Essays of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  I have never seen a loon rinse its mouth, but once I liberated a hummingbird from a spider’s web. Mr. Forbush, I think, would have wanted to hear about that. I have never watched a merganser commit suicide, but once, in Florida, I saw two flickers dancing at one end of a tin rain gutter to music supplied by a red-bellied woodpecker, who was drumming on the gutter at the other end. Mr. Forbush came instantly to mind. I have never seen a bullfrog with a swallow in its mouth, but the first cast I ever made with a spinning reel (it was a practice shot on a lawn) was taken by a mockingbird, who swept down out of a bush and grabbed the bob. These are my noteworthy bird experiences. Alas, they are too late. (And I should add that I know a man who, while hunting in the woods, learned over to pick up a glove and was bit on the nose by a bittern. He is Mr. Ward F. Snow, of Blue Hill, Maine. November 1965.)

  If Edward Howe Forbush’s prose is occasionally overblown, this results from a genuine ecstasy in the man, rather than from lack of discipline. Reading the essays, one shares his ecstasy. I have nothing in my bookshelves that I turn to more often or with greater satisfaction than his Birds. He is a man for all seasons, and, like a flight of geese, he carries his reader along into season yet to come. On a winter’s evening, it is a pure pleasure to read, “When the spring rains and mounting sun begin to tint the meadow grass, when the alewives run up the streams, when the blackbirds and the spring frogs sing their full chorus, then the Snipe arrives at night on the south wind.”

  E. B. White

  “The theme of my life,” E. B. White wrote in his fifty-eighth year, “is complexity-through-joy.” Four years later, in a 1961 statement to the New York Times, he wrote that “All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find it in there, if you dig around.” He also loved the English language, American variety. All those things—complexity-through-joy, love of the world, and love of American English—combined to establish E. B. White as the greatest American essayist of the century. The complexity that gave him greatest joy was that of life itself. And he found joy in nearly everything he saw, from a battered old willow tree “held together by strands of wire” in a city interior garden to a freshly laid goose egg, from a barn spider’s web to a railroad locomotive, from his opportunist “dash-hound” Fred to the United States Constitution and American democracy. His eye and heart delighted in the specifics of life’s complexity, and he celebrated those specifics in his incomparable essays and his three books for children. And in celebrating them, he gave them a lasting place in our Literature. “I discovered a long time ago,” White wrote in a letter, “that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the hearth, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sanctity or grace.” With a prose style unmatched for its grace and “sanctity,” he revealed—and revelled in—what is permanent and joy-giving in the “inconsequential” and the “trivial.”

  On July 11, 1899, in Mount Vernon, New York, Elwyn Brooks White first opened his eyes to the world that he would come to view daily with a newborn’s freshness of vision. His parents—“respectable people,” as he would fondly characterize them—had moved to Mount Vernon from Brooklyn because, White later speculated, “the town’s name sounded tonier.” The youngest by five years of six children, White disliked his given name from the start. “I never liked Elwyn,” he would insist, years later. “My mother just hung it on me because she’d run out of names.” The White family shared a comfortable life in a spacious and rambling Queen Anne house, and young Elwyn early on became familiar with the prosperous town in which he would spend all his school years. The older E. B. White, in an attempt to find some childhood unhappiness that would explain his having become a writer, claimed that he worried incessantly as a child. “I was uneasy,” he said in a 1976 interview, “about practically everything.” What would become a lifelong aversion to public speaking also made his childhood less than perfect. All through school, he spent every year worrying about the recitation required annually of each student; but every school year ended before the W’s were reached. His shyness persisted throughout his life; whenever an occasion required a speech, White would write the words but ask someone else to read them.

  Young Elwyn explored Mount Vernon in wider and wider circles, riding—and stunt-riding—his bicycle through the town and, as he got older, into the surrounding countryside. (He would be a lifelong cyclist, graduating to a ten-speed version after he and his wife moved to Maine in 1957.) Of all the places he discovered, he loved the neighborhood barns and stables the most, and delighted in exploring or just sitting and observing. Among the animals encountered in these warm, peaceful havens, he took a particular liking to mice and spiders. Indeed, for several years he had a pet mouse that accompanied him on his forays, tucked in a jacket or sweater pocket. And he loved Maine from the time, in 1904, when his father first rented a camp on a Maine lake and, as White later wrote (in “Once More to the Lake”), “took us all there for the month of August. . . . We returned summer after summer—always on August 1 for one month.” (White would return to that same camp, with his own son, Joel, in 1941.) Young Elwyn also began, at an early age, to describe what he saw and heard, in writing and in drawings submitted to the popular children’s periodical St. Nicholas Magazine and other publications. He was nine when he won his first award, from Women’s Home Companion, for a poem about a mouse. He also collected gold and silver badges from St. Nicholas Magazine as a repeat member of the St. Nicholas League, which he later recalled in his 1934 essay, “The St. Nicholas League.”

