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

little unit of it living on Driggs were there any who were actively involved in the arts, though Louise had once played a couple of musical instruments, and Henry himself learned to play the piano passably. Paintings were scarce around the house as were books, except in Henry’s room. Very early he showed a bookish inclination that his parents indulged with gifts of Robinson Crusoe, G. A. Henty—the boys’ favorite of that era—H. Rider Haggard, and The Adventures of Pinocchio, whose besetting sin was his chronic lying. But if neither Henry Senior nor Louise were readers, museum-goers, or much interested in serious theater, still they had an Old World respect for culture. The arts were a good thing, and they knew that many great writers had written in their native tongue, even if they themselves had never read them. They knew also how important it was that they themselves master the new tongue of their world, and in their household they had the example of Grandpa Nieting, who spoke the beautiful English he’d learned in Londonon his way to America. Because of this he was a respected member of Brooklyn’s German-American community.
    As for little Henry, once he had been sprung from the household with its German language and customs, he quickly became adept at the gutter talk of Williamsburg. This must have been pretty rough stuff, because when an older girl happened to hear him using it she was so shocked she collared him and dragged him off to the police station. This might have been the first time his use of language got him in trouble with the law, though it certainly was not the last. 10

Beginning the Streets of Sorrow
    These early years, Miller was to recall ever afterward, were ones in which he was having a grand time because he “really didn’t give a fuck about anything.” By this he apparently meant that he was yet young enough that no one expected him to have a goal in life. But the interesting thing here is that what Miller recalled of himself at about the age of eight was really what he said of himself near the end of his life when he was a living legend who could say that if his fame had permitted it, he would do nothing, “and I mean absolutely nothing.” While his sister remained forever locked in early childhood by her mental illness, Miller himself, though quite bright, remained forever in certain important respects a kind of Huck Finn character whose goal in life was to avoid growing up, toavoid as much as possible what the world called “work” and “responsibility,” so that he might live a life of anarchical freedom in some mental territory beyond the reaches of civilization. He never saw himself “getting ahead,” laboriously climbing the steep way to success as his world commonly measured it. Instead he wanted to follow his own path, and that path led always away from the beaten one, the one that America had cut with such fabulous speed and energy and now was hell-bent on pointing out to the rest of the world.
    This sort of indolent insouciance became harder for the boy to carry off when he was only nine, at which point his family decided Williamsburg was changing for the worse with the steady influx of Italians and eastern European Jews. His parents wanted to find a more stable, homogeneous German-American neighborhood and found it in Brooklyn’s Bushwick section in 1900. Here was a body blow to little Henry, ending what he always felt was an urban idyll he would have been happy to have lived endlessly. The new neighborhood represented new challenges for him and new gangs whose tribal rituals he would have to learn, beginning on the day a kid placed a chip on the newcomer’s shoulder, meaning he would have to fight or be ostracized. Instead, Miller told the other kids that he knew none of them and therefore had nothing against them. There was nothing for him to fight about, he said.Apparently his stance was sufficiently peculiar to buy him amnesty, and he was accepted as an