The Vendôme Press edition of Sleevless Errand sold well and set Kahane’s resolve to launch his own company:

I would start a publishing business that would exist for the convenience of those English writers, English and American, who had something to say they could not conveniently say in their own countries. The next Lawrence or Joyce who came along would find the natural solution of his difficulties in Paris.²

The publication of books that were either banned or unprintable in the US and Britain would remain the stock-in-trade of the Obelisk Press throughout its run from 1931 to 1939.

Jack Kahane

Kahane was born in Manchester, England in 1887. An ardent francophile from youth, he attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of WWI, but was rejected. Instead he served as an officer with the British Royal Fusiliers and was badly wounded and gassed at Ypres.

Jack Kahane

In 1917, he married a French woman named Marcelle Girodias and by the early 1920’s they were living outside Paris in Rozoy-en-Multien. There the couple raised three sons and Kahane began writing his own novels. His first, Laugh and Grow Rich, was published with moderate success, but the subsequent volumes, Love’s Wild Geese, The Gay Intrigue, The Vain Serenade, and The Pure In Heart sold poorly, prompting Kahane to try his hand at the publishing business. In 1929, he purchased an interest in the Vendôme Press and moved to Paris where the Kahanes settled into an apartment near the Champs-Élysées. Vendôme was a publisher of deluxe illustrated volumes—essentially coffee table books—run by Henri Babou from a small office in the fashionable Place Vendôme. In addition to his work on the coffee table books, Kahane managed to wrangle the publication of two minor volumes penned by his literary idol, James Joyce: Haveth Childers Everywhere (Vendôme, 1930), which was a selection from Joyce’s then Work in Progress, Finnegan’s Wake, and a collection of thirteen short poems titled Pomes Penyeach (Obelisk, 1932):

At that time my admiration for Ulysses was ardent and unadulterated, and, as a budding publisher, my dearest ambition was to publish something, anything, by THE GREATEST EXPATRIATE [...] James Joyce himself.³

Through the 1930’s Kahane would continue to write his own volumes of light smut which he self-published at Obelisk under the pen names Basil Carr and Cecil Barr.

Tropic of Cancer

In October 1932, Kahane received a package from the literary agent William Aspenwall Bradley containing a strange manuscript by an unknown author identified only as “Anonymous.” Kahane brought the manuscript home and devoured it in a single evening:

“At last!” I murmured to myself. I had read the most terrible, the most sordid, the most magnificent manuscript that had ever fallen into my hands; nothing I had yet received was comparable to it for the splendor of its writing, the fathomless depth of its despair, the savour of its portraiture, the boisterousness of its humour. [...] I was exalted by the triumphant sensation of all explorers who have at last fallen upon the object of their years of search. I had in my hands a work of genius and it had been offered to me for publication.⁴

The manuscript was Tropic of Cancer—“an unprintable book that is fit to read” as Ezra Pound later described it and the unknown author turned out to be Henry Miller, an American expatriate whom George Orwell would proclaim “the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.” However it was the “unprintable” business that gave Kahane pause. The objectionable language in Tropic of Cancer far exceeded the occasional “bloody hell” or “for Christ’s sake” that had made Sleevless Errand so appealing. Furthermore, Tropic of Cancer was a book of high literary merit—with the potential to become Kahane’s Ulysses—and he wanted it to reach the broadest possible audience. The Obelisk Press accepted Miller’s novel in 1932, but it would not see publication for nearly two years as Kahane fidgeted and fretted over the legal implications of launching such a scabrous tome. The matter was resolved only when Anaïs Nin’s offer to cover the printing expenses of 5,000 francs proved sufficient to dispel Kahane’s apprehension.

