24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY OCTOBER 16-22, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com no moral compass,” Kangalee said in the same interview. “Integrity is very important for me…And that’s something I’ve learned from Henry Miller, the idea that to be an artist you have to be really tough.” In 2025, he shared the story with his friend, the poet Magus Magnus, who is based in the Washington, D.C. area. “We are honoring Henry Miller with this piece,” Magnus says during a break from a rehearsal that the Weekly attends via a video call. Magnus adds they both admire in Miller his rebelliousness, but also his poetic drive, so palpable on the pages of The Smile. Who would have thought that the king of smut, the nonchalant jester could be so lyrical? Except for a few cliches, Henry Miller barely exists in mainstream American culture. Maybe the best proof of that is his absence from film and TV, mediums that stubbornly avoid Miller. That applies to his works—1970 was the only time Tropic of Cancer was put on screen—but also to his own story. The last serious attempt to show Miller as a character was the 1990 movie Henry and June, largely forgotten by now and based on Anais Nin’s recollection, not Miller’s own. (The literary and erotic relationship between Miller and Nin, who became famous thanks to her journals, was crucial to his development as a writer. Miller credited Nin for help with publishing Tropic of Cancer in 1934 and remained grateful to her until his death.) In the 35 years since then, the only time Miller was portrayed on screen was in 2015 in Mara with Juliette Binoche, a short film based on his Quiet Days in Clichy, and then episodically, as a companion to Lawrence Durrell in the third season of British TV series The Durrells in Corfu that cannot be described other than as a family show. In many ways, Miller experiences the same silence he did after he published Tropic of Cancer in 1934 in Paris; the curse continues. He always was and remains—taking out a brief experience with fame—unrecognized, at best disfigured in the popular imagination. “As far as Henry’s notoriety and fame, that really didn’t start across America until the book [Tropic of Cancer] was published with this intense attention due to prosecutors charging the book with obscenity,” Torén says. “The attention was entirely focused on sex.” Only with passing decades, the atmosphere of the scandal around Miller’s work had simmered down. Tropic of Cancer was the first of her father’s books that Miller’s daughter, Valentine Miller, read, at the age of 12. They were in Paris, she shares, with her brother and Miller’s fourth wife, Eve McClure, visiting writer Alfred Perles. “I asked Fred [Perles] what all the fuss was over the Tropic of Cancer, and he gave me a copy to read,” she writes by email. “I didn’t understand most of it, being a naive girl.” These days, upon reading all her father’s books and essays, she points to The Books in My Life and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch as her favorites. As in the case of Auguste, the world-famous clown, Miller’s story is a tragic one. Born in 1891 in Brooklyn, a son of a tailor, he left some traces in Paris (to an extent, popular imagination left him there), and he returned to the U.S. poor and unknown. He continued to be poor and rather unknown—international fame came first but wouldn’t really reach him during his 19 years in Big Sur, which he left only a couple of years after Tropic of Cancer was published. He became a writer late and even when he finally published, in Paris, he was already in his 40s. Add to this another 30 years of his books being banned during the “air-conditioned nightmare” of conservative post-war America; when Tropic of Cancer was published in the U.S. in 1961, Miller was 70 years old. That left him only 20 years to curate his stuff and enjoy being famous. And that leaves only a bit over 60 years, so far, for Henry Miller’s American scholars to start digesting his vast and multifaceted oeuvre. The main Henry Miller biographies were released only in 1991. (Miller rejected the first attempt at his biography by Jay Martin, published in 1980 as Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller: an Unauthorized Biography). The more recent biographical takes are Robert Ferguson’s Henry Miller: A Life and The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller by Mary V. Dearborn, who is the keynote speaker at the symposium in Pacific Grove, with a presentation titled “Nirvana Needed: Toward a New Henry Miller. What does Henry Miller have to say to us in the 21st century?” Dearborn is in a great company. The “Henry Miller in the 21st Century” symposium gathers most “That’s something I’ve learned from Henry Miller, the idea that to be an artist you have to be really tough.” MAGUS MAGNUS MAGUS MAGNUS MANNY ESPINOZA Poet and Smile director Magus Magnus in a selfie. The play premiered on Oct. 15. Dennis Leroy Kangalee during rehearsal for Smile: A Clown’s Ascension in New York City. Kangalee and Justine Stock (a producer for Smile) during their previous project together in January in Carmel. LITERARY continued on page 29
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