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This witty parody of a familiar American story traces the rise of a son of German immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York. Dressler is a hard-headed businessman with a romantic streak who seeks to assuage his sehnsucht by building a series of increasingly elaborate apartment complexes. Dressler's personal life is similarly divided. He marries a sickly, lounging wisp, and relegates her lively sister to the role of business manager and advisor. Dresssler is captive to an empty, mechanical dream, and of course i t destroys him. Success, thy name is Xanadu. Wandering his artificial halls like Charles Kane or Howard Hughes, Dressler lives the blankness of the American capitalist. Success such as Millhauser's has its own peril. It is a peculiar triumph to mirror vacuity well.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review

This wonderful, wonder-full book is a fable and phantasmagoria of the sources of our century.... -- The New York Times Book Review, Janet Burroway

内容简介

Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied by two sisters--one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner. As the eponymous Martin's vision becomes bolder and bolder he walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry, a sense of doom builds piece-by-hypnotic piece until this mesmerizing journey into the heart of an American dreamer reaches its bitter-sweet conclusion.

作者简介

Steven Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College. His first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, which has been out of print since 1990, is now available in trade paperback from Vintage Contemporaries, to coincide with the publication of Martin Dressler.

目　　录

DRESSLER'S CIGARS AND TOBACCO
CHARLEY STRATEMEYER
WEST BRIGHTON
THE VANDERLYN HOTEL
ROOM
A BUSINESS VENTURE
LITTLE ALICE BELL
ADVANCEMENT
THE PARADISE MUSE E
CAROLINE AND EMMELINE VERNON
A SUNDAY AFTERNOON STROLL
THE RADIATOR

……

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Dressler's Cigars and Tobacco

There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son,who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike goodfortune. This was toward the end of the nineteenth century, when onany streetcorner in America you might see some ordinary-lookingcitizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tincan, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and betterelevator, or open a fabulous new department store with big displaywindows made possible by an improved process for manufacturingsheets of glass. Although Martin Dressler was a shopkeeper's son,he too dreamed his dream, and at last he was lucky enough to dowhat few people even dare to imagine: he satisfied his heart'sdesire. But this is a perilous privilege, which the gods watchjealously, waiting for the flaw, the little flaw, that bringseverything to ruin, in the end.

One hot morning in the summer of 1881, when Martin was nine yearsold, he was standing in the window of his father's cigar store,looking out at the street. He liked the striped, shady awningsacross the way, the sunshiny cobbles, the heavy bent-head drayhorsepulling a delivery wagon. He watched the sunshot ripple of musclesin the shoulders of the horse and a lady with green feathers in herhat who had stopped to look at the window of the silk and ribbonshop. A gleaming wet clump of horsedung lay steaming in the sun.Along came a jogtrotting cabhorse, the upright bouncing cabbysomehow reminded Martin of a dice box-and as he watched the brightenchanting world of the street, separated from his nose by a singlesheet of carefully washed glass, he almost forgot why he wasstanding in the window. An excitement came over him, as heremembered. Already that morning he had helped his father crankdown the dark green awning and wheel out old Tecumseh into the warmshade. Under the far edge of the awning he saw Tecumseh standing onthe sidewalk, shading his eyes with one hand, holding in the othera bundle of wooden cigars topped by a plug of wooden tobacco. Inthe brown, dim store his father had walked behind the dark counterwith its glass-knobbed jars of tobacco. Picking up the big key tounlock the iron cashbox, he had again given Martin permission toplace the cigar tree in the window, while warning him not todisturb the row of cigar boxes on display.

Dressler's Cigars and Tobacco 
 
There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son,
who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good
fortune. This was toward the end of the nineteenth century, when on
any streetcorner in America you might see some ordinary-looking
citizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tin
can, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and better
elevator, or open a fabulous new department store with big display
windows made possible by an improved process for manufacturing
sheets of glass. Although Martin Dressler was a shopkeeper's son,
he too dreamed his dream, and at last he was lucky enough to do
what few people even dare to imagine: he satisfied his heart's
desire. But this is a perilous privilege, which the gods watch
jealously, waiting for the flaw, the little flaw, that brings
everything to ruin, in the end. 
 
One hot morning in the summer of 1881, when Martin was nine years
old, he was standing in the window of his father's cigar store,
looking out at the street. He liked the striped, shady awnings
across the way, the sunshiny cobbles, the heavy bent-head drayhorse
pulling a delivery wagon. He watched the sunshot ripple of muscles
in the shoulders of the horse and a lady with green feathers in her
hat who had stopped to look at the window of the silk and ribbon
shop. A gleaming wet clump of horsedung lay steaming in the sun.
Along came a jogtrotting cabhorse, the upright bouncing cabby
somehow reminded Martin of a dice box-and as he watched the bright
enchanting world of the street, separated from his nose by a single
sheet of carefully washed glass, he almost forgot why he was
standing in the window. An excitement came over him, as he
remembered. Already that morning he had helped his father crank
down the dark green awning and wheel out old Tecumseh into the warm
shade. Under the far edge of the awning he saw Tecumseh standing on
the sidewalk, shading his eyes with one hand, holding in the other
a bundle of wooden cigars topped by a plug of wooden tobacco. In
the brown, dim store his father had walked behind the dark counter
with its glass-knobbed jars of tobacco. Picking up the big key to
unlock the iron cashbox, he had again given Martin permission to
place the cigar tree in the window, while warning him not to
disturb the row of cigar boxes on display. 
 
In the narrow window-space Martin began walking carefully up and
down among the open boxes, with the colored pictures on the inner
lids, searching for a good place for his tree. 
 
The cigar tree was a wooden rod set in a round base, with sixteen
branches of twisting copper wire. From the end of each wire hung a
cigar. The tree was Martin's own invention, but he had borrowed the
idea of a gorgeous display from the windows of the big department
stores that he passed with his mother on their Sunday afternoon
walk, when she put on her best dress and feathered hat to stroll
along Broadway and look at the store windows. Martin's mother
almost never allowed him to cross Broadway, where great red or
yellow omnibuses pulled by teams of two horses came clattering by;
once she had seen a man hit by the wheel of an omnibus, and another
time she had seen a horse lying in the middle of the street. She
herself shopped at the less expensive stores on Sixth Avenue, where
high in the air the Elevated tracks stretched away like a long roof
with holes in it for the sun to come through. But the line of
stores and hotels on their side of Broadway between the two big
shady squares, Union and Madison, was almost as familiar to Martin
as his own street. At Madison Square Park his mother liked to sit
on a wooden bench under the trees and look up at the big
seven-story hotels, before heading back to their rooms over the
cigar store, where she changed into her second-best dress and went
down to straighten the boxes and dust the tobacco jars while his
father sat bent over the account book. It was after one of these
Sunday walks that Martin had begun to think of improving the window
display of his father's store. Otto Dressler had at first refused,
for he disliked anything that smacked of the frivolous or
extravagant, but he had come round, as Martin knew he would, under
the pressure of reasons presented in an orderly way and without
excitement. Martin was especially proud of one argument: he had
reasoned that the sale of even a single additional nickel cigar
each week would result in increased sales revenues of two dollars
and sixty cents in the course of one year, which even after
subtracting the cost to the wholesaler would leave enough for three
thirty-five-cent fares on the steam train from Prospect Park to
Coney Island. 
 
Although Martin liked the sunny world beyond the window, he also
liked the brown dusk of the cigar store, which even in summer was
lit by gaslights on the walls. He liked the neat rows of cedarwood
boxes with their lines of orderly cigars packed twenty-five and
fifty and one hundred to the box. His father had once taken out the
cigars from a box of fifty to show him how they were stacked: there
were three top rows of thirteen cigars and a bottom row of eleven,
with wooden inserts to make up for the missing two cigars. Still
better were the colored labels on the inside lids, showing pictures
of all sorts of things: an Indian on a horse, with teepees in the
background; a boy and his dog by a swimming hole; an Egyptian woman
with bare breasts and a gold bracelet on her upper arm, sitting in
a little white boat and trailing her fingers in flowering lily
pads; a gleaming black train puffing black smoke. He liked the
names of the smoking and chewing tobaccos: Bull Durham, Lone Jack,
Winesap, Diadem of Old Virginia, Daniel Webster. He liked the
dark-shiny briarwood pipes in their velvet cases, the cherrywood
pipes with the bark left on them, the tall Alsatian pipes with
shiny porcelain bowls and silver lids, the big-bowled meerschaums
carved with faces. Then there were the boxes of chewing tobacco,
plug and twist, the jars of sweet-smelling pipe tobacco with knobs
on top, the cigar lighter on the counter with its tulip-shaped
globe and its two alcohol burners where a customer could bend to
light a cigar. His father had started out as a cigarmaker in two
rooms over a mirror-frame-maker's shop in an alleyway off Forsyth
Street in Kleindeutschland. Otto Dressler had worked at a bench at
home, using his own cutting board and knife on tobacco leaves that
were prepared by strippers and delivered from the shop in pads of
fifty. He showed Martin the art of rolling a cigar: you handled the
leaf carefully to prevent tearing, rolled the wrapper so as to
cover holes in the leaf, and used both hands to shape the cigar
over the filler and binder. 
 
Martin himself could roll a pretty fair cigar, an art he had
demonstrated more than once to admiring customers. His father had
both admired and disapproved of these displays, which were well
done in themselves but smacked of showmanship. But Martin knew that
he'd won his father's solid respect as a helper in the store.
Customers who were at first amused by the well-mannered boy behind
the counter were quickly impressed by the thoroughness of his
knowledge of cigars, pipes, and tobacco. And he had a gift that
surprised people: he could swiftly sense the temperament of a
customer and make sensible, precise suggestions. He himself, he
well understood, was a kind of attraction in the store; men liked
him and trusted his judgment, even as they were amused and faintly
disturbed by the idea of relying on Otto Dressler's
youngster. 
 
And yet, standing in the window as he adjusted one of the brass
wires in his tree, Martin had to admit that in the brown
peacefulness of the store he sometimes had ideas that he had to
keep carefully out of sight-ideas that his father, with his heavy
shoulders and thick brown mustache, would have judged to be
extravagant. The cigar tree itself was a much quieter version of
Martin's original idea, which he had known he'd better keep to
himself: he had imagined a window filled with elegant French dolls,
all smoking cigars. When his father grew angry he never shouted but
seemed to harden himself, as if he were holding in an explosion,
and his voice became thin and hard; and sometimes when he was angry
with Martin's mother he would tell her to lower her voice, to
control herself, to stop being excited. His mother, like Martin,
helped out in the store, which stayed open six days a week from
seven in the morning to nine at night. But in the parlor over the
back of the store was an old upright piano, with a dark bench
covered in wine-red brocade, where now and then his mother would
sit and play "F?r Elise," and a dreamy look would come over her: at
the end of a phrase she would lift her hand in an odd, graceful
way, and leave it suspended in the air for a moment before it
seemed to wake up and then plunged down to the yellowish keys. His
mother told him that she had played the piano as a girl in
Darmstadt and that when she married Otto Dressler he had vowed she
would have a piano: he had insisted on renting one by the week in
the old neighborhood, at a time when they sometimes had only black
bread for supper. Martin liked to hear his mother tell that story,
for he saw that his serious father, in his own way, had a touch of
the extravagant. 
 
He gave a final bend to one wire branch, moved the tree slightly
back so that it stood behind and between two open cigar boxes, and
stepped down from the window. Then he opened the door and walked
out under the awning. On the sidewalk old Tecumseh stood shading
his eyes, staring out at the street. Martin saw instantly that the
cigar tree in the window was wrong: it looked funny and spindly,
hardly like a tree at all-it gave off an air of poverty, of
failure. It was stupid and ugly. It hadn't even been what he'd
wanted anyway. His eyes began to prickle, anger and disappointment
flamed in him, and in the dark window he caught sight of his face.
It looked thoughtful, even calm, utterly unlike the feeling in his
chest. The sight of his calm face calmed him. He felt a moment of
anger at his father and then complete calm. He felt calm and clear
and wise and old. He was old, old and calm, calm as old Tecumseh by
the door. 
 
2 
 
Charley Stratemeyer 
 
Martin's first successful business venture took place not long
after. Charley Stratemeyer, one of the day clerks at the Vanderlyn
Hotel, had a fondness for a particular kind of fancy panatella that
he couldn't get at the lobby cigar stand, and for the past few
months he had taken to strolling over to Dressler's Cigars and
Tobacco during his lunch hour and chatting with Martin before
walking over to a little chophouse he knew on Seventh Avenue.
Martin, who liked the humorous young man with the melancholy eyes,
and who had been struck by something Charley had said, turned
things over in his mind and at last decided to make a proposal. He
pointed out that Charley had to walk from the Vanderlyn to the
cigar store and then turn around and pass the Vanderlyn on his way
to Seventh Avenue, so that he was losing valuable time on his lunch
hour. But if Martin delivered the cigar to Charley at the Vanderlyn
each day, then Charley would save time on his walk to the
restaurant. In return he asked only one thing. Since the cigar
stand in the hotel lobby had disappointed Charley, it must also
disappoint many people who stayed at the hotel, and he asked
Charley to put in a word for Dressler's Cigars and Tobacco. At this
Charley laughed aloud and clapped Martin on the back, saying he was
a sharp little devil. 
 
Now every day at noon Martin walked from the cigar store to the
Vanderlyn Hotel, where he delivered Charley's cigar and took in the
great lobby with its chairs of maroon plush, its pillars carved at
the top with leaves and fruit, its ceiling decorated with gilt
hexagons, the plants in stone pots, the shiny brass spittoons on
the marble floor, the cigar stand in the corner. One day he walked
over to the stand, behind which sat an old man reading a newspaper,
and saw that it was a careless mix of expensive and cheap cigars,
displayed without plan, the whole affair badly thought out from
start to finish. Soon the first new customer from the Vanderlyn
entered Dressler's Cigars and Tobacco; and business began picking
up in a small but noticeable way. 
 
Martin liked the hot noon walk down his street to the Vanderlyn at
the corner of Broadway. He knew each window and awning well: the
paper and twine window under its green-and-white-striped awning,
the window of derbies and fedoras under its red-and-white-striped
awning, the window of umbrellas and walking sticks under its
brown-and-white-striped awning, the window of ladies' dress
trimmings, the stone steps going down to the linen draper's shop,
the window of bolts of cloth past which he could see old Grauman
the tailor, the window of ladies' hats, the barbershop window with
the reflection of the turning pole-and then the fringed awning, the
rounded stone entranceway, the high glass doors of the six-story
Vanderlyn Hotel. Martin was soon friends with the doorman in his
maroon-and-gold jacket, who for some reason reminded him of old
Tecumseh, and the lobby no longer seemed like one of the colored
pictures in the Arabian Nights, but a familiar place filled with
interesting details: the heavy room keys hanging on a board behind
the desk clerks, the chairs grouped in twos and threes around small
tables, the gentleman with gloves and a fancy walking stick who sat
smoking a second-rate cigar. Sometimes when Martin handed Charley
his cigar he would stand talking for a few minutes before returning
to the store, but one day Charley said he'd like to show Martin
something. He led Martin through the lobby past a group of pillars
into what seemed another lobby, with half-open doors giving
glimpses of smaller rooms, and turning a corner he came to a row of
three elevators.

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