Patrick Pritchett
Spuyten Duyvil ($16)
by Norman Finkelstein

In the End Notes of his audacious new volume of poems, Patrick Pritchett anticipates the question his readers are bound to ask: “What is a gnostic frequency?” Is it “the strange language in the middle of the way, on route, that speaks from the other side of knowing . . . The poem that desires, above everything else, some small vision of the otherwise?” “Becoming gnostic,” Pritchett goes on to explain, “means listening to the heretical speech of the caesura, to the extravagant pulses and rhythms of the unspeakable as it swirls about us, allowing language itself to speak. The poems in Gnostic Frequencies pay tribute to the thread of hermeticism that runs from high modernism to postmodernism.”

Centered in the tradition of modernist poetics engaged with ancient forms of inner knowing (gnosis), Pritchett’s book of “extravagant pulses and rhythms” is the most recent addition to a growing number of works by contemporary poets who can be described as “gnostic,” including Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, Peter O’Leary, and the late Paul Bray. Susan Howe’s investigations into American antinomianism may be described as gnostic; so might the austere, “worldless” lyricism of William Bronk. Jack Spicer’s Heads of the Town Up to the Aether takes its title from an ancient gnostic scripture. O’Leary’s Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness places Duncan at the center of the tradition, looking back to the hermeticism of H.D. Pound’s Neo-Platonism surely deserves mention in this context, and of course, there is the all-important figure of Yeats, with his occult explorations both early and late in his career.

Pritchett’s book is explicitly gnostic in its range of references to ancient doctrines and beliefs; it honors modern “gnostic” poets by including poems dedicated to many such figures; and it is most deeply gnostic—and most intensely lyrical—in its expressions of longing for spiritual truths which may be glimpsed through and beyond the illusory world of fallen matter. This is where Pritchett is most at risk poetically: in the hands of a less skillful writer, the level of abstraction on which many of the poems operate could prove too rarefied, and the text could float away into a shimmer of illuminated image-fragments. Fortunately, this is not the case: Pritchett keeps a firm grasp on a variety of forms and procedures, and for a book in search of esoteric wisdom, the symbolic language it employs is remarkably clear and forthright.

Structurally, Pritchett moves between an open weave of free verse reminiscent of Duncan’sPassages, and firm, measured stanzaic poems resembling H.D.’s lyrics, or for a more current model, Michael Palmer’s recent work. However uncanny the vision, the tone tends to be calmly declarative, confident that what is uttered, even if it cannot be commensurate with the spiritual event, can be rounded into music. Here is the opening of “The Books of Remembering”:

In the spring, the city is full of gods.
They speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves.

In the silver of the sea, the blue room of sky
in the whiteness of the streets, the trees alive with birds.

Here entire faiths arise out of words
for a king’s disappearance.

Nocturnes for the gaze which singed us.
The rain-touch of fever that turns our friends to stars.

But to cross out the world
with the promise of a World?

It must come back to Song—lumens, love & the names
for the double-flicker of what resists & resurges.

Pritchett understands that “entire faiths arise out of words”—or as Derrida puts it in Of Grammatology, “The age of the sign is essentially theological.” But although Pritchett looks back, perhaps nostalgically, to that age, he also knows that gnostic writing, especially the gnostic writing of poetry, must be on some level heretical, not allied with specific faiths, but with “Song,” “the double-flicker of what resists and resurges.” Although he returns again and again to “the book where reading is séance” (“The Book of Drowning”), it is not, in the end, the entertainment of ghosts—of prophets, of sages, even of poets—with which he is most concerned.

Winding in and out of Gnostic Frequencies is a female figure whom Pritchett calls Ariel, an imaginary lover of the third-century Neo-Platonic philosopher Iamblichus. Wise and sensual, Ariel understands that “The truth of writing / is in its disappearance” (“Ariel On the Truth of Writing”), that “the Book is built from the logics of loss (“Ariel On the Opacity of the Crystal”). She is the embodiment of what Pritchett calls in his End Notes “my desire to write a postmodern sophianic poem”—“sophianic,” from Sophia, the gnostic goddess of wisdom. But in the figure of Ariel, Pritchett has learned that the search for gnosis is always an undoing, that “In the pages of the Book / the lost things / are kept as lost” (“On Enigma”). In Pritchett’s book, the lost things, at least for one beautiful moment, are found.

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Lal Děd
translated by Ranjit Hoskote
Penguin India ($48)
by Graziano Krätli

One of the most interesting aspects of contemporary Indian poetry in English is the ways in which—and the extent to which—it has used this imported, imposed, and sovereignly appropriated language to revisit religious, philosophical, and literary works from its own rich and multilingual past, while at the same time creating a modern poetic idiom (and canon) through the medium of translation. Keeping safely away from classic Hindu texts, most major poets and translators of the post-independence period have focused instead on syncretic and unorthodox spiritual figures, who grappled with various religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam) and composed in local languages, demotically diverging from the Sanskrit of canonical literature and brahmanical authority. No less interesting, their choices over the past four decades have followed the historical, north-south path of the bhakti (devotional) movement, starting in the 1960s with A.K. Ramanujan’s versions from the Tamil and the Kannada of the third to the tenth century, continuing north- and westward through Maharashtra, with Arun Kolatkar’s and Dilip Chitre’s focus on Marathi saint-poets (Tukaram in particular), and finally reaching the Gangetic plain with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir, and as far north as Kahsmir with Ranjit Hoskote’s I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Děd, both issued in early 2011.

Today it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how these bhakti poems originated, circulated and were preserved in oral form, let alone to understand the multiple levels (performative, ritual, cathartical, political) at which they functioned in the particular context of medieval India. Centuries of manuscript, print, and now also digital culture have thrice removed us from any form of textual production, consumption, and reception that is not mediated by technology. The word itself, poem, seems largely inadequate to describe the original output of wandering mystics and teachers whose creative acts and performances included ecstatic singing and dancing. Similarly misleading is the concept of textual authorship and authenticity in regard to a literary corpus that, in Lalla’s case, was first recorded in print in the 1920s, after circulating “widely and continuously in Kashmiri popular culture between the mid-fourteenth century and the present, variously assuming the form of songs, proverbs and prayers.” In the former case, Hoskote prefers “utterance” over previous solutions, such as “saying” and “verse,” to render the Kashimiri term vākh (which is related to the Sanskrit vāc, “speech,” and vākya, “sentence”), although he regularly uses “poem” throughout the book. In the latter, he proposes “a radical break with the established convention of treating Lal Děd as a single personality and interpreting her poetry as an account of the vicissitudes of a single life.” Instead, “[w]hile affirming that Lalla’s poetry is deeply anchored in the personal experiences of an individual who actually lived and suffered,” he argues that

the poetry that has come down to us in her name is not the work of an individual. Rather, it has been produced over many centuries by what I would term acontributory lineage, a sequence of assemblies comprising people of varied religious affiliations and of both genders, representing the experience of various age groups and social locations, including both literate and unlettered, reciters and scribes, redactors and commentators.

The resulting corpus consists of a couple hundred vākhs, 146 of which are translated and richly annotated by Hoskote, who also includes concordances with two “benchmark collections,” George Grierson and Lionel D. Barnett’s Lallā-vākyāni (1920) and Jayalal Kaul’s Lal Ded(1973).

Lalla, or Lal Děd, lived in Kashmir in the 14th century (depending on the sources, her birth date oscillates between 1301 and 1320, while she is believed to have died in 1373), during a time of rapid and violent change, involving Tartar and Turki attacks, the downfall of the last Hindu monarchy, and the ascent to the throne of Shams-ud-Din Shah Mir, a muslim adventurer whose coronation in 1339 “marks Kashmir’s transition from a Hindu-Buddhist past to a future that would be shaped by the gradual diffusion of Islam, although Hindus and Buddhists continued to dominate Kashmiri politics and culture for several generations longer.” A married woman who, according to legend, lost her social status and domestic comfort to find spiritual freedom and realization in a wandering, ascetic life, she became “simultaneously Lalleśvarī or Lalla Yogini to the Hindus and Lal-‘ārifa to the Muslims;” similarly, her message was shaped by Hindu (Kashmiri Śaiva) and Islamic (Sufi) influences, as well as concepts and practices of what Hoskote calls Tantric underground, a trans-caste, countercultural movement incorporating elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism.

These various philosophical and doctrinal threads are ingeniously interwoven in Lalla’s poetry, making its texture smooth on the surface yet rich and complex underneath. Despite her unorthodox views on philosophical systems and doctrines, references to Yogic theory and practice occur throughout her work. Thus, the sun “beneath the navel,” the “moon river flowing from the crown,” the long/hot and the short/cool breaths, in poems 53-54, refer to the technique of prāṇāyāma, during which the upward-flowing vital breath (prān), rising from the maṇipūra-chakra located in the region of the navel, meets its cooler counterpart flowing down from the “nectar moon,” the sahasrāra-chakra situate in the crown. Other poems reflect a typical bhaktaconcern with “inward and inner-directed evolution [rather than] with the pursuit of shrines and pilgrimages, rituals and scriptures, observances and sacrifices.” Yogic adepts and the meditation buffs are warned: “You won’t find the Truth / by crossing your legs and holding your breath.” And with scholars and priests she is even more explicit: “Master, leave these palm leaves and birch barks / to parrots who recite the name of God in a cage. / Good luck, I say, to those who think they’ve read the scriptures. / The greatest scripture is the one that’s playing in my head.” Elsewhere, Lalla’s poems document a spiritual quest studded with sharp images of renunciation and self-denial. She variously and repeatedly twists a knife in her heart, pestles it in love’s mortar, roasts it in passion’s fire and eats it up, or prays so hard that her tongue gets stuck to her palate, and her fingers are sore from turning the rosary. Yet in poem 139 she values altruistic compassion over self-centered purification through mortification: “Don’t torture this body with thirst and hunger, / give it a hand when it stumbles and falls. / To hell with all your vows and prayers: / just help others through life, there is no truer worship.”

Many of Lalla’s concepts and articulations have travelled long and wide enough to be familiar to a 21st-century reader. Some of them, like the river between this world and the next, have equivalents in Egyptian and Greek mythology; others have been primed and propelled by scholars and spiritual leaders for quite some time; and a few simply resonate with sheer relevance and wisdom in today’s world. Hoskote’s pithy and evocative translation does more than any previous efforts to reduce the semantic gap between Lalla’s world and ours. A fine poet himself, he does an excellent job stripping away “a century of ornate, Victorian-inflected renderings and paraphrases, and to disclose the grain and tenor of Lalla’s voice, the orality, vocality and spokenness of her poems.” And what he cannot convey in translation (i.e., the philosophical and allegorical mold into which Lalla’s “utterances” are cast), he sapiently provides in the notes at the end of the volume. These mirror and complement the introduction, yet at the same time, by fulfilling one need they create another, which unfortunately remains unmet. Despite the extent to which philosophical terms and concepts, allegorical figures, and linguistic variants are explained, their recurrence throughout the entire corpus forces the reader to go back and forth in search of definitions and clarifications, something which a glossary would have prevented, and whose absence is perhaps the only flaw in this otherwise sterling edition. Nonetheless, I, Lalla represents a valuable and timely contribution to the growing body of works on this author, Kashmir’s most loved mystic-saint-poet.

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Meghan O’Rourke
W.W. Norton and Company ($24.95)
by Mark Liebenow

Meghan O’Rourke’s new poetry collection, Once, depicts grief’s landscape—the devastation, numbness, and moments of clarity. The intensity and open layout of poetry meshes with the episodic nature of coping with loss, and her direct tone is similar to the down-to-earth poems of the eighth-century Tang Dynasty, although she incorporates more personal introspection and edgier images.

