The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  My heart has followed all my days

  Something I cannot name.

  Animal characters often struck a chord with Andy, as did Archy’s melancholy view of life and his skepticism about the hypocrisy and cruelty in the world. Marquis’s saga featured such guest stars as a hornet addicted to eating beer-dazzled bar flies and a spider whose maternal lament took the form of a ballad denouncing flyswatters for killing the primary source of food for her children. Over the last few years, Archy had also become one of many voices crying out about the evils and inequalities of Prohibition, and Marquis had created another character, the Old Soak, for whom the difficulty in obtaining alcohol was a running theme. The tragic muddle of Prohibition had been in effect for five years. An Eighteenth Amendment had been proposed late in 1917, the year Andy started at Cornell, but it wasn’t ratified by enough states until more than a year later, and it took another year to go into effect.

  Just as in childhood his anticipation of the monthly issue of St. Nicholas had been greatly enhanced by the suspense of contributing to it, so had his trips to the newsstand gained in importance as he sent out light verse and small stories to newspaper columnists. Christopher Morley ran Andy’s sonnet about a rooster in his column “The Bowling Green” in the Evening Post. Franklin Pierce Adams (F.P.A.) published a couple of Andy’s poems in “The Conning Tower,” the famous column that in 1922 Adams had moved from the Tribune to the World. Adams especially was considered a columnist who could lift other writers’ careers into a new level of fame. Andy dreamed of such a career boost coming his way.

  This kind of writing paid little when it paid anything, so Andy supported himself with jobs at advertising agencies. First he worked in production for Frank Seaman, Inc., a bustling Fourth Avenue company whose founder had become a well-known advertising guru for both domestic and foreign markets. Occasionally Andy got to write copy, but for most of the first year he ran an electrotype machine, which produced duplicate plates for printing. The job allowed him to glimpse much of what came through the office. After the war, American marketing had become a carnival of pious boosterism, composed half of imperialistic imagery and half of the kind of joshing platitudes that Sinclair Lewis had recently pilloried in his novel Babbitt. A 1916 article had said about Seaman, “He is one of the men who saw early … that advertising is away bigger than smart description, pictures, and typography—that it is the heavy artillery of sales management, and that sales management employing the heavy artillery is generalship requiring the solidest grasp of fundamental business principles plus a generous appreciation of the intricacies of just common human nature.” Andy found such writing pompous and ridiculous. He disliked advertising and felt he ought to be doing more respectable work. He couldn’t bring himself to care whether one particular kind of window-shade material outsold another.

  ONE DAY IN late February 1925, Andy strode the crowded, noisy floor of Grand Central Terminal, checking at newsstands for the debut issue of a humor magazine that he had been told was about to appear. The terminal’s latest incarnation was twelve years old, an elegant replacement for the Grand Central Station of Andy’s childhood, from which he and his parents had departed every summer for Maine. As he scurried past the four faces of the round-headed clock above the main information terminal, cigarette smoke eddied upward in light slanting down from giant windows that gave the echoing space its cathedral air despite the lack of stained glass.

  He stopped to survey a newsstand. The New York Times happily reported robins and daffodils in New Jersey, a month ahead of the equinox. Film Fun had a color portrait of a laughing young woman in an eye-catching red swimsuit; a closer look revealed her to be Kathryn McGuire, Buster Keaton’s costar in his recent movies The Navigator and Sherlock, Jr. In deliberate contrast to the flashy mags, two-year-old Time’s stark white covers always showed a plain black-and-white drawing of a prominent public figure. This week it was Harry New, the postmaster general, who had been appointed by Warren Harding and then reappointed a couple of years ago, when Harding suddenly died and skinny little Calvin Coolidge became president.

  Finally Andy found the new magazine. Its cover was in color but drawn in a calligraphic black brush line, showing a high-collared and top-hatted Regency dandy peering through a monocle at a hovering modernist butterfly. The magazine looked resolutely frivolous, a pose that Andy himself was known to adopt occasionally. In the pink clouds over this Beau Brummell’s head was a title in a sans-serif font that looked both modern and lighthearted: THE NEW YORKER. The first issue arrived on newsstands a few days ahead of its cover date of Saturday, February 21, 1925. Liberty and Collier’s cost a nickle, Photoplay and Good Housekeeping a quarter; Andy plunked down fifteen cents for this premier issue and hurried to catch his train.

  The first issue of The New Yorker looked much like Judge and Life, neither of which was as limber in old age as it had been in youth. A cartoon showing an elegantly dressed man and woman strolling past a revival of the Victorian melodrama The Wages of Sin bore underneath it the kind of two-line overkill dialogue that had been standard-issue since Punch was in diapers, complete with scriptlike identification of the speakers:

  UNCLE: Poor girls, so few get their wages!

