Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

by Steven Millhauser

  1. The first paragraph of Martin Dressler is written as though it were the introduction to a fairy tale. Could this novel be described as a fairy tale? In an interview (Publishers Weekly, 5/6/96), Steven Millhauser said that with the Grand Cosmo, "I wanted to stretch the real into the fantastic without actually snapping it." At what point does the narrative depart from the real and become fantastic?

  2. Why does the troupe of actors at the Vanderlyn [pp. 11-12] make such an impression on Martin’s imagination? What do they symbolize to him? At what points in his life does the image of the two feet on the bed come back to him, and how does that image affect his decisions?

  3. What is it about Caroline, apart from her sexuality, that attracts and fascinates Martin? How would you describe or characterize Caroline? Does her air of mystery cover secret passions, or is she simply stupid and inert? What do you think she really wants from life? What are her feelings toward Martin?

  4. Why does Martin find it impossible to look on Emmeline in a sexual light? To what degree does Emmeline share and believe in Martin’s dreams? Is it possible to deduce her own feelings for Martin? What is significant about the evening visit she and Martin pay to the building site for The Dressler [pp. 201-202]?

  5. What roles does Martin mentally assign to the various women in his life: Mrs. Hamilton, Alice Bell, Dora and Gerda, Marie Haskova, Caroline, Emmeline, Mrs. Vernon? Does Martin compartmentalize love and sex, and if so, what effect does that compartmentalization have upon his emotions?

  6. How would you describe the four-way relationship between the three Vernon women and Martin?

  7. Why are Caroline and Emmeline so dependent upon each other? Martin feels that Caroline is married to her sister rather than to himself, even that a fairy-tale spell has been cast upon them. Can you think of any fairy tales with a complementary pair of sisters like Caroline and Emmeline? Why might Millhauser have chosen this pattern, and what does it mean?

  8. Why does Martin compare Harwinton with God? How have the theories and opinions of Harwinton, and those who followed him, characterized the twentieth century and how do they continue to rule our world?

  9. Mr. Westerhoven likes to call himself a "preserver" or "reconciler" [p. 116]. What does he represent to Martin?

  10. Martin Dressler is subtitled "The Tale of an American Dreamer." Why is Martin described as a dreamer, and what is his dream? What has this novel to say about the American dream and the quintessential American myth of the self-made man? What are the causes of the dissatisfaction Martin often feels, as on page 129, "he felt, even as he turned over the idea of a fourth cafe in Brooklyn, a little sharp burst of restlessness, of dissatisfaction, as if he were supposed to be doing something else, something grander, higher, more difficult, more dangerous, more daring"?

  11. Martin is well aware that the grand hotels of his youth embody a paradox: they must be both old-fashioned and aggressively modern. "People liked telephones and the new electric elevators and private toilets and incandescent lights, but at the same time they liked old-world architecture, period furniture, dim suggestions of the very world that was being annihilated by American efficiency and know-how" [p. 70]. What does it say about people’s desires and dreams to want the old with the new?

  12. When Martin is a child, one of his tasks is to wheel Tecumseh out onto the sidewalk. How does the image of the cigar-store Indian change and develop over the course of the novel? In what guise do Indians appear in the Grand Cosmo, and what does that appearance tell us about how Martin’s life, and the world itself, has changed during the intervening years?

  13. Is it possible to compare Martin’s fantasy of "a world within the world, rivaling the world" [p. 284] with the contemporary notion of the "global village"?

  14. How does Martin’s dream compare with the dream of Walt Disney? How do both the Grand Cosmo and Disney World aim to create alternate worlds that are self-contained and even better than the outside world? How do both of these institutions encourage a blurring in the distinction between "real" and "fake," and what are we to infer from the presence of "authentic German cigarmakers" at the Grand Cosmo Cigar Store?

  15. Why does Martin hire an actor to impersonate him in the Grand Cosmo?

  16. The Grand Cosmo is so enormous that no one knows what goes on in its further reaches, and rumors are spread by journalists. "But whether the writers spoke of the imaginary world beneath the building, or of the many worlds within, they all acknowledged, even in their puzzlement, a sense not simply of abundance or immensity, but of the inexhaustible" [p. 273]. Is this notion of inexhaustibility a metaphor for America, particularly the industrial and post-industrial America of the twentieth century? What images most completely characterize Millhauser’s America?

  17. Considering Martin’s personality and his ambitions, was the ending inevitable? At what point does the end become obvious and why? What does Martin mean when he reflects that the Grand Cosmo is "an act of disobedience" [p. 281]?

  STEVEN MILLHAUSER

  Steven Millhauser is the author of numerous works of fiction and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Martin Dressler. His story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the film The Illusionist starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He teaches at Skidmore College.

  Books by Steven Millhauser

  Dangerous Laughter

  The King in the Tree

  Enchanted Night

  The Knife Thrower

  Martin Dressler

  Little Kingdoms

  The Barnum Museum

  From the Realm of Morpheus

  In the Penny Arcade

  Portrait of a Romantic

  Edwin Mullhouse

  BOOKS BY STEVEN MILLHAUSER

  EDWIN MULLHOUSE

  At the age of two Edwin Mullhouse was reciting Shakespeare. At ten he had written a novel that critics would call “a work of undoubted genius.” At eleven Edwin Mullhouse was mysteriously dead. Documenting every stage of this brief life was Jeffrey Cartwright, Edwin’s best friend and biographer—and the narrator of this dazzling portrait of the artist as a young child. As Jeffrey follows Edwin through his preverbal experiments with language, his infatuations with comic books and the troubled second-grade temptress Rose Dorn, and, finally, into the year of his literary glory and untimely demise, Edwin Mullhouse plunges us back into the pleasures and terrors of childhood, even as it plays havoc with our notions of genius and biography.

  Fiction/978-0-679-76652-0

  ENCHANTED NIGHT

  Enchanted Night is set in a Connecticut town over one incredible summer night. The improbable cast of characters includes a man who flees the attic where he’s been writing his magnum opus every night for the past nine years, a band of teenage girls who break into homes and simply leave notes reading “We Are Your Daughters,” and a young woman who meets a dream-like lover on the tree swing in her backyard. A beautiful mannequin steps down from her department store window, and all the dolls left abandoned in the attic and “no longer believed in” magically come to life.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70696-7

  THE KING IN THE TREE

  In The King in the Tree Steven Millhauser turns his attention to the transformations of love in these three hypnotic novellas. While ostensibly showing her home to a prospective buyer, the narrator of “Revenge” unfolds an origami-like narrative of betrayal and psychic violence. In “An Adventure of Don Juan” the legendary seducer seeks out new diversion on an English country estate with devastating results. And the title novella retells the story of Tristan and Ysolt from the agonized perspective of King Mark, a husband who compulsively looks for evidence of his wife’s adultery yet compulsively denies what he finds.

  Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3173-3

  THE KNIFE THROWER AND OTHER STORIES

  The Knife Thrower explores the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, as well as the darker subterranean currents that fuel them. With the
panache of an old-fashioned magician, Steven Millhauser conducts his readers from the dark corners beneath the sunlit world to a balloonist’s tour of the heavens. He transforms department stores and amusement parks into alternate universes of infinite plenitude and menace. He unveils the secrets of a maker of automatons and a coven of teenaged girls. And on every page of The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Millhauser confirms his stature as a narrative enchanter in the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-78163-9

  MARTIN DRESSLER The Tale of an American Dreamer

  Martin Dressler is set in late-nineteenth-century New York City, when new buildings were bursting from the bedrock of Manhattan every day and you might have met an inventor or entrepreneur on any street corner. One such entrepreneur is Martin Dressler, a cigar maker’s son, a young man who has the audacity to make his dreams come true and the ability to do so on such a grand scale that other people will want to dream them too—for a little while. We watch as the young Martin makes the ascent from a hotel bellhop to a builder of hotels of his own. We witness his strange enchantment by two sisters, one of whom becomes his companion and business partner, the other his ghostly, elusive bride. And when Martin sets out to build the Grand Cosmo, a creation so vast that it will rival the world itself, this mesmerizing novel brings us face to face with the ambiguity beneath the optimism of the American dream with a swiftness and intensity that are in themselves magnificently dreamlike.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-78127-1

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  Dangerous Laughter, 978-0-307-38747-9

  Little Kingdoms, 978-0-375-70143-6

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by Steven Millhauser

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Crown Publishers, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Crown edition

  as follows:

  Millhauser, Steven.

  Martin Dressler : the tale of an American dreamer /

  by Steven Millhauser

  p. cm.

  1. Businessmen—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.I422M37 1996

  813′.54—dc20

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76386-0

  96-683

  Random House Web address: http//www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.0