Novel: Sexus

Overview
Henry Miller’s Sexus, published in 1949 as the first volume of The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, is an autobiographical novel that tracks the author’s break from conventional life and his storm-driven immersion into art, desire, and self-invention. Set largely in New York in the late 1920s, it chronicles the dissolution of his first marriage, the all-consuming relationship with the woman modeled on June Miller (appearing under shifting aliases such as Mara or Mona), and the messy birth of his vocation as a writer. As with Miller’s earlier Tropics, Sexus folds raw confession into barbed social critique, using the narrator’s emotional and erotic life as an engine for a broader revolt against propriety, wage work, and American philistinism.

Plot and Characters
The narrator, Henry, begins trapped in a respectable but deadening job and a suffocating marriage. He meets the mesmerizing dancer who becomes the gravitational center of his existence. She is beautiful, elusive, and devoted to a personal freedom that destabilizes every arrangement, drawing Henry into a world of cheap rooms, late-night cafés, theater lobbies, and aimless city rambles. Their bond is magnetic and volatile. Money evaporates; so do promises. Henry quits his job, disavows the grind, and embraces a precarious bohemian life built on borrowed cash, favors, and grand declarations.

Around the couple clusters a cast of artists, drifters, and hangers-on, pimps, poets, mystics, and poseurs, who embody the city’s ferment and hypocrisies. A tense triangle emerges when the lover’s female companion (a figure echoing June’s real-life confidante) complicates loyalty and desire, spurring jealous scenes, separations, and flamboyant reconciliations. The narrative moves episodically through flophouses and twilight fêtes, cutting from scenes of intimacy to argumentative salons where Henry sparrs over art, morality, and the uses of obscenity. The through-line is Henry’s stubborn insistence that he must write or perish, even as his personal life unravels.

Themes
Sexus is a testament of artistic self-creation framed as a love story in extremis. Miller treats sexuality as both revelation and delusion, an arena where power, dependency, cruelty, and tenderness become inseparable. The book casts American respectability as a tyranny of habit and fear, sustained by work that deadens the senses and public discourse that censors the truth of the body. Against this, Henry advances a credo of ecstatic honesty: a life devoted to appetite, risk, and the pursuit of the absolute in art.

The title hints at crucifixion as metamorphosis, fusing eros and martyrdom. Love wounds and exalts; writing requires sacrifice. The narrator’s rants about money, marriage, and morality are not only provocations but also attempts to strip away illusions so that a new self can be forged. The city, with its squalor and glitter, becomes the alchemical vessel for that transformation.

Style and Structure
Miller blends narrative episodes with riffs, diatribes, and visionary flights. The voice shifts from street talk to prophetic chant, from comedy to invective, folding in philosophical digressions and dreamlike set pieces. Instead of conventional plot progression, the book accrues momentum through cycles of frenzy and collapse, argument and embrace, leaving the reader with a mosaic of moments that together map a consciousness in revolt.

Context and Legacy
Sexus extended Miller’s reputation as a scandalous and liberating force in modern literature. Censored in the English-speaking world for years, it nevertheless circulated as a talisman of artistic freedom and sexual candor. As the opening of The Rosy Crucifixion, it sets the terms of the long war Henry wages, against institutions, against sentimental illusions, and against his own evasions, while laying the groundwork for Plexus and Nexus, which follow his love and art toward their painful, formative conclusions.