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PARTISAN REVIEW
dust tomes ground out in the airless carrels of countless university li–
braries. Along the way, the novelist mockingly deflated pompous psy–
chologists, children's books, kindergarten, and especially the animated
cartoons which obsessed his pre-adolescent wunderkind.
Mter this comic diversion, Millhauser turned away from the youthful
highjinks of parody. In two volumes of novellas-
The Barnum Museum
and
In the Penny Arcade
-
he sought to dramatize the versatility of the
imagination by depicting craftsmen at work on non-verbal art forms that
acquire magical properties. "Peopling" his strangely allegorical tales with
makers of puppets, miniatures, automatons, board games and circus props,
all of them rigorously described, Millhauser sought to convey the means
by which popular and folk arts of diverse kinds achieved their effects. But
he was equally absorbed by the moral context of such work - the way the
obsession with creative artifice conflicts, at times tragically, with the im–
peratives of reality, and why the skillful craftsmen of the marvelous objects
have such a precarious connection with the ordinary world.
In the opening tale of his new volume, "The Little Kingdom of
J.
Franklin Payne," Millhauser has renewed his early fascination with ani–
mated cartoons, which he now regards neither satirically nor playfully.
Payne draws comic strips in the 1920s for a Midwestern newspaper, and
rises later to the loftier rank of editorial cartoonist on a New York daily.
But his true passion, kept secret from the quotidian world, is animated
cartoons, which he longs to perfect as a serious art form and preserve
from the coarse demands of commercial success. As Payne devotes more
and more of his time and manic concentration to this private passion, he
jeopardizes his newspaper job and wrecks his marriage but refuses to
abandon what has become his vital center, his secret life.
The novella is thus a portrait of the artist as a hostage to artifice, en–
slaved by his fierce ambition. As Payne labors cruelly long hours on the
thirty thousand drawings for his animated masterpiece, "Voyage to the
Dark Side of the Moon," he is lured more and more deeply into the
make-believe of art and invention, seduced by "the desire to release
himself into the free, the fantastic, the deliberately impossible." In the
end, reaching for "an intoxicating release from the constriction of things,"
Payne becomes the helpless victim of his artistic delusions and surrenders
his grasp of actuality entirely to the fantasies of madness.
The most haunting and most elaborately conceived tale in the vol–
ume, "Catalogue of the Exhibition," recounts the life, and meticulously
describes the work, of one Edmund Moorash, a visionary American
painter, far ahead of his time, who dies, still in his thirties, in 1846. In a
domestic arrangement reminiscent ofWilliam and Dorothy Wordsworth,
Moorash lives with his devoted sister in an isolated corner of rural
