Crazy Cock (2 page)

I think he was willing to be that for me because his own road as a writer had been so very hard to travel. He had to pull up roots, go to Paris, live like a clochard in order to find the freedom to be an artist.

Brassai records the transformation that came over Miller in Paris: “In France, his brow smoothed out, he became happy, smiling. An irrepressible optimism irradiated his whole being.”

The New York that Henry left in March of 1930 was nowhere as fraught as the New York of today, but it still bore certain similarities. In New York it was a dishonor to be an unknown writer; in Paris one could write
écrivain
on one's passport and hold one's head high. In Paris it was
assumed
(it still is today) that an author had to have time, leisure, talk, solitude, stimulation. In New York it was, and still is, assumed that unless you fill up your time with appointments, you are a bum.

More than that (and more important, particularly for Henry) was the American attitude toward the vagabond artist—an attitude which unfortunately persists to our day. “In Europe,” as Brassai says in his book
Henry Miller: Grandeur Nature
, “poverty is only bad luck, a minor unhappiness; in the United States it represents a moral fault, a dishonor that society cannot pardon.”

To be a poor artist in America is thus
doubly
unforgivable. To be an artist in America is anyway to be a criminal (its criminality pardoned only by writing best-sellers, or selling one's paintings at usurious rates to rich collectors and thus feeding the war-machine with tax-blood). But to be poor
and
an artist—this is un-American.

Which of us has not felt this disapproval, this American rejection of the dreamer? “Poets have to dream,” says Saul Bellow, “and dreaming in America is no cinch.”

In the last few years we have seen a dramatic replay of these attitudes in the debates over censorship and the National Endowment for the Arts. Our essential mistrust of the dreamer leads us to cripple him or her with restrictions of all sorts. We seem not to understand that the basic wealth of our country—wealth and emotional health—comes from our creative spirit. Even with Japanese conglomerates buying our movie companies, even with statistics that prove that our movies, music, television shows, and inventions are our biggest exports in real dollar terms, we still honor the money-counters and money-changers above the inventors and dreamers, who give them something to count and change.

This is a deep-seated American obsession, and one whose historical genesis it would be fascinating to retrace. It comes, of course, out of puritanism and its assumption that dream-life and imagination are suspect. We must understand how Henry was buffeted about by these forces and how he fled to Europe to be reborn. As Brassai says, “It was the scorn which ultimately Miller could not stand. It was the scorn that he wanted to escape. Madness and suicide threatened him.” Miller himself writes in
Tropic of Capricorn
, “Nowhere have I
known such a degradation, such a humiliation as I have known in America.”

Crazy Cock
is fascinating because it shows us the New York that Miller fled and the reasons that he had to flee in order to find himself as a writer. Just as the Paris books are bursting with sunshine,
Crazy Cock
is dour, dismal, gray. The liveliest thing about it is its title.

Still, it is a vital part of the Miller canon. It shows us how far he had to travel to become the Henry Miller who breathed fresh air into American literature.

—E
RICA
J
ONG

May 1991

T
HE YEAR
was 1927. Henry Miller's second wife had just run away to Europe with her Lesbian lover. He was recovering from an extended period of what he called nervous disintegration. Penniless and humiliated, he had been forced to move back in with his parents, who were dismayed at their thirty-six-year-old son's failure to live up to their eminently bourgeois expectations. In desperation, he had taken a deadend office job offered him by a childhood rival. One evening, however, he stayed after work and began typing without pause. After midnight, a sheaf of closely typed pages—a torrent of words—lay next to his typewriter. They were notes for the book Miller felt he was destined to write: the story of his marriage to June, her love for Jean Kronski, and his utter debasement in the face of this betrayal. The notes would become
Crazy Cock
, Henry Miller's third novel and his surest move toward
Tropic of Cancer
, the literary accomplishment that would follow just a few years later.

This was not Miller's first attempt at writing. He had always expected that he would become a writer, or something equally exceptional. For Miller, even his very birthdate, one day after Christmas in 1891, suggested his specialness;
he later stated it was a year of extraordinary literary significance.

Born to middle-class German-American parents—his father was a tailor—Henry was precocious, and the family had high expectations for his future. As an adolescent, however, he came to scorn traditional schooling and became a confirmed autodidact. Family circumstances ruled out college, except for a brief stint at tuition-free City College, and instead Henry reluctantly joined his father in his tailor shop in 1913. He made his first serious attempt at writing—an essay on Nietzsche—at this time, but he did his most important work on his walks to and from the tailor shop; he later said that he wrote whole enormous volumes in his head, tomes about his family's history and his own boyhood, and indeed traces of these early “works” made their way into later books such as
Black Spring
and
Tropic of Capricorn
.

In 1917 he married and soon fathered a child. Faced with these responsibilities, he took a job as an employment manager at Western Union, the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of his later books. He had to hire and fire messengers, and the turnover was incredible; the absurdity of the job reduced him to despair. On a three-week vacation in 1922, he willed into being a book-length manuscript. Galled by his employer's suggestion that it was too bad there was no Horatio Alger tale about a messenger, and inspired by the example of Theodore Dreiser's
Twelve Men
, which he much admired, Miller turned out a work he would call
Clipped Wings
. The title referred to the wings on the Western Union symbol, and the book was a portrait of twelve messengers, angels whose wings had been clipped. The fragments of the manuscript that survive indicate that the book was a tedious
exercise in cynicism and misanthropy; Miller himself said that he knew it was “faulty from start to finish . . . inadequate, bad,
terrible.”

