‘The Real Human Condition’ – Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’

Henry Miller’s first novel, Tropic of Cancer, encapsulates the author’s struggles as a writer and a human during the early 1930s in a whirling, yet stagnant, and grotesque Paris, and his brief sojourn in dismal Dijon.

Tropic of Cancer is perhaps the classic of choice, a novel I needed to read, as a young adult, -with its history of censorship on grounds of pornography evoking a further lascivious attraction. To have disregarded Miller’s work however, as is often infinitely clear in our obviously more advanced culture (I jest), as the aforementioned is to singly disregard the true grit of the book. Tropic of Cancer flits infectiously between the heavy questions of life we must all ask if we are to undergo any sort of awakening – I mean this, as Miller appears to, in hopefully the least clichéd mode I can offer; awakening not as an endpoint to spiritualism or learning. No, one must live in the mire first.

Yet Miller, in posing with a resigned boldness questions I believe all of us who want more from life do, has obviously crafted a superbly, if not frankly, beautifully written piece of art. It reminds one often of Samuel Beckett’s works in the correlating themes and depictions, but the people and the city here, while caricatures, are much closer to the everyday. With a vocabulary unparalleled but accented with a mastery of form, colloquialisms and frankness of speech that distinguish Millers clear voice he writes with the clarity of an epileptic after a fit (inside joke, go read the book). A cornucopia of knowledge and allusions tinged with the fetid and tangible reality of his interactions with the carnivalesque Parisians are what make Tropic of Cancer so great without any apparent snobbishness – something that would be hard to pull off amid the scenes of degradation for Miller despite his obvious learning was a man who had trodden well the stony path of beggary.

Miller here boldly poses a lot of questions from his floating perspective as witness to the madness of love, poverty and debauchery that occur to his acquaintances and himself as if at a slight distance – and he not-so quietly tells many of them, being the Church, literature and pomp and the vacant-eyed upper-crusters, to go fuck themselves dry. Touché.

Paris is like a whore. Paris is a cancer – something thriving yet still sapping life from all its constituents as it bloats and gluts itself on misfortune and depravity. For Miller Paris is a figment, it is an irresistible façade of grandeur that gives way to the lugubrious bedsits and Pernod-soaked whore-houses behind the postcard frame. Paris is the epicentre, the microcosm in which Miller realised we are all living.