Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller | 1961 in America; 1934 in France | Grove Press | Paperback $10
Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.”
Ugh.
I was really looking forward to reading this. With descriptions like, “A new gold standard for graphic language and explicit sexuality,” (Robert McCrum for The Guardian), “A diary of a living catastrophe,” (Ewan Morrison for The Independent), “One of the most frequently censored books in the history of American literature,” (Sherri Machlin for the New York Public Library)… I mean, who WOULDN’T be at least a little intrigued?
And if that’s ALL it was – a book banned because it was too frank about someone’s sexual activities, with too many 4-letter words – I wouldn’t have slapped a one star rating on it, even if I thought it was just boring or just annoying or just not all that interesting. The problem isn’t that I thought it was boring/annoying/uninteresting (although those things are true to some extent); the problem is that I thought it was actively offensive.
Lest you lump me in with the likes of Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno (who called the book a “cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction,” etc. when he wrote a dissenting opinion in one of the many obscenity trials involving this book), let me clarify that it wasn’t the rough language or the sexual content or the “plot” (if you can call it that) that I found offensive. It was the author’s treatment of women as objects, and the subsequent acceptance of that treatment by SO MANY of its defenders.
This is the first time I’ve absolutely hated a “banned book” and it’s a weird feeling. So before continuing on with this rant let me just clarify that I’m not advocating banning books for obscenity. Philosophically, I think it’s wrong.
However, I also think it’s wrong to sexually objectify women. Yeah, I live in the real world, I know it happens, and I know people will objectify and be objectified regardless of gender/sexual orientation/etc., and I know that an 80-some-odd year old book written by a dude is not THE place to look for feminist representation. But this book… in this book, it’s extreme and pervasive and just gross in a way that I can’t forgive.
To Miller, women are nothing but warm holes waiting to be filled (by him, naturally). Any reference to a woman that doesn’t have to do with her private bits is just a passing comment, usually scathingly negative, on her appearance or her relationships with other men, topped off with a rather sad delusion that anything a woman does – even having a private argument with her husband – is obviously just an attempt to get the author’s manly attention. And when he’s not thinking about vaginas, Miller is thinking about how awesome he is, how good of a writer he is and how shocking/impressive his book is going to be.
The entire book is nothing more than a pseudo-intellectual naval-gazing performance of toxic masculinity trash.
Even more annoyingly, most of the articles and reviews I’ve read about this book are basically just gushing over how brave Miller was to write something so “real” and plotless, reveling in the controversy and the liberal use of the c-word. Which, OK, historically it was a big deal. The role of this book in breaking down obscenity laws in the U.S. is undeniable.
However, I’m inclined to agree with Kate Millett’s assessment that the book is primarily an expression of “the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence, and the sense of filth with which our culture, or more specifically, its masculine sensibility, surrounds sexuality.” Jeanette Winterson, writing for the NYT, paraphrases Millett’s observation “that half the world has been billeted to the whorehouse,” which leads us to “[wonder] what this tells us about both Henry Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.”
I wish I could have found some truly redeeming qualities in this book. It’s a classic, it’s historically significant, it’s so very different from most of the rest of the books on my shelves. But… I just can’t.
Links:
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller on ‘The 100 Best Novels’ by Robert McCrum, The Guardian
- ‘Book Of A Lifetime: Tropic of Cancer, By Henry Miller’ by Ewan Morrison, The Independent
- ‘The Male Mystique of Henry Miller’ by Jeanette Winterson, NYT
- ‘The Tropic of Cancer: Booked for Selling a Book’ by Mary Duncan, HuffPost
- ‘Still Scandalous: Tropic of Cancer 50 Years Later’ by Aaron Wertheimer, Flavorwire
- ‘Banned Books Week: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller’ by Sherri Machlin, NYPL
Publication information: Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1961. Paperback.
Source: Personal library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
