Crazy Cock Read Free

with these responsibilities, he took a job as an employment manager at Western Union, the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of his later books. He had to hire and fire messengers, and the turnover was incredible; the absurdity of the job reduced him to despair. On a three-week vacation in 1922, he willed into being a book-length manuscript. Galled by his employer’s suggestion that it was too bad there was no Horatio Alger tale about a messenger, and inspired by the example of Theodore Dreiser’s
Twelve Men
, which he much admired, Miller turned out a work he would call
Clipped Wings
. The title referred to the wings on the Western Union symbol, and the book was a portrait of twelve messengers, angels whose wings had been clipped. The fragments of the manuscript that survive indicate that the book was a tediousexercise in cynicism and misanthropy; Miller himself said that he knew it was “faulty from start to finish . . . inadequate, bad,
terrible.”
    He returned to Western Union, passive and pessimistic, less certain than ever of his writing future, trapped in a loveless marriage. Then, on a chance visit to a Times Square dance hall, he met June Mansfield Smith, the Mona of
Tropic of Cancer
, the Hildred of
Crazy Cock
, the Mara of
The Rosy Crucifixion
, the mythified “her” to whom
Tropic of Capricorn
is dedicated. Mysterious, dramatic, spellbindingly beautiful, June won Henry immediately. He was mesmerized by her torrential talk, her spinning of intricate and shadowy tales involving intrigues with other men; in
Crazy Cock
he would describe her as “a veritable honeycomb of dissimulations.” June surrounded herself with chaos, and Miller thrived on it. He later wrote in
Tropic of Capricorn:
    I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life. . . . Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—
myself
.
    Most important, he learned that what he wanted was “not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself.” For June insisted, unconditionally, that he throw over his Western Union job (and his wife and child) in order to write. Just months after they were married in June 1924, Henry began his writing life. June supported them through a succession of hostessing jobs in the Village and, increasingly,with money brought in by elaborate schemes involving her numerous admirers—an activity she called “gold digging,” but which seems actually to have been a kind of genteel prostitution.
    Miller later said he was so in love with the idea of becoming a writer that he could not write. With uncharacteristic humility, he began by trying to get magazine assignments. He warmed up by writing a series of small sketches, meditations on such subjects as Brooklyn’s Navy Yard and wrestling heroes, and submitting them feverishly to popular magazines—which almost invariably rejected them. June and he hatched a plan to print these sketches on colored pieces of cardboard and to sell them door to door. Before long, June integrated the “Mezzotints,” as they called these broadsides, into her confidence games; her admirers would buy whole runs of prose poems in exchange for her company—or, more likely, her sexual favors. She managed to get one published in a magazine called
Pearson’s
, but it appeared under her name, not Henry’s. His writing became currency in her sexual transactions, with results for his development as a writer that were, predictably enough, not salutary. His work was flat, uninspired, laden with detail, and couched in baroque language.
    Miller’s second novel, written in 1928, was a product of this compromised set of circumstances. As part of an elaborate seduction of a wealthy old man