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

I FIRST MET EDWIN on August 9, 1943. At the time I was exactly 6 months 3 days old, having been born on February 6, 1943. It is with no desire of thrusting myself forward, but only of presenting the pertinent details of a noteworthy occasion, that I thus intrude my personal history into these pages. With my stated object in mind I may add that we lived next door to the Mullhouses on Benjamin Street (we were 293, they 295), that mama had been waiting all the sunny morning for Mrs. Mullhouse to return from the hospital, and that many people have remarked upon my extraordinary, my truly inspired memory.

As I bumped along the sidewalk under the dark blue shadow of my carriage top, I wiggled my toes delightedly in a warm band of light. The shadows of passing trees rippled over my sunlit legs, and in one corner of the carriage a delicate silky spiderweb sparkled like a jeweled maze. Over the rim of the carriage I saw the dark spars of a telephone pole sailing in the bright blue sky. I also recall a little white cloud, very like a rubber whale I played with in the bathtub. Mama was chattering away in some kind of babytalk that made no sense to me or anyone else and I did my best to drown her out with my pink rattle, on one end of which Tweedledum stood with his arm around Tweedledee. Despite my efforts she managed to communicate to me a sense of intense excitement, as indeed she had been doing all morning long with her fussing and her fidgeting and her endless brushing of my silky locks. Luckily for literary history my senses were immensely alive to the importance of the occasion, that bright August morning.

A sudden stop; a turn to the left; two nasty bumps; and again I was rolling merrily along a sidewalk, but now the blue shadow of the carriage top came down to my ankles, the spiderweb hung limp and gray, smashed by mama’s thumb, and over the carriage rim I saw the familiar top of a bright white door, and over that a triangle of white shingles roofed in red, and over that an endless repetition of white shingles and a piece of window. Another turn, a change from loud concrete to quiet grass, a stop, the gathering arms, and why not skip all that and get to the good part, as Edwin used to say.

My half-year-old heart was hammering away as with a sudden hush and hurried breathing mama tiptoed after Mrs. Mullhouse up the carpeted stairs. In an anguish of anticipation I sucked my thumb. He was sleeping — Edwin was always sleeping — and as mama stepped through the door into the strange dim room I was later to know so well, the women’s hushed excitement and the sudden darkness frightened me, and I would have burst into tears had I not been fearful of incurring some strange, dim punishment. Edwin, for his part, lay sound asleep in the wooden crib by the double window. The green shades, later replaced by blinds, were drawn, though not yet luminous, and as mama bent over the crib uttering sounds of endearment, I had my first glimpse of the future author of Cartoons. He lay under a skyblue blanket with a repeated pattern of red apples and yellow pears; a fat red book with gold letters lay by his toes, which rose up under the blanket like a miniature mountain. Years later when Edwin and I were looking through the big mahogany bookcase by the stairway I came across that very book with a shock of remembrance. The gold letters spelled “David Copperfield.” I should like to report that eight-day-old Edwin was wandering precociously among those timeless pages, and perhaps he was, but a more reasonable explanation is that Mr. Mullhouse was teaching a course in the Victorians that fall (the Victorians, Edwin once said, sounded to him like one of those movies full of swordfights and slashed red curtains) and in a fit of absentmindedness had left it in the crib, and probably was searching for it distractedly somewhere downstairs at the very moment I was being introduced to his son. Edwin lay absolutely still. He looked as if he had died of old age. His chubby bare arms lay outside the blanket and were folded across his chest, the elbows by his sides and the fists together at his throat. Beneath a fringe of hair the little old face had a meditative expression. Domed over the sleeping eyes, the unlashed lids resembled the sightless white eyes of marble statues. As I watched, the little fists began to turn over, revealing handfuls of wrinkled fingers; the head rolled toward us slightly; and slowly, dreamily, the eyelids opened over large gray irises (later so deeply brown). Edwin was staring straight into my eyes. Ten years later as we sat talking late into the night, gathering material for his biography, I asked Edwin (half in jest) if he remembered our first meeting, and he replied (half in jest) that he remembered it very well indeed: “a vague sensation of someone bending too close to me.” He smiled, and I instantly moved away, and I was never able to ascertain whether or not he did in truth remember; but I record this snippet of midnight conversation in support of the very real possibility that I was Edwin’s first memory. Be that as it may, Edwin as I was saying opened his eyes and stared straight into mine. Perhaps it was the suddenness of it all, perhaps it was the strangeness of waking up in his new home, perhaps it was simply the first of his many jokes, at any rate his little wrinkled hands began to roll back and forth at the wrists, his smooth face filled with creases, and fiercely, as if he had just been born, the destined subject of these pages burst into a shriek of tears.

“OH,” said mama, “poor Edward.”

“Ed win ,” said Mrs. Mullhouse.

“Oh yes of course how — Ed win, not Ed ward.”

“It’s a perfectly natural mistake, everybody makes it. You see, we wanted to give him a special name, but not a funny one of course. This way the boys can call him Ed but he won’t just be any old stupid Edward. Shhhhhh, bubbele, shhhhhh.”

“Such a cunnin’,” cooed mama. In her own way she was a clever if haphazard punster.

DESPITE THAT FIRST MEETING, with its unfortunate aura of ill-boding, we were soon inseparable. Edwin was like that: he resisted all change violently, but as soon as the change became part of his normal scheme of things he clung to it violently, resisting all change. We developed an intimate speechless friendship. Through the mist of years I look back upon that time as upon a green island of silence from which I set forth forever onto a tempestuous sea. In green and blue August we stared at one another through the lacquered bars of his crib. In orange and blue October we rode side by side in our carriages along Benjamin Street; a yellow leaf came down out of the sky onto Edwin’s blanket. In white and blue December I gave him a snowball, which he tried to eat. He liked his father to hold him upside down and blow on his feet. On my first birthday (February is a gray month) I gave him a piece of cake; he threw it up in the air, where I shall leave it. April showers bring May flowers. Time, as Edwin would never have said, passed.

Not that we were literally silent. Before Speech the Intruder came crashing into our private party he made quite a preliminary ruckus, pounding on the door and rattling the knob and tossing snowballs at the windows. That is to say, in the early months we had an elaborate system of gasps, purrs, chuckles, burbles, sniffs, smacks, snorts, burps, clicks, plops, clucks, yelps, puffs, gulps, slurps, squeals, ho’s, hums, buzzes, whines, chirrups, grunts, hisses, hollers, yowls, rasps, gurgles, gargles, glugs, and giggles, not to mention a vast number of hitherto unclassified sounds: gurshes, jurbles, fliffs, cloffs, whizzles, mishes, nists, wints, bibbles, chickles, plips, and chirkles, to name a few, as well as occasional norples, nufts, and snools. Edwin’s pre-speech vocabulary was impressive and I bitterly regret that I was unable to record his earliest experiments with language. I do remember a number of them, however, for from the beginning I observed him with the fond solicitude of an elder brother and the scrupulous fascination of a budding biographer. I can confidently state that the following utterances issued from the mouth of Edwin before he had attained the age of three months: