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Genry Miller. Tropic of Capricorn
Henry Miller was born in 1891 in Brooklyn, New York. He had a variety of
jobs as a young man, including several years working for the Western Union
Telegraph Company. During this time, encouraged by June Mansfield Smith, the
second of his five wives. Miller began to write. Aside from articles,
stories for pulp magazines and prose poems, Miller worked on his first
novels. Crazy Cock and Moloch, and on the copious notes which would
eventually transmute into the notorious 'Tropics' books.
In 1930, Miller went to live in Paris. For the next ten years he
mingled with impoverished expatriates and bohemian Parisians, including
Brassai, Artaud and Anais Nin, with whom he had a much documented affair.
His first published book. Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1934 from the
Obelisk Press in Paris. It was followed five years later by its sister
volume. Tropic of Capricorn. Sexually explicit, these books electrified the
European literary avant-garde, received praise from Eliot, Pound, Beckett
and Durrell, but were almost universally banned outside France.
Miller returned to America in 1940, settling in Big Sur, California.
Here, he wrote the 'Rosy Crucifixion' trilogy - Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953)
and Nexus (1959) but, regarded by many as a writer of 'dirty books', he was
unable to get his major works published in America. In 1961, after an epic
legal battle. Tropic of Cancer was finally published in the States (in
England in 1963). Miller became a household name, hailed by the Sixties
counterculture as a prophet of freedom and sexual revolution. With the
subsequent unbanning of the rest of his books, Miller's work was finally
available in his own country.
He died on June 7 1980.
BY ТНE SAME AUTHOR
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Black Spring
Aller Retour New York
The Cosmological Eye
The Colossus of Maroussi
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Quiet Days in Clichy
Sexus
Plexus
Nexus
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch
The Books in my Life
A Devil in Paradise
The Wisdom of the Heart
My Life and Times
The World of Sex
Crazy Cock
Moloch
MODERN CLASSIC
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Capricorn
With an introduction by Robert Nye
Flamingo
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPuhlishers
Flamingo
An Imprint of HatperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
A Flamingo Modem Classic 1993 98765
Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1966 Reprinted 14 times
First published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) Limited
1964
Copyright 0 Henry Miller 1957 Introduction copyright O Robert Nye 1993
ISBN 0 00 654584 X Set in Plantin
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Caledonian International Book
Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
by Robert Nye
Henry Miller's first book. Tropic of Cancer, was published in Paris in
1934 and was immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. With its
sequel. Tropic of Capricorn (1939), which actually covers an earlier period
in Miller's life, it makes up a running fictional autobiography remarkable
for its candour, gusto, and completeness. The two books have in common a
plain-spoken truthfulness, a good-hearted comedy, and a quality of joy
discovered somewhere on the far side of despair, things that their author
was seldom to match and never to surpass in later self-unravellings.
When the 'Tropics' were at last made generally available in Britain and
America in the Sixties, they were praised as works of sexual liberation.
Since then they have sometimes been attacked as works of sexual misogyny.
All this seems to me rather to miss the point, as does criticism of the two
books for their verbal extravagance and their lack of art. Probably it is no
accident that nobody was ever indifferent concerning Henry Miller. There are
those who love him and there are those who hate him. His work does not allow
of the mild alternatives of liking or disliking. A case could be made that
this itself constitutes a fault, but I prefer to
find a virtue in such passion, and an important one. The Miller that
emerges from the books is, to my mind, an honest and lovable person,
splendidly undefeated by experience, a man with an unquenchable appetite for
the fundamental realities, and an infinite capacity for being surprised by
his own innocence. If there is any message extractable from his work it is
that of someone who - against all the odds and in spite of most of the
evidence - says 'More' to life. This I find honourable.
Even in the 'Tropics' Miller is, of course, an extraordinarily diffuse
and uneven writer. He repeats, paraphrases, and parodies himself with an
abandon that in a lesser spirit would be suicidal. He is sometimes brutal,
he is often sentimental. But having said that, I have said most of what
might be said against him. The best pages here, as in his one other great
work. The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), are white-hot and inspired, both
funny and terrible, a man's attempt to tell the whole truth about the life
that he has known. Miller is one of the few modern writers who can move a
reader to tears, quite simply, by the pressure of his own feeling. He can
also communicate, and induce in the reader, a delicious delight in the fact
of being alive. I never read Miller on song without feeling better, happier,
more myself and less alone, for having done so.
On the ovarian trolley
Foreword to Historia Calamitatum
(the story of my misfortunes)
Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are
soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words. And therefore,
because I too have known some consolation from speech had with one who was a
witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which have
sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is of
himself ever a consoler. This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with
mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of
small account, and so you shall come to bear them more easily.
Peter Abelard
0NCE you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead
certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never
anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in
through the gills. In the sub-strata, where the moon shone steady and
opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord.
In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the
real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There
was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a
child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender
because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved,
substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had
not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure,
ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to
tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me
so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere
sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any
good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the
condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was
convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of
men? Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke.
I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often
said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.
What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me
to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess
these virtues but if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to
be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy
was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or
anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and
everything.
From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything
too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had
need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as
my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I
balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other
words, corrupt from the start. It's as though my mother fed me a poison, and
though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she
weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent, most children rebel,
or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn't give a damn, I was a
philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on
principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me
was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an
effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap.
And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because
I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard
later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out
of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a
nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis?
The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the
gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls
in the kitchen. Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate
zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally
sluggards, naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never
realized that there were "warm" countries, places where you didn't have to
sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and
exhilarating. Wherever there is cold there are people who work themselves to
the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of
work -which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people
were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has
ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness,
to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully dean. But inwardly they
stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never
once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the
dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read
it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed
they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything
was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and
on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one
idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.
In my bitterness I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better
to condemn myself. For I am like them too, in many ways. For a long while I
thought I had escaped, but as time goes on I see that I am no better, that I
am even a little worse, because I saw more dearly than they ever did and yet
remained powerless to alter my life. As I look back on my life it seems to
me that I never did anything of my own volition but always through the
pressure of others. People often think of me as an adventurous fellow;
nothing could be farther from the truth. My adventures were always
adventitious, always thrust on me, always endured rather than undertaken. I
am of the very essence of that proud, boastful Nordic people who have never
had the least sense of adventure but who nevertheless have scoured the
earth, turned it upside down, scattering relics and ruins everywhere.
Restless spirits, but not adventurous ones. Agonizing spirits, incapable of
living in the present Disgraceful cowards, all of them, myself included. For
there is only one great adventure and that is inward towards the self, and
for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.
