The Knife Thrower
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Nostalgia! No, that is a charge that irritates us profoundly, one that we take particular pains to refute. If nostalgia is the craving for a past way of life no longer possible, then we ask our accusers: what vanished way of life can possibly be represented by our bare, winding passageways? With pride we point to our town’s modern features—our satellite dishes and solar panels, our new barium-sulfur streetlights, our highway department’s up-to-the-minute graders, pavers, and rollers, our new waste-disposal plant. We are a late-twentieth-century town poised for the plunge into the new millennium, and if we honor our Revolutionary War dead and preserve our restored town hall on its original seventeenth-century green, if we dutifully place shiny bronze plaques on our eighteenth-century houses and display Quinnepaug axheads in the basement of our historical society, we are in no sense looking back misty-eyed toward some vanished way of life that none of us could tolerate, but are merely holding on to a few keepsakes and old family photographs as we make our difficult way through life like everyone else. Our passageways have nothing to do with some earlier, simpler way of life; though we can’t say, don’t know, what our passageways are, it would be far truer to say that they bear no relation whatever to any period of our history, but rather exist as a place apart—a place from which to contemplate the town coolly, or even to forget the town altogether.
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One school of philosophy has suggested that all towns are like our town, but that only we believe in our passageways. It is our belief that permits us to descend, just as it is their incredulity that condemns them to the surface of earth. A corollary of this theory, proposed by a rival school, is that our passageways do not exist except insofar as we believe in them—that the entire structure of stairways, shadows, and turning paths lies solely within us. Members of this school insist that the only way to find an opening to our underground world is to seek out a quiet and secluded spot. Close your eyes. Concentrate your attention inward. Descend.
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For the rest of us, the stairways are most certainly there. We have only to walk along the railway embankment at the back of the stores on Main Street, or step behind the peeling red shed in the lumberyard, or wander in the north woods, where sooner or later we’re bound to come upon a fallen and decaying tree that partly conceals a rough opening with stairs going down. Carefully we descend the rough stone steps, from which blades of grass stick up, and on which, as we make our way down, patches of moss begin to appear. At the bottom we walk a short distance to a crude archway, over which a glass-globed lamp dimly glows, and stepping through the arch we come to a passageway, stretching right and left into the dark. Sometimes we wander only to the next archway before climbing back to the everyday world. Sometimes we wander for hours, or for an entire day. But however long we wander, however deep we plunge, the time always comes when we return. Indeed it is somewhat misleading to think of us as always leaving our town to descend into our passageways. It would be no less fair to think of us as continually emerging from our passageways, into the upper town. For surely the truth of our way of life lies here, in the continual act of descent and ascent. This up-and-down movement is so striking in our lives that one school of thought has chosen the stairway rather than the passageway as our secret symbol. Even we who have no interest in symbols, we citizens who refuse to bind ourselves to any school, readily acknowledge that we are people of the stairway—uppers-and-downers, we, through and through. Those who dislike us say that we are restless, dissatisfied souls, forever escaping one place for another; though we defend ourselves sharply, we know that we can’t entirely evade this charge. Those more kindly disposed prefer to think of us as continually immersing ourselves in two necessary atmospheres. For if I have spoken of the exhilaration of descent, it is necessary to speak also of a second exhilaration, the exhilaration of return: the sun striking the sidewalk, the trembling blue air, the breeze heavy with town-smells: smell of porches and warm baseball gloves on sunny summer afternoons, of cut grass and creosoted telephone poles, tang of lawn-mower gasoline in the tar-scented air. And over there, that shimmering red roof, that shout, that face vivid as fire. For when we emerge, we cellar seekers, then for an instant the lost world enters us like a sword, before settling to rest. Then we seem to understand something that we had forgotten, before confusion returns. You who mock us, you laughers and surface-crawlers, you restless sideways-sliders and flatland voyagers—don’t we irk you, don’t we exasperate you, we mole-folk, we pale amphibians?
STEVEN MILLHAUSER
Steven Millhauser is the author of numerous works of fiction and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Martin Dressler. His story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the film The Illusionist starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He teaches at Skidmore College.
