Tropic of Cancer

Massachusetts has made some progress since the days when it banned Dreiser's An American Tragedy, but not much. This week, for example, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was banned with no fuss, no hysteria, no monkey-trial shenanigans. It was a reasonable hearing in which reasonable men argued their sides before a reasonable judge. Yet the decision revealed that this is still the commonwealth of the Yahoos, the Grundys and the Comstocks.

One could, of course, take the extreme position of the book's publishers, who argue the entire Massachusetts proceedings violated their constitutional rights. Certainly it does seem strange that the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech of speech where religion, economics, and philosophy are involved, but not where literature and sex are concerned. This is, however, a position that even the liberal-minded still find difficult to accept: public morals seem too important to leave to individual caprice.

Besides, the constitutional argument is really unnecessary. Even under the terms of the relevant statutes, Henry Miller's book is not obscene. A mind incapable of understanding the book, a mind that thinks of legs as "limbs" and bulls as "he-cows" might come to such an odd conclusion. Such a mind would simply react with shock or disgust to the vigorous language of the book.

Shock or disgust, however, is not the issue. Any legal test for obscenity hinges on whether the matter appeals to prurient interest--whether the total effect of the book would be to arouse sexual desire in the average reader (In the Roth decision, Justice Brennan explicitly stated that "the portrayal of sex ... is not itself sufficient reason" to declare a book obscene.)

Only a very peculiar person would be aroused by a reading of Tropic of Cancer. In a famous (and highly favorable) review of the book, George Orwell called Miller a "Whitman among the corpses," and the phrase nicely conveys the real flavor of the novel. Parts of its are very funny, but in general--especially in sexual passages--Tropic is commenting on the death of the flesh in modern urban society:

"In the center of town were the Cafes--huge, dreary halls where the somnolent merchants of Dijon gathered to play cards and listen to the music.... On a winter's night, in a dirty hole like Dijon, nothing can be more harassing, more nerve-wracking than the sound of a French orchestra. Particularly one of those lugubrious female orchestras with everything coming in squeaks and farts, with a dry algebraic rhythm and the hygienic consistency of toothpaste."

If it were allowed to quote from the book's "obscene" passages, one could easily prove that such mechanical, brutally graphic scenes could never arouse anything except disgust in the average reader. That, most often, is the effect that Miller intends--disgust and hatred of the whole apparatus of modern civilization. This may make him silly--in the sense that Rousseau was silly--but not obscene.

The reactions of the Attorney General and Judge Goldberg to Tropic show that they do not understand a book which they have banned. Shocked by Miller's words, they have not penetrated to Miller's meaning. At the trial, witnesses like Harry Levin tried to explain this; but in vain. And it seems certain that Levin's final statement was also in vain: "As a citizen of the Commonwealth, I would be ashamed to be denied the right to read a book talked about by the rest of the world."

The Commonwealth has once again proved an old judicial rule of thumb: in battles between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines always win.