BY GEOFFREY COBB | gcobb91839@aol.com
Henry Miller grew up in Brooklyn, but it was in Paris that he found the distinctive voice that made him famous. Memories of his childhood in Williamsburg, particularly the streets around Driggs Avenue, would remain important throughout his writing. Yet the nine years Miller spent in and around Paris during the 1930s transformed both his prose and his understanding of America. Paris gave him poverty, freedom, new friendships, sexual and artistic experiences, and—perhaps most importantly—distance from the country in which he had grown up.
Miller arrived in Paris on March 4, 1930, nearing his fortieth birthday and still struggling to establish himself as a writer. He had written before coming to Europe, but he had not yet developed the uninhibited, digressive style that would distinguish his mature work. Nor did he arrive in the glamorous expatriate Paris of the early 1920s. The Great Depression had begun, and Miller had almost no money of his own. Dependent initially on what his wife could send him and later on the generosity of friends and acquaintances, he was destined to experience Paris largely from the bottom up.
Unable to pay rent consistently, Miller moved frequently, often into cheaper and shabbier rooms. He went hungry, sometimes subsisting on fruit or striking up conversations in the hope that someone might buy him a meal. Friends in New York sent money and clothes. Legal employment was difficult to obtain, and finding work during an economic depression was difficult in any case. Much of the Paris that later appeared in his writing was therefore not the Paris of luxury hotels and fashionable restaurants, but of cheap rooms, borrowed meals, cafés, streets and temporary beds.
Yet these hardships did not destroy Miller’s enthusiasm for Paris. On the contrary, one of the striking characteristics of his writing is his ability to transform material deprivation into a feeling of liberation. Hunger, uncertainty and dependence coexist with moments of extraordinary exhilaration. He famously wrote, “When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.” The tension between poverty and delight would become essential to his literary vision of the city.
Paris also changed the way Miller wrote. His prose became increasingly conversational, rhythmic and digressive. He wrote long letters, and something of the intimacy and spontaneity of correspondence entered his literary style. Living in a French-speaking environment may also have heightened his sensitivity to the sounds and rhythms of English. Instead of trying to construct a conventional novel, Miller increasingly allowed memories, conversations, sexual encounters, jokes, philosophical reflections and descriptions of everyday life to collide on the page. The wandering structure of his writing began to resemble his wandering life in Paris.
The city also liberated Miller from some of the literary and social conventions he associated with America. Before leaving the United States, he had felt constrained by ideas about respectable careers, morality and what serious literature ought to look like. Paris exposed him to a cosmopolitan artistic culture in which experimentation seemed possible. His writing became more autobiographical and sexually explicit, less dependent upon conventional plot, and increasingly willing to move abruptly between the vulgar and the philosophical.
Europe also gave Miller something equally important: distance from America. From Paris, he could look back at New York more critically. The two cities gradually became imaginative opposites in his work. Paris represented disorder, sensuality, poverty, wandering and artistic freedom, while New York increasingly represented commerce, organization, conformity and spiritual restriction. Paradoxically, leaving New York helped Miller find a more powerful way of writing about the America he had left behind.
Another important influence was Anaïs Nin, whom Miller met in the early 1930s. Their relationship became literary, sexual, emotionally intense and frequently complicated, but Nin’s importance to Miller went beyond their affair. She became an enthusiastic reader of his work at a time when he was poor and largely unpublished. She admired the rawness and freedom of his prose, while Miller responded to her psychological sensitivity and encouraged her own writing. Nin also supported him materially at times. Their exchange gave Miller an unusually receptive literary companion during the crucial period in which his mature style was emerging.
That style found its fullest early expression in Tropic of Cancer, published in Paris by the Obelisk Press in 1934. The book would have encountered formidable obstacles to publication in the United States. Its uninhibited descriptions of sex, prostitution, poverty and bohemian life challenged contemporary standards of literary respectability. The novel remained unavailable through a regular American edition until 1961, when its publication generated a series of obscenity cases. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively settled the book’s legal status by extending constitutional protection to it.
Paris is therefore far more than the backdrop of Tropic of Cancer. Miller turns the city into a symbol of freedom, poverty, artistic discovery, sexuality and escape from conventional life. His narrator wanders through streets, rooms, cafés and relationships with little money and even less security, yet experiences this precarious existence as a kind of liberation from the expectations of middle-class American life. Material failure becomes, at least in Miller’s literary imagination, a form of artistic freedom.
Paris did not erase the Brooklyn writer in Henry Miller. In an important sense, it made that writer possible. The distance between the two places gave his work much of its creative tension: Brooklyn supplied memories of childhood, family, work and American urban life, while Paris supplied the freedom and perspective from which he could transform those memories into literature.
Miller had to leave Brooklyn before he could see it clearly. In Paris he discovered not only a new city to write about, but a new way of writing about the world he had left behind. The result was the exuberant, unruly and unmistakably personal prose that made Tropic of Cancer his breakthrough and established the voice for which he is still read today.
Geoffrey Cobb is the author of “Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past.”
