June Smith Miller

Henry Miller's Muse

born 1902

Henry Miller's second wife resides in a mythic and foggy zone of literary history. Very little is known about her and most of what is known comes filtered through the words of Miller himself and, to a lesser degree, Anais Nin, who was, for a short moment, June's lover.

June Miller is variously described as "precocious and romantic", "intense and sexual", "frail and pretentious". She was born June Edith Smith, third daughter of Wilhelm and Francis Budd Smerth who modified their Austrian last name when they arrived in the United States and settled in Brooklyn, New York in 1907.

June first met Henry at Wilson's Dance Hall during the Summer of 1923. At the time, Miller was married and the father of a daughter. Henry has captured the moment he first set eyes on June. From Tropic of Capricorn:

I notice her coming towards me; she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully blanced on the long, columnar neck...The whole being was concentrated in the face. I could have taken just the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night on a pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, the whole being glowed from them...The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife. This smile, this face, was borne aloft on a long white neck, the sturdy, swan-like neck of the medium-- and of the lost and the damned.

By June of the following year, Henry was divorced from his first wife and married to June. A passionate, stormy relationship, it finally burned itself out nine years later. By that time, Henry's affair with Nin was in full bloom. According to a Henry Miller biographer, the last contact Henry had with June, occured in 1977, three years before he died. June sent him a note telling him she was moving to Arizona to live with her brother. But little is known about her life after her marriage to Henry. In Henry Miller: A Life, Robert Ferguson writes:

She preserved her silence to the end, and in some quarters acquired a mythic status of her own that exceeds Miller's. Miller, Anais Nin and Alfred Perles all created and published their own portraits of her, and in the literature of recent times perhaps only Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's On the Road and the hero of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, has been as comprehensively mythologized.

YEAR  TEAM    POS  BA     AB      H     HR    RBI
1991  Erotics  of  .294  344    101      4     37
1992  Erotics  of  .216  255     55     12     37
1993  Erotics  of  .244  418    102     22     68
1994  Erotics  of  .149  363     54     13     36
1995  Erotics  of  .287  268     77      3     29
1996  Erotics  of  .286   28      8      0      3

6 Seasons          .237 1676    397     54    210

1997 Paradise Pisces Roster

Henry & June Movie Site

June Miller- Cosmic Baseball Player Plate
URL http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/jmiller7.html
Published: October 30, 1996
Revised: September 21, 1998

© 1996, 1997 by the Cosmic Baseball Association
Email: editor@cosmicbaseball.com

323