NEW INNOCENTS ABROAD
273
Lulu,
and
M'mselle Fiji,
and its glorified image lingered through
all the high literate days of the twenties. In the mind of the average
tourist Paris is still mainly a montage of the cancan, naked breasts
at the
Folies,
filthy postcards sold on the streets, the whores plying
their brisk trade near the Madeleine and Opera, and formerly the
tour through the brothels that was as much a tourist's "must" as a
visit to Notre Dame. Though the brothels have been publicly
closed, Paris is still an immense shop-window displaying all the
wares of sensuality. One could see the release going on all around
one. There were the college boys whispering with the pimps of
Pigalle to arrange an "exhibition"; there was the blonde post-deb
from Philadelphia who used to play the hard-boiled teaser late into
the night at the cafes, but who this time had overstepped herself,
and suddenly broke down, cowering in a corner, as the two whores
undressed in the bathroom before coming out to go through their
postures; and, in a quieter vein, there were the two middle-aged
business men fumbling with guilty glee under the counter at
Brentano's for the forbidden copies of Henry Miller, furtive and
giggling, more like boys out of school than grown men. All around
one, the Americans on their sexual vacation abroad seemed to be
marked by just this quality of a pawing, gawkish, excitable adoles–
cence.
Under the influence of this atmosphere I decided to look into
Henry Miller again. Re-read in an attic on the Left Bank, the
Tropic of Cancer
rang bells. I realized I had considerably underesti–
mated Miller: the book had still all the faults that had palled in
previous reading, but I felt in it now the rude vitality that makes it
monumental, and, as I could see from the Americans etupting
around me, a document in the history of the American's attempt at
self-liberation. You couldn't, of course, take Miller at his own esti–
mate of himself: he is really a prime example of the American
adolescent raucously erupting into sex, trying violently to release
himself into some kind of mature freedom. But this may be part of
his value for us, establishing him .as the archetype of the American
adolescent struggling against the national heritage of Puritanism.
And Miller has the energy typical of his race: he goes at sex with the
cool fury with which Americans tum their bulldozers loose on a
pro~lem
of engineering.
