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Henry Miller: The Paris Years
Miller didn't just inhabit Paris, he devoured it. Not the Paris of the guidebooks, but the City of Light's lurid backways and backwaters, the dens of vice where he could slough off the pale cast of American puritanism and embrace the hedonistic facts of life. The Parisian life of Miller was a turbulent quest for new sensations and avenues, a roisterous, slumming exploration of the soul. This world Miller shared with Brassai, one of the greatest photographers of our century. Miller and Brassai's friendship was a recognition of kindred spirits, born of mutual admiration for each other's tireless, restless fascination with Paris and its inhabitants. In Miller, Brassai found his most compelling subject. Using unpublished letters, recollected conversations, and references to Miller's workand featuring sixteen unforgettable examples of Brassai's photography"Henry Miller: The Paris Years" is an intimate account of a writer's self-discovery, seen through the unblinking eye of a master photographer. Brassai delves into Miller's relationships with Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell, as well as his hopelessly tangled though wildly inspiring marriage to June. Brassai remembers Miller's favorite cafes and haunts, revives Miller's idols and anathemas, and evokes their shared passion for the street life of a Montparnasse and Montmartre captured, even during those depression years, in a dazzling moment of illumination.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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805 people want to read
About the author
Brassaï
85 books40 followersGeorge Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) (9 September 1899 — 8 July 1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars. In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940–1984 has provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and career.
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April 22, 2014
Let me just add a few comments to what I've already written below. I found this book a lot more interesting than I had expected. My infatuation with Miller in my youth had not stood up to a recent rereading of Cancer and Capricorn -- and I have begun to understand why so many of my GR friends rate his books rather poorly. I'm not even sure why I chose to read this book, in fact, given where I'm at.
On the other hand, as I read Brassaï's intelligent account (he has a wonderful eye, as you'd expect), I remembered what it was about Miller (especially the Miller of the Rosy Crucifixion) that I'd loved.
Brassaï, however, who recognized Miller's genius, was anything but hagiographic. In fact, he seems to think that Miller was something of a moral fraud -- (even if a poetic genius). He scores Miller for claiming to tell the truth about his life, and then for lying on every page -- and talks about how Anaïs (and others) had ultimately been turned away by this. Worse, he points to Miller's acceptance of Hitler -- or rather, of Miller's defeatism -- as Henry argued, with great moral callowness -- let Hitler have France; indeed, "let him have the world!" -- since the conquerers, said Henry, are always ultimately defeated by the vanquished -- failing to note, as Brassaï does note, that "ultimately" can take centuries... (as the Roman Empire goes to show). And then, at the very end, as Miller scampers off to Greece - to sunbath with Larry (sc. Durrell) -- as the German tanks move into Europe... Brassaï's ending is simply devastating -- as he lets Henry (literally) have the final word, and closes without even one, single note of commentary. It is quite effective and, judging from the remainder of the book, quite deliberate.
At the same time, Brassaï brings us intimately into the bosom (and the crotch) of the Paris of late Modernism -- of the 1930's -- the Paris of Brassaï's own photography -- and gives us fascinating portraits of Anaïs Nin, June Miller, Alfred Perlès and others -- as well as, of course, of Henry himself. There is also some interesting material on Céline.
So those interested in the period will want to look at this book, regardless of what they think of Miller -- either as a man or as a writer.
Finally -- as to Miller's writing -- Brassaï points out how his prose is poetic, and that all one needs to do to see that is to transcribe Henry's sentences into blank verse -- and then gives several examples:
Renée Tietjen
She was leaning on the iron fence
beside the gate
and the wind molded her thin sillk dress
about her limbs.
All light and grace,
chaste,
seductive,
with golden tresses and sea-green eyes.
Always silent,
always seraphic.
Buffeted by the wind,
she swayed back and forth
like a young willow.
Or...
The Heat in Nevada
It was sizzling outdoors.
The street was just a fried banana
flaming with rum and creosote.
The houses were wilting,
sagging to their knees,
threatening to melt
into glue or glucose.
Well.. maybe not great poetry...
One more... another hooker (of course)
Lucienne
I think of Lucienne
sailing down the boulevard
with her wings outstretched,
a huge silver condor
suspended over the sluggish tide
of traffic,
a strange bird
from the tips of the Andes
with a rose-white belly
and a tenacious little knob.
One last point -- the comments below on Miller and Modernism and Surrealism come from the beginning portion of the book -- after ch. IV (quote below), the remainder is more biographical and less literary history.
