The times seem to have caught up with Henry Miller, not only in the sexual sophistication that permits the recent publication of Tropic of Cancer, but in the further respect of often seeming as disordered and self-destructive as he was claiming modern life to be in the early 1930’s. If in 1934, the year of Cancer’s publication, it was histrionic to call for and accept the imminent destruction of civilization, Miller has lived on to see his political and social maledictions gain in plausibility, so that he now appears on the scene as a prophet with a certain grisly honor. Moreover, the literary extremism of Cancer ties in with the recent revival of the romantic impulse, particularly the more unrestrained attempts to respond to—or swing with—the times. Karl Shapiro’s rather frantic introduction to the Grove Press edition of the book suggests some of the reasons why Miller has not only been serving as one of the father figures of the Beat writers but also as a Vergil to more sophisticated writers, like Shapiro himself or Seymour Krim, who, having been brought to an impasse by the modern literary sin of intellectual pride, are following Miller’s lead to liberate their creative selves by a journey into their own tropics of cancer.

In The World of Sex, Miller describes the central concern of Cancer as being “not with sex, nor with religion, but with the problem of self-liberation.” A son of the German-American middle class (“They were painfully clean,” he writes in Tropic of Capricorn. “Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul. . . .”), Miller was an employment manager at Western Union until one day when he walked out, determined to alter his life once and for all. A few years later, at the age of thirty-nine, he settled—if that’s the word—in Paris, where the expatriate colony, following the crash, had dwindled away to a hard core made up (as George Orwell put it) “partly of genuine artists and partly of scoundrels.”

Tropic of Cancer records by a mixed method of narrative and spontaneous notation Miller’s more characteristic experiences and meditations during the next two years of liberating himself in the dingy twilight zone of the Montmartre slums. Some of his friends feed him; others put him up if the other half of their bed happens to be vacant. Now and then he stumbles on a good thing—a period of steady work as a proofreader, an affair with a wealthy woman, a few months of living with an open-handed young American. But for the most part he drifts on an empty stomach, his eyes attracted by the “sinister splendor . . . [of] certain leprous streets,” his nose lifted resolutely to the rancid odors of poverty, his ears tuned to the gurgling of the urinals, and his mind reeling with the impressions of a Brooklyn bohemian amid the ruins of Europe. The assault on Miller’s moral sense is no less formidable: one of his jobs involves working for a Hindu who takes particular pleasure in having Henry assist him in the lavatory; he models for lewd pictures; he has a turn living with a homosexual (“I could have forgiven him everything if only he had handed me a decent breakfast!”). To keep a few francs in his pocket, Miller comes to lie, fawn, cheat, steal, pimp, taking it all in an easygoing ça m’est égal way.

His discovery that he has a stomach for everything except hunger is accompanied, not unexpectedly, by his discovery that he is an artist, the two being aspects of the same process of freeing the inner man by a complete abandonment of conventional moral norms and social values. As he says in setting forth to describe his situation: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.”

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The two main elements of Cancer follow from the development of these two images—Miller the asocial man and Miller the artist—though they are a good deal less integrated than this opening statement presumes. The first results in the scenes from low life, the anecdotes of sordidness and disorder, usually presented in a spare, impassive prose, touched infrequently with joy, but almost invariably with comedy. These are by far the best moments in the book, for Miller is a fine natural writer and storyteller in the deadpan manner, a kind of Left Bank Mark Twain. The few pages in which Miller describes moving his shiftless friend Van Norden from one scurvy rooming house to another, or the narrative of young Fillmore’s liaison with a dizzy Russian princess (who has been to the well once too often), are classic evocations of the makeshift, roguish world created by the international flotsam that was being washed up in Paris during the 1930’s. And one finds a number of other incidents only slightly below this level.

