meant when we say that 'man was created to understand the world.' -744-
Though such an enterprise is not by its nature inevitably an avantshy; garde project, in Davenport's hands it is altogether exigent, stimushy; lating, and original. One would not think to place Davenport at the head of an aggressive formation, moving inexorably forward and spearheading an opening for others — the German writer Hans Magshy; nus Enzensberger's view of the historic avant-garde. But then such a view little applies to most other plausible participants in an American vanguard. Davenport not only has no wish to lead but also manifestly refuses to write out of a sense of impatience with what is past. His works are created out of an abiding absorption in things loved, found, collected, retrieved, used, studied, assimilated, and shared. The continual surprise and pleasure afforded by the work has much to do with the delight it takes in handling its own materials, in finshy; gering a skein of thought, a line, a physical detail, an almost forgotten fact of history, an image. Exchanges of words, confidences, emotions, couplings: these too are facts, materials, partially or barely recovershy; able presences like all the others in Davenport. His works are pershy; petually in advance of us and of most everyone else's work by virtue of what one critic calls its 'almost archaic naivete,' its warm yet simultaneously dispassionate embrace of the 'literal' and the 'enshy; cyclopedic,' the 'inconclusive' and the 'visionary.'
Davenport's several collections of short fiction contain a few novella-length works, including the lascivious rhapsody on the life of the Dutch Fourierist philosopher Adriaan van Hovendaal entitled 'The Dawn in Erewhon.' Though he has produced no full-scale novel, his writing is central to the achievement of avant-garde fiction in the United States, and aspects of his work are strangely novelistic. There is an expansiveness of vision, a leisureliness of pacing in Davshy; enport that have nothing to do with the usual concision and implicshy; itness of the short story. Indeed, such qualities distinguish most of the shorter stories as much as they do the longer. 'A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg,' however elegant its organization around a single character and a single unifying experience, can accommodate all sorts of ideas and vagrant references, and one's quiet exhilaration at the end is mixed with disappointment that there is to be no more within a structure flexible enough to accommodate more. Just so, in the title story of his first collection, Tatlin! (1974), much of the richshy; est material is not strictly entailed in the premise from which the -745- fiction unfolds. There is nothing arbitrary or willful about these inshy; clusions. The method is such as to justify itself, continuously, by finding what will serve, extend, illuminate, delight. Development is in the expansion of the evolving consciousness that is the fiction itself. Selection is, as in few other writers, inevitably a matter of addition, discovery leading — not inevitably, but plausibly — to discovery. In no other writer is there such variety of reference with so little ostentashy; tion; in no other so assured a combination of what the character Adriaan calls 'meticulous draughtsmanship' and 'voluptuous' or 'generous' command. In Davenport the American avantshy;garde demshy; onstrates a maturity, a poise and comeliness and elevation, that has not been much in evidence before.
Initially one is more apt to speak of enchantment and sorcery than of maturity in connection with the writing of Steven Millhauser. The author of several novels and collections of stories, he has frankly invited comparison with a wide range of precursors — from the Italo Calvino of Invisible Cities to the Vladimir Nabokov of Pale Fire and the Jorge Luis Borges of 'Pierre Menard' — only to astonish readers with the extraordinary singularity of his work. Millhauser's aesthetic control and meticulous intelligence have been often remarked, but there are better reasons to think of him as the most mature of vanshy; guard writers. A fantasist with a taste for the whimsical and farcical, Millhauser is also a strangely sober, sometimes melancholic writer. Though in every sense of the word an artificer, he can move within a sentence from inspired prestidigitation to disillusionment. For all of his commitment to creating 'an air of legend,' the better to set off creatures 'perfect and complete in themselves,' he is ever alert to the fact that 'today's novelty is tomorrow's ennui,' the marvelous 'a revelation that never comes.' If maturity is reflected in the achieveshy; ment of a perfect balance between abandon and constraint, lightness and weight, innocence and irony, exhilaration and defeat, then Millshy; hauser is the most mature of writers. What appears in his work as a reluctance to let go of childhood and its prerogatives seems upon reflection a persistent intimation of all that childhood, like art, canshy; not sustain. If, often, he trades in the eccentric or bizarre — one thinks of the erotic miniatures sometimes painted upon the sides and tips of the nipples of court ladies in 'Cathay' — he never seems far from evoking what Goethe called 'the spirit of eternal negation.' -746-
That the mood of a Millhauser fiction is quite different from anyshy; thing to be found in other contemporary vanguard works is obvious. Nowhere else is there so haunting a combination of enchantment and disenchantment. A character speaks of 'the obscenity of maturity' only to end by impressing upon us the frailty and bad faith of an undifferentiated commitment to play. Poetic activity is extolled only to issue in puerility or terminal self-absorption. Parody is systematshy; ically employed as a critique of particular conventions only to conshy; clude by undercutting the validity of everything, including its own playful subversions. From delight in fluency and metamorphosis we move to an equally vivid 'skepticism' and 'the knowledge that we can never be satisfied' or fully taken in. The language itself embodies these alternations and ambivalences. Pregnant, even lugubrious passhy; sages suffused by the 'secretive, dark and wayward' are also — simultaneously, deliberately — undercut, brushed by the academic, the finicky, the fanatically observant. From 'abysmal promises,' 'the disillusionment of the body,' and 'I will teach you the death of roses, the emptiness of orgasms in sun-flooded loveless rooms' we move to or from the likes of 'He thinks of Pope's tunnel at Twickenham, of the emergence of eighteenth century English gardens from the rigidity of French and Italian forms.' At its best the language is so entirely a blend of the two dimensions, of the precise and the mysterious, light and dark, that one must speak not of shifts but of interanimating textures and tonalities: wish and recoil, dream and disinfatuation are one.
