Tag: 1930s

Henry Miller, ‘Tropic of Cancer’

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Any article on the internet listing the most influential novels of the 20th century is sure to include Henry Miller’s 1934 work Tropic of Cancer. At the centre of a high-profile obscenity trial, the book challenged the literary status quo and revolutionised the canon, toppling regulations surrounding literature deemed ‘acceptable’ to print. In this way, Miller helped expand the breadth of authorial voice, allowing authors to write about, amongst other subjects, the sexual realm, with a newfound confidence and transparency. 

I found the opening few pages of the text to be engaging but quite overwhelming. The narrator (who we later found out is Miller himself) flitters from one thought to another: the essence of the book he is writing, his love interest, Tania, the Villa Borghese and animal genitalia are each considered within a few pages. In the first paragraph, the reader is introduced to the kind of ‘honest’ carnality that features throughout. Miller writes candidly about happenings with his roommate: ‘Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits … . We might never have known each so intimately.. had it not been for the lice’. Unfiltered and unashamed. But the opening section is integral in other ways. The essential philosophy of the text is expressed in another frank admission: ‘I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive’. Celebrated here is the now clichéd motto of ‘living in the moment’. ‘Hope’ is imagined as a destabilising instinct that rejects the present in favour of an unforeseen, incalculable future. Rather than being fettered by expectation, one should ‘seize the day’. The quote also captures the anti-materialist spirit that runs throughout the book. For Miller, the trappings of bourgeoise life are heavy and repressive; he experiences the most profound sense of freedom when he is destitute. 

“Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy”.

As aforementioned, the style of writing is raw and the subject matter is often brazen. Miller roams through seedy Parisian side-streets, meeting drunkards, prostitutes and down-and-outs, but also spends time with wealthy and morally reprehensible expats. He records his encounters in a visceral and graphic manner that echoes Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Nonetheless, there is also a clear poeticism to the prose – a graceful and imaginative quality that is almost incongruous with the carnal themes. Take these two sentences, for example:

‘In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled; along the beach at Montparnasse the water lilies bend and break. When the tide is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the muck, the Dôme looks like a shooting gallery that’s been struck by a cyclone’. 

A notable structural feature is the abrupt – and often confusing – diatribes that crop up during the text. These enraged, philosophical passages on the human condition break out suddenly during episodes, emphasising the need to find freedom from overbearing power structures. 

Rather than focus on humankind’s goodness, Miller takes base desires and instincts as his loci. In a self-reflexive passage that foreshadows the novel’s publishing difficulties, he writes: ‘If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what really is his experience, what truly is his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens’. Throughout the narrative he depicts his friends and acquaintances in a stark light, exposing their faults and selfish inclinations; Fillmore, for example, leaves his pregnant (and physically abusive) wife Ginette in Paris and escapes to America; Van Norden demonstrates a rampant, destructive sexuality. Rather than impose narratorial judgment, Miller merely paints them for what they are and recedes. There is no moralising or sermonising, but instead an admission that human nature contains an inherently dark streak, an ignobility that George Orwell recognised when he wrote of Miller: ‘“He knows all about me” you feel’. 

The novel is also controversial in that it espouses a patriarchal world-view, one in which women are sexually objectified and frequently referred to as ‘cunts’. Even the female characters afforded greater character development fit a range of derogatory stereotypes: seductress (Tania), abusive wife (Ginette), femme fatale (Yvette). Anti-semitism is similarly rife in the text; Jews are repeatedly insulted and singled out for their unethical behaviour. The representation of the hostile Rabbi, who turns away Miller and his associate when they are destitute, encapsulates this xenophobic spirit. Consequently, a key tension when reading the novel is how to reconcile Miller’s brave attack on social – particularly sexual – mores with his more regressive and troubling views. 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Louis MacNiece, 1930’s Poetry and Jack Lindsay’s ‘not english?’

‘Poetry today should steer a course between pure entertainment (“escape poetry”) and propaganda […] The writer today should not be so much a mouthpiece of his community (for then he will only tell it what it knows already) as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct’. So wrote the esteemed poet Louis MacNiece at the back-end of the ‘Red Decade’. Although MacNeice believed it fundamental that the poet engage with topical socio-political developments, he was critical of the form being used merely as a vehicle for propaganda. Lindsay’s mass declamations, including ‘not english?’, defied these assertions by espousing marxist discourse, and contributing to the emergence of a popular front.

Jack Lindsay’s poem of 1936, ‘not english?’, debunks myths surrounding national identity, exposing the ‘english’ as an exploited race at the behest of the ruling-classes. With a mixture of lament and condemnation, Lindsay recalls the men who were manipulated into fighting:

‘All you that went forth, lured by great-sounding names

which glittered like bubbles of crystals in your eyes

till they burst and you burst with them’

The names of prominent politicians, and indeed the rhetoric they propagate – jingoistic nationalism – entice the working-class with grand claims and false promises. Eventually, the ‘bubbles of crystals’ dissipate, and the hollow essence of patriotic spirit is realised, breaking the illusion. War in the name of nationhood, brings only death to the ‘english’, whilst society’s governing forces – the merchant, the capitalist – grow ever wealthier. History is merely a collection of rubbish piles, in which the forgotten dead are piled up, a counter-image to the notion of historical progress. Lindsay powerfully evokes the waste of lives experienced in the Great War, grimly noting that ‘Flanders mud flakes off the latest dump’ (23). Despite this injustice, the dominant ideology secures its consent to rule through the superstructure, ‘providing dope’ (35) to the people and alienating them from reality. In particular, popular cultural forms like the ‘pictures’ (34) and ‘national newspapers’ (36), render the working-classes unconscious. England, an idyllic, pastoral environment, has been robbed from the men who give their name to the land. The poem envisages change in the form of collective action, impelling the subjugated to ‘depart from its rulers, to abandon traditional epistemologies (common sense), to reorientate itself through tumult and transition’. Lindsay’s concern with unearthing the dominant ideologies’ corruptive workings indicates he is a poet in the mould MacNeice advocates, an insightful agent of the community. He proposes the re-appropriation of english identity, whereby ‘unity is born from the sweat of mingled toil’ (186), and togetherness, not enslavement, is the underlying feature. In this way, the text’s communist and nationalist impulses are reconciled.

In ‘not english?’, the radical individuals and movements of English history are appropriated, and a historical tradition for the Left to inherit is forged. The middle-section details a lengthy historical procession, in which instances like the 1381 Peasants Revolt and the English Civil War are lauded as evidence of defiance against traditional forms of authority: the church and the monarchy. Common cause is found between breakaway Protestant sects and the rebellious reformists of the industrial era, ‘Anabaptists’ (84) and ‘Muggletonians’ (85) fall in behind the Chartists, who ‘sing songs of defiance on the blackened hills / invoking the storm’ (88-89). Nature submitting to, or even aiding the cause of the oppressed is a recurring motif, adding to impression that revolution is just, or even inevitable. Time vaults to the present, in which the proletariat are heralded as yet another revolutionary body who will fulfil the legacy crafted by their forebears, taking jurisdiction over England. In this way, Lindsay imposes a structure and purpose upon history. Lines from the Communist Manifesto penetrate the verse, disseminating from the radio, as a new insurgency forms. This is the ‘augural moment’ (160), vindicating Marx and the historical struggle. Doctrine echoes across the landscape of England, drawing the men from their beds in a dream-like state; the process of night becoming day is symbolic for the new level of consciousness that is reached. Once again an alternative history is posed, the industrial revolution is perceived as empowering, not undermining the workers, teaching solidarity in ‘mine and factory’ (190) and the ability to harness technology: ‘the turbines’s fury, the craft of dynamos’ (196-197). These resources, coupled with a form of eco-communism in which nature co-operates in the attack against the ruling-class, will ensure that England is returned, the ‘disinherited.. restored’ (204). The noun ‘disiniherited’ looks back to the anti-English forces of the middle section, suggesting they may finally be at peace.

The kind of community envisaged by Lindsay is decidedly male-centric. For a mass declamation designed to rally the working-class, female exclusivity is a prominent theme, part of the troubling gender politics in the work. Every historical figure referenced is male: John Ball, John Wycliffe and William Morris are signed out and commended for their resistance. They epitomise the radical, establishment defying spirit upon which ‘another England’ (189) will be founded. Anonymous peasants are too welcomed to join the parade, promoted to ‘leave the blowsy ale-wife’ (59). This kind of separation forms a darker undercurrent of the grand design; men must abandon women who are somehow morally suspect if they are to forge a new society. Indeed whilst the men march forward, female agency is mocked, and through Charles I – ‘the henpecked king’ (75) – patriarchal anxieties about authoritative female figures are realised. The obscure reference to a frightening homeless ‘woman under a bridge’ (158) reads indaequately. As the radio diffuses the rousing cries of the Communist Manifesto, bringing together the workers, she will be left behind, symbolically trapped by the bridge. Here Lindsay’s verse captures not the ‘generous instinct’ of the working-class community, but its latently patriarchal underbelly. Despite the drive towards unity, isolation evidently remains. Women are even displayed as synonymous with the corruptive essence of capitalism, advertising boards are dominated by ‘pink whore faces beckoning the bankrupt to buy’ (10). The facade of consumerism is likened to a sexually deviant woman. The poem’s conception of gender is archaic, recycling numerous derogatory archetypes associated with women in the literary tradition: femme fatale, ‘mad’ woman and adulteress. During the act of re-creating a decidedly rural England, the earth is compared to a ‘womb’ (201) yearning for the ‘seed’ (202) of men. Impregnating the maternal earth with their toil, these men are the true agents of the new world. Continue reading Louis MacNiece, 1930’s Poetry and Jack Lindsay’s ‘not english?’