Dion Moloch
Employment manager of a New York telegraph company — clever, contemptuous, stalled, and certain the city is organized against him. Miller's first surviving self-portrait.
Henry Miller in the atlas — books, places, and lifeThe book
At a glance
- Dion Moloch, the personnel manager who hires and fires messenger boys for a New York telegraph company
- Three years when the story opens
- Hiring and firing messenger boys, at a company that cannot keep them
- When America entered the First World War
- A Brooklyn flat, with his wife Blanche and their small daughter, Edda
- Medium height, the features of a scholar and a faun, a Bedford whipcord suit with badly frayed collars and cuffs
- Prigozi, a third-year medical student who hangs around the employment office and whom nobody else can stand
- Twilliger, the vice-president on the thirteenth floor, a messenger himself in his youth
- Henry Miller · 1891–1980 · Yorkville, Manhattan, raised in Brooklyn
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeDion Moloch is the main character of Moloch, a novel by the American writer Henry Miller. The book takes its title from his surname. Miller wrote it in 1927 and 1928 and then put it away, and it was not published until 1992, twelve years after his death, so a novel about New York in the early 1920s reached its first readers seventy years late. Moloch is the personnel manager of a New York telegraph company, called in the book the Great American Telegraph Company. The job means hiring and firing the messenger boys who carry telegrams around the city, and he has been doing it for three years when the story opens. He is married to a pianist named Blanche, and they have a small daughter, Edda.
Miller describes the hiring office in more detail than anything else in the book. It fills the ground floor of a run-down building in downtown Manhattan, behind two large plate-glass windows, so people on the sidewalk can stand and watch the hiring go on inside; the porter is sent out every so often to move them off the glass. A life-size cardboard cut-out of a smiling boy in messenger uniform stands in each window to draw applicants in. A boy who is taken on changes into his uniform in a cubicle at the back, wraps his own clothes into a parcel at a table by the exit, and leaves through the rear door. Moloch is good at the work and holds it in contempt. Miller writes that he was as far removed from the usual cares of an employment manager as an igloo is from the equator.
Away from the office, Moloch walks the city. He crosses Manhattan crowds and Brooklyn side streets and finds almost everything he passes repulsive. At home in Brooklyn the marriage has settled into daily argument, and he stays out in the evenings rather than sit in it. He drinks, he chases women, and he spends money he owes to other people. He says most of what he thinks out loud to Prigozi, a third-year medical student who hangs around the employment office and whom everyone else in the building finds disgusting.
Dion Moloch is Henry Miller with the name changed. Miller himself hired and fired messengers for the Western Union Telegraph Company at its Park Row office in Lower Manhattan, and he was married to the pianist Beatrice Wickens through the years the book describes. Mary V. Dearborn, the biographer who found the manuscript in 1988 and wrote the introduction to the 1992 Grove Press edition, calls Dion Moloch the autobiographical hero of the novel, and points out how flattering a self-portrait it is. In the book, messengers adore him, his own staff come to him for advice, former employees send him long admiring letters, and women want him. Dearborn's account of the real job is harder. She writes that Miller took the messengers' carfare for his own lunch money and preyed on the secretaries and female messengers who worked under him, and that a colleague later published a memoir of Western Union calling Miller lazy and shoddy at the work.
Miller does not soften what his hero thinks of other people. The book's full title is Moloch; or, This Gentile World, and that subtitle points at the hostility Moloch keeps up toward Jews and toward the immigrant neighbourhoods spreading through Brooklyn in those years. The same novel also has him turning on his wife and on his friend Stanley for talking that way, and the one man whose company he actively seeks, Prigozi, is Jewish. Dearborn calls the attitude ambivalent, and notes that June Miller, the woman Miller left this marriage for in 1923 and then wrote about for the rest of his career, was Jewish herself.
Sex drives a good deal of the plot, and the book describes very little of it. Dearborn's introduction points out that the four-letter words and the explicit sex scenes that later got Miller's books banned in the United States are not yet part of his method here; the scenes in Moloch are interrupted, postponed, or written in soft focus. This profile is drawn from the Grove Press text of 1992, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How the book draws them
- Three years hiring and firing messenger boysDion Moloch runs the employment office of the Great American Telegraph Company in New York, and has held the post for three years when the book begins. The company cannot keep messenger boys for any length of time, so his day is spent taking them on and letting them go.
- An office the public can watch from the sidewalkThe employment office sits at street level with two enormous plate-glass windows, so passers-by can watch the whole business of hiring; idlers press their noses to the pane until the porter goes out to move them. A life-size cardboard figure of a bright, handsome boy in the full uniform of the service stands in each window, advertising a career in the telegraph service and answering a popular belief that messengers were all idiots or old men.
- The carfare he keeps for his own lunchA messenger boy sent to an office too far away to walk to was owed his fare, and the allowance existed mostly on paper. Miller writes: "Usually Moloch reserved it for his lunch money, dolling it out only to 'repeaters' who knew of its existence and were cheeky enough to demand it."