What follows is my original comment:
This book is proving to be quite fascinating. Brassaï is brilliant. I will give just a taste of it here, drawn from one chapter (ch. IV), and will then add a few preliminary comments later, when I have finished the book.
The following excerpt should be understood in the context of my rather stumbling attempts (as some here will known) to understand the essence of Modernism -- a very difficult task for someone who has spent his lifetime immersed in the classical line of Platonic Greek.
First, Brassaï quotes from a conversation he has with Miller. This is Miller speaking...
“I don’t want to progress, I want to regress. Yes, regress, become more stupid with every day, as stupid as the plants and animals. To get rid, once and for all, of the effects of five thousand years of history, gods, religions, books, ‘great men’ … If I had the power, I would do away with schools, museums, I would burn all the libraries. I would even do away with history, that maker of war. So you would do away with all civilization, all culture? Why not do exactly that? You cling to your idols: Goethe, Nietzsche, etc. I have mine too, a whole pantheon of them, but I would offer them all up to the conflagration, every single one of them… What have I gained from the enlargement of my knowledge, the enrichment of my culture. Nothing. I’ve lost more. Do you know why I called my first book Tropic of Cancer? It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the end point of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch…Yes, from scratch, no question about it, for better or for worse… What I want is to halt evolution, to go backward down the path we have taken, to go back to the world before childhood, to regress, regress, regress, further and further, until we get to the place we have only lately left behind, where culture and civilization do not figure… It is time that we start to think, to feel, to see the universe in a way that is uncultivated, primitive — but this is also without doubt the most difficult thing in the world to do.” (p. 37f.)
Then, a few pages later, Brassaï comments on Miller's reading habits, and especially on Miller's reading of Spengler. This is Brassaï speaking...
'His [Miller’s] manner of reading was profoundly subjective. He would tell me that the “meaning of words ]had] lost all importance” to him. Content was unimportant. What was most important was the “musical enchantment” of the words, whether or not they stuck in his imagination. One idea, one phrase, sometimes even one word, could make him feel strangely exalted. Bergson’s Creative Evolution, he said, had influenced him deeply, but he also confessed that he hadn’t actually understood it at all. The word creative in the title almost by itself exercised a magical appeal… The book’s music enchanted him. Again, it was not the significance or meanings in the work that struck him, but its heady, rich, living language….
The subjective nature of Miller’s approach is even more apparent in his reading of Spengler’s The Decline of the West, an event that he said was one of the pivotal events in his life. Rather than attempting to figure out what made reading it so pivotal, he preferred to abandon himself to the magic of Spengler’s writing: “His thought is music to my ears: I recognize all the hidden melodies.” The Decline of the West was to him a “grand musical poem,” a “poem of the world.”
Spengler wrote “And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty…” These sentences, which begin the final chapter of Plexus, haunted Miller, so he tells us, for many years. Curiously, it was the second half of the second sentence that haunted him the most: “Nietzsche the questioning faculty.” What about the first part of the sentence, I wondered, the part about borrowing Goethe’s methodology? Did Henry wonder what that meant? Not in the slightest. He simply was not curious about the method Spengler was referring to, or how and why Spengler had applied it to history.
[And yet…, w]hat did Spengler do in The Decline of the West, after all, except apply Goethe’s vision of a living organism to history, t hereby discovering to his surprise that history was neither “evolution” nor linear “continuity,” but that it resembled life: birth, growth, maturation, death. The great civilizations – Chinese, Hindu, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Arab, and so forth – had blossomed, and then faded, at their given moment in time…to conceive history not asa mere chronology of facts, but as a vast territory in which thousand-year-old organisms called “cultures” are hatched and die.”
.... What interested him about these writers was [only] where and how they resembled Henry Miller…'
Then, Brassaï gives a long quote from Miller's own account of Brassaï in “The Eye of Paris”. Miller....
“Eye to eye with this man you have the sensation of a razor operating on your own eyeball, a razor which moves with such delicacy and precision that you are suddenly in a ballroom in which the act of undressing follows upon the wish. His gaze pierces the retina like those marvelous probes which penetrate the labyrinth of the ear in order to sound for dead bone, which tape at the base of the skull like the dull tick of a watch in moments of complete silence…
Not the eye of a shark, nor a horse, nor a fly, not any known flexible eye, but the eye of a coccus newborn, a coccus traveling on the wave of an epidemic, always a millimeter in advance of the crest. The eye that gloats and ravages. The eye that precedes doom. The waiting, lurking eye of the ghoul, the torpid, monstrously indifferent eye of the leper, the still, all-inclusive eye of the Buddha which never closes. The insatiable eye.
