Chapter One ENTER LAUGHING, TRISTE ADIEU I I n the wake of a homebound return for legions of the 1920s expatriates, a balding exuberant Brooklyn boy of nearly forty years--ten dollars in his pocket and ship's passage paid, one-way--set forth for France to write the book "of the man that I am." It was March of 1930 when Henry Miller arrived in Paris at the raw beginning of an uncertain spring. The legendary expatriate scene had shifted dramatically: the former easy, free-wheeling invasion of Montmartre and Montparnasse had ended with the stock-market crash of 1929; an American exodus now flowed across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, but Miller was not one to drift on the outgoing tide. For the next decade Paris was to become Miller's icon city in ways no predecessor had experienced. By personal inclination and hard necessity he sought out the darker side of the city of light, the lower depths unrecorded by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Gertrude Stein, an idiosyncratic view from the underside, a Paris unknown or ignored by the café terrace set. Writing from grim acceptance and Rabelaisian humor, even rapture, he intended to create a picaresque masterpiece. To accomplish his Tropic of Cancer Miller would revive an extreme bohemianism closer to the tradition of Rimbaud and Baudelaire than to the posturing of a previous generation of American expatriates. "God damn it, it's wonderful!" His first room was in the heart of the Latin Quarter five flights up, nestled under the eaves of the Hôtel St.-Germain des Prés, with a view of medieval church towers at the corner and a façade opposite where artists hung their freshly painted canvasses to dry attached to the window-ledge grillwork like a bright panoply of flags or Persian carpets on display. Below his dormer window the street vendors of rue Bonaparte each cried a different chant punctuated by auto horns from the chaotic traffic on the boulevard St.-Germain. "The streets sing," he wrote, "the stones talk." Too excited to continue this letter to his Brooklyn friend Emil Schnellock (the first of a series of letters, actually a tentative first draft of Tropic of Cancer ), Miller rushed down to savor a Pernod in the café below; then, unable to linger in that congenial ambience he dashed on, edged his way through the animated shoppers at the rue de Buci open-air market, then along the rue Saint André des Arts in search of the ancient crumbling Église de St. Severin. This Paris Sunday was like no other Sunday he had ever known. (The Protestant ethic, he believed, was responsible for the pall cast over the traditional Sunday in America.) Mass was in progress but Miller was too elated by the street panorama to mingle with churchgoers and puzzle through a sermon in French. He rushed on, as if the devil's pitchfork prodded him forward to cross the pont Marie to Notre Dame on the opposite bank rising tomblike from the Seine. He stumbled across a sad collection of homeless women sleeping on newspapers in a tiny triangular park in the shadow of the great cathedral, a vision of the social milieu he would become more and more familiar with, and part of. Looking up he was reminded of Quasimodo's Paris: "The gargoyles leaning far out from the white façades, grimacing fiercely, hanging there like an idée fixe in the mind of a monomaniac." The monomaniac was Miller himself, and the city of Paris his idée fixe. The language eluded him, a music he was determined to master however crudely with his glutteral Brooklyn accent. At a restaurant he could not remember the word for beans and was obliged to engage in a grotesque apelike dumbshow with the waiter when he tried to order. Would he ever find the key to communication with these people, share their ineffable spirit, verily penetrate the mystery of the place? He had missed out on the larger excitement of the decade just past, when the creative fervor was at its height; he was too late for the time when everyone was a James Joyce or a Picasso, or soon would be. Never mind, the newcomer felt he had shed twenty years on arrival full of fresh impressions of this great good place. He was bombarded with sensation, overcome with new attitudes and strange insights reacting instantly to the Paris of the moment. The book of his life had begun, and express himself he must despite whatever puerility of thought--and Miller's linguistic exuberance would often run away with him--the written record would at least be his . "A year, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am ." The two hundred francs monthly Miller was to pay for his picturesque room (even the five-franc supplement for a bath was a major consideration) became