Crazy Cock

Crazy Cock

O
THER WORKS BY
H
ENRY
M
ILLER PUBLISHED BY
G
ROVE
P
RESS

Moloch
Black Spring
Quiet Days in Clichy
Sexus
Plexus
Nexus
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Under the Roofs of Paris

Henry Miller

F
OREWORD BY
E
RICA
J
ONG
I
NTRODUCTION BY
M
ARY
V. D
EARBORN

Copyright © 1991 by the Estate of Henry Miller
Foreword copyright © 1991 by Erica Jong
Introduction copyright © 1991 by Mary V. Dearborn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Henry Miller:
Letters to Emil
. Copyright © 1968 by Henry Miller.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, Henry, 1891–1980
Crazy cock / Henry Miller.
p.      cm.
ISBN 0-8021-3293-6 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3525.I5454C7     1991
813'.52—dc20               91-9247

Designed by Irving Perkins Associates

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

03 04 05 06 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6

C
ERTAIN WRITERS
become protagonists. Their writings and their biographies mingle to create a larger myth, a myth which exemplifies some human tendency. They become heroes. Or antiheroes. Byron was one such writer. Pushkin, another. Colette exemplified a kind of female heroism. As did George Sand. And de Beauvoir.

Miller is the only American who stands in their company, and appropriately enough, he is more honored in France than in his own country. His writing is full of imperfection, bombast, humbug. But the purity of his example, his heart, his openness, will, I believe, draw new generations of readers to him. In an age of cynicism, he remains the romantic, exemplifying the possibility of optimism in a fallen world, of happy poverty in a world that worships Lucre, of the sort of gaiety Yeats meant when he wrote “their ancient, glittering eyes are gay.”

I knew Henry Miller. In a number of ways, he was my mentor. I was a very young writer, very green and suddenly famous, and he, a very old writer, seasoned in both fame and rejection, when we met—by letter—and became pen pals,
then pals. I feel lucky to have known him, and in some sense, I feel that I only got to know him well after his death.

Miller was the most contradictory of characters: a mystic who was known for his sexual writings, a romantic who pretended to be a rake; he was above all a writer of what the poet Karl Shapiro called “wisdom literature.” If we have trouble categorizing Miller's “novels” and consequently underrate and misunderstand them, it is because we judge them according to some unspoken notion of “the well-wrought novel.” And Miller's novels seem not wrought at all. In fact, they are rants—undisciplined and wild. But they are full of wisdom, and they have that “eternal and irrepressible freshness” which Ezra Pound called the mark of the true classic.

In the profound shocks and upheavals of the twentieth century—from the trenches of World War I to Auschwitz to the holes in the ozone layer—we in the West have produced a great body of “wisdom literature,” as if we needed all the wisdom we could get to bear what may be the last century of humans on earth. Solzhenitsyn, Günter Grass, Neruda, Idries Shah, Krishnamurti, Sartre, de Beauvoir all write predominantly wisdom literature. Even among our most interesting novelists—Bellow, Singer, Lessing, Yourcenar—the fictional form is often a cloak for philosophical truths about the human race and where it is heading. The popularity of writers like Margaret Mead and Joseph Campbell in our time also serves to show the great hunger for wisdom. We are, as Ursula Le Guin says, “dancing at the edge of the world,” and it takes all our philosophy to bear it.

Henry Miller did not come to his profession easily. He was over forty before he had his first book published
(Tropic of Cancer)
, and by then he had won the reputation of a bum
and a no-good in the eyes of his very bourgeois German-American family.

He had been struggling for years to find his voice as a writer, and
Crazy Cock
is interesting principally for the way it recounts that struggle. Put beside
Tropic of Cancer
it is almost a textbook study of a writer looking for a voice.

The voice of Miller in
Crazy Cock
is third person, stilted, fusty. Henry appears to be ventriloquizing a Literary Voice—with a capital “L.”

The writer who
invented
first person, present tense exuberance for the twentieth century is writing here in the third person! And it doesn't suit him. It makes him use words like “wondrous,” “totteringly,” “blabberingly,” “fragrant,” and “abashed.” Here is Henry the Victorian, the reader of Marie Corelli, writing in a pastiche of Victorian romance and Dreiserian realism. Blabberingly indeed!

But
Crazy Cock
is fascinating for what it tells us about Miller's literary roots. Henry Miller was born an heir to the Victorian age—(even in the seventies, when I knew him, he used to rave to me about Marie Corelli)—and
Crazy Cock
shows us what Henry had to overcome to find his own voice as a writer.