O’Rourke employs a spare style, distilling experiences to short lines that capture a disjointed reality. Snow is an image to which she returns often, evoking the stillness of contemplating death. Her lines linger after reading them: “Inside a fire, an evergreen, a slender iris by the bed”; “shade to shade I bent / leaning down into your ground—”; “Once you were an explorer, now you are Elizabeth Barrett, / only stupider and more prone to TV-watching.”

Several longer poems with multiple sections are especially successful. In “My Life as a Subject,” O’Rourke describes a feudal world where the speaker struggles with the arbitrary decisions of the king, a land filled with courtiers, monkeys, and barbarians. In “My Life as a Ruler,” she regains control by using a knife to cut and reshape her surreal world into something she can survive. The use of the multiple-part poem is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and Denise Levertov’s “Olga Poems,” although O’Rourke is more terse than either of these precursors.

The poet’s subtle wit helps lighten the grimness of the situation. Although it’s probably happenstance that “Sex, Again” is printed on page 69, O’Rourke probably deliberately used tercets in “Theory vs. Practice,” which speaks of engaging in a triad of another kind to escape the cold, numb present:

Our ménage à trois by candlelight—;
the various absurdities: black lace,
pink mules, a little-bo-peep teddy.

Indeed, O’Rourke takes care with each poem’s structure. For example, “Hart” is constructed of two and three-foot phrases with mostly one-syllable words. The cadence slows the voice and the effect is moving, as she describes making eye contact with a deer in the woods:

The light of the heart is blue. It is a blue chamber,
it never ends, a summer night
stretched into dawn through which a deer bounds,

ghostly, calm, turning to regard you

Most of O’Rourke’s poems lyrically express the lethargy, doubts, and regret common to grief. They are honest and unadorned, which is refreshing among grief narratives. A few strike-throughs in the text indicate her frustration with trying to push through grief’s cotton and find the right word to express what she is feeling.

Sometimes a few more details would help the reader understand what is going on and feel the full weight of her images. For instance, I thought “Hart” was a touching poem about her dying mother saying goodbye, but at the end of the book a note explains the poem is for “J.S.” Checking the memoir that O’Rourke wrote at the same time, The Long Goodbye (Riverhead 2011), it’s revealed that J.S. was her husband before they divorced during the stress of the dying and grief.

While O’Rourke’s well-crafted poems capture the quiet and even beautiful moments of grief, I wanted a few poems where raw emotions were thrown against the wall—some of the rage for an unjust death that runs through Kathleen Bonanno’s Slamming Open the Door or Yeats screaming for his daughter. O’Rourke seems intent on stepping to the side and observing rather than expressing her grief. Still, this is a solid, image-rich book that deals with something intensely personal yet universally experienced. It joins other contemporary entries like Sandra Gilbert’s Aftermath, Donald Hall’s Without, and Anne Carson’s Nox, in exploring the landscape of loss.

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Denise Low
Woodley Memorial Press ($12)
by Heath Fisher

Former Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low is a poet, editor, publisher, professor, and ghost hunter. Though this last fact may not be widely known outside Kansas—nor is it necessarily the opinion of the author herself—sufficient evidence exists inside the 126 pages of her latest offering,Ghost Stories of the New West. Filled with vivid imagery of the land and the culture, and both verse and prose, the book is an enchanting tribute to the plains and the history long buried there beneath the bluestem that grows wild.

Low, who is of partial Lenape and Tsalagi (Cherokee) descent, freely applies more than just a smattering of Native American knowledge throughout the book. Surgical with the familiar and charming with the ancient, she uses every word to remind us of what has never been truer: it is the land, as much as the people who once inhabited it, that shapes this country. Ghost Stories zooms in on 200 years of time-lapse and brings into focus the Great Plains and its wondrous people.

From the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa in “A Mound Builder’s Geography,” to the great Lawrence, Kansas writer in “I Still See The Ghost Of Langston Hughes,” Ghost Stories brims with emotion for the plains and its people. At times it rolls like water from a swollen river after an April thunderstorm, as in “On Thompson River,” when the speaker recalls: “We make love at dawn with / tumbling water / our witness.” Then there are colder, dryer moments that leave you feeling wind-burned, as when “Geronimo’s Boots Leave Town” recalls “The time he slipped off a mountain / when surrounded by the army / The time he shapeshifted / so another man’s face appeared / The time he cut off one wife’s nose / for fooling around.”

The book wouldn’t be complete, however, without the more personal poems in the collection, evoking intimate details with which even the most distant of foreigners can empathize. The recollection of a familial heirloom in “Our Grandfather’s Turquoise Ring” could be the impetus to remember what is sacred, and how sometimes that’s a quality formed over time, like a jewel.

Perhaps the most resonant poem in the collection is “The Haunted Secretaire,” a chronicle of how an antique writing desk survived through the years, neglected behind boxes in garages, mold gathering on its wood surface, until it was restored and relocated to a place where it could finally blend in. “Secretaire” is a poem about searching and belonging. It’s no wonder Low placed it at the end of her collection, to bid her readers farewell, for what is a ghost if not a thing that no longer belongs anywhere? When that writing desk, newly polished and dried, finally finds a home, it’s a way of saying, “Be haunted, and then be alive.”

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W. G. Sebald
translated by Iain Galbraith
Random House ($25)
by Jesse Freedman

In the years since his untimely death in 2001, the German author W. G. Sebald has amassed something of a cult following. Praised for incorporating into his fiction haunting images of the communities lost to Nazism, Sebald produced in his novels an unsettling vision of darkness and dislocation. This vision, which contributed to the success of his most celebrated works, includingThe Emigrants and Austerlitz, plays an equally important role in Across the Land and the Water, a harrowing collection of his poetry translated for the first time into English by Iain Galbraith.

Divided into five sections, the collection provides an unfettered glimpse into Sebald’s development as a poet, beginning with a series of poems composed as a student in Freiburg. These poems, which Sebald referred to as “poemtrees,” offer the earliest hints of the themes that would appear so prominently in his novels. The complexity of the German landscape seems to have had a particular influence over the young Sebald, who in 1964 described it as a land of shadows and confusion. “For how hard it is to understand the landscape,” he wrote, “as you pass in a train from here to there and mutely it watches you vanish.”

Sebald’s preoccupation with place is infused with a deeper sensitivity to history in the second and third sections of the collection, which include poems culled from the period of his relocation to Norwich. Composed between 1975 and 1984, these works offer profound insights into aspects of the European past. From “bygone ladies of the court” to unnamed soldiers returning to “an older post in a different time,” Sebald’s gaze is sharper than in his earlier work. His perspective has shifted: once a bird, he has transformed into a mole, burrowing deep into a “reclaimed land.”

Perhaps the most significant—and exciting—moment of Across the Land and the Water comes toward the middle of its third section, when Sebald’s poetry adopts a variant of the narrative structure employed in his novels. In “Eerie Effects of the Hell Valley Wind on My Nerves,” Sebald depicts an emigrant revisiting “the cathedral square of a town he left many years ago.” The story presented in this poem is laced with a sorrow unique to Sebald’s writing: it is built, as Sebald himself concedes, on the poisonous mixture of memory and calamity.

In another poem, “Poetry for an Album,” these themes are again engaged: this time, however, their significance is measured in terms of their physical effects on the dispossessed. “For years now,” confides Sebald, in a moment reminiscent of Austerlitz, “I’ve had this same whistling sound in my ears and it troubles me greatly.” Were the roots of this whistling less catastrophic, the anguish of Sebald’s poetry might for a moment relent. Yet, there is no reprieve, for the poems collected here serve as a tribute to lives aborted by conflict. “Yearnings,” notes Sebald toward the end of the third section, are “easy to disappoint.”

The concluding sections of Across the Land and the Water include poems written during the final decade of Sebald’s life. From the outset, it is clear that these poems reflect the stylistic experimentation with which he wrestled as the millennium approached. The poems, like his novels, are ominous, but in their pursuit of a “dusty otherworld,” they reveal the mechanics of a complex imaginative process. Indeed, as Sebald approached that fateful—and fatal—day in 2001, the best of his poetry incorporated a tendency to defy uncertainty, to move from opacity to precision. “In the sleepless” is the not the only poem, for example, in which Sebald emerges from behind the mists: “Somewhere around Osnabrück or Oldenburg,” he writes, “on a patch of grass in front of a farm, a lone goose [is] slowly twisting its neck.” As Sebald defines his landscape, he proceeds with a remarkable degree of care: the uncertainty of being “around” one place or another slowly melts into the certainty of a farm, of a goose, of a twisting in time.

Across the Land and the Water serves, in the end, as a vital reminder of Sebald’s contribution to the literary history of Europe. The collection provides a valuable window into the construction of his novels, and works at the same time to enhance our understanding of the methods he employed to address a variety of challenging, often desperate, themes. As Sebald probed the darkness, he produced poems strident in their quest for totality. The last word is reserved for him:

What on earth it was
or what that ship was
yesterday in the sky
I cannot imagine
perhaps it was the soul
of the Welsh prince
slain by his brother
by the lake of Idwal
over which no bird has flown since

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by Lance Olsen

Editor’s Note: The following talk was given at the 2012 &Now Festival held at the Université de la Sorbonne in Paris June 6-10, 2012.

