Henry Miller's Paris Guidebooks

The landmarks that populated Henry Miller’s mental map of Paris in 1928 could be summed up in on exuberant sentence: “Paris! Meaning the Café Select, the Dôme, the Flea Market, the American Express. Paris!”¹ Poring over a map of the city with Emil Schnellock in New York, Miller had marveled at the profusion of streets named for illustrious figures,—yet the physical and historical Paris remained an abstraction to him. A limited tour of expatriate hotspots in Montparnasse, led by his wife June—who knew the area from having run off to Paris without Miller the year before—did little to put flesh on the city of his imagination.²

In 1930, the Millers’ situation reversed, with Henry headed off to Paris alone and June left behind in New York. Miller was ready to start a new life in Paris and he determined to absorb the full flavor of its history and romance. “Each day I will see a little more of Paris, study it, learn it as I would a book,” he wrote to Emil on March 6, 1930.³ A few weeks later he was able to report his first discoveries,

I haven’t done much reading in the last five days, but the little I have absorbed has been profitable. This time I look upon an entirely different Paris. When I walk down the most wonderful street in the world (St. Denis!)—and also the oldest in Paris—I know that I am taking the road of the Roman legions, the road of the Knights Templar, the road that the fearsome Saint Denis himself trod, head in hand.⁴

True to his word, Miller did learn Paris like a book,—and there were two volumes that he relied on for his education. The Stones of Paris in History and Letters by Benjamin and Charlotte Martin and The Paris of the Novelists by Arthur B. Maurice were both steeped in the literary history of Paris and from their pages a darker, richer vision of the city began to take shape.

From The Stones of Paris, Miller learned that it was on the Quai des Celestins, in a house of an unknown address, that the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel had died in 1553. Miller revered Rabelais and at the suggestion of his guidebook, he vowed to Emil that he would one day voyage to Chinon, his birthplace, to toast with the good red wine of that country, “this healthy, sane, normal intellect of France.”⁵

Tales of Paris during the plague years or under the reign of mad king Charles VI fascinated Miller and he found them in abundance in a chapter on “The Making of the Marais.” Soon he was larding pages of Tropic of Cancer with selections from the rich prose of The Stones of Paris:

“The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while the danse macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries. …”⁶

A tour of the Marais brought Miller to the Square du Temple, which he learned had once been the garden of the Grand Prior of the Knights Templar. Here he mused over the bloodthirsty exploits “of the horse knackers led by Jean Caboche”⁷ and from this spot, “thought long and ruefully over the sad fate of Charles the Silly. A half-wit, who prowled about the halls of his Hôtel St. Paul, garbed in the filthiest rags, eaten away by ulcers and vermin, gnawing a bone, when they flung him one, like a mangy dog.”⁸

When he read that Charles had been abandoned “by his shameless wife, Isabeau de Bavière,” and that ever after, when she did deign to visit him, “he looked upon her with unknowing eyes, or with knowing eyes of horror,”⁹ Miller must have thought of his own abandonment by June when she ran off to Paris in 1927. He learned that Charles’ only friends, aside from “his ‘low-born companion,’ Odette de Champdivers,” had been the animals kept in stone cages at the Hôtel St. Paul. And when the guidebook directed him to their remnants, Miller hustled off to the rue des Lions where, he wrote, “I felt the stones of the old menagerie where he fed his pets.”¹⁰

When Miller turned his attention to The Paris of the Novelists, he was drawn to the chapter on “Sinister Streets” with its descriptions of the Paris of Eugene Sue’s novels. He quoted a passage from it in Tropic of Cancer: “Not forgetting Rodin, the evil genius of The Wandering Jew, who practiced his nefarious ways ‘until the day when he was enflamed and outwitted by the octoroon Cecily.’”¹¹ But Miller, it seems, was himself enflamed and outwitted by Maurice’s writing. Evidently not having read Eugene Sue, he chose the passage from The Paris of the Novelists for the strength of it’s lively prose and got his evil geniuses mixed up. It was not Rodin of The Wandering Jew, but Jacques Ferrand of The Mysteries of Paris whom Cecily tormented:

It was there in a corner house, that dwelt the notary, Jacques Ferrand, perhaps the most sinister of all the sinister characters of the complex tale, the evil genius of the “Mystères de Paris” as Rodin was the evil genius of “Le Juif Errant.” There, under a garb of assumed sanctity the spider spun his webs and wrought his villainies until the day when he was enflamed and outwitted by the octoroon, Cecily.¹²

Miller returned to The Paris of the Novelists for its chapter on Balzac. He pulled a quote that Maurice had cited from Balzac’s Ferragus for use in his article “Paris in Ut-Mineur,” which he published on March 8, 1931 in the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune,—under the byline of Alfred Perlès. Balzac’s passage is notable for ascribing human characteristics to the streets of Paris:

“There are in Paris certain streets,” wrote Balzac in “Ferragus”—“as dishonoured as can be any man convicted of infamy; then there are noble streets, also streets that are simply honest, also young streets concerning whose morality the public has not yet formed any opinion; then there are murderous streets, streets older than the oldest possible dowagers, estimable streets, streets that are always clean, streets that are always dirty, workingmen’s streets, students’ streets, and mercantile streets. In short, the streets of Paris have human qualities, and impress us by their physiognomy with certain ideas against which we are defenceless.”¹³

When Miller got hold of the passage, he disemboweled it, removing any references to streets with pleasant or mundane personalities and making the minor swap of “dishonorable” for “dishonoured:”

“There are in Paris certain streets,” wrote Balzac, “as dishonorable as can be any man convicted of infamy; there are murderous streets, streets older than the oldest possible dowagers … in short, the streets of Paris have human qualities, and impress us by their physiognomy with certain ideas against which we are defenceless.”¹⁴

In his final paragraph, which includes the Balzac quote, Miller continues, “these are the streets with character, but in the suburbs there is no character; the streets have names, but the names do not belong to them. There is a physiognomy, but it is one of despair. They yawn like empty vestibules.”

