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Pages 168-176
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
Towards the end of summer, Fillmore invites Henry to come live with him in his studio. This initiates a relaxed period in Henry’s life, as Fillmore leaves him 10 francs a day and his only task is to work on his book, which he doesn’t feel pressed to do. Fillmore does occasionally ask for snippets, however, which bothers him. Fillmore spends his nights vigorously drinking and womanizing, and he brings Henry along with him. Also in this period, Mark Swift paints Henry’s portrait. Henry spends lots of time watching the cadets do drills in the prison courtyard across from the apartment, a sight he finds depressing.
Once again, Henry has lucked into a position where almost nothing is required of him and he can live on another’s dime. The fact that this keeps happening again suggests how much others must enjoy his company. His lack of interest in working on his book, even when he’s living comfortably and has no other duties, calls into question his seriousness as a writer: he seems to enjoy thinking about the radical effect his book will have more than actually writing the book.
Themes
One evening, Henry returns home to find Fillmore in the apartment with a self-proclaimed Russian princess named Macha. She seems volatile, and Fillmore leaves with her for the night. He returns alone and very drunk, telling Henry the shaggy-dog tale of their night out: across several venues, she got drunker and drunker while telling Fillmore a far-fetched story of how a movie director broke her heart and she threw herself in the Seine River. She kept disappearing, turning down Fillmore’s sexual propositions whenever he found her. Eventually he had enough and insulted her, but she was unfazed. Fillmore is convinced she’s crazy.
Fillmore’s interest in Macha, who clearly seems to be bad news, suggests his poor judgment regarding women, foreshadowing his disastrous relationship with Ginette later in the novel.
Themes
Nevertheless, Macha returns in a few days and actually moves in with Fillmore and Henry. She acts erratically, but the three go out together frequently. She claims to have gonorrhea and she menstruates for eight days, mainly staying in bed reading Russian newspapers. Fillmore keeps trying to sleep with her, to no avail; she keeps providing new reasons why she can’t. Henry and Fillmore bring her to a brothel in the hopes of stimulating her. There, the two men both sleep with the same Black woman, one after the other. This angers Macha. Nevertheless, the next night she agrees to sleep with Fillmore, but at the last minute she tells him she has gonorrhea still. Fillmore thus resigns himself to sleeping celibately beside her. Later, Macha rambles on about sordid affairs in her past with both men and women. She actually seems somewhat crazy, and it’s never clear just how much truth there is in what she says.
The Macha episode makes for yet another entry in the catalogue of troubled and possibly insane individuals that the novel presents. Her problems and experiences are described with an uncomfortable level of detail, testing the reader’s patience for squalor and depravity without any apparent meaning. The continuously deferred consummation with Fillmore seems to make a joke out of this refusal to satisfy the reader’s expectations.
Themes