Asked to speak this afternoon about Ben Marcus’s impossibility precincts, his words that become object complications on a page, his sentences that act as ontological metalepses reminding us with every syllable of their author and authoredness, I realized I had already heard enough of my own words and insights on the subject. So I decided I wanted what I said to be composed of the words and insights of others. I therefore emailed thirty fiction writers, poets, and critics, and requested that they speak in my place. The following is what they felt they had to say through my mouth. It’s all about vision. The Marcus vision is dark. It is clear and shot through with its special Marcus pessimistic energy, but, as we all know, pessimism is secret code for wild hope and idealism.¹ I’ve learned how acutely meaning depends on syntax, and how nimble and able the mind of a reader is when diction has made a rash departure.² Once, in workshop, Ben instructed us all to bury our food in the backyard for safekeeping.³ If humans are in reality hosts for the virus that is language, Ben, then are you as a writer enslaved? Language made me ask this.⁴Paragraphs that surprise you like nests mice make near a warm engine.⁵ If Marcus is conducting experiments, he’s conducting them out of view, and then unveiling the results as afait accompli, like an Edison or Tesla or some other secular magician emerging from a laboratory. Marcus’s work, with its powerful kinship to the visual arts and music and perhaps even pharmacology, should less be copyrighted than patented.⁶ For some, this will, undoubtedly, come as bad news: Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet is a science fiction novel.⁷ I once almost got to meet Ben Marcus. I was standing in line to get my book signed after a reading at Powell’s and there was a guy in front of me who was coughing—a lot—like really hacking it up—and I got paranoid and had an anxiety attack and fled. So I wrote “Ben Marcus” in my best not-mine handwriting with a Sharpee in my own book. I felt Ben would approve.⁸ “A story? No, no stories. Never again”: this is Maurice Blanchot’s interdiction and prescription in French letters. On the North American side of the pond, Ben Marcus is the writer who makes the same challenge.⁹ The Marcus of The Age of Wire and String is a sprinter, a quick-heeled maker of mini-cosmogonies, explosions of curiously sentenced ink and light.¹⁰ Ben Marcus and Sam Lypsyte are standing by the table at Bob Coover’s house on Olive Street in Providence, twin cherubs, each eating cheese, each wearing tee-shirts. Or was it Rue du Fromage and them each eating olives?¹¹ Discovering the infuriatingly original writing of Ben Marcus was like washing ashore on a new continent, one that some empire or other had very deliberately hidden. Deeply personal, ontologically sound, syntactically unsettling, that language seems to me now like one of the first: striving toward the most essential and intimate communication, more true in its beautiful noise than any pure and civil lyric.¹² From Ben, I’ve learned that the reader’s expectation should never be the writer’s goal.¹³ Something I have learned from Ben Marcus’s writing generally, and most specifically from his latest novel, has to do with the toxicity of language. Once we start fooling around with it, we can be hurt by it. Once we notice that we speak words, the words are given a power over us which writing is, can be, an attempt to control or even to obliterate. We use words to obliterate words before they obliterate us. In The Flame Alphabet it seems that children are a danger to parents, but behind all the events and plots and incidents, I have the strong sense that Ben Marcus is afraid of words, and for good reason.¹⁴ In the mid-1990s, you expressed hostility to the poetry in and around L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Did that reflect your opinion at the time? If so, as someone who is often credited with being an advocate for “innovative literature,” why?¹⁵ I met Ben Marcus at Skylight Books. I got shy and didn’t introduce myself. My question for him is: What advice do you have for people who are shy?¹⁶ Language is a fuzzy math.¹⁷ Jewish culture is being appropriated by the masses. The Flame Alphabet doesn’t represent Judaism in any traditional sense but instead extends the mysticism. The Flame Alphabet is an extraordinary account of the danger of language. As reader, I have been poisoned along with the characters.¹⁸ Ben Marcus worries a lot.¹⁹ I remember Ben Marcus’s having told me something he did in class during (I think) the first week of his first semester of teaching fiction-writing full time, at some university in (I think) Virginia. He asked his students to bring to the next class session a printout of whichever piece of fiction of theirs they considered to be their very finest. At the next session, he solemnly collected the manuscripts, then immediately dispatched them to the wastebasket. (Or maybe he ripped them to pieces before he trashed them—I forget.)²⁰ I’ve always enjoyed Ben’s dark humor, but I feel like critics (and sometimes fans) overlook it or maybe, just maybe, feel like if you acknowledge the humor, it makes his work seem less literary.²¹ By their very nature emotions tend to make us all inarticulate. Ben Marcus speaks intriguingly about the process in the description of a series of lectures he gave at Columbia University in the spring of 2002. He wanted, in the lectures, to analyze how “emotion is attempted and transmitted in fiction.” Emotional effects—rapture, sympathy, desire, empathy, fascination, grief—will be considered as techniques of language, enabled or muted by narrative context, acoustics, vocabulary choice, and our own predispositions. How can a sentence, a phrase, a paragraph cause us to feel things . . . What are emotions for, what benefit do we get from having them, what do they accomplish?²² I love that Marcus taught a class on sad books. That such a smart and erudite person goes to the core and just calls them sad books. I find that immensely relieving.²³ Ben Marcus’s fiction is the rule of nouns. If a logical positivist invented the world, we might describe it just so. Because reality has become a substantive, action feels repressed. It recurs rather than happening, like a buried memory or desire establishing conditions for the known. Everything material feels haunted. Objects lead a double life. In a Marcus fiction, the plot, dominion of verbs, is missing. Form is what is left behind.²⁴ When I read Marcus’s work, I think of that game at the fair where a man puts a marble beneath one of three cups then moves them around very quickly and scrambles them. I think of Little Red Riding Hood where the cup that says “grandmother” contains the marble “wolf.”²⁵ Marcus’s books differ from experimental writing of previous generations in the United States: his ambition, while large, is realized in patterns, recurrences, and recombinations, not in the promulgation of “grand world-thoughts” that had been, for the critic Georges Brandes, the key feature of prior world-fictions composed in times of monumental technological constructions and competing ideologies . . . . The generation of Gaddis, Pynchon, and Coover still recognized that universality, even as they worked simultaneously to dismantle ideologies and literary traditions alike. By contrast, the work of Marcus and his peers in print and on screens, is more about writing under constraint. While embracing expressive freedoms in their vocabulary and syntax, formally such works reflect a growing sense that limits have been reached, materially and ecologically, in the rationalist technological project.²⁶ Ben Marcus’s writing is the stage of language where you open your mouth but nothing comes out and everything is both still possible and inconceivable.²⁷ Lost catalogs. New catechisms. An arsonist’s guide. Ben Marcus gives us an archivist’s roadmap of fiction’s volatile future.²⁸ Ben, how can you be three steps ahead and always sneaking up behind me at the same time?²⁹ He kept saying, “I’m not really sure how it works.”³⁰ I do not know Ben Marcus, but he once carried my suitcase. He said very few words. He wore an apologetic expression that went unexplained.³¹

¹ Deb Olin Unferth.
² Noy Holland.
³ Affinity Konar.
⁴ Richard Peabody.
⁵ William Gass.
⁶ Jonathan Lethem.
⁷ Pawel Frelik.
⁸ Lidia Yuknavitch.
⁹ Dimitri Anastasopoulos.
¹⁰ Laird Hunt.
¹¹ Michael Joyce.
¹² Michael Mejia.
¹³ Lily Hoang.
¹⁴ Bin Ramke.
¹⁵ Charles Bernstein.
¹⁶ Amelia Gray.
¹⁷ John Madera.
¹⁸ David Shields.
¹⁹ Lynne Tillman.
²⁰ Gary Lutz.
²¹ Kevin Sampsell.
²² Brian Kiteley.
²³ Aimee Bender.
²⁴ R. M. Berry.
²⁵ Alissa Nutting.
²⁶ Joseph Tabbi.
²⁷ Lidia Yuknavitch.
²⁸ Christina Milletti.
²⁹ Thalia Field.
³⁰ Rob Stephenson.
³¹ Kate Bernheimer.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

by Spencer Dew

“I don’t know what it means that I spunked in the burqa,” Michael Muhammad Knight writes in his novel The Taqwacores, a text that, originally self-published in 2003, circulated “underground,” helping to transform the very Islamic punk scene it describes. The climactic scene of this novel involves an Islamic “punk rocker with a Zionist t-shirt and Budweiser in his hand getting blown by a girl in full purdah while two hundred drunk punks looked on,” and said girl in purdah, Rabeya, then spitting her mouthful of semen at some obnoxious guys with Wahhabi inclinations: absolute over-the-top shock-the-senses punk rock theological commentary, which the novel presents as deeply Islamic, true to the message and spirit of Islam.

Knight’s literary project is one of exploring and imagining the possibilities of uniquely American Islamic identity. The ummah—the community of believers in Allah’s revelation to the Prophet Muhammad—is a necessarily fragmented collection of communities, Knight insists. “Punk” and “Islam” have both “suffered from sell-outs and hypocrites, but also from true believers whose devotions had crippled their creative drive. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from the truth.” Thus, Knight’s statement of faith—submission to God but defiance of any and all level of human authority in God’s name—can be condensed to any of a number of punk mantras peppering his texts, like this one from The Taqwacores: “Be Muslim on your own terms. Tell the world to eat a dick.”

Knight, a white American convert to an Islam he identifies as informed first by South Asian immigrants and then, increasingly, by America’s indigenous African American religious traditions claiming Islamic identity—Master Fard’s Supreme Wisdom Lessons, at the root of the Nation of Islam, and a spin-off movement, the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths—is zealously ambivalent. In 2003 he published an essay in an anthology edited by Ibn Warraq, celebrating apostasy from Islam. Knight’s contribution stated that, “My own personal religion came from Islam. It has Islam at its foundations. However, it escaped that cage long ago.” But the story isn’t nearly that simple. Knight is as aggressively opposed to simplification as he is to the constrictions of authority and the bludgeons of rote tradition. This doesn’t mean that Knight’s Islam is not deeply rooted in tradition, just that he believes—in keeping with that tradition—that Islam erupts beyond all boundaries, all human limitations, and that just as Allah cannot be contained in law or language, experience of Allah must not be restricted by customs and culture.

So Knight is the sort of convert who names a fictional Islamic band “Our Holy Prophet Fingers His Six-Year-Old Bride In Her Dirty Asshole” and who has a character insist that Muslims must “own up to the fact that [the Prophet] was a pedophile,” a shocking statement—particularly in today’s sensitive public relations climate, of which more later—that Knight then glosses in what could be called punk-homiletic fashion, drawing support for a seemingly ultra-un-Islamic statement from the very core teachings of Islam, proof-texting, as it were, what sounds like an assault on the Prophet by recourse to the Prophet’s own sunnah, and, moreover, to the theology in which prophets, however excellent as humans, are, ultimately, merely humans. Thus, Knight writes, Muhammad “was human and capable of evil and sickness as much as anyone. Nothing special. His shit smelled just as bad as yours. In fact, Muhammad being a sicko is totally punk rawk. Tears down any chance of him being a Christ or sacred cow.”

The driving logic of The Taqwacores is rephrased again and again: the Quran, for instance, has a suspiciously large amount of “humanness” in it, making it “a tiny little book for tiny little men.” Do not confuse the divine revelation with the divine, Knight argues. Idolization of the text doesn’t make you a better Muslim, it makes you not a Muslim at all, because you are paying homage to an idol rather than setting your heart and mind and actions on Allah. Punk’s rashness is here conceived as a radical return to core Islamic teachings, phrased in an emotionally jagged contemporary vernacular. “I can say that Muhammad ate a fat fuck and it doesn’t even matter because he’s dead and Allah’s alive,” one of Knight’s punk Muslims declares. This is old school Islam, phrased as an angry lashing back at centuries of accumulated hypocrisy.

What’s best about the Knight oeuvre is not just that he gets progressively more sophisticated in his readings of religion and the inherent tension between tradition and innovation, institutionalization and anarchy, but that his rage against hypocrisy is aimed at himself as well; he is critically wary of his own privilege, his own flaws—including, notably, that sin of thinking that one’s thinking makes one superior or that self-reflection insulates oneself from the flaws of others. Every punk knows that punk instantly risks cooptation and commodification and calcification; so too Islam, Knight argues, but also so too anything else. We have here, then, a kind of gonzo academic journalism, a push beyond the autobiographical turn of, say, anthropologists like Levi-Strauss. Knight is devoted to vomiting all subjectivity onto the page as a way to talk more responsibly about his subject matter.

Thus, his memoir Impossible Man traces out the fantastic trajectory of his wrestling with Islam—and with race. From the kid who drew a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini on his bedroom wall and fantasized of “crashing a 747 into the White House” as part of some adolescent Islamic revolution, to the kid who stole and mutilated a Penguin Books edition of the Quran from the public library out of the pious belief that the edition was religiously “offensive,” Knight then becomes the kid who, on the flight to Pakistan, as a young convert, listens to the soundtrack to Star Wars. But the adventure here is intellectual, one of reinvention prompted by re-consideration, a perpetual return to an Islam that presents itself, perpetually, as fresh. “Real Islam is when you love Allah enough to say ‘La ilaha illa Allah’ and then piss on His Words.”

Likewise, in his memoir Journey to the End of Islam, Knight recounts how he masturbates while wearing the burqa used as a prop for the film version of Taqwacores, echoing the masturbation scene in that novel and, along the way, reiterating his basic thesis: that American Islam is unique to America, shaped in large part by the legacy of slavery, and that the Qur’an, as a single book, is insufficient, is only part of a much wider and ongoing revelation. “It’s not that the Qur’an is unable to stand alone as the source material for Islam,” Knight writes, “the Qur’an can’t even stand alone as the Qur’an. There are millions of Qur’ans, billions of Qur’ans. To pretend like I had the right one seemed kind of, I don’t know, dickish.”

