The Literary Mafia by Josh Lambert

Author:Josh Lambert [Lambert, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300265354
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Scholar/Father, Writer/Son, Mullhouse/Millhauser

While Jewish editors explored their ambivalent feelings about their inheritances through the books that they accepted for publication, writers worked to develop innovative means of exploiting while constraining their inheritances from parents who had achieved positions of influence in American literature. A striking example is Steven Millhauser, a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and admired short-story writer whose work began to appear, to much acclaim, in the mid-1970s. Millhauser’s father, Milton Millhauser, was a pioneering Jewish professor of English literature who received a PhD from Columbia University and then served in a brief instructorship at the City College of New York before taking a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1947.27 His son, Steven, who was born in 1943, at first seemed to be following in his father’s footsteps when he enrolled after college in the doctoral program in English literature at Brown University, but he then turned to writing fiction.

How does it affect a developing novelist to know that his own father is a knowledgeable scholar and literary critic? If this was not a new problem in general in Western culture, it was, as explained earlier, a relatively new and suddenly widespread one for American Jews; as discussed in chapter 2, between Lionel Trilling’s receiving tenure in English at Columbia in 1940 and the 1970s, hundreds of Jewish men (and a smaller number of Jewish women) became professors of literary studies in hundreds of colleges and universities. Eventually, many of their children would find their way into literature—whether thanks to their parents’ connections or despite them—and Millhauser was at the vanguard of this wave, coming of age as a Jew in the 1950s and 1960s, in the home of a tenured scholar of English literature.

This childhood experience inspired Millhauser’s first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, which was published by Knopf in 1972. The Washington Post’s reviewer, capturing a general sentiment, called it “an extraordinarily good novel” by a “dazzlingly successful writer.”28 Translated into French, the novel won the prestigious Prix Médicis étranger for 1975, the second book by a U.S. citizen ever to do so. Beginning with the earliest journalistic reviews and continuing with more recent scholarly appraisals, critical responses to the novel have praised Millhauser’s parody of the genre of literary biography, characterizing it as a “mock” or an “apocryphal” biography and citing Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann—along with James Boswell, who is mentioned within the novel’s own metaparatextual preface—as the primary targets of Millhauser’s satire, while also rightly naming Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges as the models for Millhauser’s generically playful project.29 These reviewers and scholars summarize the novel diligently, explaining that it takes the form of an exhaustive and pretentious literary biography written by the twelve-year-old Jeffrey Cartwright about his neighbor Edwin Mullhouse, who wrote a novel called Cartoons and died on his eleventh birthday.

What journalistic and scholarly responses to the novel missed is the extent to which the novel describes and instantiates a Jewish inheritance drama.

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