Genri Miller. Tropik Raka (engl) --------------------------------------------------------------- OCR: YAnko Slava Spellcheck: Mark Zelyony --------------------------------------------------------------- Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer HENRY MILLER was born on December 26, 1891, in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn. After a string of dreary jobs and a disastrous first marriage, Miller left for Paris in 1930. Tropic of Cancer, published when he was forty-three and immediately banned in all English-speaking countries, is considered his most important book. Miller's works include Black Spring (1936), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), The Cosmological Eye (1939), The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), The Time of the Assassins (1946), The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), and his autobiographical trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion, comprised of Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1960). In 1940, Miller returned to America and settled in Big Sur, California. A lusty romantic. Miller married five times, the last to Japanese singer Hoki Tokuda. His courageous legal battle against the censorship of Tropic of Cancer ended with a landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision, which guaranteed a new freedom of expression to all American writers. Generous and supportive of other artists throughout his life. Henry Miller in his final years was surrounded by young admirers and old friends. Writing, painting, and carrying on a voluminous correspondence until the very end. Henry Miller died in June, 1980, in the arms of his housekeeper. HENRY MILLER TROPIC OF CANCER With an Introduction by Louise De Salvo A SIGNET CLASSIC SIGNET CLASSIC Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street. New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd. 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ. England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto. Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 1R2-190 Wairau Road. Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd. Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex. England Published by Signet Classic, an imprint of New American Library. a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. First Signet Classic Printing. August 1995 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 Introduction copyright œ Louise DeSalvo. 1995 All rights reserved REGISTERED TRADEMARK -- MARCA REGISTRADA Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-74837 Printed in the United States of America BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC.. 375 HUDSON STREET. NEW YORK. NEW YORK 10014. If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." "These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies -- captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly." --ralph waldo emerson Introduction to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer by Louise DeSalvo Henry Miller arrived in Paris on March 4, 1930, to try to become a successful writer.1 He had ten dollars in his pocket (a loan from his old friend Emil Schnellock), a trunkful of suits (from his tailor father), which he knew he could pawn if he ran out of money, and carbon copies of two novels he had written in New York and hoped to revise -- Moloch (about his first marriage and his job at Western Union), and Crazy Cock (about his second marriage to June Miller and her lesbian love affair, which had tormented him).2 Though he had been writing seriously for six years, and had published a few small pieces, Miller hadn't yet published a novel, hadn't yet fulfilled his dream of becoming a "working-class Proust," the Proust of Brooklyn.3 His wife, June, had persuaded him that Paris might be where he could perfect his craft and become financially successful. What really motivated June to urge her husband to leave New York, though, was that he had become a burden to her and she wanted him (temporarily) out of her life while she pursued another of her schemes to make money for both of them. She was involved in a relationship with an older, wealthy "sugar daddy," who makes a brief appearance in Tropic of Cancer as the "fetus with a cigar in its mouth" standing opposite Miller's apartment, watching him leave for Europe. Though June had persuaded Miller to quit his job at Western Union to become a writer, and had supported him through a variety of jobs -- as a hostess, a waitress, and a prostitute -- she had lost confidence in him. Despite her efforts, he showed no signs of becoming what she believed he would become: a writer who would immortalize her in his work, who would extol her self-sacrifice, who viii would reveal her to the world as the semi-mythic femme fatale she believed herself to be -- a Dostoyevsky heroine, who prowled the streets of New York City in search of adventure.4 Miller's life with June formed the foundation of all his mature fiction. On the night of May 21, 1927, in profound despair because June had tied to Paris with her lover Jean Kronski, Miller outlined a magnum ORIs that would recount the agony of his life with June. Though June had kept in touch in her usual desultory way, with a few postcards of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and Notre Dame, she hadn't responded to his letters begging her to come back to him, and he sensed that his marriage. if not over, would never be the same again. Desperate with loneliness, and crazy with jealousy. Miller sat at the typewriter in the office of the Parks Department in Queens where he was working, to outline a novel that would recount his life with June and her betrayal. He was thirty-six