Unfortunately, Knight often fails to avoid being “dickish.” Specifically, when his critical self-reflection gives way to mere self-disgust, it functions as a sort of excuse for ongoing “dickish” behavior, whether it is his rage against what he takes to be the too-coifed façade of politically correct “progressive” Islam or his sexual interests and exploits. Knight, a guy historically fond of strip clubs and porn, a white dude who found his masculinity via hip-hop and Malcolm X, a Muslim convert whose anger at hypocrisy can eclipse all else and whose anger derives its righteousness in large part from a nuanced understanding of the politics of sex and race, nonetheless can come across as “dickish” in a way that gives no reason to believe he’s likely to reform. At an Islamic Society of North America convention, for instance, he watches “girls and pointed out the pseudo-hijabis who’d cover up at ISNA and then go out in their club gear,” but then he masturbates to the “gorgeous Muslim girls” in a shalwar kameeze catalogue—another masturbatory scene that finds repetition in his oeuvre, as in his short story collection Osama Van Halen, where he describes himself, as a fictional character, jerking off again to the “beautiful girls in that brochure with dark wet hair and long lashes.” Having submitted this evidence before his readers, he castigates himself: Look at me, I go from strip clubs to providing security for the Daughters of Hajar; “I’m a Radical Muslim Feminist with the authority of a self-hating sack of shit.”

Osama Van Halen climaxes with Rabeya, the character from The Taqwacores, now morphed into a deadly, comic book-type ninja, who, before cutting off Michael Muhammad Knight’s head, accuses him of being the sort of fetishizing convert who, like Indiana Jones, thinks “you can just swagger into the brown man’s temple and sneak out with his idol,” with the “idol” at the heart of Islam being

PUSSY! Mike, it’s all about pussy. Islam’s idol is an unbroken vagina . . . find the women’s section, wherever they put it, and fuck all the brown girls. To the uncles you’re a trophy, but you still watch us through a hole in the wall. You know that you’re not in, not really, not fully, until you get yourself a shaved houri and ritually tear her open . . . Michael Muhammad Knight, in the end you’re just another phallocentric orientalist, and I’m putting an end to your bullshit sand-wigger discourse right now.

There’s self-loathing here, to be sure, but is there anything like authentic self-revelation? I belabor the point because it clearly matters to Knight: he doesn’t want to be the white guy who swaggers into Islam to say, hey, there is no imam, no authority, just me and Allah—even while that does seem to be what he’s saying. Moreover, he doesn’t want to end up as a theorist and popularizer of “distinctly American Islam” the same way, as a white guy swaggering into a “socially South Asian and intellectually Black” scene and writing it up because, as he says in his most recent book, “I can travel among white academics, white book publishers, agents, editors, and journalists, and speak about black supremacy to white audiences, and no one’s afraid that my Elijah shirt marks me as a dangerous radical or a nutty cultist”—precisely because he is white, and also because he is, as he calls himself, an “Exceptional Devil.” As his nuanced and informative work on The Five Percenters—first in an academic history, The Five Percenters, then in the more familiar form of gonzo-journalistic-memoir, Why I am a Five Percenter—shows, Knight can tackle the race issue head on, wrestle with it with candor and vigor. His quick but brilliant treatments of Marshall Mathers, Oprah, FUBU, T.D. Jakes, and James Baldwin in his most recent book are by themselves worth the cover price. But the issue of “pussy” remains slippery for him.

At its ugliest, Knight’s “dickish” behavior is cheap and vicious, utterly removed from any of his stated ideals of Islam, masculinity, or human kindness. Making fun of Asma Gull Hasan for saying that she faces “a jihad simply to maintain a shopping budget” or because she blogs that she wants to date a clone of Todd Palin, is one thing—but Knight can’t stop himself there, and his desire to attack a woman who, from his own accounting, goes out of her way to be nice to him and seems genuinely to want to be his friend, borders on his defacement of women back in his truncated college days, when “females were just another part of the surrounding environment in need of vandalism.” The scandal and short-lived defamation suit against Knight that resulted from his portrayal of Hasan and a lyric in a song by a Taqwacore band regarding her and a hand job revolves around precisely this sort of “vandalism.” Hasan, a “bubbly” “princess” with a Louis Vuitton purse, presents an easy target, but if Knight is troubled by her politics or her wealth or her shopping, why use sex as the means of assault?

A book on William S. Burroughs and Peter Lamborn Wilson, to be called William S. Burroughs Versus the Quran, is forthcoming, but what Knight needs to write is something on the theme of “my living black manhood,” offering a serious self-examination of the role of sex and gender in his life and in Islam. What does it mean to “spunk in the burqa,” to be so filled with rage for “pseudo-hijabis” and “princesses,” yet also to work for mixed-gender prayer in American mosques while recollecting what it felt like to scream “Thank you for your daughters” back in college, at fathers packing up their station wagons or mini-vans at the end of the semester? Indeed, what does it mean to objectify female sexuality as an “idol” at the heart of Islam—what does this mean for Islamic history, for future Islamic thought and practice, but also for the author, whose fantasies about group sex and strip clubs and veiled women spitting semen are so central to his texts? Hasan’s personal jihad might involve shopping budgets, but the jihad to which Knight’s work is calling him is to be less “dickish” by examining his own conceptions (fantasies, desires, ideals, disgust, anger, etc.) of “pussy.” Indeed, such an analysis could be at once a work urgently needed in religious history and the next, more honest chapter in Knight’s ongoing autobiographical journey.

Click here to purchase The Taqwacores at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Five Percenters at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Impossible Man at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Osama Van Halen at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Journey to the End of Islam at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Why I am a Five Percenter at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

Commemorating the 51st Anniversary of the Grove Press Edition of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, with a Special Tribute to Barney Rosset

by Rob Couteau

A world without hope, but no despair. It’s as though I had been converted to a new religion. —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

In the politically correct university town where I currently reside, each year both the town and campus libraries host a banned books exhibit. Yet I’ve never once seen any mention of Henry Miller or Tropic of Cancer in these displays, despite the fact that the 1964 Supreme Court decision to allow for its distribution represents the most important censorship case in modern publishing history. Since Miller is now viewed as misogynistic, however, the cause célèbre ofTropic of Cancer has been conveniently ignored in this and in many other “liberal” college communities.

To mark the fifty-first anniversary of the Grove Press publication of this modern masterpiece, I decided to reread the novel—for at least the fourth time—and to see if I could get not only at the core of the book but also at what so many readers find disturbing, obscene, and censorable about it. And, more importantly, I wanted to relish once again the music, the vitality, the eloquence, the unparalleled stylistic genius and love of language itself that weaves like a symphony through a landscape littered with icons of hopelessness, despair, ennui.

The leitmotif of the work may be that “the cancer of time is eating us away,” yet this theme, which runs like an open sewer throughout the text, exposing us to the slime and stink of human “civilization” at every turn, is counterbalanced by an even stranger one: that despite this—in fact, because of this—we must celebrate life and meet it with even more joy, ecstasy, and rapture. The way to kindle this rapturous, hallucinated, visionary state is through the senses: being open fully to the pleasure of the moment. To do so, we must annihilate the overly rational, vaporous dogmas and abstract notions of traditional wisdom and replace them with a sagacity that is at one with the knowledge of the body, which knows what it needs and directs us to it without hesitation, via impulse and desire.

Ultimately this is an Epicurean message, not only for its acknowledgement of the importance of pleasure but also because Miller realized that only when one abandons hope of anything beyond this immediate existence and accepts the extinction that death brings will we be able to truly live.

For those who remain blind to the miracle of life and to the wonder that confronts us at every turn, Tropic of Cancer must remain a most perplexing, irritating novel. Here is a man reduced to penury, living hand to mouth, surviving off the kindness of friends or thankless minimum-wage jobs that barely leave him with enough to eat; yet this fellow has not only the gall to celebrate life but to do so while he caricatures, critiques, lampoons, and vulgarizes everything and everyone around him. He respects no institutions, despises anything conventional, and spits on all forms of propriety. Worst of all, he views the vast social, institutional, and collective efforts of our nations and cultures as laughable, and he prophesizes they will lead nowhere and end in apocalypse, for the simple reason that the actions of most men are committed without purpose, meaning, or passion. Without wonder. And even beyond what must already seem like the ultimate cynical viewpoint, he sets the stakes a notch higher by asking if it isn’t the universe itself that may be out of kilter: that there may be something fundamentally wrong with creation itself.

Yet Tropic of Cancer certainly doesn’t read like a bleak tract of Sartrean existentialism. Neither a missive of hollow, wooden prose nor a linear, literal discourse of grim cynicism, Cancer is a live wire that burns in your hand and sets you afire. If you are open to it, you realize that a great literary torch is being passed along; if your mind is closed or offended by the author’s “bad words” and unpalatable notions, your hands are scorched by this unbridled flame.

One of the reasons Tropic of Cancer is a masterpiece is that, when Miller first composed it, he did so with little hope of it ever being published. Some of his initial and most vivid descriptions of Paris were first conceived in letters written to his Brooklyn pal, Emil Schnellock. However, as Miller’s editor George Wickes points out, often, these “were not letters in the ordinary sense but rough drafts of feature articles that Miller intended to revise for eventual publication in a book about Paris.” Besides being able to focus his voice upon an “audience of one” who would appreciate its distinct tone and phrasing, this notion of a helter-skelter guidebook with a surrealistic, Milleresque undertow—a form much less constricting than the traditional novel—also helped to liberate the author’s imaginative, lyrical prowess. In a passage from one such “rough draft” letter of April 1930, he writes:

I climb up instead of down to take the Metro, at Jean Juarès. Twilight hour, Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. Juarès station itself gives me a kick. The rails fall away into the canal, the long caterpillar with sides lacquered in Chinese red dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris, it is not Coney Island—it is crepuscular mélange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. Railroad yards spread out below me, the tracks looking black, webby, not ordered by engineers but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the Polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black. I have gotten into the first-class compartment by mistake.

This is reworked, condensed, and crystallized, in Cancer, into:

Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Juarès. The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is crepuscular mélange 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.

Composing only for himself and a small circle of friends, for the first time in his life he was able to create without reservation and without any preconceived idea of what a novel or work of literature should be. Unimpeded, the river flowed. But this also meant that he’d write without caring much about whether what he was saying might offend, alienate, or disturb the reader. Therefore, this is an honest book, and therein lies its power—and its power to provoke.

Two of Picasso’s most lucid aphorisms come to mind:

Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.

Tropic of Cancer fits quite neatly into these definitions of art as both provocation and eternally modern, because Cancer is made of the stuff that will never cease to piss people off.

On the surface, the protagonist—called “Henry Miller” but not the actual Henry Miller—is a hardened, often cold, calculating, ego-driven man, with almost no sentimentality, who looks out primarily for himself, and who never fails to reveal the most disquieting details about the person or situation in front of him. He wields an unerring Machiavellian insight, coupled with an eccentric yet penetrating psychological analysis that highlights a person’s flaws, neuroses, and limitations. A third Picasso aphorism serves to explain how Cancer transcends a merely cynical, dreary, nihilistic point of view:

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you can create a feeling of strength in reserve.

The “third element” that Miller held “in reserve” was his innate gentleness and tenderness, what might be called the gentleman in him. (As Anaïs Nin wrote in her journal: “Will anyone ever be as tender . . .”) For the astute reader, this quality shines forth in a variety of nearly inexplicable and subtle manners. For one thing, there’s the narrator’s ability to provoke a sense of transcendental awe as a result of his lush vocabulary and the way he reacts to certain events. Only a man propelled by a refined sensibility and a reverence for the exquisite mystery of existence could construct something as evocative as this:

A wagon from the Galeries Lafayette was rumbling over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs with a cold fire. I recall now how the driver leaned out and looked up the river toward Passy way. Such a healthy, simple, approving glance, as if he were saying to himself: “Ah, spring is coming!” And God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. But it was not only this—it was the intimacy with which his eye rested upon the scene. It was hisParis. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people—the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth, it seems to me. And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls.

