By Saskia de Rothschild
Henry Miller was a 13-year-old teenager walking along Kosciusko Street when his life as a writer began. It was 1905 Brooklyn and on every street corner you could buy a cheap crime paperback for ten cents.
That day, a man holding a book walked up to Miller. “He asked me if I would like to read a story called “Crime and Punishment” by a guy named Dostoyevsky,” Miller recalled in a 1970 interview for Playboy.“I figured it would be one of those cheap thrillers so I took the book home.”
At the time, there was no Radio, no television and the only books Miller had ever read were “penny dreadfuls,” cops-and-robber stories known for their triviality.
Miller couldn’t believe what he read. “This was real writing,” he said, “This was literature.” Dostoyevsky’s lonesome anti-heroes were his first encounter with books. The Brooklyn streets were his first inspiration.
Miller became a successful writer, of course, but not in Brooklyn. He started perfecting his art after he left the borough and took a boat to Paris. Yet he built the foundations of his imagination while making his way through the Brooklyn streets. “To be born in the street means to wander all your life,” he wrote in his novel Black Spring.
From the year he was born in 1892 until he left for Paris in 1928, Miller was “just a Brooklyn boy” as he called himself. He was a happy child in Williamsburg, a sorrowful teenager in Bushwick and a hopeless adult in Brooklyn Heights.
In his books, whether he travels on his beloved bicycle or by foot to go sing serenades to his first love, Miller’s journeys through the Brooklyn streets have as much meaning and space as the destinations. The three neighborhoods he lived in marked three phases in his life, three stages in the development of his vision. With the help of Pete Hamill, the quintessential New Yorker and legendary journalist and a Brooklyn native himself, I went to explore Henry Miller’s vision of the borough.
I tried to see the borough through Miller’s eyes and words, maybe to illuminate my own vision of these streets, maybe because, growing up in Paris, Miller was my Dostoyevsky.
Driggs Avenue and the “Golden Years”
“I began my sojourn in paradise the first year of my life.”
Henry Miller in a 1971 New York Times article about his “old neighborhood.”
The Millers moved to Williamsburg from Manhattan just two months after Henry was born, in the winter of 1892. The move was likely spurred by the recent opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, which, according to Hamill, created a wave of German immigration from the East Village to Brooklyn. “They went to live where trees were still alive,” Hamill said.
The family lived on the first floor of 662 Driggs Avenue until 1899. The red brick house still stands today, surrounded by empty lots awaiting future condos.
At the time, Williamsburg was an industrial area, filled with small-scale industry and breweries operated by the Germans. “I remember, as if etched in acid, the grim soot-covered walls and chimneys of the tin factory opposite us. I remember the black hands of the iron –molders,” recalled Miller in Black Spring. The streets were made of dirt except for the trolley car tracks that would run in front of the Miller household.
Through his childhood eyes, Miller transformed the industrial streets into wonderful imaginary territory. In his Book of Friends, one of Miller’s last memoirs before he died in 1980, he talks about the years on Driggs Avenue as one the happiest times of his life. Across from his window, Miller could see Filmore Place, a small street that still runs from Driggs Avenue to Roebling Street. He called it the ideal street.
“Ideal for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician,” he wrote in Tropic of Capricorn.
In 2009, Filmore Place was declared an historic district by the state; as if Miller’s impressions had finally been heard nearly a century later.
Today, the one-block stretch has kept some of the quirky and mystical feel it had in Miller’s childhood. No cars go by in the middle of the day. Parked midway, there is an old 1970 red Ford van that seems to have come straight out of a cartoon. There is a medieval knight armor and a giant wooden nutcracker puppet in front of a door. Christmas decorations, a bit soggy in the late winter, still illuminate the street. It is perfectly silent. On one end (not Miller’s end) two young boys are covering green monster graffiti with white paint. Instead of the Saloon where Miller was sent to “rush the growler,” meaning fetching a pitcher of beer for his father (who was an alcholic), at the side entrance, now stands a fancy “Margo Bakery” where you can eat pink scones and drink organic coffee.
