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This article was downloaded by: [UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich] On: 21 December 2014, At: 18:43 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vcrt20 Edwin Mullhouse: Re-flexing American Themes Michael Pearson a a La Grange College Published online: 09 Jul 2010. To cite this article: Michael Pearson (1986) Edwin Mullhouse: Re-flexing American Themes, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 27:3, 145-151, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.1986.9937816 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1986.9937816 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

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This article was downloaded by: [UZH Hauptbibliothek / ZentralbibliothekZürich]On: 21 December 2014, At: 18:43Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Critique: Studies inContemporary FictionPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vcrt20

Edwin Mullhouse: Re-flexingAmerican ThemesMichael Pearson aa La Grange CollegePublished online: 09 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Michael Pearson (1986) Edwin Mullhouse: Re-flexingAmerican Themes, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 27:3, 145-151, DOI:10.1080/00111619.1986.9937816

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1986.9937816

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Edwin Mullhouse: Re-flexing American Themes

MICHAEL PEARSON

A little more than one hundred and fifty years before Steven Millhauser published his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, Washington Irving wrote “Rip Van Winkle,’’ a sketch which has been justly called the first American short story. Irving’s tale, nearly as old as our Constitution, may lay claim to an equally important part of our consciousness, and his story, although it owes much to German folklore, is distinctively American, if not exclusively so. Philip Young, in prose as finely wrought as Irving’s, has pointed out that Rip can be taken as a symbol of America, or at least as a characterization of how many people in the world perceive us: “likeable enough, up to a point and at times, but essentially immature, self-centered, careless, and above all-and perhaps dangerously-innocent” (Young, 229). Rip is the image of the child and all that image implies, fun loving and carefree but also careless and irresponsible. And forgetful enough to let twenty years slip by and misplace his responsibilities to children, wife, and country. Therefore, some part of us takes a critical and mocking view of Rip and his story, but there is another part of us that feels a poignant con- nection to him, for in Young’s words, “this remarkable Van Winkle . . . projects and personifies our sense of flight-and more: the ravages-of time” (Young, 230). Hart Crane aptly called him our “muse of memory,” the “guardian angel of a trip to the past” because Rip embodies our im- pulse toward escape, our desire to return to childhood, our wish to achieve a perfect freedom. And these yearnings reflected in “Rip Van Winkle” have ever since been a part of our best literature, manifested in our most memo- rable heroes-in Ichabod Crane, Natty Bumppo, Ishmael, Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Augie March, McMurphy-the list is potentially a long one, but there is still room to add another name, that of Edwin Mullhouse.

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Edwin Mullhouse harkens back to “Rip Van Winkle,” but it also echoes another early Irving tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Millhauser, like Irving, centers his story on the conflict between the fanciful and the mun- dane, between fiction and fact, and although he gives us no Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones, he does give us biographer and novelist, one anchored in fact and zealous memory, the other soaring into possibility and selective forgetfulness. It is in the person of Jeffrey Cartwright, narrator of the story (whose name neatly echoes Irving’s Jeffrey Crayon), that we find the source of irony. His voice strikes a comic tone, similar to Irving’s and what amounts to a central chord in American literature from its beginnings, a note which sounds from the clash between the ideal and the real. In Edwin Mullhouse, as in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” much of the humor con- sists of the literary method as it contrasts with the trivial or mundane situa- tion being described. This tension between modes of language is what L,ouis Rubin sees at the heart of American humor-a contrast between “the for- mal, literary . . . and the informal, vernacular language of everyday life” (Rubin, 5) . Notice the contrast between subject matter and literary tone in Irving’s description of Ichabod Crane’s visit to the delectable Katrina Van Tassel’s house:

Fain would I pause to dwell upon the world of charms that burst upon the enraptured gaze of my hero, as he entered the state parlor of Van Tassel’s mansion. Not those of the bevy of buxom lasses with their luxu- rious display of red and white; but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea-table, in the sumptuous time of autumn. . . . There was the doughty doughnut, the tenderer oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there was apple-pies and peach-pies and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef. . . . I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but did ample justice to every dainty. (Irving, 347)

Although a century and a half has elasped, there are some similarities be- tween Irving’s child-man and Millhauser’s man-child. Whereas Ichabod chases Katrina to get at her food, Edwin purchases candy to obtain his love, Rose Dorn. He buys her gifts:

. . . black licorice pipes with red sugar on the bowl, red licorice shoe- strings, black licorice twist . . . chocolate babies, root beer barrels, round red hots, sugary orange slices, little red hearts that burned your tongue, triangular pieces of candy corn colored white and orange and yel- low, squares of butterscotch wrapped in cellophane, strawberry candy that came in aluminum spoons, clusters of rock candy crystals glowing on white string. He gave her fine chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, in a pouch of green netting tied with gold string. He gave her pieces of large pink bubblegum wrapped in blue paper and containing little col- ored comic strips. He gave her small wax bottles filled with sweet syrup:

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biting off the wax bottlecaps she sucked out the orange, raspberry, and lime. (Millhauser, 143-44)

Ichabod hopes that his love will enable him to satisfy his appetite; Edwin hopes her appetite will help him to attain her love. But both, gastronomes for different reasons, are children-either physically or emotionally-and in both passages we see a collision between the formal literary language and the everyday life it describes.