Once every few years I was on the verge of making this discovery, but
in characteristic fashion I always managed to dodge the issue. If I try to
think of a good excuse I can think only of the environment, of the streets I
knew and the people who inhabited them. I can think of no street in America,
or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on towards the
discovery of the self. I have walked the streets in many countries of the
world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I
think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a
cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away
to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic
wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and
chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane
asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of
the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest
jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness)
but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy. At least I knew
that I was unhappy, unwealthy, out of whack and out of step. That was my
only solace, my only joy. But it was hardly enough. It would have been
better for my peace of mind, for my soul if I had expressed my rebellion
openly, if I had gone to jail for it, if I had rotted there and died. It
would have been better if, like the mad Czolgosz, I had shot some good
President McKinley, some gentle, insignificant soul like that who had never
done anyone the least harm. Because in the bottom of my heart there was
murder: I wanted to see America destroyed, razed from top to bottom. I
wanted to see this happen purely out of vengeance, as atonement for the
crimes that were committed against me and against others like me who have
never been able to lift their voices and express their hatred, their
rebellion, their legitimate blood lust.
I was the evil product of an evil soil. If the self were not
imperishable, the "I" I write about would have been destroyed long ago. To
some this may seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have
happened did actually happen, at least to me. History may deny it, since I
have played no part in the history of my people, but even if everything I
say is wrong, is prejudiced, spiteful, malevolent, even if I am a liar and a
poisoner, it is nevertheless the truth and it will have to be swallowed. As
to what happened ...
Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of
a contradiction. Until the one for whom this is written came along I
imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solutions to
all things. I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of
life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold
of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I
found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach
myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not
looked for - myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to
live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself. I
realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this
which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same
time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even
what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had
stifled every day in order to live. Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no
importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of
effort, I cannot say what I think and feel - that bothers me, that rankles.
From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this spectre, enjoying
nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a
lie - everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that
is pretty much the greater part of my life.
I was a contradiction in essence, as they say. People took me to be
serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless, or to be sincere and
earnest, or to be negligent and carefree. I was all these things at once -
and beyond that I was something else, something which no one suspected,
least of all myself. As a boy of six or seven I used to sit at my
grandfather's workbench and read to him while he sewed. I remember him
vividly in those moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a
coat, he would stand with one hand over the other and look out of the window
dreamily. I remember the expression on his face, as he stood there dreaming,
better than the contents of the books I read, better than the conversations
we had or the games which I played in the street I used to wonder what he
was dreaming of, what it was that drew him out of himself. I hadn't learned
yet how to dream wideawake. I was always lucid, in the moment, and all of a
piece. His daydreaming fascinated me. I knew that he had no connection with
what he was doing, not the least thought for any of us, that he was alone
and being alone he was free. I was never alone, least of all when I was by
myself. Always, it seems to me, I was accompanied: I was like a little crumb
of a big cheese, which was the world, I suppose, though I never stopped to
think about it. But I know I never existed separately, never thought myself
the big cheese, as it were. So that even when I had reason to be miserable,
to complain, to weep, I had the illusion of participating in a common, a
universal misery. When I wept the whole world was weeping -so I imagined. I
wept very seldom. Mostly I was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good
time. I had a good time because, as I said before, I really didn't give a
fuck about anything. If things were wrong with me they were wrong
everywhere, I was convinced of it. And things were wrong usually only when
one cared too much. That impressed itself on me very early in life. For
example, I remember the case of my young friend Jack Lawson. For a whole
year he lay in bed, suffering the worst agonies. He was my best friend, so
people said at any rate. Well, at first I was probably sorry for him and
perhaps now and then I called at his house to inquire about him; but after a
month or two had elapsed I grew quite callous about his suffering. I said to
myself he ought to die and the sooner he dies the better it will be, and
having thought thus I acted accordingly, that is to say, I promptly forgot
about him, abandoned him to his fate. I was only about twelve years old at
the time and I remember being proud of my decision. I remember the funeral
too - what a disgraceful affair it was. There they were, friends and
relatives all congregated about the bier and all of them bawling like sick
monkeys. The mother especially gave me a pain in the ass. She was such a
rare, spiritual creature, a Christian Scientist, I believe, and though she
didn't believe in disease and didn't believe in death either, she raised
such a stink that Christ himself would have risen from the grave. But not
her beloved Jack! No, Jack lay there cold as ice and rigid and unbeckonable.
He was dead and there were no two ways about it. I knew it and I was glad of
it. I didn't waste any tears over it. I couldn't say that he was better off
because after all the "he" had vanished. He was gone and with him the
sufferings he had endured and the suffering he had unwittingly inflicted on
others. Amen! I said to myself, and with that, being slightly hysterical, I
let a loud fart - right beside the coffin.
This caring too much - I remember that it only developed with me about
the time I first fell in love. And even then I didn't care enough. If I had
really cared I wouldn't be here now writing about it: I'd have died of a
broken heart, or I'd have swung for it. It was a bad experience because it
taught me how to live a lie. It taught me to smile when I didn't want to
smile, to work when I didn't believe in work, to live when I had no reason
to go on living. Even when I had forgotten her I still retained the trick of
doing what I didn't believe in.
I was all chaos from the beginning, as I have said. But sometimes I got
so close to the centre, to the very heart of the confusion, that it's a
wonder things didn't explode around me.
It is customary to blame everything on the war. I say the war had
nothing to do with me, with my life. At a time when others were getting
themselves comfortable berths I was taking one miserable job after another,
and never enough in it to keep body and soul together. Almost as quickly as
I was hired I was fired. I had plenty of intelligence but I inspired
distrust. Whereever I went I fomented discord - not because I was idealistic
but because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of
everything. Besides, I wasn't a good ass-licker. That marked me, no doubt.
People could tell at once when I asked for a job that I really didn't give a
damn whether I got it or not. And of course I generally didn't get it. But
after a time the mere looking for a job became an activity, a pastime, so to
speak. I would go in and ask for most anything. It was a way of killing time
- now worse, as far as I could see, than work itself. I was my own boss and
I had my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my
own bankruptcy. I was not a corporation or a trust or a state or a
federation or a polity of nations - I was more like God, if anything.
This went on from about the middle of the war until... well, until one
day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I
needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take
the last job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment
bureau of the telegraph company - the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of
North America - towards the dose of the day, prepared to go through with it.
I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat
books on economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the
job.
The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard.
He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was dear enough from
my application that I had long left school. I had even honoured myself on
the application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Apparently
that passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who
had turned me down. I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I
was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in
certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual
leer and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed thinking
about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on.
The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn't bother me so much,
people didn't offer you jobs because you had a family to support, that much
I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they had rejected me.
Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the
lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn't get over it. In the
morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and
hot-footed it to the subway. I went immediately to the main offices of the
telegraph company ... up to the 25th floor or wherever it was that the
president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles. I asked to see the
president. Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see
me, but wouldn't I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather.
I saw the vice-president's secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of
chap, and I gave him an earful. I did it adroitly, without too much heat,
but letting him understand all the while that I wasn't to be put out of the
way so easily.
