Book Review: Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”

 

In Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” we examine a man whose head permeates not with otherworldly thoughts but thoughts of the dirty sea of the streets which are, in themselves, another world.

In Miller’s writing, we learn that characters aren’t characters- they are play actors, and thus seem insignificant.

In the book we discover Miller’s hatred for America, his love and desperate need for food, his sexual adventures, his feelings towards the harshness of Parisian winters, and his admiration for Walt Whitman (“There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized”).

Miller discusses how God is a fine thing to believe in, but how what you often discover is a ‘skeleton,’ and you ‘must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh.’

Overall, “Tropic of Cancer” is a great glimpse into the world of a man both intelligent and (often) dirt-poor.

Quotes:

“The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time but Timelessness.”

“A man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering.”

“Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permit’s the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict.”

“Rich American cunts with paint boxes slung over their shoulders. A little talent and a fat purse.”

“The room is swimming with love and turtle piss and warm lilacs and the horses are galloping like mad.”

“They have an easy conscience, the rich. If a poor man dozes off, even for a few seconds, he feels mortified…”

“…All these abstract deaths which involved a bloodless sort of agony.”

“Even as the world falls apart the Paris that belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms, the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees tangled like hair. On its wobbly axle the wheel rolls steadily downhill; there are no brakes, no ball bearings, no balloon tires. The wheel is falling apart, but the revolution is intact…”

“This Paris, to which I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with the best of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it.”

“…There are no ready-made infernos for the tormented.”

“The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world, the charnel house to which the stinking wombs confide their bloody packages of flesh and bone.”

“My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort.”

“…In everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.”