4th grade
Aug. 1 1953
10—
5th grade
Aug. 1 1954
11
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954
Part One: The Early Years: (Aug. 1, 1943–Aug. 1, 1949)
1
EDWIN ABRAHAM MULLHOUSE, whose tragic death at 1:06 A.M. on August 1, 1954, deprived America of her most gifted writer, was born at 1:06 A.M. on August 1, 1943, in the shady town of Newfield, Connecticut. His father, Dr. Abraham Mullhouse, after a long instructorship in English at the City College of New York, transferred to Newfield College in September 1942 as an assistant professor, having in July of that year moved into a modest two-story house with his wife Helen, nee Rosoff. In March 1947 their second child, Karen, was born; and so forth. It’s about here that Edwin would have flung the book away, or in a milder mood would have looked up from the page with the nuance of a frown and said: “The only thing that doesn’t interest me is facts. Jot that down, Jeffrey.” My name is Jeffrey Cartwright.
“When I think of my youth,” he wrote (in a letter undated by him but dated by me April 26, 1954), “I think of comics and cartoons, crayons and cotton candy, clowns and kaleidoscopes.” The clowns are a lie, circuses always bored him. And kaleidoscopes never meant as much to him as picture puzzles or cereal boxes or bubblegum machines. But the spirit of his remark, as distinct from its alliterating letter, may certainly be trusted. Edwin was always playing. No occasion was too slight to serve as the pretext for another gift; his parents seemed to celebrate a perpetual Christmas. Edwin went through games very quickly, throwing himself feverishly into them for days or weeks or months at a time and suddenly abandoning them forever. But he never could bear to throw anything away, so that his beloved room gradually assumed the characteristics of a museum. In a sense, Edwin never stopped playing: he simply passed from Monopoly to fiction.
I see him now, sitting Indian-fashion on the striped bed before the double window, the tip of his tongue escaping from a corner of his mouth as he bends over a piece of tracing paper that he holds in place over a favorite comic book. Ten feet away, on the windowless side of the room, little Karen Mullhouse sits on another bed, in red corduroys and a yellow t-shirt, looking up at the ceiling light with a Viewmaster pressed to her eyes. Between them, seated at a rickety green folding table on which the empty frame of a picture puzzle lies beside a jumble of knobby pieces, is myself. Suddenly there is a blinding flash. Karen screams and drops the Viewmaster. I look up, startled to see Mr. Mullhouse standing in the doorway, blinking and grinning over his twin-lens reflex with its silver flash attachment. Only Edwin remains as before, bent in furious calm concentration over his tracing paper. He knows that as soon as the hot blue bulb cools, his father will bring it to him so that he can press his fingernails into the soft warm bumps of glass.
Now turn to summer, 1953. Edwin, wearing eyeglasses, sits crosslegged on the striped bed before the double window, bent over a blue examination booklet. Across the room, Karen Mullhouse, dressed in bluejeans and one of Edwin’s old cowboy shirts full of bucking broncos, sits on the edge of the other bed beside a rickety green folding table and moves a white marble in zigzags across a board full of holes. I am seated as before on an old folding chair, wishing she knew how to play chess instead of Chinese checkers. Again the flash. “Oh, Dad!” cries Karen. I burst out laughing. “Shhhh,” says Edwin. Behind me, on the upper shelf of one of the two gray bookcases on both sides of the single window, you can see Monopoly, Clue, Camelot, Sorry, Pollyanna, Parcheesi.