Looking for an instant into the two eyes of this man, I see therein the image of myself. Two enormous eyes I see, two glowing discs which look up at the sun from the bottom of a pool; two round, wondrous orbs that have pushed back the heavy, opaque lids in order to swim up to the surface of the light and drink with unlikeable thirst. Heavy tortoise eyes that have drunk from every stratum; soft, viscous eyes that have burrowed into the mud sinks, tracked the worm and shell; hard, sclerotic gems, bead and nugget, over which the heel of man has passed and left no imprint. Eye that lurks in the primal ooze, lord and master of all it surveys; not waiting on history, not waiting on time.”
To which Brassaï adds the following comment (44f.):
'At the beginning of our friendship, I found Miller’s writing style unnerving. Like those Roman candles that explode in a shower of sparks, which, just as they are about to die out, explode in more sparks, and then ore again, his images explode and obliterate, overlapping each other with baroque profusion. I had thought that for an image to hit its mark, it needed to be isolated, and set off against a gray or neutral backdrop. Proust also loved to amass metaphors when sometimes only a single image, judiciously chosen, would have sufficed. He multiplied metaphors from a fear that by itself one wouldn’t illuminate every facet of a subject, couldn’t render the subject in its totality. At first I had the impression that the profusion in Miller’s writing, rather than provide greater illumination of its subject, made it seem more distant. It took me some time to understand that the author of the Tropics never intended images to illuminate a subject; he used the subject to spawn a whole new a generation of images. The image became an end in itself, an autonomous creation. Language grows freely, swelling and foaming from ceaseless fulguration. The onward rush plunges words into a frenetic saraband, hurling them far, far away from where they started. Miller’s work takes us on a long, hallucinogenic voyage through the tissues and bones and organs of a body, all the way to the backbone. By journey’s end, who can remember that it all began with the simple description of one photographer’s eyes?'
A wonderful account, all of it, of the Miller's vanity, of surrealism, and of the deep hole into which European culture had driven itself by the 1930's -- as Modernism tumbled into the abyss.
[That last, of course, simply AC speaking...]
On the other hand, as I read Brassaï's intelligent account (he has a wonderful eye, as you'd expect), I remembered what it was about Miller (especially the Miller of the Rosy Crucifixion) that I'd loved.
Brassaï, however, who recognized Miller's genius, was anything but hagiographic. In fact, he seems to think that Miller was something of a moral fraud -- (even if a poetic genius). He scores Miller for claiming to tell the truth about his life, and then for lying on every page -- and talks about how Anaïs (and others) had ultimately been turned away by this. Worse, he points to Miller's acceptance of Hitler -- or rather, of Miller's defeatism -- as Henry argued, with great moral callowness -- let Hitler have France; indeed, "let him have the world!" -- since the conquerers, said Henry, are always ultimately defeated by the vanquished -- failing to note, as Brassaï does note, that "ultimately" can take centuries... (as the Roman Empire goes to show). And then, at the very end, as Miller scampers off to Greece - to sunbath with Larry (sc. Durrell) -- as the German tanks move into Europe... Brassaï's ending is simply devastating -- as he lets Henry (literally) have the final word, and closes without even one, single note of commentary. It is quite effective and, judging from the remainder of the book, quite deliberate.
At the same time, Brassaï brings us intimately into the bosom (and the crotch) of the Paris of late Modernism -- of the 1930's -- the Paris of Brassaï's own photography -- and gives us fascinating portraits of Anaïs Nin, June Miller, Alfred Perlès and others -- as well as, of course, of Henry himself. There is also some interesting material on Céline.
So those interested in the period will want to look at this book, regardless of what they think of Miller -- either as a man or as a writer.
Finally -- as to Miller's writing -- Brassaï points out how his prose is poetic, and that all one needs to do to see that is to transcribe Henry's sentences into blank verse -- and then gives several examples:
Renée Tietjen
She was leaning on the iron fence
beside the gate
and the wind molded her thin sillk dress
about her limbs.
All light and grace,
chaste,
seductive,
with golden tresses and sea-green eyes.
Always silent,
always seraphic.
Buffeted by the wind,
she swayed back and forth
like a young willow.
Or...
The Heat in Nevada
It was sizzling outdoors.
The street was just a fried banana
flaming with rum and creosote.
The houses were wilting,
sagging to their knees,
threatening to melt
into glue or glucose.
Well.. maybe not great poetry...
One more... another hooker (of course)
Lucienne
I think of Lucienne
sailing down the boulevard
with her wings outstretched,
a huge silver condor
suspended over the sluggish tide
of traffic,
a strange bird
from the tips of the Andes
with a rose-white belly
and a tenacious little knob.
