Walking Paris with Henry Miller

The year 1931 began for Henry Miller with a New Year’s Eve party at the Coupole. Upon leaving, his taxi veered out of control at high speed and crashed head-on into another car. The other car flipped over and shards of broken glass were sent flying about the interior of Miller’s taxi.¹ Remarkably, Miller emerged without a scratch, which he must have regarded as a good omen for the new year. It was the year he began writing Tropic of Cancer.

Perpetually broke and hungry, Miller prowled the Montparnasse cafes, always on the lookout for a friendly face in order to cadge a free meal. The terrace of the Coupole was a prime hunting ground and he was often to be found there holding court until the early hours of the morning with friends or people he had just met. Samuel Putnam recalls that Miller extolled his philosophy at the Coupole to a rapt audience, “principally in words of four letters”.²

One day while seated outside the Coupole, Miller hit upon a novel scheme for cadging meals with the help of his friend, Fred Kann:³ “And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if only he had the courage to demand it.”⁴ He quickly wrote a dozen letters to friends asking if they would let him dine with them once a week. The plan succeeded and for a brief time he kept a regular schedule enabling him to count on at least one free meal a day. As always, Miller paid his way by entertaining the hosts, as he wrote to Emil Schnellock: “I had to support with my good humor, my courage, my recklessness all those miserable ones who were eating regularly but had lost their spiritual appetites.”⁵

When Lawrence Durrell arrived in 1937, he, Miller and Anaïs Nin returned frequently to the Coupole for a game of chess or a drink on the terrace. The trio spent so much time here that Durrell referred to them as “the three musketeers of La Coupole”.⁶

The Coupole was opened in December 1927 on the site of a coal and lumber yard by two former employees of the neighboring Le Dôme. Today, the most prominent café on the boulevard Montparnasse, the Coupole’s immense, high-ceilinged dining area is still a place to see and be seen. The interior columns are covered with paintings by students of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger, who kept studios nearby.

Location

102 boulevard du Montparnasse – See it on Google Maps

Resources

On the Coupole’s website, you can peruse the menu and catch a view of the dining area.

Next Stop

Directly across the street from the Coupole, you will find our next stop, Le Select …

Notes

1. Henry Miller, February 16, 1931, Letters to Emil, 75
2. Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress, 112
3. Karl Orend, “Sex Dreams, Cancer & Nightmares…”, Nexus, The International Henry Miller Journal. Volume 5, 2008. Page 143
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 58
5. Henry Miller, April, 1932, Letters to Emil, 93
6. Noël Riley Fitch, Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin, 211

Posted February 8, 2006 - trackback