However, there is also Miller the “artist,” and a good half of Cancer is occupied by his ingenuous mannerisms and fulminations. If Miller came to Paris too late to cadge a living in the free-spending Paris of the 1920’s, he didn’t come too late to avoid the foaming aestheticism of surrealism, with its techniques of “unconscious writing,” its often facile tilting of psychological and moral norms, and its underlying attitudes, as one critic sums them up, of “an understandable disgust with world conditions, boredom, and the desire of individuals for self-advertisement.” From such surrealists as Lautréamont, an early predecessor, and Blaise Cendrars, Miller seems to have found much of his apocalyptic nihilism and primitivism (he describes Cancer as not a book but “a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty. . . .”), as well as the license for his prolonged bouts of manic self-entrancement (“I know that I spring from the mythological founders of the race,” and so on). The surrealists also aspired to create an immediate, uninhibited avowal of emotion by capturing those charged images that are released during extreme states of psychic pressure. (As Miller puts it: “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.”) Like all extreme romantics, the surrealists were preoccupied with instinctual forms of behavior, and this led them to prize highly those precincts of the social Id, the slums, of which Miller comes to be so enamored. Finally, the surrealists believed that the conventional literary forms were as artificial and deforming as the social and moral ones; this belief, combined with their taste for self-expression in its most exhibitionist and esoteric modes, produced as their characteristic form a sort of fictional-poetic personal tract. This, too, Miller took over; when, in his pioneering review of Cancer, Edmund Wilson wrote of it as a novel, Miller protested to him in a letter: “I don’t use ‘heroes’ . . . nor do I write novels. I am the hero, and the book is myself.”

Thus, the surrealist influence on Miller is a strong one, and though it produces a number of remarkable images, it leads more generally to passages of quasi-spontaneous hokum. Many of Miller’s friends in Paris were Jews, and he has some very shrewd observations about them. But the “artist” in Miller typically produces the literary speciousness of the following passage:

For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner. . . . Standing there . . . he finds that the lions do not understand his language. Not one lion has ever heard of Spinoza. Spinoza? Why they can’t even get their teeth into him. “Give us meat!” they roar, while he stands there petrified, his ideas frozen, his Weltanschauung a trapeze out of reach. A single blow of the lion’s paw and his cosmogony is smashed.

Under the surrealist influence, even Miller’s sharp little comedies of émigrés hanging on to their fantasies by their fingertips often are weakened by the writer’s fantasies about his artistic originality and power. Thus the brilliant description of Van Norden sitting blankly amid the little bundle of junk he carries from one flat to the next, and cheering himself up by complaining of his well-fed satyriasis, suddenly fades into a surrealistic trance, a number of trite Freudian symbols having entered the narrator’s mind. Similarly, the faces of other characters, along with certain street scenes, the interiors of bars and houses, are portentously blown up or spitefully contracted into soulful epiphanies or grotesque caricatures. Just as Miller’s inflamed “cosmological eye” can see in the “dark unstitched wound” of a prostitute’s body a whole liturgy of meanings—from the matrix of all mathematical systems to the crumbling of the modern world—so it can as easily reduce other of his people to a leaking bladder or an insect.

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This split in vision between the actualities of Miller’s life in Paris and his highly artificial reveries has two implications that I want to spell out a bit. The first flows from the split in Miller between the rather simple, hardheaded American, with his coarse but honest voice, who is involved in these liberating experiences, and the avant-garde thinker and writer who explores the lusts and cruelties of his heart as well as the splendors and miseries of his imagination. Now this split is no accident, for Miller’s celebrated powers of acceptance often seem to rest on the tactic of his withdrawing, under a smokescreen of apocalyptic projections and rationalizations, from the nastier realities that he dredges up about himself. When, for example, he and Van Norden degrade a prostitute by their cold and cynical lust, Miller soon turns his back, in effect, on the crime against life taking place in the bed—their making a human being into a thing—to generalize instead about the coldness and cynicism of modern war. Similarly a great deal of his literary, like his moral, exhibitionism, parading under the attempt to forge an idiom that will allow him “to translate all that is in his heart,” works to aggrandize his powers of passion and to evade his coldness—even deadness—of feeling.

In sum, this process of “self-liberation” in Miller’s first book (and it becomes progressively more indulgent in Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and the later autobiography), demonstrates that using writing in this way can easily lead the writer to the magic of a rhetoric rather than to the resistances of the ego, to his strategies of liberation rather than to the self. The truth is that the ego is far less interested in “self-liberation” than it is in protecting its own images and interests; and it has a distinct preference for fantasies, projections, and highly metaphorical styles when the self is being exposed. This is a problem that writers who, like Miller, are bent on “going all the way,” frequently succumb to rather than confront, and it is why both the content and the style of Cancer often function to evade the self in the process of asserting it. Thus, I end up preferring George Orwell’s chaste and impersonally honest chronicle of being down and out in Paris to Miller’s more sexually charged but often meretricious self-portrayal.

