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Миллер, Генри - Миллер - Тропик Рака (engl)Проза и поэзия >> Переводная проза >> Миллер, Генри Читать целиком фЕКНС йСИИЕН. оНЛМСХ нВХВ (engl)
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Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer
HENRY MILLER was born on December 26, 1891, in Manhattan and
grew up in Brooklyn. Af ter a string of dreary jobs and a disastrous first
marriage, Miller left for Paris in 1930. Tropic of Cancer, published
when he was forty-three and immediately banned in all English-speaking
coun tries, is considered his most important book. Mil ler's works include
Black Spring (1936), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), The
Cosmological Eye (1939), The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), The
Time of the Assassins (1946), The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
(1945), and his autobiographical trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion,
comprised of Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus
(1960). In 1940, Miller re turned to America and settled in Big Sur,
Califor nia. A lusty romantic. Miller married five times, the last to
Japanese singer Hoki Tokuda. His cour ageous legal battle against the
censorship of Tropic of Cancer ended with a landmark 1964 Su preme
Court decision, which guaranteed a new freedom of expression to all American
writers. Generous and supportive of other artists through out his life.
Henry Miller in his final years was surrounded by young admirers and old
friends. Writing, painting, and carrying on a voluminous correspondence
until the very end. Henry Miller died in June, 1980, in the arms of his
house keeper.
HENRY MILLER
TROPIC OF CANCER
With an Introduction by Louise De Salvo
A SIGNET CLASSIC
SIGNET CLASSIC
Published by New American Library, a division of
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New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd. 27 Wrights Lane,
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Penguin Books Ltd. Registered Offices:
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Published by Signet Classic, an imprint of New American Library. a division
of Penguin Putnam Inc.
First Signet Classic Printing. August 1995 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7
Introduction copyright Louise DeSalvo. 1995 All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK--MARCA REGISTRADA
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-74837 Printed in the United
States of America
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If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this
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for this "stripped book."
"These novels will give way, by and by, to di aries or
autobiographies--captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among
what he calls his experiences that which is really his ex perience, and how
to record truth truly."
--ralph waldo emerson
Introduction to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer by Louise DeSalvo
Henry Miller arrived in Paris on March 4, 1930, to try to become a
successful writer.1 He had ten dollars in his pocket (a loan from
his old friend Emil Schnellock), a trunkful of suits (from his tailor
father), which he knew he could pawn if he ran out of money, and carbon
copies of two novels he had written in New York and hoped to
revise--Moloch (about his first marriage and his job at Western
Union), and Crazy Cock (about his second mar riage to June Miller and
her lesbian love affair, which had tormented him).2 Though he had
been writing seriously for six years, and had published a few small pieces,
Miller hadn't yet published a novel, hadn't yet fulfilled his dream of
becoming a "working-class Proust," the Proust of Brooklyn.3 His
wife, June, had persuaded him that Paris might be where he could perfect his
craft and become financially successful.
What really motivated June to urge her husband to leave New York, though,
was that he had become a bur den to her and she wanted him (temporarily) out
of her life while she pursued another of her schemes to make money for both
of them. She was involved in a relation ship with an older, wealthy "sugar
daddy," who makes a brief appearance in Tropic of Cancer as the
"fetus with a cigar in its mouth" standing opposite Miller's apartment,
watching him leave for Europe.
Though June had persuaded Miller to quit his job at Western Union to become
a writer, and had supported him through a variety of jobs--as a hostess, a
waitress, and a prostitute--she had lost confidence in him. Despite her
efforts, he showed no signs of becoming what she be lieved he would become:
a writer who would immortalize her in his work, who would extol her
self-sacrifice, who
viii
would reveal her to the world as the semi-mythic femme fatale she
believed herself to be--a Dostoyevsky heroine, who prowled the streets of
New York City in search of adventure.4
Miller's life with June formed the foundation of all his mature fiction. On
the night of May 21, 1927, in profound despair because June had tied to
Paris with her lover Jean Kronski, Miller outlined a magnum
лнсs that would recount the agony of his life with June. Though
June had kept in touch in her usual desultory way, with a few postcards of
the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and Notre Dame, she hadn't responded
to his letters beg ging her to come back to him, and he sensed that his
mar riage. if not over, would never be the same again.
