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Critical Essay by George Wickes
SOURCE: "Cancer and Delirium," in his Americans in Paris, Doubleday, 1969, pp. 239-61.
Wickes is a Belgian-born American critic and educator. In the following excerpt from his study of American expatriate writers of the 1920s and 30s, he discusses the crucial influence that the avant-garde, bohemian atmosphere of Paris had on Miller's artistic growth, and the personal tribulations and friendships which contributed to the genesis of Tropic of Cancer.
On March 4, 1930, a slight, bald, middle-aged American arrived in Paris. Mild-mannered and bespectacled, he had the air of a college professor. Café waiters often took him for a German or a Scandinavian. "I lack that carefree, audacious air of the average American," he wrote in a letter at the time. "Even the Americans ignore me. They talk English at my elbow with that freedom which one employs only when he is certain his neighbor does not understand." Like so many Americans during the previous decade he had come to write, but his circumstances were altogether different. They came mostly from families which could afford to support their idleness. They usually sowed a very small crop of unpublishable literary oats and indulged in mild libertinage with their own kind along the Boulevard Montparnasse: got drunk in the American cafés for a season or two, mastered a few dozen French clichés, read a little, wrote a little, then went home to bourgeois respectability. They were the university wits of their day, following the pleasant fashion of their class, but their creative impulses were largely wishful and soon dissipated.
Henry Miller came from another world. An outcast from the lower middle class, a dropout after two months of college twenty years before, an outsider in his native land, he had worked at a succession of odd jobs and seen more of life than most men. He had no desire to associate with his compatriots in Montparnasse when he first arrived, referring to them scornfully as "the insufferable idiots at the Dôme and the Coupole." And this was more than the usual reflex of the American abroad, to whom all other Americans were a source of embarrassment. Miller had a deep-seated hatred of all things American. For him the United States represented "the air-conditioned nightmare" of technology without a soul. He had come to Europe to get away from America and to find a way of life that would answer to his psychic needs. Like most Montparnasse Americans he was a sentimental expatriate. Unlike them he found what he wanted and succeeded as a writer.
An Excerpt from Tropic of Cancer:
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev I put the perfection of Dostoevski. (Is there anything more perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in Van Gogh's letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of the individual over art.
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d'habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more …
The telephone interrupts this thought which I should never have been able to complete. Someone is coming to rent the apartment ….
It looks as though it were finished, my life at the Villa Borghese. Well, I'll take up these pages and move on. Things will happen elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice—they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now—misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch—until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.
Henry Miller, in his Tropic of Cancer, Grove Weidenfeld, 1961.
Miller had been to London and was on his way to Madrid, according to his later accounts, when he ran out of money. But the letters he wrote at the time reveal no intention to travel any farther. On his first Sunday in Paris he wondered, "Will I ever get to really understand the true spirit of this people?"—not a question asked by the casual transient. A few weeks later he wrote, "I love it here, I want to stay forever." Paris was the destination toward which he had been moving for years, ever since his friend Emil Schnellock had described it to him. Schnellock, whom Miller had known as a schoolboy, had lived abroad and become a painter. To Miller it was incredible that his friend, "just a Brooklyn boy" like himself, should have been magically transformed into an artist and cosmopolite. No doubt his example more than anything else affected Miller's decision to become a writer at all costs. Years later in Tropic of Capricorn Miller was to write:
Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real. Sometimes, after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacré Coeur, through the Rue Laffitte, in the last flush of twilight…. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my being here today.
Miller's wife June also played a crucial role. As Mona or Mara she appears in Tropic of Capricorn and other autobiographical romances, an enigmatic figure who entered his life in the early twenties, a Broadway taxi dancer with literary aspirations. Their love was often tempestuous, but through it all she was determined that he would become a writer. She persuaded him to quit his job at Western Union, she worked so that he could write, she found patrons for his work among her admirers by passing herself off as the author. Thus she raised money for a trip to Europe, convinced that he would be able to write there. They went together in 1928, but only on a tour. In 1930 she found the money to send him alone, intending to join him when she had more. As she knew better than Miller, he had reached a dead end in New York.
In one of his first letters from Paris in 1930 he voiced his deep sense of frustration: "I can't understand my failure…. Why does nobody want what I write? Jesus, when I think of being 38, and poor, and unknown, I get furious." By the time he landed in Paris he had been writing for eight years. He had completed four books and countless stories and articles. Only three articles had ever been published. Discouraged by poverty, debts, and the fact that his wife had to work so that he could lead "the true life of the artist," he still yearned for the comforts of bourgeois life. These contradictory feelings of guilt and self-pity, the compulsion to succeed and the interpretation of success as money, were all neuroses of Protestant America, with its gospel of work and wealth. In Paris Miller was never troubled by such worries. Though he lived more parasitically and marginally than ever, he was psychologically liberated as he had never been in New York. Hence the euphoric mood that marks all his writing during the decade he spent in Paris. There at last he was able to write, on the first page of Tropic of Cancer: "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am."
Miller's first impressions of Paris—and the most reliable account of his first eighteen months there—are to be found in the letters he wrote to Emil Schnellock at the time. His first letter, written three days after his arrival, announces: "I will write here. I will live quietly and quite alone. And each day I will see a little more of Paris, study it, learn it as I would a book. It is worth the effort. To know Paris is to know a great deal. How vastly different from New York! What eloquent surprises at every turn of the street. To get lost here is the adventure extraordinary. The streets sing, the stones talk. The houses drip history, glory, romance." From the start he liked everything about the city, its cosmopolitan atmosphere, the variety of people, their nonconformity. "Here is the greatest congregation of bizarre types. People do dress as they please, wear beards if they like, and shave if they choose. You don't feel that lifeless pressure of dull regimentation as in N. Y. and London."
The letters written within a month of his arrival are full of wonder and delight. Everything is new and charming, the language, the way of counting, the procedure in the restaurants, the tipping. The police are allowed to smoke on duty. Gourmet meals are cheap. The writing in the newspapers and magazines is intelligent and sophisticated. Miller was prepared to see good in everything, from the fifty thousand artists of Paris selling their work to an appreciative public to the custodian in the underground toilet writing a love letter, happy with her lot, unlike the silly stenographer in a New York skyscraper. As on his previous visit he was overcome by the setting, particularly at night. "I am on the verge of tears. The beauty of it all is suffocating me…. I am fairly intoxicated with the glamour of the city." His second letter, sixteen pages long, describes that emotion peculiar to the place, la nostalgie de Paris, nostalgia that can be experienced at the moment itself.
At the same time Paris gave him an inexhaustible supply of material and the urge to write. Within three weeks of his arrival he reported, "I have added a hundred pages to my book and done excellent revision work also. No water colors. I am overwhelmed yet by the multifarious, quotidien, anonymous, communal, etc. etc. life!" The program announced in his first letter of exploring the city and writing about it was carried out in a number of long letters written during his first two months or so. Actually these were not letters at all, but feature articles for circulation to magazine editors and for eventual use in a book on Paris Miller planned to write. Bearing such titles as "Spring on the Trottoirs" and "With the Wine Merchants," they usually described itineraries in quest of local color.
Paris was always a great city for walkers, and Miller was one of its most tireless pedestrians, covering enormous distances in his search for the picturesque. The paintings he had seen colored his vision so that wherever he went he found scenes from Monet, Pissarro, Seurat. In painting even more than literature Paris has always drawn its lovers back toward the past. Miller was particularly susceptible to this nostalgia for a city he had never known, regretting that he had been born too late. Many years later, in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, he was still wishing he had been there as a young man:
What would I not give to have been the comrade or bosom friend of such figures as Apollinaire, Douanier Rousseau, George Moore, Max Jacob, Vlaminck, Utrillo, Derain, Cendrars, Gauguin, Modigliani, Cingria, Picabia, Maurice Magre, Léon Daudet, and such like. How much greater would have been the thrill to cycle along the Seine, cross and recross her bridges, race through towns like Bougival, Châtou, Argenteuil, Marly-le-roi, Puteaux, Rambouillet, Issyles-Moulineaux and similar environs circa 1910 rather than the year 1932 or 1933!
Actually the world he yearned for was older than 1910; it was the impressionists' Arcadia painted in that string of sparkling villages along the Seine before they were industrialized into grimy suburbs.
Although somewhat self-conscious as literary compositions, the Paris letters marked an important stage in Miller's writing. They were good exercises, and they provided him with plenty of material that he was soon to use in his own way. Miller thought he was writing a book on Paris to match Paul Morand's slick guided tour of New York, which he had been reading with considerable envy at its success. He hoped his impressions might amount to "something popular, saleable, palatable." Unwittingly he was already at work on Tropic of Cancer. The letters contain the earliest writing that was to go into that book. One of them in particular, entitled "Bistre and Pigeon Dung," contains several passages that Miller saved and later wove into the fabric of his book. Here is one that reappears on one of the opening pages of Tropic of Cancer, only slightly revised:
Twilight hour, Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. Juares station itself gives me a kick. The rails fall away into the canal, the long caterpillar with sides lacquered in Chinese red dips like a roller-coaster. It is not Paris, it is not Coney Island—it is crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. Railroad yards spread out below me, the tracks looking black, webby, not ordered by engineers but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the Polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.
Another passage in the same letter describes a nude by Dufresne with "all the secondary characteristics and a few of the primary," likening it to a thirteenth-century déjeuner intime, a vibrant still life, the table so heavy with food that it is sliding out of its frame—exactly as it appears at the beginning of the second chapter of Tropic of Cancer. Still another passage describes the animated street market in the rue de Buci on a Sunday morning, then moves on to the quiet Square de Furstenberg nearby, providing a page at the beginning of the third chapter of the book. Here is Miller's original description of the Square de Furstenberg, a spot that particularly appealed to him:
A deserted spot, bleak, spectral at night, containing in the center four black trees which have not yet begun to blossom. These four bare trees have the poetry of T. S. Eliot. They are intellectual trees, nourished by the stones, swaying with a rhythm cerebral, the lines punctuated by dots and dashes, by asterisks and exclamation points. Here, if Marie Laurencin ever brought her Lesbians out into the open, would be the place for them to commune. It is very, very Lesbienne here, very sterile, hybrid, full of forbidden longings.
When he incorporated this passage into Tropic of Cancer, Miller revised for economy and sharpness of outline, but kept the imagery unchanged. The original, written in April 1930, shows his particular vision of the city; he had yet to discover how to use it.
"Bistre and Pigeon Dung" was probably rattled off in one day, like other fifteen- or twenty-page letters. Under the stimulation of Paris Miller was indefatigable: "I feel that I could turn out a book a month here. If I could get a stenographer to go to bed with me I could carry on twenty-four hours a day." Walking in the city was a creative act in itself. He was forever composing in his head as he walked, the writing as vivid to him as if he had put it down on paper. Sometimes he could not remember what he had actually written and had to ask Schnellock. His books of the thirties were all to be written in this state of exaltation, as he walked around Paris in the present tense.
Other letters anticipate Tropic of Cancer even more in spirit. Miller lost no time in getting acquainted with the most squalid sights. He had always been attracted to the ghetto and the slums; now he often painted the ugliest street scenes.
I looked around and there stood a brazen wench, leaning against her door like a lazy slut, cigarette between her lips, sadly rouged and frizzled, old, seamed, scarred, cracked, evil greedy eyes. She jerked her head a few times inviting me to come back and inspect her place, but my eyes were set on a strange figure tugging away at some bales. An old man with enormous goitres completely circling his neck, standing out below the hairline like huge polyps, from under his chin hanging loosely, joggling, purplish, veined, like gourds of wine—transparent gourds. Here the breed is degenerate and diseased. Old women with white hair, mangy, red lips, demented, prowl about in carpet slippers, their clothes in tatters, soiled with garbage and filth of the gutters.
This was Quasimodo's Paris, he pointed out, visible from the towers of Notre Dame, the inhabitants no different from those in the Middle Ages. But there was nothing romantic about the way he saw them. "They have bed-bugs, cockroaches and fleas running all over them, they are syphilitic, cancerous, dropsical, they are halt and blind, paralyzed, and their brains are soft."
Picturesque and sordid, this is Miller's Paris. Here even more than in the passages he actually used can Tropic of Cancer be anticipated. Again and again he dwelt with relish on the cancerous street scenes he found in the old quarters. He also explored the uglier regions of the modern industrial city, walking through endless dead stretches of suburb, bleak neighborhoods like those of his native York-ville or Brooklyn. Paris provided local color of the particular kind that appealed to his imagination. Some six or seven weeks after his arrival he listed the topics he wanted to write about, including in addition to such standard items as the flea market, the six-day bicycle races, and the Grand Guignol, some that appealed to his rather special tastes: the slaughterhouses, the mummies at the Trocadéro, the Moslem cemetery, sexual perversions, the pissoirs, a comparative study of toilets on the Left Bank and toilets on the Right Bank. As this list suggests, Miller took particular delight in all that was unappetizing and macabre.
Miller's accounts of his first two months in Paris are full of enthusiasm. His feelings never changed, but the idyll soon ended. The troubles recorded in Tropic of Cancer were just beginning: the long walks to American Express for the check that never arrived, the constant change of address, the search for cheap hotels, soon followed by homelessness and hunger. He had arrived with enough money to last him till the middle of April and with expectations that his wife would send more. By the latter part of April his money had run out, and he had to go without food for five days. Then he received a small amount, not enough to last long, for in early May he was penniless again and desperate enough to think of looking for a job. A week later he was solvent again, quoting prices and urging Schnellock to come to Paris where he would show him how to live on less than twenty-five dollars a week. Miller's standards were still fairly grand.
As his circumstances grew progressively worse, his notions of poverty became more realistic. In August he was living with Monsieur Nanavati, the Hindu he calls Mr. Nonentity in Tropic of Cancer, and complaining of his lot as a servant: "Life is very hard for me—very. I live with bed-bugs and cockroaches. I sweep the dirty carpets, wash the dishes, eat stale bread without butter. Terrible life. Honest!" After that his friend Alfred Perlès took care of Miller off and on, sneaking him past his concierge and hiding him in his hotel room; Perlès worked at night, so Miller could sleep in his bed then.
He became well acquainted with hunger and vagrancy and discovered that the climate was miserable most of the year. October was rainy and cold. June came for a visit, but she brought no money and stayed only three weeks under wretched circumstances. Miller began to realize that he could not live on hopes indefinitely and resigned himself to leaving before long. Several letters mentioned plans to return to New York. But he managed to hang on till December, when he found a friend who took him in for the winter. Then his constant obsession was food: "What we artists need is food—and lots more of it. No art without food." Phagomania, his chronic complaint, is as prominent as lust in Tropic of Cancer.
He spent the winter months in a studio with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Ten years later he dedicated The Wisdom of the Heart to the man who took him in, Richard Galen Osborn, "who rescued me from starvation in Paris and set my feet in the right direction." Osborn was a Connecticut Yankee who worked in a bank by day and indulged his fondness for French culture in all its forms by night. He liked to talk with Miller about modern French writers, he liked to drink Anjou, and he had a weakness for the ladies. One day he added a third member to the household, the Russian princess who appears in Tropic of Cancer as Masha. The book presents a fairly faithful portrait of their absurd ménage à trois based on a letter Miller wrote to Schnellock at the time: "Irene has the clap, Osborn has bronchitis, and I have the piles." The letter records Irene's dialogue for four pages, later reproduced almost verbatim when the episode was expanded into half a chapter. Osborn wrote his own story about their life together, "No. 2 Rue Auguste Bartholdi," presenting the same basic circumstances from another point of view and rather unexpectedly portraying Miller as a man who worked all the time.
In the same letter Miller described the full beard he grew that winter, a shaggy, dark red beard that would soon make him look like Dostoevsky. According to Tropic of Cancer, he grew the beard at the request of a painter, who then did his portrait with his typewriter in the foreground and the Eiffel Tower in the background. The painter was John Nichols, a great talker who regaled Miller with anecdotes about the artists he knew and who accompanied him to that favorite resort of painters, the Cirque Médrano, where they had "a fine Seurat night." Miller, who always sought the company of painters, acquired many artist friends in Paris. When Osborn had to give up the studio, Miller went off to stay with a sculptor, Fred Kann, who lived near the Montparnasse cemetery.
Nichols' portrait has vanished along with the beard, but a verbal portrait survives from about the same period in an article that appeared in the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune with a caricature of Miller by the Hungarian artist Brassaï. The writer was an American newspaperman with the unlikely name of Wambly Bald who wrote a weekly column called "La Vie de Bohème." What he had to say was not particularly memorable, except as evidence that Miller was already a notorious character who in his daily life enacted the role he was about to turn into literature. The role came to him naturally; he was simply acting himself as a clochard, a Paris bum. He was of course fully aware of the impression he created and capable of exploiting it. He could even have ghost-written the article himself, for he often wrote Bald's weekly column; and certainly the man who wrote Tropic of Cancer was not above self-portraiture. Miller returned the compliment by depicting Bald—probably without the least malice—as his most scabrous character.
