SubscribeNanavati’s Place
The nadir of Henry Miller’s life in Paris occurred over the course of several weeks he spent living as a flunky in the apartment of N. P. Nanavati in August and September of 1930. Nanavati was an Indian pearl merchant whom Miller had met in New York prior to sailing for Paris. Miller impressed Nanavati with the generosity he displayed toward the Hindu telegraph messengers under his employ at Western Union and Nanavati regaled Miller with visions of a “luxurious suite of rooms” he occupied on the impressively named rue Lafayette.
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
- Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 61; August 9, 1930
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 84-85
- Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 62; August 9, 1930
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 101
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 102
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 93-94
