Showing posts with label Brassaï. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brassaï. Show all posts

Monday, November 3, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 59 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)



The 100 best novels

written in English

No 59

 Tropic of Cancer

by Henry Miller (1934)


The US novelist’s debut revelled in a Paris underworld of seedy sex and changed the course of the novel – though not without a fight with the censors
Robert McCrum
Monday 3 November 2014

W
hen the English, later the American, novel began in the late 17th century, it was profoundly associated with transgression. John Bunyan (No 1 in this series) wrote in prison. Daniel Defoe (No 2) was put in the stocks. Writers of all sorts were seen (and saw themselves) as outsiders, renegades and troublemakers, an important theme in the history of the English novel. The more professional novelists became, with audiences to please, the further they moved from their reprobate origins. So it’s good, as we move deeper into the 20th century, to find a writer such as Henry Miller disrupting the still waters of convention with shock and outrage.
In American literature, the renegade strand had found its richest expression in the genius Mark Twain, who went out of his way to oppose the “genteel tradition” of Emerson and Longfellow. By the 20th century, however, the renegade frontier was to be found not in the wild west, but in Paris. Miller, the down-and-out literary enragé, revelled in a new frontier of seedy desperation, where there were “prostitutes like wilted flowers and pissoirs filled with piss-soaked bread”. He and his muse Anaïs Nin flourished here – resolute, isolated and stoical in pursuit of their new aesthetic. Nin memorably recalled that, while her lover was mellow in his speech, there was always a “small, round, hard photographic lens in his blue eyes”.The shabby, 38-year-old American with unblinking camera vision who arrived on the Left Bank of Paris in 1930 was the quintessence of abject failure. All he had going for him was creative rage, mixed with the artistic vision of the truly avant garde. “I start tomorrow on the Paris book,” wrote Henry Miller. “First person, uncensored, formless – fuck everything!”
Henry Miller
Photo by Brassaï

Miller was as good as his word, within the opening pages of the novel whose working title was “Crazy Cock”, he was celebrating Tania’s “warm cunt”, declaring that he “will ream out every wrinkle” with his “prick six inches long”. His obsessive reporting of his sexual exploits, and his low-life rootlessness, is the novel’s subject (there is no plot), a merciless assault on convention. Next to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and even Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Miller’s visceral candour was off the charts of contemporary taste, in tone as much as language. Miller’s delight in rubbing the reader’s face in filth was intoxicating and influential. His “fuck everything” would inspire Kerouac, Genet, Burroughs, Mailer and Ginsberg, among others. Not bad for a man who had once written: “Why does nobody want what I write?”


A note on the text

Miller’s sprawling masterpiece was launched by the Obelisk Press, a French publisher of soft pornography as Tropic of Cancer, with a cover by Maurice Girodias, who would later become famous as the leading French publisher of erotic literature. Wrapped in an explicit warning (“Not to be imported into Great Britain or USA”), it set a new gold standard for graphic language and explicit sexuality. From the outset, Miller’s “barbaric yawp” shook US censorship and inflamed American literary sensibility to its core. Tropic would remain banned for a generation, by which time it had become part of postwar cultural folklore, smuggled into the US wrapped in scarves and underwear. Rarely has a book had such thrilling and desperate underground beginnings.
The outsider status of Miller’s novel combined with its subject (life and love at the extremes of existence) recommended the book to writers like Orwell and Beckett. In his essay Inside the Whale (1940), Orwell wrote: “I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least Tropic of Cancer. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory ... Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.”
For his part Samuel Beckett described it as “a momentous event in the history of modern writing”. In the US, as an outright challenge to the censor, Edmund Wilson noted that “The tone of the book is undoubtedly low. Tropic of Cancer... is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I ever remember to have read.”
Miller’s vision prevailed, in the end. Finally, in 1961, the year after Lady Chatterley’s Lover secured the right to be published in the UK, Tropic of Cancer triumphed in its battle with the US censor and was published by the Grove Press. The timing of this landmark verdict did not favour the ageing iconoclast. At first, his book was treated as the fruit of Miller’s complex relationship with Anaïs Nin, who was an object of veneration within the American feminist movement. Later, feminists like Kate Millett denounced Miller as a male chauvinist, while Jeanette Winterson asked, perceptively: “Why do men revel in the degradation of women?” This question still hangs over the pages of Tropic like a rebuke, but (with a few misgivings) I’m still going to add it to this series.

Three more from Henry Miller

Black Spring (1936); The Tropic of Capricorn (1939); Sexus (1949).



THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

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Friday, July 20, 2012

Brassaï on Henry Miller




Brassaï on Henry Miller

The Hungarian photographer, Brassa (whose real name was Gyula Halász), is one of my favourite artists (and a huge print of one of his most celebrated photographs — Les Escaliers de Montmartre — hangs in our dining room). But I had no idea he could write — until I stumbled on his book,¨Henry Miller: The Paris Years. It’s a startlingly illuminating and well-written book about a writer who was one of the photographer’s closest friends in Paris in the inter-war years, and who — until now — has always been an enigma to me.
Here’s how it opens:
“How does your memory of this compare with yours? I seem to see you standing in the Gutter at the Dome, a l’angle de la rue Delambre et Blvd Montparnasse… You had a newspaper in your hand. You told us you have begun to practice photography. It may have been the year 1931. The spot where you stood I see so vividly that I could draw a circle around it.” In a letter to me, this is how Henry Miller recalled our first meeting. “It’s strange”, he told me, “but with most people we remember neither where nor under shat circumstances we met. But I remember the first time you and I met as if it were yesterday.”
My memory doesn’t quite compare with his. My memory of the first time Henry and I met was that it took place in December 1930, shortly after he had arrived in France. My friend the painter Louis Tihanyi introduced us. Louis was sort of the Dome’s PR man — everyone recognised his olive green corduroy overcoat, worn to a shine, his wide-brimmed gray felt hat, his monocle, his fleshy lower lip. He was the spitting image of Alphonse XIII — minus the pencil mustache. Every night, table by table, Louis worked the crowded Dome terrace, which, beneath the luminous green shade of the trees on the boulevard, was always festive, as if every day were Bastille. Although deaf, and very nearly dumb as well, Louis was the best-informed man in Montparnasse. He knew not only every single one of the regulars, but the measure and worth of each newcomer.
“I want you to meet Henry Miller, an American writer,” he announced in his abrupt, guttural voice, which somehow always managed to make itself heard over the hum of conversation and the noise from the street”.
And there was Henry Miller. I will never forget the first sight of his rosy face emerging from a rumpled raincoat: the pouting, full lower lip, eyes the color of the sea. His eyes were like those of a sailor skilled at scanning the horizons through the spray. They always conveyed calmness and serenity, those eyes, and even though their expression seemed as guileless and attentive as a dog’s, they lay in ambush behind large tortoiseshell glasses…”.

I couldn’t put it down. It’s a fascinating blend of insight, affection, forgiveness and acuity. And, like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, it’s beautifully evocative of an astonishing period in the life of my favourite city.







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