Photo: Vulture Novelist and short-story writer Mary Gaitskill, author of, most recently, This Is Pleasure, selects a passage from Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer. Although Miller’s work is famously “dick-centric,” the passage that stuck with Gaitskill all these years later was about a prostitute named Germaine who spoke of her vagina with great admiration as an object “she prized above everything in the world.
I immediately went out to find some Henry Miller to see just how bad he might be. But when I finally read Tropic of Cancer, the context made it very different. It was clear to me that he was writing about his experience of the world, and the world he was in was very rough. People were starving. Everybody was in a raw, desperate state, unless they were somebody with money, in which case, everyone wanted to prey on that person and get as much as they could out of them.
Most of what I remember of Miller’s writing is incredibly dick-centric. This is one of the few passages I remember where he’s praising someone’s vagina. And the portrait of her is just so vivid. I remember her having gold teeth and trotting around in the street, aggressively looking for customers and throwing back a drink. There’s a feeling of her as a person, but also that she has acquired this at great cost — she’s obtained this love for herself and ability to have great pleasure with effort.
I believe that in art, the things you wouldn’t want in real life can be entertained or understood, or even seen and examined. When I read Miller, part of what was exciting to me was that these men he wrote about just didn’t seem to give a fuck — and in some ways, the women didn’t either. Even though, certainly in real life, I’d want a man that I was with to give a fuck, to care about me, it was exciting to read about a world where maybe, sometimes, you wouldn’t want that at all.
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