A Man Cut in Slices

One week after his arrival in Paris in March of 1930, Henry Miller was making a circuitous exploration of his new city when he found himself drawn to a window display at the Honoré Champion bookstore on the Quai Malaquais.¹ The window contained an impressive collection of books and avant-garde art, including a selection of drawings by Raoul Dufy,—“drawings of charwomen with rosebushes between their legs,”² as Miller described them in Tropic of Cancer. Also on display was an album of Jean Cocteau’s drawings and next to it, a treatise on the philosophy of Joan Miró. Peering inside, Miller discovered the store was holding an exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky’s latest work. But it was a book by a much lesser-known artist which captured Miller’s imagination: “In the same window: A Man Cut In Slices! Chapter one: the man in the eyes of his family. Chapter two: the same in the eyes of his mistress.”³

The book was laid open in the display window so that only the first two chapters were visible. Each day the window dresser turned a fresh page and Miller would have to return to the bookstore in order to absorb the remaining chapters. A Man Cut in Slices (Un Homme Coupé en Tranches) contained very little text and was comprised chiefly of illustrations by the author. However, it was not the contents of the book so much as its title and chapter titles that intrigued Miller:

A man cut in slices. … You can’t imagine how furious I am not to have thought of a title like that! Where is this bloke who writes “the same in the eyes of his mistress … the same in the eyes of … the same …”? Where is this guy? Who is he? I want to hug him. I wish to Christ I had had brains enough to think of a title like that—instead of Crazy Cock and the other fool things I invented. Well, fuck a duck! I congratulate him just the same. I wish him luck with his fine title. Here’s another slice for you—for your next book! Ring me up some day. I’m living at the Villa Borghese. We’re all dead, or dying, or about to die. We need good titles. We need meat—slices and slices of meat—juicy tenderloins, porterhouse steaks, kidneys, mountain oysters, sweetbreads. Some day, when I’m standing at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, I’m going to remember this title and I’m going to put down everything that goes on in my noodle—caviar, rain drops, axle grease, vermicelli, liverwurst—slices and slices of it. And I’ll tell no one why, after I had put everything down, I suddenly went home and chopped the baby to pieces. Un acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupé en tranches!⁴

“Where is this guy? Who is he?” Miller’s questions could as easily be asked today. Several books on Miller have incorrectly attributed Un Homme Coupé en Tranches to Philippe Soupault (see Always Merry and Bright by Jay Martin, pg. 198). This mistake likely stems from a passage in Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) which Soupault co-authored with André Breton in 1919. The passage describes “un homme coupé en deux par la fenêtre” (A man cut in two by the window) and Louis Aragon used it in the title of his well-known commentary on Soupault and Breton’s collaboration, Un Homme Coupé en Deux.

The real author of A Man Cut in Slices was a Frenchman named Jean Bruller, who, at the time of publication in 1929, was best known as a cartoonish book illustrator. A few examples from his 1926 album, 21 Recettes Pratiques de Mort Violente, which illustrates 21 novel ways to commit suicide, provide a glimpse of his style. Miller enthusiastically considered A Man Cut in Slices to be “another piece of Surrealism,”⁵ though Bruller was not officially associated with the Surrealist group.

Today, Bruller is better known by his pseudonym, Vercors. His Silence of the Sea (1942), a resistance novel published clandestinely during the German occupation in WWII is considered a classic. In order to produce Silence of the Sea, Bruller initiated a secret publishing company which he dubbed Les Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Editions) and the book was distributed hand-to-hand between trusted friends. Les Éditions de Minuit survived the war and remains a vibrant publishing house to this day. Bruller’s choice of Vercors as a pseudonym was an homage to the Maquis du Vercors, a French Resistance group which operated in the mountainous region known as “Vercors” in Eastern France.

Of A Man Cut in Slices, Miller wrote, “I believe in it with all my heart. It is an emancipation from classicism, realism, naturalism, and all the other outmoded isms of the past and present.”⁶ Though the book does not appear to have ever been translated into English, an example of the French first edition can be acquired for a tidy price. It is also available in a 2002 volume of Vercors’ collected works, Le silence de la mer et autres oeuvres.

Former site of the Librairie Honoré Champion © Photo by Olivier RTD Lewis		An illustrated page from A Man Cut in Slices

If you plan to stop by, be aware that the site of the bookstore is now occupied by the Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval. Honoré Champion and his bookstore have long since left the premises, though the publishing company originally launched at the store remains in operation from a different location.

Notes

1. Karl Orend, "A Man Cut in Slices: New Perspectives on Henry Miller's Paris Years," Alyscamps Press, 2002
2. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 40-41
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 28-29 (March, 1930)
6. Ibid.

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