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CHAPTER 3 Portrait of a Romantic The success of Millhauser’s first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, contributed measurably to the favorable response to Portrait of a Romantic (1977).1 The novel begins fittingly in an unnamed Connecticut town,2 as did the first novel, and clearly this second novel is exploring another part of Millhauser country. The narrator, twenty-nine-year-old Arthur Grumm, is an older version of Jeffrey Cartwright, attempting to pass off a “fiction” as a memoir, rather than a biography . Thus, like Jeffrey, Grumm is a “character” in his own text, a hybrid of the novel and (auto)biography/memoir. Eventually Grumm reveals he is telling this story because he too has committed a crime for which he shares some of Jeffrey’s ambivalent feeling of guilt and innocence. Because Arthur Grumm is an adult, not the eleven-year-old Jeffrey, he begins by summarizing his early life. Obviously Grumm has no need to describe in detail the territory of his pre-adolescent life because he has the larger territory of his adolescence to cover, and it clearly is the adolescent Arthur who is the subject of the story. In contrast to Jeffrey’s telling the story of how he “assisted” Edwin’s “suicide” fairly soon after the event, Grumm is narrating his story well over a decade after he was responsible for William Mainwaring ’s actual suicide. Thus, as Danielle Alexander notes,3 Portrait of a Romantic begins with two Arthur Grumms—the narrator/novelist/memoirist and the character in that text. This sense of two Arthur Grumms is established by the first pages of Portrait of a Romantic.4 The storyteller Grumm offers up verbal extravagance in his opening pastiche of Walt Whitman’s style: “Mother of myself, myself I sing: lord of loners, duke of dreams, king of the clowns” (Portrait of a Romantic 1). Grumm is the “mother,” or progenitor, of himself, both as the boy 28 UNDERSTANDING STEVEN MILLHAUSER he is creating, based on the historical “Arthur Grumm,” and as the adult storyteller Grumm who is generating this text as narrator and novelist. Grumm romanticizes childhood—after all, the title is Portrait of a Romantic—until he abruptly interrupts the speaker of such romantic sentiment with an explosion of hostility. Such sentimentality, Grumm implies, is an adult’s sugar-coating of what the child knows as unrelieved boredom. Even now writing about his “massive Mommy” with her “bouncy cheeks” and “luscious red-brown hair” is boring enough to disrupt his song of himself. Through Arthur Grumm, looking backward to his childhood, Millhauser is announcing the two faces of the Romantic sensibility. In his Whitmanesque opening, Grumm identifies himself as “lover and killer,”5 who “sings” of “sunbeams and moonbeams,” in an apostrophe to the “dark angels of my adolescence ” (1). Those “dark angels” function as deliverers from the exquisite tedium of family life and school, only to play Russian roulette and join suicide clubs. That such playing with death was mere flirtation, however, is indicated by Grumm (a hybrid perhaps of “grim” and “glum”) at twenty-nine having obviously survived adolescence. These early chapters are reminiscent in other ways of Jeffrey’s storytelling . Arthur also seems occasionally fetishistic about the details that call up memories of childhood. Even though he expresses horror at sentimentality, his endless cataloging of the boy’s world expresses nostalgia for that boring childhood he attempts to dismiss. A case in point is his detailed description of a dozen or more specimens in his father’s rock collection. The presence here of that great cataloger Walt Whitman suggests that Jeffrey and Arthur, perhaps Steven as well, share this American notion that things do not really exist until named, transforming fiction into archiving what might otherwise be lost. It is a variety of archeological study of the contemporary, as though the smallest of items in our everyday world are being treated as the historical specimens they may one day become.6 Portrait of a Romantic recalls Edwin Mullhouse in other ways. Like Jeffrey , Arthur is essentially a social isolate. Just as Jeffrey has no friends other than Edwin, Arthur seems friendless until he discovers his “double” in William Mainwaring, much as Edwin found his in Edward Penn. Unlike Penn, who just disappears, William eventually accepts Arthur’s friendship and becomes one of the triads of Arthur’s companions in adolescence. Ironically, as William is taken into the Grumm family and Arthur’s parents clearly prefer him to their own...

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