Miller’s egocentric personality made him peculiarly well-suited to champion one of the rights he defended most fiercely in later life – the right of the individual not to read a newspaper. In his ground-level account of the five years between 1923 and 1928 in The Rosy Crucifixion fragments of history in the making do occasionally flicker through the story – in a bar one day, for example, he overhears two men discussing the Scopes trial of 1925* – but of the concerns of the world at large he relates little. He was the historian of his life, not its sociologist, so the relationship which developed between his wife and Jean Kronski in late 1926 seems, in his account, like a freakish bolt from the blue; yet in many aspects it reflected a general process of changing sexual attitudes that began in Greenwich Village back in 1912, and ran with accelerating effect from about 1920 onwards. This process was closely bound up with the growing impact of Freud’s theories on the standards and behaviour of young Americans in the years between 1912 and 1930.
A wealthy hostess named Mabel Dodge played an important part in this process of change. Her Wednesday evening salons at number 23 Fifth Avenue, beginning in 1912, marked the start of the modern history of Greenwich Village as a bohemian and cultural centre. At these evenings a wide range of taboo subjects were discussed – sex, birth control, labour relations, trade unionism and the need for a socialist revolution. The Village was a nice mixture of political and personal radicalism, with political radicalism the dominant strain. Malcolm Cowley, the historian of the public life of the Village where Miller was the chronicler of its private life, wrote that the ‘Bohemians read Marx and all the radicals had a touch of the bohemian: it seemed that both types were fighting in the same cause.’1 Villagers, he wrote, might get their heads broken in Union Square by the police before going along to the Liberal Club at 137 MacDougal Street to recite Swinburne in bloody bandages. Bill Haywood of the IWW, one of the orators who so impressed Miller at Union Square meetings, was a regular attender at Dodge’s evenings, and Dodge’s brief affair with the communist poet John Reed in 1913 symbolized the coexistence of political and personal radicalism among Village artists and intellectuals in this pre-war period.
The War and the Draft Law of 1917 split and polarised the two tendencies. Those whose rebellion was largely a personal reaction against the restrictions of puritan morality had little difficulty in coming to terms with Woodrow Wilson’s world, while political radicals were forced to take issue with government policy in a way that left them exposed to Establishment responses. The Masses, a magazine founded in 1911 in the basement of the socialist Rand School, where Miller had once been invited to lead the literary classes, became, under the editorship of Max Eastman, the mouthpiece of the political radicals. John Reed covered the war from Europe for The Masses, and his experiences there and interviews with French soldiers convinced him that it was being fought to decide trading rights rather than in defence of liberty and democracy. He said as much in his despatches, each of which closed with the words: ‘This is not our war’.
Inevitably, The Masses fell foul of the law and in trials in April and October 1918 its political teeth were pulled. The demise of The Masses, the Red Scares of 1917 and 1919 – which led to the infamous Palmer raids of 1920 in which 4000 suspected communist revolutionaries were jailed – and the death of Reed himself in Moscow in October 1920 effectively signalled the end of political radicalism in Greenwich Village. By 1923, the time Miller and June were frequenting its tea-houses and speakeasies, talk about revolution had given way to talk about psychoanalysis. Mabel Dodge was also an early enthusiast for the new theories of psychoanalysis, and so nicely embodies the changeover from political to personal concerns among Villagers’ leaders.
The Freudian theory that fueled this switch from the political to the private made its advance against an entrenched puritanism associated with the Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt. The sexual morality of this institutionalized puritanism was prohibitive, joyless and often frightening. Male masturbation was a common target, a typical product of the era being a book published in 1900, Natural History and Hygiene by Dr J.H. Kellogg, which described for the worried parents of adolescent boys thirty-nine unmistakeable signs of masturbation. As late as 1912, around Union Square and in the upper reaches of the Bowery, New York had its dime museums for ‘Men Only’ which exhibited the horrible effects of masturbation, syphilis and other venereal diseases. In his youth Miller frequented these ‘Men Only’ museums with a horrified fascination, and the guilt which accompanied his sex-life with Pauline Chouteau – the diary entries each time they made love, the driven athleticism, the sea-bathing and early-morning bike rides – was probably typical of the response of most adolescents of the period to the fear-ridden sexual atmosphere of the time. The general belief among physicians until about 1912 was that excessive masturbation and intercourse were not only debilitating but downright dangerous. With early hair-loss as well as short-sightedness among Dr Kellogg’s thirty-nine symptoms of self-abuse, the fact that Miller contrived to hold on to the idea that sex was a joy, no matter what the doctors said, was a real victory for his faith in the truth of his own perceptions.
The invention of the concept of adolescence was another weapon in the war against sex. To a society that regarded sex as a violent and uncivilizing phenomenon it seemed that an artificially extended childhood might serve to contain it during its most explosive phase. The idea was the creation of upper middle class parents in England and Germany. It was successfully imported to the United States, where it spread to the lower middle class. Some odd paradoxes resulted from this theory, and The Rosy Crucifixion contains several descriptions of Miller, aged twenty-two, larking about with his Xerxes friends like a boy of fourteen at the same time as he was having a sexual relationship with a woman fifteen years his senior.
In the dominant puritan ethic of the pre-war years, only grown men, whores and lower-class women were believed to experience sexual pleasure. The medical stereotype of the average decent woman became progressively purer and less realistic between 1870 and 1912, and in 1911 at least one practising physician believed the wholly passionless woman to be the norm.2 Repression, modesty and innocence were the sexual equivalents of social gentility and refinement, and since many women believed there was a connection between sexual pleasure and conception, the repression of pleasure became also a means of female contraception.
Women read more books than men, and it was out of consideration for the sensibilities of women that the censorship of books in the last years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century was pursued with such vigour. Mabel Dodge recalled how the Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane cut the word ‘pervert’ from one of her short stories, explaining to her that it ‘represents a thought which I do not want to put into the minds of millions of people, even for the sake of truth’.3 His words echo those spoken by Anthony Comstock at Clark University just a few months before Freud’s epochal lectures there in 1909: ‘Once the reimagining faculties of the mind are linked to the sensual nature by an unclean thought, the forces for evil are set in motion which rend asunder every safeguard to virtue and truth.’4 Comstock was the promoter of what was known as ‘civilized morality’, an ideal of conduct rather than a description of reality, in which sexual purity, chastity, monogamy and moral cleanliness were the goal. Theodore Roosevelt was an avid promoter of the ideal which, with its rigorous opposition to birth control, clearly implied that sex for pleasure was wrong.
Mental purity was as important as physical, and Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice campaigned energetically in this cause, seizing books, magazines, photographs, playing cards, pills, powders and rubber articles. Comstock, who once boasted of having caused the suicides of fifteen booksellers and publishers,5 knew little about literature. The banning in England of Mrs Warren’s Profession by the Lord Chamberlain and the withdrawal by the New York Public Library from its shelves of Man and Superman in 1905 drew a sarcastic response from Shaw and a counterblast from Comstock. He railed against ‘this Irish smut-dealer’ and warned that if any attempts were made to stage his ‘filthy productions’, the law would deal severely with them. The result of this outburst was that Mrs Warren’s Profession attracted huge attention when it opened in New York, and the producer of the play was duly summonsed. Surprisingly, the Society lost the case.
Yet there was still a long way to go. In 1916 the publisher of Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius withdrew the novel under pressure from the Society, which complained about its ‘obscenities on seventy-five pages and profanities on seventeen’. Six years later, in 1922, along with Ulysses and Women in Love, the book was still having trouble. Even the mantle of scientific respectability was no guarantee of protection: in 1913 a Boston neurologist was threatened with prosecution after publishing articles inspired by a psychoanalytic view of sex, and in 1917 many basic psychoanalytic texts were still housed in a guarded room of the New York Public Library, where they could be read in a cage only by those who had the special permission of the librarian.
