Walking Paris with Henry Miller

As you cross the rue Laffitte, be sure to stop for a moment and glance up to your right toward the Sacré Coeur. For Henry Miller, the view of the Sacré Coeur from the rue Laffitte was an emblematic vision of the ideal Paris that had formed in his mind long before he arrived in Europe.

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

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

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

Barney Rosset, the man who overturned the obscenity laws banning publication of Henry Miller’s major writings in the US is championed in the new documentary, Obscene, which debuted in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the nineteen-sixties Rosset fought and won the right to publish the first legal American editions of Miller’s novels including Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Rosy Crucifixion, ending three decades of official censorship.

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

A new scholarly study of Henry Miller’s writing endeavors to fit Miller snugly within a long tradition of religious authors. Henry Miller and Religion by Thomas Nesbit closely examines Miller’s major fictional works in the light of a broad range of religious tradition. The author was granted special access to Miller’s unpublished letters and notes for this project, including Miller’s personal copies of key religious texts. The unique insight he draws from this material, along with a clear command of religious and literary history combine to present a compelling view of Miller that we haven’t seen before.

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.