  White’s high school years broadened his horizons and apparently intensified his shyness and his observational powers. He was the editor of his high-school newspaper, but his dread of speaking in front of the class went unconquered. In 1917, White enrolled at Cornell University, where he studied under William Strunk, Jr., the great grammarian (whose handbook on English style, The Elements of Style, White would later revise), wrote in profusion for the Cornell Daily Sun and became its editor-in-chief, and picked up the nickname—Andy—that he would happily carry for the rest of his life. (The nickname Andy was bestowed on every Cornell student with the surname of White, in honor of Cornell’s first president, Andrew D. White.) After graduating from Cornell, White worked as a reporter for the United Press in New York and then for the Seattle Times. He also contributed articles and poems to the New York Evening Post and the New York Herald. “My prose style at this time,” he wrote later in “The Years of Wonder,” “was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H. L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys.” White was also looking for adventure and in July of 1923, discharged by the Seattle Times, he booked passage to Alaska aboard a not-quite-converted troop carrier, the Buford, ending up by working off part of his passage. But he saw Alaska. Almost immediately upon his return to Seattle, he set off with a friend, Howard Cushman, in a convertible Model T Ford, the two of them working their way back East. Their odd jobs included playing piano in a cafe, pitching hay, selling roach powder, and selling writing to local newspapers.

  Back in New York, White signed on at an advertising agency as a production assistant and copywriter, while continuing to submit essays and poems to various newspapers and magazines. Then came the two key events of 1925: the appearance of The New Yorker on February 19, and—nine weeks later—the appearance of White’s first contribution to the magazine with which his name would become synonymous. White’s initial New Yorker piece, a parody of an advertising campaign, was the first of more than eighteen hundred pieces that he wrote for The New Yorker. (He edited the magazine’s “Newsbreaks” items into his eighty-third year.) In 1926, Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founder and legendary first editor, hired White as an associate editor. Together with Ross, James Thurber, Katharine Angell (later White’s wife), William Shawn, and a handful of others, White shaped the magazine into the sophistica
ted, witty, and polished epitome of literary magazines, just as the magazine shaped his career and served him for decades as his chief outlet. Not long after joining The New Yorker staff, he became the principal contributor to the “Notes and Comment” section. And not long after that, he began his courtship of Katharine Angell, the magazine’s fiction editor.

  Thirty-three-year-old Katharine Angell had been married for nine years and was the mother of two children. Ross had hired her as fiction editor in 1925 and, through to her retirement in 1968, she shaped the magazine’s distinctive reputation for quality fiction. White reported that on his first visit to The New Yorker offices, he was immediately struck by Angell’s “knack for making a young contributor feel at ease.” Feelings of ease soon evolved into other feelings; and, following her divorce in 1928, Angell and White were married on November 13, 1929. Their only child, Joel McCoun White, became a noted boat builder.

  White entered the 1930s doubly lucky, as he had found and married the woman for whom he was clearly destined and he was a key contributor to what had quickly become one of the most respected and famous magazines of the century. In 1931 the Whites began summering in Maine, and in 1933 they bought a forty-acre saltwater farm in North Brooklin, overlooking Blue Hill Bay. The farm gave the couple the chance to escape the hassles of city life: White got to sail his boat and indulge his fondness for animals, while Katharine cultivated her garden (she was an avid gardener), read manuscripts, and, as one commentator has noted, “nursed her nostalgia for New York.”

  For four years the couple journeyed back and forth between New York and North Brooklin. In 1937, White took what he called a “sabbatical,” apparently in full retreat from the city. A year later, he persuaded his wife that they should make the farm their permanent residence. With several interludes—their being called back to New York five years later by Harold Ross to help “their” magazine survive financially as well as wintering in Florida—they became the most sophisticated farmers in Maine’s history. It was a working farm, however, stocked with 15 sheep, 112 New Hampshire Red pullets, 36 White Plymouth Rock pullets, 3 geese, a dog (Fred the dachshund), a tomcat, a pig, and a captive mouse. And the new “farmers” continued without pause to perform their writing and editing duties. Indeed, from 1938 through 1943, White also wrote a widely read monthly column, “One Man’s Meat,” for Harper’s Magazine. He later told his biographer, Scott Elledge, that the Maine years were the happiest of his life.

  In addition to editing fiction for The New Yorker, Katharine also produced an end-of-year review of children’s books, and every fall the Maine house was inundated with cartons of children’s books. It was apparently this invasion of children’s books, together with the importunings of his numerous nieces and nephews, that started White to thinking about writing a book for children. In his January 1939 Harper’s column, he wrote that “close physical contact with the field of juvenile literature leads me to the conclusion that it must be a lot of fun to write for children—reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work. One side of it which must be exciting is finding a place, a period, or a think that hasn’t already been written about.”

