Apostrophe S

FYI: I’m writing this from my PowerBook, which is currently running a copy of OS X from my iPod. Yeah.

But Henry Miller couldn’t care less. As a matter of fact, he probably would have despised me. After all, I’m not living in Paris, and I’m not him. This book was a chore to read for me, but I won’t say I didn’t like it. I wasn’t sure all the time what Miller was trying to get at. Half of the book is ramblings about his daily life in Paris, which amounted to squeezing money out of his friends, getting laid, and criticizing everything that crossed his path. The other half of the book are wild, incredibly eloquent summations of his worldview and the philosophy of being Henry Miller. The purpose of his book, in his own words:

Up to the present, my idea of collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium.

“Tropic of Cancer,” p. 243

I think the importance of this book has more to do with the lines Miller crossed than with the quality of its story. I mean, up until this book was published I would say the kinds of situations he described and the vulgar language he uses were probably never considered appropriate for high art. These days it seems if a book doesn’t contain violent and/or explicitly sexual scenes and language, it’s filed in the children’s literature section.
Personally, I found Miller to be incredibly narcissistic and hypocritical. But maybe that was the point. I mean, there are people who might use those words to describe me, and perhaps those same people could describe little pieces of themselves in the same way.
I appreciate the book for what it is. It opened the door for many other authors to be vulgar in their writing and not be labeled as outcasts for it. (Although this book was of course outlawed in the U.S. for quite some time.) Some will say that’s oversimplifying the book’s impact. And it most definitely is. I’m sure there are lots of good reasons to read this book. (It would surprise me if Hunter S. Thompson didn’t list Miller as an influence.) But after reading it, it’s really just the experiences of an expatriate American writer living in squalor in Paris in the 1930s. Nothing important really happens. The book begins nowhere and ends up just a few French city blocks from there.

I have “Tropic of Capricorn” sitting on the shelf next to “Cancer,” and I’ll probably read it someday. Hell, I like the main character. But right now I need to move on to something with a little bit more, how shall I say, plot.

This entry is part of my Open Books project.