When he picked up the telephone and demanded the general manager I
thought it was just a gag, that they were going to pass me around like that
from one to the other until I'd get fed up. But the moment I heard him talk
I changed my opinion. When I got to the general manager's office, which was
in another building uptown, they were waiting for me. I sat down in a
comfortable leather chair and accepted one of the big cigars that were
thrust forward. This individual seemed at once to be vitally concerned about
the matter. He wanted me to tell him all about it, down to the last detail,
his big hairy ears cocked to catch the least crumb of information which
would justify something or other which was formulating itself inside his
dome. I realized that by some accident I had really been instrumental in
doing him a service. I let him wheedle it out of me to suit his fancy,
observing all the time which way the wind was blowing. And as the talk
progressed I noticed that be was warming up to me more and more. At last
some one was showing a little confidence in me 1 That was all I required to
get started on one of my favourite lines. For, after years of job hunting I
had naturally become quite adept, I knew not only what not to say, but I
knew also what to imply, what to insinuate. Soon the assistant general
manager was called in and asked to listen to my story. By this time I knew
what the story was. I understood that Hymie - "that little kike", as the
general manager called him - had no business pretending that he was the
employment manager. Hymie had usurped his prerogative, that much was dear.
It was also dear that Hymie was a Jew and that Jews were not in good odour
with the general manager, nor with Mr. Twilliger, the vice-president, who
was a thorn in the general manager's side.
Perhaps it was Hymie, "the dirty little kike" who was responsible for
the high percentage of Jews on the messenger
force. Perhaps Hymie was really the one who was doing the hiring at the
employment office - at Sunset Place, they called it. It was an excellent
opportunity, I gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to take down a
certain Mr. Bums who, he informed me, had been the employment manager for
some thirty years now and who was evidently getting lazy on the job.
The conference lasted several hours. Before it was terminated Mr.
Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me the boss
of the Works. Before putting me into office, however, he was going to ask me
as a special favour, and also as a sort of apprenticeship which would stand
me in good stead, to work as a special messenger. I would receive the salary
of employment manager, but it would be paid me out of a separate account. In
short I was to float from office to office and observe the way affairs were
conducted by all and sundry. I was to make a little report from time to time
as to how things were going. And once in a while, so he suggested, I was to
visit him at his home on the q.t. and have a little chat about the
conditions in the hundred and one branches of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph
Company in New York City. In other words I was to be a spy for a few months
and after that I was to have the run of the joint. Maybe they'd make me a
general manager too one day, or a vice-president. It was a tempting oner,
even if it was wrapped up in a lot of horse shit. I said Yes.
In a few months I was sitting at Sunset Place hiring and firing like a
demon. It was a slaughter-house, so help me God. The thing was senseless
from the bottom up. A waste of men, material and effort A hideous farce
against a backdrop of sweat and misery. But just as I had accepted the
spying so I accepted the hiring and firing and all that went with it. I said
Yes to everything. If the vice-president decreed that no cripples were to be
hired I hired no cripples. If the vice-president said that all messengers
over forty-five were to be fired without notice I fired them without notice.
I did everything they instructed me to do, but in such a way that they had
to pay for it. When there was a strike I folded my arms and waited for it to
blow over. But I first saw to it that it cost them a good penny. The whole
system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly corrupt and
complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or order
into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against
the whole rotten system of American labour, which is rotten at both ends. I
was the fifth wheel on the wagon and neither side had any use for me, except
to exploit me. In fact, everybody was being exploited - the president and
his gang by the unseen powers, the employees by the officials, and so on and
around, in and out and through the whole works. From my little perch at
"Sunset Place" I had a bird's eye view of the whole American society. It was
like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically,
statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you
examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined
one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed,
the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and
degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it
was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life
- economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically,
statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out
cock. It looked worse than that, really, because you couldn't even see
anything resembling a cock any more. Maybe in the past this thing had life,
did produce something, did at least give a moment's pleasure, a moment's
thrill. But looking at it from where I sat it looked rottener than the
wormiest cheese. The wonder was that the stench of it didn't carry'em off...
I'm using the past tense all the time, but of course it's the same now,
maybe even a bit worse. At least now we're getting it full stink.
By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps
of messengers. My office at Sunset Place was like an open sewer, and it
stank like one. I had dug myself into the first line trench and I was
getting it from all directions at once. To begin with, the man I had ousted
died of a broken heart a few weeks after my arrival. He held out just long
enough to break me in and then he croaked. Things happened so fast that I
didn't have a chance to feel guilty. From the moment I arrived at the office
it was one long uninterrupted pandemon- him. An hour before my arrival -1
was always late - the place was already jammed with applicants. I had to
elbow my way up the stairs and literally force my way in to get there. Hymie
was worse off than I because he was tied to the barricade. Before I could
take my hat off I had to answer a dozen telephone calls. There were three
telephones on my desk and they all rang at once. They were bawling the piss
out of me before I had even sat down to work. There wasn't even time to take
a crap - until five or six in the afternoon. Hymie was worse off than I
because he was tied to the switchboard. He sat there from eight in the
morning, until six, moving waybills around. A waybill was a messenger loaned
by one office to another office for the day or a part of the day. None of
the hundred and one offices ever had a full staff; Hymie had to play chess
with the waybills while I worked like a madman to plug up the gaps. If by a
miracle I succeeded in a day of filling all the vacancies, the next morning
would find the situation exactly the same - or worse. Perhaps twenty per
cent of the force were steady; the rest was driftwood. The steady ones drove
the new ones away. The steady ones earned forty to fifty dollars a week,
sometimes sixty or seventy-five, sometimes as much as a hundred dollars a
week, which is to say that they earned far more than the clerks and often
more than their own managers. As for the new ones, they found it difficult
to earn ten dollars a week. Some of them worked an hour and quit, often
throwing a batch of telegrams in the garbage can or down the sewer. And
whenever they quit they wanted their pay immediately, which was impossible,
because in the complicated bookkeeping which ruled no one could say what a
messenger had earned until at least ten days later. In the beginning I
invited the applicant to sit down beside me and I explained everything to
him in detail. I did that until I lost my voice. Soon I learned to save my
strength for the grilling that was necessary. In the first place, every
other boy was a born liar if not a crook to boot. Many of them had already
been hired and fired a number of times. Some found it an excellent way to
find another job, because their duty brought them to hundreds of offices
which normally they would never have set foot in. Fortunately McGovern, the
old trusty who guarded the door and handed out the application blanks, had a
camera eye. And then there were the big ledgers behind me, in which there
was a record of every applicant who had ever passed through the mill. The
ledgers were very much like a police record; they were full of red ink
marks, signifying this or that delinquency. To judge from the evidence I was
in a tough spot. Every other name involved a theft, fraud, a brawl, or
dementia or perversion or idiocy. "Be careful - so-and-so is an epileptic!"
"Don't hire this man - he's a nigger 1" "Watch out - X has been in Dannemora
- or else in Sing Sing."
