Crazy Cock, Page 2

  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.

  A year—and a trip to Europe with June—intervened before Miller turned to the events of the winter of 1926-1927 and began writing Crazy Cock. June was now ready, she said, to make any kind of sacrifice necessary for him to succeed as a writer. She formulated a plan to send Henry to Paris, where he would, she hoped, write a novel that would make him famous and establish her as one of the muses of the ages. It was under these circumstances that he produced three versions of the novel, at first titled Lovely Lesbians. He would rework the manuscript several times over the next four years, deleting material and changing endings. He changed the title to Crazy Cock, so that it referred not to the two women but to Tony Bring. The vicissitudes of his own remarkable life, and not those of the other players in it, were his surest literary subjects, he had learned; it was an important discovery, for the “autobiographical romance” was to become Miller’s preferred genre, his subject always his own life.

  In February 1930, Miller arrived in Paris, leaving a copy of Lovely Lesbians with June, so she could take it around to New York publishers. June reported from time to time that various publishers were interested in it, but these announcements were as unreliable as any of her concoctions. Soon after his arrival, Miller had begun working on what he called his “Paris book,” the capacious, rollicking account of the down-at-the-heel narrator’s adventures in Paris that would become Tropic of Cancer. Even when the “Paris book” was accepted for publication by Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press, Miller was still trying to place Crazy Cock, sending it to Samuel Putnam at Covici-Friede.

  By the time Cancer appeared in 1934, however, Miller had given up on his third novel. The manuscripts of Crazy Cock were all now in June’s possession; he asked her to bring them on her final visit to Paris in 1932, but she forgot. At that point Miller was transmuting the elements of the story of his life with June in his epic Tropic of Capricorn; he would not return to the story of the ménage on Henry Street until he undertook the writing of The Rosy Crucifixion
in 1942. He returned to America in 1940, eventually settling in California’s remote Big Sur, where he lived in poverty as this country’s most famous banned writer.

  By then Crazy Cock seemed to have disappeared, dependent as its existence was on June’s strikingly peripatetic habits. Sometime after her return from Paris, June married Stratford Corbett, an insurance man with New York Life. (By a strange coincidence, they honeymooned in Carmel, oblivious to Henry’s presence in nearby Big Sur.) A bomber pilot in the Second World War, Corbett remained in the military after the war, and June followed him to military bases, first in Florida and then in Texas. There the marriage ended, and June made her way back to New York. She wrote to Henry in 1947 for the first time in fifteen years, and her news was not good. Her health was very poor; she suffered from severe colitis, and it was clear that her mental condition had deteriorated. She wrote regularly throughout the 1950s, thanking Henry for the small amounts of cash he was able to send her, and her letters—lodged in the Miller archives at UCLA—make for unsettling reading. She worked for several years for the city’s welfare department without pay, hoping to get on the city employment rolls. She was nearly destitute and plagued by health problems; several times she reported that she suffered from severe malnutrition. Yet she took a warm interest in Henry’s children and became very friendly with Lepska and then Eve, Henry’s wives during this time.

  In 1956, word reached Miller that June had been confined to Pilgrim State Hospital by one of her brothers after an incident that involved a television falling out of her window in an Upper West Side rooming house. Miller arranged for a New York couple, James and Annette Baxter, to visit June regularly after her release and attend to her material needs. Miller himself stopped to see June on the way back from a trip to Europe a few years later and found her horribly deteriorated, partially crippled by a fall suffered during a shock treatment at Pilgrim State. But he was struck by her courage; he believed that only sheer will had enabled her to survive.

  Nobody thought to ask June about the manuscripts of Miller’s early novels, those he had written during their marriage. Two trunks full of belongings had accompanied her throughout her travels, but she claimed the contents of one were ruined by water damage. Annette Baxter, however, was a Miller scholar—she had published her doctoral dissertation on his writing—and she convinced June that any manuscripts in her possession would have considerable interest. In December of 1960 the Baxters reported to Miller, with great excitement, that they had found the “Tony Bring” manuscripts. June, however, was reluctant to let them out of her sight. The Baxters investigated the feasibility of buying one of the recently introduced photocopying machines and had resolved to do so when June capitulated, turning over the manuscript Moloch as well. The Baxters sent them off to Miller with much fanfare.

  But Miller’s circumstances had changed considerably. Barney Rosset of Grove Press had mounted what was to be a successful challenge of the bans of Miller’s books with the U.S. publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1961, and Miller had become an international celebrity. He was hoping to find a new home in Europe; when that did not work out, he settled in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles. Rosset had a backlog of previously banned Miller titles to publish, and Henry decided not to show him his first writing efforts, which now seemed unimportant. Miller eventually sent them off to the Department of Special Collections at UCLA, where they remained, uncatalogued, for many years.

  CRAZY COCK, for an apprentice work, is remarkably self-sufficient as a novel, requiring very little emendation. Miller has not mastered certain rudiments of narrative, so that, for instance, it is difficult to understand what is happening in the first twenty pages without knowing that they chronicle Vanya’s journey east and her arrival on the Greenwich Village scene, and that they introduce Tony Bring, aspiring writer, and his wife, Hildred. Because so many drafts were produced, the narrative is not entirely consistent; verb tenses, for example, occasionally shift meaninglessly. But the narrative is far more linear than Miller’s later work, even though it is marked by the often surrealistic verbal flights that characterize the Tropic novels and Black Spring.

