On this day in 1986 the original manuscript of Henry
Miller's Tropic of Cancer was
auctioned for $165,000, setting a record price for a 20th century American
literary manuscript. The record has been smashed repeatedly now, but the sale stands as a vindication of
Miller’s “gob of spit in the face of Art,” and middle-class America.
Tropic of Cancer
is Miller's first novel, written during and about his penniless, bohemian years
in Paris in the early thirties. The diaries of his friend and lover, Anais Nin,
inspired him to rewrite his conventionally structured (and unsellable)
autobiographical novel, “Crazy Cock,” in diary form. When the book was
published in 1934, some near him — Nin, wife June, others companion to his
picaresque adventures — certainly felt burned by Miller's plagiarism,
distortion or hyperbole. Some were outraged by the book's smirking male
hedonism, or its egotism, but even highbrows such as T. S. Eliot expressed
admiration and wonder. Ezra Pound praised it as "a dirty book worth
reading," the Miller male a type that would outlast "the weak-minded
Woolf female." Miller himself scoffed at the sex-and-ego reading of his
book, even at the idea that Tropic of
Cancer was a book at all:
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander,
defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word.
No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the
pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Beauty. . . what you will. I am going to sing
for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you
croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse. . . .
One corpse he had in mind was America: "America will
call me the lowest of the low when they see my Cancer. What a laugh I'll have when they begin to spit and fume. I
hope they'll learn something about death and futility, about hope, etc. I won't
give them a fucking leg to stand on." Miller no doubt had his laugh,
though he died six years before the manuscript’s record-setting sale, and two
decades before his novel made the best-of-century lists.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in
the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's,
Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated
nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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