As the Shaw decision showed, the climate was changing. The period between 1911 and 1917 covering the breakthrough of Freud’s theories in the United States coincided with a social development that has been called ‘the repeal of reticence’. In part this was the unforeseen consequence of the agitation of purity crusaders who, in attempting to stamp out prostitution, discovered the truth of Arthur Brisbane’s perception – that the major result of any reference at all to sexual behaviour, whether approving or disapproving, is to arouse public curiosity about it. Public debate about sexual mores soon passed beyond the control of the puritans who had raised the issues, and discussion was in time followed by actual changes in sexual behaviour. Zealots for prohibition found that they too had failed to foresee one important result of their campaigning: in pre-prohibition days the saloon had been strictly out of bounds to women, but with the legal dismemberment of a whole drinking tradition women enthusiastically invaded the new speakeasies.
In view of the strain of living with a dishonest image of themselves, women had a particular interest in promoting the sexual revolution of the post-war period, and many of the most active campaigners in Greenwich Village were female. From the establishment of Mabel Dodge’s salon in 1912 to the end of Marianne Moore’s period as editor of The Dial in 1929, women played a major part in breaking down the literary and social taboos of the period. Margaret Anderson and her assistant on The Little Review, Jane Heap, were the first to print Ulysses anywhere in the world. The instalments they ran between 1918 and 1920 earned them a conviction for obscenity and a $100 fine. In 1915, Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation was prosecuted and found ‘contrary not only to the law of the state, but to the law of God’, for which Mrs Sanger was sent to jail. Emma Goldman agitated tirelessly for free love, contraception and the repeal of literary censorship. Other outstanding women of the period were Crystal Eastman, whose Woman’s Peace Party opposed American entry into the war; Henrietta Rodman, who invented the feminist uniform of bobbed hair, meal-sack dress and sandals and campaigned for equal rights, female suffrage and dress reform; Neith Boyce, Susan Glaspell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who led the agitation which resulted in votes for women in 1920. As well as these ‘responsible’ women there were those like June, strong individualists who did not need the support of a movement or the authority of statistics in order to live the kind of life they wished to live. June was not in any meaningful sense of the word a feminist. Rather than Henrietta Rodman’s drab costume she preferred a tight-fitting red dress, a flowing black cape and bare legs, and was a shameless exploiter of the difference between the sexes. Yet the atmosphere of foment and change in norms and values affected the use she made of her freedom quite as much as it affected Henry’s response to her behaviour.
Kinsey’s figures appear to confirm the rise of a new set of sexual mores after the turn of the century. The answers to questions put by his researchers suggest that women born around 1900 were between two and three times as likely to have had sex before marriage as those born before 1900, and that about a quarter of all girls born between 1900 and 1909 were having premarital sex by the age of twenty.6 Surveys of American magazines revealed that after 1918 tolerance of adultery, divorce and birth control increased rapidly, reaching a peak between 1925 and 1929, especially among intellectuals; by the mid 1920s even the stereotype of the passionless woman was quite dead.
As discussions of sexual behaviour gave way to practical experimentation, the Village experienced a wave of experiments with lifestyles. The value of marriage as an institution quickly became the subject of a long-lasting debate that survived Bertrand Russell’s attack and John Cowper Powys’s defence in 1930. For a time there was a fashion for men and women to live together without being married. It took the self-assurance of the well-educated and the wealthy to carry out such experiments with aplomb, and while Miller remained ‘addicted to the marriage state’,7 June’s working-class instincts insisted on marriage while the Bohemian in her decreed that the marriage be kept secret from her friends. The ideal of ‘free love’ which Emma Goldman promoted so keenly, and which made such an immediate appeal to Henry Miller, inevitably turned into a fashion for promiscuity; and when promiscuity became tame it was replaced by a fashion for homosexuality.
When the cult of homosexuality first became apparent in the Village, around 1926, it was associated with a number of clubs and bars like the Rainbow Inn, Trilby’s and the Village Grove. Even before she met Jean Kronski, June had been aware that homosexuality was in fashion and had developed a curiosity about such places. In talking about them with Henry she displayed a mixture of fascination, contempt, amusement and disgust. Her indiscriminately flirtatious nature was challenged by the opening up of a new field, and one evening at a club called Jo’s she was bitten on the breast by a lesbian. Jo’s was typical of the clubs she frequented. Caroline Ware, who carried out an extensive sociological survey of the Village between 1920 and 1930, described the place thus:
Jo’s was located in the basement of a tenement building. In the low, narrow room, cheap, brightly-coloured tables, rickety chairs, a few booths and an old piano were crowded as tight as they could be jammed. Liquor was not served, but it was assumed that the patrons would bring it, and order sandwiches and ginger ale. The place was usually crowded and always informal. Girls making a first visit to the place could be sure that the men beside whom they found themselves seated would assume that they were a party for the evening and night. If the girls were first at a table, they were sure to be joined. From time to time someone started to play the piano and people danced in the crowded aisles between the tables with whatever strangers they happened to be sitting beside. The proprietor stood by the door, greeting everybody, eyeing all newcomers and making announcements. Many of those present were young girls and boys with pale faces and circled eyes who drank heavily. The rest were a few middle-aged men who had obviously come for relaxation and to pick up a girl, and a number of older people, some with an artistic or literary past, who were known as habitués. A young Chinese communist came to pick up someone who could help him translate and criticize his work. Certain familiar figures who were always known to be trying to borrow money were cold-shouldered by everyone. A couple of young girls from the south who obviously came from substantial homes and a cultivated background were regularly present and conspicuous, dancing together and constantly drunk.
These people had two preoccupations – sex and drink. In the early years of the decade, free love and promiscuity had been a sufficient subject for talk and entertainment in most groups. By 1930, promiscuity was tame and homosexuality had become the expected thing. One girl who came nightly was the joke of the place because she was trying so hard to be a Lesbian, but when she got drunk she forgot and let the men dance with her. A favourite entertainer was a ‘pansy’ whose best stunt was a take-off on being a ‘pansy’. To lend a touch of intellectuality and to give people a sense of activity, the proprietor set aside two nights each week for discussion or performance by regular patrons. These evenings, however, did not interrupt the group’s major preoccupation, for the subjects chosen for discussion were such things as ‘the social position of the gigolo’ and ‘what is sex appeal?’ On the latter subject, the views of the Lesbians present were especially called for.8
Elsewhere in her study Caroline Ware observes: ‘at each stage in the Village’s history some one group was identified with the locality and offered easy contact to newcomers. In 1930 it was the pseudo-bohemians and especially the Lesbians, into whose group it was easily possible for strangers to find their way.’9
One effect of Freud’s stratification of the psyche on the breakdown of contemporary sexual morality was the creation in some people of sexual confusion, based on the implication in his theory of the unconscious that accurate self-perception is, at the deepest level, an impossibility. Thus, besides the real lesbians in the Village, and the women merely pretending to be lesbians, there were also women who were not even sure whether they were pretending to be lesbians or not. It was into this baffling atmosphere of semi-intellectualized sexual confusion that Henry Miller was plunged the night his wife came home, breathless with excitement over her discovery of the young Jean Kronski in her overalls and worn-out shoes.
