Understanding Steven Millhauser

Chapter 2: Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright

CHAPTER 2 Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright From the full title of Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, readers expect a literary biography, complete with an apparent biographer, turning Millhauser into someone who “edited” the work for publication. Millhauser was well aware of the similarities between his surname and Edwin Mullhouse’s. Because this was Millhauser ’s first novel, and first novels are frequently autobiographical, he is playing cat ’n’ mouse with the reader who is ready to accept Edwin’s childhood as Steven’s recollection of his because both were born in 1943, the sons of college professors, and grew up in small towns in Connecticut. But wait a minute, the careful reader may say; if I do the math, this “American writer” I have never heard of cannot have been more than eleven years old when he died! How much could he have lived, much less written, that could justify this moderate-sized book? That question of how an elevenyear -old boy can became a writer accomplished enough to justify a biography suddenly gets focused on the mystery of how he died—coincidentally or not— eleven years to the minute after he was born. Jeffrey as narrator is clearly anticipating the reader’s challenge—Why am I reading the “biography” of a boy?—by identifying Edwin as a “boy wonder.” Jeffrey is stressing the “tragic death” of America’s “most gifted writer” to justify his project, yes; but he is also exposing his sense of comfort in having escaped the nightmare of biographers whose subjects are still living: Edwin is conveniently dead and thus cannot undermine the finality of the biography. 16 UNDERSTANDING STEVEN MILLHAUSER Because the first sentence of this novel makes the bizarre announcement that this biography’s subject died at the tender age of eleven, the reader is immediately enlisted as a detective. We know the narrative will end with Edwin’s death. Reading toward the end, we begin to gather clues concerning how Edwin died and how it happened that he died eleven years to the minute after his birth. Some hints of answers are offered in the third chapter, when Jeffrey leaps forward to the summer of 1953, a year before Edwin’s death, when the boys were ten, and Jeffrey was riding Edwin on his bicycle to White Beach. Jeffrey is “stunned” by how the amusement park has “changed” as a reflection of his lost childhood, forcing him “to see the long arcade of my childhood shrink to a dwarfish old age” (Edwin Mullhouse 9). Even more telling is Jeffrey’s perception of Edwin as old, made miserable by his allergy, blanched as though he were looking out of an overexposed black-and-white photograph. Edwin’s lapses of short-term memory of the park only two years earlier may be signs of early senility. After a long (over a page) sentence, Jeffrey recalls the two boys together in boats, rendered in the brilliant colors of a warm, living memory . The chapter ends with the image of Edwin as an aging child, “testily” asking, “‘Can we go now? I have a splitting headache’” (13). The impulse to write Edwin’s biography will eventually become more clearly Jeffrey’s misguided effort to rescue his friend from growing old by sealing him off hermetically in childhood. The biography is his mad strategy of preserving Edwin’s and his own boyhood to celebrate its warmth and color from the inevitable bleaching into the black-and-white of aging and the diminution of childhood’s larger, richer world. How Jeffrey will save his boyhood chum from the horror of that Paradise Lost of their boyhood together will be the story’s climax of which these early chapters are the annunciation. In this chapter from “The Early Years,” Jeffrey is painting Edwin’s and his childhood with Technicolor hues. “It was a brilliant day” (6) on which he rode Edwin on his bicycle to White Beach. Similarly, chapter 18 begins: “One sun-drenched morning shortly after Edwin’s fifth birthday . . .” (76). Yet another chapter reveals Jeffrey’s color-tinting as having moved into a surrealistic cartoon fantasy world: “It was a perfect summer morning. The sky had been soaked for hours in blue easter-egg dye and the grass shone like green cellophane ” (25). Although it would be tempting to dismiss these graphic gestures as Jeffrey’s self...