years old, and living with his parents because he couldn't afford to live alone. It had been June's idea that he could become a writer. The truth was, though he had always wanted to become a writer, he was "afraid"; he didn't think he had the ability. He wasn't rich or privileged or college educated, though he was extremely well read: he had attended the City College of New York briefly, but soon left, "disgusted with the curriculum" after a "hopeless encounter" with Spenser's The Fairie Queene. As a working-class man, the son of first generation German-Americans,' who had been born in New York on December 26, 1891, Miller often said to himself, "Who was I to say I am a writer?"6 On that night. Miller began to type out his notes for what would become a lifelong literary project. The notes came "without effort"; he would deal with his and his wife's "battles royal, debauches," her lies and betrayals. He wrote a catalog of the "events and crises" they had endured. He listed the manuscripts in his possession he could cannibalize, letters he had written that he could mine for details. Everything he had lived, everything he had written, would become the source for his art. When he finished, early the next morning, he had a stack of thirty-two closely typed pages, which he labeled "June." ix He had sketched the basis for much of his life's work, for Crazy Cock, portions of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Rosy Crucifixion. More importantly, he had fastened upon the intensely autobiographical form that his life's work would take. From now on, he would be both the author and subject of his life's work. He would live his life as if it were the raw material for art; then he would turn the life he had lived into art.7 When Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930, the city, like New York, was in the midst of the Depression. His Paris was not the Paris of Ernest Hemingway or of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Miller, because of his self-imposed poverty, could describe a side of Paris that tourists (and even the expatriates who lived there before him) never saw. It was a Paris not of exquisite meals, but of hunger, of rancid butter and moldy cheese, of cheap hotels with tattered wallpaper and bloodstained gray sheets crawling with bedbugs, of old women sleeping in doorways, of whores with wooden stumps, of full slop pails, of "angoisse and tristesse." Tropic of Cancer recounts the story of Henry Miller's first two years in Paris. It is perhaps the first novel that redefines the creative process for the working-class writer. It is an (un)American, ungenteel, uneducated (but not unlettered), no-holds-barred, middle-aged-man's version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (a writer whom Miller despised, calling him a "pedagogic sadist,"8 but whom he consciously emulated), or of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (a writer whom Miller adored). It is a meditation on both the profane and divine aspects of an art that has its source in both lust and longing. Many critics have commented upon the precedent-shattering descriptions of sexuality in the novel. Yet another subject of Tropic of Cancer is even more revolutionary: It shows what a working-class man must go through to live the creative life, and how he must redefine himself to develop the courage to write a novel about his own experiences in his own voice. "A year ago, six months ago," the narrator tells us, "I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am." It is a work xii work-in-progrcss to remind himself of what still had to be written. Or he consulted the lists of words he had copied from his dictionary that he wanted to include in his novel He could work even when other people were present. Of ten, he typed and talked simultaneously. (It is likely that at limes he typed these conversations into the novel.) Sometimes "in the middle of his work he would put on a record and listen to a piece of music. Or he would burst into song himself. His work was done singing."13 After, he would go on long walks, taking his notebook with him. He would find new streets to describe, new sights to incorporate, new denizens of the street to include in his work. The "more squalid parts of Paris''14 fascinated him -- the Cite Nortier, for example, near the Place du Combat, with a courtyard bordered by rotting buildings, its flagstones slippery with slime, a "human dump-heap" filled with garbage. Or he would take a bicycle ride to the outlying parts of Paris. After dinner (again, at the expense of friends). Miller would often go back to work. Though he was still married to June Miller throughout the composition of Tropic of Cancer, this period was also the heyday of Miller's love affair with Anais Nin, who was married to the banker Hugh Guiler. Miller was introduced to AnaTs Nin in December 1931 through his friend Richard Osbom.15 Miller came into Nin's life when she was ripe for sexual experimentation, soon after she had published a book on D. H. Lawrence. Miller himself had just published a review of Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or, and was working on yet another revision of his novel Crazy Cock, about the adverse effect of his wife's lesbian love affair upon his sanity.16 When they met, Nin wrote into her diary: "I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me."17 At first, the two met to talk about their work, and to exchange ideas. But when Nin met Miller's wife, June. the relationship became immediately complicated. Nin fell in love with June, replicating the love triangle that had caused Miller so much pain. xiii After June returned to the United States, Nin and Miller became lovers. According to Nin's testimony, he