Understanding Steven Millhauser

Chapter 8: Martin Dressler

CHAPTER 8 Martin Dressler Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Martin Dressler (1996), will remind readers of his earlier novels such as Edwin Mullhouse and shorter fiction such as “August Eschenburg” and “Eisenheim the Illusionist.” Martin Dressler is a bildungsroman, following the development of yet another selfimmersed dreamer/artist who lives for the pursuit of his own ideals and goals, with a minimal concern for financial success or relationships with others. The ambivalence of the novel’s subtitle—The Tale of an American Dreamer —aptly catches the story’s double nature. It is a story of that quintessential American Dream, the concept of personal self-development—both spiritual to the idealist and economic to the pragmatist. But it is also the “tale” of a “dreamer,” with its own ambivalence—one who aspires and one who is no longer in touch with actuality. Martin at eight is a “dreamer” of a larger world beyond the narrow confines of his father’s tobacco shop and the cramped living quarters above, especially his small room. The setting over a century ago locates the narrative in a more innocent time in the United States—or so the myth proclaims—to embody in Martin the “American Dream” in its earlier and purer form. Dressler is no John D. Rockefeller, aspiring to immense wealth and power, but the representative of the Old Country’s dream of a New World in which to dream oneself into a larger, more complex and more splendid state of being.1 Any success Martin achieves only whets his appetite for greater dreams of the ultimate “hotel” as a world within the world. Because Dressler, like Eschenburg or Eisenheim, pushes himself to ever-greater achievements, this novel’s mode is essentially tragic. As Dressler himself senses, to rest upon his laurels as a visionary of the ultimate hotel is to accept a more ignominious defeat than to dream up MARTIN DRESSLER 81 worlds that are ever-more impractical for those he expects to move into these “castles in the air.” To dream the impossible and not achieve it may be tragic, but such “failure” certifies the value of the dream, while being satisfied with actuality is to deny the grandeur of American dreaming of self-transformation . As in his other renditions of personal development, Millhauser focuses on those aspects of Martin’s childhood that foreshadow the central issues of his adult life. The opening sentence draws readers into the story as a “tale” to be told, a fable—“There once lived a man . . . who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune” (Martin Dressler 1). The “American Dream” of self-transformation as a nineteenth-century construct is underlined by its being a romantic dream of satisfying the “heart’s desire” (2), rather than a tawdry effort to “get rich quick.” Even as a boy, Martin dreams of a life and a world that his parents could scarcely imagine. Accordingly Martin’s parents, especially his father, represent crucial formative elements. Otto Dressler came to America seeking the Promised Land, but like Moses he gets no more than a Pisgah view because he is too timid, too beaten down by the Old Country to do more than beget a son who will dream the Dream. Central to Martin’s early development is his construction of the cigar-tree for his father’s shop-window. Martin gets the idea for this display while on a customary Sunday stroll with his mother past shop-windows, dazzling him with the rich plenitude of the great world beyond his father’s little shop. Otto Dressler allows Martin to construct the tree, even though in his little world of self-denial the cigar-tree is potentially “extravagant.” Because his father is an inhibiting force, Martin ends in disappointment and frustration after having to scale down his vision of a tree full of French dolls smoking cigars. This is Martin’s formative experience: all his adult activities are in pursuit of greater and greater extravagance, denied him by his conservative Old World father. Martin’s success as a businessman is set in motion when he notices that Charley Stratemeyer, a day clerk at the Vanderlyn Hotel, walks to the Dressler shop each day for a cigar. The enterprising Martin offers to deliver the cigar on the condition that Stratemeyer will generate some word-of-mouth for the shop, since the cigars sold at the hotel newsstand have not been well marketed. Because of Martin’s precocious...