It's a Wise Child

...as well as visual Indeed the cartoon titles encouraged in Edwin a tendency to think ot adult culture solely as a souice of puns and jokes " But the single most important influence on the maturing artist was the cartoon image itself?a flickering combination of the grimace and grin ' At the three-quarter mark of his life, as Edwin turned eight, he was emboldened to forge in the smithy of his soul (and m 74 blue examination booklets filched from his English-professor father) the uncreated cartoon of his race The result was Edwin's masterwork, the short novel Cartoons, a dazzling progression of verbal animated frames in which an evanescent hero is pursued, one moonlit night, through a Disneying whirl of mad adventures that end in his murder "As the circle closes, the hero's last moments are depicted in a series of images that appear in rapid succession in his eyes two steamships slowly sink and two winged heroes sit on two white clouds strumming two golden harps as two little circles close and That's All Folks1 writes itself across each eye " Lest we slip into unawareness and think this fun and-games, Jeffrey the astute critic, aide-de-camp to the tenacious biographer, is quick on the mark with the figure m the carpet and the lesson of the master In his own resonant words, Cartoons explores "the false images that feed our American dreams-the technicolor and Stardust through which America, poor savage inarticulate giant, expresses her soul If the Graduate Student's Revenge were all that Steven Millhauser had in mind for his cunningly literate mockery, Edwin Mullhouse would still be an extraordinary achievement But he is aiming at much more than parody At the heart of the book, all kidding aside, is a metaphor of childhood as a state of gsnius Except for the toimented year that Edwin sweated over the writing of Cartoons, there was nothing in the least Mozartian about the boy novelist "In a sense Edwin never stopped playing he simply passed from Monopoly to fiction ' No Sahnger-type Wundeikmd like Seymour and Zooey Glass, with their astronomical IQ's and fluency in Sanskrit at seven, Edwin, as Jeffrey solemnly tells us, "was only a normal healthy intelligent American child ot the middle of the twentieth century, fascinated by toys and snow " When Jeffrey's literary horizons were expanding into Dickens and Mark Twain, Edwin was still engrossed in Walt Disney's Comics & Stories and his kid sister's first-grade texts "The only piece of adult literature he seemed able to endure was The Settlement Cookbook, whose cookie recipes exercised over his imagination a strange power ' What sets Edwin apart, the essence of his singularity, is his stubborn refusal to surrender the transient genius bestowed upon children, "the capacity to be obsessed,' whether the obsession is with Bugs Bunny or Pick Up Sticks While all the children around him were turn ing into "nothing but wretched little adults watered down by a dieary round of dull responsibilities and duller pleasures," Edwin successfully defied life's cruel assault on a child's playful freedom, "the obscenity of maturity"-and if Jeffrey cannot resist patting himself on the back for this memorable phrase," the little monster should be forgiven A biographer's lot is not a happy one Even more than a remarkable tour de force of parody, equal in its way to the best of Beerbohm, Edwin Mull-house is a portrait not so much of the artist as a young child as of the ordinary child as artist At the age of 29, Millhauser seems to have forgotten nothing of the way children go about the business ot being children, at once succored by the adult world and stymied by its elephantine misreading of what children need and want With all its satiric exaggeration and absurdity, Edwin Mull-house is the most comprehensive account I've read ot the language and lore ot American middle-class children Of course the idea of childhood as a state of grace?in the psychological, not religious, sense-is a sacred liberal shibboleth of our time From Paul Goodman's Giowing up Absurd, through the radical educational theorists like John Holt, Ivan Illich, Edgar Fnedenberg, et al, we have been told that children possess a spontaneous creativity, a capacity tor freedom of feeling and thought, that adult society inexorably stifles or deflects through such repiessive institutions as school It is the old Rousseauian idea ot the natural child doomed by the harness ot unnatural necessity And Jeffrey Cartwright, that child ot his time, knows all about the "obscenity of maturity " But Steven Millhauser knows something more-that the end of childhood is not necessarily a torm of death, just as the violence of Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry cartoons doesn't really hurt And parody is a higher form ot comedy than slapstick...

