When Elaine Kraf died, in 2013, no major publication, or minor one that I know of, published an obituary. This is perhaps not surprising; although she had worked as a painter and as the director of a special education school, she probably stood out more as a novelist, and she had not published a book in more than thirty years. the Times Dyed I call his first novel,I am Clarence”, an “extraordinary achievement”, but it was long out of print, as were two books that followed it. But the fourth and last book of his, “The Princess of 72nd Street,” remains printed; was republished by the Dalkey Archive Press in 2000, and has enough of a following to make it seem at least a little strange that an online search for Kraf turns up little more than a six-line Wikipedia page, a couple of short biographies on the websites of the publishers, and a handful of listings of the remaining copies of his works.
I first researched Kraf after asking on Twitter for recommendations for a very specific type of book. I wanted to read formally experimental novels written by women in the 1970s and 1980s that had what I considered a certain New York sensibility. I imagined ashless cigarettes on empty steps, halogen reflections in puddles of foam, hot asphalt under hurried feet. Novelist and critic Lauren Oyler suggested “The Princess of 72nd Street”; it was the only suggestion that qualified. When I asked Oyler how she came to know about the book, I had a feeling the novel was going to follow: she had found out about it from a critic, Kaitlin Phillips, who had been proposed to by the novelist Joshua Cohen. Cohen had heard of Kraf not from a writer, but from an actor, the late Joel Gold, who, Cohen explained, “paid his bills as a cameraman and a fashion photographer, but devoted his life to acting, not so much as stand-in.” up as an improvising monologuist in the tradition of Professor Irwin Corey/Lord Buckley.
“The Princess of 72nd Street” tells the story of Ellen, a bipolar artist living in Manhattan who paints “tangerines, brown teapots, scrolls and books.” Much of the novel refers to her “glows,” or manic episodes, when she becomes Esmeralda, who wears clothing with “flowers, cascades of color, or abstract designs,” as well as medallions: an Egyptian ankh, and “crushed metal found in the trash”. .” She is proud, crazy and charming, a star in the sky who is often taken for “a prostitute, sabra, American Indian, actress, dancer, witch, holy saint, mother, girl, mystic, ethereal spirit, bitch, goddess of the earth. ” The Upper West Side that Esmeralda governs “is not a country for Nordic blondes of impeccable taste” but for “filmmakers who talk about cinema but never do it, some filmmakers who do, residents who do nothing or once did something , actors and actresses waiting in line, overly casual psychologists, and a few self-made mystics,” people drinking, sleeping, and smoking together in small apartments lining “sooty streets with outdoor tables set right between the garbage bags ”, where sunlight shines off the grime.
The book is a high and a low at the same time: a paroxysm of sex and alcohol and, above all, color. It’s that rare thing: a true underrated classic. So why didn’t Kraf ever publish another book?
Kraf was born in the Bronx, in 1936, to a couple of lifelong New Yorkers, Harry and Lena Kraf, née Rosenfeld. His father was a member of the New York State Senate from 1956 to 1965 and the State Assembly from 1967 to 1972. (He got a obituary in the Times.) Elaine was his only child. In her early forties, she married a poet and credit and collections consultant named Martin Altman, who told me that his ex-wife—they divorced in 2002—had rejected her parents’ hopes that she would settle down with a man. of business or a son of the congressman. Instead, she went to art school. Her father, Altman said, “didn’t attend his art shows or publishing events. He saw no value in art or the life of the mind.” But, he added, Elaine “had a creative force in her that strove to break the ties that held her back, whether in art, writing or fashion.”
Altman and Kraf adopted a daughter, Milena Kraf Altman, who told me that her mother “reinvented herself every two years.” Kraf worked in special education schools and, in 1986, became principal of the Astoria Blue Feather. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he painted and wrote. His visual art, like his writing, often had a fragmentary quality. He did mixed-media portraits with “different textures and fabrics,” Milena said. He “he would walk the streets of New York and see an old crate, pick it up and say, ‘Okay, this will be my canvas.’ ”
Kraf’s novels vary in style but share some themes. She was particularly fascinated by those who deviate from social norms (artists, lunatics, circus performers) and by the methods used to keep social norms in place (psychoanalysis, mental institutions, lobotomies). All the books feature a beautiful, isolated female lead of delicate sanity who is surrounded by men she cannot be trusted. “I Am Clarence,” her debut, employs a series of disparate points of view to explore the relationship between a mentally ill mother, her suitors, and her disabled son. Like the main character in “The Princess of 72nd Street,” the mother is disintegrating, unable to find respect or love, and perhaps unable to give it as well. Her son, Clarence, is mocked and pitied. She lets a group of doctors experiment on him and possibly give him a lobotomy, and in the end, they take him away.
