Walking Paris with Henry Miller

64 rue de la Glacière is the site of the former Hôtel des Terrasses. This was the home of photographer Gyula Halàsz, better known by his artist-name, Brassaï. Brassaï arrived in Paris in 1924 from his native Hungary intending to become a painter. Through the influence of his countryman, Andre Kertész, Brassaï discovered the possibilities of night photography and took up the new medium. While living at the Hôtel des Terrasses, he set up a photo lab in his room.

Brassaï was nocturnal, rising at sunset and spending the night hours on long walks around Paris in search of subjects for his photography. These were often cafés, dance halls, brothels, and cobbled streets illumined by the glow of a lonely streetlight. His photos became iconic images of Paris in the thirties.

Henry Miller, who dubbed Brassaï “The Eye of Paris” in an essay of the same title, often accompanied him on these walks. He was fascinated by Brassaï’s haunting images and felt a strong sense of identification with them: “I saw my own sacred body exposed, the body that I have written into every stone, every tree, every monument, park, fountain, statue, bridge, and dwelling of Paris.”¹

When you meet the man you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes. His eyes have that perfect, limpid sphericity, that all-embracing voracity which makes the falcon or the shark a shuddering sentinel of reality.²

Brassaï recalled that Miller visited him often at the Hôtel des Terrasses and “for hour after hour he pored over my nightly harvest of photographs”³ which were spread about the furniture of Brassaï’s room.

And when one day the door was finally thrust open I beheld to my astonishment a thousand replicas of all the scenes, all the streets, all the walls, all the fragments of the Paris wherein I died and was born again. There on his bed, in myriad pieces and fragments, lay the cross to which I had been nailed and crucified, the cross on which I was resurrected to live again and forever in the spirit.⁴

Brassaï’s self-portrait in his photo lab at the Hôtel des Terrasses

Henry Miller in the doorway of Brassaï’s room at the Hôtel des Terrasses – photo by Brassaï

Two more of Miller’s Hungarian friends resided in this hotel. These were the literary agent Frank Dobo and the painter Lajos Tihanyi. According to Alfred Perlès, Dobo introduced Miller to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which influenced Miller’s own writing. Tihanyi, who was deaf, “understood Miller in his deaf-and-dumb language”⁵ as Perlès recalled. A selection of Tihanyi’s paintings, which blend cubist and expressionist influences, may be viewed here and here.

Location

64 rue de la Glacière – See it on Google Maps

Furthermore

Brassaï has written two books about Miller:
Henry Miller, The Paris Years
Henry Miller, Happy Rock

A Google or Yahoo image search will turn up many examples of Brassaï’s photography.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, “The Eye of Paris”
2. Ibid.
3. Brassaï, Henry Miller: The Paris Years, 30
4. Henry Miller, “The Eye of Paris”
5. Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller, 32

Posted April 5, 2006 - trackback