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

I HAVE HAD SOME OCCASION, in my time, to reflect upon the admirable uses of adversity, but never more than during the bright, dark spring of 1953. Edwin’s silence and absence were painful to me, and for that very reason I found myself yoked ever more tightly to our burdensome friendship. My many attempts to escape into sham hobbies were but further evidences of the true bonds they sought to sever. I do not recollect the precise day on which I clearly realized, what I had always dimly known, that I was going to write a biography of Edwin. Indeed it was not a sudden but a gradual knowledge, comparable to the growth of crystals of rock candy on a string suspended in a syrupy solution of sugar and water. Indeed I had, in a sense, been accumulating this knowledge over the long course of an observant lifetime. The reader will perhaps be surprised to learn that I did not instantly set to work, did not even begin to plan my book or take notes: I simply rejoiced in my new sense of purpose. Of course I continued to exercise my faculty of scrupulous recollection, satisfying thereby an inner need and at the same time readying myself for my great task. I knew that before beginning in earnest I should have to see Edwin’s masterpiece; nor did I doubt for a moment that it was, in fact, a masterpiece. Already it seemed to me that I understood it perfectly, that book — for was it not the organizing principle of his life, the central magnet around which the in-numerous filings of his experience were taking shape, just as my own book now began to attract to itself stray bits of memory that slowly discovered their appointed places in a previously unsuspected design? Even then I suppose I perceived dimly that the design was marred somewhat by Edwin’s indefinitely continued existence, but at the time I was less concerned with the hazy future than with the luminous past. And so I dreamed, and waited, and assembled old puzzles with Karen, and above all savored the sweet sense of mission and meaning that my life had begun to assume. Mountainous meditations, you say, for so modest and molehillish a biographer. And why not? After all, there was nothing else to do.

IT WAS NOT UNTIL SHORTLY AFTER his tenth birthday that Edwin began to show signs of resembling himself again. Meanwhile he continued the feverish and spellbound pursuit of his merciless book, following it down the hill and over the nameless dirt road into the black forest and over the flagstone path into the very heart of the house itself. About the middle of May he began to sniffle a great deal, as if he had caught a slight perpetual cold; when it failed to develop into anything serious, Dr. Blumenthal suggested that he be checked by Dr. Piccolo, Mrs. Mullhouse’s allergist. Tests showed him to be allergic to dust, feathers, pets, and pollen; Mrs. Mullhouse had to buy him a foam rubber pillow, which at first he refused to sleep on and later refused to do without, and once a week he had to be driven to Dr. Piccolo’s for an injection. Edwin submitted to this routine with surprising meekness; later he explained to me that the allergy interfered with his work. All through this period I of course continued to accompany him to and from school, observing the familiar signs of weariness and irritability that later, in the fifth grade, were to take such an alarming turn. I never saw him after school, for he napped until dinner and then went straight up to his room. Often at night, unable to sleep, I would creep into my kitchen and watch Edwin’s light until it went out: at 1:26, at 2:03, at 2:55. I even made a game of it, thrilling each time he broke a record. Once I watched from 3:27 (his previous record) to 5:06, when the sky was a deep melancholy blue and the birds had been shrieking for nearly an hour, before I had to crawl back to bed, exhausted, though his light still burned; but that morning Edwin looked surprisingly well-rested, and I realized that he had fallen asleep with his light on. But one gray dawn I saw the light burning again, and that morning Edwin’s hands were trembling and his eyes red-slashed. And one night I saw the light go out at 11:16, and I longed to know what triumph or agony had sent him to sleep at such a ridiculous hour.

In July I took up chemistry. With the end of school (fourth grade for the budding novelist was a distant blur) Edwin no longer had to rise at 7:00, and so his light began to go off later and later. He refused to come out at all on the morning of the Fourth, though in the afternoon he made a sullen appearance, sitting on the back steps with a haggard expression and wincing each time Karen and Dr. Mullhouse set off a firecracker. One bright blue morning at 8:00 when I entered the kitchen to eat breakfast with mama, I saw his yellow window shining palely among the shadowed white shingles; as I was helping myself to a second bowl of Quaker Puffed Rice, the light went out. Naturally his hour of rising retreated steadily as his hour of retirement advanced. Sometimes Mrs. Mullhouse would invite me for lunch at noon, and as I was finishing my milk I would hear the sound of the bathroom door closing upstairs. “King Farouk is up,” Mrs. Mullhouse would say, jerking her chin at the ceiling. At first she had refused to let him sleep past 9:00, but Edwin had apparently dragged his weary way through breakfast with an air of such melancholy outrage, such pained betrayal, that at last she had washed her hands of the whole affair. “If he wants to live like an owl,” she would say, “that’s fine with me. Let him. I certainly won’t stop him. He can do what he likes. Of course he’s ruining his health, you see that, don’t you. Ten million little boys in New York are all dying to have a nice back yard like Edwin’s, but he doesn’t give a damn, excuse me, Jeffrey. We might as well live in a cave, for all the good it does him. We might as well live on East Tenth Street.”

