This website is dedicated to the life and career of novelist Marianne Hauser (1910-2006). Marianne Hauser wrote 9 novels, and dozens of short stories. Her first novel, Monique, was published in German when she was 22 and living in Paris. Her last novel, Shootout with Father, was published by FC2 in 2002, when she was 91. She moved to New York in 1937 after traveling through Asia and North Africa alone, as a reporter. Only three of her works remain in print today: The Talking Room, her best known work, a brilliant, subversive and hilarious novel about a pregnant 13 year old being raised by warring lesbian parents, published by the Fiction Collective in 1976, Shootout with Father, and The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser (2004). These books are available from FC2. Her other American books, Dark Dominion (1947), The Choir Invisible (1958), Prince Ishmael (1963), A Lesson in Music (1964), The Late Memoirs of Mr. Ashley (1986), and Me & My Mom (1993), are out of print but easy to find used and in libraries.
This is a collaborative project. Its purpose is to promote her work and make available to interested readers as much information as I can unearth about her. In Hauser's long life she made many professional and personal friends. Her agent was Perry Knowlton and her first book was published by Bennett Cerf six years after she took him to task over Gertrude Stein in her New York Times review of Ida. In 1963 Prince Ishmael was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was a New York Times notable book of the year. From the 1970s through to 2004 her writing was published and reviewed by different incarnations of the Fiction Collective and Sun & Moon Press. She wrote reviews for the American Book Review and appeared in journals like Fiction International, Blatant Artifice, Witness.
If you knew her or are studying her work I welcome contributions, memoirs, interviews, letters, analyses, what have you. Since at least the seventies writers have lamented that she is not better known. Many people have tried to bring her greater recognition: Alice S. Morris, Anais Nin, Marguerite Young, the writers at the Fiction Collective, Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, Douglas Messerli, Margot Mifflin, Ed Cardoni, and Professor Andrea L. Harris, among others. Just about everyone who has written about her has wondered why her work is neglected. Hauser cared little for self-promotion and was impatient with compromise. She was an anti-authoritarian enchantress, intelligent, intuitive, playful, and genuine. She wrote every day on a small manual Olivetti typewriter and tirelessly revised. She was passionate about politics and art. Friends called her Bear. Her final work, Little Buttercup, written for her granddaughter, is subtitled, the happiest bear in the world.
Alice S. Morris was one of Marianne Hauser’s closest personal friends, and she was also a vitally important professional friend. Morris was the literary editor at Harper’s Bazaar from 1951-1968 and she published many of Hauser’s stories, as well as excerpts from her novel Prince Ishmael. In 1965 she edited The Uncommon Reader, a collection of Harper’s Bazaar stories which includes Hauser’s The Abduction, an hallucinatory journey into exile taken by a Hungarian composer. It is based largely on the life of Erno Dohnanyi, whom she knew in the 1950’s, in Tallahassee, where he was teaching and where Fred Kirchberger got his PhD. Morris died at age 90 in 1993. Alice S. Morris was one of several adventurous mid-century editors at fashion magazines. These women’s magazines became a market for serious literary fiction. She was preceded by George Davis, who was at Harper’s Bazaar from 1936-1941, who then moved to Mademoiselle until 1949. Betsy Blackwell was the editor and chief of Mademoiselle from 1937-1971. Mademoiselle was a Conde Nast publication, which for a time was a partner of McBride’s, where Coby Gilman worked editing Travel. Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, and Tennessee Williams are some of the many authors published by these fashion magazines early in their careers. When Hauser published Dark Dominion her friend Marguerite Young reviewed it in Vogue alongside McCullers’ A Member of the Wedding and Capote’s short stories.
Morris was married to Harvey Breit, a novelist and editor who reviewed books for the Times in the 40’s (his Times obit gives different dates than the Wikipedia article for his NYT tenure). When she died, Hauser wrote this about her old friend:
COPYRIGHT ESTATE OF MARIANNE HAUSER COLLECTION OF MICHAEL KIRCHBERGER
This is the cover of the August, 1962 Harper’s Bazaar where Allons Enfants first appeared. Allons Enfants is one of two autobiographical stories Hauser wrote, set in Strasbourg during World War 1. It narrates the death of her sister Dora at age 17 of meningitis and is delirious with detail of her family and the city. It also appears in her first collection of short stories, A Lesson in Music (University of Texas Press, 1964) and is currently in print: The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser (FC2, 2005). Alice S. Morris, her close friend, was the literary editor at Harper’s and was renown for the fiction she published.
