20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY OCTOBER 16-22, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com The literary world has sidelined Henry Miller. Now scholars are trying to transform his reputation. By Agata Popęda The Literary JesterThe mainstream American reader still doesn’t know Henry Miller, and there are many reasons for that. First, everybody has heard of Henry Miller—the scandalous writer, “the king of smut,” as he suspected he would be called— and this taint of supposed dirt makes for an impression one knows all that there is to know. Secondly, in terms of literary and culture studies, Miller (1891-1980) died only recently. When it comes to the arts, 45 years is very little to establish anything in terms of significance or serious studies. It will take some time before the audience at large gets deeper than the surface of his writing and will have space to embrace the Miller who loved riding a bike and playing pingpong, and who wouldn’t do anything before consulting an astrologer. While Tropic of Cancer is a universally recognized title, followed by other “dirty books”—Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring and The Rosy Crucifixion—other works of Miller’s are barely mentioned in the mainstream literary culture. Those omitted titles include important works such as Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch or The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. They show a completely different Henry Miller: lyrical, idealistic, philosophical, bordering on mysticism. (That said, Tropic of Cancer remains on reader-curated lists of the best American novels of the 20th century.) Browsing through the catalogue of Ohio University’s Rare Books collection, one can find over 250 volumes by Henry Miller, some of them written miniatures of 20-30 pages, some author’s copies. His works still are not gathered in one place, as Canadian scholar and archivist Michael Paduano observed in a 2023 conversation with Magnus Torén, executive director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, on A Big Sur Podcast. Paduano marveled over a recent resurfacing of a lost Miller manuscript, The Book of Conversation with David Edgar, which he had the pleasure to prepare for publishing in 2023. There’s still so much to do in terms of discovering Henry Miller. It doesn’t help that, as writer Arthur Hoyle wrote in 2014 in The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur, that in the 21st century, Miller continues to be shunned by academia, excluded from the American literary pantheon and omitted from anthologies of the era. A symposium from Oct. 16-19 in Pacific Grove, “Henry Miller in the 21st Century,” seeks to change that, offering a burst of scholarly and artistic energy to move forward with and celebrate Miller. Torén, Hoyle and Paduano will be joined by leading and emerging scholars of Miller, 30 speakers total, many coming from abroad. In parallel but independently, audiences will be treated to Smile: A Clown’s Ascension, a play based on Miller’s story The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. The production offers a mode of interpretation regarding Henry Miller and the role he plays in his readers’ lives—that of a jester (yes, a provocateur), but mainly the “holy fool,” a role often chosen by a sage who puts on a fool’s hat to be able to speak the truth. Additionally, Gary Koeppel, Henry Miller’s art dealer and art publisher, is producing an exhibition of Henry Miller’s artwork titled The Art of Play at Asilomar Conference Center from Oct. 16-19. It features over 60 framed artworks, exhibition catalogs, posters and unique collectibles. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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