Desperate with loneliness, and crazy with jealousy. Miller sat at the
typewriter in the office of the Parks De partment in Queens where he was
working, to outline a novel that would recount his life with June and her
be trayal. He was thirty-six years old, and living with his parents because
he couldn't afford to live alone. It had been June's idea that he could
become a writer. The truth was, though he had always wanted to become a
writer, he was "afraid"; he didn't think he had the ability. He wasn't rich
or privileged or college educated, though he was ex tremely well read: he
had attended the City College of New York briefly, but soon left, "disgusted
with the cur riculum" after a "hopeless encounter" with Spenser's The
Fairie Queene. As a working-class man, the son of first generation
German-Americans,' who had been born in New York on December 26, 1891,
Miller often said to himself, "Who was I to say I am a
writer?"6
On that night. Miller began to type out his notes for what would become a
lifelong literary project. The notes came "without effort"; he would
deal with his and his wife's "battles royal, debauches," her lies and
betrayals. He wrote a catalog of the "events and crises" they had endured.
He listed the manuscripts in his possession he could cannibalize, letters he
had written that he could mine for details. Everything he had lived,
everything he had written, would become the source for his art. When he
finished, early the next morning, he had a stack of thirty-two closely typed
pages, which he labeled "June."
ix
He had sketched the basis for much of his life's work, for Crazy
Cock, portions of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Cap ricorn, and
The Rosy Crucifixion. More importantly, he had fastened upon the
intensely autobiographical form that his life's work would take. From now
on, he would be both the author and subject of his life's work. He would
live his life as if it were the raw material for art;
then he would turn the life he had lived into art.7
When Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930, the city, like New York, was in
the midst of the Depression. His Paris was not the Paris of Ernest Hemingway
or of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Miller, because of his self-imposed poverty,
could describe a side of Paris that tourists (and even the expatriates who
lived there before him) never saw. It was a Paris not of exquisite meals,
but of hunger, of rancid butter and moldy cheese, of cheap hotels with
tattered wallpaper and bloodstained gray sheets crawling with bedbugs, of
old women sleeping in doorways, of whores with wooden stumps, of full slop
pails, of "angoisse and tristesse."
Tropic of Cancer recounts the story of Henry Miller's first two years
in Paris. It is perhaps the first novel that redefines the creative process
for the working-class writer. It is an (un)American, ungenteel, uneducated
(but not unlettered), no-holds-barred, middle-aged-man's ver sion of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (a writer whom
Miller despised, calling him a "pedagogic sadist,"8 but whom he
consciously emulated), or of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel
Proust (a writer whom Miller adored). It is a meditation on both the profane
and divine aspects of an art that has its source in both lust and longing.
Many critics have commented upon the precedent-shattering descriptions of
sexuality in the novel. Yet another subject of Tropic of Cancer is
even more revolu tionary: It shows what a working-class man must go through
to live the creative life, and how he must redefine himself to develop the
courage to write a novel about his own experiences in his own voice. "A year
ago, six months ago," the narrator tells us, "I thought that I was an
artist. I no longer think about it, I am." It is a work
xii
work-in-progrcss to remind himself of what still had to be written. Or he
consulted the lists of words he had copied from his dictionary that he
wanted to include in his novel He could work even when other people were
present. Of ten, he typed and talked simultaneously. (It is likely that at
limes he typed these conversations into the novel.) Sometimes "in the middle
of his work he would put on a record and listen to a piece of music. Or he
would burst into song himself. His work was done singing."13
After, he would go on long walks, taking his notebook with him. He would
find new streets to describe, new sights to incorporate, new denizens of the
street to in clude in his work. The "more squalid parts of Paris''14
fascinated him--the Cite Nortier, for example, near the Place du
Combat, with a courtyard bordered by rotting buildings, its flagstones
slippery with slime, a "human dump-heap" filled with garbage. Or he would
take a bicy cle ride to the outlying parts of Paris.
After dinner (again, at the expense of friends). Miller would often go back
to work.
Though he was still married to June Miller throughout the composition of
Tropic of Cancer, this period was also the heyday of Miller's love
affair with Anais Nin, who was married to the banker Hugh Guiler. Miller was
intro duced to AnaTs Nin in December 1931 through his friend Richard
Osbom.15
Miller came into Nin's life when she was ripe for sex ual experimentation,
soon after she had published a book on D. H. Lawrence. Miller himself had
just published a review of Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or, and was working
on yet another revision of his novel Crazy Cock, about the adverse
effect of his wife's lesbian love affair upon his sanity.16 When
they met, Nin wrote into her diary: "I saw a man I liked. In his writing he
is flamboyant, virile, an imal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes
drunk, I thought. He is like me."17
At first, the two met to talk about their work, and to exchange ideas. But
when Nin met Miller's wife, June. the relationship became immediately
complicated. Nin fell in love with June, replicating the love triangle that
had caused Miller so much pain.
xiii
After June returned to the United States, Nin and Miller became lovers.
According to Nin's testimony, he was a wonderful lover, who awakened her
sensuality; he was passionate yet considerate, and he satisfied her in ways
she had never imagined possible. According to his testimony, she supported
him financially, and gave him the peace of mind and the courage to begin
Tropic of Cancer, the most important novel of his life. She
con vinced him that his work was more important than Joyce's, and that he
should be as explosive and provoca tive in his work as he was in his talk.
She provided the secure base from which Miller felt free to experiment.
Nin and Miller remained lovers for years, spoke of marriage, shared a studio
apartment at the Villa Seurat, and conceived a child together (which Nin
aborted). Yet Nin never seriously considered leaving her husband for Miller,
though she urged Miller to leave June, and helped end his marriage by
letting June know that she and Miller were lovers. For one thing, it was
Nin's husband's money that financed her freewheeling lifestyle. She realized
that Miller could not be counted upon to support a wife. For another,
neither Nin nor Miller was inclined to monog amy. During their affair, Nin
was sexually involved, not only with Miller, but with her husband, her
cousin Eduardo Sanchez, and two of her analysts (Rene Allendy and Otto
Rank); Miller continued his dalliances with prostitutes. Though Miller
seemed accepting of Nin's be havior, Nin was often angry with Miller for
his.
Reading Nin's descriptions of Miller's behavior as a lover and as a man, in
her unexpurgated diaries (pub lished as Henry and June and
Incest), and in her fiction (in Cities of the Interior)
against Miller's description of himself in Tropic of Cancer is
instructive. It illuminates the distance between the "real" Henry Miller,
and the per sona Miller created for himself in his work. In Miller's
self-portrait, he presents himself as sexually rapacious, rough, tough,
woman hating, though he longs for his wife, Mona. In Nin's work, though.
Miller is a passionate and tender lover, respectful of her womanhood, though
timid, weak, and vulnerable as a man. Her portrait is nothing like the
tough-minded persona of Cancer, and suggests that Miller's creation
was largely compensatory.
xiv
Miller was, as Nin put it, "a child in need, ... a victim [of women] seeking
solace, ... a weakling seeking suste nance."18
Henry Miller developed the narrative of Tropic of Can cer from his
letters from Paris to his friend Emil Schnellock and those to Anais Nin
(especially the ones from Dijon describing his wretched teaching
experi ence),19 from the notes he made as he prowled the streets
of Paris, and from his conversations with friends about literature,
psychoanalysis (with Anai's Nin), sex (with Wambly Bald, the Parisian
columnist, who appears in the novel as the sex-obsessed Van Norden), death
(with Mi chael Fraenkel), and war. For the first time in his fiction, he
used what he called the "first person spectacular."20 It was a
point of view he had studiously avoided in his earlier attempts at fiction,
yet it suited him, for he was a magnetic teller and reteller of stories.
In one sense. Tropic of Cancer is about the healing of the damaged
self through stories, which magnify and mythicize his own and his friends'
escapades. Anai's Nin believed that Miller's work illuminated the workings
of the psyche more profoundly than James Joyce's and, in one important
sense, she was right. For as James Joyce records the contents of
consciousness. Miller's work shows the process by which the contents of
consciousness are created by the storytelling self. Miller's avowed aim, as
he states it in Cancer, is "to put down everything that goes on in my
noodle" without self-censorship. Miller shows how, by choosing the way you
describe your life, you can create the consciousness that you desire.
Without waiting for the world to change, you can change who you are by the
stories you tell yourself and others about who you are.
But his stories are not only healing, they are entertain ing. Miller adopted
the pose of a modem-day jongleur, who turned self-display into an art
form, into a carnival performance, using a narrative voice uniquely and
au thentically his, one that had not yet been written down.
Though in his novel Moloch, Miller wrote that no suc cessful work of
literature could be located in Brooklyn, or have Brooklyn as its subject.
Tropic of Cancer is written
xv
in the voice of the Brooklyn boy. It is the voice of the wise-ass street
kid, who hangs out on the comer with his friends, who trades stories with
them about his exploits, and who uses one-upsmanship to gain status. It is
the voice of the man who hides his pain behind a string of curse words, who
vulgarizes women because it is unmanly to admit how much he needs them, and
who ex aggerates how callous and tough he is so that he will not be
victimized. But his longing for Mona (his wife, June) is tenderly and
poignantly described, and it forms the emotional core of Cancer
against which his posture of viciousness toward women must be read. In
expressing his disgust at the cunt-obsessed Van Norden, the narrator
concludes that having sex without passion is like living in a state of war.