far beyond the means of a man financially dependent on a wayward wife (June, the Mona of Tropic of Cancer ) who had promised to cable money to meet his living expenses. When Miller met her at a dance hall off Times Square, June was a taxi-dancer and, appropriately enough, or so he said, he seduced her in a taxi. Soon they were living together, and eventually married when Miller finally secured a divorce from his first wife. At first Beatrice refused, but then divorced from sheer outrage at having discovered her husband and June in flagrante delicto in her bed. June was as free-spirited as Miller, and as unreliable and impractical. One of their money-making schemes was to open a speakeasy in a Greenwich Village basement, June to be the alluring hostess while Miller tended bar. The speakeasy failed, but June continued to exploit her charm and sensuality. Miller was uneasily aware of his wife's sexual restlessness, but if she was unfaithful by sporadic impulse he pretended not to know or to believe the fleeting attachments were platonic only. Whether platonic or not, June's serial liaisons produced loans or gifts of money, for she was still a taxi-dancer at heart--time spent with her must be paid for in cash--and the Millers became dependent on this largesse, an income more substantial than anything he earned from dishwashing, working in his father's tailor shop, door-to-door sales, or as a streetcar conductor. None of his jobs lasted more than a week (some less than an hour) except for the position as personnel manager for Western Union. The job would offer rich material for a future novel, Tropic of Capricorn , but allowed for little time to write. It was the one responsible position of Miller's lifetime, until June convinced him to give it up: "I'll find a place where you can write. You won't need to earn money. I'll soon be making lots of money." She was planning to become a film star; the place she had in mind where Miller could write was Paris. Throughout the trials and turbulence of their marriage, June professed great faith in Miller's literary gifts; she believed he would, with her help, make a name for himself as a man of letters. First, he would need the stimulus and inspiration of Paris in which to create his Great Book. The dream was Miller's own, and Paris was about to be realized with June's moral and financial support. Before she could put together the money for his departure, a disturbed and disturbing third partner drifted into their already unstable household. This was Jean Kronski, called Mara (Stasi, in The Rosy Crucifixion ), a mentally unbalanced poet and painter dressed in boy's clothes, "a face neither male nor female," according to June; to Miller she resembled Rimbaud. Mara attached herself to June, and June to her while Miller remained a hapless third partner in the lopsided arrangement. Perversely Miller acquiesced in this bizarre ménage à trois even when it became apparent June preferred Mara to himself. Because of his sexual bondage to his wife, Miller endured the humiliation of second-string lover in the triangle, the role of masochist-voyeur, observing Mara and June "undressing one another, licking one another all over, like calves in the meadow." Miller threatened suicide, and did make an attempt to poison himself, but the friend who provided the necessary pills made certain the dosage was not fatal. June was greatly impressed by the suicide letter declaring that if he could not have her he preferred death. But the affair with Mara had not yet run its course, and would end only when June left with Mara for a Paris sojourn. They quarreled violently, apparently requiring a third-party rival (the insanely jealous Miller) to add spice to their affair; and June returned alone. A final act of morbid masochism in this strange arrangement was when Miller worked as a grave digger to be able to send June and Mara money for the stay in France. It was now June's turn to send Miller abroad. He had a novel in progress she fervently believed in, since it was mainly about her, called Crazy Cock , and she proposed to finance Miller's solo venture to Paris with money she inveigled from a doting suitor. The affair with Roland Freedman may well have been platonic, as June maintained--Freedman later committed suicide while still in thrall to her, a death inspired by the same frustrations June aroused in Miller. With June's promise of support, passage paid by Freedman's generosity, and a ten-dollar bill shoved into his pocket by Emil Schnellock at the pier, Henry Miller embarked on his long-anticipated odyssey. Every morning Miller made the pilgrimage to the American Express on rue Scribe in expectation of the funds June