After a year in Paris Miller calculated that he could live on six dollars a week, if only he had it, but actually he was living on nothing at all. How he managed is explained by Alfred Perlès in My Friend Henry Miller: "Henry was always to be seen at one or the other of the terraces, the Dôme or the Coupole, surrounded by people he had just met or was just meeting. Impossible to say how he picked them up and where and why." After his first few months in Paris Miller had overcome his prejudices against the Montparnasse cafés, finding them good places to cadge food and drink. He had a great talent for making friends, and as he explains in Tropic of Cancer, "It's not hard to make friends when you squat on a terrasse twelve hours a day. You get to know every sot in Montparnasse. They cling to you like lice, even if you have nothing to offer them but your ears." Eventually he worked out a rotating dinner schedule with his friends, dining with a different friend every evening of the week. Sometimes he performed small services in exchange, giving English lessons or walking a child in the Luxembourg Gardens. But usually his friends were only too willing to feed him for the pleasure of his company. He was a most ingratiating person, a spellbinding talker, and a man of completely unaffected charm. Perlès observed that people loved to watch him eat and drink.
Miller did not begin writing Tropic of Cancer until the end of August 1931, but everything he experienced during that first year and a half in Paris went into the book as substance or style, the world's rottenness or his crazy hallucinated vision of it, that particular combination of "cancer and delirium" which gives the book its own very special atmosphere. By the time he began writing the book he had thoroughly explored the lower depths. What he had seen and heard would have depressed any other man beyond words; Miller was fully alive to it but buoyed up by his sense of humor, and because he had gone to rock bottom himself, elated that he had survived, more alive than ever. Then at last he succeeded in writing what had been bottled up inside him for so many years.
Toward the end of his first year in Paris he took stock of himself and his writing. To Schnellock he reported the opinions of friends who urged him to stay on: "I'm supposed to be a guy with promise. Besides that, I'm supposed to be a romantic. People wonder and shake their heads. How is it that things happen to that guy the way they do? Always in the midst of exciting things, adventures, confessions, etc. But the question in my mind is: what am I doing for literature?" He was still trying to finish the manuscript he had brought with him from New York, probably the novel called "Crazy Cock," [published as Crazy Cock, 1991] but was disgusted with it, unable to express his true feelings, boxed in by too much careful plotting and form. When he finished he wanted to burst through all such barriers. "I will explode in the Paris book. The hell with form, style, expression and all those pseudo-paramount things which beguile the critics. I want to get myself across this time—and direct as a knife thrust." In another letter written about the same time he gloried in the life he was leading: "Great days—full of missing meals—but rich in paint, verbiage and local scenery. Getting into such a bummy condition that people everywhere nudge one another and point me out." Despite hunger and hardship he felt he had lived more richly during one year in Paris than in all the rest of his life. Here is the protagonist of Tropic of Cancer: "I feel now exactly as all the great vagabond artists must have felt—absolutely reckless, childish, irresponsible, unscrupulous, and overflowing with carnal vitality, vigor, ginger, etc. Always on the border of insanity, due to worry, hunger, etc. But shoving along, day after day." Finally on August 24, 1931, having finished his novel at last, he announced that he was ready to go to work on the book he had been wanting to write: "I start tomorrow on the Paris book: first person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!"
At the end of his second summer in Paris, Miller worked for a time as a proofreader for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. His friend Perlès, who earned his small income as a proofreader, got him the job. Miller disapproved of jobs on principle but liked this one. He enjoyed the atmosphere of the newspaper office, the noise of the machinery, and the company of his fellow workers, especially the typesetters who were all like characters out of a French novel. Working at night had a charm all its own. Every evening he, Perlès, and Wambly Bald would make their long walk across Paris to the newspaper office. After work they would eat in a nearby bistro, the favorite haunt of pimps, whores, newspapermen, and others who worked by night. Then in the early morning hours, when all Paris was deserted, they would walk home again. Though Miller worked only a short time for the newspaper, the impressions of that time remained among the most vivid of his Paris years. Of the many writers and would-be writers who worked on the Tribune or the Paris edition of the New York Herald, only Miller and Bravig Imbs have given any sense of the atmosphere. Most of the journalists' accounts are full of sophomoric clichés.
Although Miller preferred the subterranean drudgery of proofreading to the more exalted editorial work upstairs, he was only too willing to be published in a newspaper, even anonymously or pseudonymously. Long before he was employed by the Tribune he wrote feature articles for that paper's Sunday edition. Only employees were supposed to contribute such articles, so Perlès submitted them as his own. In his biography Perlès reprints one of these articles, "Rue Lourmel in Fog," which is very much like the impressionistic compositions Miller had sent to Schnellock when he first arrived in Paris. Other articles appeared in the Tribune or in the Herald during his first year in Paris: "The Cirque Médrano," "The Six-Day Bike Race," "Paris in Ut Mineur." The usual rate was fifty francs, and once Miller received three hundred and fifty francs, but the important thing was that he was getting his work published readily for the first time in his life. He had tried to write for newspapers and popular magazines in the past, but with no success.
During his second year in Paris Miller's work also appeared in a literary magazine for the first time, Samuel Putnam's recently founded New Review. Putnam was a scholarly newspaper correspondent who had come to Paris in 1926 to translate Rabelais. Besides the standard modern translation of that difficult author, he produced translations of contemporary authors ranging from François Mauriac to Kiki. For all his mastery of the written language, Putnam spoke French with such an abominable accent as to be almost unintelligible. He was a steady customer of the Montparnasse bars, where Miller probably met him about the time he quit as associate editor of This Quarter and decided to found his own quarterly. Miller appeared twice in the New Review and edited one issue with Perlès. Putnam made the mistake of asking them to see the magazine through the press when he had to go to America for a visit. They promptly threw out some of the contents they found boring, including a long article by Putnam, and put in material they thought livelier, including a story by Miller. They also decided to add a supplement, a bawdy, vituperative, nonsensical parody of all manifestoes called "The New Instinctivism," denouncing everything: "A proclamation of rebellion against the puerilities of art and literature, a manifesto of disgust, a gob of spit in the cuspidor of post-war conceits, a healthy crap in the cradle of still-born deities." When the printers sent proofs to Putnam, he quashed the supplement, but the review appeared with the contents Miller and Perlès had chosen.
Miller first appeared in the New Review as a film critic. The second number, which came out in the summer of 1931, included his review entitled "Buñuel or Thus Cometh to an End Everywhere the Golden Age." Miller, who had been a cineast since childhood, was delighted to be in Paris where he could see avant-garde films that were never shown in New York. On the first Sunday after his arrival he had made a pilgrimage to Studio 28 in Montmartre to see one of the great surrealist films, Un Chien Andalou, made by Buñuel in collaboration with Dali the previous year. A week or so later he went to a ciné club meeting and was impressed by the brilliant discussion. By October 1930 he had made friends with the film maker Germaine Dulac, who promised June an important role in a talkie that was to be made in two or three months; nothing ever came of this proposal, and Madame Dulac, whom Miller described as "one of the celebrated Lesbiennes of Paris and all Europe," may have had only a passing interest in June. Toward the end of October he saw the new Buñuel-Dali film, L'Age d'Or, and in December he sent Schnellock a draft of his article for the New Review. His admiration for Buñuel never diminished. In the mid-thirties he paid tribute to him again in a long article on the cinematic art entitled "The Golden Age." Less explicit but even more pervasive is the influence of Buñuel's films on certain surrealist sequences in Miller's writing, particularly "Into the Night Life" in Black Spring.
Miller's first published story, "Mademoiselle Claude," appeared in the third number of the New Review in the fall of 1931. That story marks the actual beginning of his literary career, announcing all the characteristics of the Tropics—the first person monologue, the progressive narrative moving into the present tense, with events happening and time passing as the story unfurls. Here too are the tropical moral values—the generous whore who is almost an angel, the narrator-maquereau who wants to be a saint. He finds her customers to keep her from being sad, and they end up going to the clinic together every day, more in love than ever. Even the imagery is here: "Paris looks to me like a big, ugly chancre. The streets are gangrened. Everybody has it—if it isn't clap it's syphilis. All Europe is diseased, and it's France who's made it diseased."
The style anticipates Tropic of Cancer with its flowing rhythms:
The idea, though, of waking up in the morning, the sun streaming in the windows and a good, faithful whore beside you who loves you, who loves the guts out of you, the birds singing and the table all spread, and while she's washing up and combing her hair, all the men she's been with and now you, just you, and barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys before you and maybe after, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it chocking you, annihilating you. O Christ! Give me a whore always, all the time!
