Crazy Cock Read Free Page B

and Tony Bring stilllocked in their deadly triangle in the basement apartment. In Miller’s life, this epoch ended one evening in April 1927 when he returned to find an empty apartment and a note saying the two women had sailed for Paris. During their absence, he composed the voluminous notes that would be transformed into a fictional account of his dehumanization at the hands of June and Jean. And, slowly, he began to recover. Two months later, June returned, without Jean.
    A year—and a trip to Europe with June—intervened before Miller turned to the events of the winter of 1926-1927 and began writing
Crazy Cock
. June was now ready, she said, to make any kind of sacrifice necessary for him to succeed as a writer. She formulated a plan to send Henry to Paris, where he would, she hoped, write a novel that would make him famous and establish her as one of the muses of the ages. It was under these circumstances that he produced three versions of the novel, at first titled
Lovely Lesbians
. He would rework the manuscript several times over the next four years, deleting material and changing endings. He changed the title to
Crazy Cock
, so that it referred not to the two women but to Tony Bring. The vicissitudes of his own remarkable life, and not those of the other players in it, were his surest literary subjects, he had learned; it was an important discovery, for the “autobiographical romance” was to become Miller’s preferred genre, his subject always his own life.
    In February 1930, Miller arrived in Paris, leaving a copy of
Lovely Lesbians
with June, so she could take it around to New York publishers. June reported from time to time that various publishers were interested in it, but these announcements were as unreliable as any of her concoctions. Soon after his arrival, Miller had begun working on what he called his“Paris book,” the capacious, rollicking account of the down-at-the-heel narrator’s adventures in Paris that would become
Tropic of Cancer
. Even when the “Paris book” was accepted for publication by Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press, Miller was still trying to place
Crazy Cock
, sending it to Samuel Putnam at Covici-Friede.
    By the time
Cancer
appeared in 1934, however, Miller had given up on his third novel. The manuscripts of
Crazy Cock
were all now in June’s possession; he asked her to bring them on her final visit to Paris in 1932, but she forgot. At that point Miller was transmuting the elements of the story of his life with June in his epic
Tropic of Capricorn;
he would not return to the story of the ménage on Henry Street until he undertook the writing of
The Rosy Crucifixion
in 1942. He returned to America in 1940, eventually settling in California’s remote Big Sur, where he lived in poverty as this country’s most famous banned writer.
    By then
Crazy Cock
seemed to have disappeared, dependent as its existence was on June’s strikingly peripatetic habits. Sometime after her return from Paris, June married Stratford Corbett, an insurance man with New York Life. (By a strange coincidence, they honeymooned in Carmel, oblivious to Henry’s presence in nearby Big Sur.) A bomber pilot in the Second World War, Corbett remained in the military after the war, and June followed him to military bases, first in Florida and then in Texas. There the marriage ended, and June made her way back to New York. She wrote to Henry in 1947 for the first time in fifteen years, and her news was not good. Her health was very poor; she suffered from severe colitis, and it was clear that her mental condition had deteriorated. She wrote regularly throughout the 1950s, thanking Henry forthe small amounts of cash he was able to send her, and her letters—lodged in the Miller archives at UCLA—make for unsettling reading. She worked for several years for the city’s welfare department without pay, hoping to get on the city employment rolls. She was