After a week or two of planting shrubs and weeding flowerbeds, Miller was moved indoors and started work on his real duties. One was to help Pasta write speeches for the Parks Commissioner, while his main responsibility was to edit the Parks Department’s annual report.
Shortly after June’s departure he moved back in with his parents on Decatur Street. Louise was pleased to see he had a proper job again, his first for three years. He began receiving letters from June and during the next few weeks made one or two half-hearted attempts to join her in Paris. He enquired about the possibility of working his passage over, and one evening in an Italian restaurant fell into conversation with an interior decorator who took him home, put his hand on his knee in the small hours of the morning and told him he knew of a way to raise the fare. Henry declined the offer. He missed June, but not that much.
Besides, the parting meant that he had his time and his thoughts to himself again. Being on his own gave him a necessary sense of detachment from the irruption of Mara Andrews into his life. He brooded much on the triangular situation, and one night in May remained behind in Pasta’s office and began making notes on the history of his relationship with June, starting with his wild excitement at meeting her at the dance hall, and proceeding to outline subsequent events in eight chapters, concluding matters on the morning on which he was given strawberries for his breakfast, departed for work and returned to find June and Mara gone.
This document, in thirty-two typewritten pages, which he called June, became essential source material for the bulk of his later autobiographical writing, principally Tropic of Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion. The notes are telegrammatic, but referring back to them from the material in the published books reveals how strikingly close Miller stuck to the main outlines of his story. The focus is tight and obsessively trained on himself and June. No dates are given, the weather is never described, no world events are mentioned. In their brevity and in the absence of excessive contemplation of his own thoughts and deeds they convey a rare sense of privacy and spontaneity, and suggest that this was one of the few times when Miller wrote with the lights of his powerful self-consciousness turned off. He wrote June a long letter describing the divine afflatus, but realized he did not have her address in Vienna, where she was visiting some relatives, and so never sent it.
In June’s absence, Miller again began frequenting the dance-halls and again met a literary taxi-girl. This one was from Texas, and she enjoyed their conversations so much that she would not charge him for the dances. Like June, she too received her copy of Winesburg, Ohio. Living on Decatur Street reawakened memories of the unattainable Cora Seward, and Miller again went for walks that took him past the house on Devoe Street from which she, now a married woman with a growing family, had long since moved. With such gestures he had already begun his obsessive lifelong concern with the ‘unre-enterable’ world of the past. Where he differed from other writers like Proust and Nabokov – writers with similar concerns, though with vastly different approaches – is that he never quite accepted the impossibility of a real return to this world.
Another distraction during June’s absence was painting. Through his friendship with Emil Schnellock, and later at Henry Street as he and Mara struggled to find a modus vivendi, Miller’s interest in drawing and water-colour painting was growing. Schnellock reminded him once, in a letter, of a drawing of June’s ‘rose-bush’ he had done which hung on the wall at one of their apartments. But it was not until around 1926 or 1927 that he began painting himself, inspired in the first instance by some Turners that he had seen exhibited in a Brooklyn department store window. He was spending a lot of time with Joe O’Reagan at his Hicks Street apartment during June’s absence. O’Reagan had a crush on Emil Conason’s sister, and was a frequent visitor to the Conason’s home. Celia Conason recalls how he and Henry would arrive to show off their latest ‘Turners’, which they had produced at Joe’s flat by soaking the finished products in a sinkful of water and hanging them up on a line to dry. From Turner, Miller moved on to Chagall and George Grosz, and in the tenderness, mysticism and unashamed sentimentality of the one, and the violent, garish almost pornographic realism of the other, discovered a reflection of the contrasting extremes of his own personality. He soon began painting in a style which mixed elements of both, and which did not develop significantly over the years.
Miller usually played down his talent as an artist, but never quite ruled out the possibility that he might be, without realizing it, a ‘great’ painter, a hope easily encouraged by his firm belief in the child-like and unknowing nature of genius. Certainly he had preserved many of the qualities associated with childhood and youth, notably his sense of wonder, and the easy suspension of disbelief which led him, at the age of thirty-six, to sign some of his letters Hans Castorp after the hero of The Magic Mountain. This simplicity was essentially genuine; yet it was also conditioned by a fierce identification with Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, whose childlike directness in a world of sophisticates is both genuine and also a highly self-conscious philosophic response to life.
