5. Anecdote v. Image
Crazy Cock, Germaine, Mademoiselle Claude
Miller's use of anecdote to construct and defend a twentieth-century reality reduced to "spots of time" is followed easiest through one of the fragments cannibalized from his earlier work and "sandwiched" into the third, untitled "chapter" (pages 34 to 43) of Tropic of Cancer: the story of Germaine. Apart from the manner of its inclusion within Tropic of Cancer, this story is unremarkable. Germaine is a stock figure, the familiar "whore with the heart of gold" who knows her business and sticks to it. The narrator's encounter with her is equally predictable, cut from the same misogynous cloth: he falls in love, safely, for of course no man can truly love a whore. The cliched nature of this tale is borne out by its textual history. Germaine was imported to Tropic of Cancer from a generic "tourist" piece, "Mademoiselle Claude," one of several sketches of stereotypical Parisian figures Miller penned during his first year as an expatriate. Executed immediately after what turned out to be the last draft of the soon abandoned "Crazy Cock," "Mademoiselle Claude" proved marketable. First published in Samuel Putnam's New Review (1931), it was quickly anthologized in Peter Neagroe's Americans Abroad (1932).[20] But in the interval between the writing of "Mademoiselle Claude" and its appearance in print, Miller seized upon the narrative strategy of Tropic of Cancer, repudiating his previous efforts. Thus it was that upon hearing from Putnam that Covici of Covici-Friede had liked "Mademoiselle Claude" and would like to see "Crazy Cock" and similar pieces, Miller responded, "I think he's crazy."[21]
The distance Miller traveled in so short a time is evident, in part, in the reworked, more vital language with which he presents Germaine in Tropic of Cancer. But the conventions of the middle-class man's discovery of the generous whore remain essentially intact from the "original."[22] The full revolution in Miller's aesthetics and his purpose in cannibalizing this genre piece are appreciable in the manner in which the still-conventional tale is decentered within Tropic of Cancer's third "chapter." There it reappears transformed into an incident of a narrative drive apparently intent upon delivering a startling occurrence, but which, upon reaching it, dismantles any potential for revelation and moves on.
The Germaine "chapter" opens upon a note of hurried anticipation: "Sunday! Left the Villa Borghese a little before noon, just as Boris was getting ready to sit down to lunch."[23] Something, it seems, is going to happen. In expectation the reader is carried through the ensuing four pages of apparently random anecdotal observation and recollection as Miller walks the streets of Paris--"Prowling around aimlessly." By the end of four pages, Miller's talk has wandered so far and so aimlessly that he's quoting passages from a history of Paris, recently read. Nothing, it appears, is going to happen after all. But just then Miller baldly announces his arrival at the promised event, or, as it turns out, the recollected event: "It was a Sunday afternoon, much like this, when I first met Germaine. I was strolling long the Boulevard Beaumarchais, rich by a hundred francs or so which my wife had frantically cabled from America."[24] With this setup, what reader does not already know the story to come? But Miller launches into the well-worn tale convincingly enough, delivering as only he can an especially lurid description of a red-light district, its habitues and their practices. Still true to genre, he turns to describe Germaine against this backdrop, declaring, "Germaine was different. There was nothing to tell me so from her appearance."[25] It quickly develops, however, that Germaine is not very different, in appearance or otherwise. There is nothing new to tell. In consequence, the narrative grows restless caught within the confines of the tourist piece, of the story that has been told before. Miller signals as much when he begins again in a transparent effort at recovery, reaffirming his stereotype's uniqueness, but with strained conviction: "As I say, she was different, Germaine."[26] The recovery proves as false as the initial venture.