One last point -- the comments below on Miller and Modernism and Surrealism come from the beginning portion of the book -- after ch. IV (quote below), the remainder is more biographical and less literary history.
What follows is my original comment:
This book is proving to be quite fascinating. Brassaï is brilliant. I will give just a taste of it here, drawn from one chapter (ch. IV), and will then add a few preliminary comments later, when I have finished the book.
The following excerpt should be understood in the context of my rather stumbling attempts (as some here will known) to understand the essence of Modernism -- a very difficult task for someone who has spent his lifetime immersed in the classical line of Platonic Greek.
First, Brassaï quotes from a conversation he has with Miller. This is Miller speaking...
“I don’t want to progress, I want to regress. Yes, regress, become more stupid with every day, as stupid as the plants and animals. To get rid, once and for all, of the effects of five thousand years of history, gods, religions, books, ‘great men’ … If I had the power, I would do away with schools, museums, I would burn all the libraries. I would even do away with history, that maker of war. So you would do away with all civilization, all culture? Why not do exactly that? You cling to your idols: Goethe, Nietzsche, etc. I have mine too, a whole pantheon of them, but I would offer them all up to the conflagration, every single one of them… What have I gained from the enlargement of my knowledge, the enrichment of my culture. Nothing. I’ve lost more. Do you know why I called my first book Tropic of Cancer? It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the end point of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch…Yes, from scratch, no question about it, for better or for worse… What I want is to halt evolution, to go backward down the path we have taken, to go back to the world before childhood, to regress, regress, regress, further and further, until we get to the place we have only lately left behind, where culture and civilization do not figure… It is time that we start to think, to feel, to see the universe in a way that is uncultivated, primitive — but this is also without doubt the most difficult thing in the world to do.” (p. 37f.)
Then, a few pages later, Brassaï comments on Miller's reading habits, and especially on Miller's reading of Spengler. This is Brassaï speaking...
'His [Miller’s] manner of reading was profoundly subjective. He would tell me that the “meaning of words ]had] lost all importance” to him. Content was unimportant. What was most important was the “musical enchantment” of the words, whether or not they stuck in his imagination. One idea, one phrase, sometimes even one word, could make him feel strangely exalted. Bergson’s Creative Evolution, he said, had influenced him deeply, but he also confessed that he hadn’t actually understood it at all. The word creative in the title almost by itself exercised a magical appeal… The book’s music enchanted him. Again, it was not the significance or meanings in the work that struck him, but its heady, rich, living language….
The subjective nature of Miller’s approach is even more apparent in his reading of Spengler’s The Decline of the West, an event that he said was one of the pivotal events in his life. Rather than attempting to figure out what made reading it so pivotal, he preferred to abandon himself to the magic of Spengler’s writing: “His thought is music to my ears: I recognize all the hidden melodies.” The Decline of the West was to him a “grand musical poem,” a “poem of the world.”
Spengler wrote “And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty…” These sentences, which begin the final chapter of Plexus, haunted Miller, so he tells us, for many years. Curiously, it was the second half of the second sentence that haunted him the most: “Nietzsche the questioning faculty.” What about the first part of the sentence, I wondered, the part about borrowing Goethe’s methodology? Did Henry wonder what that meant? Not in the slightest. He simply was not curious about the method Spengler was referring to, or how and why Spengler had applied it to history.
[And yet…, w]hat did Spengler do in The Decline of the West, after all, except apply Goethe’s vision of a living organism to history, t hereby discovering to his surprise that history was neither “evolution” nor linear “continuity,” but that it resembled life: birth, growth, maturation, death. The great civilizations – Chinese, Hindu, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Arab, and so forth – had blossomed, and then faded, at their given moment in time…to conceive history not asa mere chronology of facts, but as a vast territory in which thousand-year-old organisms called “cultures” are hatched and die.”
.... What interested him about these writers was [only] where and how they resembled Henry Miller…'
Then, Brassaï gives a long quote from Miller's own account of Brassaï in “The Eye of Paris”. Miller....
“Eye to eye with this man you have the sensation of a razor operating on your own eyeball, a razor which moves with such delicacy and precision that you are suddenly in a ballroom in which the act of undressing follows upon the wish. His gaze pierces the retina like those marvelous probes which penetrate the labyrinth of the ear in order to sound for dead bone, which tape at the base of the skull like the dull tick of a watch in moments of complete silence…
Not the eye of a shark, nor a horse, nor a fly, not any known flexible eye, but the eye of a coccus newborn, a coccus traveling on the wave of an epidemic, always a millimeter in advance of the crest. The eye that gloats and ravages. The eye that precedes doom. The waiting, lurking eye of the ghoul, the torpid, monstrously indifferent eye of the leper, the still, all-inclusive eye of the Buddha which never closes. The insatiable eye.
