Title: Tropic of Cancer Author: Henry Miller Creation Date: 1934 Location: France (Paris) Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
Tropic of Cancer was published on 1 September 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris — a publisher specialising in English-language books that could not legally be printed in Britain or America. Henry Miller was an American expatriate living in Paris on the edge of destitution, and the novel is an account of that experience: the cafés, brothels, cheap hotel rooms, borrowed meals, and sexual encounters of a man without money or prospects who has decided to live as a writer.
The American edition was published in 1961 by Grove Press under Barney Rosset. Within months, more than sixty separate obscenity prosecutions were filed. Florida declared it obscene; New Jersey police confiscated copies from bookstores. The cases eventually reached the Supreme Court in Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein (1964), which found that Tropic of Cancer was not obscene. The decision effectively ended literary obscenity prosecution in America.
The novel belongs to a tradition of autobiographical fiction — Lawrence, Céline, Dostoevsky — but largely abandons plot. It has no arc, no character development in the conventional sense, no resolution. Miller's narrator moves through Paris experiencing and describing, and the prose is rhapsodic, obscene, philosophically ambitious, and formally unprecedented. Anaïs Nin, Miller's lover and a financier of the first printing, wrote in her preface: "This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art." She meant it as praise.
The Banning
Henry Miller finished Tropic of Cancer in 1932 and could not find a publisher in New York or London. Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press in Paris published it on 1 September 1934 with a wrapper warning it was not to be imported into the United States or the United Kingdom. US Customs began seizing copies at the Port of New York within weeks; British Customs did the same at Dover. For the next twenty-seven years the book existed as contraband: passed among servicemen returning from wartime Europe, smuggled inside the jackets of other books, reprinted bootleg in Mexico and Japan. The 1950 customs case Besig v. United States confirmed the book remained legally unimportable.
Barney Rosset at Grove Press had acquired American rights and watched for his moment. He chose to publish in June 1961. Grove's first printing sold out in days. Within weeks, prosecutions were filed in 21 states for a total above sixty separate cases. Some prosecutors went after the publisher, some after bookshop owners, some after individual clerks. Rosset fought every one. The cost to Grove was eventually estimated at over $100,000 — enormous money for a small press in 1961 dollars — and at several points the company came close to bankruptcy. The case that reached the Supreme Court was a Florida action, Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein, decided in June 1964 by per curiam reversal on the authority of Jacobellis v. Ohio. The Court said the book was not obscene, and the suppression was over.
The Fallout
Tropic of Cancer entered the 1960s as the most visible emblem of the new American permission and left the 1970s as an awkward monument no one quite knew where to shelve. Norman Mailer wrote a famous defence of Miller, arguing that his descent into the body was the necessary correction to an American literature that had insisted too long on the purity of the soul. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) made the counter-case: that Miller's narrator treated women as interchangeable objects of appetite, that the prose his defenders called liberation read to many women like a celebration of contempt, and that the obscenity debate had missed the deeper question of what Miller was actually saying about half the human race. The #MeToo era has returned to Millett's argument with fresh attention.
What has not faded is the book's importance to the legal history of American writing. Every novelist who has written frankly about sex in English since 1964 is writing in a space that Tropic of Cancer helped pry open. Grove Press's willingness to spend itself nearly into ruin made it possible for Philip Roth to publish Portnoy's Complaint, for Erica Jong to publish Fear of Flying, for Toni Morrison's early frankness to be reviewed rather than seized. The novel remains in print — argued about, loved, deplored, and taught in university courses on censorship, on the literary left, on the expatriate generation, and on the limits of what the obscenity standard was finally forced to release.
Why It Was Feared
The charge against Tropic of Cancer changed by jurisdiction, but the bones were the same: the book was accused of obscenity under the Roth–Memoirs standard, which held that material was obscene if, taken as a whole, it appealed to a prurient interest in sex, was patently offensive, and was utterly without redeeming social importance. Prosecutors argued the novel met every clause. Its sexual content was graphic by any standard of the period, phrased in street Anglo-Saxon rather than the Latinate register that had sometimes allowed the courts to look the other way. They produced passages out of context, arguing that the absence of conventional plot made it impossible to claim the sexual content served any larger narrative purpose.
Behind the formal charge was a broader cultural prosecution. Tropic of Cancer was also charged, unofficially, with being anti-American — with presenting a narrator who had rejected the American work ethic, family life, and ideas about respectability, not in defeat but in triumph. In school-board challenges and in letters to newspapers it was called pornographic, blasphemous, misogynist, nihilistic, and a corrupting influence on the young. In 1961 all of these were live accusations from the right and the moral left alike.
Charles Rembar, who had carried Lady Chatterley's Lover and would carry Naked Lunch, orchestrated the campaign with the explicit aim of forcing the Supreme Court to narrow the obscenity exception out of existence. The charge had become a vehicle for a much larger constitutional argument about what American literature could contain.
The Reading
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.
The flat belongs to Boris and within a fortnight I will be out of it and looking for a meal. This is the rhythm of the whole undertaking. A roof for a week, a wine for an evening, a meal cadged from a friend who has just been paid, then nothing again — the franc gone, the room gone, the friend vanished into whatever sudden employment has called him. Paris gives and Paris withholds. I am an American, no money in my pocket and no plan in my head, married once and divorced and married again to Mona who is back in New York and to whom this account is partly addressed and to whom I do not at the moment intend to return. I have left America. I have left it the way a man leaves a long boring job: not in a grand gesture but in a quiet decision, in 1930, with ten dollars in my pocket. I have decided with the calm certainty of a man who has nothing else to be certain of that I am a writer.
Paris is the only place on the surface of the earth where a man who has refused America can live and not be reminded daily that he is failing. I walk it. I walk it constantly. I walk it because walking is free and because the city presents itself to a walker the way nothing has ever presented itself to me before. The cafés are open. The brothels along the rue de la Glacière are open. The whores there are paid a fixed price and receive me with the kind of professional warmth that no woman in America ever showed me. I describe them in detail because what I am doing in this book is describing what I see, and the women who fuck for money are interesting in ways that the women who marry for security never were, and I refuse to lie about either kind.
I have friends. They are the others who have fallen out of the world in the same direction. Boris, in whose flat the whole undertaking begins and which I will lose within the first chapter. Carl, who writes articles for some French outlet to keep himself in tobacco and has theories — vast, fluent, hourly revised — about women, about himself, about the deep structure of literature. Van Norden, the most exhausting man alive, who pursues women with the joyless mechanical persistence of a man at a slot machine pulling the lever long after the coin has stopped registering; he will spend an entire afternoon describing in clinical detail the previous night's failure to feel anything at all, and the description itself is the only thing he seems to enjoy. Fillmore, an American at the embassy who has a job and a French girlfriend and is slowly losing his grip on both. We sit in cafés together and we eat what someone has paid for and we talk about money and women and France and America and writing, and the conversations have the quality of theological dispute among heretics who all agree there is no God and who are arguing about the precise shape of His absence.
The conversations go on for hours. They go on at the Dôme, at the Coupole, at small zinc-counter bars in the side streets where the cognac is bad and the patron remembers your face. Carl will tell you what is wrong with the woman he is currently pursuing; the wrongness is highly specific and will be replaced next week with an equally specific wrongness in the next woman. Van Norden will explain that all of it is impossible, that no act of love has ever been completed by anyone, that the species itself is a kind of misunderstanding, and he will say this while glancing over my shoulder at a girl who has just come in. I listen, mostly. I am the one writing this down. The talk is the raw material. The cafés are the office.
I am not a good man. I am not trying to be one. I am, by my own admission, broke, unfaithful, sometimes cruel, and entirely uninterested in correction. I see what I see and I write it down honestly. The honesty includes the appetite, which is rapacious, and the cowardice, which is consistent, and the affection, which is real where it is real and absent where it is absent. Tania, who is the wife of my friend Sylvester — I write about Tania in passages I will not defend if it ever comes to that, and the passages are accurate to what was happening at the time. They are not love letters. They are not character studies either. They are the record of a body and an appetite meeting another body and another appetite in a room in Paris in 1931, and the prose around them swells into the kind of rhapsody that comes naturally to me and that no court will know what to do with. Germaine is a whore and I am fond of her in a way I am not fond of most people. She lives in a room I will not describe and she does her work without complaint and she laughs at my jokes which are mostly in bad French. The girls at the Sphinx are professionals and treat me as a customer and I treat them as the women they are, which is to say with attention and without sentiment. The women in the cheap hotels near the Gare du Nord pass through these pages as I pass through their rooms. I will not pretend that I have considered any of them as I would consider myself. I am writing what is true, not what is flattering.
I grew up in Brooklyn in a tailor's family — German-American, Lutheran, narrow, decent in its way. I worked for several years at the Western Union office in Manhattan as a personnel manager, hiring and firing messenger boys, watching the human race come through the window with a registered exhaustion. I married, divorced, married again, loved Mona past any reasonable point, and finally left America with the ten dollars and no plan I would have admitted to if you had asked me. America made me a personnel manager. Paris is allowing me to be something else. America is a vast factory of aspiration and discipline and dollar-chasing. Paris does not care whether I work or not. Paris does not care whether I succeed. Paris merely opens at six each morning and closes at three each night and asks nothing of me beyond that I be in it, and I am in it, and I am writing.
The body keeps having to be fed. This is the simple problem and the daily problem. It is also, on the days when it goes wrong, the only problem there is. A man with money in his pocket has time to consider art and the soul and the death of God. A man without money in his pocket has time to consider, very precisely, where the next plate of bread and lentils is going to come from, and the consideration crowds everything else out until the plate has arrived. I have spent more hours of my Paris life on that one consideration than on any other. A free meal at someone's flat in Montparnasse, the wine flowing freely because the host has just been paid, is an event of such concentrated joy that I write about it for pages. Then the meal is over and there is again no meal, and the next meal must be located. I am not pretending the hunger is noble. I mock it constantly. I describe my appetite with the precision of a man who knows exactly what he is and is amused by the spectacle. But I am also writing, in the long ecstatic passages that interrupt the hunger and the women and the cafés, about something I cannot quite name — about what it costs and what it gives to have stepped off the moving sidewalk of American life. I write about Buddha and Whitman and Nietzsche in the same paragraph in which I describe a toilet, and I do this on purpose, because both belong in the same sentence and the sentence has work to do.