Edwin Mullhouse is a peculiarly American novel. It has the essential American comic vision, which sees the discrepancy between aspirations and actualities, made more pronounced perhaps by the yawning gap between the glowing abstractions of a democratic society and the oftentimes more som- ber realities faced by the average man. Edwk Mullhouse also has the partic- ularly American trait of preserving the parodoxical relationship between the impulse to take action and record facts and the tendency to dream and cre- ate new worlds. Tony Tanner in City of Words describes just such a specif- ically American dichotomy:

There is a strong desire to step out . . . into some kind of free space; at the same time, it is not certain what would happen to the individual if he did manage to break out of all these versions, roles, structures. We have found another pervasive dread of ceasing to have identity and flowing into something as shapeless as protoplasm, jelly, or mud. It has been a constant preoccupation among [American] writers . . . to see whether some third area can be found, beyond conditioning but not so far into the flux as to mean the end of the individual altogether. (Tanner, 380)

Thus, there seem to be two intrinsic elements in much American fiction: a comic sensitivity toward the imbalance between ideals and realities, and a grop- ing after some middle-ground between freedom and control. These forces are central to American literature, and they are central to Edwin Mullhouse.

First, Edwin Mullhouse is a comic novel, with strong elements of satire and parody. Millhauser satirizes academics like Walter Logan White of the fictitious introduction, in the process lampooning scholars who are pom- pous, self-serving, superficial, and of course, have the prerequisite triangu- lar name. Millhauser also has his fun with biographers who have a mania for details, those who insist on telling us the size of Faulkner’s shoe and the number of trout Hemingway managed to catch on a fishing trip, making a mountain out of minutiae. Millhauser certainly mocks our idealized view of childhood, our romantic intuition that childhood is actually a Rousseauian playground, all innocence and purity. However, Millhauser’s chil- dren-Edwin, Jeffrey, Rose Dorn, Edward Penn, Arnold Hassel- strom-are not innocent and pure. They are silly, bored, frenzied, obsessed, cruel, playful, but hardly ever innocent.

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Like much of the satire, the parody has a literary focus. Akin to carica- ture, parody can be caustic or loving, and Millhauser’s parody is both: it places the readers’ eyes where the author wants them-on the text itself, on the fiction, both silly and serious, a bit like life itself. The parody essentially begins with the title, at once an imitation of a literary biography and a child’s notebook, and literally abounds with allusions, from Dickens’ stark “dead as a doornail” simile in A Christmas Carol to a twisting of the open- ing of Anna Karenina: “Everyone sees the world differently . . . but night- mares are pretty much the same.’’ What this parody serves to do is under- line the true subject of the novel, the book itself, the act of imagining. And throughout, the novel whispers with the ghosts of great imaginations- Dickens, Tolstoy, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Melville, Twain.

For Millhauser, literature is a game but a deadly serious one. The prose style is Jeffrey’s-witty, perceptive (at times), and skillful. Jeffrey may have been fathered by Steven Millhauser but he was born of Vladimir Nabokov, it seems, and it is worth recalling what Humbert Humbert says early in Lolita: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Jeffrey’s fancy prose style is just one more reflexive characteristic of the novel, forcing the fiction to bend back on itself, reflecting not so much the world as its own image, “a budding and blossoming of words.” In Ed- win Mullhouse, subject and object are the same. The central metaphor of the novel is that childhood is a time of genius, which in turn is simply “the capacity to be obsessed and every normal child has that capacity; we have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory fades, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults” (Millhauser, 75). Undeniably, Edwin is just an ordinary boy, but that is precisely Millhauser’s point. Edwin is each of us, but the syllogism goes even further: art is the rib of imagination brought to life, childhood is a time when the imagination is at its peak, and this particular novel about a child- writer is therefore about the imagination, about art, finally about itself.

However, Edwin Mullhouse is no sterile exercise in the anti-novel, bodi- less voices speaking one abstraction after another. It is a fiction which cher- ishes the world, that pays careful witness to childhood, all its sounds, col- ors, and sensations. It brings us back into all the comedy and pathos of that time. In one instance, Millhauser describes Edwin, a second grader, at- tempting to give his beloved Rose Dorn (whose name Jeffrey makes clear rhymes with forlorn) a present of red wax lips:

On this particular day everyone except Edwin and Rose Dorn had re- turned to the room; I myself happened to be crouching on the other side of the rack, reaching for a lost glove. Under the row of coats four legs were visible. Below her right knee was a small white bandaid; on her left knee a double scratch stood out darkly against a bright red background of mercurochrome. “I’ve got this stupid thing anyway. This is such a

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stupid coatroom. Oh where is that stupid thing. I don’t know why I bought this stupid thing. You probably wouldn’t want it anyway. Here. You can throw the dumb thing out if you don’t want it. This is such a dumb school. I think I’ll go to China.