One year later, Miller would pick up the thread he had left off with “Paris in Ut-Mineur” in a second article published in the Chicago Tribune under Perlès’ name. When “Rue Lourmel in Fog” appeared in April 1932, Miller had fully digested Balzac’s lines and was able to give them to us in his own voice:

There are streets which do not belong to Paris at all. They should be torn up, demolished, forgotten. There are others, particularly those named after the illustrious dead, which are nothing but vile slanders. They should be renamed. But there are those, like the one I have in mind, the rue Lourmel whose true character asserts itself only under certain atmospheric conditions.¹⁵

“Rue Lourmel in Fog” is a minor masterpiece which brings the pre-dawn street palpably and sinisterly to life. “There was no denying that the street had a character,” Miller concludes his tale, “It even had a pulse.”

Inspiration for the title of a third Tribune article, “Gobelins Tapestries,” may have come from a description of Balzac’s living quarters which Miller would have found in The Stones of Paris. Gobelins tapestries were those lavishly illustrated seventeenth-century weavings created by the Gobelins family which adorned the walls of only the richest and most sumptuous of Parisian homes. In The Stones of Paris they appear in the list of imaginary decorations which a debt-ridden Balzac scribbled onto the bare walls of his cottage.

His rooms were almost bare of furniture, and this was suggested by his stage directions charcoaled on the plaster walls: “Rosewood panels,” “Gobelins tapestries,” “Venetian mirror,” “An inlaid cabinet stands here,” “Here hangs a Raphael.” Thus he was content to camp for four or five years, hoping his house would yet be furnished, and perhaps believing it was already furnished.¹⁶

As with Balzac and his imaginary tapestries, Miller’s article inscribes a rich title on a squalid reality. “Gobelins Tapestries” is a description of a walk through Paris’ thirteenth arrondissement, which in Miller’s hand appears unrelievedly bleak and sinister. “Coming along the Rue Jeanne d’Arc,” he wrote, “you pass through a veritable Purgatory:”

The charred tenements, arranged like prison blocks, are almost terrifying; they are separated from one another by gloomy courts barred at each end by enormous iron gates. […] People emerge from their dwellings garbed in black, their shoulders stooped, their limbs bloated or broken, their voices raucous and malign; now and then you see a face with a nose missing, or an eye.¹⁷

Jay Martin has written in Always Merry and Bright that Miller found The Paris of the Novelists “at the American Library on the Boulevard Raspail.”¹⁸ However, I was unable to locate any other references to this library. There was an American Center for Students and Artists on the boulevard Raspail, which may have had a lending library, but it didn’t open until 1934—several years after Miller read his guidebooks. A more likely source is The American Library in Paris, which opened in 1920 on the rue de l'Elysée and has since moved to the rue du Général-Camou, near the Eiffel Tower. Though both books are long out of print, The American Library in Paris still has listings for The Paris of the Novelists and The Stones of Paris in its catalogue,—possibly the very volumes that Miller consulted. A big gold star to any Parisian readers who care to drop by and check for traces of Miller’s marginalia.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 17
2. Miller wrote of his 1928 trip in volume 2 of Nexus. See Nexus 2: Vacances à l'étranger.
3. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 17-18
4. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 47 (April 1930)
5. Miller vows to visit Chinon to toast Rabelais in his April 1930 letter to Emil. He is referencing a passage from The Stones of Paris, pages 461-462.
6. The passage is from page 453 of The Stones of Paris. Miller quotes it in Tropic of Cancer, page 43 and in his letter to Emil.
7. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 43. Also in Letters to Emil, 46 — drawn from The Stones of Paris, 452
8. Miller quotes this passage from page 451 of The Stones of Paris, in Tropic of Cancer, 43, and also in his letter to Emil.
9. From The Stones of Paris, page 451, — Miller wrote of the "shameless wife" in Letters to Emil, 46, but did not include her in Tropic of Cancer.
10. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 46. He mentions looking for the stones, but not feeling them in Tropic of Cancer, 43. He was directed to their site by The Stones of Paris, 451-452.
11. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 43
12. Arthur B. Maurice, The Paris of the Novelists, 84-85
13. Arthur B. Maurice, The Paris of the Novelists, 66-67
14. Henry Miller, “Paris in Ut-Mineur,” The Left Bank Revisited (ed. Hugh Ford), 38 (attributed to Alfred Perlès)
15. Henry Miller, “Rue Lourmel in Fog,” from Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller, 35-38
16. Benjamin and Charlotte Martin, The Stones of Paris in History and Letters, 341
17. Henry Miller, “Gobelins Tapestries,” The Left Bank Revisited (ed. Hugh Ford), 40 (attributed to Alfred Perlès)
18. Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright, 184