This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

At the age of 89, Henry Miller was still writing. His output included 1,400 letters to Brenda Venus, 60 years younger, an American actress, former ballerina and Playboy model. Miller was besotted. For the last four years of his life, blind in one eye and partially paralysed in one leg, she was his paramour and muse. 

Venus’s invitation to Moscow came to her from Vladimir Putin

Lawrence Durrell said of their relationship: “She enabled him to dominate his infirmities and to experience all the Joys of Paradise.” Erica Jong was a little less fulsome: “He had the heart of a child beneath his old man’s infirmities.” 

Of Venus, Jong wrote: “She depicts herself as the last great love of Henry Miller’s life, and I am sure that is what he wanted her to believe (though I happen to know there were others).” As to Venus’s relationship with Miller, Jong downgraded it to “an experience”.

It was nevertheless an experience that filled the last years of Miller’s life and, doubtless, he thrived on it. The letters he wrote to her were voluminous — over 4,000 pages eventually contained in a 200-page book, Dear, Dear Brenda, in 1986. In a review in the Los Angeles Times, Noel Young wrote that it “brought to an end one of the most extraordinary romances ever conceived … he fell hopelessly, shamelessly in love …worked himself into a lather, at least on paper”.

Brenda Venus, now in her seventies and living in America, is in no doubt she kept Miller alive for his last four years. “I think Henry said something to that effect to his friend, Lawrence Durrell. Larry wrote in the preface of my first book Dear, Dear Brenda that Henry had become the young lover and renegade of his earlier books. I do know that his joie de vivre seemed to return and I could see a sparkle in his bright blue eyes.” And doubtless a sparkle in her eyes, too: “What a wonderful experience to enjoy love, life and relationships.” 

Venus met Miller “at a time when we both needed something fresh and positive, something to look forward to”. A lot was in the timing for her. Henry had lost the will to live, she claimed. “Destiny gave our two souls a renewed life. We experienced four joyful years before his death in 1980. He started writing books again, painting, and every day he wrote me letters — often two or three a day.”

“I provided Henry the opportunity to fall in love one last time,” Venus maintains. Miller was “nearly out of steam when I met him … but there was sex and eroticism in the air. He even started to have erotic dreams he would describe to me in his letters.” He also wrote to her about his life, his time in Paris in the 1980s and about his love for June Mansfield (his second of his five wives, portrayed by Uma Thurman in the 1990 film Henry & June) and “how she saved him from a 9-5 mundane life and gave him the monetary support and encouragement he needed to fulfil his dreams as a writer”.

The benefits from this epistolary exchange were not one-sided. “I was a young ingénue making a lot of movies, dancing in the limelight, traveling the world, going on yacht outings and to Hollywood parties and premieres,” Venus maintains and that Miller “gave me a sharper presence, a confidence to bring a more artistic and realistic focus to my life’s prose”.

Then came Venus the ballet, written by a Russian playwright who was inspired by the Dear, Dear Brenda collection. It was performed at the Moscow Art Theatre by members of the Bolshoi Ballet and starred the Olympic gold medal gymnast, Svetlana Khorkina, with choreography by Yuri Smaltzoff. 

The passage of time has not, at any rate, dimmed Venus’s gratitude towards him

Venus’s invitation to Moscow came to her from Vladimir Putin. “I think we got a call at Smaltzoff’s ballet studio on Sunset Boulevard. I remember that Mikhail Baryshnikov was doing a barre when the phone rang and a voice inviting me to opening night at the theatre to see the play in Moscow,” she recalls. “As someone who had studied ballet as an adult, having a play written about my life and performed with the Bolshoi was an unbelievable experience and honour. The trip to Moscow for the premiere and the events and opulent dinner surrounding the performance was, to use a cliché, surreal.” About Putin she restricts herself to observing that his response to the ballet was “favourable”. 

I first met Miller in London in 1967 when he was aged 76. I had the temerity to ask if he had slowed down or contemplated giving up writing. “Hell, no,” he responded, “I’m just getting the hang of it.” 

He was in good form because Britain had lifted its ban on his books, notably on this occasion Sexus, third part of the Plexus, Nexus trilogy. Not so in Australia. Miller detected my accent. “Australia, what kind of a country is that? My books are banned there.” 

Would he ever visit Australia? I asked. “Never, not even if it was the last place on earth,” he responded, “because it is an unimportant country, d’you see? I would rather go to Japan because I love the Asiatics. I have a poster of Ho Chi Minh on my ceiling in my bedroom. Mao Zedong has a lovely face.”

Miller had fought long battles to have the ban on his work lifted and resented that censorship was even a matter for debate. “I believe in complete freedom,” he told me, before lamenting, “but are we getting the best from people in the Arts? Art is being exploited and freedom debased. There is too much bad painting, bad art. Writing is becoming a parade of bad language, d’you see?”

Miller was, of course, not the only author once banned in Australia. The Department of Trade and Customs could ban any book it deemed “obscene, indecent, blasphemous and seditious, or those identified to excessively emphasize sex, violence or crime”. Other banned writers included Hemingway, William Burroughs, Simone de Beauvoir, D.H. Lawrence, J.D. Salinger and Gore Vidal. 

For his part, Miller didn’t seem overly impressed by the Beat generation. Asked his opinion of Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg he replied, “To be honest, I don’t think much of either.” As for Ernest Hemingway, “I thought he was a limited writer with a pretentious masculine quality.”

Miller’s verdict on his many romantic and sexual relationships was not burdened by guilt. “I have been married five times,” he said to me, “but I don’t think this is important. I enjoyed each life with my women. I don’t have any unusual regretful feelings about my marriages, or any of my relationships with women. I ought to be ashamed of my shamelessness, perhaps. I was trying to tell the truth about my experiences, d’you see?”

The passage of time has not, at any rate, dimmed Venus’s gratitude towards him. Now aged 75, she describes her book about the two of them, Venus, published last year, as “the story of the sexual awakening of a naive girl from the southern U.S. who secretly read Tropic of Cancer as a teenager, moved to Hollywood to become an actress and, following the most improbable of events, met Henry and became his final muse and last love”.

Miller once wrote that “to love at the end of one’s life is something special … to wake up with the words of love on one’s lips — what bliss”.

It seems he managed to do so.