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American author Steven Millhauser earned rave reviews and a cult following with his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972). The book is a brilliant parody of the literary biography, with the biographer being a young boy. For more than two decades thereafter, Millhauser produced novels and short stories in relative obscurity. He again received widespread acclaim when his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In this article, Washington Post Book World writer Michael Dirda examines Millhauser’s mysterious fictional worlds.
By Michael Dirda
Literary awards are often ridiculed for honoring popular writers over those truly deserving of recognition, but occasionally the honor does go to the right person. Such is the case with American novelist Steven Millhauser, winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his wistful Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996). The subtitle is apt, for most of Millhauser's stories inhabit the blurry world between dream and reality.
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Sometimes he describes, in leisurely detail, a locale that straddles these two realms—a museum or a theater, an amusement park, or a penny arcade. Other times Millhauser's characters—artists, children, visionaries—find themselves gradually overwhelmed by their own obsessive fantasies. As the author once wrote, 'The art of creation is the art of instilling in yourself a waking dream and learning to convey it on paper.'
In 1972 Millhauser, then in his late 20s, brought out the first of his astonishing and wonderful books, with a somewhat confusing title: Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright. That novel drew on the conventions of the authorized literary biography, but with a twist of genius: Here the famous writer, author of the neglected work Cartoons, turns out to be an 11-year-old boy. The solemn, parasitic biographer is his next-door neighbor and best friend.
The resulting book might well have been merely cutesy, a sophomoric attempt to mine the parodic vein made famous by Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), a serio-comic novel written in the form of a narrative poem and accompanied by extensive scholarly commentary. But the young Millhauser possessed a dry, stylish wit, a subtle understanding of childhood's deadly seriousness, and a flair for the telling particular that Nabokov himself might have envied. Certainly Edwin Mullhouse deserves to rank as one of the most affectionate and accurate depictions of American life in the 1950s, a book to place next to J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Nabokov's Lolita (1955).
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Occasionally good books do get noticed, and Millhauser's first novel garnered ecstatic reviews. With his exquisite prose, capable of reproducing the very grit of blacktop playgrounds or the hollow ache of puppy love, Millhauser might well have gone on to rival John Updike as a leading chronicler of contemporary American mores. But that never happened. Instead, the writer retreated to his parents' attic, occasionally taking part-time jobs but devoting himself quietly and faithfully to his artistic vocation. Following the mixed notices given to his second novel, Portrait of a Romantic (1977), an account of adolescence's troubled longings that struck some critics as a less successful, teenage version of Edwin Mullhouse, Millhauser willingly accepted a life of relative obscurity. He married at the age of 40 and, needing to support his wife and two children, began teaching creative writing in the late 1980s at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.
During much of the 1980s and 1990s Millhauser published short stories and novellas, establishing himself as a powerful and disturbing fabulist (a creator or writer of fables), a master of illusion, dream, and enchantment. Much of this shorter fiction is collected in three volumes: In the Penny Arcade (1986), The Barnum Museum (1990), and Little Kingdoms (1993). At their best, tales such as 'August Eschenburg,' 'Cathay,' 'Eisenheim the Illusionist,' 'The Barnum Museum,' and 'Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810-1846)' seem like fever dreams, glimpses of nightmare or evocations of some elusive and sensual Xanadu. Yet like any good magic realist, Millhauser always builds up his opium visions with exact, if unexpected and telling, details. Consider the following passage from the story 'The Barnum Museum':
In the gift shops of the Barnum Museum we may buy old sepia postcards of mermaids and sea dragons, little flip-books that show flying carpets rising into the air, peep-show pens with miniature colored scenes from the halls of the Barnum Museum, mysterious rubber balls from Arabia that bounce once and remain suspended in the air, jars of dark blue liquid from which you can blow bubbles shaped like tigers, elephants, lions, polar bears, and giraffes, Chinese kaleidoscopes showing ceaseless changing forms of dragons, enchanting pleniscopes and phantatropes, boxes of animate paint for drawing pictures that move, lacquered wooden balls from the Black Forest that, once set rolling, never come to a stop, bottles of colorless jellylike stuff that will assume the shape and color of any object it is set before, shiny red boxes that vanish in direct sunlight, Japanese paper airplanes that glide through houses and over gardens and rooftops, storybooks from Finland with tissue-paper-covered illustrations that change each time the paper is lifted, tin sets of specially treated watercolors for painting pictures on air.
