Betty Ryan
The American painter who lived in the same Paris house as Henry Miller. One evening of her talk about Greece is the reason the trip, and the book, happened at all.
The book
At a glance
- Miller's neighbour in Paris, and the reason he went to Greece
- The house they both lived in, over a glass of white wine
- Chinese
- China, North Africa, the desert, and Greece
- Betty Ryan · American, then living in Paris
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBetty Ryan was an American painter who lived in the same house as Henry Miller in Paris in the 1930s. The Colossus of Maroussi is Miller's account of the months he spent travelling in Greece in 1939, and its first sentence says he would never have gone to Greece had it not been for a girl named Betty Ryan who lived in the same house with him.
She gets one evening, and one sentence near the end, and that is all she gets. The evening is the reason the book exists. Over a glass of white wine she talked about her travels, and Miller followed her from China to North Africa to a riverbank somewhere in a light so strong that he lost her in it. Only long afterwards did he learn that the river was near Olympia, in Greece.
This profile is drawn from the New Directions text, read in the Internet Archive's scan of the 1958 printing.
How the book draws them
- The first sentence of the bookMiller opens by saying flatly that he would never have gone to Greece if not for a girl named Betty Ryan who lived in the same house as he did in Paris. Nothing else in the book is credited so directly.
- The evening over a glass of white wineThey began by talking about China and about the Chinese language, which she had started to study. Then they were in North Africa, in the desert, among peoples Miller had never heard of. He says he always listened to her closely, because her experiences were strange.
- A painter rather than a storytellerMiller's point about her is that she did not narrate, she painted, and that what she described stayed in his head as finished pictures. "She is not exactly a story teller, this girl, but she is an artist of some sort because nobody has ever given me the ambiance of a place so thoroughly as she did Greece."
- The river that sent him to GreeceThe part of her talk that did the damage was a stretch where she was suddenly alone, walking beside a river in intense light. Miller followed as best he could in the blinding sun, lost her, and found himself wandering in a strange country listening to a language he had never heard. At the time it was simply Greece to him.
- Named again at DelphiNear the end of the trip, standing at the Castellian Spring above Delphi, Miller traced back the chain of accidents that had put him in Greece: a friend at a Broadway dance hall, then his wife June, then Betty Ryan, then Lawrence Durrell, then Theodore Stephanides, Katsimbalis and the painter Ghika.