The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  In spring 1909, Elwyn drew upon his experiences with the secret visitor in his bedroom and wrote a poem, “To a Mouse.” The budding author, not yet ten years old, bravely sent the poem to Woman’s Home Companion. To his astonishment and delight, they accepted it for publication—and even awarded him a prize for it.

  Not surprisingly, he soon took aim at other literary targets. He was devoted to St. Nicholas magazine and waited excitedly for its monthly arrival in the mailbox—the inviting red-framed cover, the two-column pages with their sprawling illustrations of dragons and soldiers, pirates and dogs. Founded in the early 1870s, it was at first edited by Mary Mapes Dodge of Hans Brinker fame. Her original mission statement for the magazine included the line “To foster a love of country, home, nature, truth, beauty, and sincerity,” and practically from birth Elwyn tended to think of these virtuous attributes as interrelated. But Dodge’s manifesto began with a goal that broke ranks with the didactic children’s literature of earlier decades: “To give clean, genuine fun to children of all ages.” The first page of the first issue playfully asked, “Glad to see us? Thank you. The same to you, and many happy returns.” Of course, the periodical reflected its era in unsavory ways as well. Nonwhite Americans were subservient helpers at best; the depiction of foreigners changed as Americans became involved in one conflict after another—the Spanish-American War, the Great War—with Spaniards or Germans or Italians turning unsavory or heroic in turn.

  By the turn of the century, St. Nicholas was unquestionably the foremost periodical for children. It had introduced both Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad. Mowgli had fled Shere Khan across its columns. Cedric Errol, called Little Lord Fauntleroy, had first appeared in these pages, inspiring an international fad for cutaway velvet jackets and lace collars on little boys. During Elwyn’s time the magazine ran stories, poems, and articles of all sorts, from biographical profiles of prominent Americans—one about Lincoln was called “The Matterhorn of Men”—to the ongoing series “Stories of Useful Inventions” (“Next to its usefulness for heating and cooking, the greatest use of fire is to furnish light to drive away darkness. Man is not content, like birds and brutes, to go to sleep at the setting of the sun”).

  Best of all in Elwyn’s eyes, St. Nicholas was devoted to animal stories. Besides featuring work by the best-known authors and illustrators of the day, it was gaining a reputation as a cradle for writers. In 1899, the year Elwyn was born, it launched the “St. Nicholas League,” a monthly writing competition edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, author of the charming Hollow Tree and Deep Woods Book for children. Three years after the contest’s founding, a girl named Vita Sackville-West wrote in about her ancient home of Knole in England. Elwyn read several poems in St. Nicholas attributed to a girl in Maine named E. Vincent Millay, until in 1910 she retired (she was almost nineteen, the age limit for contributors) in the same issue that included a prize-winning photograph by a precocious teenager named Scott Fitzgerald. The June 1911 issue included among the honorable mentions for a drawing contest a Mississippi boy named William Faulkner. Others whose prose Elwyn read in its pages included a Massachusetts girl named Katharine Sergeant.

  Soon Elwyn joined these august ranks. Two houses up the street lived a slightly older boy named E. Barrett Brady, who was also a reader of St. Nicholas. Barrett was the son of a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, and with backstage savvy he advised Elwyn to stress in his early writing efforts the evergreen theme of kindness to animals. Elwyn agreed that this was a smart commercial notion as well as an ideal with which he was genuinely sympathetic. He followed Barrett’s advice. In June 1911, the month before he turned twelve—just about the time that Lillian, his last older sibling, was leaving home—St. Nicholas published his first story.

  When the June issue arrived, he would have flipped past the frontispiece, a painting of a Huck Finnish boy with a rakishly torn straw hat, and the photo-illustrated article on “Model Aëroplanes of 1911.” The “St. Nicholas League” pages were in the back. There under the elegant logo with its seasonally changing oval illustrations, the first listing under the heading “Prize-Winners, Competition No. 136” was his name and enough additional information to prove to skeptics that he, not some other Elwyn B. White, was the author to whom they were referring: “PROSE. Silver badges, Elwyn B. White (age 11), Mt. Vernon, N.Y.”

  On the opposite page was his story, under an ode to June by fifteen-year-old Doris H. Ramsey, and to the left of a hymn to trillium by twelve-year-old Elsie Louise Lustig, on a busy double-column page that also held photographs of a footrace and the roaring falls of Niagara embodying the theme “At Full Speed.” Elwyn had given the narrator’s dog the name of the dog from William J. Long’s A Little Brother to the Bear.

  A WINTER WALK

  BY ELWYN B. WHITE (AGE 11)

  (SILVER BADGE)

  I awoke one morning in my little shanty to find the ground covered with snow. It had fallen rapidly during the night and was about six inches deep.

  I dressed, ate a good breakfast, did some of the camp chores, and set about taking down my snow-shoes and preparing them for wintry weather. Soon I heard a short yelp which reminded me that Don, my pointer, had been left hungry. I gave him some bones and a few biscuits, then, pulling on my heavy overcoat and buckling the snow-shoes on my feet, we started out in the frosty morning air to pay the forest a visit.

  Such a morning! There was a frosty nip to the air that gave life to everybody and everything. Don was so overjoyed at the prospect of a walk that he danced and capered about as if he was mad. Jack Frost was busy for fair! My nose and ears were victims of his teeth.

  After a small stretch of smooth ground had been covered we entered the forest.

  All the trees wore a new fur coat, pure white, and the pines and evergreens were laden with pearl. Every living creature seemed happy. Squirrels frisked among the branches, chattering because we trespassed on their property. Once in a while we caught an occasional glimpse of a little ball of fur among the fern, which meant that br’er rabbit was out on this cold morning. A few struggling quails were heard piping their shrill little notes as they flew overhead.

  All these harmless little wood creatures were noticed by Don and he wanted to be after them, but I objected to harming God’s innocent little folk when He had given the world such a bright, cheery morning to enjoy.

  The issue offered a range of other material. That month’s installment in the exciting series “Nature Giants That Man Has Conquered” featured electricity. Motion pictures were all the rage, and so was the collecting of bird eggs; thus there was a cartoon of birds watching a movie called The Nest Robber, showing other birds retaliating against an egg-stealing boy. This month Edward F. Bigelow’s column, “Nature and Science for Young Folks,” was titled “Jewels on a Spider’s Web” and featured images by Wilson A. Bentley, who was already famous for his exquisite photographs of snowflakes, taken through a microscope. The article instructed readers in how to photograph dewdrops on a spider’s web: “Perhaps the smallest object on which these tiny, pearl-like formations may be observed is a thread of a spider-web. Here the drops are so small that they do not elongate, but keep a beautiful spherical form.”

  Two years later, the magazine awarded Elwyn one of its half dozen monthly gold prizes for another piece about animals, “A True Dog Story,” about the heroic nature of another White family dog—Beppo, an Irish setter. One morning in Maine, as Elwyn and Albert and Stanley walked across a pasture with their father, short-tempered steers left their herd to challenge the trespassers. Instantly Beppo raced to the family’s rescue, barking and transforming himself from bird retriever—the breed’s traditional job—to a combination guard and herd dog. Not that St. Nicholas accepted everything that Elwyn submitted. The October 1914 issue, for example, honorably mentioned but did not publish his drawing “The Love of a Mother Rabbit.” Despite this and other setbacks, he kept scribbling and typing. Distilling his experience
into words on a page was the only way he could find to prevent his daily life from blowing away like clouds.

  Chapter 5

  LIEBESTRÄUM

  The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change—and we all instinctively avoid it, and object to the passage of time, and would rather have none of it.

  IN THE AUTUMN of 1913 Elwyn found himself at Mount Vernon High School, where the desks looked very adult to him with their ink-stained and initial-carved wood, equipped with inkwell above and book cubby underneath. Each desktop was attached to the black cast-iron back of the chair in front of it, creating a solid-looking row where Elwyn sat among his fellow students and drew diagrams of bean plants and scribbled a2 + b2 = c2. He awkwardly translated Caesar and reluctantly dissected frogs. In class, however, he kept getting distracted by the silk stockings that had recently begun to peek out below schoolgirls’ midcalf skirt hems.

  Naturally girls were becoming a big preoccupation, but Elwyn was unable to act upon his growing interest in them. He was afraid to try. Not once did he take a girl to Proctor’s Theatre on Gramatan Avenue, which from its opening day in his midteens featured vaudeville shows twice a day. He never took a date to the cinema and sat holding her hand before the stylized gestures of a silent film, sneaking a glance at her face in the light from the black-and-white dramas or the blundering big-hatted Keystone Kops, which became popular in his early teens. He didn’t once laugh with a girl over Charlie Chaplin. But he permitted himself to daydream. Somewhere out there in this busy world, he would think, is a girl who is going about her daily life, just as I am, and we are unaware as yet of each other’s existence, but someday we’ll get married and live together.

  In the spring of 1916 Albert brought home a Buick that was several years old but still looked shiny and sophisticated to Elwyn, with its running boards, high, round headlights, and flat, squared-off windshield standing as straight as a wall. “To get in right with the girls,” Albert explained to his younger brother, but he failed to impress Elwyn with the glamour of dating. Elwyn held a tiny wire in place while Albert cranked the engine, which emitted a consumptive cough and then a death rattle. A cloud of dark smoke rose and a neighbor came running to learn where the fire was. From his first encounter, Elwyn loved cars. So did the boys’ father. After selling two of his three carriage horses, Samuel bought a Pope-Tribune runabout, which looked sporty with its long, straight steering shaft and boxy engine bonnet, until he replaced it with a sleek Maxwell roadster whose short running board swooped forward and back to form elegant tire guards like wings. But Samuel never learned how to drive and left that particular twentieth-century excitement to his children.

  After school, adventurous stocking-clad girls were drinking a sweet, new import from the south called Coca-Cola instead of Moxie, the bitter yet long-established favorite. Soda shops were a recent innovation but already popular, touting ice cream and soda pop as weapons of temperance. Yet Elwyn never went there to share a Coke with a girl. He looked wistfully around at other boys’ impressive accomplishments—dashing down a football field with raucous enemies in pursuit, nonchalantly blowing smoke rings, twirling a girl on a dance floor under romantic lights. He tried his own specialties, such as riding his bike while sitting backward on the handlebars, but no girls seemed to notice. He could play several tunes on the piano, even pieces from Aïda, but doing so at home did nothing to attract the opposite sex. Sadly he concluded that he didn’t possess any of the talents that girls seemed to admire. He watched amazed as other boys chatted easily with girls at parties or in the school hallways, as if interactions with them were not only less than agonizing but might actually be fun.

  Not even his favorite and determined sister Lillian, who was attractive and popular with boys, could persuade him to attend dances or go out with girls. But she didn’t stop trying. Anytime they were at home in the parlor together, she might suddenly crank up the Victrola and grab Elwyn’s hand and drag him into the middle of the room to dance. As long as she could keep him captured, before he wriggled away, she tried to teach him popular dances such as the one-step, for which the recent hits “The Old Gray Mare” and “Walla-Walla Man” had been written. Soon, however, he would tear himself free and run out of the room.

  Only once did Lillian succeed in trapping her brother into something approaching a date with a girl—and the bait she used was not the girl herself but the Arabian Nights allure of Manhattan. Elwyn had visited his father’s piano company office downtown and accompanied him into New York’s teeming streets on many other excursions, such as the Hippodrome outings or an occasional matinee. The towering buildings and bright lights glowed in Elwyn’s imagination, and their memory tempted him into finally accepting one of Lillian’s invitations. She asked him to make a fourth member of a party she was putting together to attend a tea dance at the elegant Plaza Hotel. Elwyn went along with her and her boyfriend and another girl. One of the more luxurious hotels in the city, built only the decade before, the Plaza towered nineteen stories above Central Park South, just across Grand Army Plaza from the majestic French Renaissance château that had been built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II but looked worthy of the Sun King. Elwyn was dazzled by the glamour of it all. Dressed up in their best, they sat at a tiny table on the edge of the grand dance floor, so near the action that dancers sometimes brushed against them as the teenagers nibbled sophisticated cinnamon toast and nodded in time with the band.

  Lillian must have thought she had wrought a miracle because this stylish outing inspired the most uncharacteristic decision of Elwyn’s teenage life. He had long admired a pretty but reserved girl named Eileen Thomas, who lived a few houses up Summit Street. To Elwyn, her older brother J. Parnell, a handsome lad who greeted him cordially on the street, was simply the mortal who had the good fortune to share a house with the enchanting Eileen. Elwyn’s secret crush on her forced him to watch her from a distance at every available opportunity and to tremble whenever he passed before her house. But they seldom had occasion to speak to each other. Apparently she was unaware of his interest until the day he suddenly called her up because he had decided to take her to the Plaza for a tea dance and cinnamon toast.

  Waiting until his parents had gone downstairs for dinner, he stepped out of his room and into the telephone closet in the hall. With his heart pounding, he took the earpiece off the wall hook, asked the operator for the Thomas home, and greeted Eileen’s mother with the line he had practiced: “Hello. Can I please speak to Eileen?”

  “Just a minute. Who is it, please?”

  “It’s Elwyn.”

  He stood there trembling in the telephone closet, practicing his next line: “Hello, Eileen. This is Elwyn White. Hello, Eileen. This is Elwyn White.”

  Unfortunately Eileen greeted him with “Hello, Elwyn.” He was committed to his script, however, and insisted on beginning his side of the conversation by saying, “Hello, Eileen. This is Elwyn White.” After a crumb of nervous chat, he got up the nerve to ask, “Would you like to go tea-dancing with me at the Plaza Hotel?” Eileen conferred with her mother and returned to the phone and said yes.

  A few afternoons later, dressed in a carefully coordinated and spiffed-up outfit and with money safely tucked into his inside pockets, he met Eileen at her house and walked her down the street to the train depot. On the journey into the recently rebuilt Grand Central Terminal, they sat side by side, but instead of chatting or looking at each other, they both stared awkwardly at the back of the seat in front of them. Almost prostrate with nervousness, Elwyn kept going only through sheer physical momentum. In the city, they then faced a seemingly hazardous walk across to Fifth Avenue, where they caught a bus up to Fifty-ninth Street and the Plaza. Even when they were seated in the fairy-tale hotel and eating cinnamon toast, things did not turn out quite as Elwyn had planned. He began to sweat terribly. Soon his shirt was clinging to his skin. Gradually overcoming his fear, he summoned a faint memory of the moves his sister had tried to teach him and led
Eileen onto the dance floor for a humiliating caricature of a dance. Then, his suit drenched in sweat, he led the slow retracing of their steps and returned her to Summit Avenue. It never occurred to him to suggest dinner.

  The next time he fell in love, he kept his feelings to himself. His most romantic experience during his years at Mount Vernon High was skating with a pretty blue-eyed girl on the large and skater-thronged Siwanoy Pond. Her name was Mildred Hesse. She was popular at their school and many boys enjoyed skating with her.

  One memorable late afternoon, the red winter sky faded toward twilight behind dark pines as they skated past campfires burning here and there around the shore. With Elwyn and Mildred firmly grasping one end each of a strip of bicycle tape, to hold them together but lend flexibility on the surface, they floated lazily across the ice, sometimes pulling closer together as they explored the iced-over streams that snaked away from the pond and into the woods. Their breath hung in the still air and they skated through it, with the ice creaking beneath the whisper of their skates. Then both took off one glove and he held her hand, which was wonderfully warm.

  He never tried to further his acquaintance with Mildred elsewhere, but his thoughts kept returning to her bright eyes and graceful ankles. One evening after skating with her, a chilled but happy Elwyn rode the trolley home. For some time, the Summit Avenue house had been empty of other children. Quiet Marian had been married for more than a decade to a fun-loving young man about whose fiscal recklessness Samuel often complained, and they had several children. Clara, who acted as carefree in adulthood as she had in childhood, had married a smitten young attorney whose commanding presence promised future accomplishments. Stanley and Albert were at nearby Cornell, and Lillian—one of Elwyn’s favorites and the only daughter to attend college—was at Vassar and resisting numerous offers of marriage. Elwyn was on the verge of big changes himself; next fall he would follow his brothers to Cornell. That evening, he carried his skates inside the still house, past the umbrella stand and the big oak hat rack, and for a long time he sprawled on the settee in the front hall, staring up at the ceiling and listening in a blissful romantic haze to Franz Liszt’s “Liebesträum [Dream of Love] #3” magically playing itself on the Autola. The popular piano solo’s lyrical, rolling chords circled the same melody, returning and dancing away again in melancholy variations, winding down to end on the individual notes of a slow, broken chord. Finally Elwyn climbed the stairs and went to bed.