“Well, dear,” said Dr. Mullhouse, “I entirely agree with you. Starting tomorrow that son of yours gets up at nine like a sensible boy.”

“Oh, but Abe, you know he needs his sleep. And besides, he’s working on that thing of his. You know, dear, it’s really all your fault. If you hadn’t given him all those damn books. Oh, how long does it take to write a little old novel, anyway? More milk, Jeffrey?”

Edwin’s tenth birthday (the last party of his life) was a memorably melancholy affair. Grandma Mullhouse was present, which meant that Karen was sleeping in Edwin’s room and that poor Edwin was leading abnormal hours, that is to say, normal hours. Edwin sat at the kitchen table with a green party hat on his head and dark shadows under his red-cracked glittering eyes. Piles of presents in colorful wrapping paper, tied with red and blue bows, towered before him. As he unwrapped each gift he worked his weary features into a feeble imitation of surprise and delight. He received a splendid hockey game with knobs and a steel ball (smile), a small but excellent globe on a red stand (smile), a model ship with elaborate instructions (smile), a bazooka that fired pingpong balls (smile), and a tall illustrated book called Rockets and Missiles (smile). I gave him a handsome edition of Oliver Twist (smile) inscribed “Ice again!” (frown), a reference evidently lost upon Edwin, whose only comment was: “Mom, give Jeffrey some ice cream.” Afterward he rested his elbows in a pile of crackling wrapping paper, staring gloomily as Grandma Mullhouse carried over a cake blazing with eleven candles (one to grow on). “Make a wish!” we all urged, and I have no doubt he did, but fortunately he managed to blow out only five candles.

And then, three days later, as I sat in the Mullhouse living room playing the hockey game with Karen, Edwin appeared at the head of the stairs. Slowly he descended, raising a handkerchief twice to his nostrils; and strolling over to us he sat down and said: “Hi, can I play?” It was the first time he had smiled at me in eleven months. “Be my guest,” I said, and added casually: “Finish the novel?” “Nozzle? What nozzle? Oh, novel. Well, no, not exactly. I reached a point.” A point, dear reader! But this smoke-screen of indifference only served to reveal to me the smoldering excitement beneath. It was then that I first urged Edwin to ride with me to White Beach, for old times’ sake; and the very next day he accompanied me on that nostalgic and memorable journey, as recorded in Part One Chapter 3 of this history. A distinct relaxation now became noticeable in Edwin. For although he continued to work steadily on his book, he proved accessible to companionship and even exhibited a mild prankishness on occasion; and several times he actually suffered Karen and me to be present while he “revised.” It was on one of these occasions, incidentally, that Dr. Mullhouse burst in upon us with his new twin-lens reflex and captured the second of the two delightful photographs described at the beginning of this work. Once or twice I slept over, as I often had in the past; and at the end of August Edwin accompanied me to Soundview Beach, as recorded in Part Two Chapter 4. I questioned him incessantly about that point of his, but received such vague and elaborate answers that I soon began to wonder whether he knew precisely what he meant. Indeed I have often marveled at the discrepancy between Edwin’s incoherent and vaporous explanations of his work and the coherent and luminous work itself. Perhaps it is simply that the creative imagination by nature does not understand itself; or perhaps there is something about the mysterious act of creation that resembles a dream, which fades so quickly from the waking brain. Even such a mind as mine, tenacious of detail, feeling itself waking to the dusty items of the morning, will try to plunge back into the dissolving colors of some lucid and luminous land, only to find that the very energy of the trying hastens the dissolution; and all the azure and ivory of an abundant kingdom resolves itself into a corner of pillow and a piece of wallpaper. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put that dream back together again. August ended, and with it the luxurious summer dream of endless azure time; and suddenly school was upon us, and again Edwin began to fade away; but that was all right; for now my own book began to stir in my brain like a bird, like a bird I tell you, like a bird.