At some point, however, when Miller had spoken to Schnellock again of his helpless thrashings in the literary wilderness—he wanted after all to be a writer not some mere street-corner sorcerer—Schnellock told him that the way out for him was to write the same way he talked, an easy enough observation perhaps. But in truth there yawns always a chasmic divide between the lightning quickness of speech and the more meditative act of writing, and few writers can easily bridge it, though many have tried and precisely because the former feels closer to whatever the original inspiration was.14
Cosmodemonic
While Miller continued his inevitably amateurish literary gropings, tensions in the household continued to intensify. The huge desk plumped down in the middle of the living room was a constant affront to Beatrice, who saw it as a symbol of Miller’s childish impracticality and his multiple failures as husband, father, and provider. In this context the fact that he was also proving a bust as a writer was almost beside the point. Early in 1920, though, matters changed when he talked his way into a well-paying job as an employment manager at Western Union.
Beatrice could hardly believe it, and Miller could hardly believe it, either, once he understood what the job involved: the heartless, systematic exploitation of the half-crazed starvelings the company employed to deliver its telegrams. Like the three cultured Jews in the tailor shop’s busheling room, many of the aspirants who appeared before Miller, cap in hand, seemed to him men of some breeding and intelligence. Yet all were now merely meat for the “slaughterhouse” that was modern American capitalism.
At first, he claimed (doubtless with a subsequently applied comic exaggeration) that he accepted every last condition of his employment, asking no questions of his superiors. If on a given morning he received a directive that no cripples be hired, he turned away all cripples. If on another day the word came down that all messengers over forty-five were to be fired without notice, he fired them. No more Jews, then no more Jews. But then on the casual remark of a superior something within him snapped. The man had mused aloud that someone ought to write a book about how the company (which Miller styled the “Cosmodemonic Telephone Company”) was providing the necessary breeding ground for a whole new generation of Horatio Algers. To Miller, who saw daily what those breeding grounds actually were, and who had to understand just what it was that he, Henry Miller, was himself involved in, the remark was as cruel as it was stupid. Later, in Tropic of Capricorn, he remembered of this moment that what he wanted most to do in life was to utterly destroy the secular myth of Horatio Alger with a book of a very different sort, one that would reveal the Horatio Alger story as the “dream of a sick America.” There follows a passage that might well have been reminiscent of those sudden and perhaps even unbidden outbursts that so mesmerized the men at Emil Schnellock’s studio, as Miller imagines his anti-Alger figure
mounting higher and higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven thousand decimals fore and aft.
He had a vacation coming to him, two weeks. He took three, writing an astonishing five thousand or more words a day at Schnellock’s studio until he was finished. He called the book Clipped Wings, and from his later references to it and from its few surviving scraps it’s possible the best thing about it may have been its title, a mordant turn on Western Union’s winged logo. Miller’s characters are twelve messengers, all of them deformed angels whose wings have been clipped by the corporation’s exploitation of them. Possibly he had in mind a group portrait such as Edgar Lee Masters had done in Spoon River Anthology and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio. But everyone Miller showed the manuscript to disparaged it, some evidently telling him it was so dreadful he should never again think of writing. Many years later, both in print and in filmed interviews, Miller said he himself finally understood just how bad a book it was. Its saving grace, he said, was that the writing of it taught him what it was to fail at something genuinely worth failing at—being an author. This was 1922.
She
Within a year of that creative failure it was obvious that Miller had suffered a domestic one as well: his marriage was irretrievably wrecked. It had never been a harmonious one, and the arrival of the baby hadn’t improved matters. By now Beatrice was both deeply wounded by his brutal treatment of her and contemptuous of his literary strivings. As for Miller, he no longer made any effort to conceal his flagrant philandering and was rarely at home.
One summer’s night, on the prowl around Times Square and with money in his pocket, he wandered into a taxi-dance hall, danced with one of the girls, and felt his life forever changed. It was.
For that night at least, the dancer was using the name June Mansfield, but like so many in the New World to which she had come from the Old, she had many others, and despite what speedily developed into an obsessional interest in every least detail of her being, Miller never learned all the ones she had sailed under. Nor was he ever able to penetrate the layered mysteries of her character and her past. He was to spend the following decade trying to decipher her, as if he were some rakish, feverish Cham-pollion to her Rosetta stone—whether she was whore, or angel, or the angel of death. At various moments she was any one of these to him and perhaps all of them at once. In the beginning she was a dark goddess. At the end, he was calling her a “Jewish cunt.” But first and last she was his muse, the personification of that mythic being—beautiful, all-powerful, changeful—who the male artist cannot choose but who instead merely nods in his direction and so inspires the best work that is in him. For Miller, June in one way and another inspired his three finest works, the Tropics and Black Spring. At the other end of his long career he was still trying to work out for himself what she meant to him, retelling the old stories through the endless pages of The Rosy Crucifixion, which Norman Mailer was right about when he called it a giant layer cake that fails to rise.
