This is an odd little book. Brenda Venus is/was a very minor actress of exotic good looks (she played a Native American trainer of Clint Eastwood the mountain climber in "The Eiger Sanction") born in Biloxi, Mississippi who managed to initiate a correspondence with Henry Miller very late in his life -- in the late 1970s. This book reprints his "love letters" to her. In view of the fact that she was so much younger and physically engaged elsewhere, this was largely an affair of the mind. Miller is alternately poetic, majestic, and vulgar. The "conversation" is pretty one sided: I wish she had included her own letters to him. The only time some interesting sparks fly is when they meet and she asks him some hard questions about his depiction of women in his books, particularly his wife June, and he explodes with rage. As I say, an odd little book that teeters between historic/literary interest and questionable exploitation.
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The review of this Book prepared by David Loftus
