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Pages 135-149
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tropic of Cancer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Literature and Artistic Freedom
The United States vs. Europe
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition
Summary
Analysis
Unexpectedly, Henry gets laid off from the newspaper thanks to the executives’ greedy cost-cutting measures. His financial straits are suddenly dire; Tania can’t do much to help him, and their affair dissolves. He scrounges around for odd jobs, writing pseudonymously in newspapers and promotional material for brothels. He ghostwrites a psychologist’s thesis about crippled children, and he poses for a pornographic photographer with arcane historical interests.
Henry is back to square one. Before his newspaper job, however, being unemployed was not a major threat to his livelihood. The fact that he now needs to seek out all kinds of odd and degrading jobs indicates both the bridges he has personally burned with former freeloading targets as well as the dissipation of his broader social scene and tightening financial straits nationally and internationally.
Themes
Through the photographer, Henry meets Kruger, an artist with esoteric spiritual interests. Kruger feeds Henry generously and lets him sleep on his couch. He meets another painter, Mark Swift, who has exhausted his mistress’s fortune and now humiliates her in his caustic art. Through Swift he meets Fillmore, a young American in the diplomatic service with literary interests and money to spend.
The speed with which Henry makes new friends indicates his general likability, as well as the continued vitality of Paris’s cultural scene despite his own friend group’s fragmentation and broader economic hardships.
Themes
Soon, Fillmore’s sailor friend Collins arrives in Paris, and they and Henry form a tight-knit drinking crew. Henry grows very ill one day, forcing Kruger to kick him out, since he’s exhibiting his paintings the very same day and doesn’t want a potentially dying man on the couch. Collins and Fillmore retrieve Henry and nurse him back to health, as Collins regales him with sordid stories of his time in poverty-stricken China. In Henry’s feverish state, these stories merge with childhood memories of Fourth of July firecrackers.
Henry’s ability to make friends easily perhaps saves his life in this case. As with India earlier, China now exudes a grotesque allure for Henry in his fever dreams. His attraction to exotic foreign places could have been what drove him to France in the first place. Ironically, in his fever state, an imagined China merges with the patriotic American rituals of his childhood.
Themes
A few weeks later, Collins summons Fillmore and Henry by telegram to the port city of Le Havre. Henry and Fillmore head off in good spirits, drinking throughout the train ride. Collins joins them in equally good spirits, despite his case of gonorrhea, and they all drink heavily throughout the afternoon. They end up at Jimmie’s Bar, where food, drinks, and women are plentiful, and they feast into the night.
Henry’s luck in falling in with these Americans with family money becomes obvious here: just a few weeks before, he was doing embarrassing odd jobs, nearly dying of fever, and now he’s partying on someone else’s dime.
Themes
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Henry takes up with a girl named Marcelle, but Collins interrupts Henry’s plans to spend the night with her by insisting on showing them around the town. They end up at a brothel, where only Henry has the stamina to use the girl’s services. They then hit the town again. Henry describes sex as a tide sweeping over the whole town.
Henry perhaps takes some pride in the fact that his sexual prowess outstrips that of his much younger friends. The image of the tidal wave of sex evokes visions of biblical plagues, yet Henry seems enthralled.
Themes
They drink all weekend. Collins confides that he’s considering returning to Idaho to see the mountain again before his next enlistment for an eastern voyage. He also confides that he’s lovesick for a boy. Jimmie’s wife is enamored of Collins, and that night, she picks a fight with a woman she takes to be her rival. A barfight ensues, with the entire bar getting trashed and Collins brutally beating a Swedish sailor. Jimmie’s wife tries to throw herself off a cliff but is too drunk, and Jimmie beats her mercilessly. The next day, Henry, Fillmore, and Collins say a bittersweet farewell. Henry reflects vaguely that the other two came to bad ends and that the idea of America that had brought them together is an abstraction.
The episode with Jimmie and his wife seems intended to emphasize the craziness and cruelty ubiquitous in the novel’s world, in which virtually every character participates. Henry’s elegiac narrative reflection on the three men’s parting at the end of the weekend is a rare outright expression of sympathy for his friends and a lament for their misfortunes. He’s aware that their common American roots somehow made their friendship possible, but he thinks it’s better if that connection goes unexplored.
Themes
