SOURCE: Howe, Irving. “An Afterword.” Salmagundi, no. 92 (fall 1991): 110-14.

[In the following essay, Howe offers a close reading of Millhauser's Catalogue of the Exhibition.]

Since Steven Millhauser's novella is experimental in form—I'm not aware of another prose fiction structured as an art show catalogue—let me try, by way of response, a little experiment in criticism. Instead of offering a “finished” analysis of this piece, I propose to reconstruct the steps by which I tried to apprehend it. Anyone familiar with the practice of criticism knows of course that we cannot really break down the process of reading and judgment into a series of ordered steps. Our responses are rarely so orderly. If they occur over a length of time, we may well begin with a clear judgment and only later notice the details that might sustain that judgment. The whole business of criticism is more jumbled, even more mysterious, than I am going to pretend it is. But allow me to pretend.

ANTICIPATIONS

When you read a poem or a story by a writer whose previous work you know, certain expectations shape the act of reading. With regard to Millhauser, these expectations are very high. Several years ago I read his collection of stories In the Penny Arcade and admired especially a novella called August Eschenburg. I take this work to be a masterpiece—at once a finely-nuanced sketch of the relationship between popular craft and high art in late-nineteenth-century German culture and a muted but strong parable of the artist's place in society. The protagonist is a master craftsman—really, an artist—at creating doll-like automatons which he then sets into miniature dramas that achieve an extraordinary life-like effect. It is as if he were breathing life into inanimate objects. One is astonished at Millhauser's seemingly expert knowledge of this somewhat esoteric art, and then moved by his ability to make the narrative into a semblance, quite without any self-pity, of what we have come to call the artist's condition. So there is good reason to look forward to his new work, for he is a writer of very considerable resources.

A FIRST READING

What I first paid attention to in reading Catalogue of the Exhibition was something critics rarely discuss these days—the matter of length and pacing. Millhauser has been careful to keep his catalogue notations and the interwoven story to something like optimal length—for the technique he has chosen, as it enforces short “takes” and keeps us at a certain distance from the characters, requires economy of presentation. (Perhaps some of the catalogue descriptions, while mimetically shrewd, are a little too full? Does the central story need such detailed entries about the paintings? Are these entries sufficiently interesting in themselves? Or can the catalogue notes be taken as oblique reflections of or comments on the story?)

Millhauser was also wise to make his account of the climactic horror a brief one, since he must have sensed that it would strike most readers as more like a cultural signal than a fully particularized rendering. I mean, the whole thing reeks of late Romantic Liebestod with some more-or-less Gothic touches—to the point where we may respond less to the happenings of the Moorashes and Pinneys than to their cultural associations. But as a whole, the piece is finely paced, so that even across the hurdles of the catalogue notes, suspense seems to accumulate.

There are streaks of mild humor within the “heavy” atmosphere of the story. Millhauser has some fun with the mock-scholarly references to and determined refutations of the pedant Havemeyer, an earlier authority on the work of his doomed painter. And he nicely mimics the prose mannerisms of art critics writing catalogue notes.

The color red keeps reappearing. I'm not especially enamored of color imagery in criticism, but here it does seem to play a role. Blood? Intensity? An effort to penetrate psychic conditions that form a strong motif in Moorash's paintings? None of these seems to me a very promising lead, so I'll probably not follow this up. Others can.

While not quite as richly exotic as August Eschenburg, Millhauser's new story seems a kindred work. There's the same coolness of voice, the same off-beat, somewhat eerie inventiveness, the same control of underlying emotions. The subject may be Romantic, the treatment is not. And the form, I think, is entirely original. To tell a story through catalogue notes—what might be called narrative through smuggling—may set up formidable difficulties. By its very nature the catalogue is “vertical” (a series of discrete items discussing particular paintings and only secondarily providing information and insights about the artist Moorash and those near him), while the story itself is “horizontal,” a passage of events through time. Still, it seems to work, as if each comment on the paintings, or even the paintings themselves, should be taken as, somehow, a reflection of or on what is happening within the story. (But is this really so? Or am I imposing a too rigid pattern on Millhauser's work? I should beware of the critic's temptation to make everything neat and schematic.)