Miller always claimed to have an ‘absolute belief in June’s integrity, loyalty, fidelity’ in spite of the ‘attitude of friends who misinterpret my attitude … think it indifference’.10 His occasional expressions of hostility towards men like Hoblitzell and French only partially compromise the claim, for there is a fine distinction between real sexual jealousy and the superficially similar response that is largely an expression of affronted pride. The crisis of violent jealousy into which June’s relationship with Jean Kronski plunged Miller certainly contained elements of both these responses; for humiliating as it was to discover that his first serious rival for his wife’s affections was a woman, it was perhaps even more painful for him to have to listen as June enthused about the artistic genius of her new friend. It was only too apparent that, after her slight mistake with Henry, June believed that she had finally discovered a ‘real’ artist in Jean.
In fact, Jean Kronski was not the girl’s real name. June claimed later that it was she who ‘named’ her Jean, although it is by no means certain she was telling the truth: the mental breakdowns she suffered later in life did further damage to a hold on reality that was always fragile, and in old age June made several curious claims – for example, that it was she who had submitted her husband’s resignation to Western Union, and without his knowledge – all of which tend to exaggerate the extent to which she had been responsible for the aura of myth surrounding Miller’s life in the 1920s. In his notebooks on the triangular situation Miller consistently referred to his wife’s friend as ‘Jean Kronski’, while in The Rosy Crucifixion the lesbian who became infatuated with his ‘Mona’ is ‘Stasia’. Early drafts of the autobiographical novels experiment with still other names for her. In another casual twist Miller used the name ‘Thelma’ in a passing reference in The Time of the Assassins, his long essay on Rimbaud. Alfred Perlès, an Austrian writer who met the girl in Paris and used her as a character in his autobiographical novel The Renegade also called her ‘Jean Kronski’.
If there was once a purpose to this exercise in obscurity, it is hardly possible to discern it now, and Jean Kronski has established itself firmly in the Miller legend as the real name of ‘Stasia’ in The Rosy Crucifixion. A great deal of circumstantial evidence suggests, however, that she was properly Martha Andrews, known to those outside the Millers’ circle as Mara. The daughter of wealthy parents from Baltimore, Maryland, she had only recently arrived in New York with the intention of becoming an artist. Waverley Root knew her slightly at this time and described how she would visit him at his Jane Street flat in Greenwich Village. The room was tiny, and when Mara entered ‘the place suddenly became crowded’. ‘She outweighed and outreached me,’ he wrote.11 Her physical appearance was striking and called forth contradictory responses. June said that she had the ‘face of youth, neither male nor female’. Miller thought she looked like Rimbaud, while the sister of her close friend, Jean Bakewell, recalled her as ‘very ugly’ and looking ‘like a bullfrog’.12 Perlès found her ‘an extremely lovely girl’ and a ‘veritable morceau de roi’. Cyril Connolly, who met her in Paris in 1928 through Jean Bakewell, whom he later married, noted especially ‘her frankness and sincerity, her boy’s clothes and rather talented unhappiness’.13 In the course of her brief life, which ended in suicide in a Bank Street apartment in Greenwich Village in 1942, this enigmatic young woman crossed the Millers’ paths for a few months in 1926 to devastating effect.
Miller felt the force of Mara’s influence on the marriage some time before he actually met her. He had always bemoaned the fact that June had no friends of her own sex, and actively encouraged her to try to establish friendships with other women, and June had always insisted that she had no need of women friends. Now, when Miller began to complain about the intensity of her friendship with Mara Andrews, she would retort: ‘You forced me to seek someone else.’14 The repellent Bruga on the dresser became the symbol of her independence, and Henry’s ridicule of her enthusiasm for the doll only strengthened her defence of Mara.
Miller began noticing changes in June which he attributed to her new friendship. One was the bizarre make-up she would put on each day before going out to work: coal dust and vaseline round her eyes, heavy mascara, crimson alizarin on her lips, a green layer of powder on her cheeks. This dramatic-sounding toilette may have been part of a fashion inspired by the heavy make-up used by vamps in the movies, and Miller complained that it made her look like a whore. June was unmoved – it was only another sign that beneath Henry’s khaki shirt beat an irredeemably bourgeois heart. And the more extreme she became in her bohemianism, the more did the Germanic properness and primness and fussiness in him come to the fore. One draft description of her spoke of:
Clothes, towels, shoes, socks, worn to shreds in no time, or ruined by cigarette holes, by spillt (sic) wine or gravy or paint. Habit of doing what she likes, regardless of what she has on – because it would cramp her style. Allowing others to wear her things and ruin them for her: fur coat, beautiful slippers, evening wraps, mantillas, scarves, etc. Mislaying, losing, having things stolen: purses, bracelets, pendants, costly kerchiefs, gloves, money. (Finding 50 dollar bills floating around on floor, staircase, in clothes closet, etc, where they had fallen out of bag in which they were usually carried all crumpled up like used toilet paper. Hence super-cautiousness on my part in guarding own personal belongings which have special value for me. Dictionary, for instance, watching it each time Joan (ie June) uses it so that it will not be dropped on floor, or leaves wrinkled, or pages cut or torn.15
Once when he met her outside a restaurant she was wearing a hat which was covered with sawdust or plaster from the walls. When he pointed this out to her she expressed complete indifference.
Her rampant bohemianism led to increasingly violent arguments between them as Miller struggled to assert some control. Every morning they argued about the make-up and about her habit of going bare-legged in public. Some of their fiercest arguments concerned her way of leaving the house with a freshly-lit cigarette dangling from her lips. Since the Sullivan Ordinance of 1908 it had been illegal for women to smoke in public in New York City, and although this had been breached so many times that it was not a vital issue by 1927, Miller was conservative in his view of sexual rôles and was humiliated by June’s behaviour. With neither money nor artistic success to boast of, his only status lay in his having a beautiful wife; but what use was a beautiful wife as status symbol when the husband had no control over her? It was not, anyway, so much the fact of her smoking a cigarette in the street as the way she smoked it that bothered him. As they walked together to the subway, the breakfast argument still darkening the air between them, she would puff away at it in a silent, vengeful fashion that seemed to him ‘not only defiant but insulting’.16 At times his rage was such that he had to struggle against the desire to tear it from her mouth and fling it in the gutter.
By the time Miller met Mara Andrews in person he had already heard more than enough about her. According to June, she was a Romanoff princess, an orphan who had been educated in a convent. She spoke several languages, played several instruments, and besides being a sculptress was a painter and a poet. She was an androgynous mystic of a genius who uttered strange Slavic imprecations when entering a room for the first time, wore amulets to ward off evil, smoked marijuana and walked through the streets in odd shoes carrying a douchebag, with Alice in Wonderland in one pocket of her overalls and the Tao Te Ching in the other. At each successive revelation concerning the fabulous Mara, Miller wagged his head ‘like a Jew who has just been informed of a fresh calamity’. He was already beginning to get the idea: no wonder he was not romantic enough for his wife – he was neither a genius, nor a Romanoff, nor a bastard. June was a collector of gods, and his place in the pantheon had been taken. Suddenly everything was ‘bourgeois’. Even his heterosexuality was bourgeois: Mara was ‘the greatest living poet in America’ simply because there was the same strong flavour of homosexuality in her work as in Whitman. The ability to ‘pass beyond the limits of normality, in love and in art, was to achieve the insuperable’, according to June.17 Mara was a lesbian who happened to write poetry, ergo she was a great poet.
She was also clearly a confused adolescent who appealed strongly to June’s instinct for lame ducks and outsiders, and at June’s prompting she moved from her squalid apartment in Clarkson Street to one in Pierrepont Street, just north of Remsen Street. Thereafter the two women spent much of their time together, either roaming the Village or at Mara’s or at Remsen Street.
Meeting her for the first time, Henry detested her. His jealousy was further aroused when he saw June treating Mara with the same almost religious awe as she had once treated him. Once, at Remsen Street, she washed Mara’s feet for her. Henry’s protests over such scenes were dismissed as bourgeois, prosaic, dull. His jealousy, now that she had finally managed to get him to display it openly, was ‘unnecessary’.