  FLAPPER: So few get their sin, darn it!

  Later there was a similar setup, without a drawing, but this time it was inverted in what at first seemed like a mistake:

  POP: A man who thinks he can make it in a par.

  JOHNNY: What is an optimist, Pop?

  On the first page, under the heading The New Yorker and an illustration showing the monocled dandy working at a desk with a feather quill, was a section entitled “Of All Things,” a gossipy tour of Manhattan, signed at the end “The New Yorker.” It included an apologetic note: “The New Yorker asks consideration for its first number. It recognizes certain shortcomings and realizes that it is impossible for a magazine fully to establish its character in one number.” This first slim issue reviewed a few books and plays, even some moving pictures. A two-page column called “Profiles,” whose heading bore a literal-minded illustration of people seen from the side, covered the Metropolitan Opera’s Italian-born impresario, Giulio Gatti-Casazza. The text wrapped around a caricature of sleepy-eyed Gatti-Casazza’s wedge-shaped beard and waxed mustaches and rakishly tilted fedora.

  Andy liked that most items in the magazine were brief and amusing. He decided to submit a few paragraphs, perhaps some light verse, and see if they might be interested.

  They were. During 1925 the magazine bought several brief pieces. His early contributions included a parody of advertising writing, one section of which also managed to include a favorite bird and a favorite time of year. Under the title “New Beauty of Tone in 1925 Song Sparrow” was the description “Into every one of this season’s song sparrows has been built the famous VERNAL tone. Look for the distinguishing white mark on the breast.” Another piece was about the travails of commuting. After a long trip out West with a college buddy, he had moved back in with his parents for a couple of years. Like many other families, they found this arrangement less than satisfying, and Andy also tired of the daily train commute to the advertising agency in Manhattan.

  In November 1925 he moved into the city, settling into his first apartment, in Greenwich Village at 112 West Thirteenth Street, a four-story brick walk-up around the corner from Sixth Avenue. He roomed with three other Cornell alumni, in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor, a sitting room and a single bedroom that held two dormitory-style bunk beds. Bob Adams and Gus Lobrano worked for Cunard, the shipping company; Mike Galbreath worked for the publisher McGraw-Hill. Rent on the two-room apartment was $110 per month, with Andy’s quarter coming only to $27.50, manageable even on the budget of an electrotype operator. His bank balance was also slightly raised by the small checks that trickled in from The New Yorker and elsewhere.

  Although his first contributions were amusing and achieved their modest goals, late in the year he wrote up a real-life experien
ce in a more distinctive tone of dry wit. He described a lunchtime encounter in a Childs restaurant. Starting out with a single family-owned location on Cortlandt Street in the 1880s, Childs had grown into the first major restaurant chain, a hugely profitable enterprise now serving dozens of cities with more than 100 locations. Instantly recognizable by their white marble tabletops on gleaming nickel legs and their white tile floors—they were sparkling clean, catering not only to economy-minded locals who didn’t have time for a leisurely lunch, but also to a populace newly afraid of old-fashioned germs. The waitresses—themselves an innovation when they were introduced around the turn of the century, when most restaurants hired only waiters—wore starched white uniforms and could be seen at a griddle in the windows, flipping pancakes.

  When Andy sat down to lunch he was wearing a dark blue serge suit that looked good until a waitress spilled a glass of buttermilk on it. He hid his embarrassment behind performance. He gazed stoically down at the wreck of his clothing, thinking that so few dark spots showing through his now yellow-white coat made him resemble a fire-hall dalmatian. Reassured by his lack of anger, the waitress gave him a handful of paper napkins, with which he began to dab ineffectually. A woman at the next table issued unwelcome advice. Reassuring the crying waitress, Andy felt heroic. Aware that everyone was watching him, he rose, pulled on his overcoat, and, with theatrical nobility, slipped a dime tip under the edge of his plate. Then he went to pay his check, which came to seventy-five cents. He waved away the change, saying, “Let that take care of the buttermilk.”