If I had been a stickler for etiquette nobody would ever have been
hired. I had to learn quickly, and not from the records or from those about
me, but from experience. There were a thousand and one details by which to
judge an applicant: I had to take them all in at once, and quickly, because
in one short day, even if you are as fast as Jack Robinson, you can only
hire so many and no more. And no matter how many I hired it was never
enough. The next day it would begin all over again. Some I knew would last
only a day, but I had to hire them just the same. The system was wrong from
start to finish, but it was not my place to criticize the system. It was
mine to hire and fire. I was in the centre of a revolving disk which was
whirling so fast that nothing could stay put. What was needed was a
mechanic, but according to the logic of the higher-ups there was nothing
wrong with the mechanism, everything was fine and dandy except that things
were temporarily out of order. And things being temporarily out of order
brought on epilepsy, theft, vandalism, perversion, niggers, Jews, whores and
what-not - sometimes strikes and lockouts. Whereupon, according to this
logic, you took a big broom and you swept the stable dean, or you took clubs
and guns and you beat sense into the poor idiots who were suffering from the
illusion that things were fundamentally wrong. It was good now and then to
talk of God, or to have a little community sing - maybe even a bonus was
justifiable now and then, that is when things were getting too terribly bad
for words. But on the whole, the important thing was to keep hiring and
firing; as long as there were men and ammunition we were to advance, to keep
mopping up the trenches. Meanwhile Hymie kept taking cathartic pills -enough
to blow out his rear end if he had bad a rear end, but he hadn't one any
more, he only imagined he was taking a crap, he only imagined he was
shitting on his can. Actually the poor bugger was in a trance. There were a
hundred and one offices to look after and each one had a staff of messengers
which was mythical, if not hypothetical, and whether the messengers were
real or unreal, tangible or intangible, Hymie had to shuffle them about from
morning to night while I plugged up the holes, which was also imaginary
because who could say when a recruit had been dispatched to an office
whether he would arrive there today or tomorrow or never. Some of them got
lost in the subway or in the labyrinths under the skyscrapers; some rode
around on the elevated line all day because with a uniform it was a free
ride and perhaps they had never enjoyed riding around all day on the
elevated lines. Some of them started for Staten Island and ended up in
Canarsie, or else were brought back in a coma by a cop. Some forgot where
they lived and disappeared completely. Some whom we hired for New York
turned up in Philadelphia a month later as though it were normal and
according to Hoyle. Some would start for their destination and on the way
decide that it was easier to sell newspapers and they would sell them in the
uniform we had given them, until they were picked up. Some went straight to
the observation ward, moved by some strange preservative instinct.
When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he
did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he
explained to me later, if he didn't sharpen the pencils first thing off the
bat they would never get sharpened. The next thing was to take a glance out
the window and see what the weather was like. Then, with a freshly sharpened
pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he kept beside
him and in it he gave the weather report. This, he also informed me, often
turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot thick or the ground
covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not
shuffling the waybills around more speedily, and the employment manager
might also be excused for not filling up the holes on such days, no? But why
he didn't take a crap first instead of plugging in on the switchboard soon
as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery to me. That too he explained to
me later. Anyway, the day always broke with confusion, complaints,
constipation and vacancies. It also began with loud smelly farts, with bad
breaths, with ragged nerves, with epilepsy, with meningitis, with low wages,
with back pay that was overdue, with worn-out shoes, with corns and bunions,
with flat feet and broken arches, with pocket books missing and fountain
pens lost or stolen, with telegrams floating in the sewer, with threats from
the vice-president and advice from the managers, with wrangles and disputes,
with cloudbursts and broken telegraph wires, with new methods of efficiency
and old ones that had been discarded, with hope for better times and a
prayer for the bonus which never came. The new messengers were going over
the top and getting machine-gunned; the old ones were digging in deeper and
deeper, like rats in a cheese. Nobody was satisfied, especially not the
public. It took ten minutes to reach San Francisco over the wire, but it
might take a year to get the message to the man whom it was intended for -
or it might never reach him.
The Y.M.C.A., eager to improve the morale of working boys everywhere in
America, were holdings meetings at noon hour and wouldn't I like to send a
few spruce-looking boys to hear William Carnegie Asterbilt Junior give a
five minute talk on service. Mr. Mallory of the Welfare League would like to
know if I could spare a few minutes some time to tell me about the model
prisoners who were on parole and who would be glad to serve in any capacity,
even as messengers. Mrs. Guggenhoffer of the Jewish Charities would be very
grateful if I would aid her in maintaining some broken-down homes which had
broken down because everybody was either infirm, crippled or disabled in the
family. Mr. Haggerty of the Runaway Home for Boys was sure he had just the
right youngsters for me, if only I would give them a chance; all of them had
been mistreated by their stepfathers or stepmothers. The Mayor of New York
would appreciate it if I would give my personal attention to the bearer of
the said letter whom he could vouch for in every way -but why the hell he
didn't give said bearer a job himself was a mystery. Man leaning over my
shoulder hands me a slip of paper on which he has just written - "Me
understand everything but me no hear the voices." Luther Winifred is
standing beside him, his tattered coat fastened together with safety pins.
Luther is two sevenths pure Indian and five sevenths German-American, so he
explains. On the Indian side he is a Crow, one of the Crows from Montana.
His last job was putting up window shades, but there is no ass in his pants
and he is ashamed to climb a ladder in front ofa lady. He got out of the
hospital the other day and so he is still a little weak, but he is not too
weak to carry messages, so he thinks.
And then there is Ferdinand Mish - how could I have forgotten him? He
has been waiting in line all morning to get a word with me. I never answered
the letters he sent me. Was that just? he asks me blandly. Of course not. I
remember vaguely the last letter he sent me from the Cat and Dog Hospital on
the Grand Concourse, where he was an attendant. He said he repented that he
had resigned his post "but it was on account of his father being too strict
over him, not giving him any recreation or outside pleasure". "I'm
twenty-five now," he wrote, "and I don't think I should ought to be sleeping
no more with my father, do you? I know you are said to be a very fine
gentleman and I am now self-dependent, so I hope ..." McGovem, the old
trusty, is standing by Ferdinand's side waiting for me to give him the sign.
He wants to give Ferdinand the bum's rush - he remembers him from five years
ago when Ferdinand lay down on the sidewalk in front of the main office in
full uniform and threw an epileptic fit. No, shit, I can't do it! I'm going
to give him a chance, the poor bastard. Maybe I'll send him to Chinatown
where things are fairly quiet. Meanwhile, while Ferdinand is changing into a
uniform in the back room, I'm getting an earful from an orphan boy who wants
to "help make the company a success". He says that if I give him a chance
he'll pray for me every Sunday when he goes to church, except the Sundays
when he has to report to his parole officer. He didn't do nothing, it
appears. He just pushed the fellow and the fellow fell on his head and got
killed. Next: An ex-consul from Gibraltar. Writes a beautiful hand - too
beauti- fill. I ask him to see me at the end of the day - something fishy
about him. Meanwhile Ferdinand's thrown a fit in the dressing room. Lucky
break! If it had happened in the subway, with a number on his hat and
everything, I'd have been canned. Next:
A guy with one arm and mad as hell because McGovem is showing him the
door. "What the hell! I'm strong and healthy, ain't I?" he shouts, and to
prove it he picks up a chair with his good arm and smashes it to bits. I get
back to the desk and there's a telegram lying there for me. I open it. It's
from George Blasini, ex-messenger No. 2459 of S.W. office. "I am sorry that
I had to quit so soon, but the job was not fitted for my character idleness
and I am a true lover of labour and frugality but many a time we be unable
to control or subdue our personal pride." Shit!
