THE CRUEL FATE OF IMMORTALITY: ZELDA FITZGERALD AND JUNE MILLER
“I’m going to write a book about June.”
“I’m writing about her. I know more than anybody will ever know about her.”
“Well I’m talking about something totally different, as a woman, from the inside out. I can get into the poetry of June.”
- Henry and June, 2002
It is the artist’s nature to romance and seduce those they find beautiful — to make their beauty permanent. The poets, the painters, the sculptors have all carved their lovers into the halls of history. Though we can recall Picasso’s muse, Françoise Gilot through his portraits of her and the actress and model, Edie Sedgwick, through the films of Andy Warhol, we can’t say that muses often experience devotion after their beauty expires. Despite the artists’ ability to make their muses eternal, their own ability to love them is frequently on a deadline or at the expense of their lover’s happiness.
The American author and socialite F. Scott Fitzgerald loved his wife Zelda, “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self-respect.” She was the “manic-pixie-dream-girl” of the 1920s, a monumental figure of the Jazz Age and Fitzgerald’s muse. Fragments of her personality can be seen throughout his acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby and reported on in his fourth novel Tender is the Night. F. Scott loved his wife so much that he had her institutionalized aer a mental health crisis and stole excerpts of her diary to be used in The Great Gatsby.
Zelda detailed this crisis and subsequent ones in her singular novel, Save Me the Waltz. After a suicide attempt and time spent in a mental institution, she wrote the semi-autobiographical work and sent it to her husband’s publisher. This stirred outrage in F. Scott who left scathing comments on her writing and punished her for sending the book out to be published. He had intended to write about the same content in his own novel, Tender is the Night, so he forced his wife and muse to remove material from her own autobiographical novel. The muse’s experiences are not her own, they are claimed by the artist who is supposedly devoted to her and if she tries to advance into the role of the artist, she is punished.
It is clear that F. Scott was jealous of his wife’s ability to write and couldn’t stand to see her achieving acclaim in the field that he worked in. Ultimately her novel was published but to disappointing reviews and a poor reception. This is likely because of the extreme edits that were made by her husband for his own selfish benefit. In a review of her husband’s novel The Beautiful and the Damned for the New York Tribune, Zelda wrote, “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar.”
Unfortunately this is an all too common tale within the art world. Artists, most often men, are drawn to women they can’t understand. They mythologize or minimize the lives of these women to make their own accomplishments seem greater. They are drawn like moths to a flame of exciting, enticing young women who cannot be controlled. These ingenues inspire romance and devotion if only while their skin doesn’t wrinkle and their breasts don't sag.
June Miller was one of these women — a true enigma. She was the second wife of the American author Henry Miller and the subject of desire for the French born writer Anaïs Nin. She has been depicted in the works of both Miller and Nin and was portrayed by the actress Uma Thurman in the 2002 film Henry and June. Even those who knew her well could never be sure that she graduated high school or if her name was even June. She was a mystery to all and like all mysteries, once solved they lose their allure.
Miller was born Juliet Edith Smerdt to a poor Jewish family. She likely dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to join Wilsons’ Dancing Academy in Times Square where she met Henry. The author had abandoned his previous wife and family to the charms of the young dancer. She was the definition of a femme fatale; irresistible to anyone who crossed her path. With sharp features and an assertive gaze she could tame even the wildest of characters — qualities that likely drew Miller in.
In “The Three Faces of June: Anaïs Nin’s Appropriation of Feminine Writing,” Lynette Felber writes, “The male fascination with the femme fatale is rooted, paradoxically, in the simultaneous compulsion to unmask her and the futility of doing so. If the function of the male gaze is to compensate for the loss of the mother's gaze while reinforcing his difference, when the woman is onlooker the process is not one of compensation and mastery over another, but rather one of reconnection and mastery of self.” As his muse, and in his novels, Henry could control June and assert dominance in their relationship — something that he couldn't achieve in his own life. The relationship of the artist and the muse creates an unjust power differential that always exploits the artistic subject.
Most famously, June was depicted as Mona in Tropic of Cancer and as the inspiration for other characters throughout his other novels. Her sensuality and allure inspired the liberated sexuality prominent in the novel and contributed to Miller’s literary contemplation of men who "stumbl[e] through the mazes of their conceptions of woman."
During their decade of marriage, June kept Henry on his toes. She invited her friend and lover, Jean Kronski, to live with them in their apartment, she flew off to Paris, and flirted with his peers. It was far from a perfect union but Miller must have loved the chaos and more importantly loved the experiences it brought him which would inspire his novels Crazy Cock and The Rosy Crucifixion. While Henry Miller’s writing benefited from the chaos of their marriage, June couldn’t funnel her pain into a novel, she could only sit with her heartbreak while her husband profited from it.
In Paris, the Miller’s became acquainted with Anaïs Nin, a diarist and writer. Like Miller, Nin quickly became enamored with June. She sought to understand June in a way that Henry couldn’t; to know her as a woman not just as an object of desire. Given that Nin and June shared the same gender identity, the frustrations and anxieties that are present in many artist-muse relationships were not present in theirs. The women were able to understand and see each other outside of the male gaze, an experience that was inaccessible to Miller.
Though there may have been a greater emotional connection between Anaïs and June, that doesn’t mean that their relationship was safe from the exploitative dynamic of the artist and the muse. Nin was inspired by June and wrote of her in her novels as Sabina in The House of Incest and in A Spy in the House of Love. She once again became an archetype in someone else’s story.
Though Nin and Miller may have had a greater emotional connection because of their shared gender experience, that did not absolve them of the problematic artist/muse relationship. Nin was able to publish her work and earn profit from it while June could only witness her marriage fall apart because of Nin’s involvement with Henry and herself.
June Miller is immortalized as a significant literary figure because of her relationships with Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. She is the source of inspiration for two of the greatest writers of the Lost Generation and remains one of the most famous femme fatales because of her footprint in their works. But the cruel fate of muses is to be forgotten by their creators. June Miller died in Arizona after suffering from electric shock therapy treatments in the ‘50s and with the desire to write an autobiography. An aspiration that went unaccomplished.
Lindsay Paul, 21, New York City - USA ✯ IG: @llindsaypaul
“Lindsay is a student of English Literature and World Cinema living in New York City. She aspires to travel the world and talk to strangers whenever she can.”