Sexus

Everything in Miller points at June — the taxi-dancer who became his second wife, his obsession, and his subject — and The Rosy Crucifixion was the monument he spent decades planning: the full account of the years she remade him, projected across three volumes. Sexus, the first, was written in California in the mid-forties and published in 1949 where all his unprintable books began, in Paris — by Obelisk's heir Maurice Girodias, in two volumes, in English, for the export trade. Even Paris flinched: France banned the book the following year, and in Norway it triggered an obscenity trial that reached the country's Supreme Court, with Miller contributing a now-famous open letter on the freedom to read.

The scandal was not only official. Friends and admirers split over the book — Lawrence Durrell, its dedicatee's greatest champion, first cabled Miller begging him to withdraw it — and the argument has never really closed: is the explicitness the point or the problem? Under the notoriety sits the story the whole shelf orbits: the narrator at thirty-three, chained to the Cosmodemonic job and a marriage running on guilt, meets Mona in a Broadway dance palace and begins demolishing his life to rebuild it around her — the demolition told with an honesty that spares no one, its teller least of all.

New York, the early twenties. The narrator — Miller under his own name, more or less — is thirty-three, employment manager at the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, married to Maude, father of a small daughter, and certain his life is a coffin with a salary. Then the Broadway dance palace, and Mara: taxi-dancer, fabulist, shape-shifter, the most magnetic presence in any of his books. The novel is the anatomy of the demolition that follows — the double life of hotel rooms and borrowed money, the marriage curdling scene by scene, the friends enlisted and burned, and through it all the conviction, hardening into religion, that Mara is the door to the writer he has failed to become.

At six hundred pages the book has room for everything: comic set pieces, Brooklyn nights, monologues on art and America, and the sexual episodes — extended, explicit, unapologetic — that made it unpublishable anywhere respectable and, for its partisans, the most honest account of desire in American prose. Mara becomes Mona; the divorce grinds through; and the volume closes on the wedding that the next two books — Plexus and Nexus — will spend their length unbuilding.