Passion for literature - Günther Stölmen

Here publishes for the first time the record of a deep friendship and a romantic love relationship with literature that continued throughout the long path of the lives of two writers, despite all circumstances. It began with a coincidental lunch in the vicinity of Paris in late 1931, when Inez Nen, wife of Hugh Parker Guillet, who was twenty-eight years old at the time, and was a young woman ready to embark on a mental and physical adventure, met Henry Miller, the "wandering writer," as one friend called him, who would turn forty on December 26 of the following year. All signs indicated that they were incompatible, but they shared one thing: both were emerging writers and passionate lovers of words. After a few months of exchanging intense intellectual conversations — at French café tables, at the Guillet family house in Louveciennes, and through a stream of letters — the relationship exploded into a relationship. Violent. Over the next ten years, the always bankrupt man who called himself "Feti Brooklyn" and the overly sensitive Spanish "little girl" (as Edmond Wilson called her) tried to build a life together. When those efforts failed, for reasons made clear through the correspondence, Henry Miller and Inez Nen resumed their separate lives in the early forties. But they remained connected by a fundamental bond. After shedding fleeting emotions, and after fulfilling each other's material and emotional needs, and after the risky companionship of breaking social taboos, their relationship remained firmly based on their shared need to create themselves through writing. As Henry Miller later wrote, it was a pursuit "to realize myself with words." For him, it was a obsessed quest, psychoanalyzed in his past and the suspicious role women played in it. For Inez Nen, in her diaries which she kept recording since childhood, it was an unceasing pursuit of a detached emotional present. In February 1932, Miller wrote to Inez Nen, "Oh God, I almost go crazy when I think that one day must pass without me writing. I will never be able to speed up. And surely that is why I write passionately, and with despair." After a few months, Inez Nen wrote in her diaries: "The same thing that makes Henry resilient makes me so too, is that what is inside us is a writer, not a human being. Passion for literature." - Gunther Stuhlmann