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HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
A Flamingo Modern Classic 1993
First published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) Limited 1963
Copyright © Obelisk Press, Paris 1934
ISBN 0 00 654583 1
'These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating
books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how
to record truth truly.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt
anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are
dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his
armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy
in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have
known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the
lice.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather
prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more
calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a
change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes
have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is
not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward
the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a
reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man
alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no
longer think about it, I
am.
Everything that was literature has fallen
from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
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 to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, 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…
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of
lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an
accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to
want
to sing. This then
is a song. I am singing.
It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better,
more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented
to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you
cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough.
It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep track of
the date. Would you say – my dream of the 14th November last?
There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no
consciousness of them left. The world around me is dissolving,
leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself
away… I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all
and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of
time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is
the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is
why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of
time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.
Dozing off. The physiology of love. The whale with his six-foot
penis, in repose. The bat –
penis libre.
Animals with a bone in the
penis. Hence,
a bone on …
"Happily," says Gourmont, "the bony
structure is lost in man." Happily? Yes, happily. Think of the human
race walking around with a bone on. The kangaroo has a double penis
– one for weekdays and one for holidays. Dozing. A letter from a
female asking if I have found a title for my book. Title? To be sure:
"Lovely Lesbians."
Your anecdotal life!
A phrase of M. Borowski's. It is on Wednesdays
that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who is a dried-up cow,
officiates. She is studying English now – her favorite word is "filthy."
You can see immediately what a pain in the ass the Borowskis are.
But wait …
Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion. An
invincible combination, especially when you consider that he is not a
bad artist. He puts on that he is a Pole, but he is not, of course. He is a
Jew, Borowski, and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all
Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse. There's Carl
and Paula, and Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and
Moldorf and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald
turned out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden
and Chérie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a
Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am writing this for my
friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important to understand.
Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would
become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly
as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and
liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès. The long
caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not
Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the
cities of Europe and Central America. The railroad yards below me,
the tracks black, webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic
in design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the camera
registers in degrees of black.
Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this beautiful
Villa Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence of food. It is
positively appalling at times. I have asked Boris time and again to
order bread for breakfast, but he always forgets. He goes out for
breakfast, it seems. And when he comes back he is picking his teeth
and there is a little egg hanging from his goatee. He eats in the
restaurant out of consideration for me. He says it hurts to eat a big
meal and have me watch him.
I like Van Norden but I do not share his opinion of himself. I do not
agree, for instance, that he is a philosopher, or a thinker. He is
cunt-struck, that's all. And he will never be a writer. Nor will
Sylvester ever be a writer, though his name blaze in 50,000-candle-
power red lights. The only writers about me for whom I have any
respect, at present, are Carl and Boris. They are possessed. They glow
inwardly with a white flame. They are mad and tone deaf. They are
sufferers.
Moldorf, on the other hand, who suffers too in his peculiar way, is
not mad. Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or blood vessels, no
heart or kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable
drawers and in the drawers are labels written out in white ink, brown
ink, red ink, blue ink, vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot,
turquoise, onyx, Anjou, herring, Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola…
I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I can see
myself in the mirror as I write.
Tania is like Irène. She expects fat letters. But there is another Tania,
a Tania like a big seed who scatters pollen everywhere – or, let us say,
a little bit of Tolstoy, a stable scene in which the fetus is dug up. Tania
is a fever, too –
les voies urinaires,
Café de la Liberté, Place des
Vosges, bright neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark
bathrooms, Porto Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata
Pathétique,
aural amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt sienna
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HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
A Flamingo Modern Classic 1993
First published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) Limited 1963
Copyright © Obelisk Press, Paris 1934
ISBN 0 00 654583 1
'These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating
books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how
to record truth truly.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt
anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are
dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his
armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy
in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have
known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the
lice.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather
prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more
calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a
change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes
have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is
not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward
the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a
reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man
alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no
longer think about it, I
am.
Everything that was literature has fallen
from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
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 to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, 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…
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of
lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an
accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to
want
to sing. This then
is a song. I am singing.
It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better,
more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented
to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you
cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough.
It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep track of
the date. Would you say – my dream of the 14th November last?
There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no
consciousness of them left. The world around me is dissolving,
leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself
away… I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all
and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of
time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is
the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is
why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of
time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.
Dozing off. The physiology of love. The whale with his six-foot
penis, in repose. The bat –
penis libre.
Animals with a bone in the
penis. Hence,
a bone on …
"Happily," says Gourmont, "the bony
structure is lost in man." Happily? Yes, happily. Think of the human
race walking around with a bone on. The kangaroo has a double penis
– one for weekdays and one for holidays. Dozing. A letter from a
female asking if I have found a title for my book. Title? To be sure:
"Lovely Lesbians."
Your anecdotal life!
A phrase of M. Borowski's. It is on Wednesdays
that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who is a dried-up cow,
officiates. She is studying English now – her favorite word is "filthy."
You can see immediately what a pain in the ass the Borowskis are.
But wait …
Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion. An
invincible combination, especially when you consider that he is not a
bad artist. He puts on that he is a Pole, but he is not, of course. He is a
Jew, Borowski, and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all
Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse. There's Carl
and Paula, and Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and
Moldorf and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald
turned out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden
and Chérie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a
Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am writing this for my
friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important to understand.
Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would
become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly
as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and
liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès. The long
caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not
Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the
cities of Europe and Central America. The railroad yards below me,
the tracks black, webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic
in design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the camera
registers in degrees of black.
Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this beautiful
Villa Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence of food. It is
positively appalling at times. I have asked Boris time and again to
order bread for breakfast, but he always forgets. He goes out for
breakfast, it seems. And when he comes back he is picking his teeth
and there is a little egg hanging from his goatee. He eats in the
restaurant out of consideration for me. He says it hurts to eat a big
meal and have me watch him.
I like Van Norden but I do not share his opinion of himself. I do not
agree, for instance, that he is a philosopher, or a thinker. He is
cunt-struck, that's all. And he will never be a writer. Nor will
Sylvester ever be a writer, though his name blaze in 50,000-candle-
power red lights. The only writers about me for whom I have any
respect, at present, are Carl and Boris. They are possessed. They glow
inwardly with a white flame. They are mad and tone deaf. They are
sufferers.
Moldorf, on the other hand, who suffers too in his peculiar way, is
not mad. Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or blood vessels, no
heart or kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable
drawers and in the drawers are labels written out in white ink, brown
ink, red ink, blue ink, vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot,
turquoise, onyx, Anjou, herring, Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola…
I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I can see
myself in the mirror as I write.
Tania is like Irène. She expects fat letters. But there is another Tania,
a Tania like a big seed who scatters pollen everywhere – or, let us say,
a little bit of Tolstoy, a stable scene in which the fetus is dug up. Tania
is a fever, too –
les voies urinaires,
Café de la Liberté, Place des
Vosges, bright neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark
bathrooms, Porto Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata
Pathétique,
aural amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt sienna
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