The artist Frederick Kann was one of Henry Miller’s closest friends and benefactors during his early years in Paris and he makes an appearance in Tropic of Cancer as ‘Kruger’. Miller was introduced to Kann by Brassaï in 1930 and in the fall of that year he spent several weeks living with Kann in his apartment on the rue Froidevaux overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery.

In his novel, Miller paints Kann as a “spiritual-minded individual” eager for an audience to listen to his obsessive prattling over esoteric subjects. Miller shared several of Kann’s theosophical and astrological interests and, as he was then living hand-to-mouth and often homeless, was willing to exchange an obliging ear for the occasional meal or a place to sleep for the night:

He seemed to think I was ripe to move on to another plane, “a higher plane,” as he put it. I was ready to move on to any plane he designated, provided that one didn’t eat less or drink less. He chewed my head off about the “threadsoul,” the “causal body,” “ablation,” the Upanishads, Plotinus, Krishnamurti, “the Karmic vestiture of the soul,” “the nirvanic consciousness,” all that flapdoodle which blows out of the East like a breath from the plague.¹

Kann held regular soirées on Friday nights to entertain his artist friends with “plenty to drink and good sandwiches” and Miller faithfully dropped by on Saturday mornings to polish off any leftovers. Now and then Kann treated Miller to a meal at the Restaurant des Gourmets, where they might linger over the plat du jour and a discussion of Tibetan Buddhism.²

It was likely early October when Miller moved in with Kann. The studio apartment at 59 rue Froidevaux offered several amenities which Miller prized, such as a central Montparnasse location, free rent, and a view over the Montparnasse cemetery where Baudelaire and other illustrious artists lay buried. The sound of the cemetery bell which tolled whenever a hearse passed through the gate became regular feature of Miller’s life in the apartment.³

Toward the end of October, Miller fell ill. Unable to get out of bed, he became convinced he was about to die. Perhaps it was the proximity to the cemetery that inspired Miller’s morbid tone. In any case, the situation was especially alarming for Kann, as he was preparing to host an important exhibition of his art in the apartment:

He tried to coax me out of bed, with the idea of locking me up in the kitchen upon the arrival of his visitors. I realized that I was making a mess of it for him. People can’t look at pictures and statues with enthusiasm when a man is dying before their eyes. Kruger honestly thought I was dying. So did I. […] Worse than having a sick man in his studio should the visitors arrive, was to have a dead man. That would completely ruin his prospects, slim as they were. He didn’t put it that way to me, of course, but I could see from his agitation that that was what worried him.⁴

Miller ends the account of his stay at the apartment when his friends Fillmore an Collins show up and whisk him off to a hotel in time for Kann’s exhibition to come off without a hitch.

Kann was likely preparing for his inclusion in a group exhibition of the Surindépendants which was shown between October 25 and November 24, 1930. The bulk of the exhibit was held at the Parc des Expositions at the Porte de Versailles and Kann appears to have been the only member of the group to display his work in his own apartment. His showing included two sculptures, with the unassuming titles of “Sculpture” and “Plaque,” along with one painting and a drawing.⁵

In Tropic of Cancer, Miller was a harsh critic of Kann’s artistic skill: “as a painter he was nil; as a sculptor less than nil,”⁶ but in other writings it is clear that he respected Kann’s talent: “There is a great deal of mystification in Kann’s abstract paintings, a curious blending of the mathematical and the introspective. Without transition, he jumps from the most rigid academicism to the strange no-man’s land which is not even Surrealism.”⁷

In his letters to Anaïs Nin, Miller presents his own attempts at painting as torn between the competing influences of Kann and another artist friend, Hilaire Hiler: “With Hiler and Kann I’m between two fires, two opposite poles of thought.”⁸ Hiler’s work offered a more organic approach to abstraction in comparison with Kann’s geometrical precision, but it may be interesting to consider a possible influence of Hiler on one of Kann’s own paintings. Miller famously dubbed Hiler “The Cosmological Eye” because he included an image of a disembodied eye in each of his paintings, as Hiler said, “I want that the pictures should look back at me; if I look at them and they don’t look at me too then they are no good.”⁹ In similar fashion, a disembodied eye motif makes a clear appearance in Kann’s Untitled from 1931:

In 1936 Kann collaborated with fellow artists on drafting “The Dimensionist Manifesto” which championed a fusion of modern science with art. In addition to Kann, signatories of the manifesto included Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Mirò and Alexander Calder.¹⁰

Later that year, Kann left Paris to take up a teaching position at the Kansas City Art Institute where he was a colleague of Thomas Hart Benton. Miller would meet up with him there in 1941 while making a tour of the US that he recorded in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. On March 20, Kann put Miller up on his couch again just like in the Paris days, but the ensuing years had made Miller less amenable to hardship. He now found Kann’s couch “too uncomfortable” and quickly sought out a hotel. Kann’s esoteric bent had led him to Freemasonry and he regaled Miller in his customary manner with discussions of Tibet, Madame Blavatsky and Krishnamurti.¹¹ Miller stayed for a weekend and before he left Kann presented him with a prized copy of The Phoenix by Manly P. Hall.¹²

In the 1940’s Kann moved to Los Angeles, where he partnered with the actor Vincent Price to open the Circle Gallery which displayed the works of prominent abstract painters. By the 1960’s, Kann’s art and writings were influential and well known internationally. Following his death in 1965 however, Kann’s name quickly disappeared from view—until a cache of his paintings was rediscovered more than twenty five years later. In 2007 an important retrospective of his work was exhibited at the Meredith Ward Fine Art gallery in New York titled, “Frederick Kann: Creative Spirit, Visionary Mind.”

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 195
2. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 112
3. Henry Miller, Letters to Anais Nin, 8
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 199-200
5. Sophie Levy, A Transatlantic Avant-Garde, 246
6. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 196
7. Henry Miller, quoted in Susan Larsen, Frederick Kann: Creative Spirit, Visionary Mind, 8
8. Henry Miller & Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion, 225
9. Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, 358
10. Susan Larsen, Frederick Kann: Creative Spirit, Visionary Mind, 10
11. Henry Miller, Letters to Anaïs Nin, 242-3
12. Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 144

chez Fred Kann posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

While perusing the online photo collection of the French Ministry of Culture, I stumbled upon a real gem: A set of ten photos of Le Dôme café taken in the winter of 1931-32. The pictures provide a unique glimpse of the café as Henry Miller would have known it.

The photos were taken by the Séeberger brothers (Jules, Louis and Henri), who in the early 1900′s began a long career of producing photographs for postcards, fashion and the press. Several collections of their work are available in book form.

Looking closely at the photos, they were clearly taken in the morning as there is a display of American breakfast cereal boxes on some of the tables, with brand names like Corn Flakes, Shredded Wheat, and Puffed Rice. The exterior shots give a sense of just how large the old café was—while the current Dôme café still occupies the pointed corner of the building, much of the area along its former side is now occupied by other shops and restaurants.

I’m not certain, but these photos seem likely to have been taken for producing a set of postcards which would be sold at the café. In any case, the French Ministry of Culture site informs us that the photo set was commissioned in September 1931 and delivered in March 1932, so there’s about a 6 or 7 month window in which they could have been made. Miller arrived in Paris in 1930 and spent much of January and February 1932 in Dijon, teaching English at the Lycée Carnot.

You can see larger versions of these photos at the Ministry of Culture site — simply click any of the thumbnails below and then click the thumbnail on the resulting Ministry of Culture page to see the full size.

All photos in this post are credited to Séeberger (frères) and to Ministère de la Culture (France), Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine (archives photographiques) diffusion RMN.

Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)		Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)
Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)		Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)
Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)		Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)
Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)		Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)
Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)		Le Dôme, by Séeberger (frères)

Le Dôme in Pictures: 1931 posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

It was a bleak summer day in 1930 when a dejected Henry Miller found himself trudging home to a cheap room at the Hôtel Alba following another fruitless scavenging expedition “in search of a crust or a bone to stop the gnawing in my stomach.”¹ He had not eaten in thirty-six hours and the advance rent he had paid on the room would soon be running out. As he neared his hotel, Miller was stopped in his tracks by the visage of Olga Chekhova staring out from a large theater poster a workman was busy plastering above the Cinéma de Vanves. The movie star’s languid eyes locked with Miller’s. “I’d like to see that film,” he called up to the man who smiled down warmly from the top of his ladder, “but I don’t have a cent in my pocket.” “What nationality are you?” “American,” Miller answered. “American? You’re joking!” Penniless Americans were rare in Paris and the workman, a Russian emigré, was under the impression that no such animal existed. He quickly invited Miller to join him for coffee at chez Duval, a bistro across the street.²

