Café de la Liberté

Our first walk will begin at the Café de la Liberté, located directly across from the Edgar Quinet metro station (line 6) on the boulevard Edgar Quinet.

Café de la Liberté in Montparnasse

Henry Miller discovered the Café de la Liberté shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1930. At the time, he was living just around the corner at the Hôtel Central and a stop at the café became part of his daily routine. Each afternoon he returned carrying a French novel and a dictionary, making slow progress through a story that had gripped his imagination.¹ Nearly forty years later, Miller would vividly recall the many hours he spent in this “dingy hole”² poring over Blaise Cendrars’ Moravagine. The book was one of the first that Miller had read in French and it left a profound impression: “How can I convince the skeptic that I was ravished by Cendrars’ Moravagine? How does one know immediately that a thing is after one’s own heart?”³ The title character of Cendrars’ book would even make his way into Tropic of Cancer, the budding novel that was then sprouting its first green shoots in Miller’s notebook:

I love everything that flows … I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river.⁴

In The Books in My Life, Miller wrote of his passion for reading Cendrars:

There were times when reading Cendrars—and this is something which happens to me rarely—when I put the book down in order to wring my hands with joy or despair, with anguish or with desperation. Cendrars has stopped me in my tracks again and again, just as implacably as a gunman pressing a rod against one’s spine.⁵

Cendrars was to become an equal champion of Miller’s writing. When Tropic of Cancer was published he hailed Miller in the first review of Tropic of Cancer to appear in print, titled, “An American Writer Is Born to Us:”

Discovering Paris, breathing Paris, devouring Paris, he swallowed it furiously, and ate it, then he wanted to vomit in it and piss against it, adore it and curse it until he felt that he was part of the extraordinary people in the streets of this great city, until Paris had gotten under his skin and he knew that from that day forward he could never live anywhere else.⁶

Miller and Cendrars soon became friends in Paris and would write to each other regularly over the course of forty-five years.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Joey, 17
2. Henry Miller, The Books in My Life, 58
3. Henry Miller, Remember to Remember, 347
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 257-258
5. Henry Miller, The Books in My Life, 63
6. Blaise Cendrars, “Un Ecrivain americain nous est ne”, Orbes; été 1935 — translation found in Brassaï, Henry Miller: The Paris Years, 19,
7. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 23; March 9, 1930

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