Walking Paris with Henry Miller

We begin at the Edgar Quinet metro station, which is located directly in front of the Café de la Liberté. A map of the Paris metro (PDF) can be found here. Edgar Quinet is on line 6.

In his early days in Paris, while Miller lived in the nearby Hôtel Central, he frequented the Café de la Liberté, which he described as a “dingy hole”.¹ It was here that he began reading Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars, returning each afternoon to read a bit more.² It was one of the first books Miller read in French and he progressed slowly, dictionary in hand. Moravagine left a profound impression on Miller: “How can I convince the skeptic that I was ravished by Cendrars’ Moravagine? How does one know immediately that a thing is after one’s own heart?”³ The title character of Cendrars’ book even made his way into Tropic of Cancer: “I love everything that flows … I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river.”⁴ In The Books in My Life, Miller wrote of his passion for reading Cendrars:

There were times when reading Cendrars—and this is something which happens to me rarely—when I put the book down in order to wring my hands with joy or despair, with anguish or with desperation. Cendrars has stopped me in my tracks again and again, just as implacably as a gunman pressing a rod against one’s spine.⁵

Cendrars was equally a champion of Miller’s writing. He wrote the first published review of Tropic of Cancer for the French journal Orbes, titled, “An American Writer Is Born to Us” (”Un Écrivain américain nous est né”):

Discovering Paris, breathing Paris, devouring Paris, he swallowed it furiously, and ate it, then he wanted to vomit in it and piss against it, adore it and curse it until he felt that he was part of the extraordinary people in the streets of this great city, until Paris had gotten under his skin and he knew that from that day forward he could never live anywhere else.⁶

The street running alongside the café is rue de la Gaîté, which Miller liked because it was “alive and colorful”.⁷ He often saw films at the cinemas on this street. Today the rue de la Gaîté, is an eclectic mix of first-run theaters, pornography palaces and sushi restaurants.

Furthermore

Jay Bochner provides a more thorough examination of the relationship between Miller and Cendrars in his essay, “An American writer born in Paris: Blaise Cendrars reads Henry Miller reading Blaise Cendrars”.

The collected Miller/Cendrars correspondence has been published and is available (in French) from the Canadian Amazon site: Correspondance; 1934-1979: 45 ans d’amitié.

Location

1 rue de la Gaîté – See it on Google Maps

Next Stop

Walk up the rue de la Gaîté, and take your first right onto the rue du Maine. The pale green building on your left is our next stop, the Hôtel Central…

Notes

1. Henry Miller, The Books in My Life, 58
2. Henry Miller, Joey, 17
3. Henry Miller, Remember to Remember, 347
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 257-258
5. Henry Miller, The Books in My Life, 63
6. Blaise Cendrars, “Un Ecrivain americain nous est ne”, Orbes; été 1935 — translation found in Brassaï, Henry Miller: The Paris Years, 19,
7. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 23; March 9, 1930

Posted January 27, 2006 - trackback