Walking Paris with Henry Miller

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

Posted September 9, 2007 - trackback