Crazy Cock Read Free Page A

she identified only as “Pop,” June appropriated Henry’s efforts as her own, turning to Pop for support for a novel
she
was writing. He agreed to give her a weekly stipend if she showed him some pages each week—pages that would be written by her husband. In these constrained circumstances Miller turned out
Moloch, or ThisGentile World
, an autobiographical portrait of Dion Moloch, a Western Union man married to a nagging and prudish woman. Another “arrangement,” however, was to have an even greater impact upon his writing during this period.
    Moloch
was written when Miller was in recovery after the complete breakdown caused by June’s love affair with Jean Kronski. In 1927 the two women left for Paris, and in June’s absence Henry began describing the events that led to his breakdown, collecting notes that would shape
Crazy Cock
and, later,
Tropic of Capricorn
and
The Rosy Crucifixion
. As his first attempt to transmute those galvanizing experiences into art,
Crazy Cock
is a riveting document indeed.
    The story he had to tell was almost nightmarish. While Henry tried to write in the Millers’ Brooklyn Heights apartment, June worked at a variety of hostessing and waitressing jobs in Greenwich Village. As part of the Village’s bohemian subculture, June came into contact with all kinds of conspicuous characters, from slumming millionaires to androgynous doyennes of the night. One such character, who was to become the Vanya of
Crazy Cock
, appeared one day in the restaurant where June worked, newly arrived in town from the West Coast and looking for work. June thought her extraordinarily beautiful: she had long black hair, high cheekbones, violet eyes, and a confident walk. She wanted to be an artist, the woman said, and she showed June a puppet she called Count Bruga, a garish and frightening affair, which June propped up against the headboard of her marital bed. June renamed her Jean Kronski, inventing for her a romantic past that included descent from the Romanoffs.
    June and Jean quickly became inseparable, Jean moving to Brooklyn to be closer to June. Henry soon realized thatJean was a major contender for June’s affection. He became obsessed with determining the exact nature of their attachment. He was sure Jean was a Lesbian, but was June? Preoccupied throughout his early life with questions of sexual identity, Miller now saw his hard-won sense of manhood entirely undone by June’s violent attraction to another woman. His working notes for
Crazy Cock
read at this point: “Commence to go really nuts now.”
    The triangular drama quickly shifted into high gear. Jean and the Millers took a basement apartment together on Brooklyn’s Henry Street, one door down from an alleyway called Love Lane. They festooned the walls with bizarre frescoes and painted the ceiling violet. In
Crazy Cock
, Miller says the air there was “blue with explanations”: elaborate stories, contrived confessions, misleading tales were spilled forth over the apartment’s “gut table.” As we learn from
Crazy Cock
, June began to question Henry’s sexual orientation, a habit that made her increasingly unstable husband furious. All three were by nature unbalanced—Jean had been institutionalized (as is Vanya in
Crazy Cock)
, June was almost certainly a borderline psychotic, and Miller was beginning to wonder if his situation was a symptom of the same madness that had already institutionalized one member of his family. Both June and Jean used drugs, and the basement apartment took on the atmosphere, Miller wrote, of a coke joint. At night he often combed Jean’s mane of black hair and pared her toenails; in the next moment he might embed a knife in her bedroom door. One night he was driven to a feeble attempt at suicide; June never even read the note he left for her.
    This was the milieu Miller set out to capture in
Crazy Cock
. The novel ends with Hildred, Vanya,