Millhauser made his reputation with the 1972 novel Edwin Mullhouse, a mock- biography of a 'great' novelist, dead at eleven, and a wickedly suggestive portrayal of his 'biographer,' also his confishy; dant and closest friend, Jeffrey Cartwright. For all its verbal high jinks and its intense remembrance of childish pleasure, it is a book of enormous sadness. In satirizing the romantic religion of art, including the nostalgias that often inform poetic reverie, the novel strikes at its own deepest affinities, at its own sense that in art alone there is the possibility of seeing and feeling truly. Like the character Edwin in his ostensive novel i, Millhauser 'approaches a serious subject by means of comic and even ridiculous images.' Like Jeffrey, ostenshy; sive narrator- author, Millhauser exalts and demeans, gives and takes back. Everywhere, even as it cavorts and puns and burlesques, the -747- novel secretes a poisonous, anathematical will to put an end to its own high spirits. At its most self-canceling indulging a language of transparent excess, hyperbole, cliché, it turns its own generous exshy; travagance to ridicule. With its every 'woe to the writer, most wretched of the damned' and 'who can fathom the soul of man? Friendship is a mystery. Curiosity killed the cat,' the novel irrevoshy; cably undermines its troubled commitment to 'literature,' sincerity, and wisdom. Unable quite to renounce its visceral involvement in soul and seriousness, the novel is prey to the 'peculiar vanity' of Edwin Mullhouse in wishing 'to seem not quite serious.' But for all its occasional playfulness, the novel does not really wish to sustain 'the cute grin of a cartoon cherub,' and where it does appear, as Jeffrey remarks, 'that grin is itself the mask, beneath which lies a grimace of earnestness.' Though one is necessarily reluctant to adopt the self-conscious observations of such a novel as if they were a reshy; liable guide to its intentions, the reader may be certain that Millshy; hauser knows exactly what is at stake and has installed within the novel as much as we need to discern its terrible urge to ironic selfdisenchantment.
Millhauser's subsequent books emerge from the same vision and rely for their effects upon similar procedures. The most brilliant of these later works — including the novella 'August Eschenburg' from In the Penny Arcade (1986) and the title story of The Barnum Mushy; seum (1990) — however singular, have all to do with inauthenticity and the diminishing prospects for creating serious art. In 'August Eschenburg,' these issues are the subject of the work; in other stories they flit in and out of focus as the discourse turns on one, then another related image or reflection. It is simple enough to mark out the dominant counters in 'August,' with its references to 'worldshy; irony,' 'love of truth,' and the relation between art and 'soul.' Here, in a work whose resonance reminds us not of Borges but of Thomas Mann and Confessions of Felix Krull, we have a focused reflection on the capacity of art to 'express spiritual states.' Other works, in spite of their obvious interest in such questions, intermitshy; tently take up a variety of concerns, and with nothing like an urging toward substantive closure. Single images carry enormous weight in such fictions, sometimes reversing the primary thrust of the work in which they appear. But again, for all the paradox, invention, and -748- irony, we cannot but discern the principal business of Millhauser's fiction.
The key to Millhauser's art, and to the avant-garde element in his outlook and practice, has much to do with
