Nothing Happening Here
In 2019, all the creative people I knew in Portland had given up painting or writing. A new business culture had spread through the city, and artists weren't respected anymore, unless they made money from their art. It's true these artists had to go to work to pay the new rents, which had doubled or tripled. But that's only part of the story. I believe the main reason they gave up the arts was that it was hard to keep working when everyone around you thought your life was a joke.
But it's always possible to keep writing. We all used to talk about Faulkner, who wrote As I Lay Dying while shoveling coal twelve hours a day. You simply find the time. You have to.
Now I felt ill that so many friends had given up writing. Some of them already had money jobs and others served pizza, but they all ceased creative production. Despite a few arts organizations still in business, the arts seemed to have lost its value among the people I met all over the city. I doubted Elliott Smith would have stuck around if he'd lived to see the new Portland.
Portland had always been a bulwark that insisted on the value of the creative life. In 2015, I met writers, painters, and musicians every day, in bars and cafes. I'd lived in Portland at other times before then, too, even in the 90s, and never realized how good it was.
The new Portland felt like Los Angeles County, with Super Duty trucks tearing up the little streets downtown, and everyone you met talked about money or work. One guy I met at a bar told me about his new "system" at work, and some tricks he had for learning the system. We had a long discussion about it. I had similar conversations with people at this time, about resumes, retirement funds, second home purchases, and inheritances. There was a good way to be rich or hope to be rich. But Portland hadn't found it.
One interesting wealthy person I met that year was an entrepreneur in his 30s. We met at Bar Momo in downtown Portland. A resident of Atlanta, he was leaving the next day for Paris to visit Pere Lachaise cemetery alone. He took trips around the world for specific and personal reasons. We didn't discuss his job at all. He was creative in the life he led, and he was interested in "people who had their own thing going." I had waited a long time before I ran into this compelling individual. When the bar closed we said our goodbyes.
I returned to Bar Momo the next night to discuss the money people had or would have. Most of the time, I was bored and lonely. I quit going out.
Portland remains one of the most gorgeous cities. But the old bridges and buildings seem to be waiting for better days.
The arts, though, always come back around eventually. Art is too good for the heart and mind to leave buried for long. Intelligent people grow sick without it. We have had artistic resurgences before, and we'll have them again.
In a culture without high-quality artistic expression, people suffer an evaporation of the interior. It's often a new generation that notices the terrible consequences of living lives that have nothing to do with who they are and how they feel, and they want to sing about it or write about it.
We shouldn't need a creative city or nation to coax us to do our work, but it's a lot more fun with other believers around.
Tropic of Cancer
Miller was a bohemian writer who intended to send shock waves through the English-speaking world. That might explain why his language is derogatory toward women and many others he encounters. It seems he's actually trying to alienate. At one point he laughs at the death of a colleague. Another time, he's horrified by the thought of a baby squirming in a woman's belly.
But he's up to something in his book that isn't readily apparent. He presents a Henry Miller who is far worse than the actual man. In life, for instance, he had a thousand friends, men and women. Once, when he was hungry and poor, he asked several friends if he could eat at their houses once a week. They all agreed. But he never would have received such hospitality if he treated men and women like that.
While writing the book at forty, he wanted to "get it out, spill it on them, saying shit, fuck," and all the rest of it. He included feelings and attitudes that most other writers left out of their books, and challenged the niceties and capitulations that many readers and publishers expected. Therefore he invented a Henry Miller who was built to shock.
His hero Rimbaud encouraged authors to take up a "scummy" appearance and attitude to fight the antiseptic falseness of middle-class morality. Celine, another influence, told the truth in a thousand forbidden ways. Miller writes with these authors at his back.
Baudelaire, Gide, and Genet were also part of this literary school of social combat. This describes part of their work, at any rate. They went out of their way to challenge norms, creating rebellious and sometimes low-life protagonists to strike blows against pious gatekeepers. Genet's glorified young gay criminals and prostitutes were indeed shocking, though he was beloved by literary authors.
For the most part, the French understand that exploration of taboo subjects and "crude" protagonists was part of their method and forgive them, or love them all the more.
Many American readers, on the other hand, who often fail to see the French influences in "Tropic," encounter a book that is inexplicably upsetting, as if it's a document without a context, history, or literary milieu.
Everyone knows that Henry Miller was American, but few know that his books are culturally French. That said, he can't escape his American side that pops up here and there.
Past the rude surface, the book is more inspiring and life-affirming than one might expect. On its first page, the protagonist states, “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” One finds similar Whitmanesque pronouncements throughout.
Tropic of Cancer is, in part, an experiment in contradictions, stuffing the pages full of all that is terrible and good about this fictional Henry Miller. He plays a role in the book--the vagabond artist, the womanizer, the streetwise cynic. But here and there in these chapters we find a gentler man, and he was vastly more gentle in life.
Anais Nin recorded the great respect he paid to their friendship over years in her journals. Also, she loved "Tropic."
"Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes . . . In a world grown paralyzed with introspection and constipated by delicate mental meals this brutal exposure of the substantial body comes as a vitalizing current of blood."
Henry Miller was a lifelong iconoclast--he wasn't making it up for his books. But twenty years ago, I believed he was a creep who tried too hard to be bohemian. After watching a few of his interviews, I got a sense of this kind and curious writer who was so beloved by those who knew him. After that, I read him in a different light.
Those Who Do It Anyway
I had trouble hearing my early teachers--their voices produced mysterious sounds that were beyond my understanding. In my early teens, I stood before a judge twice for petty crimes. I knew many other peaceful kids who liked adventuring. At sixteen, I quit high school and told my mom I wanted to buy a VW bus and drive to Europe. She wished me luck.
Soon I left Oregon and lived in Boston for a year, rooming with an accomplished twenty-year-old painter who had been homeless. That year was a great education for a young wanderer. I read Naked Lunch, On the Road, The Great Gatsby, Queer, Junkie, A Room of One's Own, The Ghostly Lover, A Clergyman's Daughter, and A Farewell to Arms.
Back home, I attended community college, and the university I went to the next year didn't require English majors to take math--the best luck.
Later, I failed the GREs, but the Iowa Writers Workshop was kind enough to overlook that fact. The most selective graduate program in the U.S., Iowa was a dropout's playground. Students weren't required to attend classes except for workshop once a week, and teachers didn't give grades. I wrote all the time, at least six hours a day. I annotated books on my own reading list, and casually read the books for the nonrequired lectures. As part of my financial aid, I taught creative writing classes to freshmen, and preached about craft and the lazy, hard-working lifestyle of writers.
It was wonderful to learn so feverishly in a loosely structured environment. Most people aren't stirred to ferocious work habits when they're told they can make their own schedules and they won't be graded. Maybe it's only writers and artists who do it anyway.
