. Spinning .

When I finished that last post I moved along into housework and such, wondering how I could be so flippant about a piece of work that’s considered a classic.  I do understand the notion of classics not necessarily being known as such for particularly fine writing skill and so on.  And I realize that with the passing of time, that which was once extraordinary may lose its luster.  I suppose this work of Henry Miller and others of the same style broke ground in their banning and acceptance due to language in particular.  That, and in the view of an American in Paris that shows a seemier side of the city, a true love/hate relationship that stirs the soul.

How unrighteously snobbish of me to assume that because the writer/narrator was no one I particularly cared for, I dug no deeper into his words.  Offered no insight aside from a few postings on story and writing style.  Then again, I am but one reader and certainly entitled to my own reaction.  If I have failed to ferret out the extraordinary in this novel, I have not offended by taking anything away from the book or its ultimate readers.  Very simply, I was not moved to uncover, to find any more than what was served up to me easily.  My loss, if any.

Some points of interest…

Some seemingly philosophical soliloquies on the state of mankind, the government, and God.

The idea of combining fact with fiction on such a personal level that the narrator is once referred to as "Henry" and why perhaps this choice was made to publish this as a novel.  Embellishment of truth, perhaps, and yet it makes one wary of trusting the author/first person narrator.

A rather stinky ending, just when the story seemed to follow something concrete and linear as opposed to freeloading and free wandering adventures.  Though I cannot truly say I expected any more than this out of this character, he does still disappoint.  I think that my near dislike of him as someone of any substance prevented me from closer reading the the few areas–such as those mentioned above where imagery and metaphor and symbolism appear to collide.  But then again, perhaps not. 

All in all, while I can understand the freedom of language and randomness of thought, the almost anti-American tone and making Paris both a beauty and a beast, I’m glad to say I’m finally done with it and place it back upon the shelf.

Miller’s character has been one filled with low regard for women–notwithstanding the obvious explanation that he is hanging out with whores.  But there is a subtle empathy here:

When I listen to the reproaches that are leveled against a girl like Lucienne, when I hear her being denigrated or despised because she is cold and mercenary, because she is too mechanical, or because she’s in too great a hurry, or ecause this or because that, I say to myself, hold on there bozo, not so fast!  Remember that you’re far back in the procession; remember that a whole army corp has laid siege to her, that she’s been laid waste, plundered and pillaged. (p. 160)

I think that this ‘empathy’ begins only out of seeing how much worse his fellow friends hold whores in their regard that brings the narrator on the other side, even for an instant.  It is not quite enough for me to begin to like him.  There is no real dislike of the character (based upon Miller’s own), and yet he comes off a bit flat with random ravings on the philosophical state of mankind.  It is for me a trial to listen to him; a young know-it-all who thinks he is in the hub of life because it is the backstreets of Paris he scrounges.  Yet this writer does not write–except about himself it would seem, and his friends.  To be poor in Paris is romantic; to be poor elsewhere is to be hard up.

Our young man gets a job as a proofreader, and his outlook changes, his spirits are lifted.

I had to travel precisely all around the world to find just such a comfortable, agreeable niche as this.  It seems incredible almost.  How could I have foreseen, in America, with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes?  Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day.  Potentially every man is Presidential timber.  Here it’s different.  Here every man is potentially a zero.  If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle. (…)

But it’s just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.  Day by day.  No yesterdays and no tomorrows.  The barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast.  (p. 150)

Eternal pessimist that I am, I like this type of thinking.  It’s the "I’ve been down so long it looks like up to me" attitude that brings some of us over the fences, up the hills, stumbling toward the finish line.

It is an odd philosophy of life this, but then, the land of milk and honey is a myth and not more than one  out of thousands of Bay City, Michigan little girls grows up to be Madonna. When you’ve never held a rose, the little violet is astonishing. Think about this: "But it’s just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here. 

It is a matter of perception based on experience that determines expectations that are realistic.  Maybe it is the opposite of dreaming, and for many, dreams are what keep them alive.  Many achieve their dreams, or a reasonable facsimile.  Many more never do, for dreams and hopes do not pay college tuition, win lottery tickets, or charm George Clooney into a marriage proposal.  Time and space play a large part, as to opportunity and ambition.  Just because you’ve the confidence to believe in yourself and think you’re good, doesn’t mean you are.