The other general point that arises from this split in Cancer is that in straining to get literature, as Miller says he is, “off the gold standard,” it is fatally easy to substitute merely a tin one. The need to rebel and the need for company led him directly into the form of romanticism in extremis that was available. And more particularly, they led him to those surrealists who offered him a set of attitudes—indeed a primitivist subject matter—that was disencumbered of the discipline and lucidity essential to the surrealism of Breton, the early Aragon, and Henri Michaux. These writers carefully distorted objective realities to evoke the atmosphere and some of the imagery of revery, but their main interest was in criticizing life in terms of the fantasies that dominated an individual or a society. In so doing they developed a mode of satiric vision that is strongly marked in the work of the other American surrealist of note, Nathanael West.

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However, it is Miller’s example rather than West’s that seems most characteristically American and that also characterizes the more extreme attempts by writers in recent years both to reassert the role of the self in literature and to engage it with the fantastic tenor of the times. Seymour Krim, who wishes now to “gun out some leveller messages about reality” than he was able to do in his years of writing criticism for COMMENTARY, Common weal, Partisan Review, and Hudson Review, states the aim of the “unbugged” writer as follows: “Nothing can speak for itself like what is. . . . The writing I want to do now is inspired by the pertinent, the immediate, the actual of this very minute; that would be sufficient greatness for me if I can give it full voice.”¹ And just as Miller’s efforts to make “use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives” led him to focus much of the time on his own drives and fantasies, so Krim’s essays make use of the same touchstone—that of “extreme consciousness of Self.” For, as he writes, “so complex and in many ways unprecedented has urbanized modern life become for the individual that the writer just by owning an T can find more of the traditional stuff of fiction (Dostoevskian drama, Melvillian speculation, Verne-ish fantasy) in personal reality itself than in deliberate invention.” Krim’s idiom is different from Miller’s but it places just as high a premium on rapid metaphorical invention or “spontaneity” in looking for “new colors, new sounds, new equivalents for the extremity to which the Self has been pushed.” And finally, he has become preoccupied with the lower depths, which in times of affluence means mainly Negroes, deviants, and mass culture. It is not surprising, then, that Krim should find Miller to be one of his four exemplars of “real personal honesty,” “actual American experience,” of “the imaginative emancipation of life based on this same ruthless love for what is.”

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Much of what I have been saying in objection to Miller seems to me even more thoroughly relevant to Krim. However, it is a touchier argument to carry to Views of a Near-Sighted Cannoneer, for while Cancer leaves me with a certain amount of objective disappointment, Krim’s book leaves me depressed, disgusted, or infuriated. This means, purely literary questions to one side, that Krim has more to say to me than Miller does. Partly this is a matter of the subjects he writes about: the New York intellectual scene, particularly as it involves the problem of writing for certain intellectual magazines; the realities of Negro community life, to which both “white Negroes” and white liberals tend to be equally blinded though in different ways; the attitudes today in America toward mental breakdown and suicide; the problem of writing fiction about a world whose daily life can strike one as more obsessive and portentous than a Kazan movie. These all happen to be matters about which my own knowledge and interest are on the whole as firsthand—that is to say, as complex and painful—as Krim’s. Similarly, his essay on “making it”—the new nihilism of our affluent times—his dialogue on the growing social and moral confidence of the homosexual revolt in America, his essay on the teasing sexuality of the mass media: all these involve subjects that relevantly characterize the moral atmosphere in which one lives and breathes today.

Along with being drawn out by Krim because he writes about these things, I also share his point of view in almost every essay: the fact that his manner of thinking and writing is “beat” or “hip” and mine is, as he would probably say, “square,” dissolves partly at least in the deeper similarities of background and development, which inevitably confer similarities in attitude. That we both grew up as wayward sons of the Jewish middle class and came of intellectual age in the 1940’s is a large point to have in common. Also crucial is the fact that we both tried to become writers during a period when the conditions of the higher literary apprenticeship were as gruelling and distorting as Krim says they were (though this was hardly confined to the New York journals). Until fairly recently only a few models seemed open to “serious” young writers and all involved pretending that one was at least forty-five years old in his politics and in his erudition, and fifty-five in his “tragic sense of life.” This made it very hard for someone twenty-five to stay in touch with himself and hence with his times. In the last few years, however, it has become clear that there are certain advantages for one to have come fresh into the postwar world and to rely on his independent sense of it. This, in turn, means trusting that margin of individual, lived experience that one shares with his contemporaries and must look to in good part for his point of view and his voice.

