Crazy Cock (3 page)

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.

C
RAZY
C
OCK
, 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.

—M
ARY
V. D
EARBORN

April 1991

T
HE 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.

Apologies to Michael Fraenkel.

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

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.

I
T 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.

A singular life she led with the Krupanowa woman. Drugged by the ritual of the mass, they staggered to the slaughterhouse, thence to the lives of the Popes. They ran their fingers over the skins of cretins and elephants, they photographed jewels and artificial flowers, and coolies stripped to the waist; they explored the pathologic monsters of the insect world and the still more pathologic monsters of Rome. At night they dreamed of the idols buried in the morain of Campeche and bulls charging from the stockade to expire under straw hats.

H
ER PULSE
quickened as the tumultuous procession of thoughts drove the bright warm blood full-crested through her veins. She looked at the book in her lap and saw again these words:

“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.”

Suddenly, without let or warning, a dynamo broke loose inside her. Every particle of her molten being was convulsed with shuddering raptures. Mottled words drugged her with venomous lust. . . . She felt that in everything, sublime or ignoble, there was hidden a turbulent, a vital force, a significance and beauty of which art, however glorious, was but a pale reflection. “I want to live!” she muttered wildly. “I want to live!”