Jabberwhorl Cronstadt
An American poet in Paris who pays for the household by letting apartments to strangers. He hosts the long, drunken dinner that fills the piece named after him, and he talks through all of it.
To be writing poetry rather than letting apartments, which he says plainly at his own dinner table.
The book
At a glance
- An American poet in Paris, and the host of the piece named after him
- Letting apartments to tenants, which keeps the household running
- His wife Jill, their daughter Pinochinni, and two servants, on the third floor behind a sunken garden
- Poet, musician, herbologist, weather man, linguist, oceanographer, old clothes, colloids
- Walter Lowenfels · 1897–1976
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJabberwhorl Cronstadt is a character in Black Spring, a book published in 1936 by the American writer Henry Miller. Black Spring is not a novel. It is ten separate pieces of prose that move between Miller's childhood in Brooklyn and his life as a broke writer in Paris in the 1930s, and one of the ten is named after Cronstadt. That piece is an account of a single evening: the narrator arrives for dinner, the dinner is nowhere near ready, and the host talks for the rest of the night.
Cronstadt is a poet who makes his money in real estate. He shows apartments to prospective tenants and the telephone keeps ringing through dinner with more of them. He plays the piano, quotes Herodotus and Pliny across the table, hands his guests words he has looked up in the dictionary, and gets steadily drunker while the goose fails to arrive. He lives on the third floor behind a sunken garden with his wife Jill, their small daughter Pinochinni, and two servants.
Miller drew him from Walter Lowenfels, an American poet who was living in Paris in the same years and who ran the small Carrefour Press there with Michael Fraenkel. Lowenfels appears under the same invented name in Tropic of Cancer.
This profile is drawn from the Grove Press text of 1963, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How the book draws them
- The plate above the doorbellIt lists his occupations: poet, musician, herbologist, weather man, linguist, oceanographer, old clothes, colloids. Underneath that it says "Wipe your feet and blow your nose!" and underneath that is a rosette taken off a second-hand suit.
- The piano in the cornerA small black one with silver candlesticks. The spaniels have bitten the black keys off it. The albums on it are marked Beethoven, Bach, Liszt and Chopin, and are filled with bills, manicure sets, chess pieces, marbles and dice. In a good mood he opens the one marked Goya and plays something in the key of C.
- Rooms to let, all through dinnerThe phone is carried to the sideboard behind him and he answers it in French, going through the apartment room by room for a stranger — a sitting room, an entresol, a kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom — and assuring her it is not dear at all. Between calls he tells his guests that literature is not vitally necessary, and that he could be making some himself if he did not have refugees to feed.
- Define your termsAsked a direct question he does not care for, he picks up his cognac, adds a little cayenne pepper to it, and tells the guest that before he answers, the terms will have to be defined.
- Words handed out as giftsHe stops mid-sentence to hunt a word he looked up the day before. When it is found he gives it away across the table: take it with you, write a poem about it.
- Drunk before the goose comesBy the late stages of the evening he is asking for the Spanish cape and telling the table that the next Ice Age arrives tomorrow morning, that everything will be frozen tight, and that this is fine because the apartments are rented and the bills are paid.
- What he shouts about visitorsWhen a caller downstairs has to be got rid of, he yells not to lose his copy of Ezra Pound's Cantos, and not to ask them up again, because there is no room in the apartment — only enough space for German refugees.