Looking for an instant into the two eyes of this man, I see therein the image of myself. Two enormous eyes I see, two glowing discs which look up at the sun from the bottom of a pool; two round, wondrous orbs that have pushed back the heavy, opaque lids in order to swim up to the surface of the light and drink with unlikeable thirst. Heavy tortoise eyes that have drunk from every stratum; soft, viscous eyes that have burrowed into the mud sinks, tracked the worm and shell; hard, sclerotic gems, bead and nugget, over which the heel of man has passed and left no imprint. Eye that lurks in the primal ooze, lord and master of all it surveys; not waiting on history, not waiting on time.”
To which Brassaï adds the following comment (44f.):
'At the beginning of our friendship, I found Miller’s writing style unnerving. Like those Roman candles that explode in a shower of sparks, which, just as they are about to die out, explode in more sparks, and then ore again, his images explode and obliterate, overlapping each other with baroque profusion. I had thought that for an image to hit its mark, it needed to be isolated, and set off against a gray or neutral backdrop. Proust also loved to amass metaphors when sometimes only a single image, judiciously chosen, would have sufficed. He multiplied metaphors from a fear that by itself one wouldn’t illuminate every facet of a subject, couldn’t render the subject in its totality. At first I had the impression that the profusion in Miller’s writing, rather than provide greater illumination of its subject, made it seem more distant. It took me some time to understand that the author of the Tropics never intended images to illuminate a subject; he used the subject to spawn a whole new a generation of images. The image became an end in itself, an autonomous creation. Language grows freely, swelling and foaming from ceaseless fulguration. The onward rush plunges words into a frenetic saraband, hurling them far, far away from where they started. Miller’s work takes us on a long, hallucinogenic voyage through the tissues and bones and organs of a body, all the way to the backbone. By journey’s end, who can remember that it all began with the simple description of one photographer’s eyes?'
A wonderful account, all of it, of the Miller's vanity, of surrealism, and of the deep hole into which European culture had driven itself by the 1930's -- as Modernism tumbled into the abyss.
[That last, of course, simply AC speaking...]
July 10, 2018
'Henry Miller: The Paris Years' by Brassaï was my last read of June and it was a fantastic one! I am crazy about Miller! Him and Brassaï were close friends when they were both living in Paris and this is a tender and interesting account of their friendship! Although Brassaï was a photographer, he is an excellent writer, as well. I loved knowing more about June Miller, Anaïs Nin, Miller's writing process, and so on!
For more reviews, follow me on Instagram: @booksturnyouon
For more reviews, follow me on Instagram: @booksturnyouon
October 4, 2012
Words aren't enough to express my undying love for both Brassai and Miller.
This isn't just Brassai's point of view in Henry Miller's life and books but a description of an entire society.
«Of this entire passage I can corroborate only our shared passion for the malodorous parts of towns, for the «little dark corners» and «their sinister beauty», to borrow the phrase from Jacques Prévert. Miller returns to the thought in the following passage from his introduction to my book Histoire de Marie: 'After my nightly rambles in his company to the seamy parts of the capital, I returned home, as usual, in a sort of fever. Several hours spent with him and one had the impression of being dragged into a great sieve, which would retain a little of everything that contribues to the exaltation of life'.»
This isn't just Brassai's point of view in Henry Miller's life and books but a description of an entire society.
«Of this entire passage I can corroborate only our shared passion for the malodorous parts of towns, for the «little dark corners» and «their sinister beauty», to borrow the phrase from Jacques Prévert. Miller returns to the thought in the following passage from his introduction to my book Histoire de Marie: 'After my nightly rambles in his company to the seamy parts of the capital, I returned home, as usual, in a sort of fever. Several hours spent with him and one had the impression of being dragged into a great sieve, which would retain a little of everything that contribues to the exaltation of life'.»
February 21, 2012
A picture book in landscape format from 1991, showing you the places and people inhabiting Miller's Tropic of Cancer--the denizens of the Villa Seurat, the people he borrowed money off and the women he slept with, the artist he knew and their work... you get a real feel for the vibrant life that was lived in those years before the war, a Paris a decade later that that of the well heeled expats of the '20s.
