Frederick W. Turner

Jazz and the 1920s are subjects I love, so I was happy to come across this book. It had lots of wonderful reviews, too, so I jumped right into it. But it took quite a while for me to feel the story; it’s a fictionalized biography of jazz coronetist Bix Beiderbecke but in the beginning it focuses just as much on the gang activity in Chicago, largely as experienced by Henry Wise (not his original name), former mechanic and driver for Al Capone, and his sister Helen/Hellie/Lulu, who is the girlfriend of Machine Gun Jack McGurn (the Wise siblings are fictional). In fact, the book starts in modern days, at the annual celebration of Beiderbecke, the Bix Fest, with Wise reminiscing at Bix’s grave. As Wise remembers, Bix moves from peripheral character to main, then the narrative viewpoint leaves Wise behind completely and becomes all Bix- but never from Bix’s actual point of view. He always remains viewed from the outside; we never get to see more than he shares with other people. And he shared very, very little. The people around him can never figure him out, can never make a real connection with him. He’s a (mostly) gentle person, and quiet a lot of the time, but he has a totally flat affect. Despite my respect for his work, I had trouble caring about him as a character in this book. But it’s not just him; the other characters don’t fare much better. We get celebrities- Bing Crosby, Clara Bow, Maurice Ravel (I never knew he liked jazz), bandleader Paul Whiteman, Louis Armstrong and others- but only Clara comes to life at all.

Bix was a mainly self-taught player; he couldn’t read music very well but had an incredible ear. Along with horn, he played piano. Sadly, he was an alcoholic and during Prohibition what was sold wasn’t always safe to drink. He was known to drink some stuff (alcohol with a poisonous denaturant) that ended up killing thousands of people, and it was likely that which caused his short life as much as drinking regular booze. He was only 28 when he died, having been sent to ‘dry out’ a few times by his family but always going back to booze when he got out. He was sad example of ‘live fast, die young’ and the world lost a great talent when he died.

The prose is fast paced and jerky; it barely stops for a breath. It’s like the words are doing the Charleston. While I get that this was to make the reader feel like they were in that fast paced decade, it got tiring to read. There is no real plot; it’s a telling of “and then so and so did this; then that”. I can understand why; a person’s life rarely has a plot like fiction does. I have conflicting feelings about this book; I didn’t really enjoy reading it (and thought at times of not finishing it) but I don’t feel it was a waste of time. I’m not sure if it’s the book or if I’m missing something.… (more)

When I first discovered Henry Miller for myself in the early 1990s, I was mildly frustrated by the small number of academic works to be found on the author’s books, and on Tropic of Cancer in particular. Naturally, it seemed that Miller was straightforward enough with his intentions in his own novels and essays, but I was confused as to the literary establishment’s seemingly mute response to the American “renegade”. One of my first reactions upon confronting, at age 18, the pure vitality and anti-establishment fearlessness of Tropic of Cancer was: how come nobody ever told me about this guy?

It turned out that Miller was not the secret to the world that he had been to me, yet I still found it hard to locate good academic material about Miller’s book. And frequently when I did I was disappointed; oftentimes I found his biographers simply tweaking or reviewing what Miller himself had already written, and I found the literary essayists approaching too carefully or too obsessively the problematic issues of misogyny, anti-Semitism, obscenity and anti-Americanism in Miller’s works, to the detriment of what I felt Miller really had to offer through his tone, his frustration, and his glorious, reality-confirming conclusions. If Frederick Turner’s Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer had been published in 1991, I would have found it a welcome vindication.

Renegade benefits from its refreshing lack of interest in making justifications or excuses for treating Miller as an American writer worthy of study, as Turner takes for granted that Miller has an important legacy in the pantheon of American writers and artists. After the framing first chapter, Turner undergoes an examination of the America that gave birth to Henry Miller. He traces the tensions of the New World and new country through both its writers (Crèvecoeur, Whitman, Twain) and its expressions (folklore, vulgarity, burlesque), arriving in early 20th century New York to explore the immediate context of Miller’s development. We then follow Miller through his rosy crucifixion days, his move to Paris, and his breakthrough in finally finding his artistic voice. Turner is confident and concise in guiding the reader through Miller’s development and has plenty to say about the artistic context of Tropic of Cancer.

One chapter near the end, “The Grounds of Great Offense”, particularly stands out as exactly what I was looking for when as a teenager I shook the libraries looking for commentary on Tropic. But overall, the entire book is a satisfying explanation of how Miller the artist and Tropic of Cancer came to be. Turner’s voice is objective, academic, and subtly humorous. Despite some of the range of his argument (concerning the relevance of early American folklore and the “liberal profanity” of continent-breaking trailblazers) the book is quite focused. I dare think it may be an interesting book even if one has never read Tropic of Cancer. I no longer read Miller much myself—I exhausted his oeuvre within a few years of encountering him—but reading Renegade was a good reminder of Miller’s most important achievement and the effect Tropic of Cancer has had on American literature—whether America wants to acknowledge it, or not.… (more)