A Henry Miller Honeymoon

By Eric D. Lehman

On the plane to Paris my new wife, Amy, read Tropic of Cancer. We had rented a small apartment in the Marais for our winter honeymoon, and she decided that the time had come to finally wade into the murky swamp of Miller’s masterpiece. Of course, I planned on rereading it, as well, and on visiting a few choice spots from the novel. I had printed out pages from the blog, “Walking Paris with Henry Miller,” and planned to do at least one of the tours. If I had been there by myself, on a pilgrimage, I might have done more, but this was our honeymoon, after all. I didn’t want to push it.

Paris in the winter had all the stark angles of bare sycamores and gray steeples, but we found it welcoming and friendly. So crucial to Miller during the Depression, food became our main preoccupation, being only a few blocks from the markets of Rue Montorgueil. The waiters at the cafés were polite and engaging, appreciating our juvenile forays into their language. We saw a ballet, a play at the Comedie Francaise, three cemeteries, ten churches, and a dozen museums.

On finishing Tropic a few days in, Amy commented on how “sad” it was, full of hunger and longing. When I read it this time, I couldn’t stop laughing, noticing once again the sly humor and sharp jokes. Like all great literature, it is a tremendous multiplicity, a concoction of vitamins and poison, enriching the soul and wounding the heart. And now, I knew, the parks and cafés of Miller’s Paris would be alive inside my mind, and I could drink from that potent brew by just closing my eyes.

La Rotonde		A feast at La Rotonde

We decided it was the day to follow in Tropic’s footsteps and took the metro to Montparnasse, maps and pages from Miller Walks in hand. After a visit to the top of the Tour Montparnasse and the cemetery, we walked down the Boulevard Raspail to the collection of cafés at the center of the American expatriate culture in Paris. We were hungry, and decided on La Rotonde. Inside we found a feast beyond the hungry imagination of starving writers, and indulged heartily in a salad with goat cheese, prunes, and apricots in phyllo sheets, sea bass seared with candied lemon and wild rice, leeks with beet sauce and an egg, and a galette for dessert. I felt inspired to be in the same café that Miller and so many other writers and thinkers had dined at, and began working eagerly on a short story.

La Closerie des Lilas		Fontaine de l’Observatoire

Heading down the Boulevard du Montparnasse after lunch, we saw the Tschann Librarie, where the first copies of Tropic were placed, sans wrapper, in the window. Then, the Closerie des Lilas, where Miller wrote, and which features a brass plate on a table with his name. We walked past the Fontaine de l’Observatoire where Miller suffered a cold night in Tropic of Cancer. After turning onto the Rue Henri Barbusse, we found the house of Walter Lowenfels, the model for that hilarious caricature, Jabberwhorl Cronstadt. I knocked on the door, but no one was at home.

Eric Lehman at Cronstadt’s place		Pension Orfila where Strindberg stayed

We strolled the edges of the Luxembourg Gardens, watched bocce players, and dove back into the maze of streets. There we found the house of Joseph and Bertha Schrank, known to Miller fans as Sylvester and Tania, which Miller had visited so often early on in the novel. We saw the hotel he shared with the ghost of August Strindberg, and then Otto Zadkine’s house, now a museum bursting with his terrifying cubist sculptures. I had no idea the “Borowski” from Tropic had become famous enough to warrant his own museum, and was astonished by the quality and scope of the art.

Sculpture garden at Musée Zadkine		Eric writing at La Coupole

We wandered back up the Rue d’Assas, and back along the Boulevard du Montparnasse to Le Select. It was time for deux café crème, and a talk about Anais Nin’s short stories, which Amy and I were also reading. The menu featured the name “Henri Miller” and we drank a rich, dark cup in honor of the two friends. Taking out notebooks, we wrote for two hours. Deciding to visit at least one more café, we walked across the street to La Coupole, which Miller frequented with Lawrence Durrell and Nin. We ordered drinks, and I finished writing the short story I had worked on all day, feeling that double satisfaction of completing a project, and doing it in the presence of a rich literary history.