was a wonderful lover, who awakened her sensuality; he was passionate yet considerate, and he satisfied her in ways she had never imagined possible. According to his testimony, she supported him financially, and gave him the peace of mind and the courage to begin Tropic of Cancer, the most important novel of his life. She convinced him that his work was more important than Joyce's, and that he should be as explosive and provocative in his work as he was in his talk. She provided the secure base from which Miller felt free to experiment. Nin and Miller remained lovers for years, spoke of marriage, shared a studio apartment at the Villa Seurat, and conceived a child together (which Nin aborted). Yet Nin never seriously considered leaving her husband for Miller, though she urged Miller to leave June, and helped end his marriage by letting June know that she and Miller were lovers. For one thing, it was Nin's husband's money that financed her freewheeling lifestyle. She realized that Miller could not be counted upon to support a wife. For another, neither Nin nor Miller was inclined to monogamy. During their affair, Nin was sexually involved, not only with Miller, but with her husband, her cousin Eduardo Sanchez, and two of her analysts (Rene Allendy and Otto Rank); Miller continued his dalliances with prostitutes. Though Miller seemed accepting of Nin's behavior, Nin was often angry with Miller for his. Reading Nin's descriptions of Miller's behavior as a lover and as a man, in her unexpurgated diaries (published as Henry and June and Incest), and in her fiction (in Cities of the Interior) against Miller's description of himself in Tropic of Cancer is instructive. It illuminates the distance between the "real" Henry Miller, and the persona Miller created for himself in his work. In Miller's self-portrait, he presents himself as sexually rapacious, rough, tough, woman hating, though he longs for his wife, Mona. In Nin's work, though. Miller is a passionate and tender lover, respectful of her womanhood, though timid, weak, and vulnerable as a man. Her portrait is nothing like the tough-minded persona of Cancer, and suggests that Miller's creation was largely compensatory. xiv Miller was, as Nin put it, "a child in need, ... a victim [of women] seeking solace, ... a weakling seeking sustenance."18 Henry Miller developed the narrative of Tropic of Cancer from his letters from Paris to his friend Emil Schnellock and those to Anais Nin (especially the ones from Dijon describing his wretched teaching experience),19 from the notes he made as he prowled the streets of Paris, and from his conversations with friends about literature, psychoanalysis (with Anai's Nin), sex (with Wambly Bald, the Parisian columnist, who appears in the novel as the sex-obsessed Van Norden), death (with Michael Fraenkel), and war. For the first time in his fiction, he used what he called the "first person spectacular."20 It was a point of view he had studiously avoided in his earlier attempts at fiction, yet it suited him, for he was a magnetic teller and reteller of stories. In one sense. Tropic of Cancer is about the healing of the damaged self through stories, which magnify and mythicize his own and his friends' escapades. Anai's Nin believed that Miller's work illuminated the workings of the psyche more profoundly than James Joyce's and, in one important sense, she was right. For as James Joyce records the contents of consciousness. Miller's work shows the process by which the contents of consciousness are created by the storytelling self. Miller's avowed aim, as he states it in Cancer, is "to put down everything that goes on in my noodle" without self-censorship. Miller shows how, by choosing the way you describe your life, you can create the consciousness that you desire. Without waiting for the world to change, you can change who you are by the stories you tell yourself and others about who you are. But his stories are not only healing, they are entertaining. Miller adopted the pose of a modem-day jongleur, who turned self-display into an art form, into a carnival performance, using a narrative voice uniquely and authentically his, one that had not yet been written down. Though in his novel Moloch, Miller wrote that no successful work of literature could be located in Brooklyn, or have Brooklyn as its subject. Tropic of Cancer is written xv in the voice of the Brooklyn boy. It is the voice of the wise-ass street kid, who hangs out on the corner with his friends, who trades stories with them about his exploits, and who uses one-upsmanship to gain status. It is the voice of the man who hides his pain behind a string of curse words, who vulgarizes women because it is unmanly to admit how much he needs them, and who exaggerates how callous and tough he is so that he will not be victimized. But his longing for Mona (his wife, June) is tenderly and poignantly described, and it forms the emotional core of Cancer against which his posture of viciousness toward women must be read. In expressing his disgust at the cunt-obsessed Van Norden, the narrator concludes that having sex without passion is like living in a state of war. Though a habitue of the streets, a literary clochard, Miller's narrator cannot manage to hide how learned he is. In Cancer, besides drawing upon his experiences, Miller self-consciously used such models and sources as Knut Hamsun's, D. H. Lawrence's, and Marcel Proust's fiction,21 Shakespeare's and James Joyce's soliloquies, Francois Rabelais' bawdy humor,22 Japanese shunga's and Indian sculpture's explicitly profane yet sacred depiction of sex, Walt Whitman's celebratory lists, Brassai's photography, Picasso's nudes, Anais Nin's self-reflective diaries, and the techniques of the surrealists (including assemblage),23 to name but a few. He describes how literature and art can enrich the lives of the members of the working class, of people without university degrees. Tropic of Cancer was published in a small edition in Paris on September 1, 1934, by Jack Kahane at the Obelisk Press with money provided by Anais Nin, given to her by Otto Rank.24 Obscenity laws in England and the United States prohibited publication, but "potentially 'obscene' books could be published in France if they were in English."25 The cover of the first edition was designed by Kahane's sixteen-year-old son to save money. It showed "a crab crushing a nude female in its claws,"26 and Miller thought it was "horrible." The jacket carried a warning to booksellers that Cancer "must not be displayed in the window."27 Notes 1. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, ed. by George Wickes (New York: New Directions, 1989), p. 15. 2. Erica Jong, The Devil at Large (New York: Turtle Bay, 1993), p. 21; see J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 3. Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1978), p. 139: Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 14^; Mary V. Dearborn, Henry Miller (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 108; and the account in Louise DeSalvo, Conceived with Malice (New York: Dutton, 1994). 4. Ferguson, p. 81. 5. Jong, p. 55. 6. Martin, p. 18, p. 129; Dearborn, pp. 100-1; Henry Miller, My Life and Times (New York: Playboy Press, n.d.), p. 33. 7. For accounts of this event, see Martin, p. 520; Dearborn, p. 323; Miller, My Life and Times, p. 50. 8. Henry Miller, Moloch (New York: Grove Press, 1992), p. 8. 9. Ferguson, p. 208. 10. Alfred Perles, My Friend Henry Miller (New York: John Day, 1956), p. 70; Wambly Bald quoted in Ferguson, pp. 210-11. 11. See the account in Perles. 12. Perles, pp. 70-1. 13. Perles, p. 70. 14. Perles, p. 72. 15. See Noel Riley Fitch, "The Literate Passion of Anais Nin & Henry Miller," in Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds.. Significant Others (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), pp. 155-72. 16. Fitch, p. 155; see the account of Miller's writing Crazy Cock in DeSalvo. 17. Anais Nin, Henry and June (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 6. 18. Anais Nin, Ladders to Fire, in Cities of the Interior (Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1959, 1975), p. 48. 19. See Dearborn, p. 128, R. 149. xx 20. Miller, Moloch, p. 65. 21. Ferguson, p. 69. 22. Perles, p. 112. 23. Ferguson, p. 181. 24. Martin, p. 303; Dearborn, p. 175. 25. Jong, p. 132. 26. Martin, p. 303. 27. Perles, p. 104. 28. Martin, p. 303. 29. Perles, p. 104; Dearborn, p. 173. 30. Perles, p. 142; Cendrars's review is provided in George Wickes, ed.. Henry Miller and the Critics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963). 31. Perles, p. 171; Ferguson, p. 346. 32. Dearborn, p. 241. 33. Perles, pp. 205-6. 34. Ferguson, p. 344. 35. Ferguson, p. 345. 36. Ferguson, p. 348. 37. Ferguson, p. 350. 38. Millett quoted in Jong, p. 29. 39. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin: 1931-1934, Volume One. ed. and with an Introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), p. 66. 40. Dearborn, p. 34. 41. Jong, p. 26. 42. Jong, p. 26. TROPIC OF CANCER * * * I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead. Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice. Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change. It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.... To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing. It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough. It is the twenty-somethingth of October. I no longer keep track of the date. Would you say -- my dream of the 14th November last? There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.... I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying. shedding the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon. Dozing off. The physiology of love. The whale with his six foot penis, in repose. The bat -- penis libre. Animals with a bone in the penis. Hence, a bone on. ... "Happily," says Gourmont, "the bony structure is lost in man." Happily? Yes, happily. Think of the human race walking around with a bone on. The kangaroo has a double penis -- one for weekdays and one for holidays. Dozing. A letter from a female asking if I have found a title for my book. Title? To be sure: "Lovely Lesbians." Your anecdotal life! A phrase of M. Borowski's. It is on Wednesdays that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who is a dried-up cow, officiates. She is studying English now -- her favourite word is "filthy." You can see immediately what a pain in the ass the Borowskis are. But wait. ... Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion. An invincible combination, especially when you consider that he is not a bad artist. He puts on that he is a Pole, but he is not, of course. He is a Jew, Borowski, and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half Jewish, which is worse. There's Carl and Paula, and Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden and Cherie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important to understand. Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew? Twilight hour. Indian blue water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaures. The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller-coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black, webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black. Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this beautiful Villa Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence of food. It is positively appalling at times. I have asked Boris time and again to order bread for breakfast, but he always forgets. He goes out for breakfast, it seems. And when he comes back he is picking his teeth and there is a little egg hanging from his goatee. He eats in the restaurant, out of consideration for me. He says it hurts to eat a big meal and have me watch him. I like Van Norden but I do not share his opinion of himself. I do not agree, for instance, that he is a philosopher, or a thinker. He is cunt-struck, that's all. And he will never be a writer. Nor will Sylvester ever be a writer, though his name blaze in 50,000 candle power red lights. The only writers about me for whom I have any respect, at present, arc Carl and Boris. They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a white name. They are mad and tone deaf. They are sufferers. Moldorf, on the other hand, who suffers too in his peculiar way, is not mad. Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or blood-vessels, no heart or kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable drawers and in the drawers are labels written out in white ink, brown ink, red ink, blue ink, vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot, turquoise, onyx, Anjou, herring. Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola... . I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I can see myself in the mirror as I write. Tania is like Irene. She expects fat letters. But there is another Tania, a Tania like a big seed, who scatters pollen everywhere -- or, let us say, a little bit of Tolstoi, a stable scene in which the foetus is dug up. Tania is a fever. too -- les votes urinaires. Cafe de la Liberte, Place des Vosges, bright neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark bathrooms, Porto Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata pathetique, aural amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt sienna breasts, heavy garters, what time is it, golden pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffeta fingers, vaporish twilights turning to ilex, acromegaly, cancer and delirium, warm veils, poker chips, carpets of blood and soft thighs. Tania says so that every one may hear: "I love him!" And while Boris scalds himself with whisky she says: "Sit down here! O Boris ... Russia ... what'll I do? I'm bursting with it!" At night when I look at Boris' goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical. O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider, I have ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces.... Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended, their black boughs gesticulating like a sleep-walker. Sombre, spectral trees, their trunks pale as dear ash. A silence supreme and altogether European. Shutters drawn, shops barred. A red glow here and there to mark a tryst. Brusque the facades, almost forbidding; immaculate except for the splotches of shadow cast by the trees. Passing by the Orangerie I am reminded of another Paris, the Paris of Maugham, of Gauguin, Paris of George Moore. I think of that terrible Spaniard who was then startling the world with his acrobatic leaps from style to style. I think of Spengler and of his terrible pronunciamentos, and I wonder if style, style in the grand manner, is done for. I say that my mind is occupied with these thoughts, but it is not true; it is only later, after I have crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me the carnival of lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For the moment I can think of nothing -- except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings.... The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise. Immense, avec des choses inouies. Liona now, she had a cunt. I know because she sent us some hairs from down below. Liona -- a wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On every high hill she played the harlot -- and sometimes in telephone booths and toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol and a shaving mug with his initials on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road with her dress pulled up and fingered herself. She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the land big enough for her ... not one. Men went inside her and curled up. She wanted extension pricks, self-exploding rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote. She would cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave her permission. One cunt out of a million, Llona! A laboratory cunt and no litmus paper that could take her color. She was a liar, too, this Liona. She never bought a bed for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whiskey bottle and her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Pool Carol, he could only curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath and he fell out -- like a dead clam. Enormous, fat letters, avec des choses inouies. A valise without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the Porte de la Villette. You dropped your sweetbreads into the tumbrils -- red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and Mame, where the water sluices through the dykes and lies like glass under the bridges. Liona is lying there now and the canal is full of glass and splinters; the mimosas weep, and there is a wet, foggy fart on the windowpanes. One cunt out of a million Liona! All cunt and a glass ass in which you can read the history of the Middle Ages. It is the caricature of a man which Moldorf first presents. Thyroid eyes. Michelin lips. Voice like pea-soup. Under his vest he carries a little pear. However you look at him it is always the same panorama; netsuke snuffbox, ivory handle, chess piece, fan, temple motif. He