Eventually I get a job. There is a foreign-language proofreader's position at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, and I take it and survive on it for some months — I sit in a basement office at night reading copy and there is steady money for the first time since I crossed the Atlantic. The other proofreaders are men of a similar shipwreck. We come in at midnight, we work until dawn, we drink the coffee that the night chef leaves out for us, and at four in the morning we step out into a Paris that belongs to nobody except the street-sweepers and the men hauling the meat from Les Halles. It is the best Paris there is. I love that hour. I love it more than I love most of the women in this book.
Then, later, a teaching position opens at the Lycée Carnot in Dijon. I take that one too, because I am told I should be grateful for it, and I go out to Dijon by train one cold day and install myself in a school where the food is foul and the well-meaning French masters do not know what to make of me and the well-meaning French boys do not know how to learn from me. I hate Dijon. I hate it with the completeness of a man who has discovered something fresh to hate after months of generalised happiness. The hatred is itself a relief — it is precise, it is clean, it can be named — whereas the love of Paris is metaphysical and has to be approached sideways. Dijon is cold. Dijon is provincial. The food at the long table at noon is some grey thing in a brown sauce and the boys eat it without comment because they have been eating it all their lives. The masters in their corners eat it too. I push it around the plate. I stand in the cold corridor between lessons and I think about Paris with the intensity of a man thinking about a woman he should not have left. Dijon is France in the way that Paris is precisely not France. I stay until the end of the term and then I get out, and the return to Paris has the quality of a man walking back into the only room in which his clothes fit.
The city does not provide a home in any sense my parents would have recognised. There is no house. There is no wife waiting. There is no family that asks me how the work is going. The city itself is the home and the belonging is to the city, and belonging to a city rather than to a country or a family or a class is a specific condition that I had no vocabulary for until I had spent two years inside it. Nobody has expelled me. I expelled myself. What I found in the place where my American life was supposed to be is this city, and this poverty, and the writing that is making this book.
The Fillmore business comes near the end. Fillmore — my friend at the embassy, the American with the job and the French girl — has got himself entangled with the girl, whose name in these pages is Ginette and whose family is pressing for marriage and who is pregnant or claims to be, and Fillmore is drinking himself unconscious every evening and is terrified. I do not behave well in what follows. I tell Fillmore he must leave Paris. I take him to the Gare du Nord. I put the train ticket in his hand and a quantity of money in his pocket and I keep the rest of the money — Fillmore's money — for what I describe to him as expenses, which is to say for me. I see him onto the train to London. I do not tell Ginette where he has gone. I walk back from the station with the money in my pocket and I do not pretend to myself that I have done a noble thing. I am not in the business of being noble. I am in the business of seeing clearly and naming accurately and not apologising for what the seeing has cost the people around me.
I go out to the country with the money. There is a friend's house by the Seine, a few hours from Paris, and I sit on the bank one afternoon alone with the river opening below me and the trees still and the year turning towards its end. I think about America, which I have not seen in years and have no intention of going back to. I think about Mona, who is in this book the way everyone in this book is in it — as a presence rather than a person, an address rather than a subject. I think about the writing itself, which is this writing, and which I have been doing for two years in fragments, and which will be turned away by every publisher in New York and London the moment they understand what it is.
For a long time I have been trying to die. I wrote that somewhere in the early pages and I meant it. By the river that afternoon I am not dying. I am sitting on the bank with my back against the warm wall of the country house and the Seine is doing what it has always done, which is going past me and going past the trees and going past the small French villages and going on into a distance I cannot see. The water is doing nothing in particular. The water is doing what water does. It is the most ordinary thing in France and the most ordinary thing in the world and it is the only thing that on this particular afternoon makes any sense to me at all. America is a long way off. Mona is a long way off. The years I have spent in this city are folded into me now and they will come out, one way and another, in the pages I have already written and in the pages I will go on writing.
After me, you can take on armies, tigers, war, gin. I've had my fill. The river goes on. The light on the water goes on. The sun moves a little further down behind the trees on the opposite bank and the small wake of a barge that passed an hour ago is still being completed somewhere downstream where I cannot see it. The book stops, not on a sentence so much as on the going-on of the river itself, which keeps moving whether or not anyone is sitting on the bank to watch it. I sit on the bank. I watch it.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the books that power tried to silence. See the full collection →
The Grove Press edition is the authoritative text — published by the house that fought and won the US obscenity trial in 1961, restoring the novel to American readers after twenty-seven years of suppression.
The authoritative Grove Press edition — from the publisher that nearly bankrupted itself to defend this novel's right to exist in America.
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