In 1940 George Orwell (see Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 77) reviewed more than one hundred books, so where he found the time to write essays of the caliber of the three collected in Inside the Whale and Other Essays—“Charles Dickens,” “Boys’ Weeklies,” and the title essay—is anyone’s guess. The first two are each in their own way meditations on Englishness, which would have been the attraction for Bowie, always a keen student of the subject. But the one that got him excited would have been “Inside the Whale,” a shrewd analysis of Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer, about low-living bohemian expats in interwar Paris.
Orwell is intrigued by a particular paradox. The obscene, debauched subject matter of Miller’s then banned novel ought to alienate morally upstanding readers. But somehow it doesn’t because Miller’s talent is to put you right down there among characters who are utterly familiar, to the point where you feel that what has happened to them could happen to you—when you have never in your life been slumped on a Montparnasse pavement in a pool of your own vomit after being kicked out of a brothel.
Politically, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four had little time for Miller. When the pair met briefly in Paris in 1936—Orwell was on his way to fight in the Spanish Civil War—Miller gave Orwell his corduroy jacket as a token of goodwill but told him he was an idiot for thinking anything he did could halt Fascism. Even so, Orwell thinks Tropic of Cancer is a book everyone should read because its honorable squalidness reflects Miller’s belief that if civilization collapses, as Orwell thinks it will during the coming Second World War, it doesn’t really matter. In doing this it points the way forward for literature in the second half of the twentieth century, especially (though Orwell obviously could not have foreseen this) the rawness and immediacy of the Beats.
Miller resembles the biblical Jonah in the sense that he has insulated himself in a dark, comfy space, where he remains passively indifferent to the grand historical sweep of whatever is happening beyond its blubbery walls. But this attitude actually brings him closer to ordinary people, because they are themselves mostly passive. Orwell loves Tropic of Cancer for its relentless focus on ordinary, everyday experiences and physical activities—vomiting, shitting, fucking. Its honesty makes for a strong empathetic bond between author and reader. Read Miller for five or ten pages, says Orwell, and you experience a kind of relief, one that comes “not so much from understanding as from being understood.” You feel as if Miller knows all about you and is writing for you and you alone.
What Orwell gets, and expects us to get, from Miller’s nonjudgmental acceptance of life in all its shades of sorrow and degradation is what middle-class college graduate Lou Reed got from reading Hubert Selby Jr. (see p. 188) and what, further down the line, Bowie got from listening to Reed songs like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” written under Selby’s influence. Miller might offend some people, but in the end (to borrow Orwell’s formulation), what people do feel is as important as what they ought to feel.