Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" by Frederick Turner

a stallion. Outside the saloons he inhaled the heady perfume of beer, sawdust, and tobacco smoke, and learned what drunkenness looked like.
    Williamsburg was filled with folkloric personalities, and the more colorful they were, the more outrageous, violent, even deranged, the more the boy was drawn to them. There were characters like Apple Annie and Clarence the Cop who were just that—characters who could have no other dimensions to them for the boy. Others he knew better, like Crazy Willie who barked like a dog and masturbated in public. There were also the tough guys—the sports—who swaggered through their world of the “saloon, the race track, bicycles, fast women and trot horses,” as he was later to style it. His personal roster of these folk heroes included Stanley Borowski, Matt Owen,the great Johnny Paul, and Lester Reardon, “who, by the mere act of walking down the street, inspired fear and admiration.” And there were Rob Ramsay and Jack Law-son. Rob Ramsay came back from the war covered with decorations, and then soon enough covered himself with his own drunken vomit until one fine day in an act of supreme herohood he walked off the end of a pier and drowned himself. Of Jack Lawson we know only that when Miller was twelve this best of friends died of some unspecified illness and that Miller was so glad Jack was now out of his misery that he claims he “let a loud fart” right beside the coffin where Jack’s relatives were “bawling like sick monkeys.”
    There were no heroic figures in Miller’s family, but a fair share of mental defectives and misfits, beginning with Lauretta, who never developed intellectually much past the level of a ten-year-old. Louise’s desperate efforts to browbeat an education into her daughter were a continuing source of anguish to Miller, who was often a helpless witness to them. Somewhere in this protracted, painful process he developed a coping technique that would become an essential part of his character: when his mother’s efforts at home-schooling Lauretta would reach a hysterical level and the slapping started, he would make some sort of inward, imaginative escape to a place where the slaps and Lauretta’s frightened outcries weren’t presentany longer and the boy was impervious and indifferent to the suffering there in front of him.
    In his maturity he was never able to make these scenes between mother and daughter seem comic, something he was able to do with so much other unpromising family material. But the rest of the family became, quite literally, another story, and in his cruelly hilarious recollections of them we hear the distant echo of such folk figures as Mike Fink asking whether the whiskey cup had been spilled after killing his friend Carpenter. Confronted with what he came to regard as the crowd of freaks and halfwits that made up his family tree, Miller created out of chaos and failure, illness and insanity, a group portrait that is funny in the way the grotesque is funny—at considerable cost. Among those who got together on almost any occasion, he wrote in Black Spring, there was
    cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery, mendacity, buggery, incest, paralysis, tapeworms, abortions, triplets, idiots, drunkards, ne’er-do-wells, fanatics, sailors, tailors, watchmakers, scarlet fever, whooping cough, meningitis, running ears, chorea, stutterers, jailbirds, dreamers, storytellers, bartenders… . The morgue and the insane asylum.
    Despite all, it was amazing how jolly this pitiful group could be, regardless of the weather (whether it was zeroor below) or the circumstance (a death, the outbreak of another war, or the tin factory catching fire again). There they were, laughingly gathered around the festive table crammed with “sauerkraut with kartoffelklöze and sour black gravy … with apple sauce and figs from Smyrna, with bananas big as blackjacks,” everything except a finger bowl.
    Neither in his extended family nor in the