47 pages • 1 hour read
Henry MillerTropic of Cancer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Henry receives a confusing letter from Boris, whom he has not seen for months. He describes Boris’s strange relationship with their mutual friend Cronstadt: the two men seem to communicate telepathically and “[speak] a sort of higher mathematics” (168). He wonders why so many of his friends are neurodivergent or Jewish and whether he attracts certain personality types. He has also recently reconnected with Tania, who tries to convince him and Carl to go to Crimea with her.
Henry passes a happy, drunken summer with Tania but eventually receives a note from his boss implying that he needs to clean up his act. Afraid of losing his job, Henry becomes increasingly neurotic about how he communicates and constantly shares niche, irrelevant facts in everyday conversations. He thinks of Mona as he walks around the city, remembering specific places they had gone together and imagining that Paris itself has become saturated with the thoughts and feelings he has about his marriage. He thinks in particular of August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright, whom Mona loved and who had also lived in Paris. In an extended meditation, he determines that poets and artists are drawn to Paris because “[here] all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is” (182). He accepts, albeit sadly, that Mona will stay in America and they will remain apart.
Chapter 10 Summary
Henry is suddenly laid off from his newspaper job and begins doing freelance writing. To make extra money, he poses nude for a photographer, whom he then befriends. They explore the city together and the photographer introduces Henry to a “spiritual-minded” (190) sculptor and painter named Kruger. Henry finds him pretentious, tiring, and untalented, but having nowhere else to go, begins living in Kruger’s studio. Through Kruger, he meets an Irish painter named Mark Swift. Swift lives with his mistress, a Jewish artist to whom he is particularly cruel. Through Kruger and Swift, Henry befriends two Americans: Fillmore, a wealthy young man in the diplomatic service, and Collins, a sailor. The men eat and drink well and spend their days discussing literature and art. However, the rich diet catches up to Henry, who becomes ill on the same day Kruger is giving an exhibition at his studio. Worried that Henry will die in front of potential patrons, Kruger has Fillmore and Collins remove him. To keep Henry’s spirits up, Collins tells him a story about sailing down the Yangtze River in China, which causes Henry to remember shooting off fireworks for the first time in an Independence Day celebration.
Weeks later, Henry and Fillmore visit Collins in the port city of Le Havre. The men spend the bulk of their time at an establishment called Jimmie’s Bar, drinking and mingling with locals and sex workers. In particular, Henry gets to know Jimmie and his wife Yvette, who own the bar, as well as a sex worker named Marcelle. Collins talks about a young man he has fallen in love with, and Fillmore realizes he has gonorrhea. Over the next two days, the environment at the bar becomes increasingly raucous, ending in a brawl. Henry and Fillmore decide to return to Paris. The three men talk about America with great sentimentality and disagree on whether they will ever go back.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
These chapters include the return of several characters who had disappeared from the narrative: Boris, Tania, and Mona (the latter only in flashbacks). This sense of resurrection or rebirth echoes the novel’s interest in cycles and patterns. Moreover, Boris says quite openly in his letter that he had actually died and was currently dead, an assertion that further blurs the boundaries between life and death and raises the question of what it actually means to be either alive or dead. Given Henry’s increasing devotion to eschatological vitalism as a personal belief system, it is fitting that he is untroubled by Boris’s claim and the philosophical issues it brings to the fore.
The joy Henry initially feels at Tania’s return is interrupted by a series of unbidden, powerful memories of times he spent in the city with Mona. Many of these memories are directly related to writers associated with Paris, (particularly Strindberg), and Mona herself apparently saw Henry as part of that literary tradition. Notably, he recalls an occasion in which Mona asked him to show her the Paris he had written about, a task he realizes is impossible: this Paris has never actually existed and is only a sequence of emotional experiences, largely painful ones. Similarly, in the narrative present, Mona now exists only in the form of psychological torment from which Henry can get no relief. The city is thus becoming for him a layered series of literary texts and romantic memories, and Paris as a physical landscape becomes more and more difficult for him to grasp.
Given his changing relationship with Paris, it perhaps makes sense that Henry leaves the city for the first time in the novel to visit Le Havre with Fillmore and Collins. However, the port city seems like a miniature version of Paris, and the men do essentially the same things there that they would do anywhere else: drink, visit sex workers, and get into minor forms of trouble. While in Le Havre, Collins is revealed to be in love with a man, although whether he is gay or bisexual is never addressed. This is the first openly queer male character in Tropic of Cancer; at several points, Henry briefly mentions lesbians he has met, but they do not play a significant role in the narrative. Henry and Fillmore have virtually no reaction to Collins’s disclosure, which suggests not necessarily that they actively accept the idea of queer masculinity, but rather that they refuse to pass judgment about another man’s sexual choices.
In yet another narrative “circle,” Fillmore and Henry’s return to Paris feels inevitable, particularly after the barroom brawl at Jimmie’s. However, the end of Chapter 10 is marked by a more complicated “return” when the three men—all Americans—talk in highly sentimental terms about America. They wax poetic about the “big open spaces where men are men,” (207) a phrase that stands in stark contrast with Henry’s many descriptions of Paris’s dense crowds, packed dance halls, and cramped apartments. However, the novel’s ambivalence about America continues when Henry declares that it is better to keep the country as a memory. Unlike Paris, which provides memories of nightmarish emotional devastation, America can still offer a lighter, more positive sensation of nostalgia.
In addition to Fillmore and Collins, these chapters introduce Kruger and Swift, and the novel uses them as a new conduit for its critique of artists and the art world. They are both depicted as vain, selfish, and cruel; moreover, they are only able to produce mediocre work at best. Swift’s relationship with his mistress and muse is similar to many of the novel’s other toxic heterosexual relationships, but in this one, much of the toxicity is derived from the fact that the unnamed mistress is a more talented artist than Swift. What is especially notable about this couple within the broader context of the novel is that Henry is openly sympathetic towards the mistress, emphasizing that she had done nothing to deserve such abuse at Swift’s hands. This is the first significant instance in the narrative that a mistreated woman is depicted as blameless.