In the presence of her unearthly beauty, her powerful sexuality, he recognized instantaneously that here was the muse he’d read about in classical literature but never expected to meet. And he felt at the same time that she’d given him that nod that was both permission (to continue on with his lonely artistic quest) and invitation (to do so under her aegis). She told him she believed in his star, maybe more deeply than he himself did in the moment of their meeting. Later on, as their relationship lengthened and he began to sense that with her he was in far beyond his depth, he began to turn her from the muse of myth into a legend—which is more comprehensible because more narrative—so that he could write about her in the context of their lives together, where they went, how they lived. At last, when everything personally significant about the relationship had rotted away through infinite deceptions and betrayals, savage fights, transatlantic estrangements, and June’s descent into madness, she became what perhaps she was always meant to be for him: a darkly glowing metaphor of America, in the somber light of which he composed the finest things he had in him. All of which—the wild contradictions, the changes, the sublime heights and abysmal depths—may suggest—may —why Miller hung onto June for so long, through bewilderment and poverty, through degradation, and the most awful humiliation a man might suffer.
What he might actually have felt in that moment of meeting cannot, of course, be known. He made several attempts to recapture that in words, none better than in Capricorn where he describes June moving toward him through the murk and sleaze of the taxi-dance hall. And what makes this particular effort special is that it is at once both powerful in its language and hopeless in its emotional aspirations, because this isn’t a human who is being described. It is some other order of being to whom (or should it be to “which”?) none of the known rules apply: She, for whom everything must be undergone.
She seemed to him at first blue-black in color, but the longer he stared and the
closer she came, he saw that she was an ageless chalk-white. And she wasn’t moving toward him, or even gliding, which would be the expectable verb here:
There was not just the flow to and from, but the endless chute, the voluptuousness of intrinsic restlessness. She was mercurial and at the same time of a savory weight. She had the marmoreal stare of a faun embedded in lava.
…
The earth slid rapidly beneath my bewildered feet. I moved again out of the earth belt and behold, my hands were full of meteoric flowers. I reached for her with two flaming hands but she was more elusive than sand. I thought of my favorite nightmares, but she was unlike anything which had made me sweat and gibber. In my delirium I began to prance and neigh.
I bought frogs and mated them with toads. I thought of the easiest thing to do, which is to die, but I did nothing. I stood still and began to petrify at the extremities. That was so wonderful, so healing, so eminently sensible, that I began to laugh way down inside the viscera like a hyena crazed with rut. Maybe I would turn into a rosetta stone!
Whatever else this passage means—and it is dense with meanings; whoever June Mansfield Smerth Smith was—and she was doubtless many things except the vile name Miller used when he was trying to rid himself of her haunting presence—these words, written years after the fact, tell us that when Miller saw the nameless woman moving toward him, when he first held her body in his arms, he felt himself hurled into some dimensionless state where all things were possible, especially the possibility that he had after all authentic artistic greatness within. But in order to realize that particular possibility he would have to catch hold of this being and hang on through all her protean shifts and states. This is the only way to make sense of what he willingly underwent over the next seven years.
He was ever the comic exaggerator, and there is no single subject on which he is more unreliable than June. But there can be no doubt that meeting her was in truth a life-altering experience for him, and that by the time they had finally parted ways he felt his soul had been keelhauled. But finally and most importantly, the very torments he suffered over her were magically transformed into the instruments of salvation, which is one definition of art.
The Henry Miller who had walked into the taxi-dance hall in the summer of 1923 was a husband, a father, and a man with a responsible job. A little more than a year later almost everything had changed. He had divorced Beatrice and married June; his contact with little Barbara was sporadic at best and would gradually become almost nonexistent; he had quit Western Union; and he and June were living in a Brooklyn flat they could in no way afford while bills piled up around their feet like snowdrifts. Most significantly, he had embarked on a quest to become a writer. This last was also to become a great problem, because though he now thought of himself as an artist, and though he had somehow acquired his muse, he had by 1924 entered a period of almost five years of drift, apathy, and indecision in which there was an enormous amount of talk about writing but little to show for it, only two botched novels, unpublished in his lifetime and which would never have been published had he not become famous in the 1960s. Through all this June clung to her primeval belief that “Val,” as she called him, possessed the stuff of greatness somewhere within him, though it is clear that at various points that belief seriously flickered. An illusionist herself, she seems to have at least half-believed that writing was an act of sortilege, and perhaps Miller himself may have wanted to believe this as well, though his experience of hammering out the manuscript about the twelve deformed angels ought to have told him something different. And maybe it was this shared illusion that kept them together through evictions, unpaid and unpayable debts, get-rich-quick-without-working schemes, the endless lies they told to creditors, friends, and each other; and the increasing chaos and clutter of their daily lives. All this could make sense if in fact Val was really on the path to greatness instead of being what many must have thought—a bum and a windbag. So, while he and his cronies spent days in endless talk, joking and drinking and walking the streets, June held down one job and another. From time to time the would-be writer actually did bestir himself, making solitary excursions in the greater New York area, looking for potential literary material. But there was no method to these, and because he was so largely self-educated and so insatiably curious he was easily sidetracked into intellectual labyrinths where he would lose himself for weeks at a time, reading up on, for instance, the history of chicle harvesting for a story he planned to write on chewing gum. Without his intending it, however, Miller’s wanderings and investigations of everything from amusement parks to professional wrestling were providing him with a deep knowledge of American culture that would stand him in creative stead in the future. Now, however, that was not apparent to either Miller or June, and as the months rolled on June began to wonder whether she had misjudged her Val, that he was all talk and little substance.
Perhaps simply to make ends meet she began to “gold-dig”—a thin euphemism for whoring—bringing home to Val cash from her various “admirers.” She evidently had extensive experience in this line of work by the time she and Miller met, and so in their increasingly exiguous circumstances it might have been natural enough for her to resort to it once again. He tried not to imagine what she had to do to get the money she brought him, but with a mind like his he could hardly have escaped knowing what was really going on. At one point, for instance, the Millers ran a speakeasy that had a bedroom attached, and while Miller and his pals sat in the kitchen spinning tales and drinking, June took favored customers back to the bedroom.
Still, it was a day-to-day kind of existence the couple lived, and this began to cut ever more deeply into the relationship. By the end of 1925 matters had become desperate enough for them to separate. And so at the age of thirty-four Miller moved back to the parental home on Decatur where he would sit in the parlor for hours with his typewriter, sometimes pecking at the machine, but mostly staring out the window, wondering why the magic stream wouldn’t flow for him. When guests were to visit he would hastily pack up his typewriter and papers and hide in a closet until they left. His mother was ashamed: maybe Henry was just another family nutcase.
The following year the couple reunited, but things weren’t any better. Miller was still blocked, and June, now exasperated with the man who had begun referring to himself as “The Failure,” was openly selling herself around in the Village. In the fall the nadir they’d reached at the end of the previous year was revealed to have been a false bottom when June began a lesbian relationship with a mentally disturbed artist named Jean Kronski. Soon Jean and her grotesque puppet/companion, “Count Bruga,” were living with the Millers, and soon after that June and Jean were sleeping together while The Failure consoled himself as best he could in the next bed. The women began openly talking of going to Europe together, making plans as if Miller wasn’t there, and one day when he returned from an outing he found them gone, leaving a note behind saying only that they had shipped for Paris. In mingled rage and despair he broke every piece of furniture in the place, howling so wildly that the landlady feared for his life and came down to try to comfort him.
Months later, June returned, mercifully minus Jean, yet still carrying a considerably travel-battered Count Bruga. And so once more the sorry dance began again, with Miller now but one among several men vying for June’s attentions in an eerie reprise of that initial encounter when she was a taxi-dancer. His main rival appeared to be a man who wrote jokes for the New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. Roland Freedman was an older man whom June called Pop and who was in his own way as smitten with her as Miller had been—and in many ways still was—though he seems never to have thought of her as a mythological being. June herself, if she was not a goddess, was at least remarkably resourceful and now devised a new scheme to shake more gold out of Pop. Representing herself as an aspiring novelist who lacked only money so that she could quit her degrading work for literature, she got Freedman to put her on a kind of retainer while she wr
ote the novel she had for so long had in mind. The actual work, of course, would have to be secretly done by Miller, and it is a gauge of how desperate and dangerous his attachment to June had become that he agreed to serve as her galley slave, and that after so long a period when he could write almost nothing, now, in this new humiliating situation, he was able to crank out page on page of a manuscript he called Moloch, or, This Gentile World. Freedman must have been smitten indeed to have admired the thing enough to give June the money to go to Europe for several months in late summer 1928. Her husband joined her, a kind of stowaway.
The novel was in fact dreadful, a lurching, unconvincing hodgepodge of invective, random musings, and bigotry about a character who hates almost everything, most especially his immediate surroundings, the grimy city and its even more grimy inhabitants. Blacks, Chinese, American Indians, East Indians, epileptics—all are casually, even joyously slandered. But as the title suggests, it is the Jews who come in for the worst of it. Here there is neither ca-sualness nor joy, only a species of venom the world would soon come to know too well. All this is delivered from a wavering, uncertain point of view and in language that at times is stupefyingly stilted: “Like a butterfly in the palpitant tomb of its chrysalis, Marcelle fluttered and yearned with nubile wings for the miracle of the advent of dawn. In the surrender of a caress she looked for the swoon which would bring about her deliverance.” And so on.
Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer Page 7