Walking Paris with Henry Miller

One week after his arrival in Paris in March of 1930, Henry Miller was making a circuitous exploration of his new city when he found himself drawn to a window display at the Honoré Champion bookstore on the Quai Malaquais.¹ The window contained an impressive collection of books and avant-garde art, including a selection of drawings by Raoul Dufy,—“drawings of charwomen with rosebushes between their legs,”² as Miller described them in Tropic of Cancer. Also on display was an album of Jean Cocteau’s drawings and next to it, a treatise on the philosophy of Joan Miró. Peering inside, Miller discovered the store was holding an exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky’s latest work. But it was a book by a much lesser-known artist which captured Miller’s imagination: “In the same window: A Man Cut In Slices! Chapter one: the man in the eyes of his family. Chapter two: the same in the eyes of his mistress.”³

The book was laid open in the display window so that only the first two chapters were visible. Each day the window dresser turned a fresh page and Miller would have to return to the bookstore in order to absorb the remaining chapters. A Man Cut in Slices (Un Homme Coupé en Tranches) contained very little text and was comprised chiefly of illustrations by the author. However, it was not the contents of the book so much as its title and chapter titles that intrigued Miller:

A man cut in slices. … You can’t imagine how furious I am not to have thought of a title like that! Where is this bloke who writes “the same in the eyes of his mistress … the same in the eyes of … the same …”? Where is this guy? Who is he? I want to hug him. I wish to Christ I had had brains enough to think of a title like that—instead of Crazy Cock and the other fool things I invented. Well, fuck a duck! I congratulate him just the same. I wish him luck with his fine title. Here’s another slice for you—for your next book! Ring me up some day. I’m living at the Villa Borghese. We’re all dead, or dying, or about to die. We need good titles. We need meat—slices and slices of meat—juicy tenderloins, porterhouse steaks, kidneys, mountain oysters, sweetbreads. Some day, when I’m standing at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, I’m going to remember this title and I’m going to put down everything that goes on in my noodle—caviar, rain drops, axle grease, vermicelli, liverwurst—slices and slices of it. And I’ll tell no one why, after I had put everything down, I suddenly went home and chopped the baby to pieces. Un acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupé en tranches!⁴

“Where is this guy? Who is he?” Miller’s questions could as easily be asked today. Several books on Miller have incorrectly attributed Un Homme Coupé en Tranches to Philippe Soupault (see Always Merry and Bright by Jay Martin, pg. 198). This mistake likely stems from a passage in Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) which Soupault co-authored with André Breton in 1919. The passage describes “un homme coupé en deux par la fenêtre” (A man cut in two by the window) and Louis Aragon used it in the title of his well-known commentary on Soupault and Breton’s collaboration, Un Homme Coupé en Deux.

The real author of A Man Cut in Slices was a Frenchman named Jean Bruller, who, at the time of publication in 1929, was best known as a cartoonish book illustrator. A few examples from his 1926 album, 21 Recettes Pratiques de Mort Violente, which illustrates 21 novel ways to commit suicide, provide a glimpse of his style. Miller enthusiastically considered A Man Cut in Slices to be “another piece of Surrealism,”⁵ though Bruller was not officially associated with the Surrealist group.

Today, Bruller is better known by his pseudonym, Vercors. His Silence of the Sea (1942), a resistance novel published clandestinely during the German occupation in WWII is considered a classic. In order to produce Silence of the Sea, Bruller initiated a secret publishing company which he dubbed Les Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Editions) and the book was distributed hand-to-hand between trusted friends. Les Éditions de Minuit survived the war and remains a vibrant publishing house to this day. Bruller’s choice of Vercors as a pseudonym was an homage to the Maquis du Vercors, a French Resistance group which operated in the mountainous region known as “Vercors” in Eastern France.

Of A Man Cut in Slices, Miller wrote, “I believe in it with all my heart. It is an emancipation from classicism, realism, naturalism, and all the other outmoded isms of the past and present.”⁶ Though the book does not appear to have ever been translated into English, an example of the French first edition can be acquired for a tidy price. It is also available in a 2002 volume of Vercors’ collected works, Le silence de la mer et autres oeuvres.

