The wisdom of the auction house: When Henry Miller learned to write outside the box.

Today in Literature's Steve King notes an anniversary of commerce from 32 years ago today:

On this day in 1986 the original manuscript of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was auctioned for $165,000, then a record price for a 20th century literary manuscript. This is Miller's first novel, written during and about his penniless, bohemian years in Paris in the early thirties. The diaries of his friend and lover, Anais Nin, inspired Miller to rewrite his conventionally-structured (and unsellable) autobiographical novel, Crazy Cock, in diary form. With this new approach, Miller said that he found his writer's voice: the new book went down on the back of the old book's pages at a madcap pace -- twenty, thirty, sometimes forty-five pages a day, the author's chain-smoking keeping up with the typewriter, Beethoven or jazz or an African laughing record at full volume on his victrola. One friend living in a nearby room at the Hotel Central said that those close to Miller at this time walked in his shadow, "and even his shadow was warm." After reading the manuscript, one editor said the same: "Miller is so alive nothing else can exist. It is like being close to the sun." When the book was published in 1934, some near him -- Nin, wife June, some of those companion to his picaresque adventures -- certainly felt burned by Miller's plagiarism, distortion or hyperbole. Others were outraged by the book's smirking male hedonism, or its egotism -- "What enrages me about people today," wrote Miller in a letter at the time, "is their willingness to die for things." The book's raw energy was indisputable, and even highbrows such as T. S. Eliot expressed admiration and wonder; Ezra Pound praised it as "a dirty book worth reading," the Miller male a type that would outlast "the weak-minded Woolf female." 

Miller scoffed at the sex-and-ego reading of his book. He thought of it as "volcanic," elemental, revolutionary on deeper levels. Something of this is in his early titles -- "The Last Book" and the Whitmanesque, "I Sing the Equator" -- and in the first pages:
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. 

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Beauty. . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse. . . . 

One corpse he had in mind was America: "America will call me the lowest of the low when they see my Cancer. What a laugh I'll have when they begin to spit and fume. I hope they'll learn something about death and futility, about hope, etc. I won't give them a fucking leg to stand on. . . ." Though his book was an underground classic for decades, Miller had to wait until the 60s for full fame at home. By this time the autobiographical approach that proved successful in the first book was credo -- "I don't use 'heroes,' and I don't write novels. I am the hero, and the book is myself" --and Miller was well on his way to the Big Sur sage, five-wives, nude-ping-pong-with-Playboy bunnies persona that dominated his last two decades, and brought the record manuscript price.

We have that first Miller book, the one Tropic's 1960s court-ordered release made possible to finally see print:

Henry Miller, Crazy Cock, Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, 1st edition/1st printing. ISBN 0-8021-1412-1.

Here is a book some will loathe, while others will laud it. Such is our polarized times.

In 1930 Henry Miller (born on this day in 1891) moved from New York to Paris, leaving behind — at least temporarily — his tempestuous marriage to June Smith and a novel that had sprung from his anguish over her love affair with a mysterious woman named Jean Kronski.

Initially titled Lovely Lesbians, Crazy Cock (along with his later novel Nexus) told the story of June's close relationship with the artist Marion, whom June had renamed Jean Kronski. Kronski lived with Miller and June from 1926 until 1927, when June and Kronski went to Paris together, leaving Miller behind, which upset him greatly. Miller suspected the pair of having a lesbian relationship. While in Paris, June and Kronski did not get along, and June returned to Miller several months later. Kronski committed suicide around 1930.

Begun in 1927- when Miller was unknown- and published 64 years later, Crazy Cock is the story of Tony Bring, a struggling writer whose bourgeois inclinations collide with the disordered bohemianism of his much-beloved wife, Hildred, particularly when her lover, Vanya, comes to live with them in their already cramped Greenwich Village apartment.

In a world swirling with violence, sex, and passion, the three struggle with their desires, inching ever nearer to insanity, each unable to break away from this dangerous and consuming love triangle.