has fermented so long now that he is amorphous. Yeast despoiled of its vitamins. Vase without a rubber plant. The females were sired twice in the 9th century, and again during the Renaissance. He was carried through the great dispersions under yellow bellies and white. Long before the Exodus a Tatar spat in his blood. His dilemma is that of the dwarf. With his pineal eye he sees in silhouette projected on a screen of incommensurable size. His voice, synchronized to the shadow of a pinhead, intoxicates him. He hears a roar where others hear only a squeak. There is his mind. It is an amphitheatre in which the actor gives a protean performance. Moldorf, multiform and unerring, goes through his roles -- clown, juggler, contortionist, priest, lecher, mountebank. The amphitheatre is too small. He puts dynamite to it. The audience is drugged. He scotches it. I am trying ineffectually to approach Moldorf. It is like trying to approach God, for Moldorf is God -- he has never been anything else. I am merely putting down words.... I have had opinions about him which I have discarded; I have had other opinions which I am revising. I have pinned him down only to find that it was not a dung-beetle I had in my hands, but a dragonfly. He has offended me by his coarseness and then overwhelmed me with his delicacy. He has been voluble to the point of suffocation, then quiet as the Jordan. When I see him trotting forward to greet me, his little paws outstretched, his eyes perspiring, I feel that I am meeting.... No, this is not the way to go about it! "Comme un oeuf dansant sur un jet d'eau." He has only one cane -- a mediocre one. In his pocket scraps of paper containing prescriptions for Weltschmerz. He is cured now, and the little German girl who washed his feet is breaking her heart. It is like Mr. Nonentity toting his Gujurati dictionary everywhere. "Inevitable for every one" -- meaning, no doubt, indispensable. Borowski would find all this incomprehensible. Borowski has a different cane for each day in the week, and one for Easter. We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror. I have been looking over my manuscripts, pages scrawled with revisions. Pages of literature. This frightens me a little. It is so much like Moldorf. Only I am a gentile, and gentiles have a different way of suffering. They suffer without neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering. I recall distinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like taking a cub to bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you -- and then you really were frightened. Ordinarily you had no fear -- you could always turn him loose, or chop his head off. There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with wild beasts and be mangled. They go in even without revolver or whip. Fear makes them fearless. .. For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not hear. The drama, he thinks, is going on inside the cage. The cage, he thinks, is the world. Standing there alone and helpless, the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand his language. Not one lion has ever heard of Spinoza. Spinoza? Why they can't even get their teeth into him. "Give us meat!" they roar, while he stands there petrified, his ideas frozen, his Weltanschauung a trapeze out of reach. A single blow of the lion's paw and his cosmogony is smashed. The lions, too, are disappointed. They expected blood, bones, gristle, sinews. They chew and chew, but the words are chicle and chicle is indigestible. Chicle is a base over which you sprinkle sugar, pepsin, thyme, licorice. Chicle, when it is gathered by chicleros, is O. K. The chicleros came over on the ridge of a sunken continent. They brought with them an algebraic language. In the Arizona desert they met the Mongols of the North, glazed like eggplants. Time shortly after the earth had taken its gyroscopic lean -- when the Gulf Stream was parting ways with the Japanese current. In the heart of the soil they found tufa rock. They embroidered the very bowels of the earth with their language. They ate one another's entrails and the forest closed in on them, on their bones and skulls, on their lace tufa. Their language was lost. Here and there one still finds the remnants of a menagerie, a brain plate covered with figures. x x x What has all this to do with you, Moldorf? The word in your mouth is anarchy. Say it, Moldorf, I am waiting for it. Nobody knows, when we shake hands, the rivers that pour through our sweat Whilst you are framing your words, your lips half-parted, the saliva gurgling in your cheeks, I have jumped halfway across Asia. Were I to take your cane, mediocre as it is, and poke a lime hole in your side, I could collect enough material to fill the British Museum. We stand on five minutes and devour centuries. You are the sieve through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words. Behind the word is chaos. Each word a stripe, a bar, but there are not and never will be enough bars to make the mesh. In my absence the window-curtains have been hung. They have the appearance of Tyrolian tablecloths dipped in lysol. The room sparkles. I sit on the bed in a daze, thinking about man before his birth. Suddenly bells begin to toll, a weird, unearthly music, as if I had been translated to the steppes of Central Asia. Some ring out with a long, lingering roll, some erupt drunkenly, maudlinly. And now it is quiet again, except for a last note that barely grazes the silence of the night -- just a faint, high gong snuffed out like a flame. I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgeniev I put the perfection of Dostoievski. (Is there anything more perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in one and the s