A New York tailor, the father of Henry Miller, and the subject of "The Tailor Shop" — the longest piece in his son's 1936 book Black Spring, where he is called only "the old man".
Heinrich Miller was a New York tailor and the father of the American writer Henry Miller. He was born in 1865 to German immigrants. His own father, also called Heinrich, was a tailor from Minden in Hanover who changed the family name from Muller to Miller on reaching America, and who set his son up at the same workbench he used himself in the family home in Yorkville, Manhattan. He met Louise Nieting in 1889 and married her in 1890. Their son Henry was born in 1891 and their daughter Lauretta in 1895. In 1900 the couple moved further into Brooklyn, to a rowhouse at 1063 Decatur Street in the Bushwick section.
In 1912 Louise's father died and left enough money for Heinrich Miller to buy a half-interest in a tailor shop at 5 West 31st Street in Manhattan, in partnership with Isaac Walker, the son of the original owner. The business did badly almost from the start. His customers came from the New York theatre world and from the richest families in the city — the actor John Barrymore was one, and so was Frank Harris, the editor of the Saturday Review — but he was better at drinking with them than at collecting from them. His son joined the shop as an apprentice in late 1913.
In the 1920s he gave up liquor and took up religion instead. He grew attached to his minister and sank into a deep depression when the man left for a parish on Long Island. After that he walked in the cemetery every day and sat there for hours on a stone bench. The shop went on failing. By the 1930s he was working on commission and writing to his son, by then living in Paris, to ask for three dollars a week for his lunches — to be sent to the shop rather than to Decatur Street, so that his wife would not know.
Prostate cancer left him an invalid at home. In late 1940 his son broke off a driving tour of the United States and came back to New York for his parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, and found him weaker again. Early the following year, word reached Henry Miller in Natchez, Mississippi, that his father was dying. He flew home, the first flight he had ever taken, and arrived two hours after his father had died in his sleep. Heinrich Miller was buried in Evergreen Cemetery.
"The Tailor Shop", the longest of the ten pieces in Black Spring, is his son's account of the years in the West 31st Street business. It never gives the father a name. He is "the old man" on almost every page.
How Heinrich appears in its pages: A New York merchant tailor, called "the old man" on nearly every page. He drinks with his customers, cannot collect his bills, and employs his son in the shop. Miller's own father.
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Parent of
Born in 1891 to Heinrich Miller, a New York merchant tailor, and Louise Nieting. He worked as an apprentice in his father's shop on West 31st Street from late 1913.
Depicted in · 1936
"The Tailor Shop", the longest of the book's ten pieces, is an account of the years Miller worked for his father in the West 31st Street business. The father is never named. He is "the old man" on nearly every page.
Parent of
Born in 1891 to Heinrich Miller, a New York merchant tailor, and Louise Nieting. He worked as an apprentice in his father's shop on West 31st Street from late 1913.