July 4, 2021
I am interested in all things Henry Miller, so I picked this up at a chain bookstore that was going out of business. It has a unique perspective, given that he and Miller were friends during Miller's Paris years. His thoughts are insightful and nuanced. His memories often contradict the perspective of later biographers. It also has an interesting section on Truth In Storytelling, that reflects on whether Miller's works were fact of fiction.
May 19, 2017
This could be very boring but is so well written that it isn't at all. The end is amazing. No wonder it was banned when released. Not sure it fits with rest of book either hence 4 star. Otherwise excellent
February 20, 2025
“Dreams don’t enter through the front door. They slip in unnoticed and head straight for the satisfaction of desire.”
May 19, 2019
Wonderful!
Brassai, being a close friend of Mr. Miller, gives a close up look at a man of great talent and masterful opinions that stirred him to write such compelling masterpieces as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. At times Brassai even translates and explains the cryptic, confusing passages of these books that confound readers to this day in clear, understandable commentary. To understand Mr. Miller, Brassai explains, you have to understand the man.
The book continues to detail Miller's largely vagabond life, his loves, his tragic marriage, his barnacle friends, his loves and everything...even the thick, heady, danger laden environment of the dark and foggy streets of Paris. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I love to read slow so as to savor every word and sentence of any book I read, however this book was so satisfying that I wolfed down the last few chapters, unable to stop, to put it down, to save ANY for later.
If there were any more stars to give, I would.
Brassai, being a close friend of Mr. Miller, gives a close up look at a man of great talent and masterful opinions that stirred him to write such compelling masterpieces as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. At times Brassai even translates and explains the cryptic, confusing passages of these books that confound readers to this day in clear, understandable commentary. To understand Mr. Miller, Brassai explains, you have to understand the man.
The book continues to detail Miller's largely vagabond life, his loves, his tragic marriage, his barnacle friends, his loves and everything...even the thick, heady, danger laden environment of the dark and foggy streets of Paris. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I love to read slow so as to savor every word and sentence of any book I read, however this book was so satisfying that I wolfed down the last few chapters, unable to stop, to put it down, to save ANY for later.
If there were any more stars to give, I would.
May 17, 2016
I didn't know a thing about Henry Miller when I found this book; in fact, I had him confused with that other Miller who married Marilyn Monroe! Rather, I bought this book because I love Brassaï and consider him one of the most inspired photographers of the 20th century. I had no idea he could write, too, so I couldn't resist. Of course, it didn't hurt that Miller's Paris years were 1930-1939—a rip-roaring decade just oozing with wild, creative souls who seemed to compete with each other in outrageous activities.
It made an interesting study that Brassaï was part of the biography. He was friends with Miller, and some of the letters quoted here were directed to Brassaï himself. So he wasn't exactly impartial. But my overall impression was that the author was trying to defend a person who was kind of indefensible. Miller spent his early years in Paris a freeloader who prided himself on getting someone to buy him dinner every night. He was vulgar and shameless, delighting in anything tasteless, offensive, and indecent. In justifying Miller's behavior, Brassaï kept contradicting himself. Apparently Miller had no problem in making up autobiographical memories up to suit his prose. According to the author: "Never once did I go to a bordello with Henry; and never did I use him as a model for any pornographic pictures...It was therefore from my photographs that he imagined we had gone to those 'slimy joints' together, not because we had actually done so." But Brassaï didn't seem to mind; apparently it was all right to make up things because it was in Miller's nature to fictionalize, to "drive home his point to the reader".
Brassaï gives us a fascinating view of many larger-than-life characters, all of whom seem to idolize, then ultimately break with Miller, whose philosophy doesn't hold up to the realities of daily life. The author of "Tropic of Cancer" had trouble getting published in America because his masterpiece was full of obscenities and objectionable language. He refused to alter a word. His friends thought he was brilliant but many thought he was wasting his talent.
I have to admit that after reading this biography, I have absolutely no inclination to try any of Miller's books! However, Brassaï's writing style was entertaining and I enjoyed the biography, though the last few chapters lost direction and petered out. I got a glance at an exotic world I would love to visit, full of exciting and wild bohemians who could teach us a thing or two about having a good time.
It made an interesting study that Brassaï was part of the biography. He was friends with Miller, and some of the letters quoted here were directed to Brassaï himself. So he wasn't exactly impartial. But my overall impression was that the author was trying to defend a person who was kind of indefensible. Miller spent his early years in Paris a freeloader who prided himself on getting someone to buy him dinner every night. He was vulgar and shameless, delighting in anything tasteless, offensive, and indecent. In justifying Miller's behavior, Brassaï kept contradicting himself. Apparently Miller had no problem in making up autobiographical memories up to suit his prose. According to the author: "Never once did I go to a bordello with Henry; and never did I use him as a model for any pornographic pictures...It was therefore from my photographs that he imagined we had gone to those 'slimy joints' together, not because we had actually done so." But Brassaï didn't seem to mind; apparently it was all right to make up things because it was in Miller's nature to fictionalize, to "drive home his point to the reader".