2
AND YET, OF COURSE, he had always written. In three black bindings intended for a triplicate of her husband’s dissertation, Mrs. Mullhouse preserved every scrap of Edwin’s writing she could get her hands on, from his earliest experiments in printing (“A IS FOR APPLF”) to the last, hastily scribbled note. She collected it all from the beginning, before she had any idea that Edwin was especially gifted in that way. She also preserved his crayon drawings, his pastel sketches, his report cards, his baby booties, even the old Schaum music books. Those first-grade exercises on blue-lined yellow paper are most interesting. It would be absurd to pretend to see the future author of Cartoons in the early word-lists (tip, top, tap, pit, pot, pat, spit, spot, spat), and yet the student of Edwin’s work cannot help being struck by this intimation of the later word-play. And it is true that Edwin was always fascinated by his own writing. I suppose it must have given him a sense of his own specialness to see his clumsily pencilled “family newspapers” (containing his earliest stories) and his carefully typed poems bound up in a sizable book at the age of nine. No doubt Mrs. Mullhouse intended precisely that effect. She was raising a little Wunderkind, god bless her, and she wasn’t about to let him forget it. Long before Edwin began to take pictures of himself with his own camera, he lost himself in the perusal of his early manuscripts. At least as early as the third grade he had a distinct sense of having produced juvenilia. When Edwin entered the fourth grade, a friend of the family tried to interest a publisher in the Rose Dorn poems. The venture fell through. Lucky for Edwin.
3
IN THE SUMMER OF 1953 I rode Edwin to White Beach. It was a brilliant day. The tall highway, raised over us on vast concrete pillars that looked slim and fragile at a distance, as if a flung stone could smash them, seemed lifted out of darkness into the light. Way up there, in all that blue, even the black-tipped factory smokestacks towering over us seemed necessary to the sky. The blinking caution light, the shady roof of the highway, the sudden yellow splash of a MERGING TRAFFIC sign, tanned elbows sticking out of windows, a distant helicopter, the near rush and chrome — Edwin was taking it all in, I knew. And yet some stubborn or malicious streak in him, what his father once called the traditional feigned toughness of the American writer, made him say, as I turned to look at him: “Aren’t we there yet? I have a splitting headache. Watch the road, Jeffrey.”
As we passed under the highway onto the steaming tar I began to feel an uncontrollable excitement. Ever since beginning his immortal novel in the autumn of 1952, Edwin had shut himself away from the world, fearful, I suppose, of distorting his fiction with reality; his sudden reversal seemed to mark an epoch. But I did not wish to spoil the purity of my observations by direct questioning. In the summer of 1953 I had not yet revealed to Edwin my plans for his biography, and so I could not explain to him the importance of his reactions. He was like one of those unsuspecting people whom you see being filmed by a hidden television camera: at the right moment I would reveal everything to him, his eyebrows would rise, his mouth would open, he would flash a nervous smile at the unseen audience and look away in a paroxysm of delighted embarrassment. Meanwhile I snatched eager glances at his face but he hid everything behind an absurd clownish mask.
Upon reaching a familiar billboard I turned right toward the distant wooden bridge that connected the mainland to the island of White Beach. Soon the old two-story houses with their rickety outdoor staircases gave way to empty lots and long low factories behind wire fences, as if the town had died on its way to the water. As our wheels rolled from tar to rattling wood, the smell of saltwater mingled with the old sound of water slapping against piles. From narrow footpaths on both sides of the bridge, big children and little old men stood and sat with their fishing rods, while on a solitary pile that stood farther out in the water, as if someone had had an idea and changed his mind, a white and gray seagull sat as if posing for a postcard. “Look!” I cried, “the same one you painted in forty-nine!” “Really?” said Edwin, looking with sudden interest. One remarkable fact about my friend was his mystifying inability to appreciate the humor of others; the most obvious kind of buffoonery often left him puzzled and uneasy, and he always dreaded the telling of a formal joke because he never knew when to laugh. Yet he himself loved the crudest kind of practical jokes and was master of a subtle, biting wit. It is as if he assumed an earnestness in everyone in the world except himself — an assumption that revealed at once a deep self-disparagement and a subtle contempt for the imagination of his fellowman. As we left the bridge and entered a sandy weedgrown parking lot: “I was only pulling your leg,” I said. “Oh,” said Edwin, crestfallen. But a moment later he tapped me on the shoulder and said eagerly: “But how do you know it isn’t the same one, Jeffrey? It might be the same one, after all.” In the distance, above the line of trees, to my surprise I did not see the glinting arc of a ferris wheel.