The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  DURING HIS SENIOR year at Mount Vernon High, Elwyn was assistant editor of the school’s literary magazine, which was named with classical flair The Oracle. His thoughts turned often to the war that had been cutting a bloody swath across Europe for two years. In one sketch for the magazine, he reimagined Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha, creating a version in which the peacemaking Onondaga chief marries to evade his tribe’s military draft. In an editorial, Elwyn abandoned satire and simply argued that the United States should remain out of the conflict. He enjoyed the quick response from readers that he experienced in writing for periodicals.

  Most of his literary heroes at the time were newspaper columnists. In nearby New York City alone, every day the groaning presses rolled out hundreds of thousands of copies of the Tribune, the World, the American, the Times, the Globe, the Sun, and many others. In 1913, popular Evening Mail columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, known as F.P.A., moved his column, “Always in Good Humor,” to the New York Tribune, where it became “The Conning Tower.” It was a favorite of Elwyn’s. Like many other columnists of the era, F.P.A. printed couplets and jokes and newsbreaks by contributors, and Elwyn aspired to become one of them.

  Another of his favorites was Don Marquis, whose column “The Sun Dial” appeared in the New York Sun. Marquis was one of the liveliest and most literary of the columnists. Poet, satirist, author of stories and novels, Marquis had the kind of professional versatility that the practical but restless Elwyn instinctively admired. His column was regularly visited by an array of outrageous characters, including, by Elwyn’s midteens, Hermione and her Little Group of Serious Thinkers, a series of free verse parodies featuring a naive young woman whose balloonlike brain wafted about on every faddish wind, especially the current popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle’s favorite hobby, spiritualism. In spring 1916 Marquis introduced a new character who immediately caught Elwyn’s attention. On March 29, Marquis opened “The Sun Dial” with gibes at contemporary news stories. Former associate Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes was running against Woodrow Wilson, who was seeking a second term as president. Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary, had just crossed the border and led a murderous attack on Columbus, New Mexico. There was a new outbreak of scarlet fever. Then Marquis—or rather the often fictional first-person narrator of Marquis’s column—described something he witnessed in his office:

  We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about on the keys. He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another … Congratulating ourself that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine the night before so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found:

  expression is the need of my soul

  i was once a vers libre bard

  but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach

  it has given me a new outlook upon life

  i see things from the under side now …

  The cockroach, named Archy, went on to narrate the story of Freddy, a rat who had been a rival poet in their previous life. He was still jealous of Archy’s talent and was one of many enemies that Archy now had to evade. Then Archy instructed Marquis, “… leave a piece of paper in your machine / every night you can call me archy.” Elwyn admired the literate cockroach, who began to appear regularly with dispatches from the poverty-stricken and overlooked underside of urban life in the land of plenty. He embodied both Elwyn’s ambitions as a writer and his sense of being small and insignificant, as well as his need to hide from people. And Elwyn joined Archy in hating rats. Elwyn liked most animals but he had always thought of rats as greedy, thieving villains. The first column mentioned a cat who, soon named Mehitabel, became Archy’s foil and partner in literary crime. Claiming to be a reincarnation of Cleopatra, Mehitabel was everything that Elwyn was not—free, wild, uninhibited, brave, reckless, promiscuous. Marquis had taken the most common and disdained creatures of the city and had turned them into an urban Huck and Jim, casually working in Latin epigrams, critiques of capitalism, mockery of police, and asides such as Archy’s remark that theology was his favorite sport. Elwyn watched and admired and longed to emulate.

  He graduated from high school in January 1917 but didn’t leave for Cornell until fall. With a thousand dollars’ worth of scholarships—ten times Cornell’s annual tuition—he had no financial worries. But the future did not look rosy. The month after Elwyn graduated, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Germany, and by April the nation was at war—with, as Wilson proclaimed, “civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.” The war was everywhere Elwyn turned. Two years before, one of the most popular songs in America had been the antiwar anthem “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” the sheet music for which portrayed a young man kneeling at his mother’s feet to hug her. Times had changed so much, however, that the career of the singer Morton Harvey had been ruined. Always blustering, former president Theodore Roosevelt had publicly declared that the best place for mothers who opposed the war was China or some other country far beyond the borders of the patriotic United States. Elwyn couldn’t browse sheet music for something to play at home for his parents without bumping into “America, Here’s My Boy” and George M. Cohan’s Broadway hit “Over There.” On Palm Sunday, sitting at home with a severe cold, he looked out the window and noticed that neighborhood lawns were sporting so many flags they looked like red, white, and blue spring flowers.