One day June came home with a story about Mara having been committed to Bellevue mental hospital; if she agreed to look after her, the authorities would be willing to release her at once. Miller, though disposed to regard this as yet another of June’s inventions, haplessly agreed to allow Mara to move in with them. Shortly after, all three moved into a basement apartment on Henry Street which had formerly been a laundry.
Deliberately or not, June was paying Henry back with a vengeance for foisting Joe O’Reagan on her during their first stay at Remsen Street, and for all the intensity with which he had insisted on maintaining friendships which dated back to his childhood. She and Mara lived like men. They frequented speakeasies, got drunk together and stayed away all night without explanation if they felt like it. On one such occasion, Miller prepared the first of a number of dramatic scenes for June when she returned. He took all his old love letters out of the wooden chest that June had bought especially to hold them, gathered up old photographs and manuscripts, annotated them and then scattered them about the bedroom. He wedged their marriage certificate under Count Bruga’s arm and propped him up on the pillow on her bed. When the two came in that night, Mara, who in yet another breach in the privacy of the marriage had adopted June’s habit of calling him Val, asked coolly: ‘Is this another one of your gestures, Val?’ June did not even bother to read his annotations, and treated it all as a joke. Henry, from being a ‘god’, had become ‘Val the nut’, a child-like eccentric who could be lied to with impunity.
Waverley Root, an occasional visitor to the basement flat, recalled it as ‘six or seven large rooms, all of them empty, unless you count a few burlap bags thrown into one corner’. On meeting Henry there for the first time he got the impression that he ‘seemed to relish the idea that he was living with two women at the same time’, one of whom was ‘pretty and delightfully feminine’ while the other was ‘built like a football player’. Later he realized that his impression was mistaken. The place quickly became a bohemian nightmare for Miller as June abandoned all attempts to play the part of the domesticated wife. The beds remained unmade all day, the sheets were never washed, nor the towels, nor his shirts. The sinks would regularly get blocked with the remains of their meals, so that the dishes had to be washed in the bath. The window-shades were always kept drawn and the windows themselves were never washed. Mara Andrews’s sculpting left the floor strewn with plaster of Paris, along with her paints, books, cigarette ends and dirty cups and saucers. The place was permanently cold.18
June no longer cared to save her husband’s face in front of his old friends. When one day George Wright, a former member of the Xerxes Society, turned up with his wife on a visit, June left the house at the first opportunity, and went up to Harlem with Mara and a male friend on another fund-raising trip. She did not return until 5 am the following day. Miller, who had once enjoyed June’s exhibitionist boldness, haplessly recalled her thereupon ‘mounting me despite proximity of Wright’s wife’. At his insistence – and much against June’s will – the couple were now sleeping in twin beds, still a novelty in the 1920s. This, after just three years of marriage, suggests perhaps that June was already becoming too much for him to handle. Later, when the marriage was definitely over, he reminisced with angry longing about her ‘overwhelming sex’.
Though he felt himself ‘licked, incapable of anything’, Miller tried for a while to compete for June’s attention with Mara. He bought two tickets to Battleship Potemkin and asked her to join him. She made an excuse. Only half-jokingly, he suggested that she establish a rota system, dividing her time evenly between himself and Mara. The situation was so completely foreign to him: previously, whether with his mother, Pauline or Beatrice, he had been the centre of attraction, the loved one. Soon he had to suffer the sight of the two women sleeping in the same bed next to his. This happened twice, and though he had often in all innocence slept with his own male friends in the past, his knowledge that Mara was a lesbian made the situation sinister and threatening. Beyond dreaming up what he called ‘asinine plans’ to drive Mara Andrews permanently insane and get her locked up, he could conceive of no remedy for it.
His depression increased. Endless lacerating discussions in the flat about lesbianism and perversion over what he graphically referred to as the ‘gut table’ sickened him. In part it seemed to him merely the foolish complication and intellectualization of something simple, yet he read the Satyricon and Aristophanes, as well as Auguste Forel on The Sexual Question in an effort to understand more about homosexuality. He read Otto Weininger too, encountering there for the first time the theory of sexual polarity which was to baffle and fascinate him throughout his life. He sometimes induced Emil Conason to join their discussions, and thereby found himself in something of a quandary. In this intensely Freudian era Conason’s status as a psychiatrist was high, and Miller clearly wanted him somehow or other to prove to June and Mara that there was something in some absolute sense wrong with homosexuality; or that it was a curable condition brought on by such and such a set of factors. Yet his respect for independent thinking and subjective truth led him to resent it when Conason dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant any confession by Mara that did not fit in with his theories; or clung tenaciously to his own explanations and theories even when Mara disagreed with them on the basis of her own experiences. This was perhaps the first inkling Miller had that psychoanalysis might not be the magic key to the understanding of human beings that it had at first seemed. June, aware that it was really her who was under attack, one day found a psychologist of her own and returned triumphantly spouting what Miller described as ‘a lot of gibberish about glandular disturbances’. An actress herself, she was utterly convinced that Mara was only pretending to be a lesbian. Henry was not so convinced.
There were times during these troubled months when Miller’s strong pragmatic streak began to show itself, and he and Mara, spending a lot of time at the flat, began getting to know one another better. She even wrote a poem about him, dedicated ‘To HVM’:
His pupils upheld his eyelids
with
spherical
blue
columns
Where he placed the gift of a
TARANTULA
(with a tiny pink bow
around its neck and spectacles resting on its nose)
This he pushed
with
a
pin
From his sardonic heights,
He pulled melted sand in
hopes of making it hard, and
wore nose rings in his tongue
that he might lick the steel dust off
chalk kettles where he kept his stew …
But come back to the shriveling surface:
Such a being has forgotten the fast-fading
stars
IN SCIENCE AND CAT TRICKS
Deck him in moon tears –
(the breath of a freshly turned tendril)
May dew bleach the copper hairs at his ear.
HE CAN’T PRESS OUT HIS PEARL.
WRINKLED WITH A SCRATCHING
STEEL PEN.
Let him live to prove
dissection
doesn’t
sleep
with
sky.
His circus only flings sawdust
To crack the dovetails of speed.
On a dried sucking night he may muse
and finger a cottonwad ‘til it’s gray
and the beyond of his eyes will seek
that of the lonesome unborn.
Mara’s god was Rimbaud, and it was during one of their conversations together that Miller heard the poet’s name for the first time. She was obsessed by him, and even claimed to be living her life in direct imitation of his. Rimbaud’s genius, precocity and strange fate made him a natural candidate for Miller’s pantheon, and later on he did become one of his greatest idols. At the time, he was too put off by the source of the recommendation to accept it. Mara also introduced him to the worlds of Japanese and Chinese art, and impressed him greatly when she began covering the walls of her room with bizarre paintings. He was beginning to want to paint himself, and asked Mara if she would give him lessons.
For June, sexual deviation was what guaranteed the quality of an artist’s work, while for Henry, childishness was the hallmark of genius. After getting to know Mara, it often seemed to him that she had ‘all the childish characteristics’ necessary to be a genius. It was a dispiriting thought. The fact that neither her puppets nor her poetry impressed him was never quite enough to free him of the fear that Mara was the real artist, and he ‘the Failure’.
The old life, the pre-June life, had almost faded now. All contact with Beatrice had ended over Henry’s inability to pay his alimony and the profitless farce of the candy enterprise. There would have been little point in their keeping up the relationship anyway, since it had declined to the point of total mutual antipathy. On one of the last occasions on which he had visited her there had been a miserable scene as the two of them held little Barbara on the kitchen table, screaming with fear, while a doctor pierced her eardrums. The visit ended in a more violent argument than usual, and shortly afterwards Barbara was told that her father had gone abroad.
