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Millhauser, Steven

Entry updated 26 August 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1943-    ) US academic and author, with Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs from 1988 until 2017, an upstate New York demesne never precisely named but central to his work. His first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972), earned him critical acclaim and established the uneasy relationship between reality and the fantastic that underpins all of his best work. The story of a precocious writer who dies at the age of eleven, as written by his childhood friend, is a deadpan Satire of traditional literary biographies that continually and hilariously undermines our expectations by the simple fact that both the subject and the author of the book are children. His second novel, Portrait of a Romantic (1977), plays much the same trick. In this case the teenage hero spends his schooldays casting himself in the role of a Romantic hero such as Heathcliff or Werther.

If these first two novels suggested that any distinction between the real and the fantastic is, at best, tenuous, his third novel was an out and out venture into Fantasy. From the Realm of Morpheus (1986) takes a contemporary American dreamer on an episodic journey through an underworld where he encounters echoes of the myth of Atlantis, the Libraries of Jorge Luis Borges, and other traditional devices of the fantastic such as mermaids, giants, and mirrors; some of the narrator's experiences resemble the tall tales of Baron Munchausen by Rudolph Erich Raspe. Neither of these latter two novels was entirely successful (it is rumoured that From the Realm of Morpheus was subject to excessive editorial cutting), but with his fourth and, to date, last novel he secured his literary reputation.

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996), which won the Pulitzer prize in 1997, more than any of his other novels opens up the strange hinterland between realism and the fantastic that so many of his stories would go on to inhabit. It begins as a straightforward historical fiction, the story of an enterprising young man in late-nineteenth-century New York who goes from shop assistant to hotel bellboy to entrepreneur building his own grand hotel. But once we begin to explore this new hotel the novel slips into the fantastic as, in successive layers underneath the building are revealed whole new worlds with mountains, lakes and forests.

Millhauser began publishing short stories in the early 1980s, and by the mid-1990s they became his entire literary output. The stories would revolve around the same limited set of tropes from the beginning of his career, but they allowed him to move freely between overt realism and unsettling fantasy. For instance, the sense of another realm hidden beneath, alongside, or within our familiar world would become one of the recurring images that would haunt his short stories. We see the theme, for instance, as early as "The Barnum Museum" (Summer 1987 Grand Street), the title story in his second collection The Barnum Museum (coll 1990), a dry, matter-of-fact description of a small town museum that eventually reveals a structure so vast and complex that it must swallow the entire town in which it is situated. "Beneath the Cellars of Our Town" in The Knife Thrower (coll 1998) literalizes the notion of an underworld with a network of ancient tunnels into which the inhabitants of the town descend deliberately to lose themselves. While in the same collection, "Paradise Park" (March 1993 Grand Street) with its vast amusement park, and its thematic Doppelganger "The Dream of the Consortium" (March 1993 Harper's) with its immense department store, both play with the idea of a structure that seems to contain entire worlds. We continue to catch echoes of the motif in "The Other Town" (Summer 2006 Tin House) in his collection Dangerous Laughter (coll 2008), in which a small New England town has a Doppelganger town on the other side of the woods, carefully maintained to mirror the original town in every detail except that it is uninhabited. And again in Disruptions (coll 2023), the print version of "The Little People" tells of a town which enfolds within it an entire other town whose inhabitants are bare inches high (see Great and Small). These and other iterations of the same theme always treat the other place as if it is a perfectly natural part of the world, something familiar to everyone, so that it is only as we read the story that we come to recognize how much our notion of everyday reality is being disrupted.