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All of which is to say, then, that I couldn’t agree more with Krim when he tells my generation of writers that we all “face the same problems” and that we “need each other.” The main problem, of course, is that to acknowledge that one belongs as an individual and writer to postwar America is mainly to realize that the pounding tensions and amorphousness of its social life, and the low emotional pressures and formalism of its literary norms, are primary facts of one’s experience and training. This realization is useful to disabuse one of the notions that our social and moral arrangements are still largely stable and satisfactory ones, and that a settled social vision and self-restraint and arch-subtlety are likely to produce a relevant literature. But in the end, the same realization also leaves one alone with the truth that in questioning the ideological assurances and literary standards of our cultural fathers as increasingly beside the point of contemporary American reality, one has little else besides a massive sense of fluidity. The Liberal Imagination or The Wasteland or The Portrait of a Lady are of little help after the candors of the newsstand or a Sunday evening of watching TV, but what else is of help? This is the America one has lived with more intimately and formatively than he has with any ideology—but what then? How to confront, and let into one’s writing, the suspicion that the social life we have been led to take for granted is more like the inner life of a psychopath than that of a rational society? How, on the other hand, to take into account that countervailing forces operate as well, that one’s life is less of a struggle than his parents’ was, less culture-bound, less inhibited, less closed of mind? The typical tension produced by accepting this strident, sapping, abundant, imperiled society with our practical reason while doubting it with our deepest intuitions of the good life, merely makes one’s personal formulations of what it feels like to be alive today often seem as consistent as the weather.

Now, as I indicated earlier, what partly redeems Miller and also what makes him an interesting and useful writer today is his ability to stand firm, ironic as a peasant, at the extremes of poverty and crudity and disorder, and accept what is happening long enough to get it down as it is, before he takes off on another of his evasive flights of imaginings. Since I agree completely with Krim that our best and most truthful writing today must involve “the extreme to which the Self has been pushed by contemporary reality,” I am that much more impressed by Miller’s ability to often confront “the extreme” in a cool and steady way. For all his fantasy and pretension, there is a hard center to Miller which remains, in good part, detached from his egomania and from the pressure of events, and which allows him to capture a solid feeling of reality. Krim, on the other hand, for all his courageous candor and assertiveness, keeps reveling in a self and a sense of the world that are shaky to the core.

Here, for example, Krim is talking about the most important event he finds in his own life, his break from the confinements of the New York intellectual scene:

It wasn’t until I was 33 . . . not until I spewed up every hunk of undigestible matter in my psyche and bloodily broke through to my own raw meat via the whistling rocket-ride of what is called insanity—that I began to think for myself because I had to. Man, this wasn’t any bullshit about beautiful words and dream-masterpieces anymore—this was life and death and all that cellar-deep jazz!

Here, he is talking about non-conformist thought in America:

There is much reason to think that America has reached such a point of ultimate no-return in making its world-play, that ununionized free-thinkers could easily be sacrificed today to the national destiny; our head-on position in history blushes steel and warships to permit embarrassingly free beatnik snooping into every uneasy pocket of existence; we are in the spotlight of the globe and no finks are wanted to spoil the picture.

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The obvious trouble in both cases is that Krim is less concerned with exploring an insight into himself or the society that impinges on him, than he is in exhibiting himself as a very hip, very imaginative, very candid writer, one who writes directly from the guts and the nerve-ends. As such his efforts and mistakes are largely Miller’s, only weaker and more complete: the notion that one arrives at personal and social truth by applying a pressure pump to one’s feelings, which creates false emphasis; the idea that self-discovery is merely the willingness to lay one’s personality on the line, which creates evasions; and the notion that the Zeitgeist requires an entirely new set of liberated attitudes and modes of expression, which means merely dressing up in one of the new forms of extreme romanticism—in Krim’s case, that of the Beats.

As in Miller, the exhibitionism often functions as a cover-up—a way of writing about ego-threatening matters by a rhetoric that detaches them from a full range of inner response, and buries uncertainty under a discharge of worked-up feeling. For beneath what Norman Mailer chooses to call Krim’s “odd honest garish sober [sic] grim surface,” one senses the fluidity of a writer who is unable to allow the truth of his experience to speak for itself, who can possess his insights only by doing violence to them, either by word or idea, who believes in his own voice only when he is posturing with it. The writer who speaks of a “life and death” confrontation as so much “cellar-deep jazz” is not merely affecting what Krim calls a “swinging” style; the rhetoric throughout the first passage quoted is also a way of sliding past any meaningful engagement with that world of the self that Krim tells us he has given up everything to write about. And this is also true of “The Insanity Bit,” which is much less about what it means to have an emotional breakdown today than it is about experiencing “the sheer ecstasy of 100 per cent uninhibitedness” and then having to pay for it at the hands of a repressive society.