Books by Steven Millhauser
Dangerous Laughter
The King in the Tree
Enchanted Night
The Knife Thrower
Martin Dressler
Little Kingdoms
The Barnum Museum
From the Realm of Morpheus
In the Penny Arcade
Portrait of a Romantic
Edwin Mullhouse
BOOKS BY STEVEN MILLHAUSER
EDWIN MULLHOUSE
At the age of two Edwin Mullhouse was reciting Shakespeare. At ten he had written a novel that critics would call “a work of undoubted genius.” At eleven Edwin Mullhouse was mysteriously dead. Documenting every stage of this brief life was Jeffrey Cartwright, Edwin’s best friend and biographer—and the narrator of this dazzling portrait of the artist as a young child. As Jeffrey follows Edwin through his preverbal experiments with language, his infatuations with comic books and the troubled second-grade temptress Rose Dorn, and, finally, into the year of his literary glory and untimely demise, Edwin Mullhouse plunges us back into the pleasures and terrors of childhood, even as it plays havoc with our notions of genius and biography.
Fiction/978-0-679-76652-0
ENCHANTED NIGHT
Enchanted Night is set in a Connecticut town over one incredible summer night. The improbable cast of characters includes a man who flees the attic where he’s been writing his magnum opus every night for the past nine years, a band of teenage girls who break into homes and simply leave notes reading “We Are Your Daughters,” and a young woman who meets a dream-like lover on the tree swing in her backyard. A beautiful mannequin steps down from her department store window, and all the dolls left abandoned in the attic and “no longer believed in” magically come to life.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70696-7
THE KING IN THE TREE
In The King in the Tree Steven Millhauser turns his attention to the transformations of love in these three hypnotic novellas. While ostensibly showing her home to a prospective buyer, the narrator of “Revenge” unfolds an origami-like narrative of betrayal and psychic violence. In “An Adventure of Don Juan” the legendary seducer seeks out new diversion on an English country estate with devastating results. And the title novella retells the story of Tristan and Ysolt from the agonized perspective of King Mark, a husband who compulsively looks for evidence of his wife’s adultery yet compulsively denies what he finds.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3173-3
THE KNIFE THROWER AND OTHER STORIES
The Knife Thrower explores the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, as well as the darker subterranean currents that fuel them. With the panache of an old-fashioned magician, Steven Millhauser conducts his readers from the dark corners beneath the sunlit world to a balloonist’s tour of the heavens. He transforms department stores and amusement parks into alternate universes of infinite plenitude and menace. He unveils the secrets of a maker of automatons and a coven of teenaged girls. And on every page of The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Millhauser confirms his stature as a narrative enchanter in the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges.
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br /> Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-78163-9
MARTIN DRESSLER The Tale of an American Dreamer
Martin Dressler is set in late-nineteenth-century New York City, when new buildings were bursting from the bedrock of Manhattan every day and you might have met an inventor or entrepreneur on any street corner. One such entrepreneur is Martin Dressler, a cigar maker’s son, a young man who has the audacity to make his dreams come true and the ability to do so on such a grand scale that other people will want to dream them too—for a little while. We watch as the young Martin makes the ascent from a hotel bellhop to a builder of hotels of his own. We witness his strange enchantment by two sisters, one of whom becomes his companion and business partner, the other his ghostly, elusive bride. And when Martin sets out to build the Grand Cosmo, a creation so vast that it will rival the world itself, this mesmerizing novel brings us face to face with the ambiguity beneath the optimism of the American dream with a swiftness and intensity that are in themselves magnificently dreamlike.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-78127-1
ALSO AVAILABLE
Dangerous Laughter, 978-0-307-38747-9
Little Kingdoms, 978-0-375-70143-6
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Steven Millhauser
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1998.
Some stories have appeared in slightly different form in the following publications: “The Knife Thrower,” “The Sisterhood of Night,” and “The Dream of the Consortium” in Harper’s Magazine; “A Visit” in The New Yorker; “Balloon Flight, 1870” in The Yale Review; “Flying Carpets” in The Paris Review; “Paradise Park” in Grand Street; “The Way Out” in Story; “The New Automaton Theater” in Canto; and “Kaspar Hauser Speaks” in The Kenyon Review.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Crown edition as follows:
Millhauser, Steven.
The knife thrower and other stories / Steven Millhauser.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Contents: The knife thrower—A visit—The sisterhood of night—The
way out—Flying carpets—The new automaton theater—Clair de
lune—The dream of the consortium—Balloon flight, 1870—Paradise
Park—Kaspar Hauser speaks—Beneath the cellars of our town.
I. Title.
PS3563.I422K58 1998
813′.54—dc21 97-45796
eISBN: 978-0-307-76387-7
www.randomhouse.com
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