Marianne Hauser

Marianne Hauser

Marianne Hauser (December 11, 1910-June 21, 2006) was an Alsatian-American novelist, short story writer and journalist. She is best known for the novels Prince Ishmael(1963) about the legendary foundling Caspar Hauser and The Talking Room (1976), an experimental novel about a pregnant 13 year old raised by lesbian parents. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Stories 1950 and The O'Henry Prize, 1948, and she was the recipient of a Rockefeller grant and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Biography

Marianne Hauser was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine. Her mother and father ran a successful patent business. She had two older sisters, Dora and Eva. Dora died of meningitis in 1917, which Hauser would write about in her 1962 story Allons Enfant. The Hausers lived in Strasbourg until the 1920s when they moved to Berlin. Hauser was a rebellious and difficult child who hated the German education system and was thrown out of high school. Eventually she enrolled in classes at the University of Berlin law school, but didn't complete a degree, preferring instead to study dance, anthropology and hang out with artists. She dreamed of traveling the world. In 1932 Hauser married a man she soon divorced and moved to Paris where she began writing short stories, celebrity interviews and small pieces she could place in Swiss newspapers. She wrote her first novel, Monique, in German. Monique, now lost, was published in 1934 in Zurich. Hauser decided that becoming a travel writer was the best way to see the world and contacted Otto Kleiber, literary editor of the anti-fascist Swiss newspaper Basler National Zeitung, proposing that he send her Asia to write travel articles. Despite her young age he agreed to do so and in early 1934 she departed for Asia, traveling through China, Taiwan, Cambodia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Japan and Hawaii, writing a weekly 1200 word feuilleton. She traveled by third class rail and ship, and met ordinary people, experiencing first hand colonial racism. In her autobiographical writings she refers often to instances in her early life when she was made aware of racism, whether they occurred in British India, New York City or North Carolina. It is during this period that she learned to revise, spending days working on a 3 or 4 page manuscript. In India she was the guest of the Maharaja of a small province located on the Kathiawar peninsula, which became the setting of her second novel, Indisches Gaukelspiel (Shadow Play in India). She wrote the book in China, where she lived for a year, and completed it in Hawaii. Indisches Gaukelspiel was published in Leipzig by Zinnen Verlag. A French version was published in Paris by an underground press and is now lost. In 1937 she returned to Paris via the US and Kleiber, impressed by her American reporting, sent her back to New York. She soon severed ties with Europe and set about learning English by talking to strangers on the street and reading widely. In the late thirties and early forties she made numerous connections in the New York publishing world, including Amy Loveman, Quincy Howe, and Malcolm Cowley, and worked as a regular book reviewer for the New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, The Saturday Review of Literature and The New Republic, and wrote feature articles for Travel Magazine and Arts and Decoration. She also lectured about the threat of Nazism. Encouraged by her friend and Travel editor Coby Gilman she began work on her first English language novel, Dark Dominion (1947) based on Hauser's romantic relationship with a psychiatrist. It is narrated by the brother of a woman in a bizarre marriage with a New York psychiatrist who cannot dream. It was published by Random House and widely reviewed. In a review article for Vogue Magazineher friend Marguerite Young wrote, In 1944 she married Fred Kirchberger, a German Jewish émigré who trained in Berlin and then the Julliard School of Music as a concert pianist. Their son, Michael Kirchberger, was born in Harlem in 1945. Fred Kirchberger joined the United States Army as soon as war broke out and during the war she traveled through the American south as Kirchberger was stationed at different military bases. In 1948 they moved to North Carolina where Fred taught at Bennett College, an historically black women's college. Fred Kirchberger earned his PhD at the University of Florida in Tallahassee and they moved again, this time to Kirksville, Missouri, where Fred was a professor of music at the Northeast Missouri State College. Throughout these travels Hauser wrote. She published short stories in Mademoiselle, Harper's Bazaar, the Tiger's Eye and Botteghe Oscure. The Mouse (The Tiger's Eye, 1949) was selected for Best American Short Stories, 1950. While in Kirksville she completed two novels, The Choir Invisible (1957), published first in England as the Living Shall Praise Thee, and Prince Ishmael (1963). In 1964 the University of Texas Press published her short story collection, A Lesson in Music. It would be her last book with a mainstream publisher. In 1966 Hauser divorced Fred Kirchberger and moved to New York City. The two remained close friends for the rest of their lives, traveling frequently together. Her first apartment was on Christopher Street, and that experience served as the basis for her next and most important novel, The Talking Room published in 1976 by the Fiction Collective. She became an instructor in the Queens College English Department. Between 1966 and 1976 she underwent a noticeable change in style. Her writing from here forward is broadly satirical and absurd. Always attracted to radical politics, she was energized by the anti-war movement and credits her involvement with 1960s radical politics, as well as an increasing mastery of English, with the change in style. Her next three books were published by Douglas Messerli's Sun and Moon Press: The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley (1986), narrated by a bisexual dead man; Me and My Mom (1993), a short work dedicated to her old mentor Coby Gilman, about a daughter's difficult relationship with her mother, who lives in a nursing home; and a reprint of Prince Ishmael (1991). During this time she returned to publishing short stories, and was interviewed by Larry McCaffery. She returned to the Fiction Collective, which had reconstituted itself as FC2, which published her last novel, Shootout With Father (2002), again narrated by a gay man, an artist with a wealthy, overbearing and narcissistic father who collects armor. In 2004 she published her final work, The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser (FC2 2004)with an introduction in which she discusses, among other things, masturbation in old age. She was known to her friends as Bear.

