Ned
A commercial artist from the advertising trade who talks Val into interviews, carries a ukulele to Florida, and lands the job Val wanted.
The book
At a glance
- A commercial artist and one of Val's regular accomplices
- Advertising and promotion, in and out of it
- The Mezzotint years, the speakeasy, and the trip to Florida
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeNed 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. Ned is a commercial artist who works on and off in advertising and promotion, and he is the friend Val calls when a scheme needs a second man with a straight face.
He is not one of the household — he has his own studio and his own jobs — but he is in every hustle of the book's second half, and he is one of the three who go south together during the Florida land boom. Miller renamed the people in his books; this profile describes the character as Plexus draws him, from the Grove Weidenfeld printing, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How the book draws them
- Brought along as the illustratorVal takes him to a burlesque house on Houston Street to write it up, wanting Ned to draw it, and the two of them invent a magazine that has commissioned the article in order to get backstage. They talk one of the performers into a drink afterwards, and Ned spends the rest of the evening trying to get her to come to his studio.
- The interview he stage-managedNed, back in the advertising business, drags Val into his office on Madison Avenue and tells him to talk a blue streak about anything at all, because once the man sees what he has written he will listen to whatever comes next. He then presents Val to his employer as an old friend who has been in North Carolina working on a book, and describes the pages Val has just dashed off as the work of a few minutes. Val, enjoying himself, tells the man his ideas are better than anything he could offer — and Ned signals frantically from across the room.
- The ukuleleWhen the three of them set out for Miami, Ned travels to Washington by train and takes the ukulele with him for morale. It comes out again in Jacksonville at an old commercial artist's studio, where the whole company sings "O Susanna" and "Annie Laurie" over a second cup of coffee.
- The luck of the roadThe three hitchhikers split up because nobody would stop for three, and agreed to meet at post offices along the way. Ned kept arriving first. The driver who picked him up in Charlotte took him the whole way, paid for his meals and put him up in his own room. He was also carrying most of the money, and had forgotten to divide it before they separated, which left the other two with about four dollars.
- Carrying Val out of the shelterAfter thirty-six hours without food and a sixteen-mile round trip on foot to a job that did not exist, the three of them try to get into a Salvation Army shelter and find that floor space costs a quarter. Val collapses in the lavatory in pain, and Ned and Ted O'Mara carry him out. They spend the rest of the night being driven off from a railway yard at gunpoint, not even allowed to pick up the rotten oranges on the ground.
- "But I'm not a writer"Their host in Jacksonville sends Ned to see a friend at the newspaper. Both men go; Val is voted out within a few words, and Ned is offered a series of articles. His only objection is that he does not write. Val, who does, expects to do the work.