole set of civilizations. The translations of Faure undertaken by Walter Pach and published in America in the mid-1920s are especially close to Miller in full steam the passage I quote above about the Western Union messengers is a good example both in their shared encyclopaedism and in the way they both use an anaphoric ow to marshal the creative destruction of the modern: Here are the tall chimneys like temple columns, the living animals of steel, with a heart, intestines, nerves, eyes, limbs, bones articulated like a skeleton, the turning, the sliding, the mathematical coming and going of belts, of pulleys, of connecting rods, and of pistons; here are the rigid roads, shining, and extending and intersecting to eternity, and the silent round of astronomical cupolas following the movement of the skies; here are the giant halls, and the bare facades of the factories, cathedrals dedicated to the cruel god who knows no other law than that of unbounded production. (Faure 1924: 493) Like Spenglers writings, Walter Pachs translations of Faures writings made their way into New York in a 1924 edition of The Dial (see Nesbitt 2007: 132) and in the papers of the Modern School Movement (Antliff in Bochner 2001: 63), as well as in public lectures and adult education circuits of places like the Rand School where, for a reader like Miller, they would shed their World War I livery to enter into a more universalized sense of the western world as a civilization brought to snapping point, ringing with apocalyptic and mythological portents. From this long view of modernism, laid out later by Marshal Berman as well as by Grifn and Sheppard, Millers channelling of the currents of the 1930s may actually gain by its lateness because the American cultural crisis is itself delayed. Sheppard explains: it could be argued that because faith in modernity in North America was not really shaken until the Great Depression and, subsequently, the end of the economic boom that had gone on there between 1945 and about 1970, the crisis of modernity also became a real issue there only in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (Sheppard 2000: 2) In this long American modernism, Millers unbanning in the 1960s and his nal avant-garde reception at home at the age of 70 (he was born in 1891 only three years after Eliot) is serendipitous in that it allows the post-World War II, Vietnam generation to nd their own alienation in his earlier one, as Miller found his in World War I generation. Millers declarations of amateurism and his nancial status as unpaid writer are thus in keeping with an approach to the writing of others that mobilizes

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enthusiasm in its premodern sense, that is, not just passion but possession by a god, supernatural inspiration and prophetic or poetic frenzy (s.v. OED). In 1951s The Books in My Life a book which, characteristically, includes a list that claims to contain the hundred books that inuenced him most, as well as (pre-Calvino) an appendix of Books I Still Intend to Read and Friends Who Supplied Me with Books he discusses the decision to quote such large sections of The Decline of the West in Plexus: It was an experiment which I felt obliged to conduct, and experiment between myself and my readers. The lines I chose to quote had become my very own and I felt that they had to be transmitted. Where they not every bit as important in my life as the haphazard encounters, crises and events which I had described as my own? Why not pass Oswald Spengler on intact also since he was an event in my life? (Miller 1951: 27) This intertextual enthusiasm becomes for Miller a way of working and thinking, but also at times an anxiety. He suggests that one of the reasons he cannot write about his favourite authors at length is not only because I cannot refrain from quoting them copiously, but because they have muscled so deep into my very bers that the moment I being talking about them I echo their language. It is not so much that I am ashamed of plagiarizing the masters as that I am fearful of ever being able to recover my own voice. (Miller 1951: 198) Millers romantic conception of the self privileges and worries over the sense of an origin for the individual voice, but what his texts suggest is something much closer to the author as a collector and scribe, a writer who comes into being by writing himself into the texts of others. Indeed, Millers assimilative instincts are such that an entire unsignalled paragraph from Finnegans Wake appears in Tropic of Cancer within a suitably ambiguous context. (Given that Finnegans Wake was published ve years after Tropic of Cancer it seems reasonable that this excerpt too came from the little magazines the passage beginning But what with appears in transition 7:4, 1934.) Millers meal ticket for the moment, Nanantatee, is trying in vain to teach Henry the sacred Hindu sound, Ohm and Henry cannot (or would not) master it: OOMAMABOOMBA [. . .] No, Endree [. . .] like this [. . .] [. . .] But what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling ngers, the fox-trotting eas, the lie-abed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his brainfag, the tic of his conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his fundament, the re in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the rats in his garret, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears, since it took him a month to steal a march, he was hard-set to memorize more than a word a week. (1993a: 96)