Poor Edwin. He was not an eloquent lover. (Millhauser, 143)

Nor is Rose Dorn, with battered knees and bad disposition, the ideal woman or obvious object of Edwin’s chivalric love. This passage illustrates the clash of language modes in two ways. First, there is the vernacular of Edwin’s speech colliding with the implicit courtly love ideal. Then, there is the adult, literary language of Jeffrey’s inference plowing headlong into the triviality of the situation itself. At times, Millhauser squares the literary and childish in the same sentence. In describing Edwin’s relationship with his sister, Jeffrey says: “Sometimes, when she would not learn, he lost his tem- per and shook her by the shoulders, saying, ‘You stupid stupid jerk, you stupid dumbbell,’ until her large, beautiful, copper-flecked blue eyes filled with terror, and she burst into hysterical tears” (Millhauser, 57). The abrasively colloquial and the finely poetic hold delicate balance. The playfield in Edwin Mullhouse is a linguistic one, the book becoming a hall of mirrors, making it difficult (as in Nabokov’s work) to distinguish clearly between world and word. However, even this bit of narrative complexity Millhauser transforms into a child’s perspective when he describes Billy Duda’s reflexive story in the fourth grade: “Ten boy scouts were sitting around a fire and each boy scout had to tell a story. The first boy scout said: ‘Ten boy scouts were sitting around a fire and each boy scout had to tell a story. The first boy scout said.’ ” This is a story about a story about a story-much like Edwin Mullhouse, which is an autobiographical novel (Millhauser and Mullhouse can and should be mistaken for one another) about a boy who writes a biography about another boy who writes a novel, which in turn is quite autobiographical-and the circle continues. The novel is both made up of and about words.

There is a comic playfulness in all this, surely, a sense of gamesplay- ing-both the province of the child and the artist-but just as a child plays games with a deadly earnest, so does Millhauser play his game for high stakes. Millhauser’s kindergarten world is a violent one, replete with man- slaughter, fire, and murder, not to mention the more typical namecalling, fistfights, and rock throwing. To use Tony Tanner’s metaphor, Millhauser places us on to the “edge,” somewhere between the imagined and the ac- tual, between a free-floating release into fantasy and an imprisonment in reality. Jeffrey’s evaluation of Edwin’s childhood masterpiece Cartoons could serve just as well as an estimate of Millhauser’s book:

[The novel is like] a funhouse mirror. We are shocked by distortion into the sudden perception of the forgotten strangeness of things . . . gradu-

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ally 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 inatten- tion, and that we are hereby being taught to repossess . . . the very no- tion of a real world seems a scrupulous distortion. (Millhauser, 265-66)

Beneath the “cute grin of a cartoon cherub,” there is the “grimace of earn- estness” in Edwin Mullhouse. Millhauser, for the sake of the game, pokes fun even at himself. Jeffrey’s definition of Edwin’s accomplishment in Cur- toons is profoundly serious, but it becomes a brand of literary leg-pulling, a self-deprecatory look at Millhauser’s own novel, as well. When Jeffrey says:

. . . 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. (Millhauser, 267)

this is Millhauser’s accomplishment, too, and although some critics have complained that the book becomes tedious or too clever for its own good, not much more than a three-hundred and five page game, they fail to recog- nize the actual achievement, the fact that, as Pearl Bell has declared, “With all its satiric exaggeration and absurdity, Edwin Mullhouse is the most com- prehensive account I’ve ever read of the language and lore of American middle-class children” (Bell, 16). Millhauser’s game is satiric and parodic, but it is profoundly serious, too, written as Jeffrey points out “in blood,” about subjects as significant as the realities of childhood, the nature of art, the power of the imagination, and the potential loss of the capacity to won- der. Childhood is murdered, but Edwin slyly lives on in the book, and be- sides there is always another book and another “normal healthy intelligent American child” fascinated by toys and snow and dinosaurs and such. In Edwin Mullhouse, we see a verbal shoving match between world of fact and world of fiction, in the persons of Jeffrey and Edwin, and sometimes the shoving becomes violent, but there is a symbiosis here, also. The world and the imagination create one another, life becoming art, art becoming life. Edwin Mullhouse is a patently American fiction, no matter how far it seems to stray from the Catskills or the frontier or the Mississippi. The conflict, as it has been from our literature’s beginnings, emphasizes the separation of order and freedom, of fact and possibility, of limitation and dream, and this conflict is rendered in Edwin Mullhouse, as it is in so many American novels before it, comically-both hilariously and poignantly. In this way, Edwin Mullhouse-innovative, playful, and bursting with ironies-ac tually holds up a mirror to life and to literature, reflecting on American themes as it reflects its own image, as well.

LA GRANGE COLLEGE

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REFERENCES CITED

Bell, Pearl K. “It’s a Wise Child” in The New Leader. October 16, 1972, pp. 15-16. Millhauser, Steven. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-

Rubin, Louis D. “The Great American Joke” in The Comic Imagination in America. New

Tanner, Tony. City of Words. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Young, Philip. “Fallen From Time: Rip Van Winkle” in Three Bags Full. New York: Hx-

1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1973.

court Brace Jovanovich, 1%7.

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