Henry Miller is one dirty cunt. I’ve never read Marquis de Sade but I imagined that Miller to be a modern day Sade, blending all the taboos he can think about (and I can think about) into one novel. Miller is no stranger to being a banned author. Tropic of Cancer was banned in the author’s country of birth until 1961, almost thirty years after it made headways in Paris via the famous publisher Obelisk Press in 1934, where modern day Shakespeare and Co. Bookshop is now.
This is the reason I bought the book in the first place, on an obligatory purchase and visit to the well-renowned bookshop. It took me at least a couple of hours to decide which book to buy from the place. In all honesty, much of the book available on the shelves of Shakespeare and Co. are available in other bookshops and for cheaper. But I’m a bit pretentious at the best of times, so I needed to pick out a book. Henry Miller, who created a career in Paris and owed the city his success was a logical choice. I have not read Miller’s erotica, so why not eh.
When Miller wrote Under the Roofs of Paris (formerly known as Opus Pistorum), he was broke, hungry and would write a dollar a page for this kind of smut. Paris was known for its erotica back in the early twentieth century, its explicit postcards (which also feature prominently in the book) and smut writing was of no place to the conservative American mind at the time. But this sexual liberation was perhaps representative of Paris at the epoch, and it took an American to crystalise that epitome of recklessness.
In the introduction to Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin spoke about Miller’s venture in writing erotica, that the collector wanted more, that the writers started to exhaust their personal stories and had to look elsewheres. I wonder if Milton Luboviski who commissioned Henry Miller for this was the same collector which demanded Miller to write with less poetry in his smut.
Perhaps not. Because I don’t find much poetry in the book. What we read is explicit sex, sometimes performed by individuals who shouldn’t be having sex. Some of the age is explicit, and the protagonist, Alf, had also indulged in engaging with these minors. I do feel sick at the thought of it and it makes me wonder whether Henry Miller had the same experiences. It would certainly adjust my respect for him as a person.
In the book, our protagonist Alf took part in bukkake-like orgies, a threesome with a midget (which also involves a German shepherd with a generous phallus which I guess makes it a foursome), threesomes with Lesbians, shooting porn, and let’s not talk about his involvement with underaged girls. All these leisurely activities are implemented in an extensive possible combinations of holes, body parts and bodily fluids. This list obviously, is far from exhaustive. Miller writes from experience, and whether some of these had happened to him or his acquaintances, I don’t really know nor do I really want to care.
Yes, I can find traces of Tropic of Cancer here with its crude and detailed description of sex, which makes me doubt if I am adventurous myself in that way. Alf’s organ, John Thursday, is akin to another character that literally always rear its ugly head at the worst (or best) of times. It’s like Alf has a constant walking erection. Alf and John Jeudi seem like different characters, but forever interlinked to one another and dependent on each other’s existence. Come to think of it, all men and their wangs are like that.
After the first hundred pages, the book loses its novelty, which also made me wonder if I had grown up too much to read Henry Miller. In Malay terms, we can say it’s “jelak” which means feeling eugh after having too much of something, usually after you’re halfway through that bowl of Peter’s pork noodles and you regretted getting a large portion instead of small. But comparing Miller’s writing to a bowl of hawker pork noodles is probably not the best idea.
In fact, if I can compare the reading experience with another book, it’d be Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, where the violence felt too much after a while, too caricaturish, far an adaptation of what we know violence to be. The sex in Under the Roofs of Paris is of a similar nature. Never once do I feel the reality of it, however visceral or extreme the nature of it might be.
Now for the million dollar question: as an erotica, did it turn me on? Based on what I mentioned above, no. But there are bits of it that made me raise my eyebrows, and more often than not, bits of it where I’m just shaking my head and saying yeah nah in my head, impatient for the next scene to unravel. I’ve read the book in my commute home in trains and over coffee, but thankful and hopeful that nobody is peering over my shoulder and basking over the gratuitous language.
On a side note, there was also the matter of Billie and Jean, the former more of a lesbian than the latter. Did Michael Jackson steal his most famous song from the characters of Miller’s work? No matter, if it was coincidental, then more power to Henry Miller. Another vignette: the book’s original title, Opus Pistorum literally translates to the work of the miller. Clever cunt, that Henry guy.
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On another P.S.S. read this stupendous essay on Henry Miller by Victoria Best, if you really want to dig deep into Henry Miller’s life and his past traumas.
