Michael Fraenkel

Michael Fraenkel is the man in the opening pages of Tropic of Cancer: he is Boris, the gloomy prophet of the 'Villa Borghese,' announcing that the weather will continue bad. In life he was the landlord of that scene and the philosopher behind it — a Lithuanian-born New Yorker who made enough money in the book trade to retire at thirty, moved to Paris to write, and spent the rest of his life elaborating a single idea: that modern civilization was spiritually dead, and that admitting it was the beginning of rebirth. Henry Miller absorbed the idea, argued with it for a decade, and filed its author into three of his books.

The death of Werther's younger brother

Fraenkel was born in Kopul, Lithuania, in 1896 and came to New York with his parents in 1903. He graduated from the City College of New York, where, as a freshman in 1916, he read Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and — by his own account, repeated to Anaïs Nin twenty years later — suffered the transforming pain of his existence: a calamitous love for his elder brother's sweetheart. Out of the two came the idea he never put down, the discovery of what he called his inner death.

The other thing he acquired was money. He entered the book trade selling encyclopedias and remaindered books, and by 1926 had earned enough to stop working and move to Paris to write. The first formulation of the death idea became his first book, Werther's Younger Brother, drafted by 1929 and published in 1930 in an edition of four hundred copies.

Carrefour, and the case for anonymity

He met the poet Walter Lowenfels in 1928, and by 1929 the two had a manuscript each and no publisher. Their answer was to found one — the Carrefour Press — and to open it with a manifesto, Anonymous: The Need for Anonymity (1930), arguing that art should be published without names, the writer dissolving into what they called the total creative consciousness of the world. Carrefour's first books, Fraenkel's novel and Lowenfels's play USA with Music, duly appeared unsigned.

The experiment ended in court, though not the way the story is usually told. In 1932 Lowenfels sued George S. Kaufman and George Gershwin, charging that Of Thee I Sing had lifted the plot of his anonymous play — and a plaintiff cannot stay anonymous. Carrefour credited its authors from then on.

18 Villa Seurat, and the school of death

Lowenfels introduced Fraenkel to Henry Miller, and in 1931 Miller moved into Fraenkel's apartment at 18 Villa Seurat for about a month — broke, unpublished, and working toward the book that would open in that flat. The three writers shared the conviction that the West was dead and ran what they called a school of death through most of the thirties. Fraenkel's part in Tropic of Cancer is double: he is in it as Boris, and his urging — drop the literary conventions, write the raw spoken truth — is part of the standard account of how the book found its voice. He made the case himself in a 1947 essay, 'The Genesis of Tropic of Cancer.'

The retirement fortune did not survive Paris. By the end of 1932 the money was nearly gone, and Fraenkel went back to what he knew: he spent three years selling books in the Philippines, returning to Paris in 1935. The following year Carrefour published his two central statements — Death in a Room, fifteen poems written between 1927 and 1930, and Bastard Death: The Autobiography of an Idea, whose introduction is addressed to Miller.

Hamlet

In 1935 Fraenkel, Miller, and Alfred Perlès agreed to write a book of letters about death — a thousand pages, Miller proposed, 'the longest funeral sermon in history.' Perlès objected that death was too abstract and quit within a month; at Miller's suggestion the subject narrowed to Shakespeare's Hamlet, and on that pretext Fraenkel and Miller corresponded until November 1938. Carrefour published the exchange as Hamlet in two volumes, 1939 and 1941 — Fraenkel holding the position that modern man is spiritually dead and Hamlet the first autopsy, Miller answering with appetite and scorn for systems. It was republished in 1962 as The Michael Fraenkel–Henry Miller Correspondence Called Hamlet.

Mexico, and after

Fraenkel left France in 1939, the year London published Death Is Not Enough — his first book under someone else's imprint — and spent the war years in Mexico, keeping the journal that surfaced as Land of the Quetzal (1946) and The Day Face and the Night Face (1947). In 1946 a literary quarterly named DEATH dedicated its first issue to him. He married Daphne Moschos Gillam in 1953 and died in 1957. Daphne ran Carrefour until her own death in 1991, and his papers — passports, autobiographical notes, the Mexican Journal typescripts — are now at Yale's Beinecke Library.

Folklore and open questions

Fraenkel's online record is thin and partly garbled. What circulates, against what the archives support:

• 'Born 28 June 1896, died 22 May 1957.' The finding aids at Yale and Washington University record only the years. The New York Times obituary of 24 May 1957 fits the death date closely — but its headline gave his age as 62, which matches neither year.
• 'Born in Kopcheve (Kapčiamiestis).' Both archives say Kopul, Lithuania. The identification with Kapčiamiestis is somebody's guess, repeated.
• 'A plagiarism scandal destroyed the anonymity movement.' Inverted. No one exposed Lowenfels as a plagiarist — Lowenfels sued Kaufman and Gershwin, claiming Of Thee I Sing plagiarized his play USA with Music, and suing meant signing his name. The manifesto died of its author's own lawsuit.
• 'He owned the building at 18 Villa Seurat.' Miller settled this himself. In his preface to the Hamlet letters he writes that he had always assumed Fraenkel owned the house, but that until shortly before he left for Greece it belonged to a Madame Guisbourg.
• 'He died in London.' Repeated in reference entries, recorded in neither finding aid. His papers at Yale include a death certificate, for anyone who wants to settle it.