Here is the voice of Henry Miller in
Crazy Cock
.

She was more beautiful than ever now. Like a mask long withheld. Mask or mask of a mask? Fragments that raced through his mind while he arranged harmoniously the inharmony of her being. Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him, peering at him from behind the mask. A rapport such as the living establish with the dying. She rose, and like a queen advancing to her throne, she approached him. His limbs were
quaking, he was engulfed by a wave of gratitude and abasement. He wanted to fling himself on his knees and thank her blabberingly for deigning to notice him.

Now listen to the sound of
Tropic of Cancer
.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I
am
. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. . . .

Henry is retracing his steps as an artist here, telling us exactly what happened between
Moloch
and
Crazy Cock
, and
Tropic of Cancer:
he let go of literature. It reminds me of Colette's advice to the young Georges Simenon: “Now go and take out the poetry.”

Good advice. A writer is born at the moment when his true voice of authority merges at a white heat with the subject he was
born
to chronicle. Literature falls away and what remains is
life
—raw, pulsating life: “a gob of spit in the face of Art.”

For the truth is that every generation, every writer, must rediscover
nature
. Literary conventions tend to ossify over time, and what was once new becomes old. It takes a brave new voice to rediscover real life buried under decades of
literary dust. In unburying himself, Henry unburied American literature.

The style of writing Henry Miller discovered has itself become convention, so it is hard to grasp how electric it seemed in 1934. The feminist critique of the sixties came in to bury Henry under rhetoric—just as false, in its way, as the rhetoric of male supremacy. But the feminist critique neglects to ask the main question Henry Miller poses:
How does a writer raise a voice?
The problem of finding a voice is essential for
all
writers but is more fraught with external difficulties for women writers because no one agrees what the proper voice of woman is—unless it is to keep silent. This, by the way, accounts for all the trouble feminists, including me, have with Henry. He liberates himself, becomes the vagabond, the clown, the poet, but the open road he chooses is
never
open to the other sex. Nevertheless, it is useful to trace the steps of his liberation: Paris plus first person bravado equals the voice we have come to know as Henry Miller.

Henry found this voice primarily in his letters to Emil Schnellock, his pal from the old neighborhood (who lent him the $10 that was in his pocket when he sailed to Europe in 1930 and with whom he left the manuscripts of
Crazy Cock
and
Moloch
for safekeeping
*
). Henry's
Letters to Emil
constitutes an amazing record of a writer finding his voice. The transition from the tortured prose of
Crazy Cock
to the explosive simplicity of
Tropic of Cancer
is all there. We hear the explosion as writer finds his sound. We see the contrail streaked across the sky.

Henry Miller's writing odyssey is an object lesson for anyone who wants to learn to be a writer. How do you go from self-consciousness to unself-consciousness?
Crazy Cock
will show you the first part of the journey.
Tropic of Cancer
is the destination.

In between come his
Letters to Emil
. These letters are crucial because they are written to someone who accepts him completely and with whom he can be wholly himself. In them, he practices the voice that will revolutionize the world in
Tropic of Cancer
. It is the voice of the New York writer revolting against New York. And it is the voice of the weary picaro—weary of flopping from pillar to post.

Two years of vagabondage has taken a lot out of me. Given me a lot, too, but I need a little peace now, a little security in which to work. In fact, I ought to stop living for a long while, and just work. I'm sick of gathering experiences.

There'll be a lot to tell when I get back to New York. Enough for many a wintry night. But immediately I think of N.Y. I get frightened. I hate the thought of seeing that grim skyline, the crowds, the sad Jewish faces, the automats, the dollars so hard to get, the swell cars, the beautiful clothes, the efficient businessmen, the doll faces, the cheap movies, the hullabaloo, the grind, the noise, the dirt, the vacuity and sterility, the death of everything sensitive. . . . (to Emil from The Dôme, Paris, October 1931)

The total acceptance that Emil provided made possible the voice of the
Tropics
. The perfect audience for any writer is, in fact, an audience of one. All you need is one reader who
cares
, and cares uncritically. It is no wonder that Nabokov dedicated nearly every book to his wife, Vera. And no wonder that, in
my perplexity about newfound fame, the madness of the movie business, my dilemma about how to write a second novel, I turned to Henry Miller in 1974. He was willing to be a generous sounding board for me as Emil Schnellock had been for him. He passed the gift of uncritical acceptance along. In a world where writers take virtually every opportunity to trash one another, Henry Miller was a wonder of generosity.