Tropic of Cancer rolled off the press in September 1934 bearing an explicit warning on it’s cover: “Not to be imported into Great Britain or U.S.A.” and for good measure, Kahane affixed a second label in bright red warning French bookstore owners that it must not be placed on open display stands or in windows (”Ne doit pas étre exposé en étalage ou en vitrine”). The warning effort, while offering Kahane a semblance of legal cover, seemed destined to bury the book from public view. Likely it was all a bit of marketing theater. A book requiring its own warning labels was sure to whet the appetite of expatriates looking for a salacious read. Kahane had found success with similar tactics in the past—the first printing of his own novel, Daffodil (1931) bore the label “3rd impression” to lend it an appearance of popularity; A second printing was labeled as the “5th”, a third became the “9th” and so on. Though Kahane had effectively banned Tropic of Cancer in Britain and the US before censors in either country knew of its existence, sales of Miller’s novel remained steady throughout the 1930’s—enough to see the book through five genuine Obelisk printings.

Four subsequent Miller titles were published by Kahane before the demise of the Obelisk press in 1939, including Aller Retour New York (1935), Black Spring (1936), Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). During this period Obelisk also produced books by D. H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Cyril Connelly, Richard Aldington and Frank Harris.

Assassinated?

The circumstances of Kahane’s death are rather hazy. Miller’s biographers generally limit their comments to pointing out the significance of the date: Kahane died on September 3, 1939, the day Britain and France declared war on Germany. Neil Pearson writes in a recent book on the Obelisk Press that Kahane died of heart failure in his apartment.⁵ The New York Times reported in Kahane’s obituary that a brief illness preceded his death.⁶ However, a very different story is presented by Martha Cornog who writes that Kahane, rumored to be a spy for the British Foreign Office, was shot dead by an unknown assailant while sipping tea at a cafe terrace on the Champs-Élysées.⁷ Miller researcher Karl Orend has also taken up the view that Kahane was assassinated for espionage.⁸

Notes

1. Neil Pearson, Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press, 65-68
2. Jack Kahane, Memoirs of a Booklegger, 227-228
3. Jack Kahane, Memoirs of a Booklegger, 238
4. Jack Kahane, Memoirs of a Booklegger
5. Neil Pearson, Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press, 72
6. The New York Times, September 8, 1939
7. Martha Cornog, Libraries, Erotica, and Pornography, 56
8. Karl Orend, “The Observations Gathered Concerning His Morality and Probity Are Favorable” Nexus, Vol. 4, 187

Obelisk Press posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

l’Eléphant Noctambule at 40 boulevard Beaumarchais

If you compare with the photo from the previous post, taken around 2000, you’ll notice that the exterior awning has been replaced. We also now have an interior view of the cafe. Look closely and you can make out various bits of pachydermic decor as well as a cute little café dog on the floor.

Interior of l’Eléphant Noctambule

l’Eléphant Noctambule from a different angle

Café de l’Eléphant: Update posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

When Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930, one of the first neighborhoods to draw his fascination was the confluence of streets around the boulevard Beaumarchais in the eleventh arrondissement:

Night after night I had been coming back to this quarter, attracted by certain leprous streets which only revealed their sinister splendor when the light of day had oozed away and the whores commenced to take up their posts.¹

Of particular appeal was a little tabac at 40 boulevard Beaumarchais called Café de l’Eléphant where the local prostitutes gathered to attract clients or throw back a drink between bouts. Miller became infatuated with one prostitute who stood out for the pleasure she took in her work. In Tropic of Cancer, he wrote that “she was thoroughly satisfied with her role, enjoyed it in fact:”²

Germaine was different. There was nothing to tell me so from her appearance. Nothing to distinguish her from the other trollops who met each afternoon and evening at the Café de l’Eléphant. [...] It was not difficult to come to terms with her. We sat in the back of the little tabac called L’Eléphant and talked it over quickly. In a few minutes we were in a five franc room on the Rue Amelot, the curtains drawn and the covers thrown back.³

What most interested Miller was the high esteem Germaine placed on her pussy:

she spoke of it as if it were some extraneous object which she had acquired at great cost, an object whose value had increased with time and which now she prized above everything in the world. Her words imbued it with a peculiar fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ, but a treasure, a magic, potent treasure.⁴

Though Tropic of Cancer is notorious for it’s descriptions of sex, Miller generally uses these passages to chide his characters for turning a natural act of passion into a dead mechanical grind. He championed Germaine because though she was obliged proffer her body countless times to all comers, she maintained a convincing human connection with her clients.

