The Library of Roger Wagner - PBA Galleries

99. miller, henry. Typed letter from Henry Miller to author Claude Houghton, with holograph corrections. 9 page
TL to author Claude Houghton, with holograph corrections (some by Miller, some by Houghton).
Also with A.N.s. from Houghton to Miller, returning the letter in 1958.
Hollywood: [1942]
Houghton was a British writer who exchanged a series of letters with Miller beginning in 1942.
Miller said that his letters to Houghton were some of the most personal he ever wrote, and
this letter does not disappoint. Miller found important similarities in emotions described in
a book of Houghton’s to his own feelings when his second wife, June, left him for another
woman in about 1927, spurring him to write Tropic of Capricorn. (Interestingly, he states a
couple of times in the letter that June was his third wife, not his second, with no explanation,
so, a mystery.) On page 2, Miller really gets going: “In the year 1927 June, to whom I got
married soon as I had divorced my second wife, left me to go to Europe - with a woman, a
woman whom I loathed and detested. I hated as I had never hated before. it was like the Otto
Steele affair. (My only great hatred). That temporary divorce was a real death to me. Just as you
described yourself slowly and painfully struggling back to life, so might I described my return to
life during the next seven years. Up to that point I mentioned, when I saw the pattern of my life
clearly and significantly. In that three months when she was abroad I sank to the lowest point. I
resolved then that I would write a book about her, about us, which would be immortal...It will
take me to the end of my days to tell the story of my meeting with her and our life thereafter,
which lasted until one day in 1933 or 34, in Clichy, where I was living with Perlès, when she
suddenly ran away, leaving a note on the table for me, saying she wanted a divorce. I have never
seen her since...I have not the courage to see her, and yet I must see her one day - there must be
a reckoning....” In the following few pages, Miller quotes brief passages from Houghton’s book
and contrasts their striking similarity with the events, arguments, feelings, philosophies, etc. in
his (Miller’s) past. A fine and wonderfully revealing letter. It was published in “Writers Three: A
Literary Exchange On the Works of Claude Houghton with Henry Miller, Claude Houghton,
Ben Abramson” (Ann Arbor: Roger Jackson, 1995). Fine.
(1000/1500)
You can bid absentee directly from the item description in
the online version of the catalogue at www.pbagalleries.com.
Or bid during the auction using the Real-Time Bidder.
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