by Alan Bisbort at Please Kill Me: George Orwell and Henry Miller, two of the most influential writers of the 20th century, had a single brief encounter in Paris in Dec. 1936. It has intrigued and baffled scholars and fans of both writers since. At the time, neither was the household names they’d become. If Miller was known at all, it was for the scandal surrounding Tropic of Cancer than the contents of the book. Orwell had published Down and Out in Paris and London and some novels that had reached a small audience. When he passed through Paris that day in 1936, he was on his way to fight the fascists in Spain. Had he been killed, we’d never have Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. PKM revisits this encounter with the help of Miller biographer Mary V. Dearborn.
Just before Christmas 1936, George Orwell was headed to Spain to lend support to the republican cause in its fight against Gen. Franco’s fascist insurrectionists (an experience he would later detail in Homage to Catalonia). On his way there, he stopped in Paris, a city he knew well, having lived there eight years earlier when he was still Eric Blair (an experience detailed in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published, to little fanfare, three years earlier).
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, audiobook version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R03hRZDpvsc
In addition to picking up some necessary travel documents for his Spanish trip, Orwell wanted to meet an expatriate American writer named Henry Miller who’d been living in Paris since 1930. Orwell had read a smuggled copy of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and reviewed it kindly in the New English Weekly the year before. When Tropic of Cancer’s follow-up, the equally controversial Black Spring, was published in June 1936, Orwell reviewed that as well for the New English Weekly, praising the book’s energy, its focus on common people and its sexual frankness. In the meantime, a friendly correspondence sprung up between the two writers.
Though Orwell and Miller would spend only a few hours in each other’s company that day (Dec. 23, 1936)—Orwell had to catch a midnight train to the Spanish border—the encounter has to rank, at least in retrospect, as one of the more fascinating in modern literary history. Here were two relatively unknown writers who’d become, by the time of Orwell’s death in 1950, among the century’s most influential and distinctive voices. Though both were at the peak of their writing powers in 1936, it would be years before the world caught up with them—in Miller’s case, partly due to his books being banned for “obscenity”.
A great play, novel or screenplay could be written just on this one encounter, as brief as it was—maybe call it “When George Met Henry: Paris 1936,” with music composed by John Cale. As it happens, the only firsthand account of the meeting was written by Miller’s friend and boon companion, Alfred Perles (aka “Joey”). His version, written many years later, appeared as a short interlude in a longer memoir, My Friend Henry Miller (1955).
Orwell and Miller could not have been more different. For one thing, the age difference was striking: Orwell was 33, Miller was 45, though the former seemed the older, more “adult,” of the two. Then, there was the matter of their physical statures. Orwell was tall, rail thin, almost emaciated, and already dogged by lung ailments that would eventually kill him (getting shot in the neck in Spain a few months later didn’t help). He had the manners and bearing of an Eton-educated British intellectual who’d fallen on hard times (all of which was true). Miller, on the other hand, was a wiry, exuberant, brash and blunt American with a thick Brooklyn accent who barely finished high school and never went to college. Despite the relative poverty of his Villa Seurat life, he was healthy, well-fed and strong, probably from his incessant walking around the city.
Their writing styles differed, too. Orwell’s prose was as clear as a mountain stream, precise and unflinching (as he put it in a much-anthologized essay, “Why I Write,” he had “a power of facing unpleasant facts”). Miller’s writings wandered willy-nilly across the page, in the same manner that he spoke…soliloquizing rapturously about some arcane metaphysical matter then bitterly decrying the stupidity of civilization and most human enterprise, wavering between extremes of pacifism and universal love and misanthropy and nihilism.
As for their politics, Orwell was an idealist and a polemicist, obsessive about how language could be wielded to help create a better world—or at least decry fascism and totalitarianism. Miller was completely apolitical, even naïve about politics, and he had a daydreamer’s view of how the world should be run. As he wrote to his friend Lawrence Durrell around this same time, Miller said he could solve “the whole damn problem” of Germany’s rising Nazi threat if he were given five minutes alone with Hitler—he’d simply get old Adolf to laugh (why didn’t Gandhi, or Neville Chamberlain, think of this?).
Miller threw down the gauntlet in Tropic of Cancer when he wrote, “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”
Despite the fact that Miller, at 45, was twelve years Orwell’s senior, his perception of the world was child-like—blissfully oblivious and self-centered. In “Inside the Whale,” an essay published four years later, Orwell wrote, “What most intrigued me about [Miller] was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot…my ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney.”
Perles, in his account years later, was more generous to both parties: Theirs’ was “the difference between East and West…Miller was vulnerable and anarchic, expecting nothing from the world at large. Orwell was tough, resilient and politically minded, ever striving in his way to improve the world.”
So, in one corner, we had George Orwell, the self-denying ascetic willing to risk his life for a cause. And in the other, we had Henry Miller, whose (not entirely accurate) image was of a hedonist on the prowl for wine, women, song and a good meal, preferably on someone else’s dime. A heavyweight clash, to be sure, and one that pitted the forces that would shape the rest of the century—individual freedom vs. totalitarian control, engagement in the world vs. detachment from it.
Orwell’s idealism and “power of facing unpleasant facts” were precisely why he was on his way to Spain, to fight and possibly die for the cause of democracy. When he told Miller about his plans, the live-in-the-moment American’s first impulse was to try to talk him out of going. To Miller, Orwell’s mission was pointless. Orwell’s first biographer, Bernard Crick, described the scene this way: “They discussed ‘liberty’. To Miller, it was something entirely personal, to be defended against whimsical beliefs in public obligations and responsibilities and civilization was, in any case, doomed to take a nasty turn for the far worse whatever brave boy scouts like Orwell did about it…To Orwell, liberty and democracy went together and, among other things, guaranteed the freedom of the artist.”
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