Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (9 page)

In the presence of her unearthly beauty, her powerful sexuality, he recognized instantaneously that here was the muse he’d read about in classical literature but never expected to meet. And he felt at the same time that she’d
given him that nod that was both permission (to continue on with his lonely artistic quest) and invitation (to do so under her aegis). She told him she believed in his star, maybe more deeply than he himself did in the moment of their meeting. Later on, as their relationship lengthened and he began to sense that with her he was in far beyond his depth, he began to turn her from the muse of myth into a legend—which is more comprehensible because more narrative—so that he could write about her in the context of their lives together, where they went, how they lived. At last, when everything personally significant about the relationship had rotted away through infinite deceptions and betrayals, savage fights, transatlantic estrangements, and June’s descent into madness, she became what perhaps she was always meant to be for him: a darkly glowing metaphor of America, in the somber light of which he composed the finest things he had in him. All of which—the wild contradictions, the changes, the sublime heights and abysmal depths—may suggest
—may
—why Miller hung onto June for so long, through bewilderment and poverty, through degradation, and the most awful humiliation a man might suffer.

What he might actually have felt in that moment of meeting cannot, of course, be known. He made several attempts to recapture that in words, none better than in
Capricorn
where he describes June moving toward him
through the murk and sleaze of the taxi-dance hall. And what makes this particular effort special is that it is at once both powerful in its language and hopeless in its emotional aspirations, because this isn’t a human who is being described. It is some other order of being to whom (or should it be to “which”?) none of the known rules apply: She, for whom everything must be undergone.

She seemed to him at first blue-black in color, but the longer he stared and the closer she came, he saw that she was an ageless chalk-white. And she wasn’t moving toward him, or even gliding, which would be the expectable verb here:

Whatever else this passage means—and it is dense with meanings; whoever June Mansfield Smerth Smith was—and she was doubtless many things except the vile name Miller used when he was trying to rid himself of her haunting presence—these words, written years after the fact, tell us that when Miller saw the nameless woman moving toward him, when he first held her body in his arms, he felt himself hurled into some dimensionless state where all things were possible, especially the possibility that he had after all authentic artistic greatness within. But in order to realize that particular possibility he would have to catch hold of this being and hang on through all her protean shifts and states. This is the only way to make sense of what he willingly underwent over the next seven years.

He was ever the comic exaggerator, and there is no single subject on which he is more unreliable than June. But there can be no doubt that meeting her was in truth a
life-altering experience for him, and that by the time they had finally parted ways he felt his soul had been keelhauled. But finally and most importantly, the very torments he suffered over her were magically transformed into the instruments of salvation, which is one definition of art.

The Henry Miller who had walked into the taxi-dance hall in the summer of 1923 was a husband, a father, and a man with a responsible job. A little more than a year later almost everything had changed. He had divorced Beatrice and married June; his contact with little Barbara was sporadic at best and would gradually become almost nonexistent; he had quit Western Union; and he and June were living in a Brooklyn flat they could in no way afford while bills piled up around their feet like snowdrifts. Most significantly, he had embarked on a quest to become a writer. This last was also to become a great problem, because though he now thought of himself as an artist, and though he had somehow acquired his muse, he had by 1924 entered a period of almost five years of drift, apathy, and indecision in which there was an enormous amount of talk about writing but little to show for it, only two botched novels, unpublished in his lifetime and which would never have been published had he not become famous in the 1960s. Through all this June clung to her
primeval belief that “Val,” as she called him, possessed the stuff of greatness somewhere within him, though it is clear that at various points that belief seriously flickered. An illusionist herself, she seems to have at least half-believed that writing was an act of sortilege, and perhaps Miller himself may have wanted to believe this as well, though his experience of hammering out the manuscript about the twelve deformed angels ought to have told him something different. And maybe it was this shared illusion that kept them together through evictions, unpaid and unpayable debts, get-rich-quick-without-working schemes, the endless lies they told to creditors, friends, and each other; and the increasing chaos and clutter of their daily lives. All this could make sense if in fact Val was really on the path to greatness instead of being what many must have thought—a bum and a windbag. So, while he and his cronies spent days in endless talk, joking and drinking and walking the streets, June held down one job and another. From time to time the would-be writer actually did bestir himself, making solitary excursions in the greater New York area, looking for potential literary material. But there was no method to these, and because he was so largely self-educated and so insatiably curious he was easily sidetracked into intellectual labyrinths where he would lose himself for weeks at a time, reading up on, for instance, the history of chicle harvesting for a story he
planned to write on chewing gum. Without his intending it, however, Miller’s wanderings and investigations of everything from amusement parks to professional wrestling were providing him with a deep knowledge of American culture that would stand him in creative stead in the future. Now, however, that was not apparent to either Miller or June, and as the months rolled on June began to wonder whether she had misjudged her Val, that he was all talk and little substance.

Perhaps simply to make ends meet she began to “gold-dig”—a thin euphemism for whoring—bringing home to Val cash from her various “admirers.” She evidently had extensive experience in this line of work by the time she and Miller met, and so in their increasingly exiguous circumstances it might have been natural enough for her to resort to it once again. He tried not to imagine what she had to do to get the money she brought him, but with a mind like his he could hardly have escaped knowing what was really going on. At one point, for instance, the Millers ran a speakeasy that had a bedroom attached, and while Miller and his pals sat in the kitchen spinning tales and drinking, June took favored customers back to the bedroom.