The strange thing about this in our narrator is that when he adopts this perspective, he becomes happier, recognizing that while he is in miserable circumstances, he is still one step above bottom ground.

We naturally recall other readings when we come across something similar, and one would think that these two books are just about opposites but then, there’s much that’s relative to both.

In Perfect Example, John Porcellino portrays his own adolescence in a short graphic novel that focuses on his  difficulty in understanding the transition from child to adult.  Miller’s Tropic of Cancer’s narrator is older, but does as well have many of the same questions about life as Porcellino’s character.  What’s interesting, is the way each puts into words–and in Porcellino’s case, graphic images–their wonderings and insights.

Here’s some from Miller:

In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane.  And like those frost patterns which seem to bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws.  My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambiance which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends. (p. 95)

And here’s Porcellino:

And somehow we ended up at the place where he worked.  So I went inside.  I was wandering back and forth–the faces of people and things around me; there were lights–but I didn’t see them.  Sounds–but I didn’t hear them.   Because I saw then that life is like a dream.  (The Fourth of July)

Porcellino’s words are enhanced by images:  The faces of the people are disembodied, in many panels, John is tiny in comparison to the expanse of world around him.  In this particular scene, John floats alone towards a star, the people gone from his world.  In the final panel, even John does not exist in a world where a crescent moon and single star float about the ocean waves.

Miller’s character feels he sees everything with crystal clarity, in contrast to John’s image of life as a dream:

And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed.  In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated.  The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything.

Miller’s character is a writer, therefore with more of a tendency to provide the imagery that Porcellino creates with his drawings, thus allowing the text to be of a simpler and yet no less dramatic form.

There are reasons I’m forcing myself to read this, just as I had with Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Admittedly, I go a few pages at a time with days in between pages.  It’s tough reading and not particularly engrossing as far as character or story, but there are some wondrous passages hidden within the lazy ease of a young writer with too much free time and not enough ambition who seeks out the inner forces beneath the grimy crust of his friends. 

Still in the concert scene, the narrator is moved by the experience–both the music and the intermission–to closely observe the audience with a heightened awareness that appears to draw forth his creative nature making things not as they may be:

My thoughts are spreading. The music is slipping away from me, now that the drums have ceased. People everywhere are composed to order. Under the exit light is a Werther sunk in despair; he is leaning on his two elbows,his eyes are glazed. Near the door, huddled in a big cape, stands a Spaniard with a sombrero in his hand.  He looks as if he were posing for the "Balzac" of Rodin. From the neck up he suggests Buffalo Bill. In the gallery opposite me, in the front row, sits a woman with her legs spread wide apart; she looks as though she had lockjaw, with her neck thrown back and dislocated. The woman with the red hat who is dozing over the rail–marvelous if she were to have a hemorrhage! If suddenly she spilled a bucketful on those stiff shirts below. Imagine these bloody no-accounts going home from the concert with blood on their dickies!  (p. 77)

Fired up by the Spanish number, does he truly see a man with a cape and sombrero?  We get this image, but we are then told he reminds the narrator of Balzac and Buffalo Bill.  What we’re getting here is the excitement of spirit riled up by live perfomance.  I get that way at a Willie concert.  The narrator’s imagination carries the present into possible scenarios (I go there too, watching Willie).  They are extremes, so in this episode, he has been sufficiently excited to project his thoughts onto the real members of the audience (I tend to shut out the audience, the stage crew, the other band members…).

This isn’t just an invitation to trip along with the narrator.  It tells us as much about him as about what he is thinking.

No, I didn’t put this down yet.  Slugging my way through and came across something nice:

Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people’s faces.  A polite form of self-imposed torture, the concert.  For a moment, when the conductor raps with his little wand there is a tense spasm of concentration followed almost immediately be a general slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the steady, uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra.  My mind is curiously alert; it’s as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it.  My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water.  I’ve never been to a concert before on such an empty belly.  Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling.  It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards.  I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations.  How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place.  (p. 74)

It continues on, perhaps a bit too long, but the idea is clear that the sudden hush of the audience, the expectant air just prior to the opening notes of the concert are felt within the narrator’s whole sense of being. 

