Kronski
A doctor in the couple's circle: unreliable with money and objects, generous when it matters, and the man who told Val to go to France.
The book
At a glance
- A doctor, and a member of the couple's circle from before the marriage
- Doc Kronski and Dr Kronski
- The Bronx, by the end of the book
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeKronski is a character in Plexus, the 1953 novel by the American writer Henry Miller. Plexus is the middle book of a three-part autobiographical novel called The Rosy Crucifixion, narrated by Miller under the name Val and set in New York in the middle 1920s. Kronski is a doctor, and one of the friends Val and his wife Mona were trying to escape when they moved to Brooklyn Heights and gave almost nobody their address.
The escape does not last. He is back inside a hundred pages and stays in the book to the end — lending money, staging elaborate practical jokes with Mona, sleeping on the tables at their speakeasy, and putting them up in the Bronx when they have nowhere else. He is also the first person in the book to tell Val, in plain words, to stop writing magazine pieces and go abroad.
Miller renamed the people in his books, and no model for this one is identified in the text. This profile is taken from the Grove Weidenfeld printing, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How the book draws them
- One of the people they moved to escapeThe couple chose Brooklyn Heights to get as far as possible from everyone they knew, and the two names Val gives are Kronski and Arthur Raymond. Only the painter Ulric was to have the new address.
- Everything falls apart in his handsVal draws him as the opposite of Ulric, who mended and caressed his possessions. Kronski seemed to live among the discarded bric-a-brac of his ancestors; nothing was precious to him, and whatever he touched became ragged, torn, splotched and sullied.
- The months he was a painterThen one day, by a route Val never learned, Kronski started to paint — and started brilliantly, with bold colours and daring subjects, working eight and ten hours at a stretch, eating enormously before and after, singing and whistling and applauding himself. It lasted a few months and stopped.
- He improvises on Mona's storiesMona invented freely in front of company, and most visitors either asked awkward questions or went quiet. Kronski, like Ulric, knew how to join in, and Mona trusted him for it. His problem, in Val's account, was that he played the game too well: he was not content to back her up and wanted to add inventions of his own.
- The night Val was Dr Harry MarxKronski and Mona set up an evening at the couple's expense with Alan Cromwell, the Washington banker who buys the printed sheets Mona sells. Kronski's idea was to pass Val off as a Jewish surgeon sharing his practice, under the name Dr Harry Marx, with Kronski's wife playing Val's. Cromwell, extremely drunk, accepted all of it. The two men then praised Mona's writing so extravagantly that they invented poems, essays and stories for her, and Kronski predicted she would be the foremost woman writer in America. Told that she needed money, he was genuinely hurt.
- Fifty dollars, and adviceWhen the couple are broke in the South, Kronski wires that he and his wife are coming, arrives, asks how much they need and offers fifty. Then he tells Val what he thinks: that he will never settle in the South, that he is a born New Yorker, that the place for him is France, and that he should stop writing things for the magazines because he is cut out to write books. He promises to pay for the crossing once his practice is running. He never sends anything more.
- Where they go when there is nowhereHe is one of the two people the couple can reliably borrow rent money from. Arriving back in New York at midnight with nothing, their first act is to telephone him and ask if he can put them up; he says yes, and they take the subway out to the Bronx.