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Item Details
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| Heading: |
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| Author: |
Miller, Henry |
| Title: |
SOLD BY PRIVATE TREATYTyped letter from Henry Miller to author Claude Houghton, with holograph corrections |
| Place: |
Hollywood |
| Publisher: |
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| Date: |
[1942] |
| Item # : |
180396 |
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| Sale Number |
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424 |
| Lot Number |
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99 |
| Sale Name |
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| The Library of Roger Wagner |
| Sale Date |
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03/18/2010 |
| Sale Time |
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1pm PST |
| Low Estimate |
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$ 1,000 |
| High Estimate |
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$ 1,500 |
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* No Lots sell for less than half the Low Estimate. Some Lots may have Reserves. |
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| Description: |
| 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. |
| 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). |
| Condition: |
| Fine. |
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