The Real Jean Kronski?

Was her name really Jean Kronski? Even though Miller referred to her that way in his own personal notes, most experts agree that her name was actually Mara or Martha Andrews. "Jean Kronski" was a false name given to her by June. Then there's Time of The Assassins, the single incident in which Henry Miller refers to Jean as 'Thelma.'

Read this passage from Time Of The Assassins yourself.

This "Thelma" is not a character is some pseudo-biographical fictional novel. Miller is, in theory, referring to an actual person, just as he mentions the real names of Anais Nin and John Dudley in this piece. So why the alias "Thelma" in place of "Jean Kronski"?

Maybe her name was Thelma and this "Mara Andrews" hypothesis is actually incorrect?

Case in point: The New York City Death Index has a listing for a Thelma Krinsky, who died on October 28, 1947 in Manhattan. She was 44 years old, meaning she was born around 1903. If this was "Jean Kronski," she would have been around 24 when she met Henry and June, which is about the right age it seems to me.

Thelma KRINSKY. NYC death certificate # 23094

I couldn't find an obituary listing for this name in the New York Times archives. But that just means no one listed her and that doesn't really prove anything. What we need is a copy of the certificate listed above.

Krinsky is obviously close to "Kronski." And Miller calls her Thelma in Assassins. Do I have a case? Can the scholarly Henry Miller experts out there offer me any feedback?

** UPDATE JULY 24, 2006

Take a look at the Comments section of this post for discussion about the real identity of Jean Kronski. The most recent hypothesis is that her name was actually Marion Fish, or, sometimes using her adopted name, Marion McCarthy. Karl Orend seems to have established this idea (see, for example, the annotated letter from Alfred Perles to June Mansfield in 1962, from Nexus - The International Henry Miller Journal #3.)

Why "Thelma?"

If Kronski was in fact named Marion Fish, here's one suggestion as to why Miller would choose the name "Thelma" to identify her in Time Of The Assassins: Thelma Wood. Wood [seen at left] was a contemporary of Henry's, who lived in Greenwich Village in 1928 according to this biography. Like Jean Kronski, she was a sculptor and was bisexual (she had a famous relationship with Djuna Barnes). She was also around the same age and had a "boyish" look, as did Kronski.

I dunno, just a thought ....