Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Oakland Tribune, August 15, 1931

In Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller introduces a character named Peckover who works with him at the Paris Edition of the Chicago Tribune. “Another poor devil who works on the paper”,¹ Peckover is overworked and harried by his wife. He has been moonlighting in a dentist’s office to pay for a set of false teeth. Peckover is presented as a proofreader and an Englishman, but the model for this character was actually a sportswriter from San Francisco named Madison Kirby.

Kirby joined the Paris Edition staff fresh off a string of newspaper jobs in San Francisco and New York.² A short story of his was published in a 1927 edition of The New Yorker, attesting that his writing ambitions extended beyond journalism.

Kirby had been a middle-distance runner for his track team at Polytechnic High School and Stanford University and he enjoyed impressing his colleagues by performing athletic stunts. A typical maneuver was to hurdle the rows of garbage cans encountered on his walk home from work and on one occasion he startled a colleague by impulsively leaping into the Seine to swim across, rather than taking the bridge.

Working in a skyscraper in New York, Kirby had found it humorous to terrorize his colleagues by climbing out an office window and dangling from the ledge by his fingertips—only to pull himself in again a few moments later. At the Tribune offices in Paris he routinely performed a variant on this trick, ducking out of a window in the city room and inching his way along a narrow cornice on the exterior wall to emerge again by a different window.

One night in August 1931, Kirby went out the window and didn’t return. The Tribune’s editor Waverley Root recalled that just as Kirby was reaching the second window a sudden breeze drew the window doors shut on his hand. Kirby let out a cry and plunged several stories,³ finally crashing through a skylight on the ground-floor.⁴

In Tropic of Cancer, Miller and Van Norden (Wambly Bald) receive the news from a Tribune colleague at the Coupole: “There’s just been an accident at the office, he informs us. One of the proofreaders fell down the elevator shaft. Not expected to live.”⁵

Though Miller replaces the city room window with an elevator shaft, the results of the fall remain true to life:

It seems that Peckover, when he hit the bottom of the shaft, regained consciousness before anyone could reach him. Despite the fact that his legs were broken and his ribs busted, he had managed to rise to all fours and grope about for his false teeth. In the ambulance he was crying out in his delirium for the teeth he had lost.⁶

Root’s account of that night confirms the injuries to Kirby’s legs and ribs as well as the detail about him groping around on all fours for the set of false teeth:

Kirby was on his hands and knees in the middle of the floor.

“I’ve lost my false teeth”, he said. “Find My false teeth.”

Absurdly, I ran my fingers through the swamp of blood surrounding him and found the teeth.⁷

Kirby was loaded into a delivery truck and taken to hospital, where he died that night. His death was reported in American newspapers on August 15, 1931. “I hope the editor is not sore because I am not working tonight” were cited as Kirby’s last words.⁸

Miller used the tragic event in his novel to comic effect, alternately poking fun at the absurdity of Peckover’s demise and taking a swipe at the maudlin reaction of his Tribune coworkers:

The false teeth! No matter what we said about the poor devil, and we said some good things about him too, we always came back to the false teeth. […] We laughed all night about it, and in between times, we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs. […] They made his life miserable with their fucking little semicolons and the fractions which he always got wrong. […] but, now that he was dead, they would all chip in lustily and buy him a huge wreath and they’d put his name in big type in the obituary column.⁹

Who got Kirby’s job?

In Tropic of Cancer Van Norden (alternately referred to as “Joe”) suggests a bright side to Peckover’s death:

“There’s only one good aspect to it,” says Joe. “You may get his job. And if you have any luck, maybe you’ll fall down the elevator shaft and break your neck too. We’ll buy you a nice wreath, I promise you that.”¹⁰

A few pages later we learn that Miller does indeed get Peckover’s job, “after sucking the boss’s ass for a whole week.”¹¹

In real life Miller was never a sportswriter for the Tribune. His highest rank at the paper was Assistant Finance Editor, which was an overblown title for the proofreader of the stock quotations page. A more likely candidate was Sterling Noel, who had been receiving letters from Kirby urging him to come to Paris to land a job at the Tribune. Noel booked passage to France aboard a freighter and only learned of Kirby’s death shortly before departure. When he arrived in Paris, he was immediately put to work at the paper occupying Kirby’s old chair.¹²

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 77
2. “California Writer Killed In Paris”, Modesto News-Herald. August 15, 1931 (scan)
3. Accounts differ as to how far Kirby fell. Waverley Root says five stories while the Modesto News-Herald reports four and the Oakland Tribune three.
4. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition, 175-176
5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 140
6. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 141
7. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition, 176
8. “Madison Kirby Dies In Paris of Fall”, Oakland Tribune. August 15, 1931
9. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 142
10. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 143
11. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 149
12. Ronald Weber, News of Paris: Journalists in the City of Light Between the Wars, 109

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