Former site of the Librairie Honoré Champion © Photo by Olivier RTD Lewis		An illustrated page from A Man Cut in Slices

Location

5 Quai Malaquais

If you plan to stop by, be aware that the site of the bookstore is now occupied by the Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval. Honoré Champion and his bookstore have long since left the premises, though the publishing company originally launched at the store remains in operation from a different location.

Notes

1. Karl Orend, “A Man Cut in Slices: New Perspectives on Henry Miller’s Paris Years,” Alyscamps Press, 2002
2. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 40-41
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 28-29 (March, 1930)
6. Ibid.

Let’s all raise a glass to the fine folks at Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, whose newly minted volume 6 is now available to order! Nexus is always an excellent source of new writing on Henry Miller and this one is sure to be another great issue.

I’m pleased to see that new primary source material has been made available in this volume with Miller’s “What India Means to Me” and a letter exchange between Miller and his father. I’m also looking forward to “Writing the Underground” by Maria Bloshteyn, whose recent book on Dostoevsky and the Villa Seurat circle was fascinating. Richard Kostelanetz, whose anthologies of modern poetry I’ve long admired, also has an article in this issue. And Eric Lehman, who has previously guest-blogged for this site, investigates the influences on The Colossus of Maroussi.

Copies of Nexus 6 can be purchased directly from the Nexus website via PayPal. Here’s a quick look at the complete table of contents:

Nexus, Volume 6

Tropic of Cancer was published in September 1934 with a marketing campaign that seemed destined to bury the book in obscurity. Jack Kahane, proprietor of the Obelisk Press, had pre-emptively banned the book from reaching its largest potential audience by printing “Not to be imported into Great Britain or U.S.A.” on its cover. A second label warned French bookstore owners not to place the book on open display stands or in store windows. It’s fifty franc price was also exorbitant—especially for a first novel from an unknown writer and an obscure publishing company. Henry Miller took the problem of marketing his novel into his own hands by conducting a fevered letter writing campaign and sending free copies of the book to a host of notable intellectuals including Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and Blaise Cendrars.¹ Help with getting the book into the hands of a general audience came from the unlikely source of a roaming bookseller in Montparnasse named Eve Adams.

Eve Adams (or Addams) was the gender-blending pseudonym of Eva Kotchever, a Polish Jew who had immigrated to New York where she opened a lesbian speakeasy and tea room in 1925 called Eve’s Hangout—at 129 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. At the Hangout, Eve organized weekly poetry readings, musical performances and salons where sexual topics were freely discussed. A sign on the door announced, “Men are admitted, but not welcome.” Eve was a well known figure in the Village at this time. The famous anarchist Emma Goldman was one of her personal friends and a number of radical activists could be counted among her tea room clients. Eve was hailed by her admirers as “the queen of the third sex” and vilified by detractors as a “man-hater.” One Village newspaper reported that her establishment was “not very healthy for she-adolescents, nor comfortable for he-men.”²

The popularity of Eve’s Hangout soon drew the attention of police, who in the mid-1920’s launched a crackdown on gay and lesbian clubs in the Village. On June 17, 1926 an undercover female police officer entered the tea room where Eve showed her a collection of short stories she was writing called Lesbian Love. Eve was promptly arrested on the charge of “disorderly conduct”—for allegedly making homosexual advances toward the officer—and her manuscript along with twelve other “objectionable” books in her possession were seized as obscene material. Eve was sentenced to a year in the workhouse and was deported in December 1926.³

Paris was the natural refuge of forbidden intellectuals in the 1920’s and it was here that Eve began the next phase of her life. Back in New York it was rumored that she had opened a lesbian club in Montmartre. However, Eve was impoverished and it appears that she eked out a living solely by wandering Montparnasse, selling newspapers, magazines and pornographic books to the expatriates who clustered about the terrasses of popular cafés. Eve peddled the daily editions of the Paris Herald and Paris Tribune as well as avant-garde literary journals such as Samuel Putnam’s New Review. On his 1928 trip to Paris, Henry Miller bought a copy of Fanny Hill and a set of dirty postcards from Eve, who was described around this time by James Farrell as a small, thin, and girlish-looking woman in her thirties.⁴