Once, while wandering in the street near the old home, he saw a group of children playing, and thought he recognized his own daughter among them. The presence of uncertainty reminded him of the crime of his desertion, and in a forlorn attempt to ease his conscience he toyed briefly but vainly with Strindbergian doubts about whether or not he really was the child’s father:
How do I know it’s my child? How do I know whether my wife was faithful to me? And what difference does it make now whether she was or not? I was the one who was unfaithful. Someone opened a door unexpectedly and there we were. That’s infidelity. If I sit here and dream about all the women I’d like to sleep with that’s alright. The law doesn’t say anything about bad thoughts. Bad thoughts! What are bad thoughts?…19
With the coming of Christmas there was no question of calling in to spend even part of the day with Beatrice and Barbara. As usual Henry made arrangements with his mother and father to go to Decatur Street. He was at first surprised when June asked whether Mara might come along with them. Whether a real lesbian or only a determined disorderer of the senses, Mara always dressed the part. She rolled her own Bull Durham cigarettes when not smoking cigars and dressed like a man, freely helping herself from Henry’s selection of ties to complete her outfits. She also had a thick, brass-studded belt which she sometimes wore as part of a cowboy outfit. To please June, and to alleviate the certain boredom of the occasion, he agreed to let her come with them on condition that she dress like a woman.
They took small gifts with them, including a carton of Camels for his father, and Louise murmured, as she did every year, that they shouldn’t have bothered with presents; it was too extravagant of them. Sherry was handed round and familiar scenes were re-enacted. Louise, having established that Henry was once again out of work, looked with tragic sympathy at June, commiserating with her over her burden. Then she turned to Henry, as she did every year: ‘You ought not to let her work like that. It isn’t fair.’ It was ‘futile’ to expect anything to come of his scribbling. And what about Lauretta? What was to become of her? Did he never think of her? Of course, Miller answered forlornly: ‘Please don’t go on, mother. Of course I think about these things. Of course. Of course! But….’ Louise made him squirm with her absolute certainty that he would never get anywhere.
Meanwhile Mara and Henry senior were getting along nicely talking about painters and painting. Miller’s arrogant adolescent disapproval of his father was by now a thing of the past. Instructed by his own experience of disapproving and demanding women, it had turned into a fond sympathy for the old man’s accepting and unpretentious nature. Miller listened in on the conversation, and when he heard it flagging fed it titbits about the Ruskin book his father had once read, and introduced the names of some of the artists he knew Henry senior was especially fond of – Winslow Homer, Ryder and Sisley.
By the middle of the afternoon, however, the party was dragging. Tired and hungover from a late night and exhausted by the strain of being on their best behaviour, June and Mara excused themselves from the table after dinner and curled up on the sofa for a nap. As they turned about to get comfortable a sudden twanging of springs announced that they had broken it. June began giggling, Lauretta went to fetch a blanket, Louise called for a hammer, and Henry senior went out into the back yard and returned with an armful of bricks. While the sofa was being propped up Lauretta turned on the radio to listen to an operetta. The sofa had been in the family’s possession since Valentin Nieting’s time.
With June and Mara asleep, Henry had to endure alone the ritual of fielding questions about Barbara and Beatrice, followed by melancholy recollections about what an intelligent and promising boy he had been. Later his father announced that he was trying to learn French. He got out his Berlitz primer and showed Henry some of the words he was having trouble pronouncing. Trying to reassure his father, Miller told him he ought not to let little things like that worry him, adding: ‘You’ll probably never get to France anyway.’ It was the sort of remark his mother might have made, and the moment he said it he wished he could have bitten his tongue out. To ease the situation he suggested to his father that they take some air together. As they walked the streets his father, who was the local historian before him, told him all the news about old friends and neighbours: who was married, who was in jail, who was rich, who was poor, who was dead….
When they returned, June and Mara had stirred and were drinking coffee with Louise. June was trying to convince Louise that her son was a genius, and Louise was doubting it, especially since June insisted that he would be a genius even if he never wrote a line. Professionally speaking, as far as Louise was concerned, Henry was finished. Nor could she ever really forgive him for having deserted Beatrice and Barbara.
The conversation turned to relatives. The family album was produced and for a while they looked through photographs of Henry’s German relations. In general the evening passed off better than any of them had expected, and when the three returned to Henry Street they sat up a while, drinking and talking about the success of the visit. From observations on Henry senior’s surprising interest in painting the conversation turned, not for the first time, to the subject of Paris.20
Such truces were only temporary. With the two girls spending so much time together, Miller was left to his own devices in the gloomy Henry Street apartment. One of these was an early draft of a novel he would work on over the next couple of years, Crazy Cock, his account of the triangular situation which had arisen. He discovered that writing about his predicament was therapeutic. If he could not defeat the combined efforts of the women in life, perhaps he could do so in fiction by giving the world a version of events which would clearly show how greatly he had been wronged. He carried the notes for the book around with him like a loaded gun, and sometimes took them along to the Pepper Pot. Miller let June read what he was writing about her, hoping that she would see the magnitude of her errors and get back in line. She fought back, criticising the psychology of ‘Hildred’, as Miller called her in the book, and tried hard to persuade Henry to make changes. Mara Andrews was more phlegmatic in her response, and observed only that all the suffering he was going through ought to make a better writer of him. At the time, her response seemed to him cruel, although later it became his own credo.
He had other diversions whilst they were out, one of which was tidying up the apartment. Naturally this enabled him to do a little rooting in drawers and bags as well. He discovered that Mara’s father was in fact writing out checks for the rent they paid. Clearly she was from a well-to-do family, Romanoff or not. Both she and June were extremely casual with money and he continued to find screwed up dollar bills lying about on the floor and among the bedclothes.
His most interesting discovery, however, came one evening in January when they had gone out to see Mrs Fiske play in Ghosts at the Mansfield Theatre. In Mara’s room he came across a series of love notes written to her by lesbian admirers – ‘David’, ‘Lovely Jo’, ‘Michael darling’. He was shocked to find a note from Mara to June which concluded: ‘You would be a rare, delicate pervert (pardon!) if all this chaos which surrounds you were removed. Please, don’t you see what you contain?’ Most shocking of all was the discovery of a note to Mara which June had signed ‘desperate, my lover’. It seemed to him conclusive proof that his wife and her new idol had become lovers.
Even at his most wretched, Miller had always been able to observe a distance from his own feelings. This knack had stood him in good stead during the years of suffering with Pauline while longing for Cora, and it did not desert him now. It enabled him to turn his suspicions into a literary game, and he now found himself slipping into the rôle of a fictional character with whom he practised an almost mystical identification – Johan Nagel in Hamsun’s recently-published Mysteries. Fictional Nagel and real Miller both turned their suffering into existential entertainment, carrying out secret campaigns of detective work with the aim of unmasking a suspected liar. On the trail of June, Miller began making unannounced trips to the Pepper Pot. If he did not find her there he would carry on to the Caravan, the Vagabondia, the Bamboo Forest, the Mad Hatter, all the known haunts of the Village homosexual crowd until he located her; then he would watch, note, observe, follow. In spite of the background reading he had done, Miller’s response towards the phenomenon of male homosexuality remained that of society at large – a vague, amused contempt in the abstract and, in the flesh, a distinct unease at the thought that they might be taking an unorthodox interest in his person. He found himself among a crowd of them one evening at the Caravan:
They all had dirty mouths, the crooked, evil expression which, erroneously or not, the world associates with degeneracy. He wondered why he hadn’t walked away from them at once. He rubbed his perspiring hands on his overcoat as though by doing so he was removing the danger of contamination which lurked in their grasps.21
Repeatedly he tried to get June to admit that she was having a homosexual relationship with Mara, while June steadfastly maintained that her love was platonic, and that Mara was a ‘platonic lesbian’ who was simply acting a part. Unimpressed, Miller tried brutal tactics. He humiliated June once by accosting Mara at the Pepper Pot and demanding to know, in front of a crowd of their friends, whether she was ‘an invert or a pervert’. During the violent row that followed June burst out angrily: ‘You make things so complex, so ugly! You do! You see things only in your narrow, masculine way; you make everything a matter of sex. And it isn’t that at all … it’s something rare and beautiful.’22 On another occasion she revealed her jealousy of his close friendship with Joe O’Reagan. Henry, firmly believing that Mara was a practising lesbian, refused to accept that the comparison was legitimate.