Some writers naturally tend toward dialogue or helter-skelter action, but Millhauser's specialty is the lengthy description, the catalogue of wonders. One detects in his work an attempt to capture whole worlds in a paragraph. His stories can be likened to those carefully worked miniature portraits, whether enamels or cameos, in which the artist has microscopically reproduced a young Elizabethan courtier's every dimple and ruffle, the glisten at the corner of his eye, the tiny rubies and garnets on his finger rings. In fact, one of Millhauser's favorite techniques is to recreate an artifact—to take up some cast-off item of popular culture and imbue it with unsuspected beauty and mystery: a game of Clue, the catalogue to an art exhibition, or a classic comic book. Art, after all, transforms the familiar into the marvelous.
Art also tries to replace reality, to become its own 'little world made cunningly.' Millhauser has, for instance, written a number of what one might call architectural fantasies. Besides 'The Barnum Museum' and sections of Martin Dressler, these include such uncollected pieces as 'Paradise Park,' 'The New Automaton Theater,' and 'The Dream of the Consortium'—all of which are likely to appear in Millhauser's next book, a short story collection due in the spring of 1998. Here the museum, the skyscraper, the amusement park, the puppet theater, and the department store are transformed into worlds within the world. At times, these places seem like imaginary prisons of infinite possibility—or of infinite regress. Consider the Grand Cosmo, that enormous turn-of-the-century habitation created by Martin Dressler, a combination of apartment house, shopping mall, and alternate universe:
Even as journalists attempted to describe the nature of the Grand Cosmo, rumors about the colossal building had begun to circulate in the cheap press, especially rumors about the many subterranean levels, which were said to house darker and more disturbing entertainments as one descended lower and lower. . . . It was said that rat-baiting pits flourished in dark corners of the lowest levels, where specially trained rat dogs fought bloody battles against batches of a dozen rats; it was said that a branch of an upstate asylum permitted its inmates to roam the dark in solitary gloom, garbed in the costumes of Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Jack the Ripper, Edgar Allan Poe. One article reported that the lowest level housed a labyrinthine brothel whose ornate furniture, flowery wallpaper, formidable madam and thirteen-year-old girls had been smuggled across the Atlantic in the hold of a tramp steamer. . .
Some writers might well stop here, with these extravagant but still possible fancies. But not Millhauser. He goes on, ever downward into domains of the nightmarish and the sublime:
It was said that in moss-stained halls at the ends of crumbling corridors, statues tormented with human longings came to life, roamed the dark with impassioned eyes, and flung themselves upon human lovers, after which they wandered sluggishly until they assumed new and troubling marble poses.
There, beneath the world, white and peaceful cities rose in distant river valleys, beckoning the weary of heart and the sick of soul. There, in the Garden of Black Delight, monstrous jet-black blossoms exuded dangerous perfumes, which produced visions of such searing ecstasy that afterward one lost all desire to live. In the House of Metamorphosis, deep in a cave under a hill whose top was an island, Chinese masters trained in secret academies could transform the traveler into a lion, a butterfly, an angel, a waterfall. It was said that to descend into the world beneath the world was to learn the secrets of heaven and hell, to go mad, to speak in tongues, to understand the language of beasts, to rend the veil, to become immortal, to witness the destruction of the universe and the birth of a new order of being. . . .
This depiction of a vast subterranean empire calls to mind Millhauser's most ambitious work, From the Realm of Morpheus (1986), a kind of Arabian nightmare. In the book, young Carl Haussman descends into the underworld and there experiences myriad wonders, none proving more wondrous than his host himself, Morpheus, the god of sleep. Although called a novel, the book is really a linked collection of wonder tales; reportedly, the original manuscript was more than 1,000 pages long and was drastically cut by the publisher.
In his other work Millhauser tends to write serene, clear sentences, slightly formal, deliberately precise, a prose that relies on its particulars for its poetry. But in Morpheus one discovers a whole Joycean repertory of styles and voices. The swaggering, self-dramatizing Morpheus—half Falstaff, half Father Christmas—declaims with a 17th-century gusto, sprinkling in contemporary clichés and buried literary allusions: I am, he tells Carl,
a denizen of the dark, a magnifico of murk, a malingerer, a ne'er do well, a fair chess player, a dabbler in this and that. A gentleman of dubious extraction and uncertain means. A charming rogue, a poor fellow down on his luck, a man more sinned against than sinning. A simple country lad. Just an ordinary guy. Lover of the black flame of the night, an idle dreamer of a summer's day, a loafer in the poolhalls of the soul. A dangerous companion, a trusty guide. Not the sort of fellow you'd want to introduce to your sister.'