Miller liked that long sentence well enough to quote part of it in Tropic of Cancer.
Miller was fascinated by the Paris whores. On his first Sunday in Paris he had noted with surprise: "Montmartre is simply lousy with whores. Little bars, hardly bigger than a coffin, are jammed with them." The imagery is typical, if not the reaction. "Wow! they make you shiver those dolled-up spectres. They sit in the cafés and beckon to you from the window, or bunk smack up against you on the street, and invite you to come along." By May he had found his first girl friend, a whore named Germaine. In December he wrote, "And who is Mlle. Claude? Ah, the prettiest, juiciest, cleverest little cocotte in Montparnasse. Osborn and I share her once in a while. Such taste, such discretion, such politesse." He found her intelligent, well-read, animated, and refined. He recommended her to Schnellock, who could address her in care of the Coupole. Though the letter ends half-humorously, sounding like an advertisement, Claude is described in similar terms in Tropic of Cancer, but compared unfavorably with that ordinary hustler Germaine, who according to the book, served as the real model for the story. "She was a whore all the way through," Miller concludes, "and that was her virtue!"
By the time "Mademoiselle Claude" appeared in print Miller had started writing Tropic of Cancer. He had already met most of the characters and had most of the experiences that went into the narrative. But there is more to that book than mere storytelling; Tropic of Cancer dramatizes a particular outlook, a satiric blend of humor and iconoclasm, a fiercely critical view of the world. In the fall of 1931 Miller was being exposed to some of the ideas that gave the book its philosophical bias. He then lived for a time with Michael Fraenkel, a prophet of doom whose theories appear in the first two chapters and elsewhere. On the opening page Miller summarizes Fraenkel's death philosophy, complete with Fraenkel's favorite weather metaphor.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
There is usually a note of ridicule in Miller's treatment of Fraenkel's ideas, but he also admits that Fraenkel is one of the two writers he respects, the other being Perlès. The reason he takes them seriously is that, unlike other writers he knows, these two have fervor. "They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a white flame. They are mad and tone deaf. They are sufferers."
Fraenkel was a small intense man with a goatee who bore a marked resemblance to Trotsky. Born in Russia and brought to the United States as a boy, he became the greatest book salesman in America and saved enough money to retire at the age of thirty in 1926. He had always wanted to write, and Paris seemed the best place for a writer to go. His writing was the product of a philosophical mind obsessed with one subject, the spiritual death of modern man as symbolized by the millions of deaths of the Great War. His friend Walter Lowenfels plays upon the central paradox of Fraenkel's life in an unpublished biographical sketch, "The Life of Fraenkel's Death," pointing out that Fraenkel earned his living in America so that he could retire in Europe to write about death.
Lowenfels himself followed a similar pattern. He too had been in business in America, the family butter business which he later treated as something of a joke, contrasting butter with poetry, and which he quit at the age of twenty-nine, having decided to go to Europe to write. His ideas were akin to Fraenkel's, though not nearly so extreme. At the time they became friends he had just finished an elegy on Apollinaire. Under the influence of Fraenkel he then took death as his central theme and wrote a sequence of elegies called Some Deaths, lamenting the suicides of poets such as Hart Crane and Harry Crosby, René Crevel and Jacques Rigaut. Fraenkel and Lowenfels also formed what they called an anonymous school, writing books together anonymously in the spirit of French writers and painters before them. In Tropic of Cancer Miller jokes about an anonymous collaboration proposed by Fraenkel, to be called "The Last Book," and some years later Miller and Fraenkel actually did collaborate on a book, the Hamlet correspondence, which was published by Fraenkel's Carrefour Press.
Miller became acquainted with Fraenkel about the time he started writing Tropic of Cancer. Lowenfels and Fraenkel had already been in league for two years or more. Now the three of them formed what Lowenfels calls "the avant-garde of death." Neither he nor Miller took Fraenkel's monomania altogether seriously. "Henry and I really joked about Fraenkel's death business—turning it into something else, something we could use in our business, which was, say what you like, writing." Fraenkel was useful to Miller in more immediate ways, for he owned an apartment building at 18 Villa Seurat and was better off than Miller's other friends. A number of people have claimed an influence on Miller when he was still unknown, but their most important contribution at this time was keeping him alive. This was Lowenfels' motive in bringing Miller and Fraenkel together, this and Fraenkel's need for an intelligent audience, which was as great as Miller's need for bed and board.
The Miller-Fraenkel relationship was a strange and amusing one, founded on phagomania and the death obsession and kept alive by talk. Both men were prodigious talkers. Miller remembers that Fraenkel used to drop in at breakfast time, stay through lunch, through dinner, and far into the evening, talking, talking all the time, leaving Miller exhausted. Fraenkel in turn was overwhelmed by Miller's talk. "It was extraordinary, amazing, incredible. A compulsion mechanism, a kind of sickness, if you like, something pathological." But he also adds, "It was talk of the highest order I ever heard." Though by nature stingy and indifferent to food, Fraenkel would occasionally buy Miller a meal just to be able to keep talking. In Tropic of Cancer Miller complains that there is not a scrap of food in the house. He also registers a feeling of impermanence, fearing his chair will be pulled out from under him as he types. Fraenkel, ever the businessman, rented out apartments and soon evicted Miller by renting the room he occupied. Miller liked the Villa Seurat and returned there to live three years later; meanwhile his discussions with Fraenkel continued and turned into correspondence when Fraenkel traveled about the world.
Years later, in an article entitled "The Genesis of the Tropic of Cancer," Fraenkel reminisced about the beginning of their acquaintance: "And then one day Walter told me about a strange man he had run across in Montparnasse, a fellow called Miller. He was described as one of tremendous vitality, zest, enthusiasm, an amazing talker, without visible means of support, a kind of derelict, but gay and happy withal, alive. 'Not alive exactly,' he said, 'but certainly not dead. Alive in a kind of confused, old-fashioned way. An interesting chap. Why not drop him a line, a pneu? He is down and out and maybe he can do some typing for you.' And then with a twinkle in his eye: 'Take him on. Just your meat.' Did he perhaps see a possible disciple in him?" According to Fraenkel there were no preliminaries between them, no reservations; they immediately talked to each other like old friends. Fraenkel gave Miller his book Werther's Younger Brother, a self-portrait ending in suicide. Miller responded with a long enthusiastic fan letter which Fraenkel quotes: "You say things that no one in America is saying—that I would dearly love to say myself." Miller, who had been told that Fraenkel's book was pessimistic and confused, "found everything touched with a wild beauty, and if there were disorder, then it was, as Bergson said, an order of disorder which is another order."
Though Fraenkel claims too much credit for his influence on Tropic of Cancer, he gives the best explanation on record of Miller's state of mind at the time. And though he was only the latest in a series of friends to advise Miller to write spontaneously, his insight may have been the clearest. Certainly his advice was most timely. Beneath Miller's restless confusion Fraenkel detected a determination to be himself. Miller had come to Paris to make a new start but had not yet found himself. When Fraenkel read Miller's novel in manuscript, "Crazy Cock," he immediately saw that Miller was trying to write for the publishers, not for himself.
By this time I knew the sort of person he was, impulsive, erratic, anarchic, a mass of contradictory moods, ideas, feelings, and I told him to sit down before the machine and white paper and write anything and everything that came to his mind, as it came, red-hot, and to hell with the editors and the public. Write as you talk, I told him. Write as you live. Write as you feel and think. Just sit down before the machine and let go—tell everything you are going through now; you've got all the material you want right in this, in what you are thinking and feeling and going through now.
As they talked endlessly of death, Miller found the theme that could integrate his creative impulses and give him the direction he lacked. His obscenity, his violence, his inner chaos, and love of corruption are all expressions of "The Death Theme." So Fraenkel thought at any rate, though at times his disciples may have had their little joke at his expense. Lowenfels wonders whether the Fraenkel they remember is not a creature of their imagination. He feels that Fraenkel did not come through very well in his own writing. A greater thinker than writer, he left more of himself in the writings of others, in Miller's early work and Lowenfels' poems written between 1929 and 1934. Lowenfels also remarks that Fraenkel was at his best when writing under the stimulus of Miller. No doubt they inspired each other, but long before he met Fraenkel, Miller was steeped in the thinking of Oswald Spengler, whose apocalyptic view he had taken as his own. Miller had in fact reread the first volume of The Decline of the West since coming to Paris and in doing so had concluded that Spengler was the greatest of contemporary writers, greater than Joyce, Mann, or even Proust. "There is great music, great literature, great ideas." Surely his thinking in Tropic of Cancer was fired by Spengler, though Fraenkel undoubtedly fanned the flames.
The book that most immediately anticipated Tropic of Cancer was Louis-Ferdinand Céline's first novel, Voyage au Bout de la Nuit. Not only the Spenglerian sense of doom is there, but the very idiom and tone, the picaresque narrative and the gallows humor that Miller adopted. Céline's Voyage is another episodic autobiographical novel that dwells on all that is vicious, treacherous, sadistic, obscene, diseased, and repulsive in human nature. The central character is an underdog adventurer who lives by luck and by his wits. Céline's favorite setting is the ugly, working-class Paris where he was born and where he practiced medicine, though he also traveled about the world like Candide, finding inhumanity wherever he went. His experience eventually drove him to bitter misanthropy, but his first book achieved a balance between laughter and pessimism that is much the same as Miller's comic treatment of inherently tragic matter. After reading Voyage au Bout de la Nuit it is easier to understand Tropic of Cancer, for Céline's war experience exposes the "civilization" that both writers attacked. Céline lost his innocence in the Great War, suffered shell shock, was cured of his illusions, learned to distrust all ideals and to place the law of self-preservation above all others. Miller, despite his imagery of trench warfare and poison gas, had no direct experience to compare with Céline's, yet he had gone through the same process of disenchantment, emerging with even fewer scruples. He too had become a militant anarchist, declaring war on society.
Despite the many striking parallels between the two books, Céline and Miller produced their works quite independently. Miller had finished the first draft of Tropic of Cancer before the publication of Voyage au Bout de la Nuit in November 1932. He read the book soon after it appeared and was overwhelmed, although he found it difficult reading and had to spend a week isolated in a hotel room with a dictionary to decipher its colloquial French. During the next two years he was to revise his own book three times before it appeared in print, so conceivably Céline could have influenced the rewriting. But the letters to Schnellock reveal that Miller had found his style and subject matter before he had ever heard of Céline. It was simply another case of two writers responding to their time and place with the same perceptions.
Like Céline's novel, Tropic of Cancer is autobiographical, but it is not to be taken as documentary. Although Miller protests that he is writing the plain unvarnished truth, this gambit is one of the oldest in fiction. He is closer to fact than most novelists, but his method is theirs, his powerful imagination producing a metamorphosis as it colors and heightens the original circumstances. Miller has confessed that he has difficulty remembering what he imagined and what actually happened.
Tropic of Cancer gives a more or less fictionalized account, then, of the adventures of a character named Henry Miller who explored the lower depths in Paris during the depression. The book is a jumble of sensations, reflections, conversations, encounters, and hallucinations, all filtered through the consciousness of its narrator in the first person, present tense. The chaos is deliberate, for Miller wanted to put down impressions and thoughts as they occurred to him, to depict a man "in the grip of delirium." He also wanted "to get off the gold standard of literature," to write without revising, and to record "all that which is omitted in books."
Tropic of Cancer is sometimes compared to The Sun Also Rises, not for the similarities but for the differences between them. The comparison is absurd yet apt, for it shows how much the world had changed between the mid-twenties and the early thirties. Henry Miller's adventures in Paris present a burlesque of the expatriate romance. Instead of a potentially tragic hero, the protagonist is a clown whose escapades mock all sense of human dignity. Instead of investing his characters with a glamour that excuses their faults, Miller caricatures his friends, bringing out all that is grotesque, ludicrous, or contemptible in their private lives. He also sees his surroundings in a jaundiced light and thereby makes more meaningful use of his Paris scenery. For Hemingway Montparnasse provided an appropriate backdrop, a likely setting for the lost generation, but his characters stayed on the surface and could just as well have dissipated elsewhere. Miller penetrated far deeper into Paris than any other American writer and projected a vision of the city that was altogether different. He succeeded only as Céline had done in making its ugliness symbolic of private and universal anguish, a sordid modern-day inferno, a labyrinth of cancer and despair.
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Dennis Busenitz, Frank Gerwer, Dan Plunkett hit the streets of San Francisco for the new Spitfire Wheels Arson Department Spring '15 Catalog.
Frank Gerwer
Spitfire Wheels: Arson Dept.
Antihero Skateboards: Destination Unknown
Without months or years of marketing hype, the 18 crew at Antihero Skateboards have dropped their new video, Destination Unknown to take you on the road to some great skate destinations and a bit closer the Holidays. All killer, no filler…get some!
Never Shy From Controversy: Todd Francis X Stance
For over twenty years, Todd Francis has been opening eyes—and minds—with his art. Although he sharpened his teeth in the skate industry and is often known for his work with Antihero, his art transcends the streets and is not just found underfoot. Stance is honored to team up with Todd to debut a sock that bears both his name and his art. Dig in on the video as well.
Antihero Skateboards The RAD Conspiracy Show:
Live On K-OOK 1800AM – New Antihero Goods
Now live on K-OOK 1800AM Radio, the newest roll out of goods from Antihero featuring Frank Gerwer's look at the full line up of 2014 Vagrant All Stars, Grosso's career saving street video part, and new pro boards from Trujillo, Gerwer, Pfanner, Cardiel and more.


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Book Search
King Lear
New Critical Essays
Series: Shakespeare Criticism
Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare's original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations?...
Published May 19th 2014 by Routledge
Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies and Forgeries
Series: Subcultures and Subversions: 1750-1850
Shakespeare Imitations is a collection of all-but-forgotten Shakespearean plays, composed between 1710 and 1820. These imitations, parodies and forgeries reveal the biases of eighteenth-century Shakespeare in London theatre. But these plays are far from derivative. Indeed, rather than simply...
Published May 20th 2004 by Routledge


text: Contact Us We would love to hear from you! Please fill out this form and we will get in touch with you shortly. Name* First Last Address Street Address Address Line 2 City AlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareDistrict of ColumbiaFloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyomingArmed Forces AmericasArmed Forces EuropeArmed Forces Pacific State ZIP Code PhoneEmail* How can we help you today? I need a Self Storage Unit I would like to leave Feedback Self Storage Rental InquiryPreferred LocationFour Seasons Self Storage - League CityFour Seasons Self Storage - Barker/Spring CypressFour Seasons Self Storage - Mills BranchFour Seasons Self Storage - Broadway DixieFour Seasons Self Storage - West Lake HoustonFour Seasons Self Storage - Atascocita Town CenterFour Seasons Self Storage - Cinco RanchFour Seasons Self Storage - FM 1960/FallbrookChecker StorageFour Seasons Self Storage - Richmond Dairy AshfordFour Seasons Self Storage - Pearland ParkwayDate Needed Estimated Length of Time Needed:1 to 3 Months3 to 6 Months6 to 12 Months12 to 18 Months18 to 24 MonthsMore than 2 YearsWhat type of Storage can we help you with? A General Storage unit Storage for a RV Office or Warehouse Storage Space General Storage Size:5'x5' (25 sq. ft.)5'x10' (50 sq. ft.)5'x15' (75 sq. ft.)7.5'x5' (37.5 sq. ft.)7.5'x10' (75 sq. ft.)10'x10' (100 sq. ft.)10'x15' (150 sq. ft.)10'x20' (200 sq. ft.)10'x25' (250 sq. ft.)10'x30' (300 sq. ft.)12.5'x25 (312.5 sq. ft.)I'm Not Sure YetRV Storage Size:12.5' x 25'12.5' x 40'14' x 40'14' x 50'I'm Not Sure YetOffice or Warehouse Storage Size:25' x 30'20' x 20'20' x 30'20' x 40'30' x 40'I'm Not Sure YetAdditional InformationSpace Type:Climate ControlledNon-Climate ControlledAutomobile/Trailer (indoor)Automobile/Trailer (outdoor)How did you hear about us?ReferralEmailVal PackBillboardWeb SearchYellow PagesOther"I heard about you from:"Have you used self-storage before?Yes, I have.No, I have not.Have you used Four Seasons Self Storage in the past?Yes! I'm a returning customer.No, I used a different company.How do you plan on using your storage unit?For personal use.For commercial purposes.Do you have any additional storage rental questions?YesNoPlease tell us what other question of comment we can address: Your FeedbackPlease provide us with your questions, comments, or concerns here:


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Juicy J ft. Wale & Trey Songz - Bounce It
Artist: Juicy J
Featuring: Wale, Trey Songz
Producer: Dr. Luke
Album: Stay Trippy
Avg Rating: 2.8 ( 17 votes )
Unable to Watch this Youtube Video? Click here to play in Soundcloud instead.
