The first mention of the scheme occurs on 6 June, a month after he had begun the Self-Portrait: Moorash intends to show the picture to Sophia in order to “open her eyes.” The painting is not for Sophia; but he intends that she shall “be wakened by it from her slumber.” Is he here perhaps thinking of himself as the triumphant prince, climbing to Dornröschen’s tower? Elizabeth is skeptical of the plan: apart from Sophia’s lack of understanding of Edmund’s work, there is the question of the proper aim of a work of art. Moorash argues that a painting is intended to “excite feelings”—why then should he not wish to excite the feelings of Sophia? Elizabeth asks if that is all he intends. Moorash laughs harshly and replies that the devil works in mysterious ways—perhaps he’ll possess her soul by means of his portrait. Elizabeth, disturbed by his answer, remains silent. On 18 June Moorash is discouraged and thinks of destroying the painting, but on 20 June he is hard at work. On 26 June Elizabeth is attended by Dr. Long after a bad night. The next day Moorash, who has been painting in the barn, moves to his cramped upstairs studio in order to be near Elizabeth. There is a gap of eight days, but on 5 July Elizabeth reports that she has taken a walk with Sophia and William. On 7 July Moorash tells Elizabeth that it’s enough for him if Sophia is simply “presented with the evidence.” His intention appears to have shifted: he now wishes to address her moral sense. Within a week he is filled with doubts and is on the verge of destroying the picture, but he recovers his enthusiasm and returns to work “with a vengeance.” On 17 July Moorash states that “a painting is a dagger aimed at a heart.” His intention appears to have changed again: he now wants to wound Sophia with his art. On 18 July Elizabeth asks whether he plans to woo Sophia with his portrait. Moorash grows thoughtful and replies: “No, I want her to look at me. She has never seen me.” The continual assertion of contradictory intentions during the painting of Self-Portrait is perhaps indicative of an overwrought state of mind, but it should be noted that the shifting esthetic positions of June and July are connected by a consistent theme: Moorash is insisting on the power of painting to affect a beholder, to enter another mind. On 22 July he is “almost done with” the portrait. On 23 July he asks Elizabeth if she is willing to look at it and decide its fate. He shuts himself up for three days of feverish work and on the evening of 26 July brings down the canvas, covered with a white cloth, and sets it up on an easel at the foot of her bed. Facing Elizabeth, he watches her closely as he lifts the cloth.
Later that night Elizabeth recorded the events of 26 July in a rapid, excited hand. The painting “thrills and frightens me—pierces me to the very core.” It is “dark and terrible—the image of Satan—dark.” In the terrible eyes she sees “suffering—and sorrow—and evil unspeakable.” She “cannot bear” to look at it “and yet—and yet.” She begged Edmund to leave the painting with her for the night, so that she might speak with him about it in the morning.
The events of 27 July are occasionally hazy in detail, although clear enough in outline; there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Mrs. Duff’s Report. Edmund rose early and went down to breakfast, which he ate alone in the kitchen-parlor. Elizabeth sometimes slept to mid-morning or later, and he was careful not to disturb her. He returned upstairs to his room, perhaps to work on a painting laid aside months earlier, and was interrupted by Mrs. Duff’s cry. He hurried downstairs. Elizabeth was unconscious and breathing erratically. Edmund hesitated for only a moment before leaving Mrs. Duff with Elizabeth and running the half mile into Saccanaw Falls, where he found that the local doctor was out on his rounds. He promptly hired a trap to take him to Strawson, only to discover that Dr. Long was attending a patient six miles away. In Strawson he was able to find a second doctor, a Dr. Parrish, who returned with him to Stone Hill; Dr. Parrish strode into the sickroom, bent over Elizabeth, and pronounced her dead. About fifteen minutes after the doctor left—it is not clear how long he remained—Sophia and William arrived. At the door Mrs. Duff informed them of Elizabeth’s death. Sophia rushed wildly into the room, followed by Mrs. Duff, and threw herself to her knees beside Elizabeth. Sobbing hysterically, she seized Elizabeth’s hand and began kissing it over and over again and pressing it to her tearstained cheek. William stood for a moment in the doorway, stunned and trembling, before walking into the room and sitting abruptly on the edge of the bed, where he bent his face into his hands. Moorash sat expressionless in a chair on the other side of the bed. Suddenly Sophia stood up, looked wildly about, and stepped over to a small sewing table, where she pulled open a drawer and removed a pair of sharp scissors. Uttering a cry, she ran to the portrait, which still stood on the easel at the foot of the bed, and began slashing at the face with the scissors. During this outburst Moorash stared at her from his chair but did not move. After striking repeated blows, Sophia dropped to her knees, raised her eyes to the ceiling, and with both hands thrust the scissors into her throat. Even as she raised her arms to strike the blow, Moorash leaped from the chair, but he was too late to prevent the scissors from entering with full force. It appears that he next attempted to wrench the weapon from her grasp, but Sophia, though bleeding profusely, struggled violently, as if she were being attacked. It was only now that William, as though startled out of a dream, tore himself from Elizabeth’s side and with a “wild look” and “strangled cry” rushed over to the struggling pair. Moorash had succeeded in pulling the bloody scissors from Sophia’s throat, and there now took place a fierce struggle between Moorash and William for possession of the scissors, in the course of which Moorash was wounded in the neck—it is not clear how. It is impossible to tell from the Report whether William was attempting to prevent a second suicide, or whether, in his half-mad state, he attacked his friend. William suddenly seemed to come to his senses and, holding Edmund gently, laid him on the floor. He became brisk and efficient, tearing strips of cloth to staunch the wounds of Edmund and Sophia, and ordering Mrs. Duff to fetch a doctor. When she returned some twenty minutes later with Dr. Parrish, whom she had overtaken on the road to Strawson, she found William lying on his back on the bed beside Elizabeth, one arm outstretched. She did not know at first that he was dead. On the floor lay one of Moorash’s hunting pistols, which William had removed from the small deal table in the upstairs bedroom. Moorash was dead (later it was determined that he had died from a stab wound in the throat). Sophia was alive but unconscious; she died early the next morning.
A tableau of bloody corpses presided over by a mangled painting is an effect that Moorash would have deplored; he detested banal visions of the knife-and-cadaver kind. That his life should have ended as an imitation of a mediocre academic painting would nevertheless, one imagines, have elicited from him a wry smile, for it was his conviction that the contrivances of art were always superior to the accidents of life.
The Self-Portrait is badly damaged; despite painstaking restorative efforts, much of the face, including both eyes, is so torn and scratched as to be virtually unseeable. Nevertheless, the design or plan remains clear. Moorash retained the motif of lake, hills, and sky that he used in his three late portraits, as well as the method of mythic representation: the shadows of wings are visible, as if he had intended to portray himself as a great dark angel, a fierce and fallen Lucifer. Although even in its mutilated form the portrait retains a certain power, the damage condemns it to an uneasy place in Moorash’s oeuvre, for it seems to hover in a limbo between art and biography, between the realm of imperishable beauty and the world of decay.
Elizabeth and Edmund were buried in the small graveyard in Saccanaw Falls, within sight of Stone Hill. The parents of Sophia and William insisted that they be returned for proper burial in the family plot in Philadelphia.
In October 1846 Charlotte Vail died, after a lingering illness.
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 Edwar
d 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 dreamlike 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
Copyright © 1993 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 in the United States by Poseidon Press, New York, in 1993.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Catalogue of the Exhibition” previously appeared in Salmagundi Issue #92. “The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon” previously appeared in Antaeus Issue #70.
Millhauser, Steven.
Little kingdoms : three novellas / Steven Millhauser.
p. cm.
Contents: The little kingdom of J. Franklin Payne — The princess, the dwarf, and the dungeon — Catalogue of the exhibition: the art of Edmund Moorash
(1810–1846).
eISBN: 978-0-307-76388-4
I. Title
[PS3563.I422A6 1998]
813′.54—dc21 97-34396
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.0
Little Kingdoms Page 23