In the beginning I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the
clamps below. I had ideas and I executed them, whether it pleased the
vice-president or not. Every ten days or so I was put on the carpet and
OCR: Янко Слава
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Genry Miller. Tropic of Capricorn
Henry Miller was born in 1891 in Brooklyn, New York. He had a variety of
jobs as a young man, including several years working for the Western Union
Telegraph Company. During this time, encouraged by June Mansfield Smith, the
second of his five wives. Miller began to write. Aside from articles,
stories for pulp magazines and prose poems, Miller worked on his first
novels. Crazy Cock and Moloch, and on the copious notes which would
eventually transmute into the notorious 'Tropics' books.
In 1930, Miller went to live in Paris. For the next ten years he
mingled with impoverished expatriates and bohemian Parisians, including
Brassai, Artaud and Anais Nin, with whom he had a much documented affair.
His first published book. Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1934 from the
Obelisk Press in Paris. It was followed five years later by its sister
volume. Tropic of Capricorn. Sexually explicit, these books electrified the
European literary avant-garde, received praise from Eliot, Pound, Beckett
and Durrell, but were almost universally banned outside France.
Miller returned to America in 1940, settling in Big Sur, California.
Here, he wrote the 'Rosy Crucifixion' trilogy - Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953)
and Nexus (1959) but, regarded by many as a writer of 'dirty books', he was
unable to get his major works published in America. In 1961, after an epic
legal battle. Tropic of Cancer was finally published in the States (in
England in 1963). Miller became a household name, hailed by the Sixties
counterculture as a prophet of freedom and sexual revolution. With the
subsequent unbanning of the rest of his books, Miller's work was finally
available in his own country.
He died on June 7 1980.
BY ТНE SAME AUTHOR
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Black Spring
Aller Retour New York
The Cosmological Eye
The Colossus of Maroussi
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Quiet Days in Clichy
Sexus
Plexus
Nexus
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch
The Books in my Life
A Devil in Paradise
The Wisdom of the Heart
My Life and Times
The World of Sex
Crazy Cock
Moloch
MODERN CLASSIC
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Capricorn
With an introduction by Robert Nye
Flamingo
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPuhlishers
Flamingo
An Imprint of HatperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
A Flamingo Modem Classic 1993 98765
Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1966 Reprinted 14 times
First published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) Limited
1964
Copyright 0 Henry Miller 1957 Introduction copyright O Robert Nye 1993
ISBN 0 00 654584 X Set in Plantin
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Caledonian International Book
Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
by Robert Nye
Henry Miller's first book. Tropic of Cancer, was published in Paris in
1934 and was immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. With its
sequel. Tropic of Capricorn (1939), which actually covers an earlier period
in Miller's life, it makes up a running fictional autobiography remarkable
for its candour, gusto, and completeness. The two books have in common a
plain-spoken truthfulness, a good-hearted comedy, and a quality of joy
discovered somewhere on the far side of despair, things that their author
was seldom to match and never to surpass in later self-unravellings.
When the 'Tropics' were at last made generally available in Britain and
America in the Sixties, they were praised as works of sexual liberation.
Since then they have sometimes been attacked as works of sexual misogyny.
All this seems to me rather to miss the point, as does criticism of the two
books for their verbal extravagance and their lack of art. Probably it is no
accident that nobody was ever indifferent concerning Henry Miller. There are
those who love him and there are those who hate him. His work does not allow
of the mild alternatives of liking or disliking. A case could be made that
this itself constitutes a fault, but I prefer to
find a virtue in such passion, and an important one. The Miller that
emerges from the books is, to my mind, an honest and lovable person,
splendidly undefeated by experience, a man with an unquenchable appetite for
the fundamental realities, and an infinite capacity for being surprised by
his own innocence. If there is any message extractable from his work it is
that of someone who - against all the odds and in spite of most of the
evidence - says 'More' to life. This I find honourable.
Even in the 'Tropics' Miller is, of course, an extraordinarily diffuse
and uneven writer. He repeats, paraphrases, and parodies himself with an
abandon that in a lesser spirit would be suicidal. He is sometimes brutal,
he is often sentimental. But having said that, I have said most of what
might be said against him. The best pages here, as in his one other great
work. The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), are white-hot and inspired, both
funny and terrible, a man's attempt to tell the whole truth about the life
that he has known. Miller is one of the few modern writers who can move a
reader to tears, quite simply, by the pressure of his own feeling. He can
also communicate, and induce in the reader, a delicious delight in the fact
of being alive. I never read Miller on song without feeling better, happier,
more myself and less alone, for having done so.
On the ovarian trolley
Foreword to Historia Calamitatum
(the story of my misfortunes)
Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are
soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words. And therefore,
because I too have known some consolation from speech had with one who was a
witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which have
sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is of
himself ever a consoler. This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with
mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of
small account, and so you shall come to bear them more easily.
Peter Abelard
0NCE you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead
certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never
anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in
through the gills. In the sub-strata, where the moon shone steady and
opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord.
In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the
real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There
was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a
child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender
because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved,
substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had
not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure,
ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to
tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me
so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere
sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any
good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the
condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was
convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of
men? Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke.
I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often
said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.
What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me
to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess
these virtues but if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to
be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy
was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or
anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and
everything.
From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything
too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had
need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as
my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I
balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other
words, corrupt from the start. It's as though my mother fed me a poison, and
though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she
weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent, most children rebel,
or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn't give a damn, I was a
philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on
principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me
was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an
effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap.
And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because
I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard
later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out
of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a
nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis?
The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the
gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls
in the kitchen. Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate
zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally
sluggards, naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never
realized that there were "warm" countries, places where you didn't have to
sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and
exhilarating. Wherever there is cold there are people who work themselves to
the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of
work -which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people
were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has
ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness,
to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully dean. But inwardly they
stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never
once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the
dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read
it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed
they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything
was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and
on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one
idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.
In my bitterness I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better
to condemn myself. For I am like them too, in many ways. For a long while I
thought I had escaped, but as time goes on I see that I am no better, that I
am even a little worse, because I saw more dearly than they ever did and yet
remained powerless to alter my life. As I look back on my life it seems to
me that I never did anything of my own volition but always through the
pressure of others. People often think of me as an adventurous fellow;
nothing could be farther from the truth. My adventures were always
adventitious, always thrust on me, always endured rather than undertaken. I
am of the very essence of that proud, boastful Nordic people who have never
had the least sense of adventure but who nevertheless have scoured the
earth, turned it upside down, scattering relics and ruins everywhere.
Restless spirits, but not adventurous ones. Agonizing spirits, incapable of
living in the present Disgraceful cowards, all of them, myself included. For
there is only one great adventure and that is inward towards the self, and
for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.
