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Williamsburg, Henry Miller, and June
Oct. 19th, 2015 11:09 amTwenty degrees this morning. The grass is frozen solid.
And it snowed yesterday. The snow didn’t stick. But still. Snow.
This is Henry Miller’s high school.
The Rosy Crucifixion and most particularly, its opening volume, Sexus, were very important books to me once upon a time. Its prose has the kind of raw immediacy of ripping open a scab. Its subject matter – the obsession with June, the desperate need to break away from an ugly life at all costs – really spoke to me.
I wonder what I would think of the books if I was reading them for the first time now?
I probably wouldn’t like them much. Miller writes – wrote – a lot like Kerouac, only with more modifiers. That same unpurged (for which read "unedited") flow of words straight from the id, the same violence, the same cock worship, the same implacable lack of regard for anyone who got in the way of the satisfaction of any stray whim.
Both wrote “fiction,” but with a wink-wink, nod-nod, that telegraphed to their reader that what they were really writing was… life. Both probably led lives considerably more boring than the lives they recorded.
One of my very favorite books is a memoir by a Kerouac girlfriend, Joyce Johnston, entitled Minor Characters.
I'm a 47-year-old woman with a permanent sense of impermanence, Johnston writes somewhere near the end of the book. If life were like a piece of piano music, you could play it over and over again until you got it right. She was a classically trained pianist, and no doubt, I am butchering that quote.
My interest in Kerouac and Miller is less an interest in them as writers – they’re not, after all, very good writers – and more in their Juggernaut-like ability to mow down everything in their paths. They were irresistible forces. Until they each met an immoveable object.
###
In Kerouac’s case, the immoveable object was Neal Cassady. Neal Cassady doesn’t interest me in the slightest.
In Miller’s case, the immoveable object was the mysterious June.
###
June was one of my first big literary crushes. Right up there with T.E. Lawrence and Lord Byron.
Her personality was somehow big enough to override Miller’s love/hate. You kind of liked her for outfoxing the horribly self-centered and brutish Miller. You rooted for her. You hoped somehow she'd get away.
June met Miller when she was working as a dance hall girl at the Orpheum in Times Square some time in the 1920s. (Note that Miller’s 1920s are a very different take on the era when Scott and Zelda were cavorting drunkenly in the Plaza fountain. The 1920s are not a romantic gilded era for Miller.)
Miller marries June, but June falls in love with a woman, and runs away to Paris with this woman.
The cock-obsessed Miller's sense of betrayal knows no bounds. He takes off to Paris in hot pursuit. He loves her, he tells his readers. But really he wants to destroy her. For slighting his cock.
###
As a parenthetical aside, I will note here that I’ve been unabashedly bisexual since puberty. I suppose this is one reason why gay liberation and rainbow flags have never interested me in the slightest. The whole polarization of sexual identity strikes me as idiocy. After SOTUS legalized same-sex marriage, Andrew Sullivan wrote an interesting op-ed piece in which he posed what to me is the essential question: Okay! Now that we’re not oppressed anymore, what do we have in common?
And the answer, as far as I can tell, is: NOTHING!
At least, nothing you can build any kind of political movement around.
This is why identity politics makes me roll my eyes.
Of course, people should be free to couple however they like. But I would say that sexual attraction is a spectrum, and that when people blazon any kind of polarized identity, they're falling into the same trap as hetero-normatives. Real life preferences are besides the point. (Cue my dear friend Ed telling me, "But I've never had the slightest desire to have sex with a woman!") It actually doesn’t matter if in in "real" -- ha, ha, ha! -- life, you fall on one of the far ends of that spectrum; the spectrum still exists, and you are limiting yourself, hacking off a limb, to avow that it doesn’t.
No, mine is not a popular opinion. And I’ve been beaten up for it enough over the years to keep my mouth shut in company.
But, of course, this is my diary where I can say whatever I want.
###
In Paris, Miller met pampered princess Anais Nin who ended up supporting him for over a decade. And to whom he successfully transfers his June obsession. Poor June! Forced to be the subject of the outpourings of two of the 20th century’s most prolific literary narcissists!