promised but rarely sent. The walks from Left Bank to Right were nevertheless inspiring. This critical lack of cash would help set the pattern of alternating desperation followed by euphoria, a manic-depressive reaction to this new life in Paris, survival on the narrowest of edges in the world's most fascinating city. Those first mornings of hopeful monetary expectancy (sometimes rewarded, more often not) he chose a different bridge over the Seine each trip, from the pont Royal to the pont Neuf, a selection of four magnificent spans over the same somber gray river. The most immediate thoroughfare to his destination was by the pont du Carrousel, then through the precincts of the palais du Louvre. He timed these daily excursions in order to arrive at the American Express when it opened at nine, the first eager client at the mail desk. "Nothing for Mr. Miller." He sometimes made as many as three disappointed trips across the Seine in a day and once went five days without food when there was "nothing for Mr. Miller" for weeks. This crossing and recrossing of the Seine was not without reward of another kind: "All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears as the water swirls by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings ..." True, he was exceedingly lonely. He could have called on the sculptor Ossip Zadkine but hesitated to get in touch with him, jealousy outweighing loneliness, for he was convinced June and Zadkine had been lovers on June's venture to Paris. He wrote fan letters to the poet Cocteau and to filmmaker Bunuel, no answer. Could they have deciphered his neglible French? He attempted to speak to strangers on the street, but the French have a low tolerance for a halting, imperfect command of their beloved language. June sometimes responded to his letters, and Emil Schnellock often wrote; he kept copies of Miller's jottings, later to be incorporated in Tropic of Cancer . June kept none of his letters. Lacking a companion to whom he could speak, Miller poured out his impressions on paper. "I start tomorrow on the Paris book: first person, uncensored, formless--fuck everything!" From the Hotel St.-Germain des Prés Miller was obliged to move to the Hôtel Central on the avenue du Maine, at 125 francs (about five dollars by the month), but even that rate was more than he could afford. He moved from hotel to hotel "... looking for a good cheap hotel the last three days. Have visited over 100 so far!"--and until he acquired a circle of friends and cronies who might lend him a spare bed overnight, or let him sleep on the floor of their rooms, he often had no place to stay the night. Miller moved around Paris so frequently and possessed so little to transport, he could declare, "When I move I have only to pack a few condoms and I'm off!" The condoms became a leitmotif. Everywhere he encountered the grim skull-and-crossbones warnings: DEFENDEZ-VOUS CONTRE LA SYPHILIS, and at first the constant reminders imposed on the hot-blooded Miller a vow of celibacy. The notices were posted in every streetcurb pissotière , the open-air public urinals that initially disturbed his American sensibilities along with other quaintly impossible toilet facilities. (He could always avail himself of the civilized facilities at the American Express.) Eventually French plumbing became less and less a concern, and the famed pissotières (or pissoirs , his term) a veritable object of art. Despite his vow, Miller soon enough gave in to the urge to sample the commercial sex so flagrantly available. Unable to resist a whore with a story, his first encounter cost 177 francs, an amount he had calculated to last the next ten days, "and I'm probably contracting syphilis in the bargain." The fear of infection rendered him impotent. He pleaded a sudden case of melancholy, dismissed the girl, and fled by cab (another five francs blown), appalled and depressed by the evening's folly. His next adventure, with Germaine Gaugeard, was closer to the Paris experience he was writing in his mind. He confessed to Germaine from the start that he wasn't flush enough to pay her standard fifty-franc fee, and she readily accepted his offer of twenty francs, though the reduced rate placed her closer to the poules of the lowest rank, the ten-franc girls--prostitutes, Miller discovered, had social status according to the price one would accept. Germaine considered Miller chic in his odd American knickerbockers and loud golf socks. Her territory (strictly defined, but subject to dispute between pimps) was the boulevard Beaumarchais, a characterless spoke leading from the place de la Bastille. Soliciting this district, she insisted, was merely a sideline. Actually