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The racially insensitive caricature of Nanantatee suggests that the sound might not be as holy to Henry as it could or should be, and that Finnegan s Wake too is being caricatured as nonsensical superstition. Nevertheless, the connection of Joyce with a religion of the word remains, and the section of the Wake Miller has chosen to plagiarize appeals to the same passion for the rare word and the startling prose rhythm that we see all the way through Tropic of Cancer. Even as Miller attempts to contain and dominate Joyce, he still nds the need to speak through these fragments of other texts. The moment of peace and strength that ends Millers book where he has nally got enough money to cross the Atlantic and solve the problem of his loneliness but decides to stay in France anyway is a small instance of calm and decisiveness that brings to a temporary end his chaotic manifesto and cements his decision to stay away from America and from modernity: after everything had quietly sifted through my head a great peace came over me. Here, where the river gently winds through the girdle of hills, lies a soil so saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams one can never detach it from its human background. Christ, before my eyes there shimmered such a golden peace that only a neurotic could dream of turning his head away, the sun is setting. I feel this river owing through me its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is xed (1993a: 31617). The ancient soil that holds the cemeteries of European history is the still centre that Miller has found through creating a voice for himself out of the contrary and conicting words of others, and so it is tting that this is a moment with a literary history too. The movement of the sentences draws substance from the movement of Knut Hamsuns more elegiac sentences in Pan and Mysteries (Miller was steeped in Hamsun), but the model for the impossible moment seems to be these words from a similar place in the closing chapter of Papinis Failure: Upon this rocky hilltop where the wind is never still I have once more found myself and my serenity. Within the circle of these dark and pointed hills, in these elds, poor in owers and grasses and rough with stones, in the shadow of these sturdy, untended oaks, to the sound of this clear and narrow stream which will ow through Rome broad and dirty, beneath this sky which is really blue, is transparent and delicate even when it is strewn with clouds, I have come once more to know the true smell of the earth, the taste of the air, the avour of bread, the pleasant heat of a re of logs and brushwood. Little by little life has won me back through the beauty of its simplicity. I have become a child again, have become primitive, wild, and sylvan. [. . .] I have set myself in order with the ancient family. (1928: 296) Suitably enough though, even this moment where he nally decides to remain still for a while comes out of the layering of text upon text upon text, gured here in an American vision of old Europe as a soil saturated with the human past, expressed in the syntax of a European modern trying to come to terms with the fact that his own Italian history will not stay xed to blood, bones and soil.
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Antliff, A. (2001), Interpellating modernity: Cubism and La Vie Unanime in America, in: J. Bochner and J. D. Edwards (eds.) American Modernism Across the Arts, New York: Peter Lang. Balliet, G. L. (1996), Henry Miller and Surrealist Metaphor: Riding the Ovarian Trolley, New York: Peter Lang. Benjamin Franklin, V. (1987) (ed.), On the Left Bank, 19291933, Athens: Ohio University Press. Blinder, C. (1999), A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Works of Henry Miller, Rochester: Camden House. Bloshteyn, M. (2007), The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Millers Dostoevsky, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bochner, J. (2003), An American writer born in Paris: Blaise Cendrars reads Henry Miller reading Blaise Cendrars, Twentieth Century Literature, 49, pp. 103122. Brger, P. (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Caws, M. A. (2001), Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cendrars, B. (1968), Moravagine (trans. A. Brown from French), London: Peter Owen. Comens, B. (1995), Apocalypse and After: Modern Strategy and Postmodern Tactics in Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Cowley, M. (1994), Exiles Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s, New York: Penguin. Cummings, E.E. ([1926] 1966), Conicting Aspects of Paris, in Firmage, G. (ed.), E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany, London: Peter Owen. Decker, J. M. (2005), Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity, London: Routledge. Faure, . ([1919] 1924), History of Art (trans. W. Pach from French), London: John Lane. Ferraro, T. (1993), Ethnic Passages, Chicago: University of Chicago. Fitzgerald, F. Scott ([1931] 1945), Echoes of the Jazz Age, in Wilson, E. (ed.), The Crack Up, New York: New Directions. Fraenkel, M. (1998), The Genesis of Tropic of Cancer, Paris: Alyscamps. Grifn, R. (2007), Modernism and Fascism, London: Palgrave. Hemingway E. ([1922] 1985), American Bohemians in Paris, in White, W. (ed.), Dateline Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920-1924, New York: Scribners. Jahshan, P. (2001), Henry Miller and the Surrealist Discourse of Excess: A PostStructuralist Reading, New York: Peter Lang. Kennedy, J. G. (1993), Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing and American Identity, New Haven: Yale University Press. Kermode, F. (2000), The Sense of an Ending, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kersnowski, F. L. and Hughes, A. (1994), Conversations with Henry Miller, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lewis, W. (1914), BLAST 1, London: John Lane. Martin, J. (1978), Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller, Santa Barbara: Capra Press. Mayne, G. (1993), Eroticism in Georges Bataille and Henry Miller, Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications.

