Jill
Jabberwhorl Cronstadt's wife, who runs the dinner, counts her husband's drinks and supplies the words he cannot remember. She is expecting a child, which he mentions in passing.
The book
At a glance
- The wife of the poet Jabberwhorl Cronstadt
- A third-floor Paris apartment, a small daughter called Pinochinni, and two servants
- Expecting a child, which her husband mentions in the middle of a speech about the coming Ice Age
- "Jabberwhorl Cronstadt", one of the book's ten pieces
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJill is a character in Black Spring, the 1936 book by the American writer Henry Miller. Black Spring is a set of ten separate prose pieces rather than a novel, and Jill belongs to one of them, an account of a single evening at the Paris apartment of a poet named Jabberwhorl Cronstadt. She is his wife.
The piece is mostly Cronstadt talking, and Jill is the person in the room managing him. She goes back and forth to the kitchen after the goose, answers the phone when it interrupts dinner again, tells the guests why he is in the mood he is in, and stops him when he has had enough to drink. She is also the one who knows the word he is looking for.
This profile is drawn from the Grove Press text of 1963, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How Jill Is Portrayed
- Coming in in Nile greenThe guests have been waiting a while and the hosts are still dressing. Jill finally comes forward wearing a Nile-green cloak.
- Explaining her husband to the guestsShe tells them to sit down, and accounts for his temper with one flat line: "He's got his period."
- The word he has lostHe breaks off to ask what it was he was looking up yesterday. She answers immediately — omoplate? — and then produces the one he actually wanted, omophagia.
- Counting the drinks"I think you've had enough," she says, and asks how many he has got through that day.
- Chasing the dinnerTwice she gets up to see what the girls in the kitchen are doing, and when the goose still has not appeared she calls for Elsa.
- Being corrected on her own storyShe starts telling the table about a woman he showed an apartment to who then asked to see his poetry. He cuts in to say she does not tell it right, and takes the story over.
- Late in the eveningWhen he says he is freezing, she gets up to look for the Spanish cape. A little later she says he is losing his mind.
If you like Black Spring
If you like Henry Miller
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Miller's acknowledged master at making literature out of the gutter. Journey gave him permission; Cancer is what he did with it.
View author
Ezra Pound
Pound read Cancer and sent Miller a famously backhanded postcard. Both believed literature's job was to wake the reader by any means necessary.
View author
Simone de Beauvoir
French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.
View author