Understanding Steven Millhauser

Chapter 7: Little Kingdoms

CHAPTER 7 Little Kingdoms Little Kingdoms (1993) once again raises issues of form in Steven Millhauser’s fiction. This first of two collections of novellas is a reminder that he has published twice as many novellas as novels and published many more stories than novels and novellas combined. Despite the customary misconception that a novella is simply a short story that gets away from the writer, Millhauser has made it clear that he sits down to deliberately write a novella, rather than a story, and it is the time which elapses in the narrative that makes it a novella.1 As he indicates, the novella is a risky venture because journal or magazine editors set limits on the length of short fiction they publish. Thus the novella becomes a potentially purer form, written for the writing of it, rather than the likelihood of immediate publication. “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne” offers a classic example of Millhauser’s mastery of the novella form.2 Unlike “August Eschenburg” or “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” which it resembles in certain respects, “Franklin Payne” begins in media res before it turns back to the formative experience in Franklin’s boyhood. Just as August’s art of automatons was shaped by his encounter with the paper figure animated by the frightened bird inside, or Eisenheim ’s career as an illusionist was formed by his encounter with the magician who made himself disappear, Payne’s art as an animator had its origins while he assisted his father in the darkroom. In later life, Payne recalls his father’s voice as he slowly counted the seconds for the paper to remain in the enlarger, while moving his finger up and down, as though he were a priest celebrating the mystery of how the photographic image miraculously came into being, after being called to the darkroom like a spirit from the beyond. The excitement the boy Franklin felt in the quiet reverence of the darkroom was recaptured when he put pencil or crayon to white paper, and LITTLE KINGDOMS 67 images again seemed to generate themselves from nothing. After immersing himself as a college student in Klein’s Wonder Palace—one of Millhauser’s signature museums, comprising a movie theater, freak shows, and a collection of old wax figures—Franklin is offered a part-time job doing advertising posters and quick-sketch portraits. Eventually he is noticed by a newspaperman and offered a job in the Cincinnati Daily Crier’s art department. Soon he creates a comic strip, set in Klein’s dime museum, and calls the strip “Dime Museum Dreams.” As Franklin moves into jobs with greater responsibility and higher pay, the narrative becomes more clearly a bildungsroman, or story of an individual’s development. Accordingly he becomes a forerunner of Martin Dressler, an “American dreamer,” motivated by the excitement of selftransformation . J. Franklin Payne confirms his success by marrying Cora Vaughn, daughter of a Cincinnati judge, and then moving his wife and their three-year-old daughter Stella to New Hebron, in upstate New York. Franklin divides his energies between his job as a staff artist at the New York World Citizen, where he does political cartoons as well as a comic strip, and his avocation as an animator. In the opening scene, having finished his “homework” on the comic strip, he turns to his labor of love, meticulously creating india-ink drawings on pieces of rice paper for an animated cartoon for which it will take 4,000 “pages” for a four-minute cartoon. He is working on page number 1,827. The narrative strategy of extended flashback in the second chapter allows the story to proceed some days after Franklin’s “enchanted night” of climbing out his window to celebrate the wonder of this starry night. To some, he will seem the child who refuses to “grow up,” but to the author, one suspects, Franklin retains the penny-arcade boy’s recuperated innocence, the capacity to see with a child’s eyes, crucial to creativity. As becomes overt, Franklin’s childlike innocence as an adult will recall August’s, especially as Max Horn comes on stage to reprise the role of Hausenstein. The timing of Horn’s visit to Franklin’s home is crucial, for everything follows from the entry of Horn.3 Central to this first visit is Horn’s surprise that Franklin never mentioned having a wife and Cora’s “coolly” matching the visitor’s remark to indicate her surprise that he...