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

After Christmas there was a pause, as if someone were thinking up a new holiday, but soon we were busy cutting vast hearts out of red construction paper and pasting white paper lace around the edges, each of us with his own sticky bottle of honey-colored glue capped by a slit rubber tip. One girl brought in a bag of little candy hearts with sayings printed on them, which Miss Tipp dutifully distributed and then read aloud, moving from table to table amid tempests of merriment. Rather suddenly a huge log cabin appeared, big enough for two of us to stand in, and in an atmosphere of hearts and lace we sang a song called “Honest Abe” and Miss Tipp told us that Abraham Lincoln was so honest that he once walked six miles to return a book he had borrowed. Each of us had to bring in a stamp with a picture of Abraham Lincoln on it, and when one girl brought in George Washington by mistake, Miss Tipp was delighted, because he was next. We sang a song about a cherry tree and Miss Tipp told us that George Washington could not tell a lie. Edwin wanted to know who was more honest, Abe Lincoln or George Washington; Miss Tipp said she thought they were about the same. A week later she brought in a cage with a real rabbit inside. Easter was the last big holiday, and Miss Tipp did all in her power to generate enthusiasm. She exceeded herself in the matter of eggs. She brought in a wicker basket full of soft green paper grass on which sat a large chocolate egg, three real eggs dyed red and yellow and blue, and dozens of little eggs wrapped in gold and silver foil. She brought in real eggs that sat on paper collars and had faces on them: one had a black mustache over his mouth and a little black mustache on his head, another was a rabbit with tall ears pasted on. She brought in a delicate necklace of blown eggs, painted in bright stripes. She brought in a large toy egg with a little window in one end: when you looked inside you saw a green field with miniature white sheep against a background of miniature red houses and distant blue hills. We cut out vast construction-paper eggs and pasted gold and silver stars on them or sprinkled silver dust on wavy lines of glue. Edwin insisted on cutting out a black egg, smiling mysteriously to himself and refusing to explain the joke. During one of our recent interviews I asked him about that black egg, but he had forgotten it completely, and could only suggest with another mysterious smile that perhaps it was a rotten egg. After Easter there were no real holidays, but Miss Tipp did her best, distracting us for a while with rehearsals for a Revolutionary War play (Edwin was Paul Revere) and luring us on with visions of the Memorial Day parade. After Memorial Day it was all the Fourth of July: Miss Tipp brought in a huge drum, a toy flute, and a red-and-white striped hat with a blue band filled with spangles, and we sang a song called “The British Are Coming,” during which we all stamped our feet. So the year passed in a trail of white paste and a shower of colored paper and suddenly we were out and the Fourth of July was only five days away; and even as Edwin set off red ladyfingers with his first glowing punk and with his first box of sparklers made sizzling circles in the black night sky, he was calculating the time left until his sixth birthday, which was less than a month away, and less than five months from Christmas. Let no one tell me that childhood is lived in a timeless present. Rather it is a fever of futures, an ardor of perpetual anticipations. Edwin stretched his arms greedily toward the future, bright with unopened presents. As his sixth birthday approached, he was quite unaware that more than half his life was over.

THE FATAL FLAW OF ALL BIOGRAPHY, according to its enemies, is its helpless conformity to the laws of fiction. Each date, each incident, each casual remark contributes to an elaborate plot that slowly and cunningly builds to a foreknown climax: the hero’s celebrated deed. All the details of the hero’s life are necessarily related to this central image, which suffuses them with a glow of interest they lack by themselves, as firelight enchants the familiar items of a living room; an interest, moreover, that was probably quite different for the hero himself, sporting in his meadow outside the future cage of his biography. And having borrowed a spurious significance from the central image, the details of a biography move toward it as surely as if each word were a pointing finger. “Biography is so simple,” said Edwin one sweltering night not too long ago. “All you do is put in everything.” The reader need not be reminded of the traditional unfairness of the creative temperament, an unfairness here carried to the point of fatuity. Nor did he stop at this point, but went on to claim (if I correctly interpret his half-articulate remarks) that the very notion of biography was hopelessly fictional, since unlike real life, which presents us with question marks, censored passages, blank spaces, rows of asterisks, omitted paragraphs, and numberless sequences of three dots trailing into whiteness, biography provides an illusion of completeness, a vast pattern of details organized by an omniscient biographer whose occasional assertions of ignorance or uncertainty deceive us no more than the polite protestations of a hostess who, during the sixth course of an elaborate feast, assures us that really, it was no trouble at all. And since Edwin claimed that good stories always struck him as true, he found himself in the curious position of believing absolutely in the Mock Turtle and the Mad Hatter but experiencing Lewis Carroll, about whom his father used to tell affectionate anecdotes, as an implausible invention.

So much for Edwin’s opinions, here recorded in the strict interests of biographical accuracy. They are a typical mixture of subtlety and inanity. Like so many creative people, Edwin was not impressive as a thinker; his brain resembled a murky aquarium, occasionally illuminated by the flickers of a faulty electrical system. Often, in the middle of an argument, he took refuge in contemplations of the vanity of Reason before the awesome mysteries of the universe, or some such tommyrot. At other times, caught in a glaring inconsistency, he would assert the artist’s right to inconsistency. At still other times, pressed to develop an idea thrown out carelessly in the heat of argument, he would shrug and say: “It’s just a hunch,” or “It’s not worth talking about,” or “How many anagrams can you make out of ‘Edwin’?” And he suffered all his brief, too brief life from a weakness for deliberately saying things that he knew would drive people to teeth-gnashing frenzies of annoyance. It is not worthwhile, therefore, to break our heads over his useless opinions concerning the fictionality of biography. But I take this opportunity to ask Edwin, wherever he is: isn’t it true that the biographer performs a function nearly as great as, or precisely as great as, or actually greater by far than the function performed by the artist himself? For the artist creates the work of art, but the biographer, so to speak, creates the artist. Which is to say: without me, would you exist at all, Edwin?

But enough of speculation. For one thing is certain: once I had revealed to Edwin that I was going to be his biographer, once he had allowed the idea to take hold and sink in, he became fascinated by my project, indeed obsessed by it, and proved at times almost aggressively helpful in providing me with information — information which, I am grieved to say, was often at variance with my own precise and infallible memories. The point is that for all his mockery of the biographer’s art, when it came to the real thing Edwin took it very seriously indeed. No doubt it was a relief to turn from the terrible freedom of the kingdom of Beauty to the quiet strictness of the kingdom of Truth. In one of our late conversations Edwin said that I had saved his soul — he was always saying things like that — by making him think of his life as a biography, that is, a design with a beginning, middle, and end. Smiling, and pushing away the hot lamp where a trapped moth was stupidly beating its wings, I replied that strictly speaking his life could not be considered a design with a beginning, middle, and end until it had ended. Edwin did not answer, but looked away, frowning slightly over lenses that reflected the glowing lampshade; and by one of those curious tricks played on us by our senses, I seemed to hear, faintly in that prophetic silence, the sound of wings beating madly in his eyes.