  One aspect of Crazy Cock does demand comment: the author’s marked anti-Semitism. Words like “kike” and references to the “keen, quick, slippery Jewish mind” are not what we expect from a man who was deeply committed to equality and individual rights. In fact, Miller’s early adulthood was characterized by a virulent, particularized anti-Semitism. He remembered his childhood in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn as idyllic. With the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge, the character of the neighborhood changed, as waves of Italian and Jewish immigrants settled in Brooklyn. Miller came to hate the Eastern European Jew in particular, and what in a milder man might have festered as a grudging prejudice became in Miller a virtual obsession. Like many such obsessions, it was born out of a deep ambivalence, for Miller was drawn profoundly to many things Jewish, even at times wondering if perhaps he was Jewish himself. After World War II, Miller spoke of Jews sometimes with near-reverence and always with admiration. But in his earliest books—the Tropic novels and the two that preceded them—the author’s anti-Semitism provides a shock far less pleasurable or meaningful than those we have come to expect from Miller.

  With its descriptions of Village “faggots,” its graphic portrayals of rape and clinical discussions of “perversity,” its drawn-out description of Tony Bring’s hemorrhoids, and its troubling references to Jews, Crazy Cock is an unsettling and disturbing book; it is also, as a testament to Miller’s suffering, a profoundly moving book. Like his best work, it navigates a fine line between acceptance and rebellion, rejoicing and disgust; it represents a considerable artistic achievement from one of the most complicated men of the twentieth century.

  —MARY V. DEARBORN

  April 1991

  Publisher’s Note

  THE PUBLISHING of posthumous fiction naturally presents special problems, and the reader is entitled to know what, if any, editing has taken place. We have earnestly sought to present this novel in as untrammeled a form as possible, correcting only misspellings, obvious inconsistencies, and verb disagreements where no rewriting was entailed. With these minor exceptions, this first publication of Henry Miller’s third novel is exactly as he wrote it.

  Author’s Foreword

  Apologies to Michael Fraenkel.

  Preface

  Good-bye to the novel, sanity, and good health. Hello angels!

  Part 1

  1

  A REMOTE and desolate corner of America. Vast mud flats on which no flower, no living thing grows. Fissures radiating in all directions, losing themselves in the immensity of space.

  Standing on the platform in her heavy cowhide boots, a thick, brass-studded belt about her waist, she puffs nervously at a cigarette. Her long black hair falls like a weight to her shoulders. The whistle blows, the wheels commence their smooth, fateful revolutions. The ground slips away on an endlessly slipping belt.

  Below her a gray waste choked with dust and sagebrush. Vast, vast, a limitless expanse without a human being in sight. An Eldorado with less than one inhabitant to the square mile. From the snowcapped mountains that shoulder the sky strong winds blow down. With twilight the thermometer drops like an anchor. Here and there buttes and mesas dotted with creosote bushes. Tranquil the earth beneath the moaning wind.

  “Taken as I am and as I shall always be, I feel that I am a force both of creation and of dissolution, that I am a real value, and have a right, a place, a mission among men.”

  She shifted languidly in her seat. The sensation of movement rather than movement itself. Her body, relaxed and quiescent, slumped deeper into the cushioned recesses of the seat. Taken as I am . . . The words seemed to raise themselves from the sea of type and swim before her muted vision in a colorless mist. Was there something beyond the screen of language which imparts to us . . . ? It was impossible for her to formulate, even to herself, the meaning of that flood which
illumined for her, at that moment, the hidden places of her being.

  After a time the words erased themselves from the inner pool of her eye; they vanished like the ectoplasm which is said to issue from the bodies of those who are possessed.

  “Who am I?” she murmured to herself. “What am I?”

  And suddenly she remembered that she was putting behind her a world. The book slid from her hands. She was again in the cemetery behind the ranch house, her arms clasping the trees; riding naked on a white stallion toward the icy lake; valleys everywhere choked with sunshine, the earth fecund, groaning with fruit and flowers.

  IT WAS after the Krupanowa woman made her appearance that she chose for herself the name Vanya. Before that she had been Miriam, and to be a Miriam was to be a considerate, self-effacing soul.

  The Krupanowa woman was a sculptress. That she possessed other accomplishments—accomplishments less easily categorized—was also conceded. The collision with a star of this magnitude flung Vanya out of her shallow orbit; whereas before she had existed in a nebulous state, the tail of a comet, as it were, now she became a sun whose inner chromosphere blazed with undying energy. A voluptuous ardor invaded her work. With bister and dried blood, with verdigris and jaundiced yellows, she pursued the rhythms and forms that consumed her vision. Orange nudes, colossal in stature, clawed at breasts dripping with slime and gore; odalisques bandaged like mummies and apostles whom not even the Christ had seen exposed their wounds, their gangrened limbs, their bloated lusts. There was Saint Sossima and Saint Savatyi, John the Warrior and John the Forerunner. Her madonnas she surrounded with lotus leaves, with golden groupers and leprechauns, with a vast, inchoate spawn. Inspired by Kali and Tlaloo, she invented goddesses from whose grinning skulls reptiles issued, their topaz eyes raised to heaven, their lips swollen with curses.