Brassaï gives us a fascinating view of many larger-than-life characters, all of whom seem to idolize, then ultimately break with Miller, whose philosophy doesn't hold up to the realities of daily life. The author of "Tropic of Cancer" had trouble getting published in America because his masterpiece was full of obscenities and objectionable language. He refused to alter a word. His friends thought he was brilliant but many thought he was wasting his talent.
I have to admit that after reading this biography, I have absolutely no inclination to try any of Miller's books! However, Brassaï's writing style was entertaining and I enjoyed the biography, though the last few chapters lost direction and petered out. I got a glance at an exotic world I would love to visit, full of exciting and wild bohemians who could teach us a thing or two about having a good time.
July 4, 2011
The photographer Brassai's book on his time with Henry Miller in Paris is one of my favorites - rereading it again; love his photographs too - one of the few photographers who makes pictures that are haunted and transportive.
Brassai admires Miller, as well as showing personal affection for him, but he's no dummy. Combining personal knowledge with Miller's writings, including letters to him, Nin, Durrell, Perles and others, he creates a picture of the man and assesses his importance in literature. Miller was self-absorbed, which helped him write like no one else. But he also claims to believe his obsessions (primarily with himself) are more important than, say, war. They're not. His weaknesses are not pointed out so much as revealed. When WW II hit, Miller was frightened and used cobbled-together ideas, a pastiche of crap philosophy, to justify his lack of engagement.
Still, a great writer and a great picture of him by a great photographer.
Brassai admires Miller, as well as showing personal affection for him, but he's no dummy. Combining personal knowledge with Miller's writings, including letters to him, Nin, Durrell, Perles and others, he creates a picture of the man and assesses his importance in literature. Miller was self-absorbed, which helped him write like no one else. But he also claims to believe his obsessions (primarily with himself) are more important than, say, war. They're not. His weaknesses are not pointed out so much as revealed. When WW II hit, Miller was frightened and used cobbled-together ideas, a pastiche of crap philosophy, to justify his lack of engagement.
Still, a great writer and a great picture of him by a great photographer.
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July 29, 2011Sharp and evocative memoir.
December 6, 2013
A charming account of Brassaï's friendship with Miller during the 1930s. Miller gave a portrait of Brassaï in "The Eye of Paris," an essay collected in Miller's The Wisdom of the Heart.
April 19, 2020
Vice lurked over everything like an erotic gargoyle.
Covering the decade of the 1930s, especially its first half, Brassai does an excellent job of bringing the Paris of those years to life. The volume includes 16 photos, but given Brassai's acclaim as a photographer, more would have been even better. Instead, he supplies many, many more word pictures, which, possibly owing to translator Timothy Bent, effectively and often poetically evoke the scene. A good example:
He loved "as he would his mistress" the run-down districts, the neighborhoods on the city's outer fringes, and most especially Paris as it looked at night: the windows that lit up or hid misery, the dives packed with drunks and whores, from which shafts of light, familiar melodies, and streams of obscene epithets spilled out into the street.
But Brassai's goal of illuminating the Paris of the era is secondary to that of bringing Miller to life, or of "capturing" him in that time and place, and he does this in part by reporting "the naked truth about our own relationship," as Miller's friend and sometimes carouser. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are when Brassai presents instances of his own appearances in Miller's writings followed by a line-by-line explication of the factual episodes and how Miller had fictionalized them for his art. The even better parts, for me, centered on Brassai's insight into Miller's tumultuous marriage to June (who was "an enigma from first to last" and "slithery as an eel") and how Anais Nin figured into their relationship. There is much here in this short biography not just on how Miller approached the art and craft of writing but repeatedly on which other writers he admired (Rimbaud, Whitman) and despised (Hemingway, Melville), as well as on how he approached reading in general. While Miller read voraciously (at least during this decade), Brassai says, "I was stunned to learn that he was less interested in a book's meaning than in what the book awoke in him." By that standard, one gets the feeling Miller would have liked this little book. If it doesn't awaken feelings of wanting to write or read more (so many books are mentioned here that seem wholly worth getting to!)--or to visit Paris--then it surely awakens feelings of being transported to a different time and place for a while, and to how Miller, ever noncomformable, walked, worked, raised hell, and managed to live in that place.