  White’s only published book of poems, The Fox of Peapack and Other Poems, was published in 1938, followed the next year by Quo Vadimus?, a collection of satirical pieces that Christopher Morley called a “study of contemporary jitters” and praised for its “low-pitched savagery” and its “gaiety and intelligence.” The essays that would raise White to the status of stylist nonpareil continued to flow from his typewriter, as did letters and the occasional special piece. In 1941, White and Katharine edited A Subtreasury of American Humor, and White’s introduction (adapted in the collected Essays as “Some Remarks on Humor,” with typical modesty) has become a classic commentary on its subject. White’s shyness also remained in evidence. On a 1941 visit to the White House, Richard L. Strout moved to guide White through a crowd of reporters for an introduction to President Roosevelt; but White balked. “He wasn’t going through with it,” Strout reported.

  In 1942, the Whites returned to New York and, for the next fifteen years, commuted between the city and North Brooklin. Even though they were not on the farm year-round now, they were determined to do their share as farmers in meeting the demands of World War II. Roger Angell has reported that “among White’s production goals for 1942 are 4,000 dozen eggs, 10 pigs, and 9,000 pounds of milk. . . .” The war and the attendant threat to democracy also engaged White’s attention as a well-known writer; and he began addressing issues that he saw as critical to American democracy and world peace. He continued to the end of his life to speak out in defense of individual conscience, freedom of the press, the rights of minorities, and world unity. As Bruce Allen commented, in the Christian Science Monitor, “it’s as if he felt his minor-key mastery wasn’t enough, that he had to step forth, and speak forth.” Even in connection with what were for him the most serious of issues, however, he maintained his remarkable balance between humor and seriousness. In 1984, Strout reported on White’s response in July 1943 to the Writers’ War Board request that he write a statement on “the meaning of democracy.” As quoted by Strout, White responded:

  Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.

  Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog, and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

  He was also one of the first to speak out against McCar-thyism and the blacklist. In 1947 he took the New York Herald to task for supporting loyalty oaths and the blacklisting of Hollywood writers. The idea of requiring employees “to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs,” he wrote, “is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.” He was also among the very first to inveigh against the testing of hydrogen bombs, and his warnings about pollution and calls for environmental preservation were consistent from the mid–1950s on.

  Since 1938 White had continued thinking about children’s books. And during all those years, unable to extemporize when his eighteen nephews and nieces requested a story, he had been jotting down and storing in his desk brief episodes concerning a small “mouse-boy.” The legendary children’s editor at Harper & Brothers, Ursula Nordstrom, immediately saw the worth of what would become known to the world as the adventures of Stuart Little, the first of White’s classic tales for young people. White once remarked that the character of Stuart Little had first come to him in a dream in the 1920s, “not as a mouse, but a second son.” He elsewhere described the now famous motorcycle-riding hero as “a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.” The book was an immediate success, and continues to capture the hearts and imaginations of children and adults. In response to children’s queries if Stuart ever finds the vanished Margalo, White wrote, “They are good questions but I did not answer them in the book because, in a way, Stuart’s journey symbolizes the continuing journey that everybody takes—in search of what is perfect and unattainable. This is perhaps too elusive an idea to put into a book for children, but I put it in anyway.” Stuart Little’s quest is not unlike that of his creator.

  White’s second classic book for children is, of course, Charlotte’s Web, his immortal 1952 barnyard tale of Wilbur the pig, Charlotte the weaver of wondrous webs, and Fern, the young girl who joins them in t
heir chronicle of life, death, and renewal. Eudora Welty’s judgment of this wonderful novel—“Just about perfect”—has stood the test of nearly half a century. By White’s own account, the story arose from his ruminations on the fate of a pig that he kept on his farm and his observations of an endlessly patient and clever spider in his barn. “One day when I was on my way to feed the pig,” he told Lee Bennett Hopkins, “I began feeling sorry for the pig because, like most pigs, he was doomed to die. This made me sad. So I started thinking of ways to save a pig’s life. . . . Gradually I worked the spider into the story . . . a story of a friendship and salvation on a farm.” The story did not come easily, however. In his introduction to The Annotated Charlotte’s Web (1994), Peter Neumeyer points out that White “labored tirelessly over eight manuscript drafts, researched thoroughly the habits of spiders, and meditated on the habits of pigs. En route, he corresponded with editors, filmmakers, and friends, as well as fulfilling his role as a distinguished writer for The New Yorker.” Indeed, he took as many pains with his books for children as he did with his polished writings for adults. Eighteen years after Charlotte’s Web, White’s third children’s book appeared. The Trumpet of the Swan (1970) was prompted by its author’s fascination with animals and his admiration for eggs, to his mind one of the most perfect of the world’s treasures—as he stated more than once. The hatching, growth, and behavior of birds, especially geese and swans, also fascinated him, and so he wrote a book about a stately bird with a very special talent.