Publisher’s Weekly was unimpressed: “Vicious anti-Semitic remarks and references reflect the obsession that preoccupied Miller ( Tropic of Capricorn ) until after WWII; his homophobia is also offensive. Despite the verbal power of many passages, this novel remains mawkish, its overheated hand-me-down surrealism, purple prose and self-conscious decadence prefiguring the adolescent egomania of much of Miller's later work.”

Kirkus Reviews was even hotter under the collar: “Early Henry Miller fighting the hydra of English. In the late 20's Miller was living in Greenwich Village, writing Crazy Cock and being housed and fed by his wife June. He kept revising Crazy Cock but later in Paris set it aside to write Tropic of Cancer--a wise choice, since the first three paragraphs of Cancer are worth Crazy Cock entire. Here is Miller at his moat swollen and surreal, with barely a hint of his comic genius and with the worst faults of Cancer now strung end to end. There are perhaps only two or three scenes in Crazy Cock that spring to their feet as storytelling. The rest is French dross: "Late one afternoon, as if electrified, he sprang out of bed...and began to write...The words rose up inside him like tombstones and danced without feet; he piled them up like an acropolis of flesh, rained on them with vengeful hate until they dangled like corpses slung from a lamppost. The eyes of his words were guitars and they were laced with black laces, and he put crazy hats on his words and under their laps table legs and napkins. And he had his words copulate with one another to bring forth empires, scarabs, holy water, the lice of dreams and dream of wounds." The plot is that one day June (called Hildred), who works as a waitress, brings home Vanya, a midwestern artist-waif who makes puppets and paints surreal figures on the apartment's walls and with whom Hildred forms a lesbian tie (the novel's first title was Lovely Lesbians). Miller, called Tony Bring, is soon fed up with Vanya, whom he treats as a retarded child. The rages and bad vibes among the three figures give the reader what action the novel has. Although the tie between the two women comes off rather warmly, Tony is a cold fish not even an author could love. Dull and amateurish despite the overrich boil of words.”

Library Journal called it a must for Millerphiles and completists: “Written in the late 1920s but lost until 1960, Crazy Cock was the immediate predecessor to 1934's Tropic of Cancer ( LJ 6/15/61), Miller's first published work. This earlier autobiographical novel explores a wrenching three-way relationship involving writer Tony Bring, his wife Hildred, and her bohemian lover Vanya. By this point in his career, Miller had begun to sense that conventional narrative was not his forte, but had not yet embraced the subjective, seemingly chaotic approach that would liberate his language. Crazy Cock has its moments of soaring rhetoric, but its primary value is to document the development of the most original American writer of his generation. For collections where Miller is read or studied.”

In a 1992 London Review of Books article, A. Craig Copetas enthused, "Crazy Cock will certainly continue to enrage the puritan crowd that he once said would fish-eye him as ‘the lowest of the low when they see Cancer. Crazy Cock is the roughly written but interesting Greenwich Village story of the relationship between a young man, his wife and her lesbian lover. It was Miller’s third novel, and it’s full of the sexual pitch and youthful literary eagerness which start café brawls and outrage high school librarians. Of course, the sheer force of Miller’s language in Crazy Cock didn’t fare too well in New York, which is one of the reasons he came to Paris in March 1930, returning in 1940 to California and an existence Dearborn sadly and accurately describes as a 'life in poverty as America’s most famous banned writer.'"

Printed on acid-free paper. Olive and black cloth boards; gold-stamped spine titling. Octavo, 202 pp. Unclipped dust jacket. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket.

Condition: very good. First Edition. Bound in the publisher’s olive green hardboards with contrasting black quarter cloth to spine and bold gilt title lettering to spine. There are no inscriptions. Book sits square and solid. Housed in the enigmatic dustwrapper with publishers printed price intact on front inside flap. HBB price: $50 or best offer.

Henry Bemis’ appreciation of Henry Miller is here.

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