  Contributing to his summer anxieties was the family’s sale of the big Summit Avenue house and a move to a smaller, far less distinguished-looking home, now that their youngest child was preparing to leave the nest. The setting for his childhood suddenly went away. During his last summer before college, Elwyn read sporting-goods catalogs and looked around for a job. He filled a few pages of his journal with a twenty-four-line poem about skating with Mildred Hesse. Naturally, as he came of age, Elwyn kept thinking about the bloody conflicts in Europe. One friend had already enlisted in the war and was now operating a wireless on a mosquito boat, as the low, fast attack boats (patrol torpedo or PT boats) were called. Another had joined the Naval Reserve. “I don’t know what to do this summer,” Elwyn confided to his journal in May. The month before, however, New York state’s Military Training Commission had created a Farm Cadet Corps at the behest of Governor Charles Whitman, urging boys between the ages of sixteen and eighteen to “enlist” for farmwork. The boys’ efforts would be recognized as a commitment to the war effort and honored by chevrons that they could wear on their sleeves. Elwyn worked for a short time on a farm in Hempstead, Long Island. But he thought the farmers were less enthusiastic about the patriotic contributions of their unskilled teenage helpers than they might have been.

  He looked into the possibility of other farm jobs—but he was worried that they would aggravate his hay fever. He felt desperately patriotic and wanted to contribute to the war effort—but he simply didn’t weigh enough to enlist and wasn’t officially an adult yet. He dreamed about joining the American Ambulance Corps and dying a hero’s death on the French battlefields—but he had never driven a car and his mother argued against his going to France. On July 11 he exclaimed in his journal, “My birthday! Eighteen, and still no future! I’d be more contented in prison, for there at least I would know precisely what I had to look forward to.”

  That fall, when he left home for his freshman year at Cornell, among his shirts and winter socks and new pencils he carefully packed the strip of bicycle tape that he and Mildred Hesse had clung to as they skated together across the winter pond.

  Part II

  ANDY

  All writing is both a mask and an unveiling.

  Chapter 6

 
OLYMPUS

  A blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me … What is this terrible infatuation, anyway?

  WHEN THE YOUNGEST child of Samuel and Jessie White left home for Cornell University in 1917, he left Elwyn behind on the screened porch at Mount Vernon and at the summer lake in Maine. He metamorphosed into Andy. One of the minor legacies of the college’s cofounder, Andrew Dickson White—whose white-bearded emeritus figure could be seen haunting the campus until his death in 1918—was that many male freshmen with the surname White wound up nicknamed Andy. Most let the name slip away over time. Elwyn, however, embraced the new identity, because he had never liked his given names. In the family he continued to be nicknamed En, but he began to introduce himself as Andy.

  He loved the hilly green Cornell campus, the boathouse at Beebe Lake, the stained-glass of beautiful old Sage Chapel, the nearby gorges and woods of upstate New York. From high atop East Hill, he could gaze across the rooftops of Ithaca to a narrow blue stretch of forty-mile-long Cayuga Lake, one of the glacial Finger Lakes. He had never before been around such a diverse group of people as his fellow students, whom he described in a fanciful list: “two men from Hawaii, a girl from Johannesburg, a Cuban, a Turk, an Englishman from India, a Negro from New York, two farmers, three Swedes, a Quaker, five Southerners, a reindeer butcher, a second lieutenant, a Christian Scientist, a retired dancer, a motorcyclist, a man who had known Theda Bara, three gnomes, and a lutist.”

  When he was invited to join the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, he wrote to ask his trusty sister Lillian’s advice, telling her that he worried he would have to pretend to be someone he wasn’t. “For Heaven’s sake,” she replied, “don’t be scared.… You are just like everyone else underneath only you haven’t had enough practice in bringing it out to the surface.” She admonished him to take hot baths because cold water wouldn’t get him clean, to wear good clothes, and to stop calling a fraternity a frat because it sounded small-town. “You know that you have a much-to-be-desired brain, that you have fine instincts, that you have a sense of humor and a million other things that most boys want.” Soon he was wearing the owl tiepin adapted from the fraternity’s coat of arms, and in his senior year he was elected fraternity president. But his insecurities remained. On October 13, 1917, he wrote in his journal, “My English prof said the other day that bashfulness was a form of vanity, the only difference being that vanity is the tendency to overestimate your worth, and bashfulness to underestimate it; both arising from the overindulgence of self-consciousness.” Eventually he served on several Cornell committees, from the Manuscript Club to the Sophomore Cotillion, and sang in the secular choir.

  Cornell was awash in military training. A member of the first class to enter during the war, and unable to enlist because of his low weight and slight build, Andy wrote a poem on the last day of August in which he imagined getting killed in action. He registered for the draft in mid-September 1918, but two months later the armistice was signed by the Allies and Germany—famously on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

  His urge to write showed up everywhere. In a playful letter home to his mother as a sophomore, he wrote in paragraphs that hid internal rhymes: “This error corrected, I gracefully turn to the topics of interest, and first you should learn that in spite of the Ithaca weather’s contortions (this topic alone might assume large proportions), I now—this is really a subject for prose—am entirely rid of my cold in the nose.” He remained preoccupied with his health. Once he confided to his journal that he had been sick for a week: “I think I must have consumption. If I have, I will leave college and travel for my health.”