"Clap that ass, light a blunt, baby let's get ig'nant." I don't know if it's possible to sum a rapper's work up in a single sentence, but Juicy J comes damn close in the opening verse of his latest single. Released to tide fans over as they wait for further news on the Three 6 co-founder's currently-unscheduled solo debut, this newly-released cut features Juicy flowing about his favorite topics—strippers, c-notes and Mary Jane—over Dr. Luke's scintillating synth arpeggios and sizzling trap hi-hats. As usual, the Memphis native comes flanked by high-profile guests: Wale delivers a debaucherous middle 16, and Trey Songz joins the headliner on the record's hook. Pushed back from its original July 2, drop date, Stay Trippy has yet to be rescheduled. As always, we'll keep you posted.
Update: Click "Watch Video" above or scroll down (for mobile) to view Juicy J's Benny Boom-directed Bounce It visual.
Juicy JWaleTrey Songz Music VideosHitmakerStreet BangerClub
Written by richard on Jul 19, 2013
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I am so excited that finally the film will be getting released ZOE SALDANA is A Powerful Actress capable of displaying powerful emotions not…
The Nina Simone Bio Starring Zoe Saldana Will Apparently Be Released Later This Year...
May 28th, 2015 7:38pm
Raven seems to lack a true identity. She is more about "being different" than actually being authentic. In short, her whole thing…
Why 'The View' Badly Needs Raven-Symoné
May 28th, 2015 6:23pm
This looks a lot like Arliss, which is widely considered one of the worst shows HBO ever produced.
"Legends Don't Retire; They Reinvent" in 2nd Longer Trailer for 'Ballers'
May 28th, 2015 6:13pm
I think she is a bit to much the only time you see her smile is when someone hay comes on she always shooting down everything the other host…
Why 'The View' Badly Needs Raven-Symoné
May 28th, 2015 5:18pm
great interview, so candid and honest and yes, building the team and trying to expand networks does seem to be a female thing. the work needs…
You Likely Won't Find a More Candid & Comprehensive Interview with Euzhan Palcy Than This One...
May 28th, 2015 4:56pm
Do we know who will be the choreographer? Just curious.
NBC Announces Open Casting Call for Dorothy in 'The Wiz Live!' - African American Women, 18-27
May 28th, 2015 4:54pm
No! That will be the last straw. I've loved the show from the beginning but am hanging on by a thread.
Why 'The View' Badly Needs Raven-Symoné
May 28th, 2015 4:36pm
Well, it all depends. Who is the target audience? Who is telling the story? I personally don't have a problem either way. In fact, I prefer…
Is the Classification of a Film as a "Black Film" Erroneous and Limiting?
May 28th, 2015 4:08pm
Glad to hear this! I was hoping this version would cast a young girl/woman and not an adult as Dorothy. Or at least someone who can…
NBC Announces Open Casting Call for Dorothy in 'The Wiz Live!' - African American Women, 18-27
May 28th, 2015 3:42pm
This will fail!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Former Basketball Star, Blondy Baruti, Inks Talent Deal with ABC Network & ABC Studios
May 28th, 2015 2:53pm
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Yura Karate Training
Yura is a boy in training; for us, he will show some of his skills. This Japanboyz.com video presents, "Yura's Karate Training." He is both beautiful and talented. Laughing at being, "bisexual," Yura responds by letting us know his preference is for bodies with "nunchucks." Undressing, Yura's twink body is so sexy; he turns around to present his nice bottom, which he is. The camera then pans up and down as his "sweet treasure" is revealed. Yura likes to add a little "electricity" to his erotic play, and clips on a couple of nip stimulators. He works his dick; the cheeky monkey on his underwear grins more and more. Working the tip of his penis, Yura is fully erect when he gives us a peak; his engorged head then gets the same stimulation as his nipples. Working the toy up and down his shaft, he removes his underwear and concentrates on his pleasure, and ours. Yura's outstretched body reacts to his own touch quickly. Stroking himself and massaging his hole, he is definitely a quick learne
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Although Lucie has been in this business for about 4 years, her capital is still too low to expand meaningfully. To end this situation, she needs to request a Kiva loan via Vision Finance Company. With this loan, she will hopefully earn more profits through the sale of a big number of shirts which in turn will allow her to keep reinvesting for better financial stability. In addition to that, she will continue taking care of her family.
Additional Information
About Vision Finance Company s.a – Rwanda (VFC)
Vision Finance Company (VFC) was Kiva's first partner in Rwanda. Established in 1999, VFC is an affiliate of World Vision International. Since its founding, VFC has been committed to alleviating poverty in Rwanda by ensuring that poor people have access to credit to support business initiatives that will improve their life circumstances.
VFC has a broad set of products and services, offering Community Banking services for self-selected groups of 10-30 borrowers, Solidarity Group services for more experienced groups of entrepreneurs, and Individual Loans for customers who already have a small established business. Vision Finance is also among the very few financial institutions targeting farmers and providing agricultural credit options in Rwanda, where access to credit is critical to the success of agricultural enterprises.
About Rwanda
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Success!! The loan was 100% repaid
- Repayment Term
- 14 months (Additional Information)
- Repayment Schedule
- Monthly
- Pre-Disbursed:
- Oct 20, 2010
- Listed
- Oct 30, 2010
- Currency Exchange Loss:
- Possible
- Ended:
- Nov 15, 2011


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We have full accidental damage insurance and have never claimed for anything but last night the tv got knocked off the stand and doesnt work.
We think we'll be covered but wonder if we claim will we be hammered for our renewal next year?
Has anyone done this and is that how it works? we claim and then the premium goes sky high?


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DONA would say we are completely out of line but we are doing what people need, and are educated to do it.
|What I am saying is that it depends on who your clients are, and what the needs of your area is. If you are dealing with people who are horrified of hospitals, trying to have natural birth, wish they were having a midwife assisted birth, and are in a less than ideal hospital setting, they need more help to have that natural birth.
Dear god... I've been emailing Gloria and briefly asked if 4 days was long enough training to feel confident with my skills and I haven't heard back from her yet! It's been about 4 days (granted I didn't expect her to answer on the weekend). I hope i didn't offend her in any way.
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Chile, Argentina and ??? on a SPORTY!
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Joined: Jan 2012
Location: MN
Oddometer: 43
MN to Miami
So as I said, I left on the 22nd of October, and hit my first batch of rain, lucky me. My boots are the only waterproof items of clothing I brought. I made it to Caseyville, Illinois that night. I tried reaching out to people on Couchsurfing before I left home but really didn't have much luck--I don't have patience to copy and paste messages to more than 5 people--so I ended up in hotels every night. Next day I stopped at a Harley store I saw on the way and purchased a facemask, as my helmet is faceless. I have come to depend on that facemask in a big way in Patagonia.
2nd night ended up in Macon, Georgia. Another cheap motel--Days Inn? Wanted to hit up a Mexican restaurant nearby but closed at 10 PM??? Micky Dees it is.
Can't believe this worked.
3rd day I was introduced to the Florida Turnpike. Apparently the Sunpass lanes are only for people with Sunpass. Who knew.
I hate tolls, but love citrus...sitting right next to the gas pumps.
I made it to Miami just as the sun was setting. Lots of cars but it was pretty smooth. I never thought I could enjoy riding around major cities, but riding around Miami and going through Atlanta at night was actually a blast. At the hotel, three of my good friends were waiting for me.
I touched base with my customs broker and we made plans to meet the next day for crating the bike. I feel so many different emotions right now...
After dropping off the bike, the only thing to do was get a flight. I'd been eyeing a business class fare that seemed too good to be true, but it would check off a major bullet on my bucket list so I pulled the trigger.
Yeaaaaa booiiiiii!!!!! To get to the business class lounge at Miami airport you have to go through the sliding glass doors and up two escalators, through more sliding glass doors, to a woman who eyes you up and down and is half a second from telling you that this is not a public restroom and you'll have to leave. I showed her my business class ticket and I was in the lap of luxury. I sat near two women who were discussing the most important distinctions among coffee sweeteners. Bloody mary and headphones for me.
On the plane, I had row 1 to myself...this'll never happen again.
After a brief layover in Lima, I arrived in Santiago de Chile around 4 AM local time...
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The parents of Reeva Steenkamp have opened up, like never before, about the death of her daughter at the hands of Oscar Pistorius.
The distraught couple was interviewed for a new documentary, Pistorius on Trial: Nowhere to Run, premiering Sunday on Investigation Discovery (ID).
"I think he [Oscar] has to see me, the mother, the person who gave birth to her, that he's taken that away. That's what I want to see, that's why I want to look in his face and he must look in mine," June Steenkamp says.. "He must see now that I am there for justice for Reeva, no matter what happened, and the truth, obviously, which we don't know we'll ever get. But I hope for that."
PHOTOS: Inside The Most Infamous Crimes Of Passion In History
As Radar has been reporting, Pistorius, known as the Blade Runner for the specially-designed prosthetic legs that allowed him to compete as an Olympic runner despite being a double amputee, is accused of murdering his reality star girlfriend on Valentines's Day, 2013. Pistorius has never denied shooting her but insists he mistakenly thought she was an intruder.
Barry Steenkamp, Reeva's father, added, "I've got my own feelings inside as to what happened, but what I do want to do, is to just to talk to him. I would like to have a chat to him, man to man. Guilty or not guilty, whatever it is. I would like to have a talk; that would help me a lot."
PHOTOS: Tragic Accident Or Grisly Murder? See The Bloody Oscar Pistorius Crime Scene Photos
Pistorius On Trial: Nowhere To Run premieres April 13 at 9/8c on ID.


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Van Halen, considered by many to be one of the greatest and most influential band in hard rock history. Pioneered by the legendary skills of guitarist Eddie Van Halen and the shrieking vocals of David Lee Roth, Van Halen have had been through both good times, and bad times; but regardless of the situation, there seems to be no rolling over and dying for Van Halen – Get concert tickets here
Throughout their early teen and adult years, the dutch born brothers; Edward and Alexander Van Halen, played in various bands, including a band called Genesis with bassist Mark Stone. Eventually, vocal duties were moved from Eddie to the newly hired David Lee Roth and bassist Michael Anthony soon after replaced Mark Stone. In 1974, the band changed their name to Van Halen, and the "Classic Lineup" of Van Halen was born.
After playing in various clubs and backyards, the band gained success in 1977 when they were signed by Warner Brothers and released their debut self titled album the following year. Because of the then uncommon guitar techniques presented by Eddie, Van Halen gained the attention of everyone and gained a following through a year long tour to promote the album.
The band began pumping out an album each year from 1979 to 1982 and toured relentlessly each year as well. Throughout those four years, their style began to shift to a more serious and complex style and tensions between the band began to arise.
During the tour to promote the album 1984, considered their most important magnum opus, Roth exited the band because of Eddie's decision to perform in various other projects without informing the rest of the band and his increased drug use. Roth was then replaced by vocalist Sammy Hagar, and the band was then dubbed "Van Hagar".
Two years later 1986 saw the release of 5150, which showed the new mature song writing that Eddie had been trying to achieve, with the help of Hagar's writing. Four studio albums were released during the Van Hagar years, but like before with Roth; tension arose once again. The Van Halen brothers drug and alcohol use began fueling tensions between them and Hagar. Eddie has been accused of saying negative comments about Hagar and when plans for a best of album that features both songs by Hagar and Roth. Both parties claim different reasons revolved around the exit of Hagar, who claimed he was kicked out; apposed to Eddie, who claims he quit.
Vocalist Gary Cherone joined after Hagar's exit and saw the release if Van Halen III in 1998. The album sold far less than previous albums and as a result, no music from this album was featured on any future compilation albums.
It is the only album to feature Cherone to date, who is on good terms with the Van Halen brothers. Tensions began to grow during this album as Michael Anthony claims there is little to no bass done by him. From 1998 to 2004, Van Halen didnt release any new material; however a reunion was planned in 2004 that featured Hagar, Anthony and the Van Halen brothers.
Though the tour and reunion were successful, there were still tensions throughout it. Hagar and Anthony claimed Eddie's drink was spiraling out of control. Hagar and Anthony began working together in various projects and would not be seen in Van Halen anymore. In 2006, David Lee Roth confirmed that he would be reuniting with Van Halen.
Eddie's son Wolfgang would join soon after as the new bassist. Since then, the band has toured with this "07 Lineup" and have not skipped a beat since. An upcoming summer tour begins July 15 and will feature thirty nine shows all throughout Canada and the U.S. Regardless of the various problems in the past, it is safe to say that Van Halen isn't going anywhere, but back to the top.


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Lectures, Events, New Publications
- New publication: CD-Edition "Series 13: Recordings in Egypt (Junker 1911) and the Archive (Stigler 1912–1913)"
- CD presentation at the conference "Friedrich Schürr in Romagna"
- New publication: CD-Edition "Series 14: Friedrich Schürr's Recordings from Romagna (1914)"
- Hot from the press – Volume 4 of the Phonogrammarchiv's Yearbook
- Cooperation with the Digital Archive Center for Music (DACM), Taipei
- Online Exhibition: HINeinSEHEN – HERausHÖREN (Update)
- 25 Years of the "Eternal Archive" – Audiovisual Archives Changing their Preservation Paradigm
- A look back at the presentation "Collectors, Archivists and Technology: Indian Scenario!"
- A look back at the conference "NENEI" (July 4 - 6, 2013)
- European Acoustic Heritage DVD released
- New publication: CD-Edition "Vol. 8: Musik um 1600"
New publication in the series "The Complete Historical Collections 1899–1950":
Series 13:
Recordings in Egypt (Junker 1911) and the Archive (Stigler 1912–1913)
Kenzi-Dongolawi, Nobiin and Arabic – Dholuo and Luganda
Editors: Clemens Gütl, Gerda Lechleitner, Christian Liebl.
Comments by Michael Achenbach, Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, Clemens Gütl, Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo and Birgit Pack.
Two CD series devoted to African languages have so far been released by the Phonogrammarchiv: Rudolf Pöch's Kalahari Recordings (1908) and The Collection of Father Franz Mayr: Zulu Recordings 1908. The present edition combines two further historical collections of spoken and sung recordings from the African continent. The first contains 14 field recordings (in Kenzi-Dongolawi, Nobiin and Arabic) made in winter 1911 during the Linguistic Expedition to Nubia, led by the famous Egyptologist Hermann Junker. The second collection includes six sound documents in Dholuo and Luganda; recorded at the Phonogrammarchiv between 1912 and 1913 at the instigation of the physiologist Robert Stigler, they feature the voices of "Kilimandjaro" Mori Duise and Simon Kasajja. The result of both international and interdisciplinary collaboration, the present publication again follows the well-established concept of the Phonogrammarchiv's CD edition: alongside the digitised original recordings and protocols, it comprises scholarly contributions on the context and protagonists as well as modern transcriptions of the recording contents complete with English translations.
Visit our Audio Publications site for a selection of sound samples from this publication.
-- online since January 8, 2015 --
CD presentation at the conference "Friedrich Schürr in Romagna"
(Ravenna, 10 October 2014)
In 1914, Friedrich Schürr, the Vienna-born Romance scholar, conducted the first phonographic field research in the area of dialectology in Italy. Equipped with the Phonogrammarchiv's Archivphonograph, he made 23 recordings of various Romagnol dialects in Ravenna and Forlì. 100 years later, these unique sound documents were published by the Phonogrammarchiv on its CD Friedrich Schürr's Recordings from Romagna (1914) – in cooperation with the Centro per il Dialetto Romagnolo of the Fondazione Casa di Oriani, and with the financial support from the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna. The study day organised on this occasion included several presentations by the editors and contributors of this publication, on Schürr's life and work as well as the Phonogrammarchiv and its historical holdings. The event took place on 10 October 2014 in the Sala Muratori of Ravenna's time-honoured Biblioteca Classense (pictured on the right). This was symbolic in two ways: the librarian Santi Muratori always readily assisted Schürr in his research, and it was exactly forty years ago that Friedrich Schürr was awarded honorary citizenship of Ravenna, where also his estate is housed.
-- online since November 17, 2014 --
New publication in the series "The Complete Historical Collections 1899–1950":
Series 14:
Friedrich Schürr's Recordings from Romagna (1914)
Editors: Cristina Ghirardini, Gerda Lechleitner, Christian Liebl.
Comments by Sanzio Balducci, Cristina Ghirardini, Franz Lechleitner, Gerda Lechleitner, Christian Liebl and Nadja Wallaszkovits.
This unique collection of 23 Phonogramme featuring various Romagnol dialects was compiled in 1914 in Ravenna and Forlì, where Friedrich Schürr, the Vienna-born Romance scholar, conducted the first phonographic field research in the area of dialectology in Italy. The recordings comprise not only Schürr's "Normalsätze" (standardised sentences specially created by him), but also weekday and month names, individual phrases and proverbs as well as dialect poems or prose.
The publication, which is the result of the fruitful cooperation between the Phonogrammarchiv and the Centro per il Dialetto Romagnolo of the Fondazione Casa di Oriani, was funded by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna. It contains not only an audio CD plus booklet, but also a data CD with supplementary material and Italian translations of most of the booklet contributions.
Visit our Audio Publications site for a selection of sound samples from this publication.
-- online since November 17, 2014 --
Hot from the press – Volume 4 of the Phonogrammarchiv's Yearbook!
Volume 4 is almost exclusively devoted to "Relationships of Speech Tone and Music" – a topic which reflects the Phonogrammarchiv's interdisciplinary approach. The contributions emanate from a workshop held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, jointly organised by the Phonogrammarchiv and the ICLTT (Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology). This time's field research report is on the Wayuu and permits insights into the underlying research design and methodology as well as the use of audio and video recording. Two reviews of recent publications in the areas of cultural studies, anthropology and ethnomusicology, together with the Progress Report for 2012, round off this volume.
Available from: Cuvillier Verlag, Göttingen
-- online since November 17, 2014 --
Cooperation with the Digital Archive Center for Music (DACM), Taipei
Recently, audiovisual collection came under increased threat by the unavailability of replay machines and their spare parts, aggravated by the rapid disappearance of knowledge and skills to professionally use and maintain such equipment. In response to this dangerous development, the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan, is establishing a regional competence center, modelled after the Phonogrammarchiv, with a focus on ethnomusicological materials. In its initial phase, the project concentrates on audio preservation. It was started last May with a local assessment in Taipei by Dietrich Schüller as a basis for further planning.
This was followed by a workshop, 7-18 July, in the Phonogrammarchiv, attended Professor Chun-zen Huang, the Director of DAC, with a team of four technicians and archivists. Directed by Nadja Wallaszkovits the Standards of the IASA Technical Committee have been discussed in principle as well as "hands-on", exemplified by the archive's collections, its equipment and its concrete workflows. Emphasis has been on source-critical signal extraction, alignment and maintenance of equipment, creation of preservation metadata, and the discussion of different data base structure.
Next step to follow is a visit of Nadja Wallaszkovits in Taipei in autumn 2014, aiming at consolidating local installations and the workflow. In its further development, the expansion into video is under consideration. Also, interest was expressed by the Conservatory of Music in Beijing to join in to form a trilateral partnership.
-- online since September 4, 2014 --
Online Exhibition
HINeinSEHEN – HERausHÖREN
Sound and video documents from the Phonogrammarchiv
"Saving Our Heritage for the Next Generation" is this year's motto of UNESCO's "World Day for Audiovisual Heritage" on 27th October. On this occasion, the Phonogrammarchiv has, for the first time, set up an online exhibition to provide insights into its unique and manifold holdings.
English version available now!
-- updated May 15, 2014 --
25 Years of the "Eternal Archive" – Audiovisual Archives Changing their Preservation Paradigm
AES Award for Dietrich Schüller
25 years ago, on the occasion of its 90th anniversary (on 27 April), the Phonogrammarchiv hosted the Second UNESCO Consultation of Users and Manufacturers of Technical Equipment for Audio, Film and Television Archives in Vienna (4–7 May 1989). This international group of archivists, technicians and representatives of the manufacturers of recording equipment and storage media was founded in 1987 under the umbrella of UNESCO to monitor the rapid development of digital recording systems. Its aim was to raise a voice for archival concerns, specifically the long-term accessibility of digital documents. Physically stable carriers were not in sight, and ever shorter commercial lifetimes of formats would have made the future availability of replay equipment unrealistic. In view of this scenario, the Vienna Meeting discussed for the first time the continuous digital lossless migration of contents to replace the old paradigm of preserving the original carrier and its replay equipment. For utmost efficiency, migration procedures should be automated.
Despite concerns of traditionally-minded archivists, this principle of "eternal" content migration was swiftly adopted, notably in Europe, where public broadcasters took the lead. The Phonogrammarchiv contributed to the standardisation of processes, specifically to the optimisation of signal extraction from original carriers, which is the scientific precondition for a methodologically impeccable migration principle.
On the occasion of this anniversary, Dietrich Schüller, former director of the Phonogrammarchiv and active supporter of the migration principle, was honoured with a Fellowship Award from the Audio Engineering Society (AES) at its 136th Convention in Berlin (26–29 April). He was also nominated Distinguished Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecturer of the Berlin Convention, delivering a paper entitled Preserving our sound recordings — 25 years since everything changed
-- online since May 5, 2014 --
A look back at the presentation
"Collectors, Archivists and Technology: Indian Scenario!"
by Suresh Chandvankar, Society of Indian Record Collectors (SIRC), Mumbai, India
On 30th April Dr Suresh Chandvankar from Mumbai gave a lecture on "Collectors, Archivists and Technology: Indian Scenario!". Following a short presentation of the history of India´s record industry, Dr Chandvankar spoke about the record collectors´ situation then and now, about the relationship between private shellac collectors and sound archives, and the "Society of Indian Record Collectors", co-founded by him some 25 years ago. This event was jointly organised by the Phonogrammarchiv and the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies of the University of Vienna.
-- online since May 5, 2014 --
Online Exhibition
HINeinSEHEN – HERausHÖREN
Sound and video documents from the Phonogrammarchiv
"Saving Our Heritage for the Next Generation" is this year's motto of UNESCO's "World Day for Audiovisual Heritage" on 27th October. On this occasion, the Phonogrammarchiv has, for the first time, set up an online exhibition to provide insights into its unique and manifold holdings.
English version available now!
-- updated May 15, 2014 --
A look back at the conference
"Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identitites in Northeast India"
"Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identities in Northeast India" was the theme of the conference which took place at the campus AAKH between 4th and 6th July. It was organised by the Institute for Social Anthropology and the Phonogrammarchiv, together with the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies of the University of Vienna. The predominantly international participants – mostly from India – discussed current issues from a number of scholarly disciplines relating to Northeast India. The 44 talks, a photo exhibition and two film screenings were appreciated by over 60 attendees. His Excellency, the Ambassador of India in Austria, R. Swaminathan, and Univ.-Doz. Dr. phil. Michael Alram, vice-president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, addressed the audience at the opening.
-- online since August 21, 2013 --
European Acoustic Heritage DVD released
Editor: Jürgen Schöpf
Graphic design: Roman Haynes, Jürgen Schöpf
Mastering: Johannes Spitzbart
Release date: April 30, 2013
© 2013, PhA-ÖAW, TAMK, ENSAG-CRESSON, escoitar
The EU-funded Project "European Acoustic Heritage" has come to a successful end with its last milestone: the double DVD "European Acoustic Heritage" (published by the Phonogrammarchiv, edited by Jürgen Schöpf and mastered by Johannes Spitzbart). This DVD is available for free directly at the Phonogrammarchiv as well as from the European project partners in Tampere, Grenoble and Santiago de Compostela (and can also be ordered for a handling fee). DVD 1 presents a static rendition of the current web page of the project http://europeanacousticheritage.eu, online at least until the end of 2014). Note that we recently added instructions for pedagogical work with sound that can be performed with groups of children as well as adults. This DVD also contains examples in surround sound format, e.g. a ride in a "Fiaker" (horse-drawn carriage) through Vienna's inner city. DVD 2 contains interviews about sound and acoustic heritage from all European partners. We especially recommend it for teachers of music, history, geography, art, sociology, ... check it out!
-- online since June 10, 2013 --
New Publication within the Series "Mechanical Music":
Vol. 8:
Musik um 1600
Die Automaten in der Kunstkammer des Kunsthistorischen Museums
Editor: Helmut Kowar. Editorial Assistance: Gerda Lechleitner.
The "Kunstkammer" holds five automata (four table automata and one art cabinet) with inbuilt organ works: the trumpeter Automaton (1582), the imperial ship (1585), the Bacchus carriage (ca 1602-1606), the Walbaum cabinet (ca 1620/25) and the Minerva carriage (ca 1625-30). These objects have to be rated as one of the earliest musical automata and sounding sources existing. In the course of recent restoration works it was possible to recreate their musical output. Due to conservational reasons the music of the trumpeter automaton, the imperial ship and the Bacchus carriage had to be reconstructed. The realization took advantage of partly well-preserved musical information on the automata's program carriers (discs and wheels) and of the still functioning pipes and drums of the automata. Thus the reconstructions give the true and authentic sound of the historical performance. The status of the organ works of the Walbaum cabinet and the Minerva carriage allowed repair of their mechanics and playback of their music. Every automaton presents its scenery together with an appropriate music. The music is surprisingly complex and displays unique examples of a performance practice showing improvised passages. The sound recordings are accompanied by transcriptions of all musical pieces.
-- online since May 24, 2013 --