Henry Miller

Before the Tropics

Glimmers of acrid brilliance in failed novel

Crazy Cock

By Henry Miller

General Publishing 224 pp. $26.50

Sonja Skarstedt
Special to The Montreal Gazette (1991)

The author of Tropic of Cancer had yet to make his artistic soul’s leap into the abyss of total commitment when he wrote Crazy Cock, his second failed novel, which has only now been published.

Crazy Cock is purported to be based on the frenzied relationship between Henry Miller, his wife June and the object of her obsession, Jean Kronski. The protagonist, Tony Bring, comes across more as an impressionable adolescent standing backstage at a carnival than a suffering writer-to-be; a voyeur cloaked in middle-class Victorian ideals, easily offended by bare-legged women and other “unfeminine” habits.

There are slashes in place of obscenities: by the time he had completed Tropic of Cancer, Miller had scratched out every trace of naiveté in favor of the assured, sexually cynical “I” narrator.

Crazy Cock veers between purple sensationalism and generous flashes of the acrid brilliance that became Miller’s trademark. It is an apprentice novel, serving as a necessary compulsive-repulsive document, a socio-historic record of post-Victorian America. It is also a fascinating portrait of an author at the precise moment of his cynical transformation, being slapped in the face by the reality he so thirstily seeks.

From his moral pedestal, lackadaisical Tony Bring deciphers misery’s lot. The inhabitants of 1920s Greenwich Village crawl through their purgatory like a crew of disenchanted cockroaches. At the epicenter of this tormented universe is the Caravan, a dive catering to those who have shed morality’s shackles. Their interaction, far beneath the boot of industrious America, is comparable to circus performers on coffee break. Anything is possible in the bowels of society.

Bring’s wife, Hildred, floats through her husband’s angst and bewilderment, a bohemian goddess who laughs in his face and refuses to cover her bare legs. Her painstakingly applied makeup gives her the greenish pallor of a walking corpse. To Bring’s shock, Hildred introduces him to her ultimate obsession, a mannish, strong-willed “genius” named Vanya.

Bring slips further into the pit of his own turmoil, initiating the question that quickens the plot: are Hildred and Vanya lovers? Vanya is, to Bring’s dismay, the epitome of Bohemia, the queen of Greenwich Village. At the root of Bring’s horror lies his own sexual doubts, revealed during one of many confrontations: “So you thought I was a homo once . . . or almost one. That’s rich . . .” That he could be mistaken for a “pervert” makes Bring physically sick.

Like the slashes that replace obscenities, sexuality remains mostly in the realm of delicacy. There are eloquent, sensual descriptions, yet these constitute stark hints of the scathing passages that infuse Miller’s later works.

Today’s readers (and many of yesterday’s, I am sure) will be uncomfortable with Miller’s references to women, homosexuals and Jews. These ignorant remarks typically stem from fear and envy, even a stunted awe. In one section, following anti-Semitic outburst, Tony Bring rhapsodizes: “. . .the Jewish mind was keen, slippery, capable of turning over a thousand miles to the Gentile’s once.”

The illusory veil of “womanhood” unravels like twine during Miller’s incredulous response to the women he has chosen to document via fiction. Through Tony Bring, Miller’s simplistic ideals buckle beneath the emotional shock of reality. It is obvious that Mildred’s earning’s are derived from her relationships with male admirers, yet Bring rarely complains. After all, he is the suffering artiste, she his muse-supporter. He thrives on her spontaneity, yet feels betrayed when she brings Vanya home to their dingy quarters.

Vanya, the self-styled androgyne whose uniqueness terrifies Bring, mesmerizes Hildred as intensely as Hildred mesmerizes Bring. Miller’s descriptions of Vanya’s ordeal and survival of rape, her imprisonment at the asylum, are horrifying, a surreal nightmare: “Suddenly she said to herself, I must scream, and she tried to scream but there came from her throat only a faint scraping sound . . . His breath was foul and in his eyes green bottles danced and then the wheels rolled again with a grinding noise . . . and she begged them not to grind her to pieces.”

Crazy Cock is a highly readable failed novel. Its purple moments can be forgiven in light of its vivid, surprisingly empathetic portraits, the seamy savor of New York City’s gullet. It is a valid exposé, a glimpse through the sheltered eyes of a white middle class male, an author-to-be whose innocence was turned into the cynical shrapnel that cut a luminous, searing swath through 20th century literature.

