Inscribed by Henry Miller on the front free endpaper in the month following publication: “To that rascal Rascasse, with my sincere compliments. Henry Miller, Paris, 6/36”. Rascasse was a fictional painter in Connolly’s novel, but was clearly based on Miller and Connolly’s friend, the Romanian painter Gregor Michonze, who had moved to Paris in 1922 where he was introduced by Max Ernst to the Surrealist set, including Breton, Eluard and Man Ray.
Michonze met Miller in 1928 and it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Miller wrote the preface for his 1959 London exhibition at the Adams Gallery and he himself owned one of Michonze’s famous oblong paintings or Oblonguettes, as the artist called them. In a letter to Michonze, Miller informed him: “I have your narrow rectangular painting over the closet door of my bedroom where I see it every time I hit the bed. When people ask me who did it, I say ‘an old master’. Certainly you are the toughest veteran of the art world in our time”.
In 1967, Henry Miller visited Michonze at his studio in the rue de Seine, a moment captured by the film maker Robert Snyder who was making The Henry Miller Odyssey. Michonze in turn would regularly visit Miller at his home in America. Much later, in 1978, Miller wrote to him that his painting: “… is your justification for living. It is greater than I had dreamed it to be. It is gloriously mad, drunk, insane, lecherous, caricatural and yes, anecdotal”.
Cyril Connolly had developed a friendship with Michonze when they were both spending some time on the riviera in 1931. It was here that Michonze painted a wonderful portrait of the writer alongside his then wife Jean Bakewell, mosr recently exhibited at The Wallace Collection in 2005. The Rock Pool is Connolly’s first book and his only novel. Jack Kahane, founder of the Obelisk Press recalled that: “Connolly whispered to me that he had written a book … It was as sweet a piece of writing as I have ever seen, the work of an exquisite, steeped in the classics, and in certain ways a model of impropriety. Its only fault was that it dealt with a period that was no longer of any interest - the raffish days of 1929 … It was strange that it should date so much, in fact so much that it affected sales. But I did not mind, for I had the utmost pleasure in being responsible for a piece of such wit and distinction”. An excellent copy.