After some two months – long enough for Henry to ponder morosely the swiftness with which Lindberg was able to fly between New York and Paris in a mere thirty-three and a half hours – June returned. To Miller’s great relief, she was alone, though the ubiquitous Count Bruga was still under her arm as she descended the gangplank from the Berengaria. Mara had rapidly grown tired of June’s pretentious attempts to pass herself off as a writer and had run off to Morocco with an American sculptor and an Austrian writer with whom she had fallen – briefly and platonically – in love. The jaunt lasted only a few days, but Mara’s desertion marked the end of the friendship between the two women. Clearly, it had always been much more intense on June’s side than on Mara’s. When June returned, Mara enrolled at the Colorassi, an art school on the rue de las Grande Chaumière which catered particularly for the needs of the numerous wealthy young Americans who were then flocking to Paris.
In amongst the pleasure Henry felt at seeing June again, and the hope that her return might give them the chance to save their marriage, he struggled with an unhappy realization that had come to him the night he sat outlining the story of their life together: that his detachment in the matter of his own unhappiness could only mean that, however distant, the end of their relationship was in sight. Loth to accept the fact, on his way to meet her off the boat he had stopped off at a jeweller’s shop on Maiden Lane and bought the ring that had been missing from June’s finger ever since the wedding.
The relative order that had settled over Miller’s life in June’s absence was soon disturbed. She found them a new apartment in Brooklyn Heights and persuaded him to give up his job with Pasta and return to a life of full-time writing. Soon she had hustled up another patron, a man whom the Millers referred to as ‘Pop’ or ‘Pop Roland’. His full name was Roland Freedman, and he earned a good living as a writer of jokes for Peter Arno’s celebrated New Yorker cartoons. He was desperately in love with June, and hoped one day to marry her. He kept champagne on ice for her when she visited, and sent her love letters which she and Henry would read together and laugh over. ‘The more passionate he became the funnier it seemed,’ Miller wrote later. Though the letters always ended with kisses, ‘the idea of June kissing Roland seemed preposterous to me always’.1 Physically he was apparently an ugly man, and this, coupled with June’s openness about the relationship, encouraged Miller to feel that he had no real reason to be jealous of him.
One day, June showed some of Henry’s old mezzotints to Freedman, as usual passing them off as her own work, and so impressed him with her talent – as well as her beauty – that he offered to support her on a regular basis while she set to work to produce a full-length novel. As an extra incentive he also promised her that if she managed to finish a book he would provide her with enough money to enable her to make another trip to Europe. June agreed to this, and almost at once Miller set to work on the commission.
Moloch, also known as This Gentile World, was a ‘medley of brutal realism, glorified sensuality and fantastic unreality’. Eighteen chapters and 384 pages long, it is substantially an account of Miller’s rocky marriage to Beatrice (‘Blanche’) during his days as a personnel manager at Western Union (‘the Great American Telegraph Company’) which ends in his failure to leave her. Moloch tells its story in straightforward, chronological fashion, without the use of obscenity or explicit sex, giving much space to angry scenes of dissension between the eponymous hero and his wife Blanche, often in the presence of Moloch’s friends. The focus of interest in the novel is intended to be the personality of the hero Dion Moloch which, striking as it is, never quite manages to live up to the promise of the name. Rather than dionysian scenes and four-letter words, the most striking quality of the novel is the breezy self-confidence with which Miller makes his hero an anti-semite. Its opening paragraph must be, on reflection, one of the least successful attempts ever made by a writer to enlist the interest and sympathy of his readers for his main character. Moloch, we are told, wears a suit of Bedford shipcord and a pale blue shirt with badly frayed cuffs and collar. He is an almost absurdly sane and healthy man, free from megalomania, dementia praecox ‘or any of the other fashionable disorders of the twentieth century’, and though he was often accused by his friends of being anti-semitic this does not count, since it was ‘a prejudice and not a disease’.
In what appears to be a reflection of Miller’s own street-prejudice, the anti-semitism or Jew-baiting of the main character is kept constantly before the reader’s eyes. Moloch does quite a bit of wandering through the streets of Brooklyn in the course of the novel, ‘depressed’, as he puts it, ‘by the melancholy transformation of the old neighbourhood, and furious with God’s vermin’. The Wallabout Market, however, gives him an impression of permanence and durability, ‘as though Peter Stuyvesant had laid his heavy hand upon it, and defied the dago and the sheeny to remove it’. Most of the staples of prejudice are tossed off: the Jews smell bad and throw rubbish in the street because they like dirt; the Jews condone deceit and make a supreme virtue out of cheating; the Jews take refuge in Karl Marx because they feel sorry for themselves, and so on. If Miller was not an anti-semite as a young man, then he gave a very good impersonation of one in Moloch.
Had Miller’s parents been enlightened, educated people he might not have fallen so readily for the primitive prejudices of the gangs with whom he roamed the streets during his boyhood; but they were not. His mother in particular seems to have had a strong prejudice against Jews, and the move the Miller family made in 1900 from Williamsburg to Bushwick was in most respects the retreat of a respectable middle-class family from an area that was felt to be in social decline. Evidently the vocabulary, if not the actuality, of the anti-semitism of his childhood had pursued him into the years of his early manhood, to erect its inglorious monument in the pages of Moloch. Not until he finally broke away from the enclosed world of his childhood and began meeting more sophisticated people who were prepared to question his attitudes did he manage to overcome it completely.
What made it easier for him to do so was that his prejudice was riddled with large-scale inconsistencies, including his many close friendships with Jewish people like the Conasons and Abe and Esther Elkus, and most notably the fact of his own wife’s Jewishness. Indeed, he once explicitly stated that he loved June precisely because she was Jewish: ‘she represented another race, something wholly alien to me, something I did not know’.2
Miller’s propensity for violent language and his strong desire to shock were what prompted him to take the idiotic step of actually making a feature out of his prejudice in his novel. The language of Moloch is linguistic head-butting, and the boast in the opening paragraph is in some ways the same head-on attempt to offend the sensibilities of the reader as the statement in the later Tropic of Cancer that the book is ‘a gob of spit in the face of art’ and an insult directed at ‘you’, the reader, whoever you are, and ‘your dirty corpse’, over which the narrator promises to dance. Miller specifically identifies the approach as one of provocation during a scene in which Moloch has been spouting off in a restaurant. A Dr Elfenbein rebukes him, saying: ‘You might have some consideration for the guest you invited to your table.’ Moloch finds the response ‘a highly anaemic expression of one’s injured feelings’ and reveals that what he had been ‘aching for’ was ‘a punch in the jaw’. Miller seemed to sense that there was something missing in him, a particular kind of insensitivity which made it difficult for him to know the difference between teasing and tormenting, and left him dependent on the signals of others for knowing when he had gone too far. One of the most striking observations he ever made about himself was the admission that ‘I get frightened of myself sometimes (…) I don’t know where the proper limits are’,3 and this unnerving state turned out to be both his greatest weakness and his greatest strength.
The use of himself and his friends and acquaintances as models for the characters in Moloch established a pattern that Miller followed for the rest of his literary career. It indicates the extent to which his work was, from the start, therapy rather than conscious art, a confessional record of events rather than an act of literary creation. In his later years he was little preoccupied with how his friends and acquaintances might react to their thinly-disguised portraiture in his writing, believing – usually correctly – that the prospect of a degree of fame was sufficient recompense for any offence he might give. At the start of his career, however, before the dispensation of fame was within his power, he was sensitive to the problem. When he was some two-thirds of the way through Moloch, June sat down one evening to read through what he had written thus far. She reacted with such dismay to the way in which he had portrayed his friend Conason that Miller was taken aback, and presently decided to write a letter on the subject to him. The letter is worth quoting at length, since it constitutes a rare statement of the aesthetic – if that is the right word – of a writer who used living models perhaps more ruthlessly than any other well-known writer this century:
She exclaims occasionally that I have done a striking picture of you, but that it is manifestly unfair, that I should have made you more human, etc. Her remarks shock me somewhat and yet I was not altogether unprepared for this reaction. I believe I set about consciously to distort you – possibly everyone we know who may appear in the pages of this book has been distorted. There is nothing remarkable or noteworthy about this.