Later, Morpheus refers to himself, with a flourish of wordplay, as an 'old housebound husband . . . old whorebanned hasbeen—old hussbond—old hell's boon—old he's blind horsebrain.' As Carl tours this dark world he encounters a Regency buck named Lord Hall, who sorrowfully confesses, in a style reminiscent of Lord Byron's letters, that he is in fact nothing but an oil painting come alive. The pathetic love of two giants is set down in prose as pure as that of 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift. In a strange hall of mirrors, Millhauser allows his prose to grow luxuriantly decadent and languorous. One mirror speaks about 'the boredom of reflection, the ennui of eidola, the acedia of sight.' From another we learn the history of a 'devouring mirror' which flourished in an age 'when new lassitudes had led to darker abandons.' Its hapless victims 'toward the end could feel their vital substance being drawn into the glass: and it is whispered that the final moments of dissolution were of a dark, unspeakable, intolerable voluptuousness.' The Millhauser reader recalls that the concubines in 'Cathay' are so dazzling that a mere glimpse of their beauty would leave a man broken-spirited for life, racked by unappeasable longing.
After the delicious excesses of From the Realm of Morpheus, Millhauser returned to more subdued fables of artistic identity in Little Kingdoms. Along with his obsession with miniatures and replicas, for reworked artifacts of popular culture and architectural fantasies, Millhauser also frequently likes to create a biography of a flawed or doomed artist. Edwin Mullhouse conforms to this model, as does 'August Eschenburg,' the long lead-off story of In the Penny Arcade, about a creator of clockwork automatons. In 'The Little World of J. Franklin Payne,' the first of the three novellas of Little Kingdoms, we follow the bittersweet history of a newspaper cartoonist who devotes his life to the creation of short animated films. In all his portraits of the artist, Millhauser's recurrent theme is the conflict between the attractions of the world—love, family, success—and the siren-call of the creative life, which promises nothing but years of sacrifice, neglect, and hard work in exchange for a few moments of aesthetic bliss.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Millhauser again explores a similarly restless soul, caught between the demands of the commonplace and the allure of the unrealizable. As is so often the case with Millhauser's artists, Martin reveals a patient, ordered meticulousness coupled with outsized ambitions. He possesses a real flair for business, while being burdened with a Faustian ambition to build ever bigger, ever more complex and colossal urban habitats. This cult of the unattainable ideal ultimately destroys him—both personally, in the melodrama of his marriage to a pale, frigid beauty, and professionally, in his grandiose construction of the Grand Cosmo, a habitat so enticing and inexhaustible that it overwhelms and disorients ordinary mortals. In the end, Martin Dressler realizes his dream at the cost of his material and personal well-being.
It is tempting to see Steven Millhauser as identifying, to some unknown degree, with his obsessed creations. Certainly the characters Martin Dressler, Edwin Mullhouse, Carl Haussman, and Edmund Moorash all seem to be distorted echoes of their creator's own name. And certainly this utterly distinctive writer appears to have led a life of similar artistic fidelity, refusing both the glamorous anonymity of Salinger and Thomas Pynchon and the more typical accolades of self-advertisement. In some ways, Steven Millhauser's range may be narrow—he is a late Romantic in sensibility, a prose poet, an alchemist who transmutes the detritus of daily life into dreams and marvels. Yet he is also, sentence for beautiful sentence, one of the masters of contemporary American letters.
About the Author: Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for The Washington Post Book World. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1993.
Source: Encarta Yearbook, July 1997
By Steven Millhauser:
Martin Dressler: the Tale of an American Dreamer. Crown, 1996.
From the Realm of Morpheus. William Morrow, 1986.
Portrait of a Romantic. Knopf, 1977.
Edwin Mullhouse: the life and death of an American writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright. Knopf, 1972.
Little Kingdoms. Poseidon Press, 1993.
The Barnum Museum. Plume, 1991.
In the Penny Arcade. Knopf, 1986.
Appears in
Millhauser, Steven; American Literature: Prose
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