When she lay there with her legs apart and moaning, even if she did moan that way for any and everybody, it was good, it was a proper show of feeling. She didn’t stare up at the ceiling with a vacant look or count the bedbugs on the wallpaper; she kept her mind on her business, she talked about the things a man wants to hear when he’s climbing over a woman.⁵

Miller and Germaine met regularly at the café and struck up a kind of friendship. When he revealed that he wasn’t the rich American tourist she took him for, Germaine let Miller sleep with her on credit and introduced him to her friends who teased him for falling in love with a prostitute. Miller took the teasing in stride and even enjoyed watching Germaine hustle new clients:

It gave me pleasure to sit on the terrasse of the little tabac and observe her as she plied her trade, observe her as she resorted to the same grimaces, the same tricks, with others as she had with me.⁶

Aside from her role in Tropic of Cancer, Germaine was one of the models for the story “Mademoiselle Claude,” Miller’s first work of fiction to be published under his own name.⁷

The Cirque d’Hiver at 110 rue Amelot—and an elephant

The Name

The Café de l’Eléphant derived its name from an incident which occurred one night in 1912 when an escaped elephant from the nearby Cirque d’Hiver (Winter Circus) rumbled into the café and began smashing things. The café’s proprietors, seizing the marketing opportunity, changed its name and decorated the seating area with the heads of elephants in bas-relief.⁸ The name of the café reflected its hisrtory: “l’Eléphant Noctambule” (The Sleepwalking Elephant). Update: it seems that the café has again been renamed and is now known as Le First Café.

Practical information for visiting Le First Café can be found on qype.fr. And if you’re interested in seeing the elephants at the Cirque d’Hiver, check their website for show times.

Notes

* Brassaï, “Prostitute at angle of rue de la Reynie and rue Quincampoix”, from Paris by Night, 1933.

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 43-44
2. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 47
3. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 44
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 45
5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 48
6. Ibid
7. “Mademoiselle Claude” was published in the August 1931 issue of Samuel Putnam’s New Review.
8. Ecrits-vains.com:
   http://ecrits-vains.com/ballades/balade21/balade21.htm

Many thanks to Michael Jones for providing me with the photo of the Café de l’Elephant and the idea for this post.

Café de l’Eléphant posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

The American Express office at 11 rue Scribe has been serving tourists in Paris for more than one hundred years since its opening in 1900, timed to coincide with the Paris Exposition. A booklet published for the exposition described the services on offer:

They are equipped with reading and writing rooms, in which the latest American journals are on file; a post office, through means of which the letters of clients will be forwarded on request; a telephone; commodious quarters for the handling and storage of baggage, bicycles, and purchases of travelers, together with a bureau of information.¹

Henry Miller made extensive use of these services throughout his years in Paris as the American Express grew to be strongly associated with his personal misery. Miller’s first unhappy encounter with the Paris American Express office occurred before he left New York, arriving in the form of a Dear John letter letter from his estranged wife, June, when she left him to run off to Paris with Jean Kronski:

“Dear Val,” it ran. “We sailed this morning on the Rochambeau. Didn’t have the heart to tell you. Write care of American Express, Paris. Love.”²

When Miller made his first visit to Europe a year later, the American Express office served as one of the cardinal points in his mental map of 1928 Paris: “Paris! Meaning the Café Select, the Dôme, the Flea Market, the American Express. Paris!”³

During his early years of living in the city without a fixed address, Miller received mail poste-restant at the American Express, often citing 11 rue Scribe on letters as his return address, on one exuberant occasion, signing a letter “Henry V. Miller, Man of Letters, c/o American Express, 11 rue Scribe—Vive la France! Liberté Egalité Fraternité—Pax Vobiscum.”⁴

In Tropic of Cancer, Miller recounts these early days of hardship and his many unhappy returns to the American Express:

I experience once again the splendor of those miserable days when I first arrived in Paris, a bewildered, poverty-stricken individual who haunted the streets like a ghost at a banquet. [...] The golden period, when I had not a single friend. Each morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and each morning the inevitable answer from the clerk.⁵