English was not June’s native language. One assumes that this is why though surrounded by writers, she never tried to write herself. She was probably unsure of her own language skills. June was born in Romania. Emigrated to the U.S. at age five. She was dirt poor, dropped out of high school at age 15 to help support her parents and four siblings as a taxi dancer. She was not stupid. She wanted more than anything to go to Hunter College.
Miller didn’t give her a modicum of support in that ambition. He preferred to keep her a sex object. A sex object who tortured him. Thus did his Catholic boyhood continue to hold sway.
The latter part of June's life, the part after physical beauty faded, was not happy. She moved back to the U.S. in 1934. Married a man who left her soon thereafter for an actress. Lived in a series of cheap Broadway hotels all throughout the 40s. Miller sometimes sent money.
By the early 1950s, June's mental state had deteriorated to the point where she was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric ward and given electroshock treatment. She became permanently crippled falling in full convulsion from the electroshock treatment table and breaking several bones.
Shortly thereafter, she began volunteering with the New York City Department of Welfare, and by 1960, she was working full time as a social worker.
It was right around then that Miller decided to meet up with her again. He was shocked, shocked, shocked by her mental and physical deterioration.
But, again. What did that mean coming from Miller?
When June retired from social work, she moved with one of her brothers to Cottonwood, Arizona. She died a year before Miller. Her gravestone in the Valley View cemetery reads, June E. Corbett, beloved sister. Corbett was the name of the second husband who deserted her.
I’ve often thought that June’s life would make a great novel, a counterpoint to The Rosy Crucifixion (alhtough I don't suppose anyone actually reads The Rosy Crucifixion anymore), much in the same way The Wide Saragossa Sea is a counterpoint to Jane Eyre.
###
Apart from long screeds savaging June, Miller’s most colorful prose denunciations are reserved for his descriptions of the Williamsburg he grew up in. So while I was in the city over the weekend, I decided to take a long walk – a very long walk, as it turned out, nine miles (according to iPhone GPS) to explore some of sites of Miller’s boyhood.
Many of which – surprisingly – are still extant. The house at 662 Driggs where Miller grew up. His old high school, these days coopted into some sort of purveyor of substandard Hassid education.
Miller’s right: Williamsburg is deeply, deeply ugly. Doesn’t matter how many hipsters move in to pay overpriced rents: Williamsburg is creepy and utterly charmless.
And it snowed yesterday. The snow didn’t stick. But still. Snow.
This is Henry Miller’s high school.
The Rosy Crucifixion and most particularly, its opening volume, Sexus, were very important books to me once upon a time. Its prose has the kind of raw immediacy of ripping open a scab. Its subject matter – the obsession with June, the desperate need to break away from an ugly life at all costs – really spoke to me.
I wonder what I would think of the books if I was reading them for the first time now?
I probably wouldn’t like them much. Miller writes – wrote – a lot like Kerouac, only with more modifiers. That same unpurged (for which read "unedited") flow of words straight from the id, the same violence, the same cock worship, the same implacable lack of regard for anyone who got in the way of the satisfaction of any stray whim.
Both wrote “fiction,” but with a wink-wink, nod-nod, that telegraphed to their reader that what they were really writing was… life. Both probably led lives considerably more boring than the lives they recorded.
One of my very favorite books is a memoir by a Kerouac girlfriend, Joyce Johnston, entitled Minor Characters.
I'm a 47-year-old woman with a permanent sense of impermanence, Johnston writes somewhere near the end of the book. If life were like a piece of piano music, you could play it over and over again until you got it right. She was a classically trained pianist, and no doubt, I am butchering that quote.
My interest in Kerouac and Miller is less an interest in them as writers – they’re not, after all, very good writers – and more in their Juggernaut-like ability to mow down everything in their paths. They were irresistible forces. Until they each met an immoveable object.
###
In Kerouac’s case, the immoveable object was Neal Cassady. Neal Cassady doesn’t interest me in the slightest.
In Miller’s case, the immoveable object was the mysterious June.
###
June was one of my first big literary crushes. Right up there with T.E. Lawrence and Lord Byron.Her personality was somehow big enough to override Miller’s love/hate. You kind of liked her for outfoxing the horribly self-centered and brutish Miller. You rooted for her. You hoped somehow she'd get away.
June met Miller when she was working as a dance hall girl at the Orpheum in Times Square some time in the 1920s. (Note that Miller’s 1920s are a very different take on the era when Scott and Zelda were cavorting drunkenly in the Plaza fountain. The 1920s are not a romantic gilded era for Miller.)
