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

“Ivan fell down and broke his crown

And Abdul cut off his head.

And that’s the end of the famous story

Of Abdul and Ivan and Ed.”

“Ed!” exclaimed Mr. Mullhouse. “Who’s Ed?”

“Ed win,” said Edwin. “I got all three of ’em in.”

I WONDER if I have sufficiently emphasized a major theme of this biography. I refer to Edwin’s naturalness, his distinct lack of what is usually called genius. He did not begin to speak at two months, or read at two years, or write brilliant stories at the age of three — or four, or five, or six, for the very good reason that he could not write anything but his name until the first grade. Nor was he lovably slow or backward in any way, with his talent standing out against his stupidity like an emblematic lightning flash against a black thunderhead. No, he was only a normal healthy intelligent American child of the middle of the twentieth century, fascinated by toys and snow. Oh, he had what may have been an unusually strong attraction for books and words — an attraction amplified, perhaps, by the literary bias of this biography — but my own attraction was equally strong, and both of us were also fascinated by other things: hollow pink rubber balls, for instance, tapered pieces of white chalk, a red record of cowboy songs; and I remember a favorite toy of this time, a magic drawing pad with a thin red pointed stick for a pencil and a transparent sheath: when you pressed the stick against the surface a lead-colored line appeared, and when you lifted the transparent plastic surface and the gray page underneath, with a sound of torn paper the lead-colored line disappeared. The important thing to remember is that everyone resembles Edwin; his gift was simply the stubbornnness of his fancy, his unwillingness to give anything up. In the Late Years, when most of his contemporaries were already being watered down by a dreary round of dull responsibilities and duller pleasures, he alone refused to be diluted, he alone continued to play. Of course there was the little matter of genius. But that is the point precisely. For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? Every normal child has that capacity; we have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory fades, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults. So that genius, more accurately, is the retention of the capacity to be obsessed. Somewhere along the way, probably no later than the second grade, Edwin realized that all around him children were shedding that capacity. And so he clung to it, nursed it, kept an active watch over it, as some people encourage the development of their muscles. For Edwin felt instinctively, I think, that the conditions of life tended to work for the loss of that capacity. Indeed I have sometimes wondered whether the loss may not be inevitable, and obsession, like strength itself, subject to time. Something of the sort was in my mind not too long ago when in the restless workless impatient mood of Edwin’s last months we were discussing the advantages of suicide; and I remember the bitterness of his smile as I spoke with unusual magnificence of what I called, in a memorable phrase, the obscenity of maturity.

ONE SUN-DRENCHED MORNING shortly after Edwin’s fifth birthday I came strolling as usual across the Mullhouse back yard, darkened up to the swing by the vast shadow of the house, and quietly climbing the back steps I stood for a few moments meditating on the coolness and darkness of the shadowed porch below and the hotness and brightness of the clear blue sky above. The inner door was open and through the screen I saw Mrs. Mullhouse standing with her back to me over the kitchen table, tying or untying her apron-strings in back as she bent over an open book. I rapped sharply on the wooden strip between the upper and lower screens. She turned with a flutter of dropped apron-strings and a swirl of her apron, which hung from a strap around her neck; and with one hand raised to her cheek she said: “Oh, come in Jeff. Karen, stop that.” Karen, seated on the pale linoleum, was banging a cover against a pot like a pair of cymbals. “But Jeff, where’s Edwin?”

“Isn’t he here?” I shouted.

“Why no. He went over to your house about fifteen minutes ago. That is, he didn’t say he was going to your house but I assumed. Oh Jeff, don’t tell me. Karen, please!”

Karen, terrified, burst into wails. Immediately the telephone joined in. Edwin had a special fondness for cartoon telephones, which shake angrily or jump up and down impatiently as they ring (while in the next room the wig of the startled gentleman leaps up in surprise).

“… you for calling. Yes. Oh no, no. Yes. Goodbye. That was Mrs. Whatchamacallum on Beech Street, she was just cleaning her windows and who do you think she saw?” Already she was slipping the apron over her neck, and five minutes later Karen was bumping up and down in Edwin’s old stroller and I was skipping to keep up with her as the three of us hurried along sunny Beech Street in pursuit of Edwin.

On the other side of Robin Hill Road, Benjamin Street is no longer called Benjamin Street but Beech Street — an oddity that made perfect sense to Edwin and me, since the street on the other side of Robin Hill Road was a strange new world that had nothing to do with the familiar universe of Benjamin Street, by whose hourly changing shadow-patterns of leaves and telephone wires we told the time. The shadows on Beech Street were always alien to us, even in the Middle Years when we walked freely there, for we never played on Beech Street and never learned it by heart. Halfway down, in those early days, the sidewalks on both sides stopped and the vacant lots began, some with tilted FOR SALE signs half-buried among weeds; and at the very end the road still stops at two brown posts, each with a round red reflector. Beyond the posts the weedridden ground rises gently to a scattering of bushes and trees, beyond which, from the road, only the sky is visible. So often did Edwin and I climb that little slope that years of repeated motions have blended in memory into a single pattern, and I can no longer recall the first climb of all. So much is certain: that having one day reached those two brown posts we could no more resist climbing to the sky than someone contemplating suicide can resist imagining his mourners. It took only a few seconds to scramble to the top. Had we expected some storybook illustration of windmills and canals stretching endlessly into a watercolor haze? or a maze of miniature houses charmed into neatness by the spell of distance? Alas. A field of high yellow grass, like a huge empty lot, stretched for a mere block or so to a fringe of trees that was clearly on higher ground than our little slope. To the left, parallel to Beech Street and a block away, a road with its houses was all too visible; to the right the land rose and the field changed abruptly into trees, between which the backs of houses peeped, announcing another street. And so our mountain was merely a low point on land rising on two sides of us, and our view a mere block or so of common fieldgrass. And yet the keen disappointment of our expectations was mingled with the joy of an unanticipated discovery. “Such is life,” puts in Edwin with a solemn deadpan from the grave. But such it was, and please stop haunting me, Edwin. For the little slope, having reached its peak of trees and bushes, dropped down to a shallow brown stream alive with white places where the water bubbled over stones. In the Middle Years Edwin and I sailed many a wooden boat over those brown rapids, following the stream to the left along the length of the yellow field and through a short cement tunnel under a road, after which the stream sank lower and the banks rose higher to form cliffs with green back yards on top until, just before the bakery, the high dirt walls turned to cement and passed into the black vastness of another tunnel under Robin Hill Road itself, emerging in a swampy field on the other side where tall sharp grass came down to the water and the invisible spongy ground was a nest of spotted water-snakes; while above the motionless grass-spears, on hot summer days, transparent-winged insects shaped like sewing needles hovered like a nightmare of the grass. But Edwin was no Huck Finn. He never ventured beyond the bakery, always stopping his boat before the long tunnel; though I have seen him standing on the other side of Robin Hill Road across from the bakery, leaning his forearms on top of the cement wall and resting his chin on his crossed hands as he stared out at the brown stream winding its way on and on among the yellow grass until it turned out of sight at the edge of a distant baseball diamond. But again my memory refuses to behave, again my biography escapes its frame, and I am reminded of certain pictures in Edwin’s beloved comic books in which a horse’s nose protrudes over the edge into the margin of the page or the hero’s toes come over the bottom of the frame as if he were about to step into your lap, brandishing his sword. A curse on chronology! And again: a curse on chronology! I do not refer to the hypocrisy of it all, the stupid wretched pretense that one thing follows from another thing, as if on Saturday a man should hang himself because on Friday he was melancholy, whereas perhaps his melancholy had nothing to do with his suicide, perhaps he hanged himself out of sheer exuberance. Nor do I refer to the vulgar itch to get to the good part, the desire to leave out everything and plunge at once into the bloody horrors of Edwin’s end. No, I refer simply to the difficulty of the thing, the impossibility of fitting everything into its proper niche. And if I were to let myself go! If I were to let the horse step completely out of its frame! If for no reason at all except that I have suddenly remembered it, I were to describe the trembling elastic top of an overfull glass of water standing on a yellow rubber mat before the kitchen window. Carefully Edwin holds an eyedropper above it, carefully he squeezes out a single swelling drop. It trembles, stretches, falls. The surface shatters, water sheets the sides of the glass, the little horse steps out of the picture and dissolves instantly in the solvent of a three-dimensional world; and behind him, in the shady greenwood, the hero stares in terror at that horse-shaped white hole in his universe.