Finally, as the three of them sat at the ‘gut table’ one evening, June and Mara went the whole way and suggested to him that his friendship with Joe O’Reagan was evidence of latent homosexuality. Miller became furious, used language which ‘only the very lowest had recourse to’23 and threatened without more ado to put on a red necktie and make the rounds of the clubs advertising himself, ‘a homo to rent – by the week or month – moderate terms’. ‘All along,’ he complained bitterly, ‘I thought I was a man.’24 But with Freud and the whole theory of the unconscious against him how could he prove it?
The fact that June continued her heterosexual flirting with other men was not the comfort it might have been under the circumstances. During one of his vigils outside the Pepper Pot, he saw her leave at 4 am arm in arm with a man named Nat Pendleton. Pendleton, an Olympic wrestler with a silver medal from the 1920 Games in Antwerp, was six feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds. Henry prudently kept his distance as he trailed the couple for a while before returning to Henry Street. He had his notes and his route clear in his head, and when June came back it was an easy matter to trap her into lying about her movements that evening. The difficulty was that June’s were not guilty lies, intended to cover up things of which she was ashamed, but lies to make herself and her life more exciting. Pendleton had lately been having some success in films as a ‘heavy’, and June may have hoped that he could help further her own acting career. However, she was apparently no more indulgent with him than with any of her other admirers, and felt no guilt at being caught out in a lie over what was merely a late night between bohemians. The result was that the goal of Henry’s investigations – to shame her into not lying again – was impossible to achieve. After the night with Pendleton, however, he managed to extract from her a promise that she would change her ways and not stay out late any more.
She was not merely late the following night, she didn’t come home at all. When she did return it was with a story about her mother being ill which Miller was easily able to disprove by telephoning Bensonhurst, needlessly pretending when he called to be a millionaire in the lumber trade named Johnson. Francis Smith said she had neither seen nor heard from June in months. Moreover, she flatly denied that her daughter was married. Again Miller confronted June. In some exasperation she admitted that she had lied. The real reason she had stayed out all night, she told him, was to punish him for his suspicions. On the same hopeless trail, Miller now arranged a meeting with one of her brothers. The brother confirmed that June was a born liar who had always wanted to be a famous actress. He advised Henry to follow Nietzsche’s advice in dealing with her and use the whip. Henry already had reason to be grateful to Nietzsche, since Mara specifically blamed her periodic insanity on his philosophy, but in the end he was no more capable than Nietzsche of using whips on women.
Extraordinary scenes were everyday occurrences in the Henry Street basement flat. One evening a male friend of Mara’s named Shelley gave her an exhibition of masturbation in her room. Henry didn’t attend himself but sat in his own room listening to her hysterical laughter. Mara also described how Shelley would masturbate her while she sat writing poetry. Her revelations shocked even June, and when Mara began describing sexual orgies in which she and a prostitute had participated with Maxwell Bodenheim, and how she had given paid exhibitions of lesbianism with a prostitute for the benefit of a jaded rich man, June tried to shut her up. Miller encouraged her, however, praising her honesty. He briefly hoped that Shelley, who was clearly interested in Mara, might somehow manage to show her the sexual light and take her off his hands. June, realizing what was happening, barred Shelley from the house. She was the mistress, and both Henry and Mara were afraid of upsetting her. Shelley was a poet, and the fact that one of his poems contained a reference to ‘that magnificent half-woman June’ was further dispiriting proof to Henry of the reputation she was acquiring in the Village.
Miller contributed to the extraordinary scenes. One night when he had been out drinking until dawn at Hubert’s cafeteria he came home to find Mara sleeping in his bed. In a fury he dragged her out by the hair, vomited, then urinated in the bath tub. In a second, less sophisticated account of the evening, he relates that he urinated on Mara and then slept in the bathtub.25 This other version also trebles the amount of money spent on drink at Hubert’s before the incident.
Often, in his desperate struggle to keep his place in the ménage, Miller resorted to gestures of violent infantility. Once he walked round and round in the outhouse until he collapsed from exhaustion. June pretended not to notice. An occasion on which he smashed up their few sticks of furniture and burnt them in the fireplace was dramatic enough to impress her, but a half-hearted suicide attempt was less successful: returning home to find June and Mara yet again sleeping in the same bed he chased them out into the night and then swallowed some pills given to him by Emil Conason. After willing his body to Conason and writing a suicide note to June he opened the windows and lay down naked on the bed. Presumably by prior arrangement, Conason sent a telegram in the morning to June at the Pepper Pot, telling her to return to Henry Street at once. June rushed home in a highly emotional state to find Henry lying in bed, perfectly well. The pills had been only a mild sleeping draught. Relieved, she hardly glanced at the suicide note he had written. Mara arrived home while they were still in bed together, and to Henry’s outrage June let her into the room. Within moments, the girls were smoking cigarettes and planning to go out for a meal together. ‘Could I ask you not to smoke?’ whispered Henry plaintively. After they had left he clambered up onto Mara’s bed and wrote ‘Et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’ (sic) on the toilet box above it. Virgil’s suggestion – that even torments might one day provide happy memories – was the only consolation Henry could offer himself under the circumstances. That – and the faith that he might one day be able to turn it all into literature.
Henry and June seemed to encourage the melodrama in each other, and for all the emotional violence of their relationship there was also something unreal about their life together. Miller’s desperate letters to his friends, for example, which he signed ‘the Failure’, were also being filed as carbon copies for the posterity he hoped would one day read them, and it is tempting to suspect that the composition of a good suicide note was the purpose of his suicide attempt, rather than its most pitiful detail. This is not to suggest that Miller was not deeply distressed; but he had the romantic’s faculty of recovering quickly.
Earlier scenes from the marriage were replayed, but with the rôles reversed, and with Miller now in the part of the pathetic figure. Soon it was his turn to threaten to leave June, and after packing in front of an amused Mara he made his way to the Pepper Pot carrying his bag, a bunch of violets and a letter. June read the letter, thought it, like his suicide note, ‘beautiful’, and gave his proposed trip her maternal blessing: ‘Alright, go for a little while. But let me know where you are.’ Miller was devastated by her indifference, yet never connected it with his own indifference to her feelings the year before when he ran off to Florida with Joe and Emil and left her alone to face the creditors at Perry Street. Instead, he recalled the occasion when Mara, in response to his heartfelt pleadings, had finally hinted that she might agree to leave Henry Street. Then June had begged Henry to tell Mara she was welcome to stay, swearing she would do anything for him, ‘only bring Mara back. Make her stay.’ When Henry did so June’s pitifully intense gratitude was further humiliation. She was terrified of losing her friend. In the flyleaf of a book she presented to Mara she dedicated it to ‘my first and only real friend’.
