Hamlet

Michael Fraenkel — writer, publisher of the Carrefour imprint, and the man whose death-haunted philosophy Miller alternately absorbed and mocked — had been part of Miller's Paris since the hungry first years; he appears in Tropic of Cancer's opening pages, thinly disguised, as Boris. Around 1935 the two agreed on a scheme: a correspondence about Hamlet, to run a thousand pages, conducted as letters and published as a book.

The premise was a door, not a subject. The two men wrote to each other from November 1935 to October 1938, and the letters range anywhere the argument leads: Shakespeare occasionally, but mostly death — Fraenkel's great theme — against Miller's insistence on life at any cost, with literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and the gathering European catastrophe pulled in as ammunition. It is Miller as pure intellect and pure combatant, a register the novels only sample.

Carrefour published Volume I in June 1939, at Santurce in Puerto Rico, printed in Belgium in 500 copies and left incomplete — some hundred pages of letters were held back. Volume II followed in June 1941, printed in Mexico, the war having scattered the press itself. The scarce originals were condensed three times: a French edition in 1956 that cut both writers by about a third, a 1962 combined edition printed by Daphne in London, and Michael Hargraves's selection Henry Miller's Hamlet Letters (Capra, 1988), which is the practical way to read it now.

Letters — the two-volume record of a single running argument. Fraenkel holds the position that modern man is spiritually dead and Hamlet the first autopsy; Miller counters with appetite, instinct, and scorn for systems, his letters swelling into essays on whatever the week provided. The correspondence advances the way arguments between friends actually do: by escalation, digression, and refusal to concede.

There is no story and no resolution. The letters simply stop in October 1938, a year before the war began, and neither man brought the argument to a close. Read it for Miller with his sleeves rolled up, thinking in public against a worthy opponent; the Hargraves selection trims it to the letters that earn the postage.