Le Select		Amy writing at Le Select

Although the day in Montparnasse was the only day we specifically devoted to Miller, our paths seemed providentially intertwined. At a spot on the Pont des Arts, Amy took a photo of me. Later, I found a photo of Miller in nearly the same spot, framed by the Ile de Cite. A spot from the film of Henry and June appeared along the Seine. A Miller quote graced the floor of Shakespeare and Company. On the only day trip out of the city, we traveled to Auvers-sur-Oise to see the grave of Vincent Van Gogh, and the sculpture of the artist in the town park was by who else but Otto Zadkine.

On the last day, as we browsed the booksellers on the Seine, Amy called to me. “Do you have this one by Miller?” She pointed to Max et les Phagocytes, a title I had never seen outside of a bibliography, a book I knew was impossible to get in America. I immediately grabbed it and took it to the proprietor. “Ah, Henri Miller! Tres bien.” He laughed, and said something else in French that probably meant that I was in for a wild ride. I knew it. Miller was in the veins of Paris like a rogue blood cell, and even a pair of honeymooners in love could not escape him.

As I walked those streets of Paris with my wife, I could almost see Henry there, and a thousand others like him, those legendary engineers of our personal mythologies. But they are not myths, these men and women who lived their bittersweet lives just as we do now, aware of their own debts to history and each other. That fact was never clearer to me than that day in Montparnasse, when I shared space, if not time, with an author whose landscapes had once only been literary dreams, but were now a lived reality.

The book presents a narrative bibliography, tracing the arc of Kahane’s career as publisher of last resort for English language authors whose works were too risqué to be printed in their native country. Kahane published both works of serious literary intent as well as any pornographic tripe he thought might turn a quick buck. Author Neil Pearson, a British actor famed for his roles in the television series “Drop the Dead Donkey” and the Bridget Jones movies, read the entire output of the Obelisk Press in the course of his research. One of his objectives in the book is to reveal the biographies of many now obscure writers who inhabited the expatriate literary scene in Paris between the wars.

Kahane’s first publishing success came with the printing of his own book, Daffodil in 1931, penned under the pseudonym Cecil Barr. His association with Henry Miller began in 1932, when the literary agent William Bradley approached Kahane about the possibility of publishing a book called Tropic of Cancer, the author of which was listed as simply “Anonymous.” It turned out to be just the sort of unprintable book of literary merit that Kahane was looking for, though Miller’s first novel would not see publication until September 1934. Kahane continued to published Miller’s Paris writing until he died suddenly on the day Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939.

To whet your appetite, here are two fascinating reviews of the book, which include interviews with the author:

A very British pornographer (Belfast Telegraph)

Sauce and genius, published in Paris (Times Literary Supplement)

For further reading, check out the First Published in Paris web site which offers a reissue of Jack Kahane’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Booklegger as well as the limited edition Of Obelisks and Daffodils, a book about Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press by James Armstrong and Gary Miers.

The Paris Olympia Press

Liverpool University Press is following up their book on Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press with an equally intriguing title, The Paris Olympia Press, by Patrick Kearney. This is another narrative bibliography covering the life of The Obelisk Press’ successor, The Olympia Press, which was headed by Kahane’s son, Maurice Girodias. Girodias continued the publication of Miller’s Obelisk titles after his father’s death and also brought out Miller’s later books such as The Rosy Crucifixion and Quiet Days in Clichy. Other feathers in the Olympia press hat include Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. The Paris Olympia Press was released in Britain in November 2007. An American edition, distributed by The University of Chicago Press is due in March.

• Montparnasse
• Montsouris
• Clichy & Montmartre
• Right Bank

I’ll be updating my older posts in the coming days with these new links. The maps currently available under the “Walks & Maps” menu in the navigation bar will remain and I will continue to add to them.

One of the advantages with this new external solution is that folks who have a Google account (users of Gmail or Blogger, etc. already have one), can click the “Save to My Maps” link to preserve a personal copy of the map which can then be added to—great for those planning a trip to Paris.

Save each of the maps and you can zoom out to see all of the walks at the same time. I don’t know if this is actually useful to anyone, but I find it pretty cool :-)

When you click a point on the map a balloon will pop-up that contains a “Read the article” link that will return you to the relevant post on this site.

Also, fans of Google Earth can select the “View in Google Earth” link. This will download a .KML file which you can launch to zoom around the Paris sights in Google Earth.

