Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Just around the corner from Henry Miller’s former Clichy apartment is the Espace Henry Miller, a neighborhood cultural center named in the writer’s honor which opened in November of 2003. Inside you’ll find gallery and performance space for art exhibitions, concerts, and dance. Also on offer are classes in yoga, gymnastics and computer skills. In March [...]

A plaque on the wall of number 4 avenue Anatole France in Clichy marks Henry Miller’s stay here between 1932 and 1934. This apartment was Miller’s first fixed address in Paris. After living on the bum for two years, shuttling between cheap hotels and the hospitality of friends, he moved in 1932 with his friend [...]

La Fourche is the name of a Y-shaped intersection in Montmartre where the avenue de Saint Ouen branches away from the avenue de Clichy. Fourche means “fork”, indicating the branching of the streets, but the word can also be used in French to indicate “crotch”, a double-meaning which Miller found appropriate. During the 1930’s La [...]

And so, when I stand at the bar of the Little Tom Thumb and see these men with three-quarter faces coming up through the trapdoors of hell with pulleys and braces, dragging locomotives and pianos and cuspidors, I say to myself: ‘Grand! Grand! All this bric-a-brac, all this machinery coming to me on a silver platter! It’s grand! It’s marvelous! It’s a poem created while I was asleep.