  As a junior he took English 8 with William Strunk Jr., a friendly and amusing professor who parted his hair down the middle and blinked owlishly behind steel-rimmed glasses. Strunk was a forceful teacher who had strong ideas about grammar, diction, and other aspects of reading and writing. He enforced his point of view with his own forty-three-page pamphlet—available at the bookstore for a quarter—entitled The Elements of Style, which he referred to as “the little book.” It was full of rules such as “In summaries, keep to one tense” and “Do not join independent clauses with a comma.” Strunk had colorful classroom habits such as repeating himself while reciting a rule about concision, grasping his coat lapels and declaiming, “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”

  Every Monday night a few students gathered at the Fall Creek Drive home of Professor Bristow Adams, where he and his wife hosted an evening of smoking and chat. Sometimes students lingered before the fireplace, which had Balinese and Navajo artifacts on the mantel and walrus tusks on the wall above, and talked until two in the morning. Andy would walk back home to the fraternity house in silent darkness, feeling as if his spiritual wrinkles had been smoothed out. He confided to his journal an affectionate comment about Bristow: “Sympathetic, kindly, and apparently without a care in the world, he is a fine balm for a frenzied spirit.”

  Andy also found that his spirit was calmed by hard work. He gravitated to the college newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. One of only two dailies published by an American university—and also Ithaca’s only morning paper—its eight pages even carried national and international news, complete with an Associated Press feed that came in every night via the telephone line. It seemed sophisticated. Andy’s long-running connection with the paper raised his status until by his last year he walked across campus with unprecedented confidence. The paper carried a catchall column modeled after those of Don Marquis and F.P.A., to which Andy contributed. In his senior year, he wound up editor in chief of the Daily Sun and graduated with a passionate conviction that responsible, writerly journalism was a noble calling. He sometimes wrapped up an issue in the wee hours of the morning and then, before going to class, would nap for a couple of hours in the office, sprawled across the flatbed press like Archy sleeping under the typewriter keys.

  At Cornell Andy experienced his first serious romance. Alice Burchfield, nicknamed Burch, was an intelligent, charming, and beautiful theater fanatic and chemistry major. Although wary of commitment, broadcasting a static of mixed signals, Andy dated Burch for the last half of his college years. Soon he began writing poems to her, publishing them in the Sun (without identifying her by name) under the pseudonym D’Annunzio. Even in this situation White thought in terms of animals. His first poem to Burch compared her eyes to the deepest and most appealing eyes he had ever before known—those of his dog Mutt, who lived with him in the fraternity house. For two years Andy and Burch rambled in the woods and watched boat races and meteor showers. But Andy hesitated to pursue the romance to a level of serious commitment. After graduation they wrote now and then, but soon they faded out of each other’s life.

  All beginnings are wonderful.

  IN 1923 ANDY moved to Manhattan and began submitting light verse and humorous paragraphs to columnists. Twenty-nine-year-old Lillian was commuting from the house in Mount Vernon, where she still lived with her parents, to work as a secretary in New York, and Andy proudly squired his beautiful redheaded sister around town. On the bustling streets, as he dodged leg-flashing flappers in cloche hats and bootleggers in overcoats and fedoras, he kept thinking that many gods in his literary pantheon walked the same island: Christopher Morley, Alexander Woollcott, Stephen Vincent Benét, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner. Ever since the St. Nicholas days in his childhood and the F.P.A. and Don Marquis columns of his teen years, he had enjoyed daily, weekly, and monthly updates from his favorite periodicals. His omnivorous taste led him to read the news from Russia in the Times and the news from Yankee Stadium in the Post, the classified ads in The Nation and the celebrity gossip in Vanity Fair. He particularly enjoyed Heywood Broun’s “It Seems to Me” column in the World, which was so popular the newspaper promoted it on giant billboards. A humorist and activist and essayist, Broun wrote about social injustice in the new prosperity following the war. American business seemed like a train that cou
ldn’t be bothered to stop at the local stations; columnists such as Broun kept pointing out that many little people were being left behind or run over. Broun defended labor unions and often took up the cause of an underdog who had been vilified in the more government-fawning media.

  Most of all Andy still enjoyed Don Marquis. Sometimes he would linger at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, looking up at the gray Italianate marble façade of the Sun building, home of Archy the cockroach. The building had Corinthian columns on the first floor and pediments above some of the windows on the second. At the north and south corners a square metal clock with three faces projected out from the wall, far enough that Andy could walk directly under it and look up at its underside. Its copper casing was already greening with age, although the newspaper had only moved there in 1919, after A. T. Stewart, the city’s first department store, moved uptown and left the space available. On the clock, the words The Sun stood above the octagonal, white face, and it shines for all was written below. Somewhere in that building, Andy would think as he loitered on his way home from work, Don Marquis types up his “Sun Dial” column and then goes out to a speakeasy for a drink or three before heading home. Meanwhile Archy would be crawling out of a stack of paper to type up his report from the underside—throwing his whole body at the keys, hammering out one letter at a time—and Mehitabel, his scruffy feline comrade, would show up to brag about her past life as Cleopatra. Andy also enjoyed some of Marquis’s more serious poetry, although much of it was replete with apostrophizing and archaisms. Andy liked the simplicity of a favorite line—which he almost adopted as his own motto—from Marquis’s 1915 collection Dreams & Dust, in his poem “The Name”: