Henry married June knowing that she could not distinguish fiction from reality, reality from fiction. She had “no boundaries,” we would say today. And, having no boundaries, she opened up his art.
The trancelike state the writer needs to tap the unconscious is one that borderline or psychotic people find comes easily to them. Such people are like artists in being able to invent fantasy worlds, but they are unlike artists in not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality. We are caught up in the web of living with their inventions—and disaster ensues.
This was the pattern with June. Her rhapsodic belief in Henry helped him become a writer, but her inability to live in the real world nearly drove him mad. “She put him through the tortures of hell, but he was masochistic enough to enjoy it,” said Alfred Perlès in My Friend, Henry Miller.
Henry and June commenced a chaotic life that was to take him from Brooklyn to Paris, from would-be to published author. Madly in love with hypnotic June in Jazz-Age New York, Henry clearly believed he could do anything—open a bootleg joint and get rich, write the great American novel and get famous. Did Henry live to write about it, or did he write to survive his life? No writer ever knows for sure.
June and Henry first toured Europe in 1928 (the year that Amelia Earhart flew the Atlantic), making a kind of bohemian grand tour before the Wall Street crash changed the world. Their relationship was tumultuous always—and always she tortured him with other lovers, particularly women. In the Greenwich Village of the twenties it was suddenly chic to be gay—and June was nothing if not a modern woman of fashion.
In 1930, Henry traveled to Europe without June (she remained in New York to support them with her various liaisons) and embarked upon what was to become the most fecund and joyous period of his life. The early months were desperate and threatened by starvation, but after a year or so of living by his wits, Henry’s gift for friendship saved him and he found himself surrounded by “boon companions,” lovers, and friends. By 1931 Miller was released (or released himself) to write Tropic of Cancer , the book that forever changed the way American literature would be written. The Brooklyn boy was about to be born again in Paris.
Chapter 4
Crazy Cock in the Land of Fuck
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books….
— HENRY MILLER, TROPIC OF CANCER
H ENRY MILLER WENT TO Paris in March 1930, hoping to find the freedom to become a writer.
He had always felt constricted in New York, hemmed in because it was his native city and his relatives lived there, hemmed in because of his failed marriage and abandoned child, hemmed in because in New York not to produce money is to be a bum, since New York (the most yang city on earth) measures everyone and everything by the ability to generate money. The artist requires idleness—right-brain dream time. And while idleness is possible in New York, guilt-free idleness is not. Busyness and business are the gods of New York, and art needs other gods: ease, idleness, the ability to receive life as it flows.
Henry Miller’s early novels Moloch and Crazy Cock , written in New York, show a man at war with his surroundings, trying to make the uncompromising asphalt bloom. In Paris he frees his unconscious to dream, his voice to sing, and his body to lead him in recording all the things previously left out of books.
The voice Henry Miller discovers in Paris is full of the exuberance of escape:
It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the
The trancelike state the writer needs to tap the unconscious is one that borderline or psychotic people find comes easily to them. Such people are like artists in being able to invent fantasy worlds, but they are unlike artists in not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality. We are caught up in the web of living with their inventions—and disaster ensues.
This was the pattern with June. Her rhapsodic belief in Henry helped him become a writer, but her inability to live in the real world nearly drove him mad. “She put him through the tortures of hell, but he was masochistic enough to enjoy it,” said Alfred Perlès in My Friend, Henry Miller.
Henry and June commenced a chaotic life that was to take him from Brooklyn to Paris, from would-be to published author. Madly in love with hypnotic June in Jazz-Age New York, Henry clearly believed he could do anything—open a bootleg joint and get rich, write the great American novel and get famous. Did Henry live to write about it, or did he write to survive his life? No writer ever knows for sure.
June and Henry first toured Europe in 1928 (the year that Amelia Earhart flew the Atlantic), making a kind of bohemian grand tour before the Wall Street crash changed the world. Their relationship was tumultuous always—and always she tortured him with other lovers, particularly women. In the Greenwich Village of the twenties it was suddenly chic to be gay—and June was nothing if not a modern woman of fashion.
In 1930, Henry traveled to Europe without June (she remained in New York to support them with her various liaisons) and embarked upon what was to become the most fecund and joyous period of his life. The early months were desperate and threatened by starvation, but after a year or so of living by his wits, Henry’s gift for friendship saved him and he found himself surrounded by “boon companions,” lovers, and friends. By 1931 Miller was released (or released himself) to write Tropic of Cancer , the book that forever changed the way American literature would be written. The Brooklyn boy was about to be born again in Paris.
Chapter 4
Crazy Cock in the Land of Fuck
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books….
— HENRY MILLER, TROPIC OF CANCER
H ENRY MILLER WENT TO Paris in March 1930, hoping to find the freedom to become a writer.
He had always felt constricted in New York, hemmed in because it was his native city and his relatives lived there, hemmed in because of his failed marriage and abandoned child, hemmed in because in New York not to produce money is to be a bum, since New York (the most yang city on earth) measures everyone and everything by the ability to generate money. The artist requires idleness—right-brain dream time. And while idleness is possible in New York, guilt-free idleness is not. Busyness and business are the gods of New York, and art needs other gods: ease, idleness, the ability to receive life as it flows.
Henry Miller’s early novels Moloch and Crazy Cock , written in New York, show a man at war with his surroundings, trying to make the uncompromising asphalt bloom. In Paris he frees his unconscious to dream, his voice to sing, and his body to lead him in recording all the things previously left out of books.
The voice Henry Miller discovers in Paris is full of the exuberance of escape:
It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the
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