In the bistro Miller sat munching croissants and sipping his café crème while the Russian calmly beat him in game after game of chess. After a final checkmate, Miller gruffly demanded, “What’s your name?” “I am Alekhine,” came the measured response. Alexander Alekhine was then a famous Russian chess champion and a gullible Miller stood bolt upright. “Monsieur, it’s an honor to make your acquaintance. Now I see why I lost all three games.” The Russian grinned; he had only been joking. His real name was Eugene Pachoutinsky. “Just call me Eugene,” he told Miller and invited him to return to see the film that evening.³

Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad day after all—Miller had managed to scrounge up a bit of food, he had made a new friend and now he would get to see Moulin Rouge starring Olga Chekhova, that painted beauty whose gaze had stopped him dead on the street. The movie may have been the best part; Miller had heard that Chekhova was the daughter of Anton Chekhov, a writer he admired (actually she was Chekhov’s niece), and he felt “an insane desire to see that film.” Miller returned to see Moulin Rouge many times and he wrote copiously about the film in his notes for Tropic of Cancer:

They say she is the daughter of Anton Chekov. So be it! I say she is the daughter of Beelzebub, the mother of sin, Judith and Lilith combined, more seductive than vice, deadlier than the deadliest poison. She is woman incarnate, a great, throbbing womb of love. I saw her again last night at Cinema Vanves, in Moulin Rouge. She is one of those quiet Mongol types who, in the mere act of leaning against a wall to stifle a sob, produce cataclysms in the human heart.⁴

Checkhova plays Parysia, an aging but beautiful dancer at the Moulin Rouge. Her daughter, who has been away at school for five years, turns up unexpectedly at the cabaret one evening to introduce her mother to her new fiancé. The young man falls instantly for the mother and a tense unspoken love triangle emerges, as Miller recorded,

There is no story but this red hot lust of youth for maturity, of a son for his mother’s womb. Even when he is embracing his sweetheart the young man’s eyes are riveted on the mother. And she watches them embrace, and without a single convulsive movement, one can feel with her all the poignant yearning in her breast, all the fire that is flaming through her limbs, the furnace glowing between her legs.⁵

For Miller, the film dredged up long silent memories of his first torrid love affair, with a woman fourteen years his elder, named Pauline Chouteau:

There was a woman I used to mush it up with in the hallway, on the stairs, in the cellar, anywhere where it was dark and we wouldn’t be interrupted. She was much older than I, and at first, less willing. [...] Maybe you will go to see Moulin Rouge and have nothing but quiet peaceful thoughts. Maybe you will see in Olga nothing but a middle-aged siren, who has been taught a few lascivious tricks. As for me, I kept thinking about the love of a young man for an older woman. I know what that love is like. I know what it is to be passionate about an older body.⁶

Miller’s notes grew increasingly pornographic as his imagination mingled with the plot of Moulin Rouge. He ends with this final exhortation to see the film:

Men, maybe I have a rioutous imagination … maybe nobody else saw what I saw, but—I saw it! Go see Olga the first chance you get. Have a vodka or two before going, and top it off with a Pernod or a Rhum des Incas. Get a front seat and don’t forget to bring your telescope along.⁷

After that first night at the cinema, Eugene introduced Miller to the proprietor, Monsieur Robert. There was nothing to do but head back across the street to chez Duval where Monsieur Robert bought glasses of Miller’s favorite Anjou wine. They didn’t leave until the café closed.