But a graver question obtrudes: why, if I had to distort your character, why did I choose to distort in the direction of denigration? I am trying to ask myself that very honestly, very sincerely. I don’t believe it is smartness which makes me answer immediately that it was because I felt that by doing so you became a more interesting personality. (…) There is a lot of ugliness in it. I make free confession of that. Your absurdities, the unlovely aspects, all these things have been heightened and exaggerated. Perhaps almost to the point of caricature. It made June wince and remark that ‘you no longer would be a friend of mine if you saw what I had written’ … Well, you know I intend having you read everything, that I desire your counsel, your criticism and guidance. Beyond and above that, and this is the really important thing – it never entered my head that you would take offence … even though I should say to you that I regarded you as such and such. I don’t regard you as anything of the sort, of course. I’m assuming that at the outset. And I don’t believe your friendship will go to smash on any such flimsy rocks. But I can understand people questioning my attitude, wondering about a friendship which could permit, or shall we say, provoke such a portrait.
He goes on to explain that, ‘for reasons of expediency,’ the novel is being written in June’s name, and that Conason must not think that he has done the portrait at June’s bidding. ‘If you wanted to play a mean trick you could blurt out the truth,’ he hints, and closes the letter with a surprising offer: ‘Come over as soon as you find it convenient. I’ll show you what’s accomplished. If we have to do any retouching, you have but to command.’ Conason may have taken him at his word, for in a second letter about the book Miller relates that he is ‘endeavouring to make it what you expect it to be. Patiently rewriting from the very beginning, tearing down, building up, substituting, expanding, paring down the brashness. Up to page 150 now on the finished task.’
Perhaps Conason accepted the ugliness of the attitudes portrayed in Moloch as all part of the ‘vein of harsh realism’4 which Miller claimed to be exploring. Certainly, as he got older, Miller’s taste was polarising sharply. He went with June to see a performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude while he was revising Moloch. June, whose literary taste was not hampered by professional jealousy, enjoyed the play, but to Miller it was just ‘subliminal nonsense. I’ll go on record as saying that Eugene has a mediocre brain, even if he is the foremost dramatist in the USA.’ He was ‘amazed at the prodigious amount of labor he put in it. The man’s a jackass for punishment.’5
There were interruptions to the work on the unfortunate Moloch project, such as the visit of a destitute Norwegian, Herr Mastrup, whom Conason sent along to Miller with the advice that for a good story about Hamsun or Ibsen his friend would be able to do something to help him. Though Miller was amused by his friend’s presumption, he did provide Mastrup with a new suit, six top-quality new shirts, six cravats, a pair of underpants made by Bradley, Vorhies and Day ‘for good crotch comfort’ and a quarter for the carfare to Stamford. In exchange he was given the news that Ibsen was a vain old man who had a tiny mirror concealed in the crown of his top hat, that Knut Hamsun’s brother was a Customs Officer, and that Kristiania, ‘which I had always regarded as a gay old town (a sort of Paris of the Septentriones),’ was simply Oslo under another name. However, by the spring of 1928 Moloch was almost finished, and at the end of April the Millers decided they needed a short holiday before Henry tackled the last chapters. They thought briefly of going to South Carolina and meeting up with the Conasons who were touring in Florida, but in the end decided on a more outré destination – Quebec. Miller set out hitchhiking, but got only as far as Montreal before being held up by a heavy thaw which made the road on to Quebec impassable. June travelled by rail to join him at Montreal, and they finished the journey together by train.
