Michael Fraenkel

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• He let a broke Henry Miller sleep on his floorMiller's preface remembers being down and out in Paris in the early 1930s while Fraenkel was comfortable. Fraenkel had recently come back from the Philippines, where he had sold a quantity of books that the American publisher Doubleday had remaindered, and he was playing the stock market and doing well at it. He was already living at 18 Villa Seurat. There was no spare bed or couch, so Miller slept on the floor for a few nights: 'I was damn glad to have a roof over my head.'
• The neighbour on the ground floorBy the time Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934, Miller had a place of his own at 18 Villa Seurat and found Fraenkel occupying the ground floor of the same building. Miller assumed Fraenkel owned it, then corrects himself in the same paragraph: before he left for Greece the building belonged to a Madame Guisbourg.
• He came upstairs for breakfast and stayed until midnightOnce Miller had moved in, Fraenkel visited daily. He would arrive in time for breakfast, stay through lunch and dinner, and go back down to his own flat around midnight, and the two of them talked the whole time. Miller writes that he seemed to get nothing out of these days, was fascinated by them anyway, and ended each one exhausted.
• Miller called his mind rabbinical, and said he could not speak plainlyThe preface gives the sharpest portrait of him in the book. 'He had what you could call a "rabbinical" mind, which meant sharp as a razor blade.' Miller adds that it never wore out from use, that two people could hardly be more unalike than the two of them, and that 'Talk was his meat.' Underneath the compliment is the complaint Miller then spends three years repeating: 'He simply could not utter a plain, declarative sentence.'
• Miller and Alfred Perlès took banknotes from his walletAlfred Perlès was an Austrian writer and one of Miller's closest friends in Paris. Miller writes that Perlès never took part in the talks except when the two of them were desperate for cash. Then they would call on Fraenkel in his apartment downstairs, engage him in a heated argument about any old thing, and help themselves to some of the banknotes in his wallet while he argued.
• He suggested they stop talking and write letters insteadThe book exists because of a remark Fraenkel made in a cafe. After a few months of daily talk, sitting on the terrace of the Cafe Zeyer on the Place d'Orleans in Paris, he proposed that he and Miller write to each other rather than keep talking. The correspondence that followed ran from November 1935 to October 1938 and, with few exceptions, was written in Paris.
• He owned the press, and paid to print the book himselfMiller says Fraenkel made it clear from the start that he would publish the book at his own expense, with royalties split between them. Miller was surprised to discover that Fraenkel owned a small press somewhere in Belgium, which he believed Fraenkel had originally set up with the poet Walter Lowenfels. Volume One appeared in June 1939 in an edition of 500 copies, printed in Belgium and missing about a hundred pages of letters; Volume Two followed from Mexico in 1941, also in 500 copies.
• The argument between them was about deathFraenkel's position, which every Miller letter pushes against, was that the modern world was already spiritually dead. He had published a book on it, Bastard Death, for which Miller wrote the preface, and Miller's letters keep returning to that book. Late in the correspondence Miller states the disagreement flatly: 'I saw it in you, because you had raised Death to pre-eminence. You had introduced Death with a capital D.'
• Miller told him his idea of death was too abstractIn one letter Miller turns Fraenkel's own subject back on him as practical advice. 'I want you to have a clean death, in the flesh, not these anonymous deaths which you enter presumably in microbe fashion.' What follows is blunter: 'No more death in a room. Make it an outdoor death.'
• Miller called him a weathercock stuck on bad weatherThe image runs across several letters. 'You are a fancy weathercock, but the weather is always bad.' Miller extends it later: 'You're an imperishable weathercock, variable and true as the weather itself, variable and true as God Almighty, variable and true as the tides.' And in the middle of a fine spring day he asks the question that could serve as a description of Boris in Tropic of Cancer: 'Listen, are you up in your attic praying for rain?'
• Miller said he explained everything and revealed nothingThe complaint Miller makes most often is that Fraenkel buries himself in terminology. Hundreds of pages in, Miller still does not know who a woman Fraenkel keeps referring to actually was: 'We don't know yet who Mathilda was, or why. You tell us everything — and nothing.' His advice is to drop the apparatus: 'Some day you will find it in your own interest to just be Michael Fraenkel and take the full consequences for being such.'
• Miller told him he could look ridiculous, and kept writing to himAfter describing a Yiddish film about an over-serious religious student, Miller applies the comparison directly. 'Often, when you are at your best, your "noblest," I have sensed something ridiculous about your attitude.' He says he has no wish to make fun of him personally. Elsewhere he calls Fraenkel pestiferous and cantankerous, in the same breath as the English novelist D. H. Lawrence, and then explains why he does not walk away: 'It's precisely because I see you whole that I don't run out on you.'