Eugene proved to be one of Miller’s most important friends in Paris. He helped Miller get work by posting a handwritten sign in the window of chez Duval announcing that “Henri Miller, of the Hotel Alba (a few doors away) was available to teach English for the modest sum of ten francs an hour.”⁸ Eugene also pointed him to a second-hand clothing dealer where Miller managed to sell four suits he had brought along from his father’s tailor shop in New York. Miller later credited Eugene with having saved his life during those early “dog years” in Paris: “He fed me, kept me in Gauloises Bleues and arranged for me to sleep in the Cinema Vanves.”⁹

The sleeping arrangement came courtesy of Monsieur Robert. By mid July Miller could no longer afford his room at the Alba and Monsieur Robert consented to have him to spend his nights in the theater. The caveat was that the cinema would have to be locked up overnight so Miller would be unable to leave until the ticket office opened in the morning. Eugene and Monsieur Robert always kept a seat reserved for Miller, who would usually turn up in the afternoon before showtime and hang around the ticket office scribbling away in his notebook.¹⁰ Sometimes Eugene would sing and play the piano for him from the orchestra pit:

In the afternoon we go to the cinema which is cool and dark. Eugene sits at the piano in the big pit and I sit on a bench up front. The house is empty, but Eugene sings as if he had for audience all the crowned heads of Europe. The garden door is open and the odor of wet leaves sops in and the rain blends with Eugene’s angoisse and tristesse. At midnight, after the spectators have saturated the hall with perspiration and foul breath, I return to sleep on a bench. The exit light, swimming in a halo of tobacco smoke, sheds a faint light on the lower corner of the asbestos curtain¹¹

Once locked alone inside the darkened theater Miller felt afraid and imprisoned. The only window in the place was boarded over and striped with heavy iron bars; The reels of highly flammable celluloid lying about aroused fears of being trapped in an inferno. Each night he fitfully stretched out in the office on Monsieur Robert’s overcoat and when sleep did come, so too did the nightmares. His dreams were filled with scrambled reminiscences of his meeting with the movie director Germaine Dulac, visions of an armless accordion player whose instrument turned into a writhing mass of snakes and the recurring image of a man extravagantly feeding paté to a dog while Miller looked on, starving and helpless, behind the iron bars of the office window.

While making a final rewrite of Tropic of Cancer, Miller recalled the mix of joy and despair that accompanied his nights at the Vanves, which he renamed “Cinema Splendide,”

Everything comes back to me in a rush—the toilets that wouldn’t work, the prince who shined my shoes, the Cinema Splendide where I slept on the patron’s overcoat, the bars in the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat cockroaches, the drinking and carousing that went on between times.¹²

Miller was released from his nightly prison sentence at the cinema when he ran into an old acquaintance from New York at the Dôme. H.P. Nanavati wasn’t a pleasant companion, but his offer of a place to flop in his apartment on rue Lafayette came as welcome relief after the long nights locked in the movie theater.

Miller eventually found a way to repay Eugene and Monsieur Robert’s kindness when he landed a job at the Chicago Tribune. One day he strode into the cinema brandishing the day’s newspaper triumphantly in his hand. Miller had penned a glowing review of the cinema on the paper’s front page. The article was three columns wide with a large headline and it praised Monsieur Robert’s clever advertising, his discerning selection of American films and the exceeding example of Franco-American goodwill on offer at his establishment. “They would only let me have half a page,” Miller beamed.¹³

The Cinéma de Vanves first opened its doors in 1908 and remained in business until 1962. It’s former site is today occcupied by La Prudentielle, a private reception hall that can be rented for events like meetings, church services, weddings, concerts, etc.

Moulin Rouge

The first part of the film is available on YouTube. The complete DVD can be purchased from Grapevine Video.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 124
2. Brassaï, Henry Miller: Happy Rock, 54
3. Eugene Pachoutinsky, “Chair et Metal,” Henry Miller: A Book of Tributes, 1931-1994, 201-202
4. Henry Miller, From Tropic of Cancer, Ed. Roger Jackson, 13
5. Henry Miller, From Tropic of Cancer, Ed. Roger Jackson, 22
6. Henry Miller, From Tropic of Cancer, Ed. Roger Jackson, 16-18
7. Henry Miller, From Tropic of Cancer, Ed. Roger Jackson, 24
8. Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 217
9. Henry Miller, My Life and Times, 178
10. Eugene Pachoutinsky, “Chair et Metal,” Henry Miller: A Book of Tributes, 1931-1994, 202
11. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 65
12. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 15
13. Eugene Pachoutinsky, “Chair et Metal,” Henry Miller: A Book of Tributes, 1931-1994, 203

