![]() ![]() Yet Jeffrey’s memories of Edwin go all the way back to his birth (another bit of the unbelievable). on August 1, 1943, in the shady town of Newfield, Connecticut.” Jeffrey Cartwright is Edwin’s neighbor, only six months (and three days) older. on August 1, 1954, deprived America of her most gifted writer, was born at 1:06 a.m. 1, 1954.” We learn at the beginning, “Edwin Abraham Mullhouse, whose tragic death at 1:06 a.m. It’s incredible.Įdwin Mullhouse is divided into three parts: “The Early Years: Aug. Somehow Millhauser has managed to create an unbelievable character in Jeffrey Cartwright, who is unbelievably perceptive and sophisticated. Jeffrey Cartwright has managed to write a biography that, due to his age and experience, is unreal but, somehow because of this, feels very much like the real world, the real mind, however typically inarticulate, of these young struggling boys. That sentence becomes, then, a kind of gloss on Edwin Mullhouse the novel. Perhaps it is not even possible for a pre-adolescent. It’s true: that is not prose typical to a pre-adolescent. If, then, our first reaction upon plunging into Cartoons is that we have entered an unreal world, blissful or boring (as the case may be), gradually 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 inattention, and that we are hereby being taught to repossess. As an example of this, here is how Jeffrey Cartwright describes Edwin’s Cartoons when he discusses it late in the biography (novel): There is a common complaint about this book: the prose is unbelievable no child could ever write how Jeffrey Cartwright writes. One can only regret that his work has proved less popular than his life. Meanwhile Edwin’s genius lives undimmed for me in the shining pages that follow. I myself have sternly resisted the temptation to read Cartoons, knowing full well that the real book, however much a work of genius, can no more match the shape of my expectations that the real Jeffrey could, should he ever materialize. Professor Thorndike has called it “a work of undoubted genius,” and he is not a man given to hyperbole. Edwin’s novel, some will recall, was discovered in 1969 by the daughter of Professor Charles William Thorndike of Harvard: in a children’s library, of all places!. Meanwhile the search for Jeffrey Cartwright continues. Yet Wright is more interested in the author of the biography, who, still young, has disappeared. The biography, after all, is about Edwin Mullhouse, a young literary genius (according to Jeffrey) who wrote in the short time before his death, Cartoons. Wright’s introduction serves to blur the spotlight a bit. Apparently Jeffrey, at that time, was nothing special and had almost slipped from Wright’s memory when, ten years after their brief acquaintance, he came across this book. It begins with a brief introductory note by someone named Walter Logan Wright, who first met Jeffrey Cartwright in the sixth grade. ![]() ![]() Let me start out by saying that this is quite the strange book - in a beautiful way - this biography by the young Jeffrey Cartwright about his young friend who died the moment he turned 11. I’ve been putting it off for a long time, certain that I would love the book, but I’ve finally read Millhauser’s also-neglected classic Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright. I dare it to change my life!” Yet for decades Millhauser has been producing solid work, particularly in the short story form. Perhaps this is not a surprise to Millhauser who once told an interviewer, “I don’t anticipate the Pulitzer will change my life at all. Most of the books on the list were published between fifty and sixty years ago, but Martin Dressler was published only in 1997. One of my favorite books, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (my review here), was reported by Abebooks as one of the top ten forgotten Pulitzer Prize winning novels. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943 - 1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright by Steven Millhauser (1972) Vintage (1996) 305 pp ![]()
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