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

Recently he had begun to experiment with animation. Reaching into one of the bureau drawers he removed a small thick pad with blue, white, green, and pink pages. On the top page was a circle consisting of words, inside of which was a small car driven by a mouse. Penn read the circle to us, turning the pad as he pointed to each word: EDWARD PENN’S COMICS AND STORIES. Then grasping the pad in one hand he began to flip the pages with the thumb of his other hand. Facing left, a mouse wearing a scarf was driving along in a little car past trees and houses and telephone poles; spurts of smoke came out the back, and the scarf streamed out behind him. After a while a string of E’s appeared in the air, followed quickly by a motorcycle emerging on the right, on which sat a cat with a policeman’s hat. The motorcycle gained on the car; they rode side by side; as they slowed to a stop, the puffs of smoke disappeared and the scarf hung down. The cat stepped off his motorcycle and wrote in a pad. Then the cat got back on his motorcycle, facing the other way, and drove off toward the right until he disappeared, while the mouse drove off toward the left, his scarf streaming, until he too disappeared. The cartoon ended.

Edwin was fascinated. He begged to know how it was done. To my surprise Penn proved quite willing to explain the secret. He opened up to the first page, in the center of which the mouse sat motionless in his car with his scarf standing out stiffly behind him; in the background stood a house and a tree. On the next page the mouse looked exactly as he had before, but the house and tree had moved to the right. Ten pages later the mouse was still in the center of the page but the tree had disappeared, only half the house was visible, and a telephone pole had come into view on the left. Until the very end, when the mouse drove out of sight, he and his car stayed unchanging in the center of the page as the background moved or stayed still. The motorcycle appeared first as an arc of wheel on the right-hand side of the page, then as a half wheel, then as a complete wheel with the toe of a cat. It was all astoundingly simple, drawn with little attention to detail; the important thing, said Penn, was to keep the background moving at a constant rate and to make sure that each object looked the same on successive pages. He showed us an early experiment in which he had been careless: the car seemed to puff along at wildly different rates of speed, and also to shrink and expand. But his very clumsiness had inspired new ideas; and he showed us his most recent pad, called PENN IN WONDERLAND, in which the little mouse drank from a bottle and grew taller and taller, hitting his head on the ceiling.

Edwin returned from the first visit in a fever of excitement. Within three days he had hung old sheets all over his room and had acquired great supplies of tracing paper and pads. Without success he tried to persuade Mrs. Mullhouse to permit him to paint pictures on the cellar walls, on the walls of his room, on the ceiling of his room, on the walls of his closet, on the ceiling of his closet, on the inside of his closet door; he had to settle for reluctant permission to tack up tracings on the closet door. Daily he begged Mrs. Mullhouse to take him back to Penn’s but she said she couldn’t just drop in on people she didn’t know and besides they were such a funny old couple, talking your ear off about their son’s diseases, and anyway it was their turn to call. I think Edwin would actually have disobeyed the stern injunction never to cross Robin Hill Road if he had known where to find Penn; but in those days the world ended a block away, and houses “beyond the bakery” might as well have been in China or a comic book. When at last Mrs. Mullhouse called, a week later, it was to invite Penn to Edwin’s house for dinner. But Mrs. Penn said that her son never ate out because he was on a special, difficult diet and required a private bathroom because of various internal troubles that apparently she discussed in some detail, since Mrs. Mullhouse kept on making faces at the phone and opening and closing a hand like a mouth. “That woman,” said Mrs. Mullhouse, when at last she had hung up, “simply doesn’t know when to stop. And that son of hers: really, Edwin, don’t you have enough friends already?” Penn, it seemed, had to be consulted about visitors; Mrs. Penn would call back in a little while. “Here we go again,” said Mrs. Mullhouse, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling as she lifted the phone; and as she listened she arched an eyebrow, tapped her long fingernails loudly against the receiver, and with a ballpoint pen drew box after box on a white pad, filling them in with parallel diagonal lines and darkening carefully every other stripe. When she hung up she announced that the King of Siam would be receiving visitors the following afternoon at one.