They booked in at an old-established and expensive hotel, the Chateau Frontenac, and set about spending money like ‘drunken sailors’. ‘It almost makes me weep,’ Miller complained, ‘I shall never get used to high living’. There was no Prohibition in Canada, and for a while they had the pleasure of wine with every meal; but though they enjoyed the vaudeville shows and a two-hour sightseeing drive round the snow-banked streets of Quebec in an open, horse-drawn calèche, they were big-city people, and were soon bored. There were no plays to see, no concerts, and the films were ‘the very worst I have seen anywhere, worse than ye south’. In general Quebec reminded Miller of Grand Street, Williamsburg, ‘only with French names on the window,’ and well before their return to New York in mid-May their thoughts were on the much greater adventure that awaited them once the novel was finished: ‘About Europe,’ he wrote to the Conasons, ‘– no doubt any more. Next Fall will see us either in Spain or France.’6
Roland Freedman must have been an odd man. In return for supporting what he believed to be her attempts to become a writer, all he apparently demanded of June was the right to send her the passionate love letters which she and Miller laughed over. He must also have been an enviably credulous man to believe not merely that June was a single girl living at home with her invalid mother but that she could have written the fierce and aggressive Moloch, not to mention the mezzotint hymn to the joys of drinking known as ‘Make Beer for Man’, with its defiant final cry: ‘Keep your libraries. Keep your penal institutions. Keep your insane asylums. Give me beer.’ The secret of such credulity must have lain in what the writer Lionel Abel called June’s ‘almost frightening beauty, like Garbo’s’.7 It seems that at one point Freedman even provided June with the capital to open her own café on MacDougal Street, which she called the ‘Roman Tavern’.
As part of their game-playing Henry would try to get June to admit that she and Freedman had been lovers at least on one or two occasions. Pressed like this she would eventually reply, like some dreamy sinner in a Hamsun novel: ‘Ah no Val, it was more than that … too many times for me to remember … all Summer, or all Winter, I forgot which it was. Night after night.’8 The chief difficulty in trying to get a clear picture of June is that almost all the information about her stems from Miller himself, whose deliberate reinvention of her as an enigmatic and mysterious person was so thorough that it is imprudent to believe too much of what he wrote. Can she really have said ‘all Summer and all Winter, I forgot which it was?’; or was that something Miller invented later as part of his campaign to win the heart of the new woman he was then wooing by presenting himself to her as a pathetic lover, cruelly tormented by the capricious beloved? Or did June actually say it, but only to stop him pestering her? For when the game-playing was all over Miller was a realist who knew quite well that Pop Roland was only a poor fool, pathetically enamoured of an unattainable young woman who allowed him, for a price, and at a distance, to indulge his fantasies of winning her love. To admit as much, however, would have spoiled the fun. Miller liked to pretend that life was vastly more complicated and romantic than it really was. Poor Roland had no need to pretend, and took his own life in the early 1930s, apparently as a direct result of his ultimate failure to win June.
The trip to Europe at Roland’s expense which the Millers embarked on late that summer lasted about six months. It is uniquely undocumented in Miller’s life; as he wrote some thirty years later,9 routinely doubling the duration of the adventure, there was ‘almost a year of it. No diary notes, no notebook sketches,’ a circumstance worthy of note in a life characterized by an almost pathological mania for documentation.
The sampling of die Canadian Frenchness of Quebec was intended to give them a taste for the real thing, although Miller had been disappointed by the sort of French the Canadians spoke, which he identified as ‘the lingo of Louis XIV. It’s flat, monotonous, American in tone and feeling.’ He therefore made his own preparations for reviving his schoolboy French, and on visits to his parents’ house would take a French primer along with him and get his father to read out the English questions for him to answer in French. His father much enjoyed these sessions, and when Henry answered ‘Oui, monsieur, je suis très content’, his father would smile with pleasure and say: ‘Why even I can understand that; it’s just like English, only they use different words.’ Whereupon they would shake hands and say ‘Comment allez-vous aujourd’hui?’ The success of these sessions did not, however, prepare him for the dismaying gap he found between phrase-book French and the swift-flowing real thing he found when he actually arrived in Europe.