Similarly, when he formulates the very real and very subtle problem of dissent in America by announcing that the beatniks are in danger of being liquidated in the interest of our foreign relations, I begin to see much the same necessary flashiness of formulation and much the same desperate pathos of uncertainty driven to total assertion. Similarly, when Krim tells me that the mass media have released a stream of sexuality “which has eaten into all American life . . . which has savaged through my tiny literary life and your Plymouth-hustling life. . . .” And similarly, when he has to attack the New York literary pundits for their impossibly high and false standards by suggesting that these led to his own crack-up and to the premature deaths of Isaac Rosenfeld, Robert Warshow, James Agee, Weldon Kees, and William Poster.

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The fact is that behind each of these compulsively extreme, compulsively souped-up characterizations of himself or of his world, one detects a baffled but adaptable figure of our times, now looking for a home in the Village among the Jewish intellectuals, now for one in Harlem, finally for one among the Beats; forcing the underlying tractability to flow this year into the channels of COMMENTARY, next year of Hudson Review, and eventually, and with no less forcing, into the brassy pipes of the new demi-underground that run from the Village Voice to Swank. Having made all the literary scenes, as they say, of the past twenty years, Krim seems now to be compressing his protean ambition and intelligence into a new take-off after the Zeitgeist: “Survival at its highest conception means making it! To live you must conquer if you’re normal enough to hate being stuck with your futile being and smart enough to know you must trade it for success!”

So perhaps, then, Krim is finally breaking through to bedrock, to the naked ego drives he spends most of the other essays evading by half-confessions, half excuses: “my innocence was raped (willingly)”; “as a man I was self-deceptive, self-indulgent. . . . Ah, the extraordinary mismating of thoughts in the mind of the modern American literary romantic . . .” and so on. But the point remains that Krim is still writing as much for his “ego’s bread” as he ever did in writing fancy criticism and is mainly using the very real need for more self-awareness and less academicism to put himself under a new spell.

As Harold Rosenberg has noted, the world of the convert changes, not his character. At present, in the vestments of the hip, self-liberated writer, Krim lives in a world where suicides are “stubborn amateur Hamlets and Ophelias” who “unconsciously reclaim their humanity and even ours”; where “fiction [is] much less relevant to today’s actuality than the more universal story of sheer being”; where “change only occurs . . . when we stand against the ultimate wall and realize that there is no place else to go except in a totally opposite direction”; where the “pioneering ‘psychotic’ is the human poet of the future”; and where “Baby, there is no significance today but YOU.” As I have said, there’s a sector of one’s awareness of life today in which these assumptions make a certain amount of sense. But in the total ambiance of Views, they also mark the end of the line in the opposite direction from the restraints of “objectivity” and “impersonality”: they seem less ideas than symptoms of the recklessness, self-righteousness, flatulence, panic, and compulsiveness of a writer who in freeing himself of inhibition has also left himself with practically no conception of “otherness” with which to correct and connect with his self-preoccupations.

The pity of it is that Krim is in a first-rate position and has the perceptiveness and zeal to become one of the moral historians of the past twenty years. One essay stands out in this collection, in which Krim argues that many whites who take and imitate Negro life in terms of its jazz have “literally no idea of the conditions of life that lie behind this music.” Here Krim avoids trafficking in his self-apologetics, inside dopesterism, and facile lingo, and writes with the clarity and sincerity of a man whose point is too meaningful to risk misunderstanding or require false emphasis.

So too are his points about the narrowing and unnerving literary standards of the past fifteen years; about the mixed reactions of a white in Harlem; about the cult of genius in the American mentality; about the causes behind the new wave of personalism and irrationalism in the novel. But in each case one is left not with a truth but with the same overflowing 8th Street cocktail, one part bile, one part blood, and one part corn.

Coming back to my original point, what Views finally dramatizes is, in Krim’s own words, that “increasing chasm which separates intelligent people from understanding each other.” This polarization of attitudes is very real today and my criticism of Krim is part of it; for in the end I am driven back by reading him in the direction of those genteel, authoritarian souls who write supernaturally smug essays about the Beats. But is the soft, indulgent, hysterical element in Henry Miller an answer to the common problems of our generation of writers? And, in effect, isn’t Krim himself failing this generation by confusing it with a coterie, by falsifying its consciousness with frantic and whining exaggerations, and by adding his watery extremism to the general fluidity that threatens to swamp us all?

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¹ Views of a Near-Sighted Cannoneer (Excelsior Press, 128 pp., $1.45).