And so at one the following afternoon we found ourselves again in Penn’s subterranean den. Edwin sat sideways on the white wooden chair before the white metal table and I sat on one end of the mustard-colored bedspread, listening to the sound of sharp footsteps overhead and an occasional scrape of chairs. “I can’t stand that noise,” said Penn, and it was almost the only thing he did say; for the most part he sat stiffly on the other end of the bed, plunged in gloomy silence and evidently controlling a desire to ask us to leave. The den itself had changed: though direct sunlight from the cellar windows was shut out by the curtains, at this hour the sun made its presence more strongly felt than on our late-afternoon visit. The blazing cartoon wall was paler, the burning lightbulb at the end of its chain seemed to illuminate only itself, and the air was hot and close, as if we were shut up in a large trunk in a hot attic. Penn himself seemed considerably wilted; only during our third visit, in the evening, did I realize that he became more and more lively as the night approached, like the moonflower, which opens at night and closes before noon. I suspected then, and I suspect still, that Penn had invited us to come in the early afternoon because he was unable to work well at that time and had hoped to create a diversion. After a painfully long silence, punctuated by ineffectual attempts on the part of myself and Edwin to lure Penn into conversation and equally ineffectual attempts to talk naturally between ourselves, as if we were alone in Edwin’s room, Penn suddenly stood up and walked away, just like that, sweeping aside a curtain that fell heavily into place behind him and fading away in a series of diminishing footsteps that quickly disappeared, only to become audible again as they creaked upstairs. Edwin and I sat speechless, staring at our toes; when I tried to catch his eye he looked angrily away. After a while Edwin stood up and went over to the cartoon wall, which he pretended to examine with great interest. I coughed into my fist, cleared my throat, sniffed and swallowed and licked my teeth in sheer boredom, and was about to lean back and close my eyes when Edwin whirled around and shouted: “Stop making those water-noises!” I smiled helplessly, raising my eyebrows and turning up my palms in imitation of Mr. Mullhouse; Edwin turned back to the wall. The tense attitude of his neck revealed that he was listening hard for water-noises. I felt saliva rising in a pool under my tongue, I yearned for one of those gurgling sucking things that dentists put in your mouth, I clenched my teeth and pressed my lips together in a fierce determination not to exasperate Edwin with a sound of swallowing, and I think I would have burst like a hydrant if a loud flushing noise overhead hadn’t come to my rescue. I swallowed in ecstasy, and soon Penn’s footsteps were audible on the stairs, and both of us watched the curtain for that squirming motion. Penn found the opening with difficulty this time; I was reminded of a kitten trapped under a towel. Stepping at last into the den he avoided our eyes, walked to the bed, and sat down uncomfortably on the very edge, clasping his hands stiffly over his knees and staring gloomily at the middle of the floor. I said: “Was that you flushing?” but my attempt at a humorous sally proved a dismal failure: Edwin thrust his hands into his pockets and slumped his shoulders forward, as if he were trying to fold himself in half like a letter, while Penn continued to look wan. We were saved at last by Mrs. Penn, who stamped three times. At once Penn stood up and explained that it was time for us to go; he left it at that, as if the reason were transparent. The profound feeling of relief that overcame all of us put all of us into an excellent humor, especially Penn, who said without a trace of irony that he was sorry we had to go since there were so many things he had wanted to show us, and who cordially invited us back for the following week. The prospect of our leaving had clearly animated him; he talked rapidly and breathlessly, as if he were trying to hold us there — and I have no doubt that he sincerely wanted us to stay, if only for the pleasure of prolonging the sense of our imminent departure. But another three stamps sent us scurrying through the curtains. Penn, of course, did not accompany us out of the den; and as we turned the corner I saw him watching us from between the curtains, with an expression of distinct sadness on his face.