Novels and Collections

Monique. Zurich: Ringier, 1934. (written in German, lost)

Indisches Gaukelspiel (Shadow Play in India). Vienna: Zinnen, 1937. (an edition was published by an underground press in French, but that is now lost. It has never been translated from German into English)

Dark Dominion. New York: Random House, 1947.

The Choir Invisible. New York: McDowel, Obolensky, 1958. Published in England under original title, The Living Shall Praise Thee. London: Gollancz, 1957.

A Lesson in Music. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

Prince Ishmael. New York: Stein and Day, 1963. Reprinted, Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics Series, 1991.

The Talking Room. New York: Fiction Collective, 1976.

The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley: An American Comedy. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986. Trans. In German, Suhrfkamp, 1992.

Me and My Mom. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics, 1993.

Shootout with Father. Normal [Ill.]: FC2, 2002.

The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser. Normal [Ill.]: FC2 She also wrote and published a story for her granddaughter, Nell Charley, Little Butter Cup, the Happiest Bear in the World, with pictures by artist Joel Fisher and music composed by Fred Kirchberger, in 2003.

Uncollected Stories

“The Colonel’s Daughter.” The Tiger’s Eye 3 (March 1948): 21-34

“The Rubber Doll.” Mademoiselle (1951).

“The Sun and the Colonel’s Button.” Botteghe Oscure 12 (Fall 1953): 255-72. This is an early version of chapter 1 of Prince Ishmael, written in the third person.

Nonfiction

“The Indomitable Spirit of Alsace.” Travel 70 (1938): 28 – .

“Swan Song of the Middle Ages.” Travel 72 (1939).

“Pantomime in Blue and Silver.” Travel 72 (1938): 18 – .

“Bamboo, Symbol of Old China.” Travel. 73 (July 1939): 30.

“Successful Small Home That Suits the Environment.” Arts and Decoration 49 (February 1939): 18 – .

“Home Industries of the Swiss Peasants.” Arts and Decoration 50 (April 1939): 22–40.

“Marrakesh: Descent into Spring.” Harper’s Bazaar, 3054 (May 1966): 188-203.

“Mimoun of the Mellah.” Harper’s Bazaar, 3061 (December 1966): 114-82.

She published an autobiographical entry About My Life So Far in the Contemporary Author’s Series, Volume 11, Gale (Detroit), 1990.

Her interview with Larry McCaffery is published in Some Other Frequency.

Hauser’s papers are housed at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Critical Studies

Caserio, Robert L. Supreme Court Versus Homosexual Fiction South Atlantic Quarterly, 88.1 (1989):269-99

Dillon, Steven. Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies: Female Desire in 1940s US Culture. Albany: State Univ of New York Pr, 2015.

Friedman, Ellen G. and Miriam Fuchs, eds Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1989

Gregory, Sinda. Contemporary Novelists. Sixth. Detroit, MI: St. James Press, 1996.

Harris, Andrea L. Other Sexes: Rewriting Difference from Woolf to Winterson Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000

Punday, Daniel. “Narrative Order and Representing the Body in ‘The Talking Room.’” Narrative 6, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 31–48.

Ziareck, Ewa ‘Taking Chances’: The Feminine Genealogy of Style in Marianne Hauser’s The Talking Room Contemporary Literature, 33 (1992): 480-501

Obituaries

Federman. Raymond: "Marianne Hauser has Changed Tense." at: Jdeshell. “Now What: Marianne Hauser Changed Tense.” Now What, June 23, 2006. http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/marianne-hauser-changed-tense.html.

Messerli, Douglas Greenintegerblog. “American Cultural Treasures - ACT: A WAR AGAINST DEATH.” American Cultural Treasures - ACT, February 4, 2010. http://americanculturaltreasures.blogspot.com/2010/02/war-against-death.html.

“Marianne Hauser--1910-2006.” American Book Review 27, no. 6 (October 2006).

Interviews

McCaffery, Larry. Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors. Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Mifflin, Margot. “Dreams and the Writer.” DREAMWORKS 2, no. 4 (1982): 255–59.

References

Gregory, Sinda. Contemporary Novelists. Sixth. Detroit, MI: St. James Press, 1996.

Hauser, Marianne. Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Vol. 11. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co, 1990.

Marianne Hauser Papers, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.

McCaffery, Larry. Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors. Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Links

http://www.library.ufl.edu/spec/manuscript/guides/hauser.htm

http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4410/Hauser-Marianne.html

http://americanculturaltreasures.blogspot.com/2010/02/war-against-death.html

http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/marianne-hauser-changed-tense.html?showComment=1151251500000#c115125151168109218