OlD SOUL MAD AGAINE
-Tropic of Cancer
flows. Cliches, platitudes, literary echoes are swept
along in the stream, unnoticed. But now we get whole pages of earnest,
sticky dullness:
"If
the caterpillar through sleep can metamorphose into
a butterfly, surely man during his long night of travail must discover
the knowledge and the power to redeem himself," etc.
Certainly, something has happened. A French critic put it very
simply: "Perhaps, in
Tropic of Cancer,
Miller said everything." But this
needs qualification. I see
Tropic of Cancer
as a text on which the later
works are commentaries. A commentary is not entirely ancillary to its
text; it may have new qualities and insights of its own; but the interpre–
tation is always less than the thing interpreted. Besides, Miller is not
an artist. In itself, this doesn't matter. Neither is God, as Sartre said,
speaking of Mauriac. But an artist can make his books seem different and
similar at the same time: illusion, after all, is his business.
Miller's concern is with the truth about himself. All his books, as
he confesses in this latest one, are installments of an autobiography, even
though large parts of them purport to be criticism or philosophy.
Remem–
ber to Remember,
then, is the fifth installment of Miller's life-story to
be brought out by New Directions, his principal American publisher.
Since his sea change from Paris pavements to a rock on the Pacific–
his re-expatciation-his dominant theme has been disgust with the
American way of life, a feeling kept bitterly constant by recurring mem–
ories of Europe. The title-piece of
Remember to Remember,
like
"Vive
la France!"
in the preceding volume, may be taken as typical of this
prevailing mood. "I prefer the corrupt world of Europe. I prefer the
maggots which crawl. I prefer the song of the flesh, even though that
flesh be rotting. While there is still a body there will be spirit....
There has been so little evidence of the spirit here in America that one
grows .accustomed to thinking of it in terms of negation." Interwoven
with this reinterpretation of Miller's European experience are two other
strands: the praise of friends, and general comments on the moral state
of the world.
Miller has found a few oases in the American desert, some natives
who impress him as talented for art or living. Those of whom he writes
in these volumes are mostly artists--painters, sculptors, musicians-but
there are also plain "ragged individualists," including a saloon-keeper,
a convicted murderer, and a novel-writing bootblack. Five chapters of
Remember to Remember,
with parts of its preface and parts of other
sections, portray and celebrate such people, whom Miller seems to con–
sider fellow originals, in traditional romantic style-as heroic rebels
121
