Walking Paris with Henry Miller

On this corner, where the Luxembourg Gardens join the rue d’Assas, once stood a public urinal that was a favorite stopping point for Henry Miller. Relieving a full bladder in open view of the street, he could reflect on the different vision of human necessity that distinguished France from America: how is the Frenchman to know [...]

Slip into the narrow alley at 100 bis rue d’Assas and you’ll enter a small courtyard where abstract bronze figures mingle with trees and shrubbery. This is the entrance to the Musée Zadkine,—the former home of Ossip Zadkine, a Russian sculptor and one of Miller’s earliest friends in Paris. Readers of Tropic of Cancer may [...]

Miller’s friend Walter Lowenfels, the model for Cronstadt in Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring, was a surrealist poet and editor of several influential anthologies of American poetry. His leftist political activism led to his being jailed briefly in 1953 when Joseph McCarthy distinguished him as one of the leading communists in Philadelphia. Lowenfels shared [...]

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 [...]