Book Review: 'Tropic of Cancer' by Henry Miller

The book is perhaps summed up best by one of its characters:

“…I’ll lay myself down on the operating table and I’ll expose my whole guts … every goddamned thing. Has anyone ever done that before?—What the hell are you smiling at? Does it sound naïf?”





It exposes. It hadn’t been done before (well, not in the same way). It is comic. It is naïf.

With Henry Miller’s bizarre and incongruous existence in his time and place, there’s a kind of sense of loss, that something was lost after him, that an opportunity slipped us by. He represents a fork in the road, and it’s a fork that was never really taken. Instead, he can be easily reduced to a series of issue based identity-political dot points. Easily, that is, by those that…

…live among the hard facts of life, reality, as it is called. It is the reality of a swamp and they are the frogs who have nothing better to do than to croak. The more they croak the more real life becomes.

The same sort of people that can look at this book, even the first thirty pages or so, even if that’s all they read and threw the mouldy paperback down in disgust and reproach, and then croak on about ‘narcissism’, about ‘dead white men’, about ‘misogyny’ about all the stinking murky depths of the swamp that they’re paddling in.

So, all the croaking aside, what is Miller’s project? He takes Walt Whitman by the end of his beard and drags him along behind him through the streets of 1930s Paris and all the humanity around him, the world of men and women, and goes the full length, he starts with drums and ends with dynamite, he makes the world more endurable in his own sight, he throttles all the birds in creation, he tries to look earnest and looks pathetic, he finds himself again naked as a savage, he makes pages explode, he disregards existent principles, he contradicts and paralyzes, he makes lists of experience, he lives a life rendered down to cunts and stomachs.



This is not fifty shades of fucking grey. This is not a series of banal-titillations made to feel extreme and naughty while you keep warmly rolling in the swamp, wrapped up in a bunch of ideas that’ll keep you moist enough to pass inspection. There is no comfort here, unless it is the comfort of understanding that there is no comfort. Perhaps you have to be hungry and desperate to get to that point? You have to be that to make ‘the guinea pigs squeal’. To know where to put ‘the live wire of sex’, to know…

…that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals.

Is Miller above all this crap? Looking down like a Titan? If he’s part Titan, he’s also part goat. He’s below it. He’s burrowing underneath like he’s a haemorrhaging mole. You’re not meant to love him. Or like him. Or respect him. He asks for nothing from you. He doesn’t ask for you to review his book, since the book is a failure, it's not even a book, because it has to be a failure or else it fails completely; and since reviewing it is just further croaking in the every-spreading swamp of reality. Looking up a picture to slot into the coding so that someone might Like it and say, hey, yeah, nice review man, I liked that book too, lots of fucking, gave me a boner; or no, I disagree, this only got printed coz it gave guys boners and this book was a waste of my precious time when I could be reading the latest Miles Franklin shortlist from onetofive or something exceedingly more contemporary andslashor relevant, or that currently has a film version out with [insert some cunt] in it. I mean there’s only one review that counts and, bango, you start writing the book out word-for-word in all its glorious lack-of-glory and all its primal failure that then bleeds into that time when you were living at the Villa Borghese, and maybe it wasn’t lice, and maybe it wasn’t cunt, or books or dreams you were asking from life, but there was shit happening that you might not want to put down on a piece of paper, since it would certainly be inappropriate and revealing even if you shook it really hard and laughed and covered it in irony since there’s actually nothing appropriate going on down there, under the carapace, where all you might need is to have a rosebush thrust under your nose.

It's all about a 'level playing field'. Apparently...

The reaction to the 2013 Miles Franklin shortlist would be fine if that was all there was to it: the best five books according the judges were these five books, let’s get on with it. But that’s not the case. It’s the ‘first ever all-women’.  Ignore the fact that the men who’ve been on it have been writing for—and read primarily by—women for years, so that the award itself has been irrelevant to more and more men every year, probably since David Foster. But an all-women shortlist isn't un-level, since there have been four all-men ones in the past, reductively referred to as ‘sausagefests’ (making this one a crackcarnivale?). So the playing field is not this one shortlist, it is the amount of shortlists that your sex-team gets to dominate. And, if we get to the point that there is a fifth all-women shortlist, then the playing field will shift again to accommodate that.

Unfortunately, it would seem, the Stella prize invention was premature: They didn't give the Miles Frank team time to adjust… 

This is not all about a ‘level playing field’ for both sexes. It’s about creating a heavily graded playing field, and then teaching men to lean as hard as they can to one side before they look at it.

Like it has in other areas of writing and publishing, women dominate fiction writing, publishing and reading, so those playing field angles are all dealt with and level (again, as you long as you lean far enough). So we move on to some area where we can accommodate that, and find something, anything we can use to further ‘level the playing field’. So it comes down to: statistics collected on how many women writers are reviewed in major periodicals compared to men; and—look out you dwindling few men who still actually read any fiction—how many women authors and/or women-authors’-stories-about-women men read compared to …well … I suppose, anything else. Once these are dealt with, and ‘leveled’, then there’s sure to be something else.

It’s quite obviously, once you strip back the rhetoric and look at what is actually being done, about Total War, in a very Machiavellian sense. The playing field is not level until Total Domination occurs, until there is not one single tenuous statistic that can be teased out that does not favour your sex-team. It’s the same in higher education. Once you dominate overall, start looking at individual faculties. Once you dominate all the faculties…

…you just keep going.

But the whole time you say that you’re all about equality of opportunity.

Like the Roman Empire. Legions are notoriously difficult to disband. And if you don’t disband them, because it’s so difficult and hard and quite a fight and you may look foolish and reactionary and unprogressive, then they go ahead and create the war for them to fight in.