  Soon he wrote up the incident in a tone of placid virtue and sent it to the new magazine. In the story he even had himself think, “Perhaps this is one of those ‘smart backgrounds’ The New Yorker is always talking about.” His surprise Christmas gift was a check for the piece, which appeared in the last issue of the year, with its cover montage of holiday festivities—a champagne bottle in a bucket, opera glasses and tickets, a glittering diamond necklace. Apparently the magazine was doing well; the Christmas issue had been the largest yet, at fifty-six pages, and this one was also healthy-looking, including advertisements for Old King Cole cigars and a profile of Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. Andy’s story was tucked between a caricature of Harry Houdini, who was drawing crowds over at the spacious Forty-fourth Street Theatre—with its speakeasy, the Little Club, in the basement—and a caricature of the Russian actress Olga Baclanova, who was starring in the Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio’s production of Lysistrata, which The New Yorker’s columnist described as “the naughtiest, most hilarious, most timely and by far the most entertaining play in town.” Andy’s story was on page 17, titled “Child’s Play” (incorrectly, because the name of the restaurant family was Childs, not Child). Under the title was the line “In Which the Author Turns a Glass of Buttermilk into a Personal Triumph.” The story covered almost the entire right page, opposite a piece called “Sex Is Out,” by none other than Robert Benchley. It was heady company for a young writer.

  “ARE YOU ELWYN Brooks White?”

  The woman striding purposefully toward him across The New Yorker’s reception area was in her midthirties, about seven years older than Andy. She had a straight and rather patrician nose, beautiful dark eyes under dramatic brows, and long, dark hair pulled into an elegant bun on the back of her head. She wore a stylish, expensive-looking dress and a string of pearls. With a slightly reserved but still charming smile, she introduced herself as Katharine Angell, and her voice, while warm and friendly, had an educated refinement to it.

  It was late 1926. Angell was the editor who had bought a dozen or so of Andy’s light verse and brief humorous prose items over the previous year. She had invited him to drop by their small suite of offices at 25 West Forty-third Street and go to lunch with her and the magazine’s maestro, Harold Ross. Fourth in her 1914 graduating class at Bryn Mawr, Angell had majored in English literature and philosophy. Only a few months after founding the magazine, Andy soon learned, Ross had hired the sharp, well-educated, and witty young woman to read manuscripts for a couple of hours each day. Soon she became indispensable. The first head of the Fiction Department, she also participated in almost every other decision, from poetry and layout to cartoons and advertising.

  Soon her boss joined them and they went out to a restaurant. At thirty-four, Harold Ross was gaunt and angular and pale, with small, intense gray eyes. He brushed his hair into a pompadour worthy of a cockatoo, and his nervous habit of running his big-knuckled hands through it didn’t calm it down. Even at first glance, Ross was a mass of contradictions. His chiseled, austere upper lip rested uneasily on a full, sensuous lower lip. Like his other features, they were constantly in motion, bouncing from a disapproving purse to a sudden good-humored smile showing a prominent gap between the incisors. His voice varied just as much, from a doglike growl to a higher-pitched Western twang. As if to make himself invisible, Ross wore a plain dark suit and tie. Despite his air of youthful distraction, he was already an experienced newspaperman, having worked for two dozen papers in his eighteen-year career, and having managed Stars and Stripes during the Great War. He had a distracting way of gesturing by flailing his arms about, and because of his ulcers, he ordered lunch only after a careful perusal of the menu. Beside Ross, the beautiful Mrs. Angell seemed an oasis of calm. Together, over the meal, Angell and Ross invited Andy to come to work for them part-time as a staffer at The New Yorker.

  Despite his longtime daydreams of a successful writing career, Andy resisted, hesitating as usual over commitment. But Angell and Ross persisted. Especially after talking with Andy at lunch, Ross—who trusted his instincts and was always looking for new talent—decided he wanted Andy on board the ship of which he himself was the profane and restless captain. Over several lunches, they expressed their admiration for his writing and extolled the virtues of working for a burgeoning enterprise such as The New Yorker.

  In the year and a half since its debut, the magazine had matured at a breakneck pace. Ross’s friends among the Algonquin Round Table—Robert Benchley, Arthur Kober, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker—were finally coming aboard, at least occasionally. (Few had taken the magazine venture seriously at first and most were still skeptical.) Ring Lardner had submitted one small piece. Ross was hoping to get Alexander Woollcott interested. The quality of the material was rising, although not quickly enough to suit Ross. He still quested after the perfect crew to staff his quixotic venture. He kept saying he was searching for the right “formula.” Although he yearned for the magazine to develop a unique persona, at first it was very much of its era. The brief paragraphs, usually humorous, that comprised the front departments of the magazine—“The Talk of the Town,” starting out with “Notes & Comment”—followed the popular catchall format of Andy’s own favorite columnists: Morley, Marquis, F.P.A. Each owed a debt to nineteenth-century forebears such as Eugene Field’s “Sharps and Flats” in the late 1800s. Unpredictable, even anarchic, the format permitted almost anything and in its honed brevity built up a kind of narrative momentum. He wanted Andy to take charge of this department.

  Finally, in January 1927, Andy agreed to contribute new work every week and to show up every weekday, at least for a few hours, at a small office that was assigned to him. In return Harold Ross agreed to pay him $30