Once every few years I was on the verge of making this discovery, but
in characteristic fashion I always managed to dodge the issue. If I try to
think of a good excuse I can think only of the environment, of the streets I
knew and the people who inhabited them. I can think of no street in America,
or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on towards the
discovery of the self. I have walked the streets in many countries of the
world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I
think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a
cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away
to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic
wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and
chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane
asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of
the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest
jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness)
but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy. At least I knew
that I was unhappy, unwealthy, out of whack and out of step. That was my
only solace, my only joy. But it was hardly enough. It would have been
better for my peace of mind, for my soul if I had expressed my rebellion
openly, if I had gone to jail for it, if I had rotted there and died. It
would have been better if, like the mad Czolgosz, I had shot some good
President McKinley, some gentle, insignificant soul like that who had never
done anyone the least harm. Because in the bottom of my heart there was
murder: I wanted to see America destroyed, razed from top to bottom. I
wanted to see this happen purely out of vengeance, as atonement for the
crimes that were committed against me and against others like me who have
never been able to lift their voices and express their hatred, their
rebellion, their legitimate blood lust.
I was the evil product of an evil soil. If the self were not
imperishable, the "I" I write about would have been destroyed long ago. To
some this may seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have
happened did actually happen, at least to me. History may deny it, since I
have played no part in the history of my people, but even if everything I
say is wrong, is prejudiced, spiteful, malevolent, even if I am a liar and a
poisoner, it is nevertheless the truth and it will have to be swallowed. As
to what happened ...
Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of
a contradiction. Until the one for whom this is written came along I
imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solutions to
all things. I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of
life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold
of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I
found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach
myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not
looked for - myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to
live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself. I
realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this
which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same
time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even
what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had
stifled every day in order to live. Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no
importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of
effort, I cannot say what I think and feel - that bothers me, that rankles.
From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this spectre, enjoying
nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a
lie - everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that
is pretty much the greater part of my life.
I was a contradiction in essence, as they say. People took me to be
serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless, or to be sincere and
earnest, or to be negligent and carefree. I was all these things at once -
and beyond that I was something else, something which no one suspected,
least of all myself. As a boy of six or seven I used to sit at my
grandfather's workbench and read to him while he sewed. I remember him
vividly in those moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a
coat, he would stand with one hand over the other and look out of the window
dreamily. I remember the expression on his face, as he stood there dreaming,
better than the contents of the books I read, better than the conversations
we had or the games which I played in the street I used to wonder what he
was dreaming of, what it was that drew him out of himself. I hadn't learned
yet how to dream wideawake. I was always lucid, in the moment, and all of a
piece. His daydreaming fascinated me. I knew that he had no connection with
what he was doing, not the least thought for any of us, that he was alone
and being alone he was free. I was never alone, least of all when I was by
myself. Always, it seems to me, I was accompanied: I was like a little crumb
of a big cheese, which was the world, I suppose, though I never stopped to
think about it. But I know I never existed separately, never thought myself
the big cheese, as it were. So that even when I had reason to be miserable,
to complain, to weep, I had the illusion of participating in a common, a
universal misery. When I wept the whole world was weeping -so I imagined. I
wept very seldom. Mostly I was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good
time. I had a good time because, as I said before, I really didn't give a
fuck about anything. If things were wrong with me they were wrong
everywhere, I was convinced of it. And things were wrong usually only when
one cared too much. That impressed itself on me very early in life. For
example, I remember the case of my young friend Jack Lawson. For a whole
year he lay in bed, suffering the worst agonies. He was my best friend, so
people said at any rate. Well, at first I was probably sorry for him and
perhaps now and then I called at his house to inquire about him; but after a
month or two had elapsed I grew quite callous about his suffering. I said to
myself he ought to die and the sooner he dies the better it will be, and
having thought thus I acted accordingly, that is to say, I promptly forgot
about him, abandoned him to his fate. I was only about twelve years old at
the time and I remember being proud of my decision. I remember the funeral
too - what a disgraceful affair it was. There they were, friends and
relatives all congregated about the bier and all of them bawling like sick
monkeys. The mother especially gave me a pain in the ass. She was such a
rare, spiritual creature, a Christian Scientist, I believe, and though she
didn't believe in disease and didn't believe in death either, she raised
such a stink that Christ himself would have risen from the grave. But not
her beloved Jack! No, Jack lay there cold as ice and rigid and unbeckonable.
He was dead and there were no two ways about it. I knew it and I was glad of
it. I didn't waste any tears over it. I couldn't say that he was better off
because after all the "he" had vanished. He was gone and with him the
sufferings he had endured and the suffering he had unwittingly inflicted on
others. Amen! I said to myself, and with that, being slightly hysterical, I
let a loud fart - right beside the coffin.
This caring too much - I remember that it only developed with me about
the time I first fell in love. And even then I didn't care enough. If I had
really cared I wouldn't be here now writing about it: I'd have died of a
broken heart, or I'd have swung for it. It was a bad experience because it
taught me how to live a lie. It taught me to smile when I didn't want to
smile, to work when I didn't believe in work, to live when I had no reason
to go on living. Even when I had forgotten her I still retained the trick of
doing what I didn't believe in.
I was all chaos from the beginning, as I have said. But sometimes I got
so close to the centre, to the very heart of the confusion, that it's a
wonder things didn't explode around me.
It is customary to blame everything on the war. I say the war had
nothing to do with me, with my life. At a time when others were getting
themselves comfortable berths I was taking one miserable job after another,
and never enough in it to keep body and soul together. Almost as quickly as
I was hired I was fired. I had plenty of intelligence but I inspired
distrust. Whereever I went I fomented discord - not because I was idealistic
but because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of
everything. Besides, I wasn't a good ass-licker. That marked me, no doubt.
People could tell at once when I asked for a job that I really didn't give a
damn whether I got it or not. And of course I generally didn't get it. But
after a time the mere looking for a job became an activity, a pastime, so to
speak. I would go in and ask for most anything. It was a way of killing time
- now worse, as far as I could see, than work itself. I was my own boss and
I had my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my
own bankruptcy. I was not a corporation or a trust or a state or a
federation or a polity of nations - I was more like God, if anything.
This went on from about the middle of the war until... well, until one
day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I
needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take
the last job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment
bureau of the telegraph company - the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of
North America - towards the dose of the day, prepared to go through with it.
I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat
books on economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the
job.
The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard.
He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was dear enough from
my application that I had long left school. I had even honoured myself on
the application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Apparently
that passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who
had turned me down. I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I
was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in
certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual
leer and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed thinking
about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on.
The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn't bother me so much,
people didn't offer you jobs because you had a family to support, that much
I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they had rejected me.
Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the
lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn't get over it. In the
morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and
hot-footed it to the subway. I went immediately to the main offices of the
telegraph company ... up to the 25th floor or wherever it was that the
president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles. I asked to see the
president. Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see
me, but wouldn't I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather.
I saw the vice-president's secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of
chap, and I gave him an earful. I did it adroitly, without too much heat,
but letting him understand all the while that I wasn't to be put out of the
way so easily.