One of the variations in this idea of a partly glimpsed world alongside our own is a fascination with the parallel world we create in art. Repeatedly we are shown that to make art is to make that other world. "Cathay" (Summer 1982 Grand Street), assembled in Millhauser's first collection, In the Penny Arcade (coll 1986), describes a realm in which everything is art, from the way that concubines walk to the elaborate landscapes painted on the eyelids of court ladies. "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" in Little Kingdoms: Three Novellas (coll 1993) tells the story of a Comic strip artist, clearly modelled on Winsor McCay, who steadily becomes more and more immersed in the world he is creating while his everyday life crumbles around him. "The New Automaton Theater" (1981 Canto) in The Knife Thrower presents miniature Automata that perform elaborate theatrical productions. And "In the Reign of Harad IV"(10 July 2006 The New Yorker), assembled in Dangerous Laughter, tells of a court miniaturist who becomes so obsessed with his work that he makes ever smaller pieces until they are invisible even to the strongest lens.

Many of his stories would play with ideas from folklore or from other writers or even from games and animations, though the tone of his language is always such as to imply that there is nothing fantastic even about the most extraordinary of events. Many such stories were collected in The Barnum Museum, including "The Sepia Postcard" which clearly echoes "The Mezzotint" (in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary coll 1904) by M R James, "Alice, Falling" (date unknown Antaeus) which expands on Alice's descent into Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), or "Klassik Komix #1" (1983 Grand Street) which recasts The Waste Land by T S Eliot (1922 chap) as a comic book (something Martin Rowson would actually produce in 1990). The title story of The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (coll 2003) is a variation on the legend of Tristan and Yseult. "Cat 'n' Mouse" (19 April 2004 The New Yorker), assembled in Dangerous Laughter, treats a typical Hanna-Barbera Tom & Jerry cartoon as if it were a record of actual events.

Perhaps even more than literary influences, Millhauser is drawn to Theatre and Cinema as a way of casting aside the thin veil between our real and imaginary lives. Performances keep recurring in his work, such as the stage magicians "August Eschenburg" (Antaeus; in In the Penny Arcade), "Eisenheim the Illusionist" (December 1989 Esquire as "The Illusionist"; in The Barnum Museum) – later filmed as The Illusionist (2006), directed by Neil Burger – or "The Knife Thrower" (March 1997 Harper's) in the collection of the same name. What attracts Millhauser to these productions, and also to the cinema in, for instance, "Behind the Blue Curtain" in The Barnum Museum, is the way they fool the senses (see Perception). Thus in "The Wizard of West Orange" (April 2007 Harper's; in Dangerous Laughter), Thomas Alva Edison is involved in the Invention of a new device that will do for touch what the phonograph does for sound and the cinematograph does for sight (see also Edisonade); but this does not just record tactile sensations, it creates new ones, and as so often in Millhauser's work, that way lies madness.

Thus "Theater of Shadows" in Disturbances tells of a town that becomes so obsessed with a shadow play that it goes on to affect every aspect of their lives. This takes us into the most persistent and wide-ranging theme in all of Millhauser's stories: the small New England town. Always unnamed, referred to only as "our town"(though see Saratoga Springs above), and often told in the first person plural as if the narrator speaks collectively for the entire community, these stories tell of sudden enthusiasms, of irruptions of the strange, the weird, the disturbing, something that conjures the emptiness of modern American life. Witty and horrifying at the same time, they show people who are prey to the disruption of outside influences. In his novella, Enchanted Night (1999), during the course of one summer night dolls come to life, girls suddenly form gangs and break into houses, and people are awakened by a chorus of night voices. We Others: New and Selected Stories (coll 2011) contains one specific sf tale, "The Invasion from Outer Space" (9 February 2009 The New Yorker). The collection Voices in the Night (coll 2015) is filled with stories in which phantoms prowl the streets and there are epidemics of suicide. "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman" (22 November The New Yorker) assembled in Dangerous Laughter tells of an ordinary woman who simply fades out of existence because no one notices her.

In much of Millhauser's work it is difficult if not impossible to tell whether the story is intended to be realist or fantastic; but then, the point being made is that there is no real difference between the two. [PKi]

Steven Millhauser

born New York City: 3 August 1943

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collections and stories

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