Looking down on the Empire State by Henry Miller an unpublished typescript 1931
Paris: An unpublished typescript for a magazine (circa December 1930 to March 1931)
*A satirical essay about the construction of the Empire State building during the great depression*
4to., 7 pages including the title page; rust stain from a paperclip to the top right-hand corner of the title page, and an indentation to others; A small chip to the top right of the title page and a couple of small tears along the same edge; there are two folds showing the transcript was folded in an envelope; the transcript is largely finished barring three corrections, with one in Miller’s hand. The title page bears the name and address of Madeleine Boyd, who for a short time was Miller’s New York literary agent along with a pencilled note, most likely in Miller’s hand that says “Rubber-neck’s dream”.
This short typescript dates to December 1930 to March 1931. Miller had been in Paris for several months and was relying on the good will of friends and acquaintances to put him up and feed him. It was at the beginning of December 1930 that he moved in with an American Lawyer called Richard Osborne. He was given 10 francs a day by him in return for him keeping the apartment clean. It enabled Miller to have a relatively short period of security after what had been a tumultuous first few months of grifting to keep a roof over his head.
During these 4 or so months, Miller wrote every day, on his novel “crazy cock” and on several essays for periodicals, including this one, which he hoped to get paid for. He sent most to a small army of friends and supporters back in the US, but in the main to Madeleine Boyd. She said at the time that the typescripts were “so good I think there is a chance of their being sold” then spoilt the praise by adding that she would return them to him “when I finally do give up hope of selling them”. In letters between the two later in 1931, he asks for her to return his offerings, and said to her that while he appreciated her faith in him, he had doubts that America was ready yet for his work. “….my stuff is too frank, too obscene perhaps….” This unpublished typescript sent to Boyd and then presumably returned was written by Miller from Osborne’s Paris apartment, during the construction of the Empire State building. The satirical essay is spoken through a tour guide in the future, who is showing the rubberneckers around a fantastical skyscraper. The guide describes a monstrous building of 563 floors, with a flagpole at the top, and a structure made of pure ivory. The narrator tells the rubbernecking tour party that it is “the most wonderful building in the world with the exception of those still more wonderful buildings now in course of construction which will outdo everything past and present including the ones to come and those not yet dreamed of...” Miller wrote this at time of worry and anxiety for workers in the city, as the great depression took hold. His narrator chirpily talks of the flag flying regardless of bank panics – or bank runs, of citizens attempting to get their money out.
According to Miller’s biographer Robert Ferguson, his earlier trip and bike ride across Europe and its haphazard sprawling cities with his second wife June Smith, had given him a new perspective about the man-made Manhattan grid. He came back and saw New York differently, as a place displaying the worst excesses of society, being the worship of success, blind mania for progress and promotion of a work ethic like it was a religion. This couldn’t have been symbolised more at that time in New York by a range of brash mega structures such as 40 Wall Street, The Chrysler Building and Empire State being constructed, amidst the backdrop of the wall street crash and the beginnings of the great depression. He pointedly pokes fun at the owners of these buildings and at the gratuitous nature of their plans to be bigger, brasher and bolder than the last. A real scarcity to have anything like this from his first year living in Paris, written only a few months before he put pen to paper to write Tropic of Cancer.