He returned to Western Union, passive and pessimistic, less certain than ever of his writing future, trapped in a loveless marriage. Then, on a chance visit to a Times Square dance hall, he met June Mansfield Smith, the Mona of
Tropic of Cancer
, the Hildred of
Crazy Cock
, the Mara of
The Rosy Crucifixion
, the mythified “her” to whom
Tropic of Capricorn
is dedicated. Mysterious, dramatic, spellbindingly beautiful, June won Henry immediately. He was mesmerized by her torrential talk, her spinning of intricate and shadowy tales involving intrigues with other men; in
Crazy Cock
he would describe her as “a veritable honeycomb of dissimulations.” June surrounded herself with chaos, and Miller thrived on it. He later wrote in
Tropic of Capricorn:

I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life. . . . Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—
myself
.

Most important, he learned that what he wanted was “not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself.” For June insisted, unconditionally, that he throw over his Western Union job (and his wife and child) in order to write. Just months after they were married in June 1924, Henry began his writing life. June supported them through a succession of hostessing jobs in the Village and, increasingly,
with money brought in by elaborate schemes involving her numerous admirers—an activity she called “gold digging,” but which seems actually to have been a kind of genteel prostitution.

Miller later said he was so in love with the idea of becoming a writer that he could not write. With uncharacteristic humility, he began by trying to get magazine assignments. He warmed up by writing a series of small sketches, meditations on such subjects as Brooklyn's Navy Yard and wrestling heroes, and submitting them feverishly to popular magazines—which almost invariably rejected them. June and he hatched a plan to print these sketches on colored pieces of cardboard and to sell them door to door. Before long, June integrated the “Mezzotints,” as they called these broadsides, into her confidence games; her admirers would buy whole runs of prose poems in exchange for her company—or, more likely, her sexual favors. She managed to get one published in a magazine called
Pearson's
, but it appeared under her name, not Henry's. His writing became currency in her sexual transactions, with results for his development as a writer that were, predictably enough, not salutary. His work was flat, uninspired, laden with detail, and couched in baroque language.

Miller's second novel, written in 1928, was a product of this compromised set of circumstances. As part of an elaborate seduction of a wealthy old man she identified only as “Pop,” June appropriated Henry's efforts as her own, turning to Pop for support for a novel
she
was writing. He agreed to give her a weekly stipend if she showed him some pages each week—pages that would be written by her husband. In these constrained circumstances Miller turned out
Moloch, or This
Gentile World
, an autobiographical portrait of Dion Moloch, a Western Union man married to a nagging and prudish woman. Another “arrangement,” however, was to have an even greater impact upon his writing during this period.

Moloch
was written when Miller was in recovery after the complete breakdown caused by June's love affair with Jean Kronski. In 1927 the two women left for Paris, and in June's absence Henry began describing the events that led to his breakdown, collecting notes that would shape
Crazy Cock
and, later,
Tropic of Capricorn
and
The Rosy Crucifixion
. As his first attempt to transmute those galvanizing experiences into art,
Crazy Cock
is a riveting document indeed.

The story he had to tell was almost nightmarish. While Henry tried to write in the Millers' Brooklyn Heights apartment, June worked at a variety of hostessing and waitressing jobs in Greenwich Village. As part of the Village's bohemian subculture, June came into contact with all kinds of conspicuous characters, from slumming millionaires to androgynous doyennes of the night. One such character, who was to become the Vanya of
Crazy Cock
, appeared one day in the restaurant where June worked, newly arrived in town from the West Coast and looking for work. June thought her extraordinarily beautiful: she had long black hair, high cheekbones, violet eyes, and a confident walk. She wanted to be an artist, the woman said, and she showed June a puppet she called Count Bruga, a garish and frightening affair, which June propped up against the headboard of her marital bed. June renamed her Jean Kronski, inventing for her a romantic past that included descent from the Romanoffs.

June and Jean quickly became inseparable, Jean moving to Brooklyn to be closer to June. Henry soon realized that
Jean was a major contender for June's affection. He became obsessed with determining the exact nature of their attachment. He was sure Jean was a Lesbian, but was June? Preoccupied throughout his early life with questions of sexual identity, Miller now saw his hard-won sense of manhood entirely undone by June's violent attraction to another woman. His working notes for
Crazy Cock
read at this point: “Commence to go really nuts now.”

The triangular drama quickly shifted into high gear. Jean and the Millers took a basement apartment together on Brooklyn's Henry Street, one door down from an alleyway called Love Lane. They festooned the walls with bizarre frescoes and painted the ceiling violet. In
Crazy Cock
, Miller says the air there was “blue with explanations”: elaborate stories, contrived confessions, misleading tales were spilled forth over the apartment's “gut table.” As we learn from
Crazy Cock
, June began to question Henry's sexual orientation, a habit that made her increasingly unstable husband furious. All three were by nature unbalanced—Jean had been institutionalized (as is Vanya in
Crazy Cock)
, June was almost certainly a borderline psychotic, and Miller was beginning to wonder if his situation was a symptom of the same madness that had already institutionalized one member of his family. Both June and Jean used drugs, and the basement apartment took on the atmosphere, Miller wrote, of a coke joint. At night he often combed Jean's mane of black hair and pared her toenails; in the next moment he might embed a knife in her bedroom door. One night he was driven to a feeble attempt at suicide; June never even read the note he left for her.

This was the milieu Miller set out to capture in
Crazy Cock
. The novel ends with Hildred, Vanya, and Tony Bring still
locked in their deadly triangle in the basement apartment. In Miller's life, this epoch ended one evening in April 1927 when he returned to find an empty apartment and a note saying the two women had sailed for Paris. During their absence, he composed the voluminous notes that would be transformed into a fictional account of his dehumanization at the hands of June and Jean. And, slowly, he began to recover. Two months later, June returned, without Jean.