The dreary, fruitless return to the American Express is a thread that runs throughout the novel. At times, he would make the pilgrimage several times a day:

For five days I have not touched the typewriter nor looked at a book; nor have I had a single idea in my head except to go to the American Express. At nine this morning I was there, just as the doors were being opened, and again at one o’clock. No news. At four-thirty I dash out of the hotel, resolved to make a last minute stab at it.⁶

The office acts as a gloomy beacon in the center of Paris, drawing Miller’s memory from any of the various streets and alleyways he traversed to arrive there:

I remember passing this way the other morning on my way to the American Express, knowing in advance that there would be no mail for me, no check, no cable, nothing, nothing.⁷

When he is offered free room and board from a new friend in the suburbs, it is only Miller’s fixation with the American Express that clouds his decision: “The only question is, how will I get from Suresnes to the American Express every day.”⁸

Miller’s fixation with the American Express is only resolved at the very end of Tropic of Cancer in the scene where he is escorting his delirious friend Fillmore as he flees France to avoid a paternity claim. On the way to the train station they stop by the American Express to withdraw all of Fillmore’s money:

When we got to the American Express, there wasn’t a devil of a lot of time left. The British, in their usual fumbling, farting way, had kept us on pins and needles. Here everybody was sliding around on castors. They were so speedy that everything had to be done twice. After all the checks were signed and clipped together in a neat little holder, it was discovered that he had signed in the wrong place. Nothing to do but start all over again. I stood over him, with one eye on the clock, and watched every stroke of the pen. It hurt to hand over the dough. Not all of it, thank God—but a good part of it. I had roughly about 2,500 francs in my pocket. Roughly, I say. I wasn’t counting by francs any more. A hundred, or two hundred, more or less—it didn’t mean a goddamned thing to me.⁹

Once his friend is packed off for America, Miller pockets most of the money intended for Fillmore’s girlfriend.** With the ill-gotten loot in hand, Miller reaches apotheosis. His journey along the American Express, progressing from a marginal existence eked out from begging and the crumbs of his wife’s soft prostitution earnings to relative affluence derived from cheating a friend caught in a compromising position constitute a kind of subversion of the Horatio Alger American Dream story, which he vowed to destroy.¹⁰

Anaïs and June

June Miller (left) and Anaïs Nin

While Miller had awaited letters from June at the American Express, Anaïs Nin waited there anxiously for June to arrive in person. Her diary reveals that during the first months of 1932, the American Express office was their regular meeting place:

We met, June and I, at American Express. I knew she would be late, and I did not mind. I was there before the hour, almost ill with tenseness. I would see her, in full daylight, advance out of the crowd. Could it be possible? I was afraid that I would stand there exactly as I had stood in other places, watching a crowd and knowing no June would ever appear because June was a product of my imagination. I could hardly believe she would arrive by those streets, cross such a boulevard, emerge out of a handful of dark, faceless people, walk into that place. What a joy to watch that crowd scurrying and then to see her striding, resplendent, incredible, towards me. I hold her warm hand. She is going for mail. Doesn’t the man at American Express see the wonder of her? Nobody like her ever called for mail. Did any woman ever wear shabby shoes, a shabby black dress, a shabby dark blue cape, and a violet hat as she wears them?¹¹

The American Express Today

The neighborhood of the American Express office, known as l’Opera, is one of the principal tourist hubs of Paris, most famous for its elaborate opera house, upscale shopping destinations such as Galeries Lafayette, and its expansive Grands Boulevards. The office itself is still open for business and though the interior was completely overhauled in 1955, the exterior appearance remains largely as it was when Miller made his regular visits in the thirties.¹²

Notes

** Miller researcher Karl Orend has asserted that in real life, Miller didn’t pocket the money intended for Fillmore’s girlfriend, Ginette. Instead, he handed over all of Fillmore’s money to Ginette and acted as friend and counselor to them both.¹³

1. “Our Story in France”, American Express web site.
   http://home3.americanexpress.com/corp/swfs/global.swf
2. Henry Miller, Nexus, 153
3. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 17
   [see also: Brassaï, Henry Miller: Happy Rock, 145]
4. Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright, 181
5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 14-15
6. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 51
7. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 70
8. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 74
9. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 314
10. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, 23-27
11. Anaïs Nin, Henry and June, 19
12. “Home Away from Home”, Time. October 24, 1955.
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,891629,00.html
13. Karl Orend, “A Man Cut in Slices : New Perspective’s on Henry Miller’s Paris Years”. Alyscamps Press: Paris and Austin, 2002

American Express posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

In New York, Miller had salivated at the vivid descriptions of Paris supplied by his friend Emil Schnellock. Though his own experiences in Paris were often troubled by hunger or homelessness, Miller could always count on a glance up the rue Laffitte to refresh his spirits. He would refer to the view again and again in his novels; First in Tropic of Cancer:

the Rue Laffitte which is just wide enough to frame the little temple at the end of the street and above it the Sacré-Cœur, a kind of exotic jumble of architecture, a lucid French idea that gouges right through your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly in the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and yet doesn’t jar your nerves.¹

…and again in Tropic of Capricorn:

Sometimes, after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he [Emil] described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of Sacré Coeur, through the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight.²

…and in Quiet Days in Clichy:

Looking towards the Sacré Coeur from any point along the rue Laffitte on a day like this, an hour like this, would be sufficient to put me in ecstasy.³

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 176
2. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, 41
3. Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy, 6

Rue Laffitte posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Once in Paris, Miller and Nanavati met again by chance on the terrasse of the Dôme café. Miller was destitute and homeless, having been recently kicked out of his lodgings at the Hotel Alba. Perhaps the pearl mogul would allow Miller to stay for while in his fancy apartment? Nanavati consented.

But when Miller arrived at the suite, he was sorely disappointed. Here were no palatial living quarters, but only a squalid apartment in which Miller was expected to perform menial chores such as washing vegetables, sweeping floors, and scrubbing the bidet for his room and meager board of stale bread and lentils:

Life is very hard for me—very. I live with bedbugs and cockroaches. I sweep the dirty carpets, wash the dishes, eat stale bread without butter. Terrible life. Honest! [...] only a pair of flannel trousers and a tweed coat to cover my nakedness. I can’t go any more bohemian than this.¹

Nanavati took pleasure in Miller’s helplessness—needling him about his lack of funds and requiring him to perform demeaning chores:

If I fail to come back at night and roll up in the horse blankets he says to me on arriving: “Oh, so you didn’t die then? I thought you had died.” And though he knows I’m absolutely penniless he tells me every day about some cheap room he has just discovered in the neighborhood. “But I can’t take a room yet, you know that,” I say. And then, blinking his eyes like a Chink, he answers smoothly: “Oh, yes, I forgot that you had no money. I am always forgetting, Endree . . . But when the cable comes . . . when Miss Mona sends you the money, then you will come with me to look for a room, eh?”
[...]
I’m nothing but a slave to this fat little duck. I’m at his beck and call continually. He needs me here—he tells me so to my face. When he goes to the crap-can he shouts: “Endree, bring me a pitcher of water, please. I must wipe myself.”²

At Nanavati’s, Miller despaired at the possibility of ever becoming an artist: “I am the same miserable failure as always. No money—no hope”, he wrote to Emil Schnellock, and resigned himself the fate of mediocrity:

Maybe some day I will become a respectable member of society. I hope so for your sake. I think there is nothing finer in this life than to be a good citizen, a self-respecting member of society.³

It was only a strange incident concerning a brothel and a bidet that brought Miller to his senses.