His second novel, “Magdalena’s house”, is completely strange: insofar as it has any plot, it is about a woman who shares her first name with the author and cannot escape from the inhabitants of a house that belongs to a friend. Eventually, she is accused of murdering her friend’s husband and faces an absurd trial; the most obvious influence of the novel is “Alice in Wonderland”. It is deeply disorienting, like a recurring dream, the details of which escape you. The passageways seem to connect before they get out of reach, as if disappearing, with the characters from the book, down the central hallway of the house, lined with Formica tables.
Kraf’s first two books were published by Doubleday, but, unsurprisingly, after Madelaine’s House, he left corporate publishing for independent houses. The Fiction Collective, which was run by a group of experimental writers and editors including Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, BH Friedman, and Peter Spielberg, published her third book, “Find him!Its narrator is an anonymous, childish woman who one day wakes up dressed as a schoolgirl, unable to eat, speak or wash herself without help. Her caretaker is a man named Oliver, who alternately introduces himself as her father, lover, captor, abuser, and teacher. We learn that Oliver had a wife, Edith, who disappeared; it is strongly suggested that Edith is our narrator before she had a lobotomy. The text interweaves dreams, fantasies and nightmares, and is broken up by musical notations and drawings. A disturbing meditation on patriarchal violence and the construction of femininity, the novel feels indebted to both. Tillie Olson Y anais nintwo of Kraf’s favorite authors, and deserves to be rediscovered as a significant work of feminist literature.
But, if there is one author who seems to act as an ancestor of Kraf, it is jean rhys, whose work Kraf considered in an essay he published in 1985. Rhys’s women, Kraf argues, are essentially a single character, a deteriorating figure who is a “victim of her self-destructive nature and her dependence, for survival, on mens”. .” Rhys’s men, Kraf writes, while distinct, are generally loathsome, irresponsible, and chauvinistic.
It’s Rhys who comes to mind when I read “The Princess of 72nd Street,” with his revealing tale of what it feels like to fall apart when you were never really whole. At the beginning of the book, Ellen/Esmeralda has at least a degree of control, or at least the illusion of having it: she “projects a special dignity” that no one would want to “taint or manipulate,” she says. She is wrong, of course; wrong, Kraf seems to suggest, because she is a woman, wrong because it means that someone, somewhere, will always want to defile or manipulate her dignity. When Ellen enters a glow, the prose becomes frantic, like a whirlwind; We don’t just watch Esmeralda, we run alongside her, through a Manhattan filled with jazz clubs and street performers and a bright yellow sun. After this centrifugal outburst, the return to earth, in its depressive periods, is heartbreaking. By the end, we have seen her exploited and abused, and the novel’s pain and heartbreak come when we recognize that this has happened before her. While the book is wryly funny—“Anyone wearing a bra on West 72nd Street is suspicious,” Esmeralda says, in one of many memorable statements—it’s also devastating.
In order to interest New Directions in publishing “The Princess of 72nd Street,” Kraf sent New Directions “letter after letter,” Altman told me, “somewhat outlandish letters,” he added. They worked. In the first few years after the book’s release, he wrote two more novels, with the working titles “Joachim and the Angels” and “The Final Delusions of Cinderella Korn,” and hoped that New Directions would publish them as well. He told Peter Glassgold, a publisher there, in a letter that he had “forced out” the first of these books “during a difficult period.” The publisher rejected that, and so did “Cinderella Korn,” though Altman recalls that New Directions asked Kraf to rewrite it “at least twice, which she tried to do.” Kraf gave him the impression that the publisher “wanted something more like ‘The Princess of 72nd Street.’ Milena recalls that her mother was relatively optimistic about her rejections. “She understood, I guess, the reasoning,” Milena said. “And she kept it up. She had a bunch of novels that she would try to get published, but no one would pick them up.”
In another letter to Glassgold, Kraf wrote that she “never particularly liked ‘The Princess of 72nd Street’ as a piece of literature. In that,” she continued, “I guess our tastes are very different.” He was in his mid-forties and had recently had a miscarriage and an accompanying intestinal virus; she was still recovering. He described “The Princess of 72nd Street” as a “farewell to a part of my life made up of dreams and fantasies”, adding, “I was young for a long, long time and now I’m not anymore.” She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave her a year to work on “Cinderella Korn.” He later said that the book grew out of “the good, creative part” of her.
Milena said that her mother, near the end of her life, was working on a play about a woman who, perhaps, saw herself younger in Central Park. She was “very determined to finish it,” she said Milena. But, in 2011, Kraf was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. He died two years later. Kraf’s unfinished manuscripts, along with openings and snippets of unrealized novels, are in a storage space in Manhattan, which is “filled with much of his artwork and his writing,” Milena told me. He still hasn’t been able to go through everything properly. ♦