When he picked up the telephone and demanded the general manager I
thought it was just a gag, that they were going to pass me around like that
from one to the other until I'd get fed up. But the moment I heard him talk
I changed my opinion. When I got to the general manager's office, which was
in another building uptown, they were waiting for me. I sat down in a
comfortable leather chair and accepted one of the big cigars that were
thrust forward. This individual seemed at once to be vitally concerned about
the matter. He wanted me to tell him all about it, down to the last detail,
his big hairy ears cocked to catch the least crumb of information which
would justify something or other which was formulating itself inside his
dome. I realized that by some accident I had really been instrumental in
doing him a service. I let him wheedle it out of me to suit his fancy,
observing all the time which way the wind was blowing. And as the talk
progressed I noticed that be was warming up to me more and more. At last
some one was showing a little confidence in me 1 That was all I required to
get started on one of my favourite lines. For, after years of job hunting I
had naturally become quite adept, I knew not only what not to say, but I
knew also what to imply, what to insinuate. Soon the assistant general
manager was called in and asked to listen to my story. By this time I knew
what the story was. I understood that Hymie - "that little kike", as the
general manager called him - had no business pretending that he was the
employment manager. Hymie had usurped his prerogative, that much was dear.
It was also dear that Hymie was a Jew and that Jews were not in good odour
with the general manager, nor with Mr. Twilliger, the vice-president, who
was a thorn in the general manager's side.
Perhaps it was Hymie, "the dirty little kike" who was responsible for
the high percentage of Jews on the messenger
force. Perhaps Hymie was really the one who was doing the hiring at the
employment office - at Sunset Place, they called it. It was an excellent
opportunity, I gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to take down a
certain Mr. Bums who, he informed me, had been the employment manager for
some thirty years now and who was evidently getting lazy on the job.
The conference lasted several hours. Before it was terminated Mr.
Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me the boss
of the Works. Before putting me into office, however, he was going to ask me
as a special favour, and also as a sort of apprenticeship which would stand
me in good stead, to work as a special messenger. I would receive the salary
of employment manager, but it would be paid me out of a separate account. In
short I was to float from office to office and observe the way affairs were
conducted by all and sundry. I was to make a little report from time to time
as to how things were going. And once in a while, so he suggested, I was to
visit him at his home on the q.t. and have a little chat about the
conditions in the hundred and one branches of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph
Company in New York City. In other words I was to be a spy for a few months
and after that I was to have the run of the joint. Maybe they'd make me a
general manager too one day, or a vice-president. It was a tempting oner,
even if it was wrapped up in a lot of horse shit. I said Yes.
In a few months I was sitting at Sunset Place hiring and firing like a
demon. It was a slaughter-house, so help me God. The thing was senseless
from the bottom up. A waste of men, material and effort A hideous farce
against a backdrop of sweat and misery. But just as I had accepted the
spying so I accepted the hiring and firing and all that went with it. I said
Yes to everything. If the vice-president decreed that no cripples were to be
hired I hired no cripples. If the vice-president said that all messengers
over forty-five were to be fired without notice I fired them without notice.
I did everything they instructed me to do, but in such a way that they had
to pay for it. When there was a strike I folded my arms and waited for it to
blow over. But I first saw to it that it cost them a good penny. The whole
system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly corrupt and
complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or order
into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against
the whole rotten system of American labour, which is rotten at both ends. I
was the fifth wheel on the wagon and neither side had any use for me, except
to exploit me. In fact, everybody was being exploited - the president and
his gang by the unseen powers, the employees by the officials, and so on and
around, in and out and through the whole works. From my little perch at
"Sunset Place" I had a bird's eye view of the whole American society. It was
like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically,
statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you
examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined
one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed,
the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and
degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it
was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life
- economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically,
statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out
cock. It looked worse than that, really, because you couldn't even see
anything resembling a cock any more. Maybe in the past this thing had life,
did produce something, did at least give a moment's pleasure, a moment's
thrill. But looking at it from where I sat it looked rottener than the
wormiest cheese. The wonder was that the stench of it didn't carry'em off...
I'm using the past tense all the time, but of course it's the same now,
maybe even a bit worse. At least now we're getting it full stink.
By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps
of messengers. My office at Sunset Place was like an open sewer, and it
stank like one. I had dug myself into the first line trench and I was
getting it from all directions at once. To begin with, the man I had ousted
died of a broken heart a few weeks after my arrival. He held out just long
enough to break me in and then he croaked. Things happened so fast that I
didn't have a chance to feel guilty. From the moment I arrived at the office
it was one long uninterrupted pandemon- him. An hour before my arrival -1
was always late - the place was already jammed with applicants. I had to
elbow my way up the stairs and literally force my way in to get there. Hymie
was worse off than I because he was tied to the barricade. Before I could
take my hat off I had to answer a dozen telephone calls. There were three
telephones on my desk and they all rang at once. They were bawling the piss
out of me before I had even sat down to work. There wasn't even time to take
a crap - until five or six in the afternoon. Hymie was worse off than I
because he was tied to the switchboard. He sat there from eight in the
morning, until six, moving waybills around. A waybill was a messenger loaned
by one office to another office for the day or a part of the day. None of
the hundred and one offices ever had a full staff; Hymie had to play chess
with the waybills while I worked like a madman to plug up the gaps. If by a
miracle I succeeded in a day of filling all the vacancies, the next morning
would find the situation exactly the same - or worse. Perhaps twenty per
cent of the force were steady; the rest was driftwood. The steady ones drove
the new ones away. The steady ones earned forty to fifty dollars a week,
sometimes sixty or seventy-five, sometimes as much as a hundred dollars a
week, which is to say that they earned far more than the clerks and often
more than their own managers. As for the new ones, they found it difficult
to earn ten dollars a week. Some of them worked an hour and quit, often
throwing a batch of telegrams in the garbage can or down the sewer. And
whenever they quit they wanted their pay immediately, which was impossible,
because in the complicated bookkeeping which ruled no one could say what a
messenger had earned until at least ten days later. In the beginning I
invited the applicant to sit down beside me and I explained everything to
him in detail. I did that until I lost my voice. Soon I learned to save my
strength for the grilling that was necessary. In the first place, every
other boy was a born liar if not a crook to boot. Many of them had already
been hired and fired a number of times. Some found it an excellent way to
find another job, because their duty brought them to hundreds of offices
which normally they would never have set foot in. Fortunately McGovern, the
old trusty who guarded the door and handed out the application blanks, had a
camera eye. And then there were the big ledgers behind me, in which there
was a record of every applicant who had ever passed through the mill. The
ledgers were very much like a police record; they were full of red ink
marks, signifying this or that delinquency. To judge from the evidence I was
in a tough spot. Every other name involved a theft, fraud, a brawl, or
dementia or perversion or idiocy. "Be careful - so-and-so is an epileptic!"
"Don't hire this man - he's a nigger 1" "Watch out - X has been in Dannemora
- or else in Sing Sing."
