cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their places. You can read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other. Nobody dies here….
Why does the American artist feel that nobody dies in Europe when obviously this is not true? What the expatriate artist feels in Europe is a spiritual rebirth: the old self dies; the new self feels immortal.
I have had this feeling myself, writing in Italy— my chosen place—and I have argued with myself about it, much as Miller did. Europe for the American writer means the proximity of culture, a perpetual wanderjahr, a place where one’s family skeletons do not rattle in closets (only other people’s family skeletons do that). Even in the new Europe, one does not have to justify being a writer or artist with bestsellerdom or a prestigious gallery. The pursuit itself is honored—and sex, not money, is in the air.
Exile is necessary to many writers who come from puritanical cultures. Joyce is another example. One cannot imagine him writing Ulysses in Dublin. He had to leave Ireland to see it clearly. This is partly because of the simple need to remove oneself from the X-ray eyes of family in order to discover and utilize one’s gifts. But for the American writer it also means a necessary escape from bourgeois values, from those people who assume that “making a living” is the same as making a life. Henry Miller had to go to Paris to escape the ghost of his father’s tailor shop and the hallucinatory Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. It was that simple.
Why Paris? Because for Miller’s generation and the generation before his, Paris was midwife to the arts. Henry Miller had to dream of Paris. Any would-be would.
What was Paris like when he arrived? If you were a novelist trying to create the Paris of 1930, what details would you pick to distinguish it from the Paris of today? The life of a city, as anyone who has tried to recreate another era knows, dwells in its plumbing and transport, its food and drink, its cafes and theaters and the hours it keeps.
I always think of it as the Paris of petits bleus or pneumatiques —those instant communiqués, the faxes of their time—that crisscrossed the city in vacuum tubes. It was a city of bicycles, of buses, of all-night cafés, of refugees from everywhere in the world. It was a city in which certain districts, Montparnasse, for example, resembled an endless carnival. People who lived in Paris in those years remember its extraordinary Rabelaisian gaiety. Far more than New York, it was a city that never slept, and a stroll on the night boulevard was always an adventure.
Paris in 1930 was utterly hospitable to the artist with no money.
Here is Georges Belmont (one of Henry’s French translators and later mine) speaking about the Montparnasse of 1930:
In Montparnasse, particularly, you had plenty of those people who had absolutely no money, like Henry, and you could sit at a table, have a café crème, and stay there for the whole evening. Nobody would throw you out. Even at five, they wouldn’t expel you but people would go finally because they were exhausted. At La Coupole, for instance, there was dancing upstairs with jazz and downstairs there were different corners. There was the chess corner, the writers’ and painters’ corner. You could see Chagall, and Foujita with his famous lover, Kiki de Montparnasse—a remarkable woman. I met her later when she was Robert Desnos’s mistress. She was very beautiful, small, and had a marvelous face, round with big eyes, a humorous face. From time to time I saw Picasso in La Coupole and plenty of others…. People met and spent hours together,
Why does the American artist feel that nobody dies in Europe when obviously this is not true? What the expatriate artist feels in Europe is a spiritual rebirth: the old self dies; the new self feels immortal.
I have had this feeling myself, writing in Italy— my chosen place—and I have argued with myself about it, much as Miller did. Europe for the American writer means the proximity of culture, a perpetual wanderjahr, a place where one’s family skeletons do not rattle in closets (only other people’s family skeletons do that). Even in the new Europe, one does not have to justify being a writer or artist with bestsellerdom or a prestigious gallery. The pursuit itself is honored—and sex, not money, is in the air.
Exile is necessary to many writers who come from puritanical cultures. Joyce is another example. One cannot imagine him writing Ulysses in Dublin. He had to leave Ireland to see it clearly. This is partly because of the simple need to remove oneself from the X-ray eyes of family in order to discover and utilize one’s gifts. But for the American writer it also means a necessary escape from bourgeois values, from those people who assume that “making a living” is the same as making a life. Henry Miller had to go to Paris to escape the ghost of his father’s tailor shop and the hallucinatory Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. It was that simple.
Why Paris? Because for Miller’s generation and the generation before his, Paris was midwife to the arts. Henry Miller had to dream of Paris. Any would-be would.
What was Paris like when he arrived? If you were a novelist trying to create the Paris of 1930, what details would you pick to distinguish it from the Paris of today? The life of a city, as anyone who has tried to recreate another era knows, dwells in its plumbing and transport, its food and drink, its cafes and theaters and the hours it keeps.
I always think of it as the Paris of petits bleus or pneumatiques —those instant communiqués, the faxes of their time—that crisscrossed the city in vacuum tubes. It was a city of bicycles, of buses, of all-night cafés, of refugees from everywhere in the world. It was a city in which certain districts, Montparnasse, for example, resembled an endless carnival. People who lived in Paris in those years remember its extraordinary Rabelaisian gaiety. Far more than New York, it was a city that never slept, and a stroll on the night boulevard was always an adventure.
Paris in 1930 was utterly hospitable to the artist with no money.
Here is Georges Belmont (one of Henry’s French translators and later mine) speaking about the Montparnasse of 1930:
In Montparnasse, particularly, you had plenty of those people who had absolutely no money, like Henry, and you could sit at a table, have a café crème, and stay there for the whole evening. Nobody would throw you out. Even at five, they wouldn’t expel you but people would go finally because they were exhausted. At La Coupole, for instance, there was dancing upstairs with jazz and downstairs there were different corners. There was the chess corner, the writers’ and painters’ corner. You could see Chagall, and Foujita with his famous lover, Kiki de Montparnasse—a remarkable woman. I met her later when she was Robert Desnos’s mistress. She was very beautiful, small, and had a marvelous face, round with big eyes, a humorous face. From time to time I saw Picasso in La Coupole and plenty of others…. People met and spent hours together,
Similar Books