Still, it was a day-to-day kind of existence the couple lived, and this began to cut ever more deeply into the relationship. By the end of 1925 matters had become desperate
enough for them to separate. And so at the age of thirty-four Miller moved back to the parental home on Decatur where he would sit in the parlor for hours with his typewriter, sometimes pecking at the machine, but mostly staring out the window, wondering why the magic stream wouldn’t flow for him. When guests were to visit he would hastily pack up his typewriter and papers and hide in a closet until they left. His mother was ashamed: maybe Henry was just another family nutcase.

The following year the couple reunited, but things weren’t any better. Miller was still blocked, and June, now exasperated with the man who had begun referring to himself as “The Failure,” was openly selling herself around in the Village. In the fall the nadir they’d reached at the end of the previous year was revealed to have been a false bottom when June began a lesbian relationship with a mentally disturbed artist named Jean Kronski. Soon Jean and her grotesque puppet/companion, “Count Bruga,” were living with the Millers, and soon after that June and Jean were sleeping together while The Failure consoled himself as best he could in the next bed. The women began openly talking of going to Europe together, making plans as if Miller wasn’t there, and one day when he returned from an outing he found them gone, leaving a note behind saying only that they had shipped for Paris. In mingled rage and despair he broke every piece of furniture in the
place, howling so wildly that the landlady feared for his life and came down to try to comfort him.

Months later, June returned, mercifully minus Jean, yet still carrying a considerably travel-battered Count Bruga. And so once more the sorry dance began again, with Miller now but one among several men vying for June’s attentions in an eerie reprise of that initial encounter when she was a taxi-dancer. His main rival appeared to be a man who wrote jokes for the
New Yorker
cartoonist Peter Arno. Roland Freedman was an older man whom June called Pop and who was in his own way as smitten with her as Miller had been—and in many ways still was—though he seems never to have thought of her as a mythological being. June herself, if she was not a goddess, was at least remarkably resourceful and now devised a new scheme to shake more gold out of Pop. Representing herself as an aspiring novelist who lacked only money so that she could quit her degrading work for literature, she got Freedman to put her on a kind of retainer while she wrote the novel she had for so long had in mind. The actual work, of course, would have to be secretly done by Miller, and it is a gauge of how desperate and dangerous his attachment to June had become that he agreed to serve as her galley slave, and that after so long a period when he could write almost nothing, now, in this new humiliating situation,
he was able to crank out page on page of a manuscript he called
Moloch, or, This Gentile World.
Freedman must have been smitten indeed to have admired the thing enough to give June the money to go to Europe for several months in late summer 1928. Her husband joined her, a kind of stowaway.

The novel was in fact dreadful, a lurching, unconvincing hodgepodge of invective, random musings, and bigotry about a character who hates almost everything, most especially his immediate surroundings, the grimy city and its even more grimy inhabitants. Blacks, Chinese, American Indians, East Indians, epileptics—all are casually, even joyously slandered. But as the title suggests, it is the Jews who come in for the worst of it. Here there is neither ca-sualness nor joy, only a species of venom the world would soon come to know too well. All this is delivered from a wavering, uncertain point of view and in language that at times is stupefyingly stilted: “Like a butterfly in the palpitant tomb of its chrysalis, Marcelle fluttered and yearned with nubile wings for the miracle of the advent of dawn. In the surrender of a caress she looked for the swoon which would bring about her deliverance.” And so on.

Just about the only thing in these pages that retrospectively would suggest the Henry Miller of only three years later is the cruelty of the humor, a bequest to him from American culture’s bedrock. If
Clipped Wings
was, as he
later claimed, bad enough to stiffen his backbone and put sulphur in his blood,
Moloch
by such logic should have made him feel as if he were sitting on top of the world. It was another very bad book, to be sure, as maybe even he would then have known. But, after all, he had now written an actual, full-length novel under unimaginable pressure. And the payoff was a trip to the legendary Old World, a trip that would take him and his wife far away from her faceless and unnumbered admirers. The fact that June was supposed to have written it and that the money the Millers would use to visit France, Belgium, and eastern Europe had come from a man who was bedding her might not have seemed in that moment of much importance to a man living almost completely within a garish illusion that was beginning to take on distinct aspects of a nightmare.

Not much is known about the European escape. For a man who’d been dreaming of just such an opportunity for years—tracing Paris’s streets with his dreaming fingers and devouring heaping helpings of Europe’s writers and thinkers—Miller was oddly silent about it once they had come back to Brooklyn, mostly complaining to friends about the hygienic hardships an American faced over there where an indoor toilet seemed something of a novelty. This sounds a bit like the ultra-fastidious
Innocents Abroad
—published sixty years earlier by a man who wore
white suits to visually separate himself from the world’s nastiness.

The couple found a flat on Brooklyn’s Clinton Street and settled again into what appeared to be the old routine, with June going back to a restaurant where she’d worked before while Miller stayed home to write another novel. Actually, though, there were differences, and what the Millers now began to enact was a dark reconfiguration of a fairy tale in which Beauty goes out to service her bestial customers while the Unpromising Hero is condemned to a tower cell until he can spin the chaff of their life into a story that rescues Beauty from her sexual servitude. This wasn’t, however, the way the tale ultimately turned out. June went back to the Pepper Pot as before, and as before she went to bed with certain of her customers, particularly an insurance man with money to spend on her. Pop, too, was in the picture but not so centrally. By this time June’s drug use, which before had been casual, was deepening toward true dependency, and her behavior, always dramatic and eccentric, had become occasionally very erratic. At the same time, her attitude toward Val’s writing had narrowed to a narcissistic obsession: he must write a novel about her and thus ensure her immortality. Nothing short of this would make her sacrifices worthwhile.
This, she apparently felt, was the great book Miller had in him, that vital spark she had intuited the first night in the dance hall.
Moloch
had served its purpose, but it was after all an apprentice work.