Miller worked for the messenger service as a manager for four years. During this time he realized that his marriage to Beatrice too closely resembled the relationship he had with his mother. He soon met and married June Edith Smith Mansfield, a New York taxi driver and Broadway dancer, who financially supported and emotionally encouraged Miller while he pursued his artistic career. Although many believe Miller to be anti-Semitic because of the beliefs of his German parents, Mansfield was, in fact, Jewish. She saved enough money for them to move to Paris, but Miller ended up going without her 1930. It wasn’t until he was in Paris, during the depression, that he finally had the freedom he needed to write his first masterpiece, “Tropic of Cancer”, a chronicle of Miller’s lives and loves as an expatriate in Paris. Mansfield joined him in France in the fall of 1930 and they struggled for money. She left soon after her arrival, a fact that left Miller once again feeling the freedom of Paris.
While June was back in New York Miller became acquainted with an artist named Anais Nin, who gave him the acceptance that he needed. She believed passionately in his writing and proved to be his greatest love: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” By 1934 Henry and June were divorced, and while he and Nin continued their romance, they were never married.
Miller moved to 18 Villa Seurat, which became his home for the next five years. He began an affair with Betty Ryan, but kept it a secret from Nin, although she already had a slew of other lovers to care for. In 1935 he jealously followed Nin and a lover to New York to make her his wife. She did not have the same plans, however. While he was in New York he met with every one he could to get “Tropic of Cancer” published in the United States, but the book was deemed inappropriate and “too obscene.” In 1935 Miller returned to Ville Seurat and continued his work on “Tropic of Capricorn.”
In 1936 Miller returned to New York with Nin at a time “Tropic of Cancer” was gaining rapid popularity around the world and being smuggled into the US by soldiers. He was becoming an underground celebrity. But by 1940 Henry Miller was once again penniless on the streets of New York. Desperate for money, he received a $500 grant to write a book about America. “The Air Conditioned Nightmare” was finished in 1941 and filled with rough truths about the country, which had just entered World War II. The book would not be published until 1945.
During the time that “The Air Conditioned Nightmare” was finished and published Miller traveled around the US. He spent some time in Hollywood where he focused on his watercolor painting. Needing a place to call home where his art could flourish, he chose Big Sur, a town in Northern California. In 1944 he married a woman named Janina Martha Lepska, with whom he had two more children, Tony and Valentine. However, they were divorced by 1951.
Henry Miller’s forth wife, Eve McClure, showed up in 1952. They met by letter and book, the way he would meet many of his friends after this point. But like his other marriages, this one started to deteriorate by 1959 when McClure discovered Miller had been unfaithful.
In June of 1961 “Tropic of Cancer” was finally published in America by Grove Press and sold 68,000 copies in its first week. He continued living out his life in the Pacific Palisades in California. He married a 27-year-old Japanese woman, Hoki Tokunda, but she looked at Miller as more of a grandfather figure than a husband. By 1974 she had left the country and was found running a club in Tokyo called Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller continued to write, paint, and fall in love until his death on June 7, 1980.
Paris may have been the first place Miller found acceptance and the freedom to nurture his work, but his life in New York City during the early 1900s bore the greatest influence on him and his uniquely American art. At the same time that young Miller was growing up in Brooklyn, Jazz music began to capture the attention of the world. He was deeply touched by the music of Louis Armstrong, a music that was free and unashamed, with no definitive beginning and end. A music that rang true with life. The environment that jazz created gave birth to a rich human landscape and insight that would fill Miller’s work. He tried to capture the uninhibited, improvisational spirit of jazz in his writing.
Louis Armstrong was a man who mastered the entirety of the musical influence that came before him and transformed those sounds into a brave new class of music. Like Armstrong, Miller took in all that came before him traditionally and historically in literature and consumed it wholly. This voracious attitude allowed him to absorb the multitude of stories that existed in New York City.
Though it only offers the vaguest amount of cartographic and historical information, “Tropic of Cancer” is still able to fill the reader with a sort of furious enthusiasm about Paris that a travel guide to the city wouldn’t even approach. Miller’s writing style can accurately render an image of Parisian life that could surpass even the memory of the most observant tourist or cultural photographer. The artistry of a writer like Miller can bring places like Paris, New York, and Greece alive:
‘Why don’t you show me that Paris,’ she said, ‘ that you have written about?’ One thing I know, that at the recollection of these words I suddenly realized the impossibility of ever revealing that Paris which I had gotten to know…Such a huge Paris! It would take a lifetime to explore it again…it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside to like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it. (Tropic of Cancer, 179)
Very rarely can the mind be fooled into mistaking a representation for the real thing, but Miller has the ability to do this. Miller dissects a few years of Parisian life through a series of chapters where the story alternates between bewildering and extraneous. He intertwines them into a narrative that is both beautiful and ugly all at once.
Henry Miller was also known for writing about himself. He is the protagonist in every one of his books. In an interview with American Legends, Elmer Gertz, Miller’s lawyer comments, “Henry Miller wrote exactly as he lived and felt. He tried to avoid all literary devices such as verbal inhibitions.”
