Le Zeyer
As you emerge from the Alésia metro station, look for the the bright yellow awning which swathes a large café at one corner of the Carrefour d’Alésia. This is Le Zeyer, a brasserie that Henry Miller returned to nearly every day throughout the years he lived in Montsouris at the Villa Seurat.
Miller and his boon companion Alfred Perlès favored the Zeyer when they were "in funds" or whenever they could coax Michael Fraenkel, who often dined here alone, to treat them to a meal. Perlès would remember the Zeyer as, "a gaudy place with red plush and mirrors and polished brass; the perpetual odor of choucroûte garnie, gauloise bleues and fine à l'eau." Fine à l'eau (brandy and seltzer) was their regular drink here because it was the cheapest option at one franc seventy-five.
On November 1, 1935, Miller, Perlès and Fraenkel were gathered for a meal at the Zeyer. As was usually the case when Fraenkel was present, conversation soon turned to the subject of death. Fraenkel was enthralled with his own conception of the spiritual death of modern man: The world was dead, civilization was dead and the Great War had only served to make the fact apparent to all. As such, the only possible course was to accept the death, to close ones eyes and die to the modern world and so begin the process of bringing a new civilization to life.
Miller loved these death talks. Fraenkel was an erudite thinker and a stimulating conversationalist. In his interminable pursuit of the death theme he was liable to drag the discussion all over the philosophical terrain.
With a few drinks under their belts, the trio began to lament that such invigorating conversations would not be preserved for posterity. And then the idea occurred to them to collaborate on a book that would exhaust the subject—a monumental and abruptly ended tome, like the death itself:
"A thousand pages!" Fraenkel shrieked. He was already a little tipsy. "A thousand pages—no less!"
"No more either," I said.
"Don't worry, Joey. We'll make it a thousand pages, not a line more—even if we have to stop in the middle of a sentence," said Henry
The book was to take the form of an exchange of letters and for its subject they eventually settled on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose famous contemplation of suicide was sure to provide endless fodder for discussion. Perlès dropped out before the project was complete, but Miller and Fraenkel charged ahead, eventually publishing Hamlet in two volumes under the imprint of Fraenkel’s Carrefour Press. Miller’s contribution began with a nod the the Zeyer:
We sit in the Café Zeyer and we decide to write this book. It is not a book that the French will like. It is not a book for our American compatriots either. Yet this book is born of France and of America. Born in a moment of extreme lassitude, born out of a despair created by the inertia and paralysis surrounding us.