Cinéma de Vanves posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

A Henry Miller Honeymoon

By Eric D. Lehman

On the plane to Paris my new wife, Amy, read Tropic of Cancer. We had rented a small apartment in the Marais for our winter honeymoon, and she decided that the time had come to finally wade into the murky swamp of Miller’s masterpiece. Of course, I planned on rereading it, as well, and on visiting a few choice spots from the novel. I had printed out pages from the blog, “Walking Paris with Henry Miller,” and planned to do at least one of the tours. If I had been there by myself, on a pilgrimage, I might have done more, but this was our honeymoon, after all. I didn’t want to push it.

Paris in the winter had all the stark angles of bare sycamores and gray steeples, but we found it welcoming and friendly. So crucial to Miller during the Depression, food became our main preoccupation, being only a few blocks from the markets of Rue Montorgueil. The waiters at the cafés were polite and engaging, appreciating our juvenile forays into their language. We saw a ballet, a play at the Comedie Francaise, three cemeteries, ten churches, and a dozen museums.

On finishing Tropic a few days in, Amy commented on how “sad” it was, full of hunger and longing. When I read it this time, I couldn’t stop laughing, noticing once again the sly humor and sharp jokes. Like all great literature, it is a tremendous multiplicity, a concoction of vitamins and poison, enriching the soul and wounding the heart. And now, I knew, the parks and cafés of Miller’s Paris would be alive inside my mind, and I could drink from that potent brew by just closing my eyes.

La Rotonde		A feast at La Rotonde

We decided it was the day to follow in Tropic’s footsteps and took the metro to Montparnasse, maps and pages from Miller Walks in hand. After a visit to the top of the Tour Montparnasse and the cemetery, we walked down the Boulevard Raspail to the collection of cafés at the center of the American expatriate culture in Paris. We were hungry, and decided on La Rotonde. Inside we found a feast beyond the hungry imagination of starving writers, and indulged heartily in a salad with goat cheese, prunes, and apricots in phyllo sheets, sea bass seared with candied lemon and wild rice, leeks with beet sauce and an egg, and a galette for dessert. I felt inspired to be in the same café that Miller and so many other writers and thinkers had dined at, and began working eagerly on a short story.

La Closerie des Lilas		Fontaine de l’Observatoire

Heading down the Boulevard du Montparnasse after lunch, we saw the Tschann Librarie, where the first copies of Tropic were placed, sans wrapper, in the window. Then, the Closerie des Lilas, where Miller wrote, and which features a brass plate on a table with his name. We walked past the Fontaine de l’Observatoire where Miller suffered a cold night in Tropic of Cancer. After turning onto the Rue Henri Barbusse, we found the house of Walter Lowenfels, the model for that hilarious caricature, Jabberwhorl Cronstadt. I knocked on the door, but no one was at home.

Eric Lehman at Cronstadt’s place		Pension Orfila where Strindberg stayed

We strolled the edges of the Luxembourg Gardens, watched bocce players, and dove back into the maze of streets. There we found the house of Joseph and Bertha Schrank, known to Miller fans as Sylvester and Tania, which Miller had visited so often early on in the novel. We saw the hotel he shared with the ghost of August Strindberg, and then Otto Zadkine’s house, now a museum bursting with his terrifying cubist sculptures. I had no idea the “Borowski” from Tropic had become famous enough to warrant his own museum, and was astonished by the quality and scope of the art.

Sculpture garden at Musée Zadkine		Eric writing at La Coupole

We wandered back up the Rue d’Assas, and back along the Boulevard du Montparnasse to Le Select. It was time for deux café crème, and a talk about Anais Nin’s short stories, which Amy and I were also reading. The menu featured the name “Henri Miller” and we drank a rich, dark cup in honor of the two friends. Taking out notebooks, we wrote for two hours. Deciding to visit at least one more café, we walked across the street to La Coupole, which Miller frequented with Lawrence Durrell and Nin. We ordered drinks, and I finished writing the short story I had worked on all day, feeling that double satisfaction of completing a project, and doing it in the presence of a rich literary history.