Yet it’s not the sounds of anticipation, the rustlings of audience members settling into their seats, the test notes of the players that he mentions.  And it’s not the much beyond the visibility of the bored faces.  It’s a visceral effect that the environment has on him.  The lighting  he does not see with his eyes but with his gizzards.  Why is he absorbing so much of what is around him?  Is this his nature?  Is this transition we see just one example of a good scenario after he’s absorbed so much of the fetid atmosphere in which he’s been living? 

Up to this point I did not like this narrator/protagonist much, felt he was aimless and a bit of a sponge.  He brought to my mind the spoiled schoolboys of an earlier era who welched on deals, lived on family allowances, drained his friends who were often not much better off.  Here he seems to redeem himself in that he is open to the good that mankind has produced, that there is a new sense of optimism that may push him into producing artistically what he is taking from this experience.

I certainly hope so.

I’m wondering if some so-named literary classics must be read for that which gave them their standing.  In other words, what made them exploratory and outstanding in their time, even though it no longer appeals for that reason.  As, by the way, would anything that is groundbreaking once the ground is broken. 

I’m going to give Tropic of Cancer fifty more pages (beyond the ten I struggled through today) to convince me it’s worth reading for itself, not for its impact on the literary world. 

The narrative pace here is fairly boppin’ along, despite my own limited attention given the book.  There is, however, very little happening.  What we’ve been served is the narrator’s perceptions of his surroundings and his friends and lovers.  All of which, by the way, he seems to have a low opinion. 

It’s imagery then that is moving the story along.  Miller does give some intense description as I’ve noted in a prior post.  Here’s a more pleasant side of Paris:

Easter came in like a frozen hare–but it was fairly warm in bed.  Today it is lovely again and along the Champs-Elysees at twilight it is like an outdoor seraglio choked with dark-eyed houris.

There is that poor little rich kid attitude in this novel, as there were many of this era.  Either as students at university or young adults roaming the underbelly of Europe, these characters are aching for something, yet by seeing all they do in the rough streets of the outer city, they easily are bored.  The fire  that burns for knowledge, for writing, becomes sharpened and honed yet rounded by use eventually.

There is a conflict here of seeking, of struggle, and yet it is a vulgarity of choice.  The narrator himself recognizes this.

As for Carl, he’s not himself these days.  He’s upset, his nerves are jangled.  He says he’s ill, and I believe him, but I don’t feel badly about it.  I can’t.  In fact, it makes me laugh.

Let me begin by advising you to put down that slice of pizza before you read this.  I made the mistake of eating just that and while my ironclad stomach was fine, I found myself making some bleh lip movements and much nose wrinkling.

On a Sunday afternoon, when the shutters are down and the proletariat possesses the street in a kind of dumb torpor, there are certain thoroughfares which remind one of nothing less than a big chancrous cock laid open longitudinally.  And it is just these highways, the Rue St. Denis, for instance, or the Faubourg du Temple–which attract one irresistibly, much as in the old days, around Union Square or the upper reaches of the Bowery, one was drawn to the dime museums where in the show windows there were displayed wax reproductions of various organs of the body eaten away by syphilis and other venereal diseases.  The city sprouts out like a huge organism diseased in every part, the beautiful thoroughfares only a little less repulsive because they have been drained of their pus.  (p. 40)

What cracks me up is again looking at the back cover blurbs:

"…a rush of spirit into the world as though all the sparkling wines have been uncorked." — William H. Gass, the New York Times Book Review

"Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities."  — Anais Nin

Uh, I don’t agree.  And it’s not the language the author uses, highly sexually oriented and in a low-opinionated way, but rather the rather depressing and dirty vision he sees and relates via the narrator.  C’mon, no one can say that pus, even as a white blood cell reaction to fighting disease, is not a nasty thing.

A point made in this observation of Paris and New York however is that it is attractive to people; it attracts them to itself, this sliced-open cock of a street.  What’s Miller telling us about human nature?

Had to laugh when in my weblog reading this morning I found at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading today’s posting of a review of Elizabeth Landensen’s Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita.  Curiosity had me linking through to check the Contents page of the book and I found this:

CHAPTER SIX: Henry Miller: A Gob of Spit in the Face of Art  p. 157 

Yesterday’s posting here on my reading:

It’s the tendency to spit in the face of tradition, reminiscent of the first papers submitted in a Creative Writing class with their overdoses of angry sex and bad words included just for effect.

There is a feeling to this novel, or perhaps just my reaction to the narrator, that nothing matters.  I get the impression that the narrator is what becomes the stereotypical starving artist, caring desperately for mankind and earth and caring for nothing at all.

While I am not shocked at the language of this book–I’ve read this and more–I’m sure it knocked a few noses out of joint in its time.  There’s no real feeling however behind the character’s disgust with his friends, people who are not his friends, women he screws and those he hasn’t.  There is an equal disgust for all and everything.  Paris is great, Paris sucks.

In the little garden adjoining the Eglise St. Germain are a few dismounted gargoyles  Monsters that jut forward with a terrifying plunge.  On the benches, other monsters–old people, idiots, cripples, epileptics.  Snoozing there quietly, waiting for the dinner bell to ring.  (p. 38)

There’s some nice writing, yet it appears to me immature.  It’s the tendency to spit in the face of tradition, reminiscent of the first papers submitted in a Creative Writing class with their overdoses of angry sex and bad words included just for effect.

I strongly suspect that this classic, more than most, has its effect based in the time it is read.

I’m getting the feeling that I’m going to be hopping from book to weblog posting on this novel.  I love this:

"To be sure," says Boris, with a twinkle in his eye, "but, in the wintertime he writes.  And he writes well…remarkably well."

I try to induce Mr. Wren to talk, to say something, anything, to talk about the spavined horse, if necessary.  But Mr. Wren is inarticulate.  When he essays to speak of those dreary months with the pen he becomes unintelligible.  Months and months he spends before setting a word to paper.  (And there are only three months of winter!)  What does he cogitate all those months and months of winter?  So help me God, I can’t see this guy as a writer.  Yet Mrs. Wren says that when he sits down to it the stuff just pours out.  (p. 14)

Sorry, but I’m immediately sympathetic to the tongue-tied Mr. Wren. Had e-mail and weblogs been available thirty years earlier I might have been considered quite eloquent a ‘speaker.’

So in between the writing I’m trying to catch up on my reading and have once more picked up Miller’s novel and opened to this:

It looks as though it were finished, my life at the Villa Borghese.  Well, I’ll take up these pages and move on.  Things will happen elsewhere.  Things are always happening.  It seems wherever I go there is drama.  People are like lice–they get under your skin and bury themselves there.  You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get permanently deloused.  Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives.  Everyone has his private tragedy.  It’s in the blood now–misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide.  The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility.  Scratch and scratch–until there’s no skin left.  However, the effect upon me is exhilarating.  Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it.  I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures.  I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.  (p. 12)

Wow.  I love the honesty, the insightful acknowledgement of what is really the nature of man as it persists through his evolution (and dissolution by civilization, I might add). 

Close to the cliche’ that people ‘get under your skin’, it is more, it is man’s inability to live as an island, foregoing contact and thus caring for another human being or even for the human race as he "scratches until there’s no skin left."  Problems–no, the inevitability of problems–will always torture man’s mind and soul, and how he perceives them and eventually handles them is what the narrator is describing here.

The narrator is also a writer so his taste for drama and extremes will be part of that search for the best, the worst, the most dangerous, most lustful and sinful of experiences.

After already having described the world as "a cancer eating itself away," this likening to human beings as lice is very likely what put many in a frame of mind to dislike this novel.  Somehow I don’t see the back cover review by William H. Gass (The New York Times) as accurate just yet. Part of his statement is "There is an eager vitality and exuberance to the writing which is exhilarating…"  Yes, it’s written with almost a mad exuberance, an all encompassing determination yet at this point, it is still, for me, a downer. 

Not Miller’s novel, certainly, but rather my own small allowance of reading time since I’ve been writing my fool head off the last two months. 

And it’s not the colorful language and topic that has put me off–although it did sort of jolt me out of the somber beauty of the holiday week.

I shall be reading more soon.  I must say that the little I did read did impress me with the poetic quality of the prose.