Subscriberue Delambre
To all appearances only a side street, the rue Delambre was once a major thoroughfare of prominent artists between the world wars. Man Ray had a small studio on this street and Andre Breton lived here for a time as well. In April 1925, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald met for the first time at the bar, Le Dingo (now the Auberge de Venise). It was a warm day in May of 1928 when Henry Miller first ran across Alfred Perlès on the rue Delambre. At the meeting, Miller would recall, “a friendship was begun which was to color the entire period of my stay in France.”
The building at number 8 was home to Samuel Putnam. Putnam was the editor of New Review, a literary journal which published several of Miller’s early sketches, including a vigorous defense of Luis Buñuel’s film, L’Age d’Or, titled “Buñuel: Or Thus Cometh to an End Everywhere the Golden Age” and “Mademoiselle Claude”, Miller’s account of a relationship with a French prostitute.
It was the article on Buñuel that led to Miller’s first meeting with Anaïs Nin. Richard Osborn, who was Miller’s friend and a co-worker of Nin’s husband, showed her the article. Anaïs was enamored of the vigorous writing, commenting in her diary, “it was like hearing wild drums in the midst of the Tuileries gardens”, and invited Miller and Osborn to her home in Louveciennes.
Putnam appears in Tropic of Cancer in the guise of a drunk named Marlowe, who in the midst of a five day binge, naively turns over the reins of his review to Miller and Carl (Alfred Perlès) before passing out in Carl’s bed.
During the summer of 1931, Putnam traveled to the US, leaving production of the fall issue of New Review in the hands of Perlès and Miller. It was expected to be a simple job. The articles for the issue were already selected and all that remained was to check over the galleys and make sure the printer was kept on schedule. Miller, however, saw the opportunity for a prank. He re-imagined the scene in Tropic of Cancer:
“We’ll take his lousy review over and we’ll fuck him good and proper.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Why we’ll throw out all the other contributors and we’ll fill it with our own shit—that’s what!”
Miller and Perlès were soon tossing out articles from other authors and filling the space with their own writing. They concocted a manifesto for the issue titled, “The New Instinctivism”, which announced “a proclamation of rebellion against the puerilities in art and literature, a manifesto of disgust, a gob of spit in the cuspidor of postwar conceits, a healthy crap in the cradle of still-born deities.” Their idea was to rid the creative process of intellectualism by being simply “for or against—instinctively.” Putnam’s wife, however, caught on to their game and halted the printing, salvaging what she could of the issue.
On your right, at number 4, is the former home of Edward Titus’ gallery and rare book room, “At the Sign of the Black Mannikin”. From this address, Titus published the literary journal, This Quarter, and twenty five books under the imprint of the Black Mannikin Press, including D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 1932 he published Anaïs Nin’s first book, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. Miller also submitted a manuscript to Titus, who apparently lost it. This was the early novel, Moloch, which remained unpublished until Miller biographer Mary Dearborn uncovered a copy of the manuscript, which was brought out posthumously in 1992 by Grove Press.
Location
rue Delambre – See it on Google Maps
Next Stop
At the corner on your left you will find the Dôme café … 