Miller marries June, but June falls in love with a woman, and runs away to Paris with this woman.
The cock-obsessed Miller's sense of betrayal knows no bounds. He takes off to Paris in hot pursuit. He loves her, he tells his readers. But really he wants to destroy her. For slighting his cock.
###
As a parenthetical aside, I will note here that I’ve been unabashedly bisexual since puberty. I suppose this is one reason why gay liberation and rainbow flags have never interested me in the slightest. The whole polarization of sexual identity strikes me as idiocy. After SOTUS legalized same-sex marriage, Andrew Sullivan wrote an interesting op-ed piece in which he posed what to me is the essential question: Okay! Now that we’re not oppressed anymore, what do we have in common?
And the answer, as far as I can tell, is: NOTHING!
At least, nothing you can build any kind of political movement around.
This is why identity politics makes me roll my eyes.
Of course, people should be free to couple however they like. But I would say that sexual attraction is a spectrum, and that when people blazon any kind of polarized identity, they're falling into the same trap as hetero-normatives. Real life preferences are besides the point. (Cue my dear friend Ed telling me, "But I've never had the slightest desire to have sex with a woman!") It actually doesn’t matter if in in "real" -- ha, ha, ha! -- life, you fall on one of the far ends of that spectrum; the spectrum still exists, and you are limiting yourself, hacking off a limb, to avow that it doesn’t.
No, mine is not a popular opinion. And I’ve been beaten up for it enough over the years to keep my mouth shut in company.
But, of course, this is my diary where I can say whatever I want.
###
In Paris, Miller met pampered princess Anais Nin who ended up supporting him for over a decade. And to whom he successfully transfers his June obsession. Poor June! Forced to be the subject of the outpourings of two of the 20th century’s most prolific literary narcissists!
English was not June’s native language. One assumes that this is why though surrounded by writers, she never tried to write herself. She was probably unsure of her own language skills. June was born in Romania. Emigrated to the U.S. at age five. She was dirt poor, dropped out of high school at age 15 to help support her parents and four siblings as a taxi dancer. She was not stupid. She wanted more than anything to go to Hunter College.
Miller didn’t give her a modicum of support in that ambition. He preferred to keep her a sex object. A sex object who tortured him. Thus did his Catholic boyhood continue to hold sway.
The latter part of June's life, the part after physical beauty faded, was not happy. She moved back to the U.S. in 1934. Married a man who left her soon thereafter for an actress. Lived in a series of cheap Broadway hotels all throughout the 40s. Miller sometimes sent money.
By the early 1950s, June's mental state had deteriorated to the point where she was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric ward and given electroshock treatment. She became permanently crippled falling in full convulsion from the electroshock treatment table and breaking several bones.
Shortly thereafter, she began volunteering with the New York City Department of Welfare, and by 1960, she was working full time as a social worker.
It was right around then that Miller decided to meet up with her again. He was shocked, shocked, shocked by her mental and physical deterioration.
But, again. What did that mean coming from Miller?
When June retired from social work, she moved with one of her brothers to Cottonwood, Arizona. She died a year before Miller. Her gravestone in the Valley View cemetery reads, June E. Corbett, beloved sister. Corbett was the name of the second husband who deserted her.
I’ve often thought that June’s life would make a great novel, a counterpoint to The Rosy Crucifixion (alhtough I don't suppose anyone actually reads The Rosy Crucifixion anymore), much in the same way The Wide Saragossa Sea is a counterpoint to Jane Eyre.
###
Apart from long screeds savaging June, Miller’s most colorful prose denunciations are reserved for his descriptions of the Williamsburg he grew up in. So while I was in the city over the weekend, I decided to take a long walk – a very long walk, as it turned out, nine miles (according to iPhone GPS) to explore some of sites of Miller’s boyhood.
Many of which – surprisingly – are still extant. The house at 662 Driggs where Miller grew up. His old high school, these days coopted into some sort of purveyor of substandard Hassid education.
Miller’s right: Williamsburg is deeply, deeply ugly. Doesn’t matter how many hipsters move in to pay overpriced rents: Williamsburg is creepy and utterly charmless.
