Back to the Classics #13

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic on Your ‘To Be Read’ Shelf Longest: In this novel the narrator says, “Let no one tell me that childhood is lived in a timeless present. Rather it is a fever of futures, an ardor of perpetual anticipations.” True – we all remember the frenzy of Christmas. Ardor fades with age. Letting a book stay on the shelf for literally decades even when I expect it to be fun to read may be part of living in the present which I increasingly tend to do instead of looking forward. The future, I figure, will come soon enough. It always has in the past.

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright - Steven Millhauser

This 1972 novel perpetuates the traditional literary fraud of fiction impersonating fact: in this case, the biography of Edwin Mullhouse (1943-1954), who at the age of ten, wrote the Great American Novel, entitled Cartoons.

The self-styled biographer is a friend of Edwin, Jeffrey Cartwright. Only a few hours after the tragic death of the precocious genius, Pal Jeffrey starts to chronicle young Edwin’s very short but intense existence. For a 12-year-old, Jeffrey has an exceptional ability to grasp all those irrelevant but wonderful things that constitute anyone's childhood.

The first reason to read this novel is to be astonished at Millhauser's re-construction of the whole world of transient impressions, turbulent emotions, dramas and interludes, fears, confusions, bungles and shocks that constitute the daily life of a child. Jeffrey narrates the story in a strangely formal and pedantic voice at times, but at other points in a style of dazzling clarity and coloring. But always with the vision and perspectives of a child, which reminds us fogeys of everyday things sixty years ago, like being in elementary school, bored witless but then excited to be distracted by a spring storm:

Quite suddenly, with a sound of crumpled cellophane, it began to rain. The drops were immense; within minutes the playground was uniformly dark. The wind flung rain against our windows with a sound of fingernails against glass, and scraped the gleaming garbage-can cover in short sharp bursts across the tar. ... Hardly had the last ripple of thunder died away when again the lightning came, a precise enormous many-veined flash that stood fixed for an instant, transforming the heavens into a vast nervous system: in the pale intense light, monstrous black telephone poles stuck up into the livid sky; far away white houses gleamed; and palely luminous through the sheeted rain, white crossbeams of distant frontyard fences gleamed.

The second reason to read this novel is that Millhauser presents a satire of biography, especially literary biography (also skewered in A.S. Byatt’s Possession).  Jeffrey’s anxious dedication to detail astounds and overwhelms and in the end disturbs; for example, one list of many is the list of prizes from candy and cereal boxes that goes on for a hilarious and nostalgic two pages. Like our narrator reminds us:

For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? ...We have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults.

Such is the choice our workaholic culture and addiction-driven consumer life offer: be obsessed or be average. As literary biographer Lucasta Miller says, “Only obsession can explain what keeps the literary biographer going.”

When this book was released in 1972, some critics griped that though the writing was evocative and well-observed, the novel seemed to lack deeper meaning. Beyond me is how they missed that this is story of obsession. As such, it joins classics of passion and fixation such as Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Collector, and Possession (again with Byatt!).

Jeffrey is obsessed with Edwin. The reader wonders why Jeffrey is so sedulous and rapacious in observing and collecting data on Edwin’s life. Is the voracity for information gathering and analysis to fill a gap in Jeffrey and his world? Jeffrey mentions his mother only in passing and mentions his father not at all. He has no sibs. He has no friends but Edwin. He manipulates girls to like him to distract Edwin’s attention from them. Adapting typical maladaptive behavior, Jeffery seeks to control his corner of a chaotic world and allay anxiety by collecting rocks and stamps. And Edwin.

Jeffrey’s asides and mania for lists hint he has blind spots, as he imposes on Edwin’s life Jeffrey’s own narrow interpretations and expectations. He’s cynical and jealous as he describes Edwin’s schoolboy crush on the “unworthy” Rose Dorn. That Edwin’s family is Jewish, for example, escapes his fixed gaze and detailed commentary. So do the sudden disappearances or deaths of kids that have attracted Edwin’s attention and that are blandly mentioned in passing by Jeffrey. Jeffrey is the classic untrustworthy narrator who poses as all-knowing, like a literary biographer.

Millhauser wrote this novel while he was a break from PHD studies in you-know-what major – the reader can tell Millhauser had read enough literary biographies and literary criticism for three lifetimes. While the novel reminds us of an American childhood that those us born in the Forties and Fifties can connect with, it also reminds us that this mock-biography did not stem the tide of doorstop biographies: John Adams by David McCullough (751 pages); Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (818 pages); and Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather L. Clark (1,154 pages).