Jay Martin
THE LAST BOOK
The new book. The first book. In dismissing Henry Miller's
unpubli shed novel,
Crazy Cock,
Michael Fraenkel had urged him:
"Write as you talk. Write as you live. Write as you feel and think. JUSt
sit down before the machine and let go.... Evacuate the trenches!"
That, if only Henry knew himself well enough, was good advice. He
decided to find out how he did live and think and feel. Inspired now by
t
he mere ex istence of Ana·is N in 's ]
ournallntime
(which he had not yet
read in its entirety), and accepting the logic of the confessional impulse
from which her book had sprung, he decided to compose his own
au tobi ography as a diary. He ca ll ed it "Th e Last Book. " Later he called
it "The Tropic of Capricorn" and finally
The Tropic of Cancer.
Probably to conserve paper, but with a nice gesture of dismissal for
his previous work, he turned over the sheets of his original Tony Bring
manuscript (of
Crazy Cock)
and rolled the clean side upward into the
typewriter. Ri cha rd Galen Osborn was on his mind and he began the
logbook of his desperate life with the story of Osborn , himself, and
Irene, the Russian princess. This was an account of a woman who lived
with them and preyed on the two of them, especially upon Dick, while
ass uring them of the truth of the most outlandish tales of her past and
keeping th em away from her by claiming that she had a dose.
At once the line between fi ction and reportage broke down.
Wha tever Henry said was true
was
true, a t least for that moment. The
on ly rule that remained was the drive to digress. Soon, everything was
go ing into th e diary, all the stories o f his Paris years. " It's like a big,
public garbage can ," he wrote to Ned Schnellock. "Only the mangy
cats are missing. But I'll get them in yet." In they went. He pillaged his
notebooks for additional material, observations, quotations, questions .
Some he even pasted in , along with n ewspaper clippings and menus. A
description of Wambly Bald's room went in along with a catalogue of
th e la bels and brand names of the liquors from which Bald distilled his
column . One day while he was writing, the voice of a woman singing
·'Never wanted to ... What am I to do?" drifted into his room. The