If I had been a stickler for etiquette nobody would ever have been
hired. I had to learn quickly, and not from the records or from those about
me, but from experience. There were a thousand and one details by which to
judge an applicant: I had to take them all in at once, and quickly, because
in one short day, even if you are as fast as Jack Robinson, you can only
hire so many and no more. And no matter how many I hired it was never
enough. The next day it would begin all over again. Some I knew would last
only a day, but I had to hire them just the same. The system was wrong from
start to finish, but it was not my place to criticize the system. It was
mine to hire and fire. I was in the centre of a revolving disk which was
whirling so fast that nothing could stay put. What was needed was a
mechanic, but according to the logic of the higher-ups there was nothing
wrong with the mechanism, everything was fine and dandy except that things
were temporarily out of order. And things being temporarily out of order
brought on epilepsy, theft, vandalism, perversion, niggers, Jews, whores and
what-not - sometimes strikes and lockouts. Whereupon, according to this
logic, you took a big broom and you swept the stable dean, or you took clubs
and guns and you beat sense into the poor idiots who were suffering from the
illusion that things were fundamentally wrong. It was good now and then to
talk of God, or to have a little community sing - maybe even a bonus was
justifiable now and then, that is when things were getting too terribly bad
for words. But on the whole, the important thing was to keep hiring and
firing; as long as there were men and ammunition we were to advance, to keep
mopping up the trenches. Meanwhile Hymie kept taking cathartic pills -enough
to blow out his rear end if he had bad a rear end, but he hadn't one any
more, he only imagined he was taking a crap, he only imagined he was
shitting on his can. Actually the poor bugger was in a trance. There were a
hundred and one offices to look after and each one had a staff of messengers
which was mythical, if not hypothetical, and whether the messengers were
real or unreal, tangible or intangible, Hymie had to shuffle them about from
morning to night while I plugged up the holes, which was also imaginary
because who could say when a recruit had been dispatched to an office
whether he would arrive there today or tomorrow or never. Some of them got
lost in the subway or in the labyrinths under the skyscrapers; some rode
around on the elevated line all day because with a uniform it was a free
ride and perhaps they had never enjoyed riding around all day on the
elevated lines. Some of them started for Staten Island and ended up in
Canarsie, or else were brought back in a coma by a cop. Some forgot where
they lived and disappeared completely. Some whom we hired for New York
turned up in Philadelphia a month later as though it were normal and
according to Hoyle. Some would start for their destination and on the way
decide that it was easier to sell newspapers and they would sell them in the
uniform we had given them, until they were picked up. Some went straight to
the observation ward, moved by some strange preservative instinct.
When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he
did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he
explained to me later, if he didn't sharpen the pencils first thing off the
bat they would never get sharpened. The next thing was to take a glance out
the window and see what the weather was like. Then, with a freshly sharpened
pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he kept beside
him and in it he gave the weather report. This, he also informed me, often
turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot thick or the ground
covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not
shuffling the waybills around more speedily, and the employment manager
might also be excused for not filling up the holes on such days, no? But why
he didn't take a crap first instead of plugging in on the switchboard soon
as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery to me. That too he explained to
me later. Anyway, the day always broke with confusion, complaints,
constipation and vacancies. It also began with loud smelly farts, with bad
breaths, with ragged nerves, with epilepsy, with meningitis, with low wages,
with back pay that was overdue, with worn-out shoes, with corns and bunions,
with flat feet and broken arches, with pocket books missing and fountain
pens lost or stolen, with telegrams floating in the sewer, with threats from
the vice-president and advice from the managers, with wrangles and disputes,
with cloudbursts and broken telegraph wires, with new methods of efficiency
and old ones that had been discarded, with hope for better times and a
prayer for the bonus which never came. The new messengers were going over
the top and getting machine-gunned; the old ones were digging in deeper and
deeper, like rats in a cheese. Nobody was satisfied, especially not the
public. It took ten minutes to reach San Francisco over the wire, but it
might take a year to get the message to the man whom it was intended for -
or it might never reach him.
The Y.M.C.A., eager to improve the morale of working boys everywhere in
America, were holdings meetings at noon hour and wouldn't I like to send a
few spruce-looking boys to hear William Carnegie Asterbilt Junior give a
five minute talk on service. Mr. Mallory of the Welfare League would like to
know if I could spare a few minutes some time to tell me about the model
prisoners who were on parole and who would be glad to serve in any capacity,
even as messengers. Mrs. Guggenhoffer of the Jewish Charities would be very
grateful if I would aid her in maintaining some broken-down homes which had
broken down because everybody was either infirm, crippled or disabled in the
family. Mr. Haggerty of the Runaway Home for Boys was sure he had just the
right youngsters for me, if only I would give them a chance; all of them had
been mistreated by their stepfathers or stepmothers. The Mayor of New York
would appreciate it if I would give my personal attention to the bearer of
the said letter whom he could vouch for in every way -but why the hell he
didn't give said bearer a job himself was a mystery. Man leaning over my
shoulder hands me a slip of paper on which he has just written - "Me
understand everything but me no hear the voices." Luther Winifred is
standing beside him, his tattered coat fastened together with safety pins.
Luther is two sevenths pure Indian and five sevenths German-American, so he
explains. On the Indian side he is a Crow, one of the Crows from Montana.
His last job was putting up window shades, but there is no ass in his pants
and he is ashamed to climb a ladder in front ofa lady. He got out of the
hospital the other day and so he is still a little weak, but he is not too
weak to carry messages, so he thinks.
And then there is Ferdinand Mish - how could I have forgotten him? He
has been waiting in line all morning to get a word with me. I never answered
the letters he sent me. Was that just? he asks me blandly. Of course not. I
remember vaguely the last letter he sent me from the Cat and Dog Hospital on
the Grand Concourse, where he was an attendant. He said he repented that he
had resigned his post "but it was on account of his father being too strict
over him, not giving him any recreation or outside pleasure". "I'm
twenty-five now," he wrote, "and I don't think I should ought to be sleeping
no more with my father, do you? I know you are said to be a very fine
gentleman and I am now self-dependent, so I hope ..." McGovem, the old
trusty, is standing by Ferdinand's side waiting for me to give him the sign.
He wants to give Ferdinand the bum's rush - he remembers him from five years
ago when Ferdinand lay down on the sidewalk in front of the main office in
full uniform and threw an epileptic fit. No, shit, I can't do it! I'm going
to give him a chance, the poor bastard. Maybe I'll send him to Chinatown
where things are fairly quiet. Meanwhile, while Ferdinand is changing into a
uniform in the back room, I'm getting an earful from an orphan boy who wants
to "help make the company a success". He says that if I give him a chance
he'll pray for me every Sunday when he goes to church, except the Sundays
when he has to report to his parole officer. He didn't do nothing, it
appears. He just pushed the fellow and the fellow fell on his head and got
killed. Next: An ex-consul from Gibraltar. Writes a beautiful hand - too
beauti- fill. I ask him to see me at the end of the day - something fishy
about him. Meanwhile Ferdinand's thrown a fit in the dressing room. Lucky
break! If it had happened in the subway, with a number on his hat and
everything, I'd have been canned. Next:
A guy with one arm and mad as hell because McGovem is showing him the
door. "What the hell! I'm strong and healthy, ain't I?" he shouts, and to
prove it he picks up a chair with his good arm and smashes it to bits. I get
back to the desk and there's a telegram lying there for me. I open it. It's
from George Blasini, ex-messenger No. 2459 of S.W. office. "I am sorry that
I had to quit so soon, but the job was not fitted for my character idleness
and I am a true lover of labour and frugality but many a time we be unable
to control or subdue our personal pride." Shit!
In the beginning I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the
clamps below. I had ideas and I executed them, whether it pleased the
vice-president or not. Every ten days or so I was put on the carpet and