They travelled on a French liner, the Île de France, arriving at Le Havre and taking the boat train to Paris and the Gare Saint-Lazare. Miller, at thirty-seven making his first trip abroad, was primed for ecstasies, and found the station itself an experience, with its glass roof and its mysteriously-named waiting room, La Salle des Pas Perdus. From here they went to their hotel, the Grand Hôtel de la France on the rue Bonaparte, close to the École des Beaux-Arts.
They stayed in Paris for several weeks, sightseeing and visiting some of the many people June had met during her trip there with Mara Andrews in 1927. Most of these were artists or would-be artists. Some were famous, like Marcel Duchamp and the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine, samples of whose work June had brought back to New York with her in 1927 with the intention of acting as his American sales agent. June introduced Miller to Zadkine at a party held in the sculptor’s garden. Miller was awestruck at shaking hands with his first real European artist, and felt like a small boy in his presence.10 June also introduced Henry to the man who later became one of his closest friends, Alfred Perlès. Perlès had taken an instinctive dislike to June on meeting her on her earlier visit. He thought her a poseuse, and later recalled that on the day he saw her walking down the street towards him with Miller in 1928 his first impulse was to cross over to the other side and avoid them. He did not, however, and the three of them spent what turned out to be a most enjoyable day picnicking on bread and cheese and wine in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Perlès found Miller a simple and genuine man, and listened with pleasure as he enthused about Dostoevsky, Spengler and how much he and June were looking forward to their tour of Europe.
June had managed to raise about $2000 for the trip. With the dollar strong against the French franc, it was enough to keep them for months, and to allow them to indulge in the wonderful luxury of a long and leisurely bicycling holiday through France. They bought two bicycles. June, a true Greenwich Village bohemian, did not know how to ride, and Henry had the pleasure of giving her lessons on the rue Visconti, a tiny street close to their hotel. As soon as she was competent they loaded their bikes onto the train to Fontainbleau to start the tour.
From Fontainebleau they meandered slowly southward, vaguely following a route mapped out for them by Zadkine which would take them to Marseilles and thence to their goal, the Italian border. Whenever they got tired or bored with a stretch of road they would take the train and then join up with the towpaths running by the canals. They ate primitive picnic meals with cheese and fruit, cold sausage, and wine, or else stopped at village cafés. One hot day, at a place called Tournon, between Vienne and La Voulte-sur-Rhône, Henry had an experience of suddenly forgetting who and where he was which reminded him of a similar experience in National City, during his adolescent flight west to California. But where the adolescent experience had been distressing and alienating the Tournon moment was the blissful trance of pure, unthinking happiness.
By the end of September they were enjoying the Roman ruins at Arles and looking forward to the bullfight at Nîmes the following day. By the time they reached Nice their money had run out, and for three weeks they were supported by an American negro who was working as a shoe-shine on the Boulevard des Anglais. When funds arrived which enabled them to continue their travels, they made a pilgrimage to Èzes-sur-Mer, where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, and then carried on by train to visit Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Czernowitz (now Cernauti).
The train taking them from Budapest was held up at the border by the Romanian authorities, and an uncle of June’s in the Hussars collected them and drove them in a three-horse carriage to Cernauti,11 where they stayed briefly before moving on to visit more of June’s relatives in Vienna. These were poor people, and though the Millers protested that they could stay at a nearby hotel the family insisted that their American guests accept their hospitality. On their first night Henry and June were tormented by bugs, and the following day went out and bought quantities of insecticide with which they discreetly sprayed the room. Even so the torment continued and after several days they fled to a hotel. This stay in Vienna was the part of the trip Miller enjoyed the least:
That whole Vienna episode was a nightmare to me – I gave a little of it in the novel, I think (Crazy Cock) – the part about the Ferris Wheel, the Jew who talked about God continually, the woman in the café playing the zither with long nails, the whores under the gas lamps, creating for me that imaginary scene which I inserted in the novel. Vienna! The name is magic to me (no, I don’t destroy magic!) and I wanted to be so happy there with June, with Vienna, with her women, her lovely boulevards, her désuétude, her softness. But everything turned out differently, as everything always does. I lived cooped up in a ghetto, in a vile little flat with bedbugs and everyone was dying of poverty, of misery, around us.12
Having met June’s relatives in person, one result of the trip was that Henry could no longer convincingly entertain himself with speculation about who June really was and where she really came from. Where people were concerned, his threshold of boredom was low, and the collapse of her mystery made the continued success of their relationship less likely than ever.