Marianne Hauser published three pieces in The Tiger’s Eye, an avant-garde arts magazine published by poet Ruth Walgreen Stephan and her husband, artist John Stephan, from 1947-1949. This is Hauser’s review of a Henry Miller book, from the October, 1938 issue, #5. It is one of 4 opinions in an article entitled To Be Or Not: 4 opinions on Henry Miller’s book The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. Hauser was good friends with Anais Nin, who published a piece in the first issue of The Tiger’s Eye. She makes brief appearances in Nin’s diaries of the 60’s and 70’s, when they were neighbors, but Hauser refused Nin permission to publish more entries, and I wonder what’s in those unpublished diaries. Weldon Kees also appears in this article, and likes the book even less than Hauser. Given that these people were all friends, it is striking how honest she is, but then, she was like that, as her comments about her future publisher Bennett Cerf, in an review of Gertrude Stein’s Ida for the New York Times (1941) make clear.
VICE VERSA One of the pleasures, many pleasures, of research is stumbling on the unknown. So, I’ve been reading a bit about the 1940s, trying to understand the context for Dark Dominion, published in 1947. WOLF-WOMEN AND PHANTOM LADIES,by Steven Dillon, is a recent academic book about pop culture and women’s desire in the 40’s, which is right up my alley, and in that book I found a reference to the first lesbian magazine, Vice Versa, hand-typed (with carbon paper) by the editor, Lisa Ben (pseudonym), and given to her friends. Each issue (there were 10 in all) was distributed to about 10 people, who passed it on. Ben has been recognized, lauded, and documented, but I’d never heard of her, and spent Sunday morning reading Vice Versa online.
Dillon’s book is absorbing, clearly written and intelligent, so I’m really looking forward to finishing it. I was a bit disappointed that Hauser, whose Dark Dominion is mentioned in it, in a chapter on women’s magazines, somehow eludes the index! This is one of the very few critical works to even mention Dark Dominion.
The neglect of her work before The Talking Room is puzzling, given how important and brilliant that book is. I would think people would be interested in where she came from. The few critical works about her have focused on gender and sexuality, which makes sense. But without knowing anything about her earlier work critics can do weird things. Friedman and Fuchs, writing about women’s experimental fiction (Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), put Hauser in the 3rd generation of women experimentalists, with Kathy Acker of all people. Superficially this works, but scholarship isn’t supposed to be superficial, and creating a genealogy of style without knowing the genealogy of the individual writer is crazy.
Hauser is most like Djuna Barnes in attitude, a second generation experimentalist. Hauser came of age in the 1930s. Her earliest memories are of World War 1. She lived in Paris and was widely traveled. She was deeply affected by reading Celine’s Journey to the End of Night, in French, when it was published. Dark Dominion, a book of the forties, is immersed in the European literature of the inter-war years. It has much in common with The Talking Room, although it is more constrained.
Hauser was a working writer when she came to NYC in 1937, and while she was writing Dark Dominion not only was she in the heart of NY literary culture, she was reviewing books. Lots and lots of books. Most of them are forgettable, but a few stand out and indicate that she was always aware of, and always working within, an experimental context. She reviewed Gertrude Stein’s Ida. Her close friend Marguerite Young reviewed Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil. Dark Dominion was reviewed by Elizabeth Hardwick in the Partisan Review alongside Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Beyond this she was associated with Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, and she also wrote important reviews (still quoted) on Eudora Welty. They are not normally thought of as experimentalists. They were not radical, avant-garde writers but they were writing in a tradition of serious literary fiction that was deeply influenced by Joyce and Faulkner, by surrealism and symbolism and Hauser, like them, was not a conventional realist. (And Capote’s In Cold Blood IS experimental, if you consider what he is up to, and the precedent for that book, the first piece of Gonzo journalism, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). Dismissed as ‘gothic’ (see Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies) they were working at a time when mainstream publishers were interested in serious and challenging fiction in a way that would NOT be true 30 years later, when The Talking Room was published by the Fiction Collective. Of course, much else had changed, especially in the realm of censorship. If America was sex obsessed in the 1940s there were still limits on what authors could write and send through the mail. When that changed the lid blew off and Hauser could give free rein to her imagination.
