This picture? For people who follow me on social media, they know that I have been doing a series on our dog, Nina. So β¦ when I came home the other day, she had tossed my Henry Miller pages in the trash and grabbed my favorite fountain pen. When I objected, she shook her head, and told me my readers needed a good chase. Here we go:. I was sent here for a reason I have not been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. Miller is not a son of the badinage. He is a legitimate child of Montparnasse, the salt of the Quarter. That France had become my mother, mistress, home and muse, I did not realize for a long time. In this book, Paris is not a mere literary backdrop, but the city is mentioned, revered, loathed and worshiped more than all the pages dedicated to sex scenes and the mention of lice combined.
There is only one thing that rivals Paris, and that is the portrayal of Henry himself as an author in the making. Needless to say, Paris and the creation of authors, and American authors in particular, are historically and intrinsically linked. This started after WWI, when American soldiers and ambulance drivers settled in the city to write novels and poetry. Soon more followed. It was as much a subject and a character as the other characters in his Paris books.
And yet, Miller felt inadequate in giving Paris its proper due and descriptions. A decade before Miller landed there, Americans seized on Paris as an escape hatch of everything that represented America.
The intellectual critic Harold Stearns was possibly the instigator for this movement and one could consider him the Timothy Leary of the s. Come they did. Hope Mirrlees, whose blank verse prose poem Paris was a clear precursor to T. This was before F. But it was not all about booze, jazz and partying. In his fascinating book, Dangerous Pilgrimages , Malcolm Bradbury wrote that this was the time of the internationalization, or rather, the Americanization of Paris.