Though a habitue of the streets, a literary clochard, Miller's
narrator cannot manage to hide how learned he is. In Cancer, besides
drawing upon his experiences, Miller self-consciously used such models and
sources as Knut Hamsun's, D. H. Lawrence's, and Marcel Proust's
fiction,21 Shakespeare's and James Joyce's soliloquies, Francois
Rabelais' bawdy humor,22 Japanese shunga's and Indian sculpture's
explicitly profane yet sacred depiction of sex, Walt Whitman's celebratory
lists, Brassai's pho tography, Picasso's nudes, Anais Nin's self-reflective
di aries, and the techniques of the surrealists (including
assemblage),23 to name but a few. He describes how liter ature
and art can enrich the lives of the members of the working class, of people
without university degrees.
Tropic of Cancer was published in a small edition in Paris on
September 1, 1934, by Jack Kahane at the Obe lisk Press with money provided
by Anais Nin, given to her by Otto Rank.24 Obscenity laws in
England and the United States prohibited publication, but "potentially
'ob scene' books could be published in France if they were in
English."25 The cover of the first edition was designed by
Kahane's sixteen-year-old son to save money. It showed "a crab crushing a
nude female in its claws,"26 and Miller thought it was
"horrible." The jacket carried a warning to booksellers that Cancer
"must not be displayed in the window."27
Notes
1. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, ed. by George Wickes (New York: New
Directions, 1989), p. 15.
2. Erica Jong, The Devil at Large (New York: Turtle Bay, 1993), p.
21; see J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993).
3. Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright (Santa Barbara: Capra Press,
1978), p. 139: Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 14^; Mary V. Dearborn, Henry Miller (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 108; and the account in Louise DeSalvo,
Conceived with Malice (New York: Dutton, 1994).
4. Ferguson, p. 81.
5. Jong, p. 55.
6. Martin, p. 18, p. 129; Dearborn, pp. 100-1; Henry Miller, My Life and
Times (New York: Playboy Press, n.d.), p. 33.
7. For accounts of this event, see Martin, p. 520; Dearborn, p. 323; Miller,
My Life and Times, p. 50.
8. Henry Miller, Moloch (New York: Grove Press, 1992), p. 8.
9. Ferguson, p. 208.
10. Alfred Perles, My Friend Henry Miller (New York: John Day, 1956),
p. 70; Wambly Bald quoted in Ferguson, pp. 210-11.
11. See the account in Perles.
12. Perles, pp. 70-1.
13. Perles, p. 70.
14. Perles, p. 72.
15. See Noel Riley Fitch, "The Literate Passion of Anais Nin & Henry
Miller," in Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds..
Significant Others (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), pp. 155-72.
16. Fitch, p. 155; see the account of Miller's writing Crazy Cock in
DeSalvo.
17. Anais Nin, Henry and June (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1986), p. 6.
18. Anais Nin, Ladders to Fire, in Cities of the Interior
(Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1959, 1975), p. 48.
19. See Dearborn, p. 128, н. 149.
xx
20. Miller, Moloch, p. 65.
21. Ferguson, p. 69.
22. Perles, p. 112.
23. Ferguson, p. 181.
24. Martin, p. 303; Dearborn, p. 175.
25. Jong, p. 132.
26. Martin, p. 303.
27. Perles, p. 104.
28. Martin, p. 303.
29. Perles, p. 104; Dearborn, p. 173.
30. Perles, p. 142; Cendrars's review is provided in George Wickes, ed..
Henry Miller and the Critics (Carbondale: Southern Il linois
University Press, 1963).
31. Perles, p. 171; Ferguson, p. 346.
32. Dearborn, p. 241.
33. Perles, pp. 205-6.
34. Ferguson, p. 344.
35. Ferguson, p. 345.
36. Ferguson, p. 348.
37. Ferguson, p. 350.
38. Millett quoted in Jong, p. 29.
39. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin: 1931-1934, Volume One. ed. and
with an Introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1966), p. 66.
40. Dearborn, p. 34.
41. Jong, p. 26.
42. Jong, p. 26.
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Анекдот
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У каждой женщины должно быть пять мужчин!
Первый мужчина - это друг, которому все рассказывают, но ничего не показывают.
Второй мужчина - это любовник, которому все показывают, но ничего не рассказывают.
Третий мужчина - это муж, которому немного показывают и немного рассказывают.
Четвертый мужчина - это гинеколог, которому все рассказывают и все показывают.
Пятый мужчина - это начальник, который как сказал так и будет! |
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