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Miller, H. (1951), The Books in My Life, Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions. ([1934] 1993a), Tropic of Cancer, London: Flamingo. (1993b), Tropic of Capricorn, London: Flamingo. (1993c), Plexus, London: Flamingo. (1993d), Nexus, London: Flamingo. Miller, H. and Perls, A. (2007), The new instinctivism: A duet in creative violence, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, 4, pp. 356. Moglen, S. (2007), Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1992), Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (trans. R. J. Hollingdale from German), London: Penguin. Nin, A. (1996), Fire: From A Journal of Love, The Unexpurgated Diary of Anas Nin, 19341937, London: Peter Owen. Orwell, G. ([1940] 2000), Inside the Whale in Orwell, S. and Angus, I. (eds.), George Orwell: An Age Like This, 19201940: The Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters, vol. 1, Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Papini, G. (1928), A Man Finished (Un Uomo Finito) (trans. M. P. Agnetti from Italian), London: Hodder and Stoughton. Perloff, M. (1986), The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Chicago: University of Chicago. Putnam, S. (1947), Paris Was Our Mistress, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Sheppard, R. (2000), Modernism-dada-postmodernism, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Spengler, O. ([1918] 1961), The Decline of the West: Abridged Edition by Helmut Werner (trans. C. F. Atkinson from German), London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Stearns, H. (1922), Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, New York: Harcourt Brace. Strindberg, A. (1912), The Inferno (trans. C. Field from Swedish), London: William Rider & Son. Surette, L. (1994), The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult, Montreal; London: McGill-Queens University Press. Tytell, J. (1995), Passionate Lives: The Love Lives of D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, New York: St. Martins Press. Wickes, G. E. (1990), Henry Miller: Letters to Emil, Manchester: Carcanet.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Garland, S. (2010), The dearest of cemeteries: European intertexts in Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer, European Journal of American Culture 29: 3, pp. 197215, doi: 10.1386/ejac.29.3.197_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Sarah Garland is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia with a background as an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, lm and visual studies. Her work concerns intersections between style, form and literary aesthetics and she has published on twentieth-century literature and the baroque, on aestheticism and on the language of food writing. Her research interests include transatlantic modernism and postmodernism; avantgarde style and the role of the reader; taste, consumption and the material;

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gender, sexuality and writing; canonical and non-canonical American literature of the 1920s and the 1930s (particularly expatriate writing); and American visual cultures. She is currently working on a book-length critical study of Henry Millers novels and co-organizing a June 2011 conference on the American Imagetext (see American-image-text.blogspot.com). Contact: Dr Sarah Garland, Lecturer in American Literature and Culture, School of American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ, UK. E-mail: Sarah.Garland@uea.ac.uk

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