Miller, Henry

The final typescript of Black Spring as it was delivered to the printers, 256 pages 4to (280 x 210 mm.)  including title page, 3 pages of preliminaries, 9 pages bearing section titles and the full text, with autograph corrections and deletions and printers' notations, dated at the end, "Louveciennes/Clichy/Villa Seurat/1934-5" with long autograph inscription on title page to David Edgar, signed and dated "HVM./Paris 6/36"; some marginal browning and tears.

From the estate of David Edgar, a young American painter who was part of Miller's circle in Paris in the 1930's; Sotheby's New York, May 6, 1981, lot 80, $4,000.

"I am dazzled by the glorius collapse of the world!" the corrected typescript for miller's second novel

Miller presented the typescript of Black Spring to Edgar in June 1936, the month in which the book was first published by the Obelisk Press. The inscription on the title reads "To 'my best friend' in Paris, David Edgar whom I discovered through 'Bastard Death'- presumably entered in a taxi on the way to Ferreu's. Keep nothing, I say. Just keep your bowels wide open and trust in the Lord." However, one of the most striking features of the title page is Miller's original, typed dedication to Anais Nin, which he has crossed out in pencil.

The typescript, which is on several different stocks of paper and is partly in carbon copy, was evidently assembled from sections composed or revised at different stages. The pagination is irregular and in some places has been changed by Miller. Miller's pagination does not run continuously, there being several places where pages have been removed altogether and their absence noted. His page numbers run from 1 to 275 with omissions, and the printer or publisher has added his own pagination, 1 through 256, to the finished work. At least sixteen pages have substantial passages deleted, and the last sentence of the book, "Let there be an end, I say, to the spiritual death racket!" has been crossed out. 

Black Spring opens with Miller's Brooklyn childhood ("...The third room was an alcove where I contracted the measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, et cetera: all the lovely diseases of childhood which make time stretch out in everlasting bliss and agony...")  The opening sections, with much revision suggested by the different paper stocks, include his accounts of the tin-roofed factories and Navy Yard, his first encounters with literature. Juxtaposing this setting with his current life in Clichy allows the author to give full rein to his most surrealist imagery.

Since a flurry of significant Miller manuscripts wear sold at auction some three decades ago - including the final typescript for Tropic of Cancer at Sotheby's New York on 14 December, 1984, for $150,000 - very little of similar importance has been available.