Or this:

The day opens in milky whiteness, streaks of salmon-pink sky, snails leaving their shells. Paris. Paris. Everything happens here. Old, crumbling walls and the pleasant sound of water running in the urinals. Men licking their mustaches at the bar. Shutters going up with a bang and little streams purling in the gutters.

And regardless of the gangster-like façade he commits himself or his “protagonist” to in Cancer, Miller’s bark was always worse than his bite. In reminiscing about the author, the renowned First Amendment lawyer Stanley Fleishman once said: “He was a funny guy. Very gentle. I remember we were over at his house once. And we were talking about his kids, and our kids, and he was saying things like, ‘When Tony had to go doo-doo, or pee-pee . . .’ That was Henry Miller!”

This is just one example of what I mean by considering carefully how the fictional Miller and the actual Miller react to events. Of course, it might be argued that Fleishman was remembering an older, more mature Miller. Yet we have too the testimony of Samuel Putnam, who knew Miller from his earliest Parisian days and who published his first short story, “Mademoiselle Claude,” in the New Review. In Putnam’s memoir Paris Was Our Mistress, we learn that, in the early ’30s, before most of Miller’s companions were even aware that he aspired to being a writer, “To us he was a good drinking companion, a nice guy to run into at Jimmy’s or the Coupole or in those desolate shivering hours at the Dôme as we watched the dawn come creeping down the boulevard du Montparnasse to awaken M. Potin’s grocer boys across the way and send the ‘artists’ home to bed. We found him humorous, affable, generous, somewhat reserved with those who did not know him well, and with a certain timidity behind it all.”

Most significant of all, Putnam composed this warm and balanced homage even after Miller had utilized his memory of Putnam to fashion the ridiculous figure of Marlowe, a drunken magazine editor who is lampooned in the fourth chapter of Cancer. So, despite all this, something about Miller must have endeared him to his cronies. Although he attempts to mask his empathy and to promote a roguish fictional persona, Miller was usually held in high regard by his friends and was valued as a caring companion by many of the women in his life. A hardened, cynical, pathological narcissist would not have developed the kind of friendships, or elicited the everlasting devotion, that remain the hallmarks of his biography. Lawrence Durrell best exemplified this when he wrote Miller: “I think you know I love you more than any man I ever met.” In addition, in the years to come, he was deeply loved by each of his children and never deprived them of his attention, even when they burst into his studio and interrupted his writing.

Of course, there remains an unquestionable strain of narcissism running through Miller’s life and work: one that was likely imprinted upon him by his emotionally distant, self-centered mother, whom he portrays at various times as being either icy cold or raging and wrathful. Yet, while she was clearly a narcissist in the most pathological sense of the word, Miller is more accurately described merely by the adjective, narcissistic. And, as is well known among clinicians, there can be both an unhealthy and a healthy aspect to this psychic function. The dividing line is whether one is capable of extending empathy toward others, and this Miller was not only capable of but at times almost obsessed with, perhaps as a compensation for what he never received as a child.

One of the joys of Tropic of Cancer is the manner in which this seemingly ruthless individual cares about the downtrodden, forgotten dregs of humanity. He commemorates them in a series of portraits that extend throughout his oeuvre, and the impulse to do so goes all the way back to his early days as employment manager for Western Union, when he dreamed of writing a novel based on the “lost boys” who served as messengers for what he called the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. Part of the bitterness and rage in Cancer stems from this sense of injustice suffered by the anonymous, unknown, silent souls who make the world go round and who never receive the credit or even the paychecks they so sorely deserve. (In Walt Whitman’s words: “the absentees, the forgotten: the shy nobodies who in the end are best of all.”) In a 1956 interview with Ben Grauer, he again touched on this theme:

It’s true, “the folks,” “the people,” are what supports us . . . the people who do the dirty work. Who are without name, without honor . . . It’s they who are doing the work of the world.

And in chapter seven of Cancer, he fondly recalls his Hindu messengers from New York:

Two of them were saints, if I know what a saint is; particularly Gupte who was found one morning with his throat cut from ear to ear. In a little boarding house in Greenwich Village he was found one morning stretched out stark naked on the bed, his flute beside him, and his throat gashed, as I say, from ear to ear. It was never discovered whether he had been murdered or whether he had committed suicide. But that’s neither here nor there.

This urge to, if not immortalize, then at least pay his respects to such men closely resembles that of another Brooklyn-born author, one who also held his profound empathy “in reserve.” In recalling the inspiration behind his first novel and its unforgettable drag queen, Georgette, Hubert Selby said: “I met someone from the old neighborhood and they said Georgie had been found dead in the street, evidently an O.D. He was only about twenty years old when he died . . . I guess I felt Georgie needed more than a death in the street. He needed a memorial . . . Thus, in a very real way, Georgie is responsible for the book Last Exit to Brooklyn.”

While briefly working as a language instructor at Dijon, in one of his early letters to Anaïs Nin, Miller wrote:

God, it is maddening to think that even one day must pass without writing. I shall never, never catch up. It is why, no doubt, I write with such vehemence, such distortion. It is despair . . . And with it grows a certain hard selfishness—or self-interest. I don’t know whether I am becoming a solipsist or a narcissist. Certainly, more and more the world revolves around me, in me.

When I reread this the other day, it struck a most discordant note. I realized that, like other children of narcissistic parents, Miller’s own needs were deferred; the authentic self had long remained under the shadow of a domineering mother who always expected nothing but conventionality from her son. And this line to Nin signaled to me that it was only when he arrived in Paris and escaped not only the narcissistic demands of his mother but also those of his second wife, June, that his own needs could finally be attended to.

This, more than anything, explains the self-centered, self-obsessed nature of the protagonist ofTropic of Cancer. And it also explains the kind of naïve surprise with which Miller frames this revelation of perhaps being egoistic. Deep in his guts, he felt an obligation to nurture hisdaemon, no matter how unpalatable this might appear to others. So, part of this unbolting of the floodgates involved allowing himself to serve himself, to feed his soul on the most profound psychic level, to tend to the self whose needs had been eclipsed for so long, and which is nourished in normal development in the early and adolescent years but which was not properly succored in that period of Miller’s life. Food of all kinds, exotic and mundane, and rhapsodies to hunger and to sustenance appear like fragments of an ancient opera in Tropic of Cancer. Yes, he was literally starved, but he was also emotionally starved and he needed to engorge, no matter how unsavory that appetite might appear to a well-heeled politically correct graduate student skimming over the novel fifty years later. Again, this is an honest book, and the world does not always appreciate honesty. As he would clarify in a letter to Nin a few months later: “Really, I can’t consider myself an egotist . . . No, I feel merely like a force which must express itself, at any cost.”

Norman Mailer thought he’d detected a whiff of this narcissistic pattern in Miller and tried to explore it in Genius and Lust, but lacking any real understanding of the clinical definition of the disorder and, more importantly, being a full-blown narcissist himself, he possessed no way of grasping or seeing with any clarity the extent of its implications for Miller. A bully who thought nothing of intimidating and physically attacking people with whom he disagreed, he was perhaps not the person best suited for this task.

Another reason Mailer may have been thrown off track is that, in popular usage, the term “narcissist” has been distorted to simply imply self-centeredness or self-aggrandizement: symptoms of the illness but certainly not the core of the problem. Instead of being based on love, the narcissist’s relationships are focused on gaining control over others. A thirst for power obliterates any possibility of empathy or tenderness. The pathological narcissist is interested only in abusing others for material or emotional gain. To the extent that he lacks empathy, to the same degree does he revel in disempowering, tormenting, and torturing others. When the need to torture increases to the point of fearlessly breaking serious laws in order to do so, we enter the realm of the sociopath: just a step beyond the narcissist in the spectrum of personality disorders.

Again, although Miller wasn’t a pathological narcissist, he was narcissistic in that he preferred to pursue romantic obsessions and infatuations rather than authentic love based on commonality and reality. He could state unequivocally “I don’t want the truth, I want illusion, mystery, intrigue” because only illusion fuels the drug of infatuation and promotes all its joys. But the modest love of spiritual union is grounded through truth, takes roots in reality, and blossoms only there.

Of course, infatuation can lead to love and even spark and ignite it. And what would life be without such delicious obsessions? Miller’s oeuvre is in many ways an epic poem celebrating an infatuation with every aspect of life—even with its “cancer” or, at least, with the acceptance of it. That he refused to complete the epic with a realistic or convincing portrayal of love, however, is what so many readers find unbearable and obscene. They may focus upon and object to his “dirty” words, but this is the real reason Miller alienates certain readers. And, as H. L. Mencken might say, this alienation becomes a moral condemnation. Rather than accepting the novel for what it is, and valuing the truth of its portrait, we feel compelled to render a moral judgment upon the work—and then upon its author. The reaction is typical since, as Mencken reminds us, “There has never been any question before the nation, whether political or economic, religious or military, diplomatic or sociological, which did not resolve itself, soon or late, into a purely moral question.”

One of the most effective tools against what Mencken calls the “dirty-mindedness of Puritanism” is humor. And one of the great powers that explodes like a minefield beneath the reader ofTropic of Cancer is Miller’s unparalleled wit. Again, at this stage of his career, since Miller had nothing to lose and only himself to please, he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether you’d be horrified, amused, or both. And, as is well known among the poor, humor is the one thing you cannot take away from a man who has been stripped of everything else. Humor is also the medium through which you will be reborn. Because Tropic of Cancer is nothing if not a renaissance document—a testament of naissance and a manual for how to effect it. Only if you are truly free of the manacles of propriety can you laugh so heartily—or even laugh at all—at the wit and wisdom of this diabolical tract.

Like any renaissance man worth his salt, Miller was also moved by the power of beauty in art. There is, entwined in the substrate of Cancer, a perennial root and vine that surfaces here and there: sometimes in no more than a passing reference, sometimes in an ode of a few sentences or paragraphs, sometimes as a keynote around which everything harmonizes and resounds into a major chord. I am speaking of Miller’s awareness of and respect for the antique Parisian Muses and his attempt to return something to them in the creation he titles Tropic of Cancer. The most significant image and form this embodies is his continual homage to what many regard as the “soul of Paris”: la Seine. Here are two such examples:

After everything had quietly sifted through my head a great peace came over me. Here, where the river gently winds through the girdle of hills, lies a soil so saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams one can never detach it from its human background. Christ, before my eyes there shimmered such a golden peace that only a neurotic could dream of turning his head away. So quietly flows the Seine that one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great artery running through the human body . . .

The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me—its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.

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.

This hauntingly beautiful passage is just a paragraph away from the more vaudevillian and censorable one made famous by Lenny Bruce, who would read it to audiences as part of his comedic routine: the passage where Miller tells Tania, “I will make your ovaries incandescent” and “After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards.” One has the impression that the comic, like so many others, including the lusty American GIs who smuggled the book back from Paris and made it a cause célèbre, never bothered to carefully read the adjacent paragraph. And, if they had, one wonders who among them would have understood or appreciated it, regardless of the fact that it contains the real message of Tropic of Cancer.

And, in a nod to the splendors of the antique Mediterranean world, we have this eulogy to the nameless veilleur de nuit (night watchman) at the lycée in Dijon: Miller informs us that he “is the only human being in the whole institution with whom I feel a kinship. He is a nobody.” Yet something about him, particularly the way he imbibes his bottle of wine, fascinates the author: “To me it’s like he’s pouring rubies down his gullet. Something about this gesture which seizes me by the hair. It’s almost as if he were drinking down the dregs of human sympathy.” Then, two pages later, comes a proclamation that completely distinguishes Miller from the typical American writer:

The whole Mediterranean seemed to be buried inside him—the orange groves, the cypress trees, the winged statues, the wooden temples, the blue sea, the stiff masks, the mystic numbers, the mythological birds, the sapphire skies, the eaglets, the sunny coves, the blind bards, the bearded heroes.

It’s of note that although Cancer takes place almost entirely within the crucible of Paris, the two main adventures that occur outside the city happen not only within the vicinity of the Seine but at its culmination, at la Havre, and near its source at Saint-Seine, which is close to Dijon. Thus, the chronicle is framed between the beginning, middle, and end of this historic, mythic, and majestic river.

In August 1932 the manuscript was shown to book agent William Bradley, along with Miller’s more traditional novel, Crazy Cock. Yet when Bradley offered to represent Cancer and send it to the publisher Jack Kahane, Miller made little of the gesture and instead tried to convince him to take on the far-inferior Crazy Cock.

Biographer Jay Martin regards this “curious” reaction as a “backpedaling loss of confidence exactly at the moment of his triumph.” Was Miller’s hesitation due to a sudden realization that, if it were published, the unwavering provocations in the text would open him to a variety of attacks for which he was not yet prepared? A more likely explanation is that, to the end, there remained something in him that refused to take seriously the prospect of its success, and those very doubts had allowed Miller to hold nothing back in the actual writing of it.* (And in fact, it wasn’t until Anaïs Nin subsequently helped to whittle it down to its present form that its success would become inevitable.) In April 1932 he had even asked Nin: “Are you sure I am not crazy? I mean, is all this personal narration justifiable? . . . I begin to think even you will balk. But I have said to myself ‘there must be no limits.’ I must be the one person in the world to risk everything, tell everything.” And as late as July 18, just a few weeks before Bradley agreed to represent the book, he added: “Yes, I am going completely nuts these days, not knowing whether I have failed again or not, but feeling as I wrote certain passages that they were fine, splendid, the best I ever wrote, only nobody will take the pains to read them.” Put another way, Miller’s hyperconscious approach to Crazy Cock—agonizing over it for years in the attempt to create a saleable novel—had yielded nothing of value, while the playful, intuitive approach to Cancer’s creation yielded a success that surprised even Miller, since it was the product not merely of his conscious efforts but also of an instinctive urge to give free rein to his unconscious psyche.

Perhaps as a result of holding nothing back, Cancer remains more didactic than his other novels, in that he returns time and again to an overt message of hopelessness and destruction in the narrative (due to the influence of Spengler’s Decline of the West), even though it’s the dramatized, humorous, and vaudevillian scenes that remain more firmly planted in the reader’s memory. Yet, despite the directness of their message, these passages represent some of the most lyrical ones in the book (and I use the word didactic simply to describe their nature and purpose and not to imply any shortcoming):

If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that would wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly the truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

Once Cancer was published in Paris and a small but significant readership began to respond, the novelistic character of “Henry Miller” began to shift a bit closer to the man Henry Miller in one subtle way. As someone once said in comparing Miller and Céline, the difference between them was that Miller wanted to be liked, while Céline went out of his way not to be liked. (In the single correspondence that he allotted him, Céline warned Miller: “Learn how to be wrong—the world is full of people who are right—that’s why it is so revolting.”) In the major novels that followedCancer, even when Miller portrays himself at his “worst,” there is a cunning sleight of hand that warms the reader up to the protagonist and shows him in a redeeming light sooner or later; or that evokes our pity or concern; or that encourages us to forgive him simply because he’s so witty, so bright, so naïve, so human. To put it in the context of our earlier discussion: we’re reminded of the narcissist’s need to be liked, while the sociopath doesn’t care whether you like him or not. Miller was deeply wounded by his mother’s callous denial of love and spoke of it repeatedly throughout his life and work, and, like anyone suffering under such circumstances, he tried to replace this basic emotional sustenance with attention and approval from others.

In the superb documentary Henry Miller Asleep and Awake, Miller points to a German poster advertising the cinematic adaptation of Tropic of Cancer and translates the caption: “Without love, we’re nothing.” Then, with a laugh and a sparkle in his eye, he adds: “But of course, theTropic of Cancer wasn’t very much about love!” Yet, one could argue that this is one of the marvelous things about it. For here is a character who lives not only without proper employment, or regular meals, or the propriety and respect that one is expected to accord social and cultural institutions, but he also lives without what we’d normally define as romantic love. In its place are obsessions, infatuations, and what we might call a love of the universe itself: an openness to and continual embrace of the Epicurean sense of cosmic awe, carefully balanced by an unceasing acknowledgment of the horror and futility of life as it’s ordinarily lived. Yet the author has conceived of a protagonist who not only finds peace; he prospers and flowers as few men do. And for this to happen, we suspect that the author himself, although perhaps not identical with his creation, shares this essential aspect of it.

In his book The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt describes how

Christian polemicists had to find a way to turn the current of mockery against Epicurus and his followers. Ridiculing the pagan pantheon did not work in this case, since Epicureanism eloquently dismantled the whole sacrificial worship of the gods and dismissed the ancient stories. What had to be done was to refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he appeared no longer as an apostle of moderation in the service of reasonable pleasure but instead as a Falstaffian figure of riotous excess. He was a fool, a pig, a madman. And his principle Roman disciple, Lucretius, had to be comparably made over.

I see an identical strategy at work in besmirching modern Epicureans such as Henry Miller and one that ran a similar course against his predecessor, Walt Whitman. Like Epicurus and Lucretius, they were each accused of exactly the same thing. Thus, it comes as no surprise that critics continue to attack the author of Tropic of Cancer with as much vehemence as they excoriate its hero.

Toward the end of his life, Miller confessed to his housekeeper Twinka Thiebaud: “Looking back, I realize that my loves were, in actuality, obsessions,” and added: “I don’t want the truth, I want illusion, mystery, intrigue. That is why women have been able to take advantage of me so often.” When I read this, I see evidence of the wound he suffered at the hands of his mother, Louise Marie Neiting, and how it bit into him like a slowly burning acid all his life. And when I see him proclaiming to Twinka, “Love is the be-all, end-all, and cure-all,” I harbor lasting doubts about whether Miller, even at eighty-eight, really knew what love was. I see this limitation reflected in his work, yet I also see that, despite this, he created not one but several masterpieces to the human spirit. Like a tree trunk forced to grow round an obstacle blocking its path, Miller grew round this impediment and was simultaneously shaped by it.

This lack of authentic love in his novels is certainly linked to the accusation of misogyny. Yet rather than simply a case of misogyny, I see in Cancer a man who thumbs his nose at men and women alike, who has decided for once in his life to enjoy himself even if it means being a bit selfish and callous; I see a character who is living on so few material resources that he cannot always afford to be honest, caring, or sincere; and I see a fellow who is desperately trying to understand himself and define himself, one who is ever aware of a fecund creative power surging within but who has not learned everything about how to channel it or where to direct it, or what forces to train upon it, or how to balance it with the merely human and profane needs that comprise quotidian life. I see a silhouette bobbing along the quai de la Seine, admiring each gleaming cobblestone while the dismal clouds of hatred, violence, war, and chaos swell ever larger over the Continent. And this man is also aware of the coming catastrophe and weaves that too into his prose:

If you want bread you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits, more lawn mowers, more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums.Forward!

And I see an American who was even more horrified by the acultural life that drove him into deep anguish in New York, and now this same soul is reborn and he walks electrified, surrounded by a mystery and beauty he can hardly find words for, but find them he does, and with these words—admittedly, “dictated” to him by an inner voice that wells up from a completely transpersonal source—he succeeds in handing back to the Parisian Muses what they have been giving him all along.

A word as loaded as misogyny has come to have all sorts of subjective and unintended meanings. And it’s casually tossed about, just as the word witch or communist was tossed about in earlier epochs. If misogynist means someone who uses the word cunt to describe part of a woman’s anatomy, then Miller is guilty, and if you need to crucify him so be it. But if, as Merriam-Webster defines it, it means someone who hates women, then he is not guilty, because no matter how the protagonist of Cancer behaves toward others it’s never with actual hatred, and the same can be said, with even greater emphasis, for Miller himself.

Instead, I would argue that the key figure of this novel has one goal, and that is to make fun of everyone and everything he encounters, including himself, and in so doing create not only a new world but also a new self. Tropic of Cancer caricatures everything, analyzes and dissects everything, bemoans of everything and rejoices in everything. Whether one agrees with this treatment or with the conclusions drawn by its fictional hero, it remains one of the great books. Therefore, I have no ultimate interest in explaining, excusing, forgiving, or condemning the morality of the author or his protagonist. But I do wish to commend both: for what they are and for what they accomplished.

And I would offer a final proviso: that we’d be better served when appreciating literature if we took heed of the words of a critic who was an early supporter of Miller’s work, calling it “one of the most beautiful prose styles today.” Almost a hundred years ago, in his essay “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” H. L. Mencken warned:

the prevailing American view of the world and its mysteries is still a moral one, and no other human concern gets half the attention that is endlessly lavished upon the problem of conduct, particularly of the other fellow . . . The American, save in moments of conscious and swiftly lamented deviltry, casts up all ponderable values, including even the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. He is beyond all things else, a judge and a policeman; he believes firmly that there is a mysterious power in law; he supports and embellishes its operation with a fanatical vigilance.

Even more to the point, he goes on to say: “the American, try as he will, can never imagine a work of the imagination as wholly devoid of moral content. It must either tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be suspect and abominable.” It’s also in this essay, published in book form in 1917, that Mencken coins the terms “the new Puritanism” and “neo-Puritanism,” phrases that are often bandied about today, and he concludes:

Any questioning of the moral ideas that prevail—the principal business, it must be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professed inquirer into human motives and acts—is received with the utmost hostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to disturb the peace—and the disturber of the peace, in the national view, quickly passes over into the downright criminal.

In other words, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even if it involves as unsympathetic a person as Céline, we must judge the work itself primarily on its own merit. The witch hunt that has commenced to either accept or condemn the labors of each artist based on whether he fits into our current notion of what is politically correct is, at heart, no different from the puritanical hypocrisy that has always assailed the so-called land of the free. As Mencken says, in America, eventually every question turns into a moral question. Miller’s key contribution is that he revealed what it was like to be a particular man, an American, floating like a cork through the human wasteland of the underclass of Paris in the early 1930s. He didn’t lie about the thoughts and fantasies that went through his mind and body; instead, he unveiled them, and, as Whitman did in the previous century, he celebrated them.

In his Preface to Tropic of Cancer—signed by Anaïs Nin but obviously composed by Miller himself—he calls it a “naked book” (a remark that bears a prophetic resonance to the title of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch). There, you may be sure, he wasn’t stretching the truth. He unabashedly exposes himself and demands—if you are to be as honest a reader as he is a writer—that you do the same, even if it causes quite a bit of discomfit.

In a country where, in general, it’s all right for a woman to call a man a prick but an abomination for a man to call a woman a cunt, this has created a bit of a ticklish problem for old Henry. And when every thirteen-year-old hipster considers herself a “Goddess,” what dear me are we to do about an author who uses the vagina as a symbol and metaphor with which to promulgate various disturbing images from The Decline of the West? In Tropic of Cancer the cunt is a crack through which the meaningless pursuits of modern “progress” are seen as null and void; the cunt is the acme and nadir of emptiness and ennui; the cunt is as “fucked out” and as “pooped out” as the universe itself. And on the microcosmic level, the cunt, in the character Van Norden’s words, doesn’t even contain a harmonica or a calendar: there’s nothing inside, nothing that would redeem us, and he knows because he’s carefully trained a flashlight upon its barren walls. Worse still, Fillmore (such a fitting name since his cock is gargantuan!) is so cunt struck that he’s nearly plunged into the abyss of a loveless marriage ruled over by a vicious, conniving, thieving cunt, and he only escapes by the cunt hairs thanks to “Henry,” who sees right through this cunty illusion and ships him off to bloody England. The cunt is a trapdoor through which we may fall thanks to syphilis and gonorrhea, and every Métro station warns of this by plastering the walls with the sign of Cancer, the crab: its claws outstretched like two chancre-ridden grasping cunt lips. Yet, this only raises the stakes because if you brave the dangers the rewards seem that much sweeter, and thus we have that mighty blast of sperm-ridden ecstasy that heralds the coming of a new literature in Cancer’s opening pages, when Miller pays homage to the emotionally unfettered joys of ejaculatory male sex by proclaiming he will ream out every wrinkle in Tanya’s twat, set her ovaries ablaze, and yank “toads, bats, lizards” from her butt hole.