Henry Miller: A Life
by Robert Ferguson. Hutchinson
Random Century Group Ltd., London, 1991
397 pp. $37.95

An Unpublished Review by Sonja Skarstedt

Henry Miller, perhaps twentieth century literature’s most visible sexual proponent is, eleven years following his death at age eighty-nine, enjoying a brief revival. Of two biographies released this year, Robert Ferguson’s Henry Miller: A Life is the more satisfying.

Miller poured his life and creative juices into the cultivation of a mythic persona. Ferguson’s biography unravels those legendary layers and rubs away the gloss of iconization, overlaying an articulate compilation of dates, names and places on an historically-accurate grid. He includes the anecdotes one might expect to find in novels such as Tropic of Cancer, or the trilogy comprising The Rosy Crucifixion.

Henry Miller: A Life offers readers a straightforward analysis of the human being whose sexually explicit novels shocked a world still reeling over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The emerging picture is that of an utterly self-motivated, paradoxical rebel. There is Miller as meandering romantic, Miller as iconoclast, and Miller as book fiend. He was allergic to responsibility yet compulsively moral; a Bohemian who refused to relinquish his middle-class comforts; an anti-Semite who romanticized Jewishness; a God-fearing denouncer of institutionalized religion; a believer in the buddy system who pedestalled independent women yet was confounded by their refusal to be controlled.

Miller’s upbringing irrevocably shaped the rebellious evolution of a sensitive boy. The son of second-generation German immigrants, Henry Miller grew up in turn-of-the-century Manhattan and Brooklyn. Years later, when he returned to his grandfather’s native Germany, Miller wondered “how Heinrich Muller . . . could have left such a place for New York.”

Miller’s blatant dislike for his mother contributed to the dual nature underlying his disastrous relationships with women. Ferguson, refreshingly, does not lambaste Louise Miller: Louise, like most women, was a prisoner of domestic circumstances. Henry’s father was a “heavy drinker, and though he was a good tailor he had little ambition or drive.”

Sexuality was, of course, an omnipresent if forbidden subject. Miller viewed his “first naked woman” during puberty: his pal Tony’s older sister, over whose bed hung a crucifix. Religion and sex, those indelible companions, fit Miller’s dual perception with perfect precision.

Miller struggled briefly with a nine-to-five existence, trying his hand as a filing clerk, a part-time piano teacher, as a Western Union “spy” and even a stint in his father’s tailor shop. Miller offset his terrific boredom and tension headaches induced by his doomed first marriage by popping pills and attending burlesque shows.

He consumed literature at a pace one could only describe as insatiable. Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Madame Blavatsky and a host of others became his gods. Knut Hamsun’s novel, Hunger, would spark his formal decision to become a writer.

Taxi-dancer June Mansfield Smith, Miller’s second wife, provided the axis of what would become his greatest literary achievement. The Tropics would transform June into a cult figure. To Miller, June was “an ikon, his own personal Cleo, an unreal sex goddess who had climbed down from the magic world of the stage, walked straight into his life and appropriated it”—though Miller had more than a hand in this “appropriation”, obsessively pursuing his at-first reluctant goddess.

Their estrangement was well under way when Miller met and fell in love with Anais Nin—along with Paris itself. Nin was attracted to Miller’s “relaxed personality and his obvious ability to savor the joys of the moment”, while Miller found Nin’s “impression of great physical frailty” appealing. Thus began the literary affair that would set Miller’s career in forward motion. He put away his two failed novels, Crazy Cock and Clipped Wings, and began Tropic of Cancer.
The Paris years, that hovering period between wars, of life on the edge, cheap rent and food, the horror and close calls of his Jewish friends during the Nazis’ reign, are acutely documented, a treasury of names and events.  A “precocious twenty three year old” named Lawrence Durrell wrote a fan letter to Miller, by then an underground cult figure, beginning once of literary history’s most durable friendships.

On an ironic note: Huntington Cairns, Special Advisor to the U.S. Treasury Department, “the man personally responsible for forbidding the entry of Miller’s book into his own country”, was one of the highest bidders for Miller’s pseudonymously-written pornography.

Kate Millett’s summary of Miller, that he was “a compendium of American sexual neuroses”, makes for an accurate, but not dismissive conclusion. Henry Miller was indisputably a gifted writer whose contribution to the world of letters helped open the floodgates of public perception that led in turn, to the crackdown on hypocritical morality. Like the other great confessional writers of this century, this “sexual guru” tapped his own life, along with the lives of friends and lovers, in order to carve his own unique brand of fiction. Henry Miller: A Life allows readers to judge for themselves and, to paraphrase one of Ferguson’s favorite expressions, is unquestionably “Miller-objective”.

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