Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Through the influence of his friend Alfred Perlès, Henry Miller secured a job on the staff of the Paris edition of The Chicago Tribune in August of 1931. Here he worked the night shift from 8:30 pm to 1:00 am as proofreader of stock market quotations under the inflated title of Assistant Finance Editor. The $45 he earned each month was enough to provide a fairly comfortable living.¹

The job was simple, but tedious. Following a night of work, Miller would complain to Anaïs Nin that, “I read every goddamned stock from A to Izzit, highs, lows, opening and closing prices, dividends, etc.”² The proofreaders worked in the basement among the machinery of the presses. There was no glamour in the position, but Miller preferred it to the editorial work that went on upstairs, as he confessed to Emil Schnellock:

Although the job is very uinimportant it seems that everything centers about it. It forms the very core of my life, shapes it, directs it, permeates all my activities, my thought, etc. I would be unhappy, I think, if I were deprived of it, or if (and this is wholly impossible) I were transferred to the editorial department, promoted as it were. Honestly, I would not like to write news. I prefer this slavery. The very atmosphere of the place has gotten into my blood. I miss it on my night off. In the first place, it is a perfect maze of machinery. The air is fetid. And then there is the noise—a deafening noise, and the blinding lights.³

The clatter of press equipment and human voices formed a discordant symphony that Miller came particularly to enjoy:

With a piece of copy in my hand I listen to the music around me, the hum and drone of voices, the tinkle of the linotype machines, as if there were a thousand silver bracelets passing through a wringer⁴

Two of his close friends joined Miller in his employment at the Tribune. The “three inseperables”⁵ as editor Waverly Root referred to them, consisted of Miller, Alfred Perlès, also a proofreader, and Wambly Bald, who contributed a regular column titled, “La Vie de Bohème.” Perlès and Bald appear in Tropic of Cancer as Carl and Van Norden respectively. During breaks, the three would meet for drinks at one of the neighboring cafés, such as Les Trois Cadets. Once the paper was put to bed they joined again for dinner across the street at Gillotte’s, followed by a long walk across Paris to their rooms in Montparnasse. As Perlès recalled, “I always think back to the days when we were working as proofreaders on the Chicago Tribune as the most fertile period of our life in Paris”.⁶

Listen to this recording of Miller describing a typical night’s journey from the Tribune.

Miller’s ironic position as a proofreader of stock market quotations during the midst of The Great Depression afforded him a unique perspective. From his perch at the proofreaders desk he surveyed the collapsing world economy with the sense of detached amusement that permeates Tropic of Cancer:

They have a wonderful therapeutic effect upon me, these catastrophes which I proofread. Imagine a state of perfect immunity, a charmed existence, a life of absolute security in the midst of poison bacilli. Nothing touches me, neither earthquakes nor explosions nor riots nor famine nor collisions nor wars nor revolutions. I am inoculated against every disease, every calamity, every sorrow and misery. It’s the culmination of a life of fortitude. Seated at my little niche all the poisons which the world gives off each day pass through my hands. Not even a fingernail gets stained. I am absolutely immune. I am even better off than a laboratory attendant, because there are no bad odors here, just the smell of lead burning. The world can blow up—I’ll be here just the same to put in a comma or a semicolon.⁷

Having felt himself profoundly out of step with the financial and social obsessions of boomtown New York in the 1920’s, Miller now found contentment in his humble job in Depression-era Paris:

I had to travel precisely all around the world to find just such a comfortable, agreeable niche as this. It seems incredible almost. How could I have foreseen, in America, with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes?⁸

Miller’s employment at the Tribune lasted for less than two years and was punctuated by several periods of unemployment, including a sojourn of nearly two months spent in Dijon from January through February, 1932. Lack of a valid work visa cost Miller his job for a brief time in March of 1932 and blocked him from ascending above the rank of proofreader.⁹ He was eventually fired in the summer of that year, due, as Miller claimed, to staffing cutbacks necessitated by the extravagant lifestyle of the paper’s ownership:

I think it was the Fourth of July when they took the chair from under my ass again. Not a word of warning. One of the big muck-a-mucks from the other side of the water had decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses of his trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he occupied at the Ritz.¹⁰

Waverly Root however, recalled a different scenario:

What actually happened was that Miller, who had worked for the paper only briefly, was invited to make a free trip through Belgium and took off without warning anybody. His place remained vacant for a couple of weeks, while efforts to reach him were unavailing [...] Frantz [the managing editor] finally decided that Miller must have quit without giving notice [...] and hired somebody to replace him. When Miller returned, he was hardly in a position to ask for his job back, and if my memory is correct, he didn’t.¹¹

The Paris edition of the Tribune, which had been founded in 1917, continued publication for several years after Miller’s departure, finally closing its doors in November of 1934.

Location

5 rue Lamartine – See it on Google Maps

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Letters to Anaïs Nin, 33; February 21, 1932
2. Henry Miller, Letters to Anaïs Nin, 42; April, 1932
3. Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, 81; August 24, 1931
4. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 151
5. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition: 1927-1934, 59
6. Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller, 41
7. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 150-151
8. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 150
9. Jay Martin, Always Merry and Bright, 252
10. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 191
11. Waverly Root, The Paris Edition: 1927-1934, 59

Posted July 30, 2007 - trackback