Paris Café: The Select Crowd is written by Noël Riley Fitch, author of Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin and the seminal book on Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Co. Her Walks in Hemingway’s Paris and Literary Cafés of Paris were inspirations for this blog.

The book is illustrated by longtime Select regular and MAD Magazine artist Rick Tulka.

CBS News recently broadcast a video segment on Tulka and Le Select which features Tulka’s caricatures as well as the patrons, staff and history of Le Select, and delves into the current state of café culture in Paris—definitely worth a look.

I haven’t read the book myself yet, but I have spent many pleasant hours at the Select. The look and atmosphere of the place suggests it hasn’t changed much since Miller was a regular in the 30’s—it’s one cultural landmark that hasn’t succumbed to being simply a tourist destination. The Select’s is graced by a friendly staff (and cat) and its patronage is still made up primarily of regulars.

For more information on Paris Café: The Select Crowd check out the publisher’s page for the book. The Kirkus Review called it “A tribute so pleasant and persuasive that swarming tourists may make it difficult for Fitch and Tulka to find a table.” You can read the full Kirkus Review article on Fitch’s website. I’ve written about Le Select previously as part of our Montparnasse walk.

Noël Riley Fitch and Rick Tulka at Le Select — Drawings by Rick Tulka

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

Location

corner of rue Laffitte and rue La Fayette – See it on Google Maps

Notes

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

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

Location

54 rue Lafayette – See it on Google Maps

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

Rosset first encountered Miller’s writing in 1940, when as a college freshman he was inspired to write an essay titled, “Henry Miller vs. Our Way of Life”. In 1951 he founded Grove Press with the purpose of one day bringing Miller’s work to a larger American audience. Warming to the task, Rosset fought and won the right to publish the previously banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959. Two years later, Grove Press brought out an American edition of Tropic of Cancer while the book was still officially prohibited. The ensuing court battle rose all the way to the US Supreme Court where the ban on Miller’s work was finally abolished in 1964. Of his legal battles against American obscenity laws, Rosset said, “I didn’t do that to save humanity, I did it to save Tropic of Cancer and Henry Miller”.

Trailer

A nice video clip of the Henry Miller portion of the film is available, but I can’t link to it directly because it’s nested within a larger Flash application. To view the clip, go to the TIFF ‘07 Screening Room, select the blue “Trailers” link on the right of your screen and navigate to the third page. The Miller clip is the one titled “Obscene (Tropic of Cancer)”.

In the trailer, Miller briefly discusses Tropic of Cancer, followed by interviews with Barney Rosset and Erica Jong. There’s even a clip of Lenny Bruce reading a selection from his smuggled copy of Tropic of Cancer.

Reviews

I haven’t seen the film yet, but several informative reviews have popped up around the net. Here’s a selection:
Twitch
Cinematical
Variety
Green Ciné Daily

Miller was profoundly inspired by the confessional writing of Dante, William Blake, and Abelard, as well as The Bible and a great variety of esoteric texts and eastern religious traditions. Nesbit captures the religious allusions that escape the casual reader. His close analysis of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion, reveals how the whole structure and purpose of Miller’s writing is informed by the quest for spiritual liberation.

Nesbit began studying Miller in 1999 and completed a dissertation on the subject of Miller’s religious connections at Boston University. Research from his dissertation formed the basis of Henry Miller and Religion, which he began writing in earnest in 2004.

The connections between Miller’s earthy writing and its spiritual foundations is a deep and fascinating subject. No other work on Miller has yet plumbed these depths with such thoroughness and insight.

From the author:

Henry Miller often claimed that he was a religious writer, yet no scholar has convincingly identified his religiosity, showed its sources, and offered in-depth interpretations of his works as deliberately constructed religious texts . . . until now.

Henry Miller and Religion argues that Miller devoted his entire life to articulating a religion of self-liberation in his autobiographical books. As the guiding principle behind his vision, Miller believed that sex, religion, and art are streams from one holy river of creativity. To understand how he imagines this trinity, this book examines his life and work within the context of fringe religious movements that were linked with the avant-garde in New York City and Paris at the first of the 20th century.

After reconstructing Miller’s religious milieu, this study offers close readings of his first-person texts as confessions and testaments. Chapters are allotted to his most important works, including Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. By reassessing these books, we gain a more accurate understanding of Modernism, the origins of Postmodern styles, recent American religiosity, and the creative interplays of religion and literature in the 20th century.

Henry Miller and Religion is published by Routledge and can be purchased at Amazon.com or Powell’s.

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.

Location

32 rue Richer – See it on Google Maps

Notes

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

Not to be confused with other Nin books titled Winter of Artifice, which have dramatically different contents, these novellas that draw on Nin’s own experiences are occasionally so graphic in detail that the book was, according to Nin, banned in America.

The original edition of The Winter of Artifice contained three novellas—Djuna, Lilith and The Voice. Djuna has never before been reprinted and the two other stories were altered in later publications.

Nin set the type for the 1939 edition by hand on her own printing press and publication costs were covered by Lawrence Durrell. “As I walk down the Villa Seurat with my red Russian dress, I feel in love with the world again, in love with the whole world,” an elated Nin wrote in her diary after signing the book contract with Jack Kahane. Sadly, The Winter of Artifice was to be the last book that The Obelisk Press ever published as Kahane died that same year at the outbreak of WWII.

The publication is a limited edition of 500 copies which are available at $48.95. A special collectors’ edition of 25 copies is also available at $100. Pre-orders are being taken now for an October release.

Sky Blue Press is also the publisher of A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal, which is an excellent resource for information about Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and the Villa Seurat circle.

More background information on the original publication of The Winter of Artifice can be found here.

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.

Location

44 rue de Trévise – See it on Google Maps

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

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.

Location

rue Lamartine – See it on Google Maps

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

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.

Location

10 rue Lamartine – See it on Google Maps

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

Through the influence of his friend Alfred Perlès, Henry Miller secured a job on the staff of the Paris edition of The Chicago Tribune in August of 1931. Here he worked the night shift from 8:30 pm to 1:00 am as proofreader of stock market quotations under the inflated title of Assistant Finance Editor. The $45 he earned each month was enough to provide a fairly comfortable living.¹

The job was simple, but tedious. Following a night of work, Miller would complain to Anaïs Nin that, “I read every goddamned stock from A to Izzit, highs, lows, opening and closing prices, dividends, etc.”² The proofreaders worked in the basement among the machinery of the presses. There was no glamour in the position, but Miller preferred it to the editorial work that went on upstairs, as he confessed to Emil Schnellock:

Although the job is very uinimportant it seems that everything centers about it. It forms the very core of my life, shapes it, directs it, permeates all my activities, my thought, etc. I would be unhappy, I think, if I were deprived of it, or if (and this is wholly impossible) I were transferred to the editorial department, promoted as it were. Honestly, I would not like to write news. I prefer this slavery. The very atmosphere of the place has gotten into my blood. I miss it on my night off. In the first place, it is a perfect maze of machinery. The air is fetid. And then there is the noise—a deafening noise, and the blinding lights.³

The clatter of press equipment and human voices formed a discordant symphony that Miller came particularly to enjoy:

With a piece of copy in my hand I listen to the music around me, the hum and drone of voices, the tinkle of the linotype machines, as if there were a thousand silver bracelets passing through a wringer⁴

Two of his close friends joined Miller in his employment at the Tribune. The “three inseperables”⁵ as editor Waverly Root referred to them, consisted of Miller, Alfred Perlès, also a proofreader, and Wambly Bald, who contributed a regular column titled, “La Vie de Bohème.” Perlès and Bald appear in Tropic of Cancer as Carl and Van Norden respectively. During breaks, the three would meet for drinks at one of the neighboring cafés, such as Les Trois Cadets. Once the paper was put to bed they joined again for dinner across the street at Gillotte’s, followed by a long walk across Paris to their rooms in Montparnasse. As Perlès recalled, “I always think back to the days when we were working as proofreaders on the Chicago Tribune as the most fertile period of our life in Paris”.⁶

Listen to this recording of Miller describing a typical night’s journey from the Tribune.

Miller’s ironic position as a proofreader of stock market quotations during the midst of The Great Depression afforded him a unique perspective. From his perch at the proofreaders desk he surveyed the collapsing world economy with the sense of detached amusement that permeates Tropic of Cancer:

They have a wonderful therapeutic effect upon me, these catastrophes which I proofread. Imagine a state of perfect immunity, a charmed existence, a life of absolute security in the midst of poison bacilli. Nothing touches me, neither earthquakes nor explosions nor riots nor famine nor collisions nor wars nor revolutions. I am inoculated against every disease, every calamity, every sorrow and misery. It’s the culmination of a life of fortitude. Seated at my little niche all the poisons which the world gives off each day pass through my hands. Not even a fingernail gets stained. I am absolutely immune. I am even better off than a laboratory attendant, because there are no bad odors here, just the smell of lead burning. The world can blow up—I’ll be here just the same to put in a comma or a semicolon.⁷

Having felt himself profoundly out of step with the financial and social obsessions of boomtown New York in the 1920’s, Miller now found contentment in his humble job in Depression-era Paris:

I had to travel precisely all around the world to find just such a comfortable, agreeable niche as this. It seems incredible almost. How could I have foreseen, in America, with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes?⁸

Miller’s employment at the Tribune lasted for less than two years and was punctuated by several periods of unemployment, including a sojourn of nearly two months spent in Dijon from January through February, 1932. Lack of a valid work visa cost Miller his job for a brief time in March of 1932 and blocked him from ascending above the rank of proofreader.⁹ He was eventually fired in the summer of that year, due, as Miller claimed, to staffing cutbacks necessitated by the extravagant lifestyle of the paper’s ownership:

I think it was the Fourth of July when they took the chair from under my ass again. Not a word of warning. One of the big muck-a-mucks from the other side of the water had decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses of his trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he occupied at the Ritz.¹⁰

Waverly Root however, recalled a different scenario:

What actually happened was that Miller, who had worked for the paper only briefly, was invited to make a free trip through Belgium and took off without warning anybody. His place remained vacant for a couple of weeks, while efforts to reach him were unavailing […] Frantz [the managing editor] finally decided that Miller must have quit without giving notice […] and hired somebody to replace him. When Miller returned, he was hardly in a position to ask for his job back, and if my memory is correct, he didn’t.¹¹

The Paris edition of the Tribune, which had been founded in 1917, continued publication for several years after Miller’s departure, finally closing its doors in November of 1934.

Location

5 rue Lamartine – See it on Google Maps

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Letters to Anaïs Nin, 33; February 21, 1932
2. Henry Miller, Letters to Anaïs Nin, 42; April, 1932
3. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 81; August 24, 1931
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 151
5. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition: 1927-1934, 59
6. Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller, 41
7. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 150-151
8. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 150
9. Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright, 252
10. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 191
11. Waverly Root, The Paris Edition: 1927-1934, 59

Moricand was born in 1887 to an aristocratic family—his father was a Swiss baron—and he spent the early portion of his life in affluence. For many years he kept an open table at his home in the Pigalle neighborhood of Paris where he entertained the bohemian artists of Montmartre, maintaining close ties with such figures as Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Carco, and Amedeo Modigliani. However, the great depression brought financial ruin to Moricand and in 1935 he was forced to auction his art collection and personal belongings.

Later that year, at the time he was introduced to Miller by Anaïs Nin, Moricand was destitute and enduring a disconsolate bohemian existence in his room on the top floor of the Hôtel Modial. Miller and Nin did their best to help Moricand financially by commissioning him to produce a series of horoscopes of their friends. When they ran out of friends, Miller invented new ones, complete with false identities, birth dates, etc. for Moricand to analyze. On his visits to Moricand’s room, Miller would discreetly leave 50 or 100 francs under a statuette on the dresser.

Moricand was already the author several books on astrology, including Le Miroir d’Astrologie, Les Interprètes and Portraits Astrologiques and Miller was fascinated by his deep knowledge of occult subjects. The two met weekly in Moricand’s room at the Hôtel Modial in order to discuss astrology (Moricand and Miller were both Capricorns). Moricand observed a strange meticulousness in the arrangement of objects in his room and there were always several astrological charts or horoscopes which he was working on pinned to the wall above his writing table:

my mind always reverts to the room he occupied on the top floor of his hotel. There was no elevator service, naturally. One had to climb the five or six flights to the attic. Once inside, the world outside was completely foreign. It was an irregular shaped room, large enough to pace up and down in, and furnished entirely with what belongings Moricand had managed to salvage from the wreck. The first impression one had, on entering, was that of orderliness. Everything was in its place, but exactly in place. A few millimeters this way or that in the disposal of a chair, on objet d’art, a paper knife, and the effect would have been lost—in Moricand’s mind, at least. Even the arrangement of his writing table revealed this obsession with order. Nowhere at any time was there ever any trace of dust or dirt. All was immaculate.
—Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Both men shared a taste for exotic subjects and a facility for stimulating conversation. Alfred Perlès, who sometimes accompanied Miller on his visits to Moricand’s room, recalled:

On several occasions I accompanied him there and was enchanted by the facility with which Moricand held forth on the most recondite subjects pertaining to the arcana of magic. The precision and acuity of his thought were astounding. He spoke with great lucidity and the images he employed were always inventive and tinged with a sort of diabolical originality. An evening spent with Moricand was not only enjoyable but fruitful; on leaving him we were always in an exhilarated mood.
—Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller

In a late article, Moricand wrote of his early friendship with Miller:

Henry Miller was at the time a picaresque, volcanic, quixotic personage. In the margin of a feverish existence, the results of which are his Tropics. Miller, a man of great culture, had recently begun to take an interest in occultism, astrology and magic—all subjects within my jurisdiction, as it were. It was for this triple reason that I associated with him and we soon became great friends. Once every week Miller came to visit me in Montmartre, where I lived and there I taught him the rudiments of the craft (against payment, of course). I lost count of the number of horoscopes he made me do for his friends—the “horoscope factory” was working full steam and overtime.
—Conrad Moricand, quoted in My Friend Henry Miller by Alfred Perlès

Though Moricand is perhaps best known today for his palette of illustrious friends, most of his friendships ended badly. Miller would eventually find his personality, which combined an attitude of superiority with a gloomy, fatalistic outlook, repellent. At one point he described Moricand as “a Stoic dragging his tomb about with him.” Cecily Mackworth recalled Moricand as “a dark, creepy man who made me feel uneasy” and Blaise Cendrars, who had once been fast friends with the astrologer, told Miller he now regarded Moricand as nothing more than a cadaver.

Miller’s personal falling out with Moricand began in 1947 when he invited the penniless astrologer to share his home, along with Miller’s wife and their two small children, in Big Sur, California. Moricand’s aristocratic disposition would prove completely unsuited to life in the Millers’ remote cabin and he refused to make efforts to adapt. In Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch Miller details a litany of futile attempts made to please this most arrogant, ungrateful and petulant houseguest. Eventually, through great effort and personal expense, Miller returned Moricand to France in 1949 and forever severed their friendship. The final straw came, according to Elayne Fitzpatrick in her book, Doing It with the Cosmos, when Miller began to suspect Moricand of pedophilia. Moricand died alone and destitute in Paris in 1954.

Conrad Moricand’s astrological chart, found on Astrotheme.fr

A portrait of Conrad Moricand by Amedeo Modigliani

A likely incomplete bibliography of Conrad Moricand’s writings

Note: Moricand generally published under the pseudonym “Claude Valence” or “L’ésotérique”

• Les interprètes: essai de classement psychologique d’après les correspondances planétaires (1919)
• Miroir d’astrologie (1928)
• Portraits astrologiques (1933)
• Les traces du culte d’Isis dans le nom, l’emblème et le thème zodiacal de la ville de Paris (1952)
• Les cinquante rames du navire ARGO (1955)
• Les signes du Zodiaque suivi de Comment dresser un horoscope (1966)

Also…

The poetry journal, Le Pont de l’Épée published an issue devoted to Moricand in 1981, titled, “Critiques, Poèmes et l’Affaire Miller”.

Blaise Cendrars’ novel Moravagine includes a drawing of the title character from the hand of Moricand.

Copies of his books are available from AbeBooks.com, listed under the pseudonym Claude Valence and Conrad Moricand.

Location

Hôtel Modial, 21 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette – See it on Google Maps

Try it out

The Hôtel Modial, which was was established in 1900, is still a working hotel. For information on reserving a room or to see more photos, visit this page.