Tropic of Cancer

Fillmore is one of Henry’s closest friends throughout the latter half of the novel. A young American from a wealthy family, he moved to Paris to work in the diplomatic service. While sensitive and self-involved, Fillmore is generous with his money and happy to support his friends and loved ones. He frequently gives money away, seeming to not understand how valuable it is for those not born into wealth. He enjoys talking about literature and art, but Henry derides his favorite authors, particularly Anatole France and Joseph Conrad. However, Fillmore is still young, and Henry believes he will cultivate a more sophisticated literary palate. He admits that Fillmore is “a bore” who enjoys talking about himself too much, but when he is around interesting people, he becomes more interesting himself (194).

Fillmore develops strong friendships with Henry, Collins, and Kruger but struggles to form healthy relationships with women, often finding himself overwhelmed by any challenge he faces a in sexual or romantic encounter. He is so upset when he contracts gonorrhea that he will not even say exactly what happened; rather, Collins is forced to guess. His fondness for Macha is largely motivated by his appreciation for her education and aristocratic background, but the two have frequent arguments in which he says deeply cruel things to her. At the end of the novel, he finds it virtually impossible to abandon Ginette, even in the face of her physical and psychological abuse. Sobbing, he says to Henry before boarding the train to London, “Jesus, I think I ought to go back. I ought to go back and face the music. If anything should happen to her I’d never forgive myself” (313). Henry even avoids shaking his hand when they say goodbye because Fillmore “would have slobbered all over [him]” (314-15). This helplessness reflects both Fillmore’s background—the wealthier characters throughout the novel are often the most incapable—and his tendency towards heightened emotional states that make him feel out of control.

Van Norden is a friend of Henry’s as well as his coworker at the unnamed newspaper. He is a perpetually depressed man given to lengthy speeches and rambling complaints. When he introduces Van Norden, Henry writes that the former “wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life. He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to realize that he did not die overnight” (100). Van Norden equally curses both rainy days and sunny days and seems to simultaneously hate and welcome the filth of Paris. When Henry helps him move to his new hotel, for example, he looks at the dirty room, smiles, describes the place as a “bughouse,” and lights a pipe contentedly. His emotions are thus predictable in their very unpredictability: He is always unhappy about something, but exactly what will be bothering him is not necessarily consistent.

Like many of the artists and writers who populate the novel, Van Norden has strong feelings about concepts like truth and fiction. He is allegedly writing a novel, although because “the book must be absolutely original, absolutely perfect,” he is unable to actually start writing it (132). He lures women to his room by promising to read his poetry to them and instead expounds to them his views on art, which he creates spontaneously in the moment. He becomes unusually upset about the fact that Carl lied about having had sex with Irene. He says, “He told it to me with such accuracy that I know it’s all a goddamned lie…but I can’t dismiss it from my mind. You know how my mind works!” (118). Van Norden does not care what actually happened between Carl and Irene but is deeply offended at having been presented with such a vivid scenario that could have happened. Thus, his troubled relationship with imagination—a concept he finds to be sometimes magical, sometimes harmful—is as unpredictable as his emotional relationship with the world around him.

Van Norden is also a notably misogynistic character, referring to women as “cunts,” insulting their bodies, and manipulating them into having sex with him. After Van Norden delivers an especially long rant about how horrible women are, Henry finally asks him what he wants from a woman. Stammering, Van Norden blurts out that he wants “to be able to surrender [himself] to a woman” (131). Henry realizes that his friend’s worst fear is being left alone, and this fear runs so deep that even when he is having sex with a woman, Van Norden cannot escape the prison of that fear. What torments him the most and hampers his relationship with both literature and women is that he is unable to fully and honestly express himself; however, in an ironic, metanarrative moment, he begs Henry not to characterize him as simply a “cunt-chaser” (132).

Mona is Henry’s enigmatic wife. She is largely absent from the narrative and appears only in flashbacks, but she still has a profound emotional impact on Henry. Throughout his Parisian wanderings, he frequently connects his tempestuous relationship with Mona to specific places in the city, a habit that highlights the novel’s larger tendency to conceptualize Paris as a highly sexualized woman: sometimes loved, sometimes hated, but always objectified.

In an early flashback, Henry describes greeting Mona when she arrives to visit him in Paris. They miss meeting each other at the Gare St. Lazare, a train station, but he sees her later while walking past the Dôme café. In an emotional description, Henry relates, “She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately […] I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die” (19). He tracks the memory across the city, referencing particular locations, and claiming that even though Paris is “crumbling” around them, Mona’s body in her velvet suit is still “aching” for him (19). They stay in the same bug-infested hotel room multiple times, and even though they have no money, Henry knows that the city will deliver gifts to people who are in love: “Paris. Paris. Everything happens here […] By morning something will happen” (21). Ironically, Henry never tells the reader what did happen that caused Mona to leave again.

Mona takes on an even more powerful symbolic role later in the novel when Henry is reflecting on his life in America. He says, “I did think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura of time and space, but separately, detached, as though she had blown up into a great cloudlike form that blotted out the past” (177). He delves further into his memories as he recalls walking down particular streets with her, past particular buildings and statues, and imagines that she will exist forever on a certain spot on the sidewalk even after the rest of Paris is demolished. He ultimately concludes that even in Paris there is no escape from the devastation he feels about the end of their marriage. Thus, while Mona herself gets very little time in the novel and is almost entirely silent, her influence is staggering, for she alters the shape of both space and time and colors the rest of Henry’s relationships, his writing process, and his emotional life.