These were the balmy days of our early conversations, before they took that strange, fateful turn that wound its intricate and evil way to a certain shoebox at the top of Edwin’s closet, where under a heap of silver cowboy pistols and an old leather holster lay Arnold Hasselstrom’s gun. I followed no rigid and confining method but simply asked questions and let Edwin talk. And talk, talk he did. For if at first he was inclined to treat the whole thing lightly, as if it were all merely a game, in no time at all he was speaking in great bursts and rushes, as if he were relieved to have someone to talk to at last. And really it was not so surprising, for he had spoken to no one in a year and a half. What did we speak about? Nothing, I suppose, and everything: the moonlight, the meaning of Cartoons, the curse of allergy, Arnold Hasselstrom. When I asked him why he had ever accepted that gun in the first place, he shrugged and said: “Oh, I don’t know,” and turning he added with absurd solemnity: “Don’t ever tell anyone about that — stuff, Jeffrey.” “Oh, of course not,” I answered, hurt by the implication that I might ever betray one of his secrets, and asked: “Next question: is the one-eyed cat supposed to be Gray?” “What one-eyed cat?” asked Edwin, in a surprise that was possibly genuine; for he was sincerely forgetful as well as cunningly evasive. And indeed after a time I was forced to realize that there was something distinctly unsatisfactory about these conversations, however delightful, for I was able to learn nothing I did not already know. My memory was ten times more acute than Edwin’s; his understanding of his own book was questionable, to say the least; and there was a maddening evasiveness in him that kept me from ever penetrating to the heart of things. Perhaps the evasiveness was as often unconscious as cunning, the mere reflex of a shyness; but there it was, and I could do nothing about it. There were some things he simply would not talk about. He would not talk about Rose Dorn. He would not talk about Karen. He would not talk about his mother and father. He would, however, talk endlessly about Arnold Hasselstrom, whose dark wordless history seemed to obsess him like the riddle of existence. Of course he was bound to brood over his relation to that disobedient boy. “Remember the last time he came?” said Edwin one evening as we strolled under the streetlamps along Robin Hill Road. “And why didn’t I answer the door? But no, I couldn’t, and besides, he was such a — such a — he was always taking things, and he never gave you anything back, I mean even when he gave you something he wasn’t really giving it to you, he thought he had to, and besides, oh, I don’t know.” It was always a puzzle to me why someone who wrote as well as Edwin should speak so badly. We came to the low concrete walls over the stream beside the bakery, and as Edwin leaned his arms on the top of a wall and looked out across the dark field and the dark stream, shiny in the moonlight, I asked: “Do you then blame yourself for the death of Arnold Hasselstrom?” Edwin flinched perceptibly but did not answer at once. After a time he said quietly: “I didn’t kill him.” After another silence he said: “I didn’t help him, either.” And after still another silence he said: “Phew! A biographer is a devil.” “Oh, we’re not so bad, once you get to know us,” I said with a smile, and Edwin said: “And the way he just sat there, saying nothing, just sitting there, like a, like a …” “Bump on a log?” I suggested, and Edwin turned sharply as if he were going to reply, but apparently he changed his mind.
Our discussions of Cartoons were a grave disappointment. At first I had questioned Edwin incessantly about his book: its nature, its meaning, and its relation to his life. But very quickly I came to realize that Edwin was not able to offer any insights whatsoever into the nature and meaning of his book, and its relation to his life. For either he did not understand the nature and meaning of his book, and its relation to his life, or else his mind grappled with these matters in so curious and personal a manner as to be unable to communicate its findings to intellects organized in a more commonplace way. If, for instance, I asked him a simple technical question, such as “Why is the moon first a white crescent moon and then a round yellow moon?” he would answer: “Why? What do you mean, why? You mean: why?” “Yes: why.” “Oh, why. Well, why. Well, the reason why, it’s obvious, why is the moon first a white — I really don’t understand your question, Jeffrey, are you sure you mean: why?” And although at first I suspected him of eluding a challenge, gradually it became clear to me that he really did not understand my question, or that he understood it in some partial or eccentric way that rendered it puzzling or insane. So much for the technical aspects of Cartoons. If, shifting my ground, I asked him some simple question of interpretation, such as “Who is the mysterious figure in black?” he might reply: “I don’t know,” or in a playful mood might answer, with an infuriating smile: “But don’t you know?” And when on occasion I would venture to explain to him my own understanding of the nature and meaning of his book, and its relation to his life, he would burst into rude laughter, or he would listen with a kind of wide-eyed innocent interest, saying: “Why yes, I see what you mean.”
I tried to discuss books with him but quickly lost patience. His literary taste was really unspeakable. At a time when I was discovering Huckleberry Finn, Kidnapped, David Copperfield, Edwin was still immersed in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. He continued to devour teenage baseball novels, and to read with delight the same old blue biographies in the Childhood of Famous Americans Series that he had started reading in the summer between the first and second grades. He sought out the complete versions of children’s books he had read in unsuspected abridgments (Bambi, Pinocchio, The Wizard of Oz), and he was an avid reader of Karen’s library books and 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.
And by the end of April, despite his initial enthusiasm, he was already losing interest. A note of levity began to creep back into his talk. He began to prepare his statements beforehand, and to deliver them in a distressing tone of mock solemnity. “Life is useful,” he would say, twirling an imaginary mustache, “for the purposes of fiction. Jot that down, Jeffrey.” One day I received in the mail a long letter addressed to Dr. Jeffrey Cartwright, containing a reminiscence so highly wrought as to draw deliberate attention to itself as artifice (I have quoted from this letter, the only one I ever received from Edwin, in Part One Chapter 1). At the same time a moody restlessness was taking possession of him, so that at times he seemed impatient of all talk and barely tolerant of my companionship. It was during this period, therefore, that I began to apply myself to the systematic accumulation of objective data, copying the titles of Edwin’s earliest books, tracing the hand and foot in MY STORY: A BABY RECORD, and so on. One night as we sat on the top of the steps at the back of Franklin Pierce, looking out at the deserted starlit playground, I asked Edwin something or other about Cartoons, and when after a silence I turned to him, I saw him shaking in silent mirth, with that same pipe curving from his clenched lips. Yes, he was bored, there was no holding him; and really there was nothing more to speak about. It occurred to me that Edwin had become distinctly less interesting since the completion of his book. That very night, when I returned to my room, I withdrew from my desk a brand new three-ring notebook in blue cloth that I had purchased some months before, and grasping a brand new perfectly sharpened No. 2 yellow hexagonal pencil I wrote without hesitation at the top of the first page EDWIN MULLHOUSE: THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN WRITER. I stopped, knitting my brows; and after three hours of staring at the blue lines, and the red slash, and the three holes, and the bright white empty spaces, I closed the notebook and turned out the light, and crawled into bed and pulled the covers over my head, and you would be amazed if I told you how bright that blackness was, how lively that silence.