she was a model, or so she told Miller. Since he was a writer and she a model, they were both artists, n'est-ce pas ? Miller thought she might have been a factory girl, but if the script called for a twenty-franc tumble with an "artist's model," so be it. More than a one-night stand, they became friends and Germaine was truly flattered to be seen with her American. When they met at her way station, the Café l'Éléphant, she insisted he wear his authentic costume, the knickerbockers. Often when Miller was out of funds--he was more often broke than not--Germaine would admit him to her room on the rue Amelot (her pimp was not to know of this) and there offer her favors pour l'amour only. Initially Miller made it a point not to associate with "the insufferable idiots of the Dôme and the Coupole," the dilettantes and poseurs of the boulevard Montparnasse. He did not intend to be affiliated with the dregs of the 1920s scene; however, stark necessity finally drove him to frequent the café terraces and loiter over a drink in the hope of putting the touch on some visiting American. Not long after Germaine had succumbed to the Miller charm--for all his thick-lipped balding homeliness and verbal overflow, Miller generated a certain charm--he began to acquire a circle of American, Russian, and French acquaintances, strays and intimates who could be counted on for a loan, a dinner, a drink--even a bed for the night if he could be smuggled past a watchful hotel concierge. When Miller was evicted from the Hôtel Alba on the rue Vanves, he could have, as so often before, curled up on some cobbled quayside under the shelter of a bridge over the Seine, lying on a pad of newspapers like the destitute women he had seen asleep in the shadow of Notre Dame, but a sympathetic cinema owner, Monsieur Girardot, allowed him to sleep in his office at the Cinéma Vanves. Here was a long-term solution to Miller's pressing need for sanctuary--ideal, except that Monsieur Girardot was obliged to lock up the premises for the night. From the time of the last film showing until nine in the morning, Miller was a prisoner in the empty movie house, all doors locked from outside and the window in the office barred. At first he could not sleep at all, and when he did sleep he suffered crushing claustrophobic nightmares. He would awaken in the small hours or at dawn to the street sounds that so fascinated him his first day in Paris, but now the streets of Paris stirred beyond his reach outside the bars of his cell. Mornings, a prisoner still, he endured the remaining hours of incarceration suffering pangs of obsessive hunger. When Miller did eat, he ate exceedingly well: he had come to share the French passion for la bonne cuisine : he now knew the term "haricots verts," but as yet could not pronounce the throaty "r" in beurre , and was adding to his vocabulary, and taste, daily. He dreamed up hearty American breakfasts as the breakfast hour passed, then imagined a five-course French lunch, with wine, squeezing his stomach to suppress the rumblings of hunger. He recalled with horror a Frenchman feeding paté de foie gras to his poodle. Enough! When next he was freed by Monsieur Girardot promptly at nine, Miller thanked his benefactor, and jailer, but chose not to return that night or any night thereafter. His address was no longer Cinéma Vanves; he now headed his correspondence: "Henry V. Miller, Man of Letters, c/o American Express, 11 rue Scribe--Vive la France! Liberté Egalité Fraternité--Pax Vobiscum." For the artist-nature, security he decided was a kind of cage not unlike the locked and barred Cinéma Vanves. America represented another kind of cage, one he had successfully fled, so why submit to imprisonment in Paris? (Miller actually risked literal imprisonment when he wandered certain suspect quarters at night; he was liable to arrest if a gendarme demanded to inspect the permis de séjour he did not possess.) Eagerly he returned to the uncertainty of the streets and the irregular charity of friends, a free agent whose vagrant existence brought Paris into the closest possible focus and a state alternating between anguish and delight. He would accept the inevitable elusiveness of the city, the disillusionment and depression that accompanied its pleasures. Beyond the façade, Paris was a whore: "From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait till you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked." Tricked and disgusted, but rewarded by an accumulation of insights making possible "the struggle of the human being to emancipate himself, that is, to liberate himself from the prison of his own making." Copyright © 2000 William Wiser. All rights reserved.