Humiliation was the keynote of this period of Miller’s life. One day a policeman brought June home to him and gave him some friendly advice, man to man: ‘Well, if she wuz my wife….’ It was not necessary for him to finish. Mara had a similar brush with a policeman who found her walking down the street in overalls and smoking a cigarette and escorted her home to Henry Street. Miller reassured the man that it was quite all right, Mara was an artist, but the incident only added to his fears that he and his two uncontrollable women had now become figures of fun in the Village, suitable subjects to bring up in gossip sessions, along with Aimee Cortez and her stuffed gorilla or the Baroness Elsa von Fretag von Loringhoven, the elderly poet who wore a coal-scuttle lid or sometimes a peach basket on her head and decorated her face with postage stamps.
The most humiliating experience of all, however, came as he was standing on the stairs outside the door to the apartment one evening and heard June reasure Mara: ‘my love for Val is only like that of a mother’s for a child, that’s all.’26 This, more than anything, brought home to him how he had sunk in her estimation in the three short years they had been together. Instead of becoming June’s Raskolnikov, her Myshkin, he had become her Ridiculous Man.
From the day he left Western Union back in September 1924, Miller had been floundering. He was not a hustler like June. He had jumped down into the street, expecting it still to be filled with boys playing, having adventures and going back home at teatime. Instead he found a tough world in which, without June’s help, he might not have held out at all. As his actual adventures show, from the Californian jaunt of 1913 to the Florida flight of 1925 and the night of the smelly feet, he was a man fond of his creature comforts. The sudden trips he made, to Florida, North Carolina, Philadelphia, Atlantic City or wherever, were as much desperate attempts to flee from insoluble practical and personal problems as they were expressions of wanderlust. Had June not absolutely forbidden him to, he might well have taken a proper job.
People have breakdowns all the time without going to doctors, and at the height of his wife’s involvement with Mara Andrews, Miller seems to have had a sort of breakdown. He was plagued by vague ailments, piles and nervous vomiting, and became furious when the doctors found nothing wrong with him. The meaningless flights from New York; the pointlessly intense detective work on the trail of June, never quite knowing what he was looking for nor whether he was really looking for anything at all; his periodic nights of drunkenness; his blind furies and infantile rages all suggest that his life was slipping out of control, and by February 1927 he was about ready to admit defeat in the sex war. Tony Bring, his mouthpiece in Crazy Cock, put it very simply: ‘Alone he could tackle the Bruga woman triumphantly. Alone he could subjugate his wife. But taken in combination they were invincible.’27
This time, instead of fleeing from the situation, he tried a different response and went to bed. There he remained for ten days, stirring only to go to the toilet. Twice a day, June would rub his bottom with cream to ease the pain from his haemorrhoids. Emil Conason was summoned to see what was the matter with him. Henry snarled that he didn’t want any kikes tinkering with him, and Conason retorted that he was a lazy malingerer. Afterwards they played chess and argued about Hilaire Belloc’s book on the Jews. Miller admired Belloc, but for Conason he was merely ‘a scholar without wisdom’.
Conason was an invaluable friend to Miller. Too often in later years Henry had a tendency to cultivate sycophants among his friends. Conason, while supporting and encouraging him, never indulged him. He was especially hard on him about his sentimentality. Miller’s own view was that sentimentality was practically an illness, and he would fly into ‘a towering rage’ if criticised for it: ‘This dagger of sentimentality which people plunge into one another’s breasts so heartlessly – how little it is understood! What has the sentimentalist to be ashamed of any more than the epileptic or the neurotic?’28
This ten-day sabbatical from life turned out to be of crucial importance for Miller in two respects. In the first place, it may have been the occasion on which he discovered for himself the tactic of responding to a difficult situation by simply giving up completely and just letting events flow on as they will. This fatalism, closer to the cheerful wu-wei of Chinese taoist philosophy than the grim stoicism of Icelandic saga heroes, became in time the deepest truth he knew about the art of living.
Secondly, while in bed he read a book which was most important in a practical sense to his own future as a writer. Beatrice, in giving him Hunger in 1922, had introduced him to a possible literary identity. The fact that in giving him the book she also indirectly hastened the end of their marriage always struck Miller as ironic. A similar irony lay in the fact that it was his second wife who gave him, for his Christmas present that year, a volume by Proust which suggested to him the literary setting in which he could place the character of the starving writer from Hunger. For in reading Proust, it occurred to him that the massive and detailed recall of the events of one’s personal life, carried out in the form of a literary project, in the end creates its own synthesis and in so doing gives meaning to the life of the one recalling and recording. He also found, in Proust’s obsessive fascination with Albertine, a reflection of his own concern with June. Yet the problem, which he recognized almost straight away, was how to write honestly about June unless she were a part of his past. It was a strange death she had arranged for herself; stranger still if he recalled her desire to be famous, and the mixture of fear and hope with which she had accused Miller, in the first few days of their affair, of pursuing her only because he wanted to write a story about her.
Under the influence of Proust, Miller experimented with his own powers of recall while lying in bed. Beginning with his earliest memory, of sitting in a high chair reciting a German nursery rhyme, he realized to his astonishment: ‘if I lie here long enough and think it all out patiently, I can string my whole life together, day for day’. These were persuasive revelations. In all probability it was at some point in that period between February 12th and 22nd that the idea of writing a working-class Proust, a Brooklyn Proust, occurred to him, and he had the first intimations of a lifelong involvement with an autobiographical project of his own, The Rosy Crucifixion.
That any such project would have much to do with women was at once obvious to him, and rehearsing his past during these ten days in bed Miller thought about the rôle they had played in his life:
Retracing the course of his life he could see that it was not a continuous drama, as was so often said, but a series of dramas, each clearly defined; the early ones involving Duty, God, Amelioration, and all those that came after … women. Not the chase, for that was a blind, instinctive affair, not more important than the food problem; no, it was rather the taming of them that produced the strife and discord. A distorted sense of their own importance led them to resist subjugation; they all had the cracked idea of wanting to be emancipated, which was simply another way of saying they wanted to wear the pants. They didn’t want to wear wedding rings. Wifehood was the bunk and children a nuisance. Even the menstrual period was too much for them – a blow to their vanity, an unpleasant reminder of their femininity. If science interested them it was because science was an instrument, a weapon with which to combat nature.29
These ruminations, with their faint echo of Strindberg and Lawrence, show the extent of the bitterness he felt over his failure to dominate June, a bitterness which extended to embrace the whole tribe of ‘modern’ women who seemed not to know their place. They also show Miller’s willingness to broadcast his prejudices, one of the most important aspects of his writing. Crazy Cock is filled with outbursts against women. He rails against modern mothers who ‘have no breasts, or else they strangle them under brassieres’.30 Wandering between speakeasies with friends like Conason, Dewar and Joe O’Reagan, he notices another distressing example of the modern woman’s limitless boldness: places like the Perroquet, the Club New Yorker, the Côte d’Or, the Tree Club and Hubert’s differ in only one striking respect from the saloons of pre-prohibition days:
The only innovation was the presence of the other sex. In the old days the female element kept to the back room. They weren’t allowed to stand at the bar telling dirty stories or bragging about the number of men they slept with. Nor did they need to be dragged out with a boat hook when the place closed. No, in the old days the women of the streets sometimes conducted themselves like ladies, or at least they tried; the new age made it compulsive for the ladies to conduct themselves like whores.31
But, again like Strindberg, he never for a moment forgot how he loved both his torment and his tormentors.
