A Devil in Paradise

Conrad Moricand was an astrologer and occultist Miller met in Paris in the 1930s, part of the circle around the Villa Seurat that also appears in Anaïs Nin's diary. He cast horoscopes for the whole group and lived, even then, in genteel poverty. After the war he was destitute. In 1947 Miller, by then settled at Big Sur and earning enough to help, offered to support him as a houseguest for the rest of his life. Moricand accepted and arrived that winter.

The book tells what happened next. Moricand, a city man in his sixties, was unsuited to a cabin on Partington Ridge: he suffered from the damp and the isolation, developed a severe itch that no treatment relieved, and grew more demanding and more resentful as the months passed. Miller published the account in 1956 as a paperback original, and later included it in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch as its final section. Many readers consider it his most controlled piece of storytelling: one story, one arc, no digressions.

Moricand arrives from Europe in the winter of 1947 with his trunks, his pomades, and his astrological charts. The household adjusts around him badly: he is a formal, nocturnal man in a house of children and kerosene lamps, and he dislikes the food, the weather, and the informality. Then the itch begins — a skin condition no doctor can diagnose or cure. It confines him indoors, scratching, taking codeine, increasingly convinced his miseries are someone else's fault.

The second half of the book follows the collapse of the arrangement: Miller's patience turns to guilt, Moricand's dependence turns to accusation, and both men keep up the forms of generosity and gratitude after the substance is gone. Miller asks directly whether his rescue was kindness or vanity, and does not fully acquit himself.