Le Select		Amy writing at Le Select

Although the day in Montparnasse was the only day we specifically devoted to Miller, our paths seemed providentially intertwined. At a spot on the Pont des Arts, Amy took a photo of me. Later, I found a photo of Miller in nearly the same spot, framed by the Ile de Cite. A spot from the film of Henry and June appeared along the Seine. A Miller quote graced the floor of Shakespeare and Company. On the only day trip out of the city, we traveled to Auvers-sur-Oise to see the grave of Vincent Van Gogh, and the sculpture of the artist in the town park was by who else but Otto Zadkine.

On the last day, as we browsed the booksellers on the Seine, Amy called to me. “Do you have this one by Miller?” She pointed to Max et les Phagocytes, a title I had never seen outside of a bibliography, a book I knew was impossible to get in America. I immediately grabbed it and took it to the proprietor. “Ah, Henri Miller! Tres bien.” He laughed, and said something else in French that probably meant that I was in for a wild ride. I knew it. Miller was in the veins of Paris like a rogue blood cell, and even a pair of honeymooners in love could not escape him.

As I walked those streets of Paris with my wife, I could almost see Henry there, and a thousand others like him, those legendary engineers of our personal mythologies. But they are not myths, these men and women who lived their bittersweet lives just as we do now, aware of their own debts to history and each other. That fact was never clearer to me than that day in Montparnasse, when I shared space, if not time, with an author whose landscapes had once only been literary dreams, but were now a lived reality.

A Henry Miller Honeymoon posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. [...] After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. […] I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces….

All went well until Bertha encountered a photograph of June in Miller’s room at the Hôtel Central. Realizing his affections for her were only skin deep, Bertha broke off the affair and destroyed all of the letters he had written to her, — an act which infuriated Miller as he was intending to use portions of the letters in Tropic of Cancer.

Joseph Schrank was an established playwright who had several productions on Broadway and later became a Hollywood screenwriter. Miller had no respect for this sort of writing, noting in Tropic of Cancer that “though his name blaze in 50,000-candle-power red lights” Joseph (Sylvester) would never be a writer.

The Schranks fell out of Miller’s life when, enamored with communist theory, they left Paris for the Soviet Union in the fall of 1931.

That wraps up this tour of Montparnasse. If you need to find a metro, the nearest station is “Notre Dame des Champs”, which is just ahead on the corner of the boulevard Raspail (line 12).

Resources

Joseph Schrank wrote a memoir of his days as a Hollywood screenwriter which appeared in a 1983 issue of American Heritage magazine. Further information on his extensive career can be found here.

Bertha and Joseph Schrank posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Severely depressed due to the recent collapse of his marriage, Strindberg arrived at the hotel alone and anxious to cut himself off from all but the most unavoidable of social contact. He chose the Orfila because it resembled a monastery. In his room he assembled an alchemical laboratory and began experimenting with the production of gold. When he discovered that the hotel was named for the Spanish chemist, Mateo Orfila, Strindberg thought he observed the hand of destiny in his choice of accommodation. Throughout this period, Strindberg was prone to interpret all of his experiences in ominous terms. As Henry Miller later observed: “Strindberg in his madness had recognized omens and portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila”.

Believing himself beset by demons, Strindberg spent the summer at the Orfila teetering on the edge of madness. Paris was gripped in a severe heat wave and Strindberg felt that he was literally descending into hell. A diary he kept at this time and later published under the title, Inferno, made a strong impression on Miller.

August Strindberg in 1896

click this image to enlarge

Like Strindberg, Miller found himself alone in Paris, tormented by the disintegration of his marriage and despairing over his lack of friends or resources. As he recounts in Tropic of Cancer, Miller walked into the Orfila one day and asked to be shown Strindberg’s room:

inspired by the plaque which I passed day in and day out, I impulsively entered the Pension Orfila and asked to see the room Strindberg had occupied. Up to that time nothing very terrible had befallen me, though I had already lost all my worldly possessions and had known what it was to walk the streets in hunger and in fear of the police. Up to then I had not found a single friend in Paris

But as he ruminated on Strindberg, Miller felt his good cheer return. Perhaps his own experience had not been so torturous as Strindberg’s:

One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. [...] As I was leaving the place I was conscious of an ironic smile hovering over my lips, as though I were saying to myself “Not yet, the Pension Orfila!”