...He learned Singing, Clapping, and Keeping Quiet He learned Standing on Line and the Pledge Allegiance He learned Opening Milk, and Raising Your Hand to Go to the Lavatory " Just before Thanksgiving, "we all told what we were thankful for, Edwin said he was thankful for Thanksgiving " Clearly a young man of uncommon promise By the Middle Years the decisive literary influences begin to assert themselves, in his gigantic collection of comic books and his passion tor animated cartoons As our biographer trenchantly reminds us after listing some of the weightier cartoon titles that left their indelible looney-tune imprint on the chrysalid novelist ("The Fall of the Mouse of Usher, Kit and Kapoodle, Is There a Dachshund in the House9, Madame Pussycat-music by Poochim"), Edwin saw over 200 cartoons during the Middle Years, and "the influence of the animated cartoon is clearly verba...

...Writers & Writing IT'S A WISE CHILD BY PEARL K BELL Little could James Joyce have foreseen the avalanche of cliche he was setting rn motion when he began A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the now legendary sentence "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo In thousands of first novels since Joyce's revolutionary use of the baby artist's earliest lisping literacies half a century ago, a precocious horde of sensitive, rebellious, grimly ambitious children—every last one of them wise and gifted beyond his tender s/b years-have marched to the same leitmotif The child is father of the novelist, and the proper study of a young writer is Himself when young It has been left to the ingenious imagination of still another first novelist, a Brown University graduate student named Steven Millhauser, to stand the Kunstler-loman genre on its swollen head in Edwin Mullhouse The Life and Death of an Amencan Witter, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwnght (Knopf, 307 pp , $6 95) Not in the least by chance, he has also produced a brilliant parody of Literary Biography (Semi-Worshipful) This definitive life of a great American writer, Edwin Mullhouse, who died at the age of 11, was written shortly after-in fact, hot on the heels of-is death by his lifelong friend and self-appointed amanuensis Jeffrey, the novelist's senior by six months Compared to Jeffrey's zealous sense of purpose, his industrious concentration on his subject's infinite variety and plenitude of sameness, James Boswell seems inattentive, Richard Ell mann's Joyce slipshod, Leon Edel's James cursory As Jeffrey indignantly declares in his Preface to the First Edition, no one lifted a finger to help "I feel that grateful thanks are due to myself, without whose kind encouragement and constant interest I could never have completed my task, to myself, for doing all the dirty work, and above all to myself, whose patience, understanding, and usefulness as a key eyewitness can never be adequately repaid " Certainly not, since Jeffrey lived in the house next door, and the boys were inseparable from the day Edwin came home from the hospital With the inspired orderliness of a born biographer, Jeffrey divides Edwin's life into three distinct periods, and enlightens us with delicate pomposity that "If the Early Years are the prehterate years, and the Late Years are the literary years, then the Middle Years may neatly be named the literate years ' Since his subject is an immortal writer, Jeffrey must have felt strongly tempted to skim the brief time "before Speech the Intruder came crashing into our pnvate party," but his scholar's conscience permits no shortcuts Deaf to the siren-song of selectivity, Jeffrey records in full Edwin's earliest 'gasps, purrs, chuckles, burbles, sniffs, smacks, snorts, burps," then moves on to sophisticated six-month-old combinations like "kakooka, pshhh, dam dam dam, chuff (an early version of Jeffrey'')," and in time wrestles with such thorny research material as the books Edwin owned between ages two and three His samples should drive the whimsical "authors' of children's books to eternal silence "The Three Billy Goats Gruff, the Pinch-me Punch-me Bounce-me Bump-me Toss-me Tumble-me Tickle-me O, The Little Pretzel Who Had No Salt, Jerry the Giraffe Has His Tonsils Out An account of kindergarten days manages to say finally and forever, in five incandescent pages absolutely everything about the tense tedium ot a child's first year in formal school What did Edwin learn in kindergarten...