THE BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
24 February 2010
The only book in my parent’s bookcase which was turned the wrong way round with the spine hidden was Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller (1891-1980). Their idea was, no doubt, one of caring parental censorship: they didn’t want the novel that led to the rewriting of US laws on pornography to fall into my thirteen-year-old hands (copies had to be illegally smuggled into the US till the 60’s and a publisher did ten years in jail). Given that my parents were liberal leftists and their bookshelf also included texts by Erica Jong, Aldous Huxley, Jean Paul Sartre and Vance Packard, I realised that the hidden book had to be something pretty radical. I stole it and hid it under my bed.
One might worry that I would have been corrupted by the book. Thankfully, at that point, I found it totally incoherent; the page long sentences unwinding like the ramblings of some drunken failed poet, wandering from meal to meal, drink to drink, from one sexual adventure to the next through the streets of Paris and Brooklyn. The surrealist stream of consciousness style, the impossible mixture of social commentary and autobiographical rantings did not provide me with the tools I required from so-called pornography. The behaviours described were no more extreme than those that happened weekly in my hippy household. I mentally filed it away under ‘pretentious modernist experiment.’
It took me twenty years to come back to Miller and when I found him again he was a life-saver. Ironically, as if fated, I found myself living within a mile of his old home in Brooklyn, wandering from drink to drink and bed to bed, dangerously close to total collapse. In many ways, I blamed my downfall on the permissive society that Miller had helped spawn through his influence on the beats then the hippies – a line that traced all the way to my dysfunctional family and our addictions.
Along with medication doctor prescribed that I cut out all destructive behaviours and sit quietly each day, taking stock. I needed the company of a book, any book. In a bookshop on Park Slope, Brooklyn, my eyes came to rest on a book, the title of which had worn away. When I picked it from the shelf it fell into three pieces. I bought it for 25c. Beneath a cherry tree in a garden in Park Slope, I started again to read Tropic of Cancer.
And what came across was not the graphic sex or the experimental prose, but the warm generous spirit of an author who’d made a total mess of his life and somehow from it created an even bigger mess of a book (that, somehow, saved him). Rambling, rambunctious, aimless, vain, flawed, with no overview or methodology, a diary of a living catastrophe, it was however had more heart and vulnerability than any book I have read since. Beneath my Brooklyn cherry blossoms I started quietly to write a diary like Miller had done, and I learned that even if you have no direction, writing can you the strength to go on, at least to the next line.
This extract is published in THE BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE, an anthology of stories from people all over Scotland about the books that have made an impact on their lives as part of a project run by the Scottish Book Trust. These include Alan Bissett, Brian Cox, Janice Galloway, AL Kennedy, Michael Rosen and Alexander McCall Smith.
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