MARIANNE HAUSER’S 1946 REVIEW OF MARGUERITE YOUNG’S ANGEL IN THE FOREST
First published in the Sewanee Review, vol. 54, no. 2, Spring 1946. Copyright 1946, 1974 by the University of the South. Reprinted with the permission of the editor. THE DUAL INTENTION
BY MARIANNE HAUSER
In AngelintheForest, Marguerite Young has found a strikingly regional subject matter, one transcending regionalism, to express both her wit and fantasy to the fullest, to illuminate the American scene with vision. Her region is nearly that of, though it purports to be concerned preeminently with the Indiana corn field and the cultural factors diversely at play there, the lost Atlantis, the city of Campanella, other marvelous matters. The dual intention, reality and unreality, is made clear from the first page-when you cross the Wabash to that land by a “creaking ferry,” the other passengers being only two blind mules. Here, myth extends its many branches like an octopus, along with the filling station, along with hollyhocks and “spinsters numerous as hollyhocks.” The subtitle, AFairy TaleofTwoUtopias, is thus a meaningful indication of surrealistic and realistic events in a pat tern of infinite motion. New Harmony, Indiana village, laboratory, and nameless graveyard of man’s aspiration for the ideal happiness, both social and individual, both of heaven and earth, becomes, under Miss Young’s eyes, the one gloomy, the other prismatic, a spectacle of the world at large, contradictory as the human soul, even more contradictory, since it takes in harsh aspects other than the soul-for instance, the climate, its extremes of hot and cold. A view of life as homely as that of James Whitcomb Riley, Hoosier poet, is combined with a view of life as unhomely as that of Swedenborg or Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne, John Locke’s mind, born into the world as a blank page-here frequently discussed-takes on the wild, eccentric coloration of E. T. A. Hoffmann, German fairy tale writer. There are all kinds of conspiracies going on within a text which escapes its boundaries.
“What dream among dreams,” Marguerite Young asks, “is reality ?” Such a question sets the key for the entire procedure.
At the beginning of the last century, two divers dreams, ancient in origin, converged on the banks of the Wabash far away, Father Rapp’s golden New Jerusalem, a city foursquare as measured by the burnished reed-both Biblical reed and Jimson weed which grow today in a still unlegislated country; and Robert Owen’s equally unrealizable rectangular community of reason. Father Rapp, founder of the first Utopia, a Scriptural communism, promised bliss eternal in heaven, “when this green earth should be destroyed by violence, by poisonous hailstones.” Robert Owen, his successor, founder of the second Utopia in a village deserted by the Rappites, made the more difficult promise of bliss eternal on earth, which paradoxically enough was very gray in his era, though he held it to be indestructible. For Father Rapp, the earth was in its springtime–for Robert Owen, the earth was in its autumn. The Owenites had not even enough energy to harvest the hops in that field where, so short a time back, the angel Gabriel had promised that men should be a “confluence of bright sunbeams.” The Owenites were easily discouraged, having no angel. Father Rapp, long-bearded patriarch from cloudy Wurtemberg, a businessman parexcellence, both “mystic and murderer,” planned for his not-too-distant heaven by means of hard labor, the whiskey trade, strictly enforced celibacy on all but pigs, sheep, goats, the animal kingdom (on which celibacy Lord Byron watching from afar, wrote a caustic canto, “Don Juan”). Robert Owen, father of the British labor movement and many societies for the real advancement of the human race, visualized an Eden of Children, such as he had established at New Lanark cotton mills, shorter and shorter working hours, mental independence, a triumph over all mythologies. The Devil (perhaps in league with the shades of Father Rapp and company ) was preparing “a hole deep in the polar ice to swallow Robert Owen’s soul,” according to one of the many popular rhymes on the subject of Elysium.
Both Utopias failed dismally–Rapp’s being a financial success but a spiritual loss, Robert Owen’s being a financial loss though, in the last analysis, perhaps not a spiritual loss. The paradox suggests a poem of Browning’s. At any rate, the exodus of the Rappites was followed by the disintegration of the Owenite settlement before it was hardly established in what was perhaps “a fatal atmosphere.” For instance, the germs of malaria had already been released. Our heroes are not, in fact, Rapp and Owen-but populations, inclusive of the Rappite hens and roosters who dwelt outside Utopia, inclusive of the community of drunks which built its citadel at the gates of Owenite Utopia, inclusive even of “the little goat who, in 1940, cried and cried with its fleece caught on a thorn bough.” All that remained of New Harmony, in 1940, was human nature and the spectre of two enchanting dreams which, Jehovah’s and Rousseau’s, could not pass away. An angel’s footprints in stone, the maze where the Rappites had wandered, the black locust trees which the Rappites had left standing as their most macabre monument. Of the Owenites, fewer relics, fewer monuments, since their contribution to society had to do with legislation and government in all nations. Of the Owenites, only the golden rain trees which were to cast their shadows over “a new moral world,” when there should be neither crime nor punishment- not one sentient creature crying. “Utopias of the past seemed, in spite of their shade trees, not so tangible, finally, as Miss Hobbie and Miss Duckie, old sisters carrying their feather pillows to the show where the seats were hard to set on-sneaking in to see Clark Gable. All mankind seemed not so real as one lonely, frostbitten character, like the man who died with his feet in the ashes of the cold stove last winter, or was it winter before last ?” People were still betting on imaginary horses-like those at the race track at Dade Park, like those of the Apocalypse, too. Roosevelt was a white man riding on a white horse. Hitler was a brown man riding on a brown horse.
