Signed, Henri Miller and Nancy Meyer Durrell, 1st Printing, NF - To paint is to Love, - 1968

MILLER, Henry.
To Paint is to Love Again, including the text of Semblance of a Devoted Past .
New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968.

First Printing. "Manufactured in the United States of America". Pp (10),[3]-117,(3). Illustrated in colour. Large 8vo (220 x 283 mm), tan cloth, with white lettering to front, white & red lettering to spine. Top edge dyed orange-red. With photo-illustrated end-papers.

First Edition in Very Good+ Condition!!

Signed and inscribed by Henri Miller and Nancy Isabel Meers Durrell!

Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He broke with existing literary forms and developed a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, and mysticism. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, which are based on his experiences in New York City and Paris (all of which were banned in the United States until 1961). He also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism, and painted watercolors.


Nancy was born in Eastbourne in 1912, and though the first five years of her life were comfortably genteel, her family suffered a mysterious downturn in fortune, necessitating a move to a factory town in Lincolnshire, where they entered that malignantly English drama of keeping up appearances. This experience, combined with a miserable spell at boarding school, left her with a lasting disdain for bourgeois convention. She escaped to art school in London, made friends with a rackety array of male students and reinvented herself as a beauty, with the help of a blunt-cut bob and borrowed lipstick.
It's almost 100 pages before Larry toddles on to the scene, a small blond man who disguises what would later prove a ferocious tongue under an endearing – to Nancy, at least – fondness for baby talk. After a spell in one of those underfurnished Sussex cottages so irresistible to 1930s bohemians, they lit out for Corfu for an Edenic period of swimming, sailing and creative work. The fall came in 1937, when they joined Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris. The couple had always rowed, but now Larry's bullying slid into cruelty ("Nothing but a dirty Jew" was a favourite insult). Nancy's apparently charming silence is revealed to be the product of a sustained campaign on the part of her husband to keep her isolated behind what Miller later described as a "wall of ice". By the time war began, the marriage was over, although the couple had by then produced a child. After an impossibly dramatic escape from Greece to Cairo aboard various boats and lorries, she left him for good, spending the rest of the war in Palestine.