First lines:
"How does my memory of this compare with yours? I seem to see you standing in the gutter at the Dome. . . ."
---------
My memory doesn't quite compare with his.
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March 9, 2024"Autobiography is the purest form of romance"
Henry Miller was a true romantic (derogatory???)
Picked this up having never read nor known anything about Miller, and have finished -- albeit skimmed -- it still knowing nothing about him. He's abundant with optimism and exuberance yet completely cynical and slanderous?? He's adamant about the truth yet increasingly spiritual?? He writes because it is a way of being, but perhaps also only writes because he knows nothing else?? Honestly, he just sounds like he would have been an exhausting person to know.
Plunged me into the deepest reading slump (by no fault of Brassai)... in desperate need of a fluffy read.
Henry Miller was a true romantic (derogatory???)
Picked this up having never read nor known anything about Miller, and have finished -- albeit skimmed -- it still knowing nothing about him. He's abundant with optimism and exuberance yet completely cynical and slanderous?? He's adamant about the truth yet increasingly spiritual?? He writes because it is a way of being, but perhaps also only writes because he knows nothing else?? Honestly, he just sounds like he would have been an exhausting person to know.
Plunged me into the deepest reading slump (by no fault of Brassai)... in desperate need of a fluffy read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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April 25, 2020I read this book in order to do research for an essay in my book “The Modern Salonnière.” I found it to be very informative. Exploring Henry Miller's time in Paris was inspired by his Paris notebooks, which I found at the Beinecke Library at Yale. I photographed many of the pages he created and used them to illustrate my post excerpting the essay. If you are a Henry Miller fan, you may want to see them: https://bit.ly/39vaNtM
August 28, 2021
Illuminating, informative, evocative... It is not quite a biography, it is more a portrait, a written photograph even, of the man Brassai knew. And he knows him very well - all kind of insights and details that one doesn't normally know of friends. Brassai is also a really good writer, though not as good as Miller of course.
I'd warn readers to take what Brassai says with a pinch of salt: he may have his own personal reasons for what he writes, his own biases and ways of looking at things. There are a few contradictions in this work surrounding Miller which I won't go into as it would be a kind of a spoiler.
:)
I'd warn readers to take what Brassai says with a pinch of salt: he may have his own personal reasons for what he writes, his own biases and ways of looking at things. There are a few contradictions in this work surrounding Miller which I won't go into as it would be a kind of a spoiler.
:)
July 26, 2017
Intriguing little, well written book of interest to any Miller fan. Brassai was an intelligent and informed observer of his friend and there are one or two great chapters. The rest was biographical detail but I enjoyed it a lot.
May 1, 2024
I love reading anything I can about interbellum Paris, and I love Brassai's beautiful black and white photos that capture everything. Although I do not like Henry Miller, I'm very interested in the context of this book. Brassai is very skillful with the written word as well as the camera.
March 25, 2014
"I don't want to progress, I want to regress. [...] Do you know why I called my first book Tropic of Cancer? It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch... Yes, from scratch, no question about it, for better or for worse... What I want is to halt evolution, to go backward down the path we have taken, to back to the world before childhood, to regress, regress, regress, further and further, until we get to the place we have only lately left behind, where culture and civilization do not figure... It is time that we start to think, to feel, to see the universe in a way that is uncultivated, primitive - but this is also without doubt the most difficult thing in the world to do." (Miller on regression, his search for an original state)
December 28, 2012
I was expecting an immensely personal recollection of Miller by Mr Brassai, and it was that at times, but for long stretches it simply read like any competently researched biography.
Even given that, this book delivers exactly what it says it will on the jacket. If you read that, if you're looking into this book at all, I suspect you will enjoy it.
Even given that, this book delivers exactly what it says it will on the jacket. If you read that, if you're looking into this book at all, I suspect you will enjoy it.
June 5, 2016
Personajes iluminados y en el momento justo. Rimbaud, Artaud, Picasso, Brassai, algunos del lote de la Francia de los '30 con los que HM se cruzó. Una gran historia (que quizás mereció un mejor narrador)
October 11, 2012
Intimate revelations about Henry and Paris, Henry and June, Henry and Anais etc. Really worthwhile if you love Miller.
March 20, 2016
This is a fascinating book--a personal memoir of the time and the lives of both Miller and Brassai. Well done and filled with lovely asides.
August 5, 2009
I love this book!
November 10, 2012
Henry Miller- living in Paris. Dark, seedy, creative, beautiful and inspiring.
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