Walking Paris with Henry Miller

The Folies Bergère opened in 1870 as an upscale cabaret featuring elaborate performances by revealingly costumed dancing girls. Its early notoriety derived primarily from its cancan dancers and a famous painting by Édouard Manet. Henry Miller visited the Folies Bergère in the early 1930’s when the cabaret’s best-known performers were Mistinguett and a banana-skirted Josephine Baker. Though not a customer, in Tropic of Cancer, Miller describes how he received a surreptitious backstage tour of the cabaret by helping a Russian emigré unload barrels of insecticide:

Sniffing about for food I found myself towards noon the other day in the neighborhood of the Folies-Bergère—the back entrance, that is to say, in the narrow little lane with an iron gate at one end. I was dawdling about the stage entrance, hoping vaguely for a casual brush with one of the butterflies, when an open truck pulls up to the sidewalk. Seeing me standing there with my hands in my pockets the driver, who was Serge, asks me if I would give him a hand unloading the iron barrels. When he learns that I am an American and that I’m broke he almost weeps with joy. He has been looking high and low for an English teacher, it seems. I help him roll the barrels of insecticide inside and I look my fill at the butterflies fluttering about the wings. The incident takes on strange proportions to me—the empty house, the sawdust dolls bouncing in the wings, the barrels of germicide, the battleship Potemkin …¹

When Serge offers Miller a place to sleep and a daily meal in exchange for English lessons, Miller readily accepts. However, the arrangement is only to last for one night. Serge’s squalid apartment with its lingering odor of germicide repulses Miller and his fitful sleep is interrupted by a vision of pestilence and disorder underlying the Folies’ veneer of sex and glamour:

I see the empty pit of the Folies-Bergère and in every crevice there are cockroaches and lice and bedbugs; I see people scratching themselves frantically, scratching and scratching until the blood comes. I see the worms crawling over the scenery like an army of red ants, devouring everything in sight. I see the chorus girls throwing away their gauze tunics and running through the aisles naked; I see the spectators in the pit throwing off their clothes also and scratching each other like monkeys.²

As if to illustrate Miller’s escapade, Brassaï produced a set of photographs of dancers backstage at the Folies Bergère in 1933:

Brassaï – L’Oiseau de feu’aux Folies Bergère		Brassaï – Backstage at the Folies Bergère

Furthermore

Visit the official web site of the Folies Bergère to reserve tickets for current shows. The site provides a detailed history of the Folies as well as many photographs and a virtual tour.

Location

32 rue Richer – See it on Google Maps

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 73-74
2. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 75

Sky Blue Press has announced the publication of a facsimile of Anaïs Nin’s 1939 novel, The Winter of Artifice. This is the original, uncensored Obelisk Press edition that has not been in print for over sixty years:

Not to be confused with other Nin books titled Winter of Artifice, which have dramatically different contents, these novellas that draw on Nin’s own experiences are occasionally so graphic in detail that the book was, according to Nin, banned in America.

The original edition of The Winter of Artifice contained three novellas—Djuna, Lilith and The Voice. Djuna has never before been reprinted and the two other stories were altered in later publications.

Nin set the type for the 1939 edition by hand on her own printing press and publication costs were covered by Lawrence Durrell. “As I walk down the Villa Seurat with my red Russian dress, I feel in love with the world again, in love with the whole world,” an elated Nin wrote in her diary after signing the book contract with Jack Kahane. Sadly, The Winter of Artifice was to be the last book that The Obelisk Press ever published as Kahane died that same year at the outbreak of WWII.

The publication is a limited edition of 500 copies which are available at $48.95. A special collectors’ edition of 25 copies is also available at $100. Pre-orders are being taken now for an October release.

Sky Blue Press is also the publisher of A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal, which is an excellent resource for information about Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and the Villa Seurat circle.

More background information on the original publication of The Winter of Artifice can be found here.

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

Gillotte’s was a small bistro located across the street from the Chicago Tribune offices on rue Lamartine that stayed open throughout the night. As such, it was a favorite eatery for the Tribune staff who worked late nights to produce the morning edition. Waverly Root, the Tribune editor and well-known food writer, found the quality of Gillotte’s cuisine confirmed by it’s popularity among taxi drivers who, unlike the Tribune staff, were free to take their meals in any part of the city they wished.¹ The bistro was a favorite of Henry Miller’s and he looked forward to his nightly meal there, usually taken about 2:30 am, following his work at the paper:

my life has not become any easier because I have a job. Au contraire, I am worse off than ever. [...] However, there is the life at Gillotte’s nightly (that is, the little bistro around the corner from the office). That compensates for everything.²

The Tribune staff and taxi drivers were joined at Gillotte’s by other denizens of the Paris nightlife, notably the local prostitutes and their pimps. It was just the sort of setting, bringing together the Paris literati with the working class and demi-mondaine, all mixed with copious quantities of food and wine, at which Miller was in his element:

Naturally we always had a few liters of wine with our meals, which were veritable banquets. Miller shone at these little gatherings. He was brilliant, especially when a little tipsy, and made friends with the whores and the pimps and even the ‘upstairs guys [editorial staff].’³

Miller described Gillotte’s in Tropic of Cancer, where it appears as “Monsieur Paul’s”:

At Monsieur Paul’s, the bistro across the way, there is a back room reserved for the newspapermen where we can eat on credit. It is a pleasant little room with sawdust on the floor and flies in season and out. When I say that it is reserved for the newspapermen I don’t mean to imply that we eat in privacy; on the contrary, it means that we have the privilege of associating with the whores and pimps who form the more substantial element of Monsieur Paul’s clientele.⁴

The newspapermen ate on credit and were expected to pay their bill every other week. So, when Miller was fired from the Tribune, he used part of his final check to settle up with Gillotte’s, ensuring that he could continue to eat regularly:

Well, I wouldn’t starve, that’s one thing. If I should do nothing else but concentrate on food that would prevent me from falling to pieces. For a week or two I could still go to Monsieur Paul’s and have a square meal every evening; he wouldn’t know whether I was working or not.⁵

During a 1969 return trip to Paris, Miller made a point of seeking out Gillotte’s as part of his son’s project to photograph the writer’s former Parisian haunts, but discovered that the bistro had already disappeared.⁶ The photograph above is taken from Vol. 2 of Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal and appears to be from the 1950’s.

Unfortunately, I don’t know the address or exact location of Gillotte’s. However, there are presently two small café restaurants on rue Lamartine across from the former Tribune offices that are worth stopping by. If you know the correct address or have a more recent photo of the location, please let me know in the comments.

Location

rue Lamartine – See it on Google Maps

Notes

1. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition: 1927-1934, 107
2. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 80; August 24, 1931
3. Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller, 46
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 158
5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 191
6. Brassaï, Henry Miller: Happy Rock, 155; July 17, 1969