Tropic of Cancer: Pages 135-149 Summary & Analysis

One day, a letter arrives from Boris, whom Henry has not seen for several months. The letter has no greeting and simply launches into a dark and riddling philosophical diatribe about his relationship with Henry and his own death. Henry can make no sense of it and simply finds it amusing, recalling Boris’s usual tendency to obscure and tormented philosophizing. Boris always treated Henry solely like an idea. Boris’s letter here makes no attempt to ask about how Henry’s doing, prompting Henry to wonder why he always attracts cranks and oddballs.

In reflecting on this question, Henry mentions that Tania has just returned from Russia; Sylvester stayed behind, fully committed to the communist project. Tania now wants Henry to run off with her to the Crimea, an idea that greatly excites Carl. The three of them talk about it while drinking heavily one afternoon and going on a cab ride around the city. Henry entertains the idea of going to Russia but secretly knows he wouldn’t leave Paris for anything.

Henry and Tania begin a steady affair, meeting up early every morning when he gets off his night shift and drinking in cafes and making love until he has to go back to work. Occasionally, he has to make himself vomit when he’s too drunk to proofread. His bosses become suspicious of him, as much for his apparent intellectualism as his drinking, and he starts trying to please them by acting dumber than he is, with only mixed success.

Vacillating between the drudgery of his office and his steamy love affair puts a strain on Henry’s mind. The words passing under his eyes when he proofreads become jumping-off points for wild mental fantasies as soon as he’s off work. The disconnect between his work and life outside of it makes him emotionally confused.

Henry reveals that Mona still crosses his mind from time to time, causing him sharp pain when something on the street prompts an unexpected memory. For seven years, he says, he could think only of her. Now that he’s mostly pushed her out of his mind, whenever he does think of her, it plunges him into an abyss. He agonizes over whether she’s forgotten the significant moments with her that he remembers so vividly. He realizes that Paris, for him, is defined by his loneliness and hunger for Mona.

Awash in these recollections, Henry suddenly recalls a day when he decided abruptly to visit the cell in the Pension Orfila where the writer Strindberg was kept during his madness. Mona loved Strindberg. As he reflects on Strindberg’s struggle with madness and the poet’s archetypal struggle to liberate himself, he feels he understands why so many great writers have come to Paris in the past. In Paris, all illusions dissolve and “the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is.” Henry walks the streets, seeming to show signs of a madness of his own, as visions flutter up before his eyes.

Henry recalls various partings from Mona in the past, always painful and mysterious, precipitated by some unspecified event. The grief still agonizes Henry in the present. He meditates darkly on graffiti about syphilis and cancer.