In fact, the phantasmagoria of life persisted, above and beyond the crystalizations of lost Utopias.
Marguerite Young does not relate the dilemma of two Utopias for the sake of an easy maxim. Life is viewed in its irrational diversity, and no judgment is passed. The narrator of an epic, cosmic and psychic, she speaks and sings her tale, words and visions rising and falling with the rhythm of life, which has, she implies, more agents, seen and unseen, than can be mentioned in even this spacious contest. We must consider, for example, in considering New Harmony whether the whale swallowed Jonah or Jonah swallowed the whale-the effects of such translucent matter on the present fluctuation of Wall Street. We must consider the woman “who buried her baby, no bigger than her hand, in a hollow tree stump, filled with old cocoons and autumn leaves.” ‘When she came back next spring, they all were gone. From the shadows who people New Harmony in 1940, from “the walking dead,” rise, by subtle, implicit innuendo, the living shapes and voices of a still persistent past, bevies of kings, emperors, clowns, cotton lords, cotton workers. Human progress is shown in many shapes, through Father Rapp’s golden rose of Micah, to be enjoyed only by the dead, through Robert Owen’s toy pyramids which rep resented, he said, the edifice of human society at that date, his toy blocks which represented human society when it should be conducted according to the light of reason only. “Alas, however, for the best of plans! We are all, finally, perhaps the best of us, mistaken human beings, like our human life, which may be another mistake, due to the aboriginal whirlwind.” Father Rapp spent his old age as a million aire growing peach trees. Robert Owen spent his old age discoursing with those spirit voices whose existence he had previously denied, in arguments with Coleridge at Manchester.
The level of perpetual change is expressed in Indiana’s shifting landscape, one of many symbols. “For thousands of years, what is now the state of Indiana was a vast plain of granitic rock covered by a deep, salt, tideless sea.” When man arises at last, he is “already old and corrupt, like the earth before him-a creature with a history.” There was “never a first dawn”-“never a pristine Eden but that where the ants performed their marriage flight and lost their wings”-a statement which profoundly expresses the basic conception of the cost of life.In juxtaposition with the lost sea of Indiana, we witness moments no less ghostly, drawn from the largesse of time and space: old, deaf, blind, dreaming George III, playing a harpsichord or rather a series of harpsichords–or barking like a mad dog at Windsor; the unacknowledged death of Anne Bronte in a seaside hotel; the Pope of Rome dressed as the Pope’s valet and become, by this shift in costume, God’s truest representative on earth ; the fat Emperor of Russia, entertaining “a cancerous tutor or a ballet dancer from an other sphere,” Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria, Frances Wright, Audubon, Raffinesque, John Quincy Ada ms, Coleridge, Shelley, many other notables ; indeed, many disrelated people and events drawn into a complex system which seems, in each instant, unity.
Values fluctuate; effects may precede cause; there is the fact of chaos, negative and positive. There is always a question mark and what Margueri te Young calls “a joker in the philosophic pack.” She does not see life as, in fact, a given system. Yet by doubting each accepted value, each norm, each convention, by examining the fragments and splinters, she creates out of a manifold diversity of impressions and artistic unity, a roundness of strange beauty, a most distinguished work of art. Her vision is, for all its strangeness, not willfully solipsistic, the refuge of an unfounded individualism. As evidenced by her poetry, lmmoderateFable, a fable moderate because it omits narcissism, her thinking has been conditioned by philosophers Democritus, for example, Locke, William James, many others to whom she makes, indeed, a constant though unobtrusive reference. Fewer idealists than skeptics. She has humanized, however, the unhuman fable. What may in Angel intheForest appear to the unschooled or biased reader a singular display of mental acrobatics for their own sake must seem, to the schooled, the generous, the end-result of amoral mental discipline. Only an artist of her stature can afford to clothe her keen, realistic, nudist deductions in the glittering brocades of such a baroque, unreal, out-of-this-world fantasy. She philosophizes with her tongue in her cheek.