The main story portraying the entanglements of the four characters bears an obvious resemblance to the Wordsworth-Coleridge grouping, but it adds a distinctly New Englandish Puritanical tone. Millhauser is especially good at rendering that tone, it seems to come to him intuitively. Here Romanticism takes on a curiously ascetic vibration, self-denial rather than self-indulgence—or self-denial and self-indulgence. But I'm not yet clear as to the relationship Millhauser wishes to establish between the reader and his characters.

So I admire this novella, it has gripped my imagination, but I certainly can't claim to “get” it all. But then, why should I want to?

SECOND THOUGHTS

Is there any historical basis for the Moorash-Pinney quartet? Somehow it seems familiar; it carries a New England chill, Liebestod at a frigid temperature; but I don't know of any actual models.

Talking with my learned friend John Hollander, I briefly describe the story and ask him whether he thinks there might be an historical source. He suggests the possibility of Washington Allston, the American artist who lived at about the same time in which the story is set—the first half of the nineteenth century. I know nothing about Allston and shall have to check it out.

There are biographies and biographical sketches of Allston, but perhaps the most vivid sketch is to be found in Van Wyck Brooks' The Flowering of New England. Allston was a popular favorite of his time, much visited by celebrities, not at all the moody recluse Millhauser has drawn. No Liebestod here. Still, as usual, Hollander is on to something, for there seems to be some similarity between the kinds of Romantic and historical paintings Allston did and those Moorash is described as having done. But there's not enough here to pursue, at least by me.

I write a note to Millhauser, whom I've never met, asking him about all this, and he kindly replies as follows:

Moorash is entirely an invention. I wanted someone who would be an American equivalent of Turner, about whose life I know nothing, and I was pleased to discover that American romantic painting hadn't produced a figure in any way equivalent—this gave me a certain freedom. The Phantasmacists and Diabolists [of the novella] are of course also inventions, but when I read around in the period—my research was deliberately unthorough—I discovered an odd minor painter named John Quidor, who painted macabre illustrations of Washington Irving tales and set me to thinking about imaginary schools. The cottage setting in a remote place was dimly influenced by the little I know of Wordsworth and his sister. I mention this only because I'm a little uneasy at having claimed that Moorash is ‘entirely’ an invention, which might sound naive or arrogant. Various details come from whatever lay at hand. But in the sense that I believe you had in mind, yes, he is an invention and not based on an actual figure.

REREADINGS

I have now reread the story several times, and it doesn't seem to yield itself much more fully than after my first reading. (Could be my fault, of course.) Yet I admire the piece greatly and carry its images around in my head. Nor should this be taken as a criticism of Millhauser's work; quite the contrary. A good piece of fiction always resists complete elucidation—that's part of its mimetic strength. Something must always remain inaccessible, beyond our terms and categories.

Perhaps the problem has to do with the novella's form. I have tried to find some pattern of relation between the progression of the catalogue notes and the movement of the narrative about Moorash and the others. Maybe a professional art critic could do better, but I cannot find such a pattern. There is of course a general atmospheric connection between the deepening and darkening of Moorash's art as described in the catalogue notes and the gathering catastrophe of the central action. It's as if there must be some punishment attached to an effort to penetrate too deeply into the recesses of the psyche or as if madness inheres in the close scrutiny of madness. So my initial desire to find a pattern of relationship between Millhauser's technique and his narrative seems misconceived. I feel some relief about this.

How then and why does this novella make the strong impact that I believe it does make? It's not, I think, primarily the story of Moorash and the quartet as a rendered human action that strongly affects us. The figures are not presented with sufficient fullness or differentiation to move us very deeply as figures in their own right. And my guess is that Millhauser did not intend that—did not intend, primarily, to draw a picture of psyches in disarray. He deliberately chose to keep his action at a certain, an optimal, distance because what interested him, I now think, is a cultural situation in which talented but troubled people become so introverted, so deeply in the depth of obsessions, that the capacity for spontaneous life seems to dwindle radically. Perhaps the central theme of the novella, at least as I read it, is to show how the life of culture, for many of us the mode of life we value most highly, can turn upon itself, bringing wreckage to its most committed agents.

But if any readers of Salmagundi have other readings, I would very much like to hear from them. Meanwhile, a tip of the hat to Steven Millhauser.