WHEN HENRY MILLER MET GEORGE ORWELL: A CLASH OF TITANS

By: Alan Bisbort

George Orwell and Henry Miller, two of the most influential writers of the 20th century, had a single brief encounter in Paris in Dec. 1936. It has intrigued and baffled scholars and fans of both writers since. At the time, neither was the household names they’d become. If Miller was known at all, it was for the scandal surrounding Tropic of Cancer than the contents of the book. Orwell had published Down and Out in Paris and London and some novels that had reached a small audience. When he passed through Paris that day in 1936, he was on his way to fight the fascists in Spain. Had he been killed, we’d never have Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. PKM revisits this encounter with the help of Miller biographer Mary V. Dearborn.

Original article published at pleasekillme.com

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Just before Christmas 1936, George Orwell was headed to Spain to lend support to the republican cause in its fight against Gen. Franco’s fascist insurrectionists (an experience he would later detail in Homage to Catalonia). On his way there, he stopped in Paris, a city he knew well, having lived there eight years earlier when he was still Eric Blair (an experience detailed in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published, to little fanfare, three years earlier).

In addition to picking up some necessary travel documents for his Spanish trip, Orwell wanted to meet an expatriate American writer named Henry Miller who’d been living in Paris since 1930. Orwell had read a smuggled copy of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and reviewed it kindly in the New English Weekly the year before.