Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

TWO MONTHS AFTER HIS FOURTH BIRTHDAY Edwin entered Miss Hersey’s Nursery School. He endured Miss Hersey’s Nursery School for fourteen days. By Christmas his entire two weeks at Miss Hersey’s Nursery School had contracted to a single memory: a wooden ladder at the side of a bunkbed where he napped. Miss Hersey’s Nursery School was considered a preparation for Kindergarten. I shall have no further occasion to mention Miss Hersey’s Nursery School.

Meanwhile he continued to pursue the study of literature with all the desperate passion of pre-literacy. He acquired shiny new volumes of all shapes and sizes, arranging them scrupulously on the shelves of his new gray bookcase in accordance with some private system curiously resembling disorder. The books of the Early Years were much of a muchness and it is unnecessary to name them all; if the reader studies the list given in Chapter 10 he will have a fair idea of the range of literature available to the future novelist. It is not entirely accurate to refer to Edwin as pre-literate, for by this time he was able to recognize many words (“Edwin,” “Karen,” “Pinocchio,” “island,” etc.) and to name most of the letters. But for all practical purposes he was as illiterate as a mouse.

In the lower right-hand corner of the bookcase, beneath a shoebox filled with marbles, lay a new kind of book that made its appearance one darkening afternoon that fall, and was destined to exercise a considerable pressure of influence on Edwin’s imagination. I remember that afternoon quite well. We were sitting on his front step discussing a surprise attack on a neighboring village — Edwin was wearing his new Indian headdress with the feathers down the back and holding in one hand a tomahawk with a black rubber head and a red wooden handle — when from the direction of the distant bus stop Mr. Mullhouse came striding down the sidewalk past my house, swinging his briefcase with one hand and waving over his head with the other. I took aim with my pistol but a sudden blow from the tomahawk knocked it out of my hand. I protested with some heat as I gathered the gun from the dampish grass. “I was only aiming, Edwin.” “Ugh,” said Edwin. I knew it was hopeless to converse with him in one of his Indian moods and contented myself with wiping the gun on my cowboy pants. As Mr. Mullhouse turned down the steps from the sidewalk and strode briskly toward us along the cement walk, I watched Edwin staring at the deep pockets of his father’s trenchcoat. An endless stream of toys came pouring out of those pockets during the Early Years. “Good evening, Jeffrey. How, chief. You’ll excuse me, boys, but I’m tired as the deuce.” We bent to the left and right respectively, and as Mr. Mullhouse stepped between us onto the front step Edwin frowned bitterly and began to scalp the grass with his tomahawk. “Now where in God’s name are my keys,” said Mr. Mullhouse, standing behind us on the fuzzy mat. “Not here,” he said loudly, reaching into one pocket and extracting a rumpled handkerchief that emitted bits of dust. “And not here,” he said more loudly, shifting his briefcase to his right hand and reaching into his left pocket with a jingle. Edwin turned and looked up. Mr. Mullhouse extracted and replaced a handful of change, a pipe, a flat yellow package of pipe cleaners, a pouch of tobacco, and three books of matches. He sighed. “Maybe they’re in here,” he said, clicking open the briefcase, “though to tell you the truth, hmmm, what’s this,” and taking out a slim brown paper bag he looked at it with a puzzled frown. “Here, see if you can make head or tail of it.” Edwin seized the package joyfully, and placing it on his lap began to slip out a glossy magazine. “But of course!” cried Mr. Mullhouse. “What an absentminded professor!” He opened the unlocked door. “Oh by the way, Jeffrey.” I turned around. “Bang,” said Mr. Mullhouse, shooting me in the head with his finger and closing the door behind him before I could reach for my gun. Edwin stared in disappointment at his gift. “What is it?” I asked. “Oh, pictures,” said Edwin, flipping through the magazine. “Pictures of what?” I asked. But Edwin had already lost interest, and closing his left eye he reached out his left arm, pulled his right fist back to his ear, and released over a distant rooftop an invisible arrow.

It was his first comic book. When Mr. Mullhouse, in a spirit of glowing anticipation, began to read it aloud in the living room after dinner, Edwin listened politely for a page or two but at last could not conceal his impatience. Mr. Mullhouse sighed and returned to The Littlest Injun, Edwin’s current favorite, about a boy who rode on the back of a buffalo. One rainy spring day six months later, in the bored restless mood that had seized him after his recovery from a nasty cold and fever, without enthusiasm Edwin set up his red British soldiers with their black hats in a line at one end of the room and his blue American soldiers with their white hats in a line at the other end of the room and removed his box of marbles from the bookcase in preparation for war. Under the marbles he discovered the comic book. From the bed where I sat I saw its glossy cover catch the light; under a bright red sky a vast snowball rolling downhill contained a duck and a pair of yellow skis. And I knew by a certain familiar hush of tension that something had happened inside Edwin, and that this sky, this snowball, this tumbling duck, which six months ago had left him so indifferent, were suddenly the most important things in the world to him, and that we would never play soldiers now and perhaps would never play soldiers again. Lying on his bed in warm yellow light while farther and farther away the gray rain rattled his windows, Edwin plunged into a dazzle of many-colored adventures from which in a sense he never emerged. From that moment he began to live in a world of frames and colors. Mr. Mullhouse, who believed that adults should not impose their own tastes on children, encouraged Edwin’s interest, which Mrs. Mullhouse viewed with alarm. Not only did he read comic books aloud over and over again as Edwin sat on the couch beside him, leaning against his vast arm, but I have seen him sitting in his armchair in the evening with one leg hooked over the side, reading one of Edwin’s comics with a frown of concentration, while beside him, on the polished lamp-table, a fat book sat under a smoking ashtray.

But having leaped ahead to a rainy spring day I must now return to the fall, as if the last paragraph were one of those sudden warm days that come upon you like a promise of spring in a setting of falling yellow leaves. For it was at this time that Edwin began to show an interest in cameras, an interest that seems to me not unrelated to his interest in the railroad station machines, not unrelated to his later passion for comic books, not unrelated, in short, to the history of his imagination, and thus to the history of his life and fiction. Mr. Mullhouse’s old Graflex was a big black box that sprang clattering open like a jack-in-the-box with no jack in the box. Kneeling on a chair beside the kitchen table, enraptured Edwin looked through the top at a colored blur. As his father turned a knob the picture became clearer and clearer until he saw the kitchen sink and the yellow dishrack, glowing in full color in the square frame. “Extraordinary, the things you come across,” said Mr. Mullhouse, slowly turning the camera; and as the dark lens pointed at me he said “Egad!” while I frowned in annoyance and imagined myself in the camera looking up at Edwin with a frown of annoyance. Mr. Mullhouse liked to explain how his camera worked, and Edwin loved to listen, nodding happily and understanding nothing as he waited patiently for the part where his father pushed the button and made the loud and unspeakably satisfying thud-crash-thud. He also liked the part where Mr. Mullhouse opened the camera and showed him the hole getting bigger and bigger.