MILLICENT BELL
617
is described as making his pictures by an endless application of paint and
its removal, the scrapings covering the floor of his studio. The onlooker
might feel, says the narrator, that one of his portraits "had evolved from a
long lineage of gray, ancestral faces, rendered into ash but still there, as
ghostly presences on the harried paper." This description recalls the paint–
ings-and perhaps procedure-of the English artist Frank Auerbach, who
may be the real artist Sebald knows. Robert Hughes calls Auerbach's art
" inquisi torial" and describes it as having for its subject not the observed
facts or their kinetic equivalents but "the process of discovery." As such an
artist, Ferber may also be a representation of Sebald himself. The remark–
able sentence just quoted, like much of the prose of
The Emigrants,
gestures
mutely at something beyond itself, that ghostly ancestry "rendered into
ash," which the writer cannot look at directly yet strives to know.
The 1997 Pulitzer Prize brings me back, finally, to Steven Millhauser's
Martin Dressler,
a novel, its publisher boasts, that "captures place and time
so vividly that history and fiction became thoroughly blurred." In fact, the
blurb does not do justice to the brilliant fabulousness of this hallucinato–
ry book which is as much a fairy tale-like
Briar Rose-----as
it is a
reconstruction of the real New York of the 1890's. Brilliantly authentic
with precise details exhumed from historical record, it is also a
marchen
that
begins, as such a tale should, with an immemorial once-upon-a-time:
"There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son, who
rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune."
Martin's "rise" seems, for a while, to be a model Horatio Alger fable of
the step by step elevation of a poor boy by dint of industry and wit. It
begins in his father's tobacconist shop where, at twelve, he learns to roll cig–
ars and boosts business by a clever window display. But soon he is employed
as a bellboy at the luxurious Vanderlyn hotel. He is fascinated by its vast
organized design, "a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well–
planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up
and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired
the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam
boiler or a suspension bridge." It is the beginning of his obsession with the
idea of businesses and social structures as vast machines and of himself as an
energizing force. By the time he is eighteen he is the Manager's secretary
and knows everything there is to know about the hotel's hierarchy and
functional gears and switches. But his dreams go further.
Martin thought of iron El trestles winding and stretching across the
city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric ele-
