Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" Read Online Free PDF Page B

fiction’s first major character, is an oblique and somewhat sanitized reference to America’s dark and violent past. But very little else of this folk-based material entered the national literature’s mainstream until the career of Mark Twain, and none of it in all its hairy violence, its cruel humor, its profanity, sexuality, casual bigotry, and xenophobic contempt for anything foreign or smacking of culture (often enough regarded as synonymous). As for language, the American vernacular was confined to levels far beneath polite letters. It appeared in minstrel shows, in newspaper sketches, and in almanacs that mingled jokes and regional speech oddities with crop forecasts and reports of three-headed calves. It appeared also in burlesque, which achieved enormouspopularity after the Civil War, especially in New York City. But even in burlesque, with its bawdiness and disdain for just about everything, the full dimensions of the vernacular were hardly more than hinted at, as if in the broad innuendo, the double entendre, the smutty stage whisper audiences were being invited to understand and participate in an otherwise forbidden code. Beyond this there was nothing to indicate the liberal profanity, the crude sexuality that must certainly have been there in the stories swapped about Mike Fink, Annie Christmas, Big Harpe, even Crockett, whose comic antics and speech would originally have been strong stuff indeed at the oral level.
    In his famous Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1837, “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson had boldly called for a literature that would reach down to the real roots of the American experiment and speak in a radically native way. “Give me,” he said,
    the insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat… .
    But what could the Concord sage have known of the news of the boat when that boat was a keelboat or a broadhorn docking at the noisome slum of Natchez-under-the-Hillor New Orleans where some eighty years later a precocious Jelly Roll Morton was learning the street songs that would ultimately scorch the stately decor of the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Chamber Music Auditorium when he recorded them for Alan Lomax? Henry Miller would have loved this stuff. Emerson would have been appalled. Nor could he have imagined the existence of unlettered artists of profanity who could reduce their audiences to stunned silence with their long, rolling braids of oaths and epithets—rude oral-formulaics such as those that made possible the Homeric epics. Emerson was perhaps our most original thinker, and at great effort he had struggled out of the heavy cloak of his ancestral Puritanism to encourage American writers and artists to create art out of the experiences of a new world instead of pining for those of an old one. He had, however, a thin opinion of fiction (including that of his neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne) and thought that eventually “these novels” would give way to truer and more serious stuff. And he actually never learned much about the life of the street or the waterfront and even less about what went on where the ragged edges of civilization met the great woods—certainly far less than Crèvecoeur. Lecturing in Beloit, Wisconsin, in the winter of 1856 where it was twenty below, he confided to his journal that he knew well enough that his rough audience in their thawing coats and boots could accept his wisdomonly if it came in comic dress. But he couldn’t give them that. Wit he had, though he employed it sparingly. But not that comic spirit that kept company with violence to make up the American Grotesque.
    Emerson saw more of the country than Henry Tho-reau did, though almost always surrounded by Bostonian acolytes who did their best to shield him from certain incivilities. But on the wild shores of Cape Cod and in