Life with Richard Osborn
Auguste Bartholdi
In the winter of 1930, six months into his first year in Paris, Henry Miller moved in with Richard Osborn to his flat on rue Auguste Bartholdi. Osborn was the youngest child of a blueblood New England family from Bridgeport, Connecticut and was prone to bouts of schizophrenia. “A Connecticut Yankee, with a slip in the ancestry somewhere” is how Miller described him.1 Only recently removed from his Yale graduation, Osborn had come to Paris in order to experience the wild side for a few years before settling into a planned career on Wall Street. While in the city of light, he found employment in the legal department of the Paris branch of National City Bank. Osborn Appears in Tropic of Cancer as Fillmore, a name derived from Fillmore Place, a favorite street from Miller’s childhood in Brooklyn.
The apartment was a seventh floor walk-up “with a separate kitchen and good-sized bedroom.”2 The space was too large for one person, Osborn reasoned, and Miller would help him take care of the place and keep the fire going while he was away at work. The apartment was conveniently located next to a metro line and from his window perch, Miller could observe soldiers absurdly flourishing their swords and practicing bayonet charges on the parade grounds of the nearby École Militaire. Beyond, he was afforded a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.
The two got along well for most of the winter. Miller admired Osborn’s adventurous nature and Osborn, in turn, was sure that Miller was a budding genius. Osborn’s only complaint was Miller’s habit of clattering away at the typewriter into the early hours of the morning.3 In exchange for Osborn picking up all of the expenses, Miller diligently swept the floors, cleaned the apartment and cooked meals.
With his bank salary, Osborn treated Miller to wine and revelry and took him to the Cirque Medrano.4 Often he returned from work with arms laden with bottles of Miller’s favorite Anjou, Vouvray, Macon, or Rhum Negrita, ready for a night of carousing. Upon crossing the threshold he would inevitably shout in absurdist French, “Ce soir, Henri, nous vouldras fait un rigolo!”5
Each morning Osborn deposited a 10 franc note on Miller’s pillow in hopes that the money would be spent on a healthy meal. He was disappointed to learn that the daily fare went only toward two packs of Gauloises Bleues cigarettes and a breakfast of croissants and café crème.
Occasionally tempers flared between Osborn and Miller. The truth was that each man envied the other’s freedom. Miller, who was penniless, longed for the liberty Osborn enjoyed to lavish money on good food, drink and entertainment. Osborn, a would-be writer who never got around to writing very much, envied Miller’s freedom to indulge his artistic passion removed from the constraints of the workaday world.6
Miller was making good use of his free time in the apartment. While on the rue Auguste Bartholdi he completed the fledgling novel Crazy Cock and began composing his first published articles. “Mademoiselle Claude” and “Buñuel, or Thus Cometh to an End Everywhere the Golden Age” were printed in Samuel Putnam’s New Review at this time while “The Six Day Bike Races” and other articles began making their appearance in the Paris edition of The Chicago Tribune. Emboldened, Miller began to anticipate greater tasks. He wrote to Emil Schnellock that after Crazy Cock, whose literary pretensions had made him feel walled-in and suffocated, “I will explode in the Paris book. The hell with form, style, expression and all those pseudo-paramount things which beguile the critics. I want to get myself across this time—and direct as a knife thrust.”7 ‘The Paris book,’ of course, was to become Tropic of Cancer.
Miller began constructing the new novel in his usual disjointed manner: scribbling cryptic notes, copying interesting phrases he found in an assortment of books and cleaving passages from his letters home to Schnellock. “On the wall to one side of him, on a sheet of large brown wrapping paper, is a list of words which he adds to from time to time: scientific words, descriptive words, mythological terms, archaic and obsolete expressions, crapulous words, insulting words, explosive words, garnered from the weirdest sources.”8
Later in 1931, Osborn would introduce Miller to the woman who would become his muse and lover, Anaïs Nin. Nin was the wife of Hugo Guiler, Osborn’s boss at National City Bank. Osborn, who had a habit of bragging over his literary flatmate, showed some of Miller’s writing to Nin. Impressed, she arranged a meeting and would record her first encounter with Miller in her diary: “In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He is a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.”9 The first shoots of one of history’s great literary love affairs had begun to take root.
Osborn, meanwhile, had become smitten with a woman named Irene who quickly joined Miller in sharing the apartment. Irene frustrated Osborn by claiming to be a Russian princess and demanding luxuries befitting her title. She further made claim to a dose of gonorrhea in apparent ruse to prevent him from attempting to have sex with her. Unlike Osborn, Irene’s charms were entirely lost on Miller and the two essentially ignored each other while living under the same roof for most of the winter.
When the lease ran out on March 4, 1931 Miller and Osborn parted ways to find separate living arrangements.10 They remained friends however, with their further Parisian adventures occupying much of the latter portion of Tropic of Cancer. The two kept in contact over the years through letters and Miller would go on to dedicate The Wisdom of the Heart to Osborn:
“To Richard Galen Osborn originally of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who rescued me from starvation in Paris and set my feet in the right direction. May heaven protect him and guide him safely to port.”
Location
2 rue Auguste Bartholdi
Paris, 75015
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Notes
- Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 68
- Richard Osborn, “No. 2, Rue Auguste Bartholdi,” Henry Miller: A Book of Tributes, 1931-1994, 35
- Osborn, 36
- Osborn, 38
- Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright, 220. Anther variant found in Letters to Emil, 69
- Osborn, 41
- Letters to Emil, 72
- Osborn, 29
- Anaïs Nin, Henry & June, 6
- Letters to Emil, 71
1 comment on "Life with Richard Osborn"
To see the first public photos of the mysterious Osborn, get the next issue of Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, where they will be published!