In Miller’s memories, there was a crazy cat lady, Mrs Omelio,who lived across from him and used to keep thirty cats on her rooftop. I listened for meows and looked at the doorbells for the signs of an Omelio descendant. I also looked for Miller’s favorite candy store and for the theatres where he was first acquainted with art.
Every Saturday, the seven-year old Miller would receive a dime from his mother to go to the Amphion theatre, a vaudeville house at the end of Driggs Avenue. With the ten cents he could sit in what in those days of casual racism was “nigger heaven,” he recalled.
Miller was always fascinated with theatre in all of its forms. “He clearly must have been obsessed with language from an early age and the silent movies weren’t entertaining enough for him,” guessed Pete Hamill.
Those were the “golden years” and moving out was a traumatizing experience for the eight year old. He was pulled apart from his childhood friends and was taken to Bushwick, a neighborhood he found “unspectacular” and “bourgeois.”
1063 Decatur Street: “The street of Early Sorrows.”
“How well I know the tremendous decalage between what one wished and what one does!” Henry Miller to Lawrence Durrell; 1959
The house on Decatur Street where Miller lived for more than seventeen years is gone. It has been replaced by Public School 45, in the heart of Bushwick, a neighborhood now mainly populated by the Hispanic and black community.
A huge concrete building has been built above Miller’s sorrows.
Maybe he would be happy to know. He never liked the elegant two-storey house where he started hating his mother; a puritanical woman who would mistreat Miller’s mentally retarded little sister. Young Miller attended Public School 85 on the corner of Covert and Evergreen where he met Cora Seward, the first love of his life. But he wasn’t loved back and the Bushwick streets became the theatre of his sorrows.
Every night, he would walk six to seven miles to Cora’s house at 181 Devoe Street in Greenpoint. “It was the same walk night after night−a long walk to Cora’s house on Devoe Street and then home. I never stopped to ring the doorbell and have a chat with her. I was content to merely walk slowly past her home in the hope of seeing her shadow in the parlor window. I never did, not once in the three to four years during which I performed the crazy ritual.”
“He sounds like he might have been shy at 15,” observed Hamill when I told him the story. “It’s a good quality, because when you are shy you listen to what is being said and how it is being said. It’s what made his writing believable even if it was just his imagination.”
When I walked on Devoe Street late at night looking for number 181, I wondered if Miller had exaggerated. Would he really travel from Bushwick to Greenpoint every night for four years just to walk under a window? In the end I didn’t care if he really did. I thought it was the most romantic thing on earth. I nearly rung the doorbell looking for a Seward descendant who would tell me about his beautiful great grandmother. I thought about what Pete Hamill had said: “When you write about your life, it’s always fiction, a work of the imagination. Remembering, you re-imagine.”
Not once did Miller kiss Cora, and yet he wrote that Cora Seward would be the last woman he would think of on his deathbed. But meanwhile during these same years of abstinent walking, Miller paradoxically discovered Burlesque dancers and prostitutes. When he was 14, his mother took him to see “Wine, Women and song” by Lew Hearn at the Follies, on the corner of Graham and Broadway. “Not so far from the home of my first love” Miller recalled. It was a burlesque number and it was the first time Miller got to see half-naked ladies (it was always a mystery for him why his puritanical mother took him to burlesque theatre).
Slowly turning into an adult, three different women compete in Miller’s mind; a terrible mother, an alluring Burlesque dancer and an inaccessible first love. Later, he would write about women with the same complexity and ambiguity; falling in love with whores and hating his idealized lovers.
When I asked Pete Hamill about 1910 Brooklyn he told me about Halley’s Comet and the Dodgers. “I wonder if Miller liked sports, everyone liked sports at the time,” he said before explaining that the Dodger’s first field in Eastern Park was bordered on both sides by trolley tracks, which earned them the nickname “trolley dodgers.”
“Once there was the radio,” Hamill said, “in the summer when there was a game, you could walk twenty blocks without ever missing a pitch.” Before televisions, I gathered people’s main diversion was to sit outside, gossip and tell stories.
Hamill also told me about the light in Brooklyn before they started putting tall buildings everywhere; “refracted from the harbor, it gave a beautiful glow to the borough.”
In 1909 By his early twenties Miller dropped out of City College two months after the beginning of classes. He started working at the Atlas Portland Cement Company and later went back to working in his father’s tailor shop. It is in those years of odd jobs that the thought of becoming a writer started crossing his mind. “I wanted nothing more of God than to become a writer,” he wrote in a letter to his young friend Lawrence Durrell forty years later. “Confined to my father’s shop, a slave to the most idiotic kind of routine imaginable, I broke out−Inside. Inwardly I was a perpetual volcano. I will never forget the walks to and from my father’s shop every day, the tremendous dialogues I had with my characters. And never a line of any of this ever put to paper. Where would you begin if you were a smothered volcano?”
Miller still had far to go.
Brooklyn Heights: The wake-up call
“I wanted so much, so much to be a writer and I doubt that I ever would have become one had it not been for the tragedy with June.”
Henry Miller to Lawrence Durrell; 1959
In 1924, after one failed marriage and some time spent in the city, Miller moved back to Brooklyn with his new wife June Mansfield. He didn’t move back to his beloved Williamsburg but to Brooklyn Heights.
Miller called the 91 Remsen Street apartment “the Japanese love nest.” His first address in Brooklyn Heights was a beautiful space, all made out of wood and completely beyond the writer’s budget.
After a year and a half, Miller and Mansfield were evicted because they couldn’t pay the 90-dollar rent. In the next year, they had to move various times, sometimes staying at friends’ houses, sometimes just renting small rooms that matched their budget.
Hamill remembered walking in Brooklyn Heights with Norman Mailer, another Brooklyn boy. “It was the seventies, Mailer pointed out the house to me. I didn’t know he had lived there. No one could afford to live there at the time, even less now.”
There were not happy years. Navigating from odd job to unemployment, having to suffer the sight of his lover’s betrayal, Miller was feeling he was slowly going mad.
In 1926, after Mansfield had decided they should live with her lesbian lover Jean Kroski, all three of them moved into a basement on the corner of Love Lane and Henry Street. Miller’s darkest years were paradoxically spent in clean and proper Brooklyn Heights.
The basement Miller once described as “a lunatic asylum, only worse” has now been replaced by a CVS. Half a block away, there is a barely finished white condo waiting for his first occupants. “LoveLanecondos.com” says the sign.
I stood on the stoop of Miller’s 91 Remsen Street address and read the name of the new occupants out of curiosity. Obviously no Millers. Not one sign of Miller around, both tangible or abstract. Across the street, two blond children on shiny scooters sped to a front door. A black nanny runs after them with a stroller: “Henry, Henry, Be careful Henry,” she screams
It was the only connection to Miller around.
In 1927, when June and her lover fled to Europe without even telling him, Miller suffered the humiliation of having to move back with his parents. Miller took his first boat to Paris the next year, just months before the Great Depression.
Brooklyn in Paris
“I am a patriot of the 14th ward Brooklyn where I was raised. The rest of the United States does not exist to me except as idea or history or literature.
Like the 14th ward of my childhood, Paris was my country, I have never succeeded in being more than a local patriot.”
In The Henry Miller reader, 1959
In Miller’s imagination, Brooklyn and Paris are two magic entities detached from the rest of the world. Some say he wrote about Paris like a 1910 Pre-War Brooklyn, desperately trying to remember the dreamy streets of his teenage years.
I think Miller saw Paris through his Brooklyn eyes when he wrote Tropic of Cancer only one year after having moved away. I think he saw Brooklyn through his Paris eyes when he recalled his childhood years in Black Spring (written in Paris.) The two places have merged in his mystical vision of the streets as they lead him to love, passion and disillusions.
I asked Hamill what it was like to read Henry Miller in the fifties. “He marked the end of the old bullshit United States, the last of literary taboos. Every cop or district attorney in the city spoke like Miller’s novels, just no one had ever written it down.”
“He never should have moved to California,” Hamill said. “He was better at right-angle places.” Oh how I agree, Mister Hamill.
(Thank You to Henry Miller Blogger Randy Chase for his help reporting this story : http://cosmotc.blogspot.com)
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