Walking Paris with Henry Miller

The origins of Henry Miller’s second wife, June Smerth, have long remained a mystery. In recent years, research by Randy Chase¹, James Decker,² and Karl Orend³ has pointed to the town of Biory or Bori in Bukovina as her home town. Their conclusions rely on the ship manifest from her father Wilhelm’s 1907 voyage to America which is available at the Ellis Island Foundation web site. This handwritten document is difficult to read, but the entry for Wilhelm’s last residence and place of birth has been transcribed into the Ellis Island database as “Biory, Austria.” This is the town cited by Chase and Decker as June’s probable place of origin, while Orend discovers⁴ in Biory a misspelling of Bori. Biory does appear to be a poor transcription as no such town is known to exist. The town of Bori, in the Bukovina region of Romania, is real enough, but a second manifest from Wilhelm’s trip points us in a different direction.

Database entry from Ellis Island with incorrect transcription of Wilhelm Smerth’s name and residence

The Ellis Island manifest was created in New York upon Wilhelm’s arrival. I found a second manifest, completed in Hamburg at the outset of the trip, while searching the records on Ancestry.com. The handwriting on this document is clearer and, when compared with the New York manifest, reveals Brody, a town in western Ukraine. Brody is the transcription provided by Ancestry.com, though it assigns “Biorz” to the New York document.

Brody appears twice in Wilhelm’s entry on the New York manifest				Brody from the Hamburg manifest

Ancestry.com also provides a Hamburg manifest for the trip Wilhelm’s wife and children made to join him in New York in 1908. Chase and Decker have described the New York manifest for this trip in their articles, but the Hamburg document presents a new piece of information. Here, the Smerth family is identified as Galician, from the town of Lemberg. Lemberg is the German name for L’viv, another city in western Ukraine, roughly 90 kilometers (55 miles) southwest of Brody. In 1908, L’viv was the capitol of Galicia.

Hamburg manifest showing Lemberg designation for the Smerth family

Seeming to confuse the issue, the New York manifest declares the Smerth’s last permanent residence as “Russ. Moldawica” (Moldovita in Romanian), which is located in Bukovina. Galicia, which contains both L’viv and Brody, shares a border with Bukovina. Both were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

On a second page of the 1908 New York manifest, which appears to be unavailable through the Ellis Island search, the birthplace of each member of the Smerth family is listed. Here we learn that June’s mother Fanie was born in Podhajce. She bore her two eldest children in Brody and her three youngest in Moldovita.

To tie up all of the information found in these ship manifests, I present the following scenario: June’s parents, Wilhelm and Fanie, were born around 1878 in Galicia. Wilhelm is from the town of Brody and Fanie from Podhajce. By 1897, they are married and living in Brody, where Fanie will bear two sons, Gustawa and Hermann. By the beginning of 1902, the young family has moved to Moldovita in Bukovina where June (Julia) is born, followed by her two younger brothers, Siegmund and Ignatz. In the summer of 1907, Wilhelm departs for America, leaving his wife and children to take up temporary residence in L’viv. There they remain for one year before following him to New York.

The Documents

Copies of the complete ship manifest pages discussed in this article are linked below. Entries describing the Smerth family in the 1908 New York manifest are found on three separate pages.

1907 New York manifest for Wilhelm (line 4)
1907 Hamburg manifest for Wilhelm (line 31)
1908 New York manifest for Smerths pg. 1 (lines 20-25)
1908 New York manifest for Smerths pg. 2 (lines 20-25)
1908 New York manifest for Smerths pg. 3 (line 94)
1908 Hamburg manifest for Smerths (lines 6-11)

Notes

1. Randy Chase, “June Comes To America”, Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog. November 29, 2005.
   http://cosmotc.blogspot.com/2005/11/june-comes-to-america.html.
2. James M. decker, “June Miller: Remnants of a Life”, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal. Vol. 3, 2006.
3. Karl Orend, “Alfred Perlès and June Mansfield—Some Unforgiving Encounters in the Shadow of Henry Miller”, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal. Vol. 3, 2006. [see photo captions]
4. The 2003 mailing list discussion in which Orend is advised to regard Biory as Bori has been preserved online:
   pg 1: http://www.ehpes.com/czernowitz/czernowitz12/testfile2003/0289.html
   pg 2: http://www.ehpes.com/czernowitz/czernowitz12/testfile2003/0290.html

When he arrived in Paris in 1930, Henry Miller found the walls of his new city plastered with lurid posters calling for public vigilance against the scourges of syphilis and cancer:

In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with “Défendez-vous contre la syphilis!” Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis.¹

Miller was fascinated with the posters and the depiction of the crab in particular may have been an inspiration for the title of his novel, Tropic of Cancer. Through these early days in Paris, Miller was under the sway of Michael Fraenkel’s ‘death theme’ and the pages of his novel are littered with references to death and disease.

The syphilis poster above was commissioned around 1910 and warns that the disease is contagious and may lead to blindness, paralysis, ataxia and insanity. The crab poster counsels that cancer can be killed if treated early. It was launched in 1930 to coincide with the first national defense-against-cancer week.

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 189

The example of the syphilis poster was found at the Wellcome Library in London.

The cancer poster was found at the Institut Curie in Paris.

The June 2005 issue of Le Journal de l’Institut Curie contains an article by Nathalie Huchette providing further information on the publicity campaign behind the cancer poster (PDF - see page 19).

Karl Orend wrote in Nexus, volume 5 (page 148) that Miller was influenced by a cancer poster “showing a black and a red crab fighting each other.” I assume the above poster is the one he had in mind.

In Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller introduces a character named Peckover who works with him at the Paris Edition of the Chicago Tribune. “Another poor devil who works on the paper”,¹ Peckover is overworked and harried by his wife. He has been moonlighting in a dentist’s office to pay for a set of false teeth. Peckover is presented as a proofreader and an Englishman, but the model for this character was actually a sportswriter from San Francisco named Madison Kirby.

Kirby joined the Paris Edition staff fresh off a string of newspaper jobs in San Francisco and New York.² A short story of his was published in a 1927 edition of The New Yorker, attesting that his writing ambitions extended beyond journalism.

Kirby had been a middle-distance runner for his track team at Polytechnic High School and Stanford University and he enjoyed impressing his colleagues by performing athletic stunts. A typical maneuver was to hurdle the rows of garbage cans encountered on his walk home from work and on one occasion he startled a colleague by impulsively leaping into the Seine to swim across, rather than taking the bridge.

Working in a skyscraper in New York, Kirby had found it humorous to terrorize his colleagues by climbing out an office window and dangling from the ledge by his fingertips—only to pull himself in again a few moments later. At the Tribune offices in Paris he routinely performed a variant on this trick, ducking out of a window in the city room and inching his way along a narrow cornice on the exterior wall to emerge again by a different window.

One night in August 1931, Kirby went out the window and didn’t return. The Tribune’s editor Waverley Root recalled that just as Kirby was reaching the second window a sudden breeze drew the window doors shut on his hand. Kirby let out a cry and plunged several stories,³ finally crashing through a skylight on the ground-floor.⁴

In Tropic of Cancer, Miller and Van Norden (Wambly Bald) receive the news from a Tribune colleague at the Coupole: “There’s just been an accident at the office, he informs us. One of the proofreaders fell down the elevator shaft. Not expected to live.”⁵

Though Miller replaces the city room window with an elevator shaft, the results of the fall remain true to life:

It seems that Peckover, when he hit the bottom of the shaft, regained consciousness before anyone could reach him. Despite the fact that his legs were broken and his ribs busted, he had managed to rise to all fours and grope about for his false teeth. In the ambulance he was crying out in his delirium for the teeth he had lost.⁶

Root’s account of that night confirms the injuries to Kirby’s legs and ribs as well as the detail about him groping around on all fours for the set of false teeth:

Kirby was on his hands and knees in the middle of the floor.

“I’ve lost my false teeth”, he said. “Find My false teeth.”

Absurdly, I ran my fingers through the swamp of blood surrounding him and found the teeth.⁷

Kirby was loaded into a delivery truck and taken to hospital, where he died that night. His death was reported in American newspapers on August 15, 1931. “I hope the editor is not sore because I am not working tonight” were cited as Kirby’s last words.⁸

Miller used the tragic event in his novel to comic effect, alternately poking fun at the absurdity of Peckover’s demise and taking a swipe at the maudlin reaction of his Tribune coworkers:

The false teeth! No matter what we said about the poor devil, and we said some good things about him too, we always came back to the false teeth. […] We laughed all night about it, and in between times, we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs. […] They made his life miserable with their fucking little semicolons and the fractions which he always got wrong. […] but, now that he was dead, they would all chip in lustily and buy him a huge wreath and they’d put his name in big type in the obituary column.⁹

Who got Kirby’s job?

In Tropic of Cancer Van Norden (alternately referred to as “Joe”) suggests a bright side to Peckover’s death:

“There’s only one good aspect to it,” says Joe. “You may get his job. And if you have any luck, maybe you’ll fall down the elevator shaft and break your neck too. We’ll buy you a nice wreath, I promise you that.”¹⁰

A few pages later we learn that Miller does indeed get Peckover’s job, “after sucking the boss’s ass for a whole week.”¹¹

In real life Miller was never a sportswriter for the Tribune. His highest rank at the paper was Assistant Finance Editor, which was an overblown title for the proofreader of the stock quotations page. A more likely candidate was Sterling Noel, who had been receiving letters from Kirby urging him to come to Paris to land a job at the Tribune. Noel booked passage to France aboard a freighter and only learned of Kirby’s death shortly before departure. When he arrived in Paris, he was immediately put to work at the paper occupying Kirby’s old chair.¹²

Notes

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 77
2. “California Writer Killed In Paris”, Modesto News-Herald. August 15, 1931
3. Accounts differ as to how far Kirby fell. Waverley Root says five stories while the Modesto News-Herald reports four and the Oakland Tribune three.
4. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition, 175-176
5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 140
6. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 141
7. Waverley Root, The Paris Edition, 176
8. “Madison Kirby Dies In Paris of Fall”, Oakland Tribune. August 15, 1931
9. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 142
10. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 143
11. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 149
12. Ronald Weber, News of Paris: Journalists in the City of Light Between the Wars, 109

I was recently directed to this great old postcard of avenue Anatole France in Clichy by a commenter on this site, Michael Jones. A cleaned-up version of the image has been added to my post about Henry Miller’s apartment on this street.

Examining the full-resolution image, I was unable to make out any addresses on the buildings, though someone has thoughtfully drawn an arrow pointing out a particular balcony. The light-colored awning on the left reads “ET LIQUEURS” (presumably the tail of “Vins et Liqueurs”—a liquor store) and the darker storefront next to it is “Librairie Anatole France”—a bookstore. The postcard is undated, but the cars in the picture should provide a pretty good estimate of the era. Compare with the images below of two popular French cars from 1932, the year Miller and Alfred Perlès moved to Clichy.

1932 Peugeot 301 - source		1932 Citroën C6 G - source

Looks like a match to me! For a glimpse of how avenue Anatole France appears today, check out the more modern postcard below, which points out the entrance to Miller’s address on this street.

The source of the older postcard is notrefamille.com and the more recent postcard is something I picked up in Paris few years ago.