During the 1920s the literary centre of gravity shifted from New York to Paris. The 1921 departures of Dos Passos, Cowley and Cummings, and the publication of Carl van Vechten’s novel Peter Whiffle in 1922, marked the beginning of the large-scale migration. Though the most influential literary exiles – Pound, Eliot, Stein, Hemingway – were not associated with the Village, their achievements in Paris acted as a magnet on the young. Malcolm Cowley writes in Exiles Return of an evening drinking in ‘an unfamiliar saloon – it was in the winter of 1925–26 – and finding that the back room was full of young writers and their wives just home from Paris. They were all telling stories about Hemingway, whose first book had just appeared, and they were talking in what I afterwards came to recognise as the Hemingway dialect – tough, matter-of-fact and confidential. In the middle of the evening one of them rose, took off his jacket and used it to show how he would dominate a bull.’32 Miller read Hemingway. He read Eliot and Pound and Faulkner (but not Fitzgerald); he read all his contemporaries – Hecht, Bodenheim, Dos Passos, Dreiser, Anderson, e.e. cummings, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, James Branch Cabell, Eimer Rice, Amy Lowell, Paul Green, Carl van Vechten – and he felt intimidated and less confident than ever that there was a place for him. He was in any event much too busy trying to dominate his wife to find out how to dominate a bull. Dostoevsky and Hamsun remained the writers that spoke to him, with the added voices of Spengler, Faure, Van Gogh (the letters), Proust and Joyce, whose courage and linguistic artistry he greatly admired. D.H. Lawrence had still not entered this pantheon, in spite of Schnellock’s enthusiasm, or perhaps precisely because of it – Miller was as obstinately determined at the age of thirty-six to discover the world for himself as he had been at the age of five.
As well as reading the work of his major contemporaries, Miller was nourishing a more esoteric side of his literary personality represented by writers like John Cowper Powys and Arthur Machen. He also discovered Gurdjieff, whose disciple A.E. Orage visited New York in 1924 and made a number of converts among Greenwich Villagers. Machen’s Hill of Dreams, which he read in 1925, fuelled his attachment to a way of writing that appeared to observe a minimal distinction between imaginative fiction and straight autobiography. ‘In my easy chair, in my sumptuous unearned grandeur,’ he wrote to Schnellock, ‘I am eaten by a secret rending desire to write such a book as this. I will not say it is the greatest book written in the English language (that for the idle critics) but I can say that it has bereft me of emotion.’33 Miller’s enthusiasm for the Celtic school of mysticism and eroticism represented by Machen and Powys is indicative of one of the real continuities of his life. The absorption in sex in the 1930s for a while obscured this religious side of his personality, but it re-emerged strongly as he moved into middle-age and beyond in the 1950s, forming part of a chain that would link the enthusiasms of his old age with his adolescent interest in Madam Blavatsky and the writings of her disciple A.P. Sinnett.
Literary centre of the universe or not, when Mara and June began to talk about the three of them going to Paris, Henry was not enthusiastic. Though he had learned to be civil to Mara, it was a cosmetic civility. He absolutely refused to share June with her. His failure as a man was compounded by his failure as a writer. At thirty-six the future he had gone so enthusiastically to meet with June had evaporated; yet a future that did not include his own success as a writer was an impossibility. He closed his eyes and imagined that it did not exist. It was not an easy task, since the girls were soon talking of nothing but their forthcoming trip to ‘Paris. Godammed Paris. Eternally Paris.’34
For a while they worked at making puppets to sell around the Village as a way of raising money for the trip, hammering through the night as Miller tried to sleep his troubles away, never believing June would leave without him. With the coming of spring the girls’ plans became ever more specific, and he had to work harder than ever not to believe in them.
One area at least – the past – was safe from the ravages of the future. The past stood still. Its inhabitants were known and dependable. Rambling the streets of Brooklyn one day he met one of them – his old rival from schooldays, Jimmy Pasta. The two went to a bar together and exchanged news. Pasta now had a good job as Chief Clerk of Parks in the borough of Queens, with responsibility for the one hundred non-specialized labourers working in die parks. Miller still bravely claimed to be a writer, but admitted that his financial situation was not good. Pasta, who never liked to see a good man unemployed, offered to use his influence to get Henry an office job in his department, though he warned him that he would have to put him down as a gardener to begin with.
June and Mara were not overimpressed by Henry’s new job. However, on his first day home from work they made a fuss of him, decking the table with flowers and providing French wine. He enjoyed the work, and the other gardeners were kind to him, as the manual workers at Chula Vista had been, because he had soft hands and was unused to hard physical labour. At the end of the week, with his wage packet, he came home with a brassiere and a pair of stockings for June. The signs of packing and imminent departure were everywhere, and yet he dared not raise the subject for fear of hearing what he could not bear to hear. June and Mara went out that night to say goodbye to their friends, and when they returned Henry started a violent argument with June, rejecting all her attempts to caress him, refusing absolutely to caress her. In his rage he again choked on his own spittle.
In the morning, to set him up for his Saturday half-day at work, there was a bowl of strawberries on the table for his breakfast. And when he left June stood out in street, waving to him until he had turned the corner. When he returned the apartment was empty. June’s note was the final humiliation. It read:
Dear Val, we sailed this morning on the Rochambeau. Didn’t have the heart to tell you. Write care of American Express, Paris. Love.
1 ‘fighting in the same cause,’ Exiles Return by Malcolm Cowley, p66.
2 ‘passionless women to be the norm,’ Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 by Nathan G. Hale, Junior, p40.
3 ‘for the sake of truth,’ Ibid, p44.
4 ‘safeguard to virtue and truth,’ Ibid, p24.
5 ‘caused 15 suicides,’ The Erotic in Literature by David Loth, p145.
6 ‘sex before marriage as those born before 1900,’ Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 by Nathan G. Hale Junior, p476.
7 ‘addicted to the marriage state,’ June notebook.
8 ‘Lesbians present were especially called for,’ Greenwich Village – 1920–1930 by Caroline Ware, p253.
9 ‘strangers to find their way,’ Ibid, p237.
10 ‘…. think it indifference,’ June notebook.
11 ‘She outweighed and outreached me,’ International Herald Tribune, November 5th 1982.
12 ‘like a bullfrog,’ Cyril Connolly by David Pryce-Jones, p118.
13 ‘rather talented unhappiness,’ Ibid, p211.
14 ‘to seek someone else,’ June notebook.
15 ‘pages cut or torn,’ My Life and Times, p143.
16 ‘not only defiant but insulting,’ Crazy Cock.
17 ‘achieve the insuperable,’ Crazy Cock.
18 ‘place was permanently cold,’ Henry and June by Anais Nin, p46.
19 ‘What are bad thoughts?’ Crazy Cock.
20 ‘the subject of Paris,’ Plexus, p79-100.
21 ‘lurked in their grasps,’ Crazy Cock.
22 ‘something rare and beautiful,’ Ibid.
23 ‘lowest had recourse to,’ Ibid.
24 ‘I thought I was a man,’ Ibid.
25 ‘bathtub and urinated on Mara,’ interview in Playboy magazine.
26 ‘a mother’s for a child, that’s all,’ June notebook.
27 ‘they were invincible,’ Crazy Cock.
28 ‘than the epileptic or the neurotic?’ Ibid.
29 ‘with which to combat nature,’ Ibid.
30 ‘strangle them under brassieres,’ Ibid.
31 ‘the ladies to conduct themselves like whores,’ Ibid.
32 ‘how he would dominate a bull,’ Exiles Return by Malcolm Cowley, p223.
33 ‘it has bereft me of emotion,’ Henry Miller: Letters to Emil, p13.
34 ‘Paris. Eternally Paris.’ June, notebook.
* John T. Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee state law by teaching the theory of evolution in the classroom. His defence lawyer was the celebrated Clarence Darrow.