The Mental Flip Responsible for Henry Miller's Success After a Decade of Failure

Irreverence created "Tropic of Cancer"

In Tropic of Capricorn Henry Miller describes the process of writing his first novel at-length. For three years he’d been firing messenger boys at random and promising jobs to women he wanted to fuck—what he called “working”—without an extended period of repose. He deserved a vacation, badly, yet when he finally took one it turned out to be more manic than restful. For three weeks straight Miller wrote five thousand words per day. For context, that is more than twice what Stephen King used to produce whilst fueled by his white heavenly powder, and ten times what Hemingway penned before setting out for the whiskey bar.

By the end of the period—once Miller had pushed his eyes back into their sockets—he bandaged his bleeding fingers and regarded his literary cherry, now popped. With great pride he solicited feedback on his masterpiece:

I suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written… Everybody I showed it to said it was terrible. I was urged to give up the idea of writing.

Two years later, at the age of thirty-two, after everyone who read his work had said to him, “Holy shit—that’s what you’re thinking when you’re talking to me?” he quit his job. He’d decided to devote himself completely to art.

The first novel he wrote during this period went unpublished until after his death. Judged by the name (Moloch: or, This Gentile World) or the circumstances (his wife’s rich admirer thought he was paying her to write it) or the absolute absence of interest from anyone, the book must’ve read like it came from Captain Bull Goose Looney.

His next attempt—Lovely Lesbians, Crazy Cock—told the true story of his triad relationship with June and Jean before the girls left him to go to Paris alone. Posthumously published, it was also entirely unsuccessful.

In 1930—encouraged by the tremendous failure of these six years—Miller rode a big steamer over from New York to Paris to continue his pursuit. There was coal involved, lots of fedoras and trench coats. Musicians played jazz music at night by the bar. Women smoked skinny cigarettes indoors. Men made vulgar jokes at their expense; then groped them. It was a great time to be alive except for the smiles, which revealed yellow or brown teeth and sent a shudder down your spine. Still the whole thing was, as American chicks say, “so Great Depression.” Miller was, as American chicks need to stop saying, “in his 1930s era.”

Divorced once officially, but twice essentially, he moved alone to the squalid neighborhood that he called the Villa Borghese. Arriving when most of the other American writers were on their way out, the friend group he cultivated was closer to the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than those who frequented Gertrude Stein’s salon. None ever had more than a few evanescent francs to their name, money they most often spent on the gratification of kinks.

In this milieu Miller wrote diligently for another four years. One decade after he’d started writing seriously, he completed Tropic of Cancer.

Soon after there was a global uproar. Nations from the US to Canada to the UK to Australia to Finland banned the book. Some of the greatest authors of human history (i.e. Eliot, Durrell, etc) praised Miller to no end. Over the course of a couple of years, he went from a poor forty year-old ranter and raver to, as Orwell put it, “the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.”

How?

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Let’s start by acknowledging the rule Malcolm Gladwell became famous for: Writing assiduously for ten years—even if the work is met without success—has salutary effects on a writer. During Miller’s ice age he made a rigorous study of great novels. He experimented with voice and story structure. It was an epoch of back-breaking work and vigilant training. Without the effort he put in then, he never could have never reached the heights of prose or the originality of narrative one finds in Tropic of Cancer.

Over a decade Miller built a colossal mountain of dynamite. But on the first few attempts to blow it all up, the detonator went bust. The fire wouldn’t nibble its way down the fuse. For him to take advantage of his hard-earned skill, something needed to flip. Right before he wrote Cancer, he spelled out to a friend what that was:

I start tomorrow on the Paris book: First person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!

This change in attitude, and the following success, is a pattern amongst innovative artists. William Faulkner’s first two novels were pastiches that sometimes stole exact phrases from contemporary influences like Anderson, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. After realizing minor success from them and an outright rejection of his third, Faulkner said:

One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher's addresses and book lists. I said to myself, ‘Now I can write.’

The result was The Sound and the Fury, a terrifically original work still lauded as one of the finest novels in history.

In music, Eminem went through the same stages. For years he slaved over rhyme schemes without recognition; in 1996 he launched a highly derivative music album, Infinite, which was more of an ode to rappers like Nas than a display of the lyrical elements he’s now known for. He was twenty-five years-old when he said fuck everything and created what would become a world-famous alter ego:

Tapping into his reservoir of rage and resentment, Eminem created Slim Shady, a drug-dealing, bloodthirsty thug who spits furious rhymes about murder, rape, drugs and living by the law of the urban jungle.

Fields says he was shocked by his old friend's new persona. So was another Detroit rapper, Buddha Fulla Rhymes, he says. “Buddha asked [Eminem], ‘Why do you rap about doing heroin and smokin’ crack? This isn't you.’ Marsh said, ‘Look, I've been doing this for 10 years. I'm not making any money. I'm making pizzas.’

Like Eminem and Faulkner, Miller needed to lose all hope to create a novel from the future. If the market had credited his earlier attempts, he never would have gone beyond the mediocre. But the world was uninterested in the insipid watered-down version of him, and he became the writer that only he could be. It’s all there, right on the first page of Tropic of Cancer:

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse....

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