- Two thousand new boys hired in a single monthHis monthly report of resignations and dismissals showed at least a tenth of the force quitting after less than a day's work. When Twilliger, the vice-president on the thirteenth floor, arrived with orders to cut wages, the office had to hire more than two thousand raw recruits the following month and still could not fill the gaps. Safety First posters in the offices and inside the dressing booths carried the national tally of messengers killed, crippled or disabled, with snapshots of the commonest ways it happened.
- What he looks like: a good suit going threadbareMiller introduces him plainly: "Dion Moloch was a modest, sensitive soul attired in a suit of Bedford whipcord and pale blue shirt, the collars and cuffs of which were disgracefully frayed." A later look at him from the street adds a man of medium height with the composite features of scholar and faun, an American of three generations, a husband and a father.
- He married when America entered the First World War"When America entered the war Dion Moloch took it into his head to get married." The book declines to explain how it happened, says the story is a volume of its own, and reports only that he packed his things that morning and wiped his feet on his parents' rug for the last time. Leaving home is what forced him to find a job.
- The friend nobody else in the building can standPrigozi is short, hairy, unpressed and unclean, a third-year medical student running an unlicensed practice on the side and expecting to be a psychiatrist one day. He talks constantly about Freud, Jung and Adler; the year before he had cut up some twenty-three guinea pigs and kept them in his flat along with a skeleton, a wife and a few sticks of furniture. Everyone in the office finds him repulsive. Of Moloch's attachment to him, Miller writes: "No one could quite fathom why Moloch tolerated him."
- He tells his friend to take a crackpot plan to the bossPrigozi, the medical student who hangs around the employment office, keeps announcing a scheme of his own for improving the quality of the messenger force, and keeps threatening to take it to Twilliger, the vice-president who runs the company from the thirteenth floor. Moloch tells him the plan is cockeyed and that he should go anyway, assuring him that Twilliger has never been known to kick anybody downstairs. Then he adds: "Anyway, I believe in letting every man be his own Jesus."
- The night he took thirteen creditors to a burlesque showHe turns up at Cooper Square one evening with several hundred dollars in his pocket. He might have bought a shirt or a tie, or done what the other married men at the telegraph company did and gone home with roses to sit up half the night studying advertisements for houses in the suburbs. At a quarter past eight he and thirteen satisfied creditors were riding south and east in three Yellow taxis, fourteen tickets for the National Winter Garden stacked in his vest pocket.
- He pushes his way into a woman's room at nightMoloch's friend Prigozi talks to him about a woman named Naomi and then tells him to go ahead and take her: "I don't want her, understand?" Moloch decides to storm the place. He knocks softly at her door in the dark, and when it opens a fraction and her voice asks who is there, he leans his weight against it and pushes into the room.
- He says his wife keeps their daughter away from himDion Moloch and his wife Blanche have a small daughter, Edda. He complains to his friend Prigozi that Blanche has a trick of manoeuvring the child out of his way, and that it makes his blood boil, as though he were something contagious; Prigozi answers that Edda is the one getting a raw deal. Meeting them in the street, he catches her up when she slips out of her mother's grasp and tosses her in the air. He also describes to Prigozi a night fight in the dark that woke the child screaming, and what he did afterwards was bathe Blanche's face and try to smooth her hair.
- Walking Brooklyn, he finds the crowds unbearableThe streets set him off. He passes the old Amphion Theatre, where he had sat in the gallery with his mother to see Way Down East, and reads the new bills outside it as an insult. Coming out of the burlesque he finds the crowd unbearable, sees disease and deformity everywhere on the pavement, steps aside for a man he calls an idiot, and cries out for an ax. Later, looking down a flight of steps at a Brooklyn backyard, he takes in a dump heap of rusty can openers, broken-down baby carriages, discarded tin bathtubs, greasy window shades, sewer pipes and half-eaten animal crackers.
Late in the book Dion Moloch finishes writing a manuscript and hands it in at work, and it ends up lying in a drawer of the vice-president's rolltop desk, waiting to be read whenever he gets to it. Miller then steps forward and tells the reader what will come of it: within days that document will be used as the pretext for sacking Moloch from the telegraph company. The novel adds that it has no intention of following him into what happens after that, when he is out of work and lodging with someone else's family.
Near the end Moloch reaches his cheerless lodging with his brain on fire, decides to give up his vagabond days and the part he has been playing, and speaks aloud to himself: "What has my life amounted to? What am I living for?"
The way out that the novel cannot imagine is the one Henry Miller took in real life. He left the Western Union Telegraph Company, left his first marriage, and went to Paris, and when he came to write about these same years again he did it in the first person, in his 1939 novel Tropic of Capricorn. Mary V. Dearborn's introduction records that the original manuscript of Moloch carries a note pencilled in Miller's own hand in the margin, marking chapter 13 as destined for that later book.