Crazy Cock by Henry Miller

I looked over and organized my notes on Henry Miller yesterday because I had decided to finally, over a year after buying it, read Crazy Cock. I have been reluctant to read it because Moloch was so weak, and like Moloch, Crazy Cock was an early work of Miller’s, written before his breakthrough Tropic of Cancer and never published in Miller’s lifetime.

Written in the 1920s, Crazy Cock is based on Miller’s relationship with his second wife. As depicted in Crazy Cock, the marriage of Tony Bring (the Miller stand in) and his wife Hildred, a waitress at an establishment in bohemian Greenwich Village, has been a strange and difficult one from the start. Hildred, for example, endeavors to keep their marriage a secret from her friends, coworkers and family. Then a strange woman, Vanya, a depressed artist who makes eerie dolls, comes on the scene, and in a flash becomes Hildred’s inseparable best friend, and Tony’s formidable rival for his wife’s affections.

Written in the third person, unlike Miller’s later works, the novel lacks their immediacy and power. Crazy Cock is also burdened with too many “literary” descriptions of the sky and trees and so forth. (“White jockeys with spurs of malachite were scudding through the low-hanging clouds that hung like collars of fat about the slender ribs of the skyscrapers.”)

The triangular relationship of the three principles is interesting, of course, but Crazy Cock provides only a glimpse of the many themes and episodes that make The Rosy Crucifixion books, which cover the same period as Crazy Cock, touching, amusing and exciting: Miller’s many odd friends who tell him he is a genius and lend him money he likely won’t pay back, his love of good music, good food and good books, his love of the burlesque and of riding his bicycle, his frustrating efforts to become a writer, his agonizing desire to see Europe.

That glimpse of Miller’s mature work comes mostly in Part 5 (this 200 page book is split into six parts of several chapters each), the best section of Crazy Cock. There are loving references to Proust, the funny and sad story of a Christmas visit by the trio to Tony’s long-suffering parents’ home, and a stark snapshot of the complexity of the Tony-Hildred-Vanya relationship: Tony comes home drunk, and goes into a violent rage when he finds Vanya in his bed with his wife. He physically ejects Vanya from the bed, and in the melee punches Hildred to the floor, and minutes later, when the booze and anger have made him sick, it is Vanya who nurses him and mops up the mess he makes in the bathroom.

If Part 5 is a sort of prototype of the Miller I enjoy, Part 6 resembles the parts of Miller’s work I often find tedious: long surrealistic and symbolist passages and bizarre dreams that leave me yawning.

I wouldn’t recommend Crazy Cock to anyone who hasn’t read Miller’s later, more famous work, but devoted Miller fans will find it interesting, and Part 5 (about 55 pages) could stand on its own as a good short story or novella. Some will find Erica Jong’s 1991 foreword denouncing the United States amusing. Mary Dearborn’s introduction provides useful information on Miller’s life, and warns the reader about the anti-Semitism to be found in Crazy Cock. In fact, Crazy Cock has about one tenth as much anti-Semitism as Moloch.