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

I began it some three hours after his death, at 4:28 A.M. to be precise, despite my exhaustion from the domestic mayhem that frothed and bubbled in the wake of my shouts. During those hours my headache slowly spread downward through my entire body and erupted in my eyes in the form of red slashes. I left finally in the company of mama, who had appeared with a kerchief over her curlers shortly after the departure of the ambulance, and who had plunged into hysterical conversation with a sympathetic policeman. Once in my room I opened a drawer in my desk and removed my three-ring notebook and a sharp No. 2 yellow hexagonal pencil. At the top of the page were the words: EDWIN MULLHOUSE: THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN WRITER. Introducing a careful caret between LIFE and OF, I added the words AND DEATH above. Without hesitation I set to work, writing furiously the first draft of what are now the first, second, and fourth chapters, and finally fainting into sleep. The next day my sore throat had spread and I felt rather feverish, but I wrote on and on, all day and all night, and when I fell asleep I dreamed of a page of words that kept changing their shapes: blue fall, bloe fell, bell fel, beff lef. When I woke I instantly set to work, and indeed by the end of the first week it was clear to me that I had to keep writing on and on, for if I should stop, if I should brood … I did not see much of the Mullhouses that August, for they were often in New York; besides, a reluctance, a shyness, kept me from intruding on their grief. Once or twice I did allow myself to be dragged over by mama, but there was a terrible strain in the air, Edwin seemed always about to enter with his dripping wound, and I was relieved to escape into my happy pages. And by September they were gone. Three days after Edwin’s death a FOR SALE sign appeared on the front lawn; the moving van arrived at the end of August. According to mama, they were going to New York and then abroad; their plans were vague. I waved goodbye to all three of them as they drove off forever in the black Studebaker. Mrs. Mullhouse promised to write, but not until two months had passed did we receive a perfunctory postcard from San Marino. Thereafter we heard nothing. Many and many a time did I send up a silent prayer to the guardian spirit of Biography for having impelled me to make a copy of Cartoons; for of course they took everything. When I finish my book I shall type another copy of Edwin’s book and submit it along with my biography to one of the professors at Newfield College, who should be able to help Edwin and me find a publisher. The Hoopers moved in just before school began. Janey was entering the first grade and Paul was entering the fourth. Janey was a stupid little thing, always watching television, but Paul was a pale solitary fellow with a slight limp who spent his time devouring big books about dinosaurs and other Mesozoic monsters.

School interrupted my heavy labors, but by September I was glad of some relief, for the strain of writing all day long was well-nigh intolerable. I found it positively pleasurable to lose myself in the elaborate study of subjects that bore no relation whatsoever to my life, lovely subjects such as current events, social studies, science, and mathematics. I mastered the major imports and exports of every Central and South American country; I brooded endlessly over the labeled parts of a carefully dissected flashlight battery. I began to read newspapers regularly, pondering the national deficit, nuclear disarmament, and the prospects for world peace. Nevertheless my biography proceeded by leaps and bounds, so that by the end of October I had already reached the death of Rose Dorn. A kind of alarm came over me; I forced myself to go more slowly, to reflect more deeply, to write more carefully, to revise elaborately all my earlier pages. It took me two whole months to tell the story of Arnold Hasselstrom; it took me three whole months to tell the story of the creation of Cartoons, a labor I completed on the last day of March. But then despite myself I became caught up in the conclusion, and in one feverish week, as spring was bursting and cracking all around me, I wrote the series of chapters that culminated in Edwin’s untimely death.

Over the yellow field, the sky was so blue that blue is not the word. Obeying an obscure impulse, I moved into the sun and lay down on my back. The sky seemed to be composed of an endless series of translucent blue panes, or rather of a single endless transparent blue substance that was at once solid and impalpable, for although it pressed down onto the very grass, crushing the blades under its heavy blue weight, crushing my supine form, at the same time it invited my mind to travel upward and ever upward in dizzying spirals of brighter and brighter blue, of formless and sinister blue — for who has not felt that there is a terror in blue noon skies such as no midnight blackness, frank in its emptiness, soothing as failure, can ever harbor. And as I gazed in helpless fascination at that terrible blue sky, which crushed my body and sucked out my soul, which soaked my soul as cotton is soaked in blue dye, oh! I seemed to read an image of my fate in that vast oppressive vacancy of blue, blue, blue. And when I thought of Edwin’s fate — of old Edwin cozily tucked up between the loving covers of my soon to be completed book — I felt a sudden envy of him, a sudden anger, as if he had fooled me after all, as if in some manner he were still mocking me, as if, almost, he were smiling at me from my own pages. No, I would not mourn for Edwin. All things considered, his fate was not so bad; he was being well looked after. And he had come through with flying colors, all innocent and sainted; I was the foul devil lashed to a relentless hell. Pinned under my blue boulder, I could not help feeling that he had managed things with his usual cunning.

A sudden sound shattered my thoughts, shattered the sky, flung me to my feet. Ten feet away stood little Paul Hooper, peering at me through his thick glasses. “Your mother said come home,” he stated in his precise fashion. I dusted myself off, sent up a silent curse to the big blue spook in the sky, and proceeded to walk home with limping Paul. On the way he told me his theory that just as the dinosaur proved unfit to survive because of the overdevelopment of its body, so man has proved unfit to survive because of the overdevelopment of his brain. He invited me to see his oil paintings of the creation of the universe, the cooling of the lava, the formation of the seas. For him, I gathered, the real world had ended with the extinction of the ceratopsians, approximately seventy-five million years ago. He is really an interesting little fellow and I expect to be seeing more of him in the near future.