One of Miller’s duties at Nanavati’s was to show his foreign guests the nightlife of Paris. As he described in Tropic of Cancer, one of these guests (apparently Miller’s old friend Haridas Muzumdar) accompanies Miller to a brothel where he mistakenly shits in the bidet. The furor elicited by this faux pas enables Miller to envision a sort of grand banquet at the end of time at which everything that mankind is collectively striving for is revealed to be “nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet“:

What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit.⁴

Miller felt liberated by his ability to reframe the situation.; The problem was not that he personally was hopeless, but that there was nothing to be hoped for:

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.⁵

Miller moved out of Nanavati’s apartment at the end of September 1930 when June arrived for a brief stay. He took his revenge on Nanavati in Tropic of Cancer, where the pearl merchant appears variously as “Nanantatee” or “Mr. Nonentity”. Miller even used the opportunity to take a swipe at James Joyce. During a scene in which Nanantatee is teaching Miller to recite a lucky word, the gibberish of Nanatatee’s chant flows seamlessly into a passage ripped directly from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake:

I will give you a word that will always make you lucky; you must say it every day, over and over, a million times you must say it. It is the best word there is, Endree . . . say it now . . . OOMAHARUMOOMA!”
“OOMARABOO. . . .”
“No, Endree . . . like this . . . OOMAHARUMOOMA!”
“OOMAMABOOMBA. . . .”
“No, Endree . . . like this. . . .”
. . . But what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the fox-trotting fleas, the lie-a-bed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his brainfag, the tic of his conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the rats in his garret, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears, since it took him a month to steal a march, he was hardset to memorize more than a word a week.⁶

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 61; August 9, 1930
2. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 84-85
3. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 62; August 9, 1930
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 101
5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 102
6. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 93-94

Nanavati’s Place posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

The Folies Bergère opened in 1870 as an upscale cabaret featuring elaborate performances by revealingly costumed dancing girls. Its early notoriety derived primarily from its cancan dancers and a famous painting by Édouard Manet. Henry Miller visited the Folies Bergère in the early 1930’s when the cabaret’s best-known performers were Mistinguett and a banana-skirted Josephine Baker. Though not a customer, in Tropic of Cancer, Miller describes how he received a surreptitious backstage tour of the cabaret by helping a Russian emigré unload barrels of insecticide:

Sniffing about for food I found myself towards noon the other day in the neighborhood of the Folies-Bergère—the back entrance, that is to say, in the narrow little lane with an iron gate at one end. I was dawdling about the stage entrance, hoping vaguely for a casual brush with one of the butterflies, when an open truck pulls up to the sidewalk. Seeing me standing there with my hands in my pockets the driver, who was Serge, asks me if I would give him a hand unloading the iron barrels. When he learns that I am an American and that I’m broke he almost weeps with joy. He has been looking high and low for an English teacher, it seems. I help him roll the barrels of insecticide inside and I look my fill at the butterflies fluttering about the wings. The incident takes on strange proportions to me—the empty house, the sawdust dolls bouncing in the wings, the barrels of germicide, the battleship Potemkin …¹

When Serge offers Miller a place to sleep and a daily meal in exchange for English lessons, Miller readily accepts. However, the arrangement is only to last for one night. Serge’s squalid apartment with its lingering odor of germicide repulses Miller and his fitful sleep is interrupted by a vision of pestilence and disorder underlying the Folies’ veneer of sex and glamour:

I see the empty pit of the Folies-Bergère and in every crevice there are cockroaches and lice and bedbugs; I see people scratching themselves frantically, scratching and scratching until the blood comes. I see the worms crawling over the scenery like an army of red ants, devouring everything in sight. I see the chorus girls throwing away their gauze tunics and running through the aisles naked; I see the spectators in the pit throwing off their clothes also and scratching each other like monkeys.²

As if to illustrate Miller’s escapade, Brassaï produced a set of photographs of dancers backstage at the Folies Bergère in 1933:

Brassaï – L’Oiseau de feu’aux Folies Bergère		Brassaï – Backstage at the Folies Bergère

Furthermore

Visit the official web site of the Folies Bergère to reserve tickets for current shows. The site provides a detailed history of the Folies as well as many photographs and a virtual tour.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 73-74
2. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 75

Folies Bergère posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

In May of 1934 Henry Miller lived in the Grand Hôtel de la Havane for one week. Though he no longer worked at The Chicago Tribune, Miller enjoyed being surrounded by the bustling environs of his old workplace. The hotel was cheap and run-down, but as he wrote Emil Schnellock, Miller enjoyed that too:

I like my cheap hotel—like its crazy wallpaper, the stains on the wall, the odor of mildew, the broken things, etc. Even the noise! For I have selected the very busiest district imaginable—one short block from the Rue Lafayette, from Chicago Tribune, from Folies-Bergère—etc. I like the bustle and smell and sweat and dirt—for a while anyhow.¹

It was to be a productive week for Miller. He was making a final rewrite of Tropic of Cancer:

I am rewriting Tropic of Cancer over again, as I told you. Hard job. Hard to imagine that empty belly and the fever and the agony and the suspense and the nightmares. Mostly it’s the construction of it I’m altering. And eliminating, as usual. Weeding out the useless shit. Putting in new shit.²

On completing his task, Miller would report back to Emil: “Jesus, I had to sweat some in rewriting that book. Rewrote the whole god-damned thing from beginning to end. Only left about thirty pages intact.”³

Inspiration for the rewrite of Tropic of Cancer may have come in part from a book Miller was reading during his week at the Havane. He would later recall this hotel with the “rather flamboyant name” as the place he had read Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night: “I had spent a week in this hotel once, in bed most of the time. During that week, flat on my back, I had read Céline’s Voyage au bout de la Nuit.”⁴

Miller had likely borrowed a copy of Céline’s novel from Anaïs Nin, who recommended it to Miller based on “affinities” she recognized between the two men’s writing styles.⁵ Miller and Céline each write first person, autobiographical novels and share a sense of despair at the spiritual state of contemporary society. Both writers shocked readers with their visceral use of street language. And in Tropic of Cancer, Miller frequently employs Céline’s signature technique of stringing together truncated statements with ellipses to create a fluid style that is more reminiscent of speech patterns than traditional prose structures.

Furthermore

Céline’s second novel, Death on the Installment Plan (Mort à Credit), cites his father’s place of employment at an insurance company just a few doors away from Hôtel Havane at 32 rue de Trévise.⁶

The Hotel de la Havane is currently a three star hotel with fifty-four rooms. You can make reservations and see more photos here.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 149-150; May 12, 1934
2. Ibid
3. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 152; July 14, 1934
4. Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 362
5. Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion, 150; May 3, 1933
6. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, 480

Grand Hôtel de la Havane posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Gillotte’s was a small bistro located across the street from the Chicago Tribune offices on rue Lamartine that stayed open throughout the night. As such, it was a favorite eatery for the Tribune staff who worked late nights to produce the morning edition. Waverly Root, the Tribune editor and well-known food writer, found the quality of Gillotte’s cuisine confirmed by it’s popularity among taxi drivers who, unlike the Tribune staff, were free to take their meals in any part of the city they wished.¹ The bistro was a favorite of Henry Miller’s and he looked forward to his nightly meal there, usually taken about 2:30 am, following his work at the paper:

my life has not become any easier because I have a job. Au contraire, I am worse off than ever. [...] However, there is the life at Gillotte’s nightly (that is, the little bistro around the corner from the office). That compensates for everything.²

The Tribune staff and taxi drivers were joined at Gillotte’s by other denizens of the Paris nightlife, notably the local prostitutes and their pimps. It was just the sort of setting, bringing together the Paris literati with the working class and demi-mondaine, all mixed with copious quantities of food and wine, at which Miller was in his element:

Naturally we always had a few liters of wine with our meals, which were veritable banquets. Miller shone at these little gatherings. He was brilliant, especially when a little tipsy, and made friends with the whores and the pimps and even the ‘upstairs guys [editorial staff].’³

Miller described Gillotte’s in Tropic of Cancer, where it appears as “Monsieur Paul’s”:

At Monsieur Paul’s, the bistro across the way, there is a back room reserved for the newspapermen where we can eat on credit. It is a pleasant little room with sawdust on the floor and flies in season and out. When I say that it is reserved for the newspapermen I don’t mean to imply that we eat in privacy; on the contrary, it means that we have the privilege of associating with the whores and pimps who form the more substantial element of Monsieur Paul’s clientele.⁴

The newspapermen ate on credit and were expected to pay their bill every other week. So, when Miller was fired from the Tribune, he used part of his final check to settle up with Gillotte’s, ensuring that he could continue to eat regularly:

Well, I wouldn’t starve, that’s one thing. If I should do nothing else but concentrate on food that would prevent me from falling to pieces. For a week or two I could still go to Monsieur Paul’s and have a square meal every evening; he wouldn’t know whether I was working or not.⁵

During a 1969 return trip to Paris, Miller made a point of seeking out Gillotte’s as part of his son’s project to photograph the writer’s former Parisian haunts, but discovered that the bistro had already disappeared.⁶ The photograph above is taken from Vol. 2 of Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal and appears to be from the 1950’s.

Unfortunately, I don’t know the address or exact location of Gillotte’s. However, there are presently two small café restaurants on rue Lamartine across from the former Tribune offices that are worth stopping by. If you know the correct address or have a more recent photo of the location, please let me know in the comments.

Notes

1. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition: 1927-1934, 107
2. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 80; August 24, 1931
3. Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller, 46
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 158
5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 191
6. Brassaï, Henry Miller: Happy Rock, 155; July 17, 1969

Gillotte’s posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller

In March of 1932, Henry Miller lived at the Hôtel Cronstadt for about two weeks while waiting for repairs to be completed on his new apartment in Clichy. Miller was expecting the move to Clichy to deliver him from the circuit of cheap hotels he had been traveling since arriving in Paris more than a year before. But when he and Alfred Perlès arrived to take possession of their flat, they discovered that the water had yet to be connected, the electric lighting was not installed and the apartment was in general disarray. That first night in Clichy, they awoke from a fitful sleep covered in bites and the walls seething with insects:

Then we get busy and inspect. Hold the candle to the walls. Marvellous! The walls are alive! Big ones, egg-layers, nests, nits, cocoons, spider webs, dead ones, comatose ones, active ones … we take matches and burn them alive.¹

The sight was enough to convince their concierge to order repairs and Miller spent the interim at the Hôtel Cronstadt.

The Cronstadt had two points of recommendation for Miller. First, it was convenient, located directly across the narrow rue Lamartine from his office at The Chicago Tribune. And second, the look of the place had a certain charm for Miller, as he told Anaïs Nin, “The Cronstadt looks like what a French hotel should look like.”² He was anxious for her to see it with him.

So I’m here at the Cronstadt and you have the telephone number. I will be here at the office until the afternoon, If you don’t find me at the hotel try this joint—editorial room. I want you to see the Cronstadt.³

When Nin did visit him, their conversation left him in an agitated creative state. He remained in the hotel room after she left scribbling a series of telegraphic notes:

The night you left me in the Hotel Cronstadt I was in a fever. I made so many notes, and I was going afterwards to the office to write … but I didn’t.⁴

A smattering of his notes from that night include:

“Read Rabelais in old French.” “Reread Cervantes” … “Write Joe’s column in the morning.” “Include dream of Aunt Annie—see the dream book.” “Make the last book the first of a series—a life job, like Proust’s.” “Anaïs must see A Nous la Liberté.” … “Read the Golden Ass of Apuleius and Les Diaboliques in French” … “Go to Russian Church on Rue Crimée for the music.” … “Get back the first volume of Albertine and make annotations … write copiously, there is time for everything” … “Read Jacques Maritain” … “Tell Anaïs how I stumbled into Anatole coming out of the Gare St. Lazare that afternoon … Anatole is a beautiful character.” “Begin the book with a paean to Buñuel.” “Go with Anaïs to the Franco-Czech restaurant on the Rue St. Anne.”⁵

By March 28, Miller had left the Cronstadt and he and Perlès were installed again in the their newly cleaned apartment in Clichy.

Try it out

The Cronstadt is a 2 star hotel with room prices starting around 38 euros. Many hotel booking websites, such as this one, will help you reserve a room.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, A Literate Passion, 26-30; March 17, 1932
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Henry Miller, A Literate Passion, 37-45; March 28, 1932
5. Ibid

Hôtel Cronstadt posted by: Walking Paris with Henry Miller