This, more than anything, is what gets people steamed about Miller. Too much cunt. And without the reverence, without the wrappings with which we’re supposed to deliver it. In his own words, looking back: “Tropic of Cancer wasn’t very much about love!”

* * *

In one of those strange twists of personal fate, in the moments after I completed this tribute to a man and a book I love, I learned of the passing away of Barney Rosset, who was also one of the great men of our time and one whom I deeply admired. In the words of Miller-biographer Frederick Turner: “Even in 1961, the year of its American publication, [Tropic of Cancer] still looked amazingly avant-garde, enough so that its appearance through Barney Rosset’s Grove Press was a cultural sensation felt far beyond the realm of arts and letters. It was in truth one of the first major shots fired in what were to become the cultural wars of that remarkable decade.”

If Barney hadn’t made the decision to balls up and publish Cancer, and if he hadn’t doggedly persisted in convincing Miller of the need to do so—cutting through every one of the author’s fears and hesitations about finally publishing the book in a potentially hostile Cold-War America—our lives would have been substantially different.* Not only because of Tropic of Cancer but also because many of the gems that followed it, such as Naked Lunch, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the works of the Marquis de Sade, would have remained hidden away from our collective consciousness for who knows how long. After Cancer anything seemed possible, and the publishing world was indeed forever altered.

“Everything is possible”—the battle cry of the 1960s counterculture—may have seen its truest expression in the list of titles that Barney courageously brought forth. Many of those in my generation, who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, grew up studying these works as if they were Holy Scripture. We fashioned our style after them, expanded our vocabulary through them, molded our ideas upon them. Even more important than having long hair or wearing blue jeans, if you encountered a stranger with one of these titles tucked under his arm it was something akin to the ancient Gnostics, under the Roman Empire, who recognized each other by drawing the sign of the fish on the arid desert sand. Conversations commenced, relationships formed or dissolved, friendships expanded or deflated based upon how you reacted to characters such as Dr. Benway in Naked Lunch, Vanessa in Tropic of Capricorn, or Harry in Requiem for a Dream. Behind it all was the éminence grise of Barney Rosset, polluting our minds with such wonderful “filth and smut” and turning us all into “angelheaded hipsters.”

In Tropic of Cancer, in one of his hyperbolic invectives against the air-conditioned nightmare, Miller writes: “America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.” So true. And truer now, perhaps, than ever. Yet, as the ultimate counterpoint to such unredeeming malefic forces, we have the likes of Barney Rosset, who lives on in so many ways but especially as an example of how one real man—“who would turn the world upside down”—makes a difference.

* “In writing it . . . I had almost no hope of its ever being accepted by a publisher. It was something I had to do in order to preserve my own integrity. It was a case of do or die. Certainly the last thing I ever dreamed of was that it would one day be published in my own country.” Henry Miller, letter to Stanley Fleishman from December 26, 1962, as quoted by Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere. The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius, New York: Random House, 1992, p. 367.

* I once asked Barney if he felt that Miller had appreciated the enormous personal sacrifice that Rosset underwent: selling his beachfront properties, worth millions of dollars, to finance the trials of Tropic of Cancer. With a straight face and a tone of utmost sincerity he replied, “Oh, yes. He was very nice to us. He even gave me some of his watercolors”!

Rob Couteau is the author of the novel Doctor Pluss, the anthology Collected Couteau, the memoir Letters from Paris, and the poetry collection The Sleeping Mermaid. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, a competition open to North American writers and sponsored by the American Humanist Association. His work as a critic, interviewer, and social commentator is featured in books such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury, ed. Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen’s Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless mentally ill. His writing has appeared in over thirty-five literary publications.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

by David Moscovich

Yuriy Tarnawsky is responsible for the complex syntactical literary candy behind Three Blondes and Death, the novel Meningitis, and Like Blood in Water, as well as numerous collections of poetry, books of fiction, and plays in his native Ukrainian. His most recent collection of fiction, called Short Tails (JEF Books/Civil Coping Mechanisms), is a vivid, dream-like sequence of stories told in an avid and plain voice. Each story, on its own time, is a twisted gallop through a city of the seemingly innocuous. But these tales are not about a city—they are about the small significances that lead us to naves of imagination where the reader has always wanted to be. Tarnawsky and I met over fresh varenyky and beer at a Ukrainian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village to discuss the question, among others—were these stories based on dreams? He lives in White Plains, New York, with his wife.

David Moscovich: You mentioned that some of the stories in Short Tails were composed using the titles as prompts. Could you elaborate on this process?

Yuriy Tarnawsky: Yes, it was a very joyful experience. The first story was “Missing,” which I had had in mind for a number of years but kept postponing. I was really happy to be able to finally get to it. The title is a gerund and I came up with other gerundive forms to go with it, such as “Receding,” “Leaving,” and “Screaming.” (This last one I finally excluded from the collection since it differed fundamentally from the other stories). I didn’t have any story or plot in mind, but let my imagination roam as it pleased, as happens in a Rorschach inkblot test. As I said, it was sheer joy to work like that. Three Blondes was an extremely tightly structured work, and all novels require some degree of control over their structure, but here I felt completely free and wrote whatever came to mind. “Surchild,” for instance, arose when I misheard “surplus” spoken on the radio. “Fourth of July” is a synonym for “independence day” and it evoked this particular story. “Smoke” and “Stone” were like that too, the first one prompting me to do the second as a companion piece, stone being in a sense the antonym of smoke. “AC Robat,” which is, philosophically at least, the central story in the book, came about when I was trying to come up with names having the harsh “r” sound in it, and thought of “Robat,” as a follow-on name to “Robak” in ”The Performance.” I saw the possibility of what would happen if I added AC to the name and this led to the story. Most of the others came about in similar fashion.

DM: Did inspiration for the story ”The Albino Inside You” come from a dream?

YT: No, it actually didn’t, although it should have and the dream should have been the one with which the story ends. In this particular story, I actually struggled with the ending, not knowing how to wrap it up, and then, one day, it came to me in a flash. I must have had it in mind all along and just kept it buried inside me under all that rational crap that gets in your way as you write. I suspect it was there from the beginning and it gave me the idea for the title, but then I had to tunnel my way back to it.

I forget how the title actually sprung up in me. I recall, though, realizing that a bone, being white, could be compared to an albino and that then the human skeleton would be “the albino inside you.” I liked the way the phrase sounded and it propelled me to write the story, which came out easily until the very end.

DM: In the story “Lenin's Brain,” the narrator buys a package in an antique store in Greenwich Village that contains the brain of Vladimir Lenin. Is there anything autobiographical that influences this story (your feelings about Lenin or the Soviet Union, for example), or the way you write in general?

YT: No, there really isn’t, except for the fact that I have been to Greenwich Village many times. I got the idea for the story from my friend, the well-known Ukrainian painter Olexander Dubovyk, who was telling me about a biography of Lenin he had recently read, recounting the details from his childhood and his signing execution papers, and that his brain was withered on one side, as I describe. He is the one I have dedicated the story to. So, the origin of this story is different from all the others.

As is true of all of my writing, there is virtually no autobiographical material in the book, except on a very basic level, such as appearance of objects, details of situations, types of personalities, and so on. I find that biographical material holds me back, hampers my creative process, cramps my imagination. Imagination is so much more fertile than life. But of course, imagination has to work on material from life experience, and it does it on that very basic level, as I have just mentioned.

DM: Why the title Short Tails? What is the significance?

YT: I remember driving to work one morning, many years ago, and the phrase “short tails” popped up in my mind as a pun for “short tales,” the opposite of “tall tales.” In other words, I am saying that these are honest to God true stories despite being usually so outrageous. In the book I try to point out the absurd nature of life and I think the title is very appropriate for this. Finally, a short tail implies it having been cut off, which is painful, which points out another aspect of life. It was I who chose the idea of showing a dog with a cropped tail on the cover, as a visual pun. I think the artist, Michael Seidlinger, did a wonderful job in representing this.

DM: We spoke a little about standing behind the words we write, as writers. That perhaps especially, in the more experimental or non-commercial realms, where we are crafting work which is primarily about the work itself, the perception of others can be an impediment, and at worst, an infringement on the work. What about the value of peer critique?

YT: I am uneasy about the practice of other people telling you how to write. This is especially true for beginners who haven’t yet developed their style and their writer’s persona and are easily pushed off the course. In fact, the very phrase “teaching creative writing” sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative? You have to create yourself. I have been thinking about this issue for years and have actually developed a sort of a teach-yourself handbook for writers, which consists of exercises that point out what happens when you take a certain path in your writing—different point of view, different tense, etc., etc. I did this for poetry, fiction, and drama. I have taught over the Internet the poetry part with students at a university in Ukraine and held a seminar on part of the fiction exercises at University of Louisville. I find this kind of teaching useful, because here the student learns from his own work. But I feel that other people’s suggestions are very dangerous. Yet, I can’t say that they are always destructive or not useful. Perhaps, rather than having other people tell you how you should improve your work, they should just tell you how they understand your work, what they got out of it, so that you can figure out yourself if what you did was right or wrong. It’s a tricky issue and you have to tread very carefully here.

DM: You were a cofounder of a group of avant-garde émigré Ukrainian writers called The New York Group. Could you tell us a little about it?

YT: In 1959, a bunch of us, recently arrived Ukrainian émigrés who lived mostly in New York, decided to form officially a group and call ourselves The New York Group and to publish a poetry magazine called Novi Poeziyi (New Poetry). Within a year we were joined by two more poets, one from Germany and one from Brazil, and eventually five more, four from the US and one from Belgium. Stylistically, the group was fairly diverse: some of the members utilized relatively traditional poetics, while others were quite radically new. What we all had in common, though, was that we had nothing in common with the older generation of Ukrainian writers. We totally shunned nationalist, patriotic subjects. The group was influenced to some degree by modern American and French poetry, and especially strongly by that from Spain and Latin America. The most interesting aspect of the group is a style many of the members practiced which bears strong resemblance to Surrealism, but closer to Hispanic Surrealism than to the classical French. It seems more organic and less intellectual, being rooted in the national (in this case Ukrainian) tradition. A similar trend appeared in a somewhat younger generation of poets that cropped up in Ukraine in the late ’60s, called The Kyiv School, and the style perhaps should be called “Ukrainian Surrealism,” which might be an original contribution to world literature.

DM: At some point you stopped writing in Ukrainian and switched to English. Tell me why.

YT: There were a couple of reasons. The first, and probably the strongest, was the fact that I always lived in a multilingual society (Polish-Ukrainian, German-Ukrainian, English-Ukrainian), and was open to outside linguistic influences. I think it was within three years of coming to the US that I started writing in English, although purely for myself, not trying to get it published. Living in America, I was constantly in touch with English, and Ukrainian was for me a private language.

Another reason was that I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because “it sounded better this way.” My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre. So in the end (actually fairly soon, sometime in the early ’60s), I switched to writing prose in English, although I continued writing poetry in Ukrainian, primarily, I think, because I was able to publish it. This continued essentially until recently, when I switched to writing exclusively in English, although this might change.

DM: How do you feel about translating from Ukrainian to English, and vice versa?

YT: I’ve done a lot of going back and forth with my own writing, in particular translating my English language stuff into Ukrainian—poetry as well as prose. But I actually hate doing it. It is a thankless, mind-numbing process, additionally unpleasant for me because it reminds me of my ambiguous status of not belonging anywhere. So that is one more reason why I write in English only right now. I prefer writing in the language I hear around me for the people by whom I am surrounded.

DM: How do you balance family life with the writing life?

YT: When I worked full time (I worked virtually all my adult life for the IBM Corporation, first as an engineer and then as a computational linguist), it was extremely tough. I would put in hard eight or more hours of work at the lab, come home, have supper, and then sit down to write. At times it was torture. I was exhausted and nothing of value would come out. But somehow I managed to get something reasonably satisfying out from time to time and published a fair number of books. Things got even tougher when I went back to school to study linguistics at NYU. For about seven years I wrote nothing at all. Eventually I took early retirement from IBM and taught Ukrainian literature at Columbia University for a few years. This was even tougher. I didn’t write anything except course material. The added problem here, too, was the fact that this was creative work and it took away my need to write. Then, after leaving Columbia, I started writing like a fiend. I wrote a cycle of plays in Ukrainian called 6x0, which, at nearly 400 pages, I finished in a little over a year. I did Short Tails in a couple of years, and then a book of short fictions I call “mininovels” Like Blood in Water, followed by two additional ones. So now, it’s much easier. Except for the usual house chores, doing income tax, etc., I am free to write whenever I want.

DM: You made the switch from poetry to fiction and are now primarily known as a writer of prose. Could you talk about why the shift happened away from poetry?

YT: This isn’t quite true. Last year I wrote (in English) a whole, longish (100 plus pages) book of poetry called Modus Tollens, in about six months. I did this because I felt a strong need to write poetry again. But it is true that I didn’t write any poetry between 1995 and 2011. The reason for this was probably because I had stayed away from fiction for so long and couldn’t tear myself away from it. I told you above with what gusto I delved into Short Tails because I craved to write fiction. The same was true with Modus Tollens in regards to poetry. So it’s my dual nature that makes me behave like that. But I must say that, on the whole, I prefer fiction to poetry. I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a “hobby,” a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.

DM: What are you working on now? What's next?

YT: I have just re-edited the two collections of mininovels I mentioned above and will be looking for a publisher for them. Together with Like Blood in Water they form a trilogy. It is a tightly knit work, more like a big novel than three separate collections. I view it as being on a par with Three Blondes and Death. Then, I have to finish the book of writing exercises I mentioned. I already have all the rules written down, and some examples, but have to complete the latter. That should keep me busy for a while.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

An Interview with Faruk Ulay

by Norman Lock

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1957, Faruk Ulay is a prolific multimedia author / graphic designer living in Pasadena, California today. After receiving a B.A. in Graphic Design in Istanbul, he attended The Goldsmiths’ College in London for postgraduate studies in Visual Communications. He moved to the United States in 1982 and established a design business in Los Angeles, where he still occasionally designs, but mostly writes difficult-to-classify texts, often incorporating photographs of American urban landscapes notable for their emptiness.

Only two of Ulay’s books have been published in the U.S.: Terra Infirma (Triple Press, 2005) andCultivation of Enigma (self published, 2011), although two others have been published in both Turkish and English editions, and his complete catalog consists of ten volumes, including short stories, experimental texts, and novels. In 2012, Turkish publisher Notos Books will publish Birakmak (a title for which, as Ulay explains, “There is no satisfactory translation”). I interviewed Ulay via email to discuss his unique approach to the creation of books, and the resulting visible and invisible literatures.

Norman Lock: Before I ask about the discrepancy in works available to an English-speaking audience as opposed to a Turkish one, indulge me in a Borgesian conceit: I imagine an “invisible literature” of Faruk Ulay’s—by which I mean one written and published in his primary language—to which his admittedly slim English-language productions refer. Is there any validity to such a notion?

Faruk Ulay: The English-language texts could be called récits. They are not full-fledged stories—not overly polished and finished, but they are not drafts either. They are focused on the problematics of narrative. They all have an inner voice and logic. On the other hand, many of my books published in Istanbul are longer, finished writings. Finished in a sense that traditional forms are recognizable in them—especially in the stories, which observe the conventions of writing more closely. Nevertheless, my first novel seemed a six-hundred-page jumble of words to most Turkish readers and critics (I suspect because of its Oulipian elements and Russian Formalist ideas). Since it appeared, whatever I write is automatically labeled “new writing” and therefore deemed hard-to-read.

While more than a dozen stories from the Turkish works were translated into English and published in literary journals here, I wasn’t happy with the translations. It’s difficult to find an English speaker to decipher my writing—some, like that 600-page novel, require a superhuman effort to translate properly. So most of my books have stayed in their native language and become my “invisible literature.”

NL: Why have publishers and readers in a traditionalist and Islamic, if highly secularized, nation been so tolerant toward an avant-garde literature such as yours, which can find few American outlets?

FU: Both readers and writers of these kinds of texts are quite young, and many follow avant-garde literature to distance themselves from a rapidly advancing Islamic conservatism. Some of my fellow writers there are well known in other creative fields, and a small but dedicated readership has developed around them. They have excellent foreign language skills, are aware of the classics of avant-garde as well as contemporary experimental writing, and have even translated some of them into Turkish. They publish a literary journal and introduce many foreign writers to Turkish readers.

What surprises me is the tenacity of a few publishers; they know they’ll never recoup their expenses and yet they publish those works. I think one reason for this support is the close relationship between publisher and writer. Fortunately, the concept of “literary agent” is not yet established in Turkey, so writers can still get close to publishers.

NL: In the works I’ve read (those in English), southern California or even America, considered as a category of existence, doesn’t seem to have any direct bearing on their landscape or subject matter, which are intensely imagined. The settings remain alien in spite of color photographs—an essential aspect of Beneath the Shadow of Perpetual Defeat and the recent Cultivation of Enigma—that produce a sense of estrangement in the texts. This unease in the world of signs and outward phenomena seems to be fundamental to your work. You recently asserted that where you live now (the U.S.) is more important than where you are from (Istanbul). In light of this, will you comment on the relationship between actual places and your works in general?

FU: I strip away recognizable features from my fictional landscape. The same deliberate “facelessness” can be said of my protagonists: they have strong voices, but they don’t have names. Their characters are defined by behavior and gestures. I also distort time. My narratives are not eventful, but everything and everybody is in motion within an essentially lethargic condition.

NL: You invent landscapes for your works?

FU: I’ll draw an imaginary city block complete with buildings, for example, and then let the characters wander around in it. I had to create thirty-three different lands for The Lands Betweenand map out their positions in such a way that from the borderland a reader can see and “enter” another land.

And yes, you’re right. If I decide to add a visual layer to the work, I must draw the imagery from my own working and living environment. As a result, images do not have the semi-abstract feel of the texts; but I try to lessen their material impact by forgoing the aesthetic of the well-made photograph. I also use objects that verge on the banal and conceal as much as possible any association with real places. So to answer your question, where I live does not affect my writing and I never subscribed to the notion that local color makes it universal—but in the visuals, there will be traces of that local color.

NL: A shared theme among Terra Infirma, Beneath the Shadow of Perpetual Defeat, and Cultivation of Enigmaseems to be the profound dislocation that you view as symptomatic of our age—its culture, governments, and sign-making. Is that a fair assessment; and if so, can it be said to be equally true of those works of your invisible literature?

FU: Yes, I am writing the same theme over and over again. I change perspective, experiment with forms and language; but I still end up writing about helpless people struggling to get out of a situation in which they unexpectedly find themselves because of outside forces.

NL: You once remarked: “I am a foreigner but my writing is not exotic; it is esoteric.” This echoes the sense of estrangement we’re talking about. Even some of your titles suggest dislocation: Terra Infirma, for instance—and in their English translations, Broken Connections, Lies Written for Thirty Two Photographs, Time of Strange People, The Lands Between, and Beneath the Shadow of Perpetual Defeat. But I find your work inescapably exotic in the way of Latin American fantasists or Henri Rousseau or Philip Glass. Like their quite different productions, yours is the rich assay of an imagination unwilling to acknowledge limits, together with a willingness to destroy forms unsuitable to the fractured nature of our time.

FU: What I meant by forgoing exoticism is to eliminate the ethnic elements Western readers may expect to find in a book written by a writer from the Middle East. I am talking about Orientalist clichés. In my view, exoticism diminishes the literary value of a text because it adds too much ornamentation. Literature—the sort I subscribe to—will lose its purity by an overlay of the exotic. What interests me is to record conflicts occurring within my characters’ vulnerable minds because of oppressive environments—magnified by their inability to manage their crises by any other means than losing themselves in imagined worlds. To this extent, my works do employ a degree of exoticism. I prefer the words irreality, absurdity, and—yes—estrangement, but in Viktor Schlovsky’s version of it. Estrangement was the concept behind 32 Busts, Lies Written for Thirty Two Photographs.

NL: I understand that the book caused enormous controversy in Turkey.

FU: It was a collaborative work: thirty-two prominent people agreed to be photographed naked from the waist up while I wrote a story—a fictionalized biography—for each of them. Readers encountering many of Turkey’s intelligentsia naked found the book almost blasphemous and artists guilty of subverting society’s values. My least experimental, most accessible writing caused an uproar without—I suspect—having been read by many.

Beneath the Shadow of Perpetual Defeat, on the other hand, was intended to be polemical. It is a faked manifesto, poking fun at commercial design—specifically ad agencies and graphic designers willing to work in the shadow of corporate ethics (or non-ethics). The work holds them accountable for eroding social and cultural values and proposes absurd ways to transform them into cultural activists. Deliberately elitist and emphatically Modernist, the book was ignored completely.

NL: In Turkey as well as America?

FU: Yes.

NL: How does graphic design, your “other” career, consort with texts that are declarations of “misreading”—of the culture’s systemic information breakdown? I am thinking of Beneath the Shadow of Perpetual Defeat and Cultivation of Enigma, which you yourself designed, as well as the locusnovus.com site of others’ text/image works you’ve maintained since 2000. Is it the case that your love of design overcomes your skepticism about the truthfulness of written communications?

FU: “Misreading” is inherent in written language, so loading the text with additional layers of signification will not add to any satire of literature’s insidious incomprehensibility. Graphic design does help me to question the traditional form of the codex as a vessel believed to carry meaning precisely and unambiguously. Apart from this subversive element, graphic design helps me to organize my text and to integrate other media in interdisciplinary projects, coherently and harmoniously. My literary works require less design. I should add that not every one of my hybrid works has been designed by me.

NL: Why is that?

FU: Because I wouldn’t push the design far enough. I’d be afraid of making my text illegible. The design of Cultivation of Enigma is very subtle. It’s a grid-based, Modernist design whose purpose is to guide the eye of the reader.

I like the French tradition of livre d’artistes and admire the efforts of some independent, American presses working in this tradition: their exquisite books printed on old letterpresses look and feel exotic next to an e-book.

NL: With the various elements incorporated into your works, and often the collaboration, as in design mentioned above, your works can be difficult to classify. In fact, you call your writings “works” rather than “stories” or “novels.” What is it about your writing that makes your works sui generis—a classification of its own—and why should we read it?

FU: My novels read like fragmented, experimental narratives; my stories can sometimes sound like essays. They encourage the reader to be part of their creation. They are open-ended to allow readers to insert their own ideas. They respect conventional writing while attempting to expand traditional forms. And certainly they do not belong to Postmodernism.

Interviewer Norman Lock has written novels and short fiction as well as stage, radio and screen plays. His latest work, Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions, was issued by Spuyten Duyvil.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012