The American writer and artist’s final work of fiction plays with the dreams and fantasies we contain and reveal to society
‘It’s too bad the society is so intolerant of changes in personality,’ bemoans Ellen, the narrator of American writer and artist Elaine Kraf’s fourth and final work of fiction (only now, bizarrely, being published in the UK, 46 years after its original US publication and 12 years after the author’s death). Ellen of New York City, it turns out, has two. The other emerges at periods of what the pair term ‘radiance’: increasingly frequent psychotic episodes, during which Ellen becomes the titular princess, Esmeralda, sometimes developing an aversion to clothing, appearing naked or seminaked in public, at other times wearing homemade Indian or Arabic garb (a sari made out of a bedsheet; the Arabian dress out of layers of cheap scarves), sleeps with strangers and strange men, performs a variety of dances and generally dazzles the residents (her ‘subjects’) of West 72nd Street with her innate divinity. When she’s not having an episode, Ellen, a portrait painter who is secretly dissatisfied with the lack of honesty in her work, has militant views on marriage and fidelity (real or imagined unfaithfulness is an unforgivable crime; married men should have their status tattooed upon their groins) and is constantly worried about her own diminutive stature and the threats to her prospective love life posed by tall blonde Nordic-type women. Who are what Ellen believes that all the men in her life really want. Some of them have told her so. Those men, it goes without saying, are at best weak and unreliable, at worst shockingly cruel and manipulative.
Her former lover banned her from laughing, singing and talking; while they were dating, his therapist (who has persuaded his patient that all his flaws lie outside himself) made the narrator sign a document stating he has no responsibility for her welfare and then proceeded to prescribe her experimental brain-chemotherapy drugs (for the benefit of the lover). The husband of her college mate (the latter obsessively paints purple plums) seems determined to have sex with Ellen in spite (or because) of his impotence. Need- less to say, the men pursue their happiness; Ellen does not pursue her own. Esmeralda, on the other hand, has such an excess of happiness that she needs to spread it around. Or, inside the ‘spiritual and sweet Princess Esmeralda’, the latter informs us, ‘there also lived Ellen with great anger, a sense of the world of material necessity, economics, politics and growth… always looking for a man suitable to be her husband’.
What makes this extraordinary and sometimes shocking book particularly intriguing, however, is not the revelation that the narrator has two personalities, but rather that one is presented as the direct consequence of the other; neither is irrational in its own terms and both are narrated in the same tone of straightforward confessional, laced with a heady draught of authorial humour (for example, our height-conscious narrator believes that Dr Clufftrain, the therapist, always carries a hacksaw on his person in order to adapt doorways to match his excessive tallness, while a relationship with a urologist breaks down over urinalysis). Ironically, in the case of a narrator who openly confesses to being unreliable (she’s prone to blackouts, advocates her rules as absolute before breaking them, has nights when she believes herself transported to an exotic orient while never actually leaving the street), her twin personalities seem to allow this particular self-portrait to be more honest. On the one hand Ellen paints black backgrounds around the heads in her portraits, so that people can be distinguished from their backgrounds; on the other, Esmeralda fully immerses herself in the social background of West 72nd Street, confident that she will always be seen (‘I suspect I look like a saint in ecstasy’). Ellen conforms to a society that seems engineered to supress women’s subjectivity and personality; Esmeralda rebels against precisely the same. Although she does find that society always eventually punishes her for her lack of compliance. With medication and institutionalisation. ‘I was no longer in the habit of laughing,’ Ellen remarks in the wake of one postradiance incarceration, ‘the reflex was gone. That can happen to tears or laughing or anything with the proper drugs or conditions.’ Radiance on the other hand, despite the obvious dangers of waking up in the bedrooms of unknown strangers with no recollection of how you got there, sometimes covered in bruises, ‘is like a glorious holiday’. While Kraf would later describe this novel as ‘a farewell to a part of my life composed of dreams and fantasies’, we should be thankful that it also preserves some of those dreams and fantasies today.
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf. Penguin, £9.99 (softcover)
From the January & February 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
