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

Let others breathe on the clear cold glass of Edwin’s immortal masterpiece the mist of analysis. Let others beat against the rich red brick of Edwin’s art their heads. There are many things that I might say about his work, but I shall limit myself to a small number of major insights. It will not have escaped the attention of the most imbecile reader that a significant feature of Cartoons is a quality that I shall call scrupulous distortion. No object in Edwin’s novel, with the amusing exception of the ghost’s wild drawings, matches a real object in the real world. But the reader, and Edwin too, must under no circumstances forget one simple fact: distortion implies that which is distorted. Edwin’s book, far from portraying a world that has no connection whatsoever with the real world, is bound to the real world more tightly than a photograph. Oh it is, Edwin, it is. For by the method of scrupulous distortion, Edwin draws attention to things that have been rendered invisible to us by overmuch familiarity. The familiar image that gazes sleepily at us from our bathroom mirror, or glides companionably beside us in the plate-glass window on the shady side of the street, has long since ceased to surprise; not so his prankish cousin in a funhouse mirror. We are shocked by distortion into the sudden perception of the forgotten strangeness of things. If, then, our first reaction upon plunging into Cartoons is that we have entered an unreal world, blissful or boring (as the case may be), gradually we come to feel that we are experiencing nothing less than the real world itself, a world that has been lost to us through habit and inattention, and that we are hereby being taught to repossess. So much is clear, and elementary. And most of us will go no further, happy in the recovery of a world we had not known we had lost. But some few intrepid wanderers will venture beyond this brightness to a dark misty realm wherein things cease to have definite and distinct shapes, and the very notion of a real world seems a scrupulous distortion, a specious clarity and hardness imposed on mists and shadows — as if sunlight itself were a form of stylization. And in this dark realm, but only here, Edwin’s distortions are not distortions at all, but precise impressions scrupulously conveyed. For in this dark realm, Penn is in truth a ghost, and Rose Dorn a weeping princess, and Arnold Hasselstrom a chained and bleeding wolf. And as for that mysterious figure in black: “But don’t you know?” said Edwin, and I suggest we leave it at that.

If distortion is the essence of Edwin’s fiction, the means to distortion is of course the animated cartoon, whose influence on Edwin’s art I have promised to discuss. It was the animated cartoon that taught Edwin to combine the precise and the impossible. It was the animated cartoon that provided him with a whole bagful of comic tricks. It was the animated cartoon, far more than the solemn and sentimental adventure film, that acknowledged frankly a violence in things, and provided Edwin with a method of reflecting the violence he had witnessed in the course of his own quiet life. It was the animated cartoon that provided him with the central theme of pursuit, which in his hands seems to be transformed into a vision of Destiny. But even more important, it was the animated cartoon that influenced the very soul or spirit of his book. In the last chapter of Part Two I mentioned a certain disturbing quality in Edwin’s list of cartoon titles, a quality that I described as a repellent cuteness. Now I do not mean that Edwin was blind to this quality of cartoons, on the contrary he was especially sensitive to it and sought it out deliberately for his book. For it is Edwin’s achievement to have discovered Beauty not in the merely commonplace, not in the merely ugly, not in the merely malodorous and disgusting, but in the lowest of the low, in the vilest of the vile: in the trivial, in the trite, in the repellently cute. And if, with Edwin’s permission, I may briefly leave the narrow bounds of the personal for the free fields of the socially significant, I think it is permissible to say that in his immortal masterpiece the false images that feed our American dreams — the technicolor and Stardust through which America, poor savage inarticulate giant, expresses her soul — are in a manner purified, are used seriously in a serious work of art but without losing their gimcrack quality, so that every syllable (written in blood, gentlemen, in blood) seems to plead to be taken as a joke only. It is as if Edwin wanted you to discover, as the hidden intention of his book, the cute grin of a cartoon cherub — whereas that grin is itself the mask, beneath which lies a grimace of earnestness. For it was Edwin’s peculiar vanity to wish to seem not quite serious.

WHEN, ON THAT RAINY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Edwin announced that he had finished, he meant that he had finished transferring into the last of seventy-four blue examination booklets a more or less legible version of the screaming scrawls that defaced eighty-one blue examination booklets, themselves drawn from two sets of even messier blue booklets and a scattering of single pages covered with unsightly additions, corrections, suggestions, deletions, and so on. It was in this more or less legible set of seventy-four blue booklets that I first read Edwin’s masterpiece — though not, I fear, until the following Friday, despite my pained impatience, since Dr. and Mrs. Mullhouse naturally took precedence over me. It was I who insisted upon typing up the entire novel in duplicate, with two patient forefingers, on the big old machine on Dr. Mullhouse’s big old desk in the big old cellar, on a rickety folding chair, under a low-hanging bare bulb, while Edwin peered into the big hooped barrels under the stairs or walked back and forth paddling a vile pingpong ball up and down, up and down, up and down. It was not simply that I wished to possess a copy of my own but that I wished to read a copy free from the distracting personality of a particular handwriting. Each of the handwritten words seemed to be intimately mixed with Edwin, to quiver with his personality, to be uniquely his by virtue of their uniquely Edwinian curves and angles; but this was a false uniqueness, for it was a matter of surface only, and kept me from penetrating to the true personality that lay beneath those surfaces, in the shapes and shadows of the well-turned sentences themselves. I have never understood the adult fascination with author’s manuscripts, and have refused to encumber my biography with inserted instances of Edwin’s horrendous scrawls.

It took me more than one hundred hours to type that copy, at the rate of thirty-three minutes per page; the final typescript was 204 pages long, which rather disappointed Edwin, who was inclined to prefer the bulkier version in seventy-four blue examination booklets. Rather mechanically, as it seemed to me, he thanked me for my trouble. I reread the entire typescript backwards, checking for typographical errors and retyping each imperfect page, and I then read the entire thing forwards, in a single dizzy evening, with a pounding heart, and with a piercing pleasure ten times sharpened by the lucid impersonality of type.

Meanwhile three weeks had passed, and I had not yet revealed to Edwin my important secret. The truth of the matter is that I had once or twice been on the verge of so doing, when an unaccountable shyness rose up in me and choked me before I could speak. I must confess that I took myself completely by surprise. It was as if I had such tenderness for my project, call it what you will, that I feared the possible shock of an unfavorable reaction. For even biographers are subject to those little distresses of the nervous system that so engage our sympathy when the nervous system happens to belong to an immortal genius. And perhaps it was only this, that in the face of Edwin’s recently completed work, in seventy-four blue examination booklets and 204 impeccably typed pages, I was bowed down by my own lack of accomplishment. And Edwin these days was filled with such confidence, such zest, such cruel good humor! His very friendliness seemed only a cry of strength, the cruel triumphant strength of one who has accomplished his task after staring for all eternity at the bloodshot eye of Failure. At times his joy seemed to me a wild victory dance about my prostrate body.