A FINAL MYSTERY FROM ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST CAPTIVATING STORYTELLERS
BY SAL HAMILTON
CHICAGO, IL. MAY 5, 2010—Perhaps one of the most culturally heartbreaking events we’ve been forced to become familiar with in our country this century has been the passing of our literary icons. Yesterday, this routine tragedy came to us as anything but routine and claimed one of our most beloved. Arthur Louis Pullman, author of the modern classic A World Away, passed away, tragically and mysteriously, in a Kent, Ohio, hospital.
His wife, Josephine Pullman, passed away in 2005. He is survived by his sons, Arthur Jr. and Timothy.
The death was announced by Mr. Pullman’s longtime literary agent and friend, Richard Volpe, who’d cited a long-developing degenerative brain disease as the cause of death. “We have no reason to believe there were any extraordinary circumstances surrounding his death, other than the extraordinary manner in which he lived. [Mr. Pullman] has been battling illness for the better part of his life, and the only explanation for his passing is that he must have decided it was finally time to move on from this form and go see what else was out there for him.”
While all evidence sides with this conclusion, Mr. Pullman still left a few unanswered questions for his family and literary communities at large surrounding the location and events leading up to his passing. A week prior to his death in Kent, Ohio, Mr. Pullman was reportedly staying for an extended period with his son Tim Pullman at his cabin in Truckee, California, 2,300 miles away. The events of that week, the manner in which he traveled those 2,300 miles, and his reasons why are all, at this point, unknown.
Presently, his family and law enforcement have chosen not to speculate on any of these questions. “His life was miraculous and his death was natural, and that’s all that matters to us,” his son Arthur Pullman Jr. said in a statement issued to the press. “We ask that, like my father asked so many times, our privacy be respected.”
While it was not well publicized during his life, recent statements are making clear that Mr. Pullman’s later years were marred by early onset Alzheimer’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects over five million Americans. In his statement, Mr. Pullman’s son continued, “Throughout his longtime struggle with this disease, his brilliance and spirit never wavered, and we hope that he can be an inspiration to others out there struggling with early-onset Alzheimer’s and all forms of dementia.”
A World Away, Mr. Pullman’s first and only published novel, was first printed in 1975, when the author was 25. Tilda Pullman, his mother, said her son wrote the novel after moving back to live with her at age 20. Commercially, it was an instant success, developing a cult following among teenagers of the post-antiwar era. It took less than two months to become a certified bestseller, and that success has been reborn with every new generation; the book still sells nearly 50,000 copies a year.
His book, argued to be among the best of its literary generation, follows a young protagonist, Jeffery Colton, on a cross-country journey to reclaim a lost something. Literary experts, high school English classes, and strangers on bus rides have long debated the novel’s cryptic and noncommittal description of the object of the narrator’s quest—in different sections called “an empire,” a “her,” a “Him,” “the Great,” and many more. Critics have often heralded Pullman’s detailed handling of Jeffery’s psychosis, observing what it says about the human compulsion for desire, and how that compulsion evolves as we achieve those things. In the novel’s final line, Jeffery remarks, “I have become all that I want, and for that, I am the one thing I will never understand.”
The writing style of the novel has become, in and of itself, subject for literary study. An early review written by Tomas Cornish of the New Yorker called Pullman “the degenerate son of Kerouac, the quicker cousin of Whitman, and the only one of them that could ever tell a real story.” His usually plot-heavy and focused prose is spattered with abstract moments and poetic musing, frequently highlighted by grammatical touches such as scorning capital letters and replacing the word “and” with ampersands (&). When asked once whether he felt that the different, seemingly competing styles were indicative of some kind of split-personality writing, he remarked, “You show me an author who’s got just one trick, I’ll show you his blank piece of paper, and my thing will be more interesting.”
After the publication of A World Away in 1975, Mr. Pullman began his lifelong hiatus from formal literary publication and the public eye. He met Josephine Webb just prior to the novel’s release and they were married three months later at a private ceremony in Northern California. Retreating to seclusion immediately, they purchased a home in Palo Alto, where he spent the remainder of his life.
He made his scorn of public attention well-known. Mr. Volpe has confirmed that Pullman had a long-standing objection to any proposed interviews, stories, fan mail, or connection with his literary audience in general. This aversion did little to reduce the outside world’s attempts to connect with Mr. Pullman, and rather added to his mystique. It has long been believed that Mr. Pullman spent his thirty-five years in seclusion writing what would become his most representative work, or body of work. Other rumors go further still, suggesting Pullman’s connection to a collection of unpublished works from America’s greatest writers, himself included, but these theories offer very little explanation beyond the naming of the seemingly mythical collection: “the Great Library.”
Arthur Louis Pullman was born in 1950 and raised in Truckee, California, the son of a hotel chambermaid. A child of California through and through, he wouldn’t leave the state until he was an adult. At age 14, he began working for the Pacific Railroad Company, laying tracks across the blossoming Bay Area of San Francisco. After several stints of employment, he enrolled briefly in the National Guard, but never made it past his training in the Bay Area. His transition to writing, as with the majority of his life, is not well documented. When asked about her husband by a reporter in public, Josephine Pullman said, “My husband is a private man.”
While these stories and his forbidden history may paint a portrait of Mr. Pullman as a cold, bitter recluse, those who were close with him maintain the opposite to be true. After meeting him at a function for this newspaper forty years ago, I described him in a letter as “warm and inviting; the sort of kindness that extends beyond formality and into real understanding. . . . To speak with [Mr. Pullman] is to speak with yourself as you wish you were.”
This is the Arthur Louis Pullman that I knew, and the one that I will always remember him to be. The literary revolution and subsequent youth culture movement that he inspired are a testament to the seminal nature of his work, his character, and his reading of humanity, all of which will rightfully be remembered as among the best in the English language.
As Lou Thurman, political writer and contributor to this newspaper, said, “At the end of his life, a man’s story is written in the words he never said.” Almost as compelling as the stories Mr. Pullman wrote are the holes in his own story that he left behind.
Whether these holes are ever filled and understood, Mr. Pullman will forever be remembered for his incredible ability to captivate and inspire.