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

eccentric—precisely the sort of character that appealed to Miller himself. This, however, didn’t affect his homesickness for Williamsburg; he missed the old neighborhood with a deep poignancy and would always refer to the new house on Decatur Street as the “street of early sorrows.”
    At P.S. 85 he was regarded as a good student, though often bored and therefore mischievous. He didn’t have to work hard at all to master the rote learning he was assigned and had plenty of time to continue his own unsu-pervised reading. He made a close friend of Emil Schnel-lock, whose draftsmanship everyone admired, including the teacher who often asked Emil to come forward to draw on the blackboard. Here was a form of distinction new to Miller: maybe you didn’t have to be a tough guy, a rock thrower, a street fighter, to stand out. Maybe you could use your imagination. Yet when it came time to move on to high school, Miller chose to leave Emil and the others behind, going back to Williamsburg and its Eastern District High.
    He found the old neighborhood much changed, just as his family had feared. There were now a great many more Jews than he’d remembered, so many in fact that he and his kind were outnumbered, an unpleasant situation for him that gave rise to a persistent, virulent anti-Semitismthat later he would try to disguise as a form of envy, even going so far as to suggest that there must have been Jewish blood in his own lineage. To an extent, however, Miller’s anti-Semitism needs to be seen in a larger cultural context. What now might be regarded as bigotry and unacceptable ethnic slurring was then a common and historic fact of American life, and if it was not present at the very outset of the American experiment, this was only because immigration from places other than the British Isles was not yet the huge phenomenon it was to become. “Mick,” “kraut,” “dago,” “polack,” “chink,” and so on were casually employed by adults and their children. “Nigger” and “kike” were used as well, but these latter terms, while they continued to be common at the street level, gradually dropped from acceptable usage. 11 Miller continued to use “nigger” in his work at least until World War II, apparently regarding the term as no more offensive than “fuck” and “cunt.” Compared to his published remarks about Jews, however, “nigger” seems almost offhand, and the boy who felt out of place in his old neighborhood grew up to write an early novel, Moloch, or, This Gentile World, in large part to ruminate on what was for him the insidious mystery ofJewishness.
    The high school in the old neighborhood was probably no better academically than the one Schnellock and theothers attended in Bushwick. Miller most keenly felt the lack of cultural context in the presentation of subject matter: facts and events were taught rather as if they were Platonic absolutes instead of living, interrelated aspects of the human story. Still, he had his own private curriculum, anchored in a complete set of the Harvard Classics his parents had given him, and he supplemented this with an enthusiastic engagement with the popular entertainments of his time and place: six-day bicycle races; wrestling and boxing matches; and the theater, especially burlesque, which he fell hard for with his first exposure to it around the age of fifteen.
    Though the origins of the form lie in Old World folk performances and folk-based forms like commedia dell’arte that made fun of class distinctions, burlesque in America achieved unprecedented popularity, especially in New York in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The reasons for this lie mainly in the character of the country, for burlesque as it evolved in America played to deeply ingrained predilections. It was crude and violent in its “dramaturgy.” It shamelessly catered to the endemic bigotry of the national culture. It savagely mocked high art, particularly music and literature.