One of the outstanding experiences of the European trip for Henry was the day he got caught short in a Parisian street and had to use the toilet of a small hotel they happened to be passing at the time. Up on the third floor, the toilet was in semi-darkness, and so small that he had to manoeuvre in order to sit down on it. Neatly cut squares of newspaper hung on a hook on the wall. Finishing his business he rose to leave, and suddenly discovered a view from the small, dirty window of one of the oldest quarters of Paris, ‘so sweepingly soft and intoxicating it brought tears to my eyes’. He fell into a trance there, and once he had recovered he hurried down to tell June about it, and encouraged her to go and see the view for herself. This experience of his, mingling the smells of the toilet with a sensation of ecstatic reverence for his ancient and grimy surroundings, sounded the keynote of the long love-affair with Paris on which he was about to embark. Indeed, it may have been the moment at which he actually fell in love with the city.
By the time the Millers returned to New York early in 1929, a world of new possibilities had been opened up to Henry. By contrast with the boringly rational and all-too-obviously man-made Manhattan grid, die European cities he had visited seemed wonderfully haphazard structures that grew like natural chaos out of history. The trip gave him the beginnings of a whole new set of perspectives on his own country, a frame of reference from which he would go on to attack the worst excesses of American society, notably the worship of success, the blind mania for progress, the promotion of a work ethic as though it were a religion, and that mania for personal cleanliness and hygiene so relentlessly promoted by the New York advertising industry as part of its campaign to market the fatuous idea of the ‘life-style’, in which it deliberately created a sense of shame in people over the fact that human beings sweat and are smelly and then made a fortune out of selling them the solutions to these invented problems, encouraging a definition of self-worth in terms of one’s success as a consumer of this packaged ‘life-style’.
Unfortunately, June did not share Henry’s love of French toilets. Indeed, she was ominously averse to the smell of them – yet another small sign that they were drifting apart at an accelerating rate.
Back in New York after their six months away, the Millers moved into yet another apartment, this time on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn. Here Miller set to work on a novel based on his notes from 1927, on the theme of a husband being cuckolded by his wife with another woman, and the bewilderment this causes him. The subject looked to have some potential for commercial success. Lesbianism was not only the most talked-about sexual fashion among Greenwich Villagers in 1929, it was also a much discussed literary topic since the tribulations of Radclyffe Hall’s account of a lesbian love-affair, The Well of Loneliness. After being withdrawn under pressure by its publisher in London, the book had been attacked in New York in 1929 by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Under the personal supervision of Charles Sumner, Society members carried out a raid on the offices of the publisher, Boni and Liveright, and confiscated remaining copies of the sixth edition. They then marched into the book department at Macy’s and cleared the novel from its shelves. Miller had read the book, and may have entertained hopes of a scandalous success of his own with a novel on a related theme.
Yet even as he worked on Crazy Cock, literary fashion was moving on. In 1926, he had been well abreast of contemporary sentiment in a letter he wrote to the New Republic, passionately defending Dreiser’s use of what a critic had called his ‘cheap, trite and tawdry’ language in An American Tragedy. But the debate that raged in the pages of the magazine in the winter of 1929 over Thornton Wilder was another matter. It was started by a working-class communist writer named Michael Gold who published an article attacking the revered Wilder on the extra-literary grounds that his writing was culpably non-political. Malcolm Cowley recalled that the attack ‘was the occasion for scores and then hundreds of letters to the editor, some carefully reasoned, some violent and almost hysterical. The burden of them was that reviewers should confine themselves to the style and pattern of a book, taking its subject matter for granted.’13
When the violence of the initial reaction died down, however, the observable effect of Gold’s attack was that he had made many grudging converts to his point of view. Along with events like the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in August 1927, the bitter and violent Gastonia strike of textile workers in North Carolina in the autumn of 1929 – the first major labour battle conducted by a Communist union – and the Wall Street Crash of October 29th, the net result was to lead to a consensus of opinion among American writers that the misery of the working class placed them under a moral obligation to produce a utilitarian literature that would fight for the cause of social progress. The self-indulgence and the horseplay characteristic of the art world during the 1920s continued for a few months yet, but serious days were definitely on the way by 1929.