Miller and Adams’ proper acquaintance seems to have began in 1931, following the publication of Miller’s story, “Mademoiselle Claude”—about a well-known Montparnasse prostitute and her pimp—which appeared in the August 1931 issue of New Review. Alfred Perlès recalled that Eve usually sold few copies of such highbrow literary magazines: “She used them, chiefly, to conceal the pornographic books from the vigilant eyes of the police,” he wrote. But when a review of “Mademoiselle Claude” appeared in Wambly Bald’s “La Vie de Bohème” column in the Chicago Tribune, Eve’s customers started requesting copies of Miller’s story. Eve decided that Miller was a hot property and began pointing him out to her customers on the terrasse of the Dôme.⁵

According to Perlès, Eve “was very fond of Henry, who treated her with great gentleness and listened to her tales of woe.” They spoke principally of Eve’s friend Emma Goldman, whom Miller greatly admired. Miller was also pleased to learn that Eve could always be relied upon to lend him a few francs when he turned up at the Dôme with empty pockets.⁶

When Tropic of Cancer was published, Miller acquired copies at the author rate and consigned them to Eve for sale in the cafés.⁷ In December 1934, while Kahane was selling around 20 copies a month, Miller wrote to Anaïs Nin that Eve Adams was “still selling a few now and then.” The only problem, he noted, was that he had “to keep away from Dôme and other places because I am constantly being introduced to jackasses who read the book and whom I don’t care to know.”⁸ A few years later Miller enthused to Lawrence Durrell that Eve was now selling his watercolors at fifty francs apiece.⁹

In her peregrinations about the Montparnasse cafés, Eve Adams became something of a Paris institution. Other authors such as Anaïs Nin, James Farrell, and Bob Brown specifically sought her assistance in promoting their books.¹⁰

Eve–June Connection?

Did Eve know Miller’s wife June in Greenwich Village? I haven’t found any direct confirmation of this, but given June and her friend/lover Jean Kronski’s penchant for visiting lesbian bars in the Village around 1926-27, Eve and June may well have known or at least known-of each other. Eve’s Hangout was just one door away from the corner of MacDougal and Third Streets where June opened her own nightspot called the Roman Tavern in 1927. It was also just around the corner from the Pepper Pot (146-150 Fourth Street) where June was sporadically employed between 1925 and the early 1930’s. Whether or not they were personally acquainted, the two women would come to observe a strange parallel in that just as June had once sold Miller’s “Mezzotints” from bar-to-bar in 1920’s Greenwich Village, Eve later sold Miller’s Topic of Cancer and watercolors from café-to-café in 1930’s Montparnasse.

Inconclusions

I haven’t been able to determine when Eve immigrated to America. As a personal friend of Emma Goldman, who was imprisoned in America in 1917 and deported in 1919, Eve likely arrived prior to 1917. However, Goldman spent time in Paris in the late 1920’s, so it’s possible their friendship began there,—meaning Eve could have arrived in America as late as 1925. I also have been unable to find references to Eve’s life after the 1930’s. (Miller painted a watercolor of “Eve Adams Miller” in 1956, but this is presumably a portrait of his then-wife Eve McClure). Anaïs Nin writes of meeting with Eve Adams in 1939, shortly before WWII began. A Jewish lesbian would have found life in Nazi-occupied Paris extremely inhospitable, but having already been deported from the US and with her native Poland occupied, Eve’s options for fleeing Paris would have been quite limited.

Notes

1. Neil Pearson, Obelisk, 442
2. George Chauncey, Gay New York, 240
3. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession, 269-270
4. Edgar Branch, A Paris Year, 32-33
   (Description of Eve and her wares)

   Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller: A Life, 177
   (Miller’s purchase of Fanny Hill and a set of postcards)

5. Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller, 42-43
6. Ibid.
7. Mary Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive, 173
8. Henry Miller, A Literate Passion, 248 (Letter to Anaïs Nin, December 11, 1934)
9. Henry Miller, The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-1980, 107
10. Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon, 345
    (In 1939 Nin enlisted Adams’ help in distributing her novel, The Winter of Artifice.)

    Edgar Branch, A Paris Year, 120
    (Farrell wrote to Brown that he would try to get Eve to sell his book, The Readies—a kind of manifesto on the need for cinematic reading machines.)