To combine cold, unsentimental thinking with quick, lively tragicomedy, the commonplace like the old outhouse with beautifully mad imagery like “the asexual angel Gabriel in a hop field”-therein lies the genius of the adventuresome performance. The book is, as so many critics have pointed out, “wild,” perhaps because made up of “wild” data, angels, drunks. The writing seems free of literary scheming, too, as if the writer needed no sly skill. Readers looking for neatly swept sidewalks, road signs, traffic lights, will find themselves engulfed in a precolonial wilderness, a fertile abundance of many-faced trees and flowers-in the hollow of every tree, a man, on every treetop, an angel. If there is in Miss Young’s book a “too much,” as the more literal minded may argue, it is the “too-much” of the Renaissance imagination which delighted in excesses, the “too much” of a modernist Rabelais, a John Webster. The writing, from first to last, shows a dynamic force, stronger than the neat rules of literary perfection. ‘It is a piece of banal, sacred life, not anemic. (And some of our most gifted writers suffer from anemia, perhaps because they have made the mistake of worshiping perfection, the one thing never worshiped by Marguerite Young, who writes: “Our perfection is our death.”)
It is just because of its unusual range of experience that Angel intheForest may appeal to many diverse readers as Utopia, as mock Biblical, as Americana, as essay on human character. The book is too vivacious to be written down as “rare,” for the few only. Nothing is here esoteric or invented for the sake of invention. Every figure is human or the project of the human imagination, of the greatest con sequence in ordinary life, partaking, too, of that life. As to the angel Gabriel, for example (and he is another barefoot boy on Wall Street)-
Evolved out of ether and air, tears and sorrow, an angel stood in the hop field. He was big, massive, corpulent. He carried a rainbow on his back . . . . He was taller than an oak full grown, and of a diameter exceeding the oak, the beech, the sassafras. . . . He was grass and fire and homely as an old shoe. He was a farmer with a golden book in his hand. . . . His voice was like the river Wabash, loud and wild, rolling between the buff-colored hills.
Dark Dominion Author Photo
Perhaps Miss Young agrees, to some extent, with the crucial angel she despises. Like Voltaire in Candide, like Dr. Johnson in Rasselas, she affirms that this is not the best of all possible worlds, that there is no perfect happiness attainable. Yet even this formula fails-for it is Shelley’s bright hair, the ghost of Shelley, Robert Owen’s friend, who rides in the wind with Robert Owen on his last journey of man’s redemption from crime and punishment. Perhaps the drama is still going on?
Indeed, it is a very grim fairy tale Marguerite Young has written grim and glorious.
ANGEL IN THE FOREST: A FAIRY TALE OF TWO UTOPIAS.
By Marguerite Young.
Reynal and Hitchcock. 313 pages. 1945. $3.00.
Dark Dominion is Marianne Hauser’s first English language novel, published in 1947 by Random House. She had been living in the United States for about ten years. It was described at the time as a Gothic novel. It is a novel of hallucination, memory and dreams, about a Swiss woman who comes to America and marries her psychiatrist. Narrated by her brother, who hopes to persuade her to return to Switzerland, it is indeed dark and perverse, a witty satire of psychoanalysis, and a serious meditation on the perils of repressed desire and illusion. It received mixed reviews at the time.
Hauser wrote Dark Dominion at the suggestion of her editor and friend Coby Gilman, a brilliant, erudite alcoholic who was legendary in 1930’s literary circles. He is now only known through the diaries and letters of his close friend, Dawn Powell. She wrote it mostly while traveling with her husband, Fred Kirchberger, through the American south, where he was stationed during World War 2 as a German language specialist. Kirchberger fled Germany in 1938 when he was unable to perform a recital in Berlin, due to his mother being Jewish. Hauser wrote articles, book reviews and short stories, and lectured to church groups about the rise of Hitler and threat of fascism. Her son, Michael Kirchberger, was born in 1945. Marguerite Young, author of Miss Macintosh My Darling and a number of other works, was his godmother. At this time she also met Ruth Stephan, Mari Sandoz and Anais Nin, all of whom were in New York from the late thirties or early forties.