Few things are more difficult for a struggling writer to respond to than a call from the literary trendsetters for him to make yet another change of direction while he is still trying to make sense of the old route. The prospect of having to restructure his idea of literature to make it useful, social and, above all, not about himself if he wished to be successful can only have appalled Miller. If the Crash had any noticeable effect on him it was to confirm him in his belief that he would have to remain absolutely indifferent to the vagaries of ‘The Economy’ if he ever hoped to get anything done at all.
So he carried on with Crazy Cock, loyal to his intentions, struggling to quell the feeling that he might be wasting his time, that even if the book turned out to be good, it would not arouse much interest. He also had to contend with the knowledge that June was reading what he wrote over his shoulder. She was the one who had reacted with disquiet to the portrayal of Conason in Moloch, and the realization that her husband’s style was naturally caricatural. Now, as she read through Crazy Cock, she found that he was distorting her character in the same way as he had distorted Conason’s, ‘in the direction of denigration,’ and she took exception to it. Miller’s wholly personal difficulty was that, in the writing of the book, he was trying to take the consequences of the realization he had had while making notes for it during June’s absence in Paris in 1927 – that he was no longer really in love with her. Her interest in his writing, so vital for his self-confidence, had always been slightly proprietorial. Now it was becoming directly inhibiting.
Progress on the book throughout 1929 was halting, and when June suggested to him, early in February 1930, that he should return to Europe to try to get it finished, he jumped at the chance. She persuaded him that she would be able to keep him with money obtained from Roland Freedman, and promised that she would join him there as soon as she could. It was a cold, snowy day when the subject came up, and Miller’s first response was to suggest that he should head for somewhere warm like Spain rather than France. June was his manager, however, and she insisted on Paris.
He left in the middle of the month, taking with him two suitcases and a trunk containing a selection of suits made by his father. The day of his actual departure acquired such symbolic significance for him later that it suffers from an embarrassment of often contradictory detail. What seems certain is that Emil Schnellock saw him off at the docks and gave him $10 to keep himself during the ten days he would be on board ship until he arrived in London. There he was to remain until June wired him the money to continue his journey to France. The time of the unorthodox hero was nigh. Rin Tin Tin was about to start work on his first barking picture and, within a few short months of arriving in France, Henry Miller too would be raising his rough, wild voice.
1 ‘kissing Roland seemed preposterous to me always,’ A Literate Passion by Anais Nin and Henry Miller, p49.
2 ‘alien to me, something I did not know,’ Henry Miller: Letters to Emil, p123.
3 ‘the proper limits are,’ Sexus, p362.
4 ‘Miller claimed to be exploring,’ February 2nd 1928, Celia Conason’s archive.
5 ‘a jackass for punishment,’ Celia Conason’s archive, undated.
6 ‘in Spain or France,’ May 4th 1928, Celia Conason’s archive.
7 ‘beauty, like Garbo’s,’ Anais: An International Journal, Volume 8, 1990.
8 ‘Night after night,’ A Literate Passion by Anais Nin and Henry Miller, p41.
9 ‘some thirty years later,’ Who Am I? Where Am I? What Am I Doing Here? for Holiday magazine.
10 ‘small boy in his presence,’ Ibid.
11 ‘three-horse carriage to Cernauti,’ letter to Frank Dobo, October 22nd 1958.
12 ‘poverty, of misery, around us,’ A Literate Passion by Anais Nin and Henry Miller, p39.
13 ‘taking its subject matter for granted,’ Exiles Return by Malcolm Cowley, p304.