Miller emerged from the Orfila with a new vision of Paris and the historical role it has played in the gestation of the artist:

It was no mystery to me any longer why he [Strindberg] and others (Dante, Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange [...] One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed [...] Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is.

Pension Orfila posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

how is the Frenchman to know that one of the first things which strikes the eye of the American visitor, which thrills him, warms him to the very gizzard is this ubiquitous urinal? How is the Frenchman to know that what impresses the American in looking at a pissotière, or a vespasienne, or whatever you choose to call it, is the fact that he is in the midst of a people who admit to the necessity of peeing now and then [...]

There are certain urinals I go out of my way to make—such as the battered rattle-trap outside the deaf and dumb asylum, corner of the rue St. Jacques and the Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée, or the Pneu Hutchinson one by the Luxembourg Gardens, corner Rue d’Assas and Rue Guynemer.
—Black Spring

Such urinals, no longer to be found in Paris, were captured in the evocative night photographs of Miller’s friend, Brassaï. Miller singled out these photos in his tribute to Brassaï’s work, “The Eye of Paris”: “I see the old tin urinals where, standing in the dead silence of the night, I dreamed so violently that the past sprang up like a white horse and carried me out of the body.”

A Paris street urinal in the 1930′s - Photo by Brassaï

The modern variety of Paris street urinal

Public Urinals posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Your anecdotal life! A phrase of M. Borowski’s. It is on Wednesdays that I have lunch with Borowski. His wife, who is a dried-up cow, officiates. She is studying English now—her favorite word is “filthy.” You can see immediately what a pain in the ass the Borowskis are. But wait….

Borowski wears corduroy suits and plays the accordion. An invincible combination, especially when you consider that he is not a bad artist.
—Tropic of Cancer

Zadkine entered Miller’s life by way of his wife, June, who befriended the sculptor while visiting Paris with her lesbian lover in 1927. On her return to Paris the following year, this time accompanied by Miller, June introduced the two men. Zadkine was the first established European artist Miller had met and he found himself intimidated in the presence of this man who was once on close terms with the likes of Picasso and Modigliani. As Miller noted to Emil Schnellock, Zadkine was actually quite shy and he was mystified by the ease with which Miller accumulated new friends:

Saw Zadkine at the Dôme the other night. Called me back just as I was sortieing. “Henry, why do you stay away from me?” he says. “You know where I live. Why don’t we go out some night and have a little fun?” Yes, Herr Zadkine hat dies gesagt. You know me, soft guy … almost melted. The truth is I’m abashed in the presence of great men. I avoid them. Nobody takes me for a great man—I’m not saying I am, be Jesus. Whoa … Stop … So Zadkine adds, “Henry, how do you make so many friends here? Do you know I am very lonely? I never think of speaking to someone unless I know him. I am very lonely, really. Why don’t you take me out with you when you go on your folklore expeditions?”

The Musée Zadkine is small and is not heavily patronized, providing an intimate setting for visitors to become acquainted with Zadkine’s work. For the most part, his sculpture is abstract and appears to be an attempt to translate the techniques of cubist painting into three-dimensional form.

Ossip Zadkine in 1930 – photo from the Ossip Zadkine Research Center

Zadkine’s sketch of a projected monument to Miller, which was to be erected in Washington Square, NY and St. Germain de Prés, Paris

Resources

Ossip Zadkine Research Center

Musée Zadkine posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

They talked a sort of higher mathematics, these two. Nothing of flesh and blood ever crept in; it was weird, ghostly, ghoulishly abstract. [...] I enjoyed those sessions immensely. It was the first time in my life that death had ever seemed fascinating to me—all these abstract deaths which involved a bloodless sort of agony.—Tropic of Cancer

Following death, food was be the subject Miller most often associated with Lowenfels. During his more destitute days, Miller was hosted to a once-a-week dinner by Walter and his wife at their apartment where he could always count on being served champagne and homemade apple pie. Sometimes he turned up unannounced:

Dropped in at the Cronstadts’ and they were eating too. A young chicken with wild rice. Pretended that I had eaten already, but I could have torn the chicken from the baby’s hands. This is not just false modesty—it’s a kind of perversion, I’m thinking. Twice they asked me if I wouldn’t join them. No! No! Wouldn’t even accept a cup of coffee after the meal. I’m delicat, I am! On the way out I cast a lingering glance at the bones lying on the baby’s plate—there was still meat on them.—Tropic of Cancer

A dinner party at the Lowenfels’ provided the subject for Miller’s surrealistic story, “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt” in Black Spring, which begins with Miller’s arrival at the Lowenfels’ apartment:

He lives in the back of a sunken garden, a sort of bosky glade shaded by whiffletrees and spinozas, by deodars and baobabs, a sort of queasy Buxtehude diapered with elytras and feluccas. You pass through a sentry box where the concierge twirls his mustache con furioso like in the last act of Ouida. They live on the third floor behind a mullioned belvedere filigreed with snaffled spaniels and sebaceous wens, with debentures and megrims hanging out to dry. Over the bell-push it says: “JABBERWHORL CRONSTADT, poet, musician, herbologist, weather man, linguist, oceanographer, old clothes, colloids.” Under this it reads: “Wipe your feet and blow your nose!” And under this is a rosette from a second-hand suit.

The street, known as rue Denfert-Rochereau when the Lowenfels’ lived here in the thirties has since been renamed to rue Henri Barbusse. Man Ray set up a studio on this street in 1937.

Next Stop

Next up is the Musée Zadkine. To reach it, head back up the rue Henri Barbusse in the direction you came, taking your first right onto rue du Val de Grâce. Head for the box-shaped trees that line a narrow strip of the Jardin de Luxembourg. As you cross this section of the park, notice the ornate fountain filled with statues of horses and turtles. This is the Fontaine de l’Observatoire. In Tropic of Cancer Miller recalled spending a night on one of the benches near the fountain: “All night I was lying on a bench outside the mall while the globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss and the horses stiffened with priapic fury galloped like mad without ever touching the ground.” Once across this narrow stretch of park, exit on the rue des Chartreux and turn right onto rue d’Assas. On your left will be the Musée Zadkine.

“the globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss and the horses stiffened with priapic fury galloped like mad without ever touching the ground”

chez Walter Lowenfels posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

The Closerie des Lilas (The Lilac Arbor) dates to the seventeenth century. Inside, the tables are affixed with small brass plates, each bearing the name of a prominent artist or writer who frequented the establishment. One of the plates is inscribed with Miller’s name.

In the nineteen-twenties, this was the favorite café of Ernest Hemingway, who often came here to write, completing the story “Big Two-Hearted River” while seated at one of the corner tables. In the thirties Miller worked on his own manuscripts at the Closerie as he described in a letter to Emil Schnellock:

Well, we must be getting on to a nice, quiet café, and so we go along the Boulevard Montparnasse, past the insufferable idiots at the Dôme and the Coupole, until we reach the Closerie des Lilas. I take a seat near the window facing the Bal Bullier, and as I sit studying my manuscript, I can see on the greensward outside a weight-lifter, clad in full tights amusing the crowd with his stunts. After awhile I go downstairs to the lavatory and by mistake walk straight into the ladies’ room. The ladies smile and take the faux pas good naturedly.

A caricature of Miller accompanied Bald’s article, drawn by Brassaï

In his October 14, 1931 “La Vie de Boheme” column for the Chicago Tribune, Wambly Bald published a short biographical sketch of Miller which claimed that he occasionally spent the night sleeping on the bench outside the Closerie:

A couple of days ago he woke up on a bench outside the Closerie des Lilas. The only thing that bothered him, he said, was that he didn’t have a tooth-brush. “Being on the bum is all right if you can clean your teeth occasionally—say every third day. Otherwise you feel bad.”

Miller, who often ghost-wrote Bald’s column, likely wrote the sketch himself. Bald appears in Tropic of Cancer as the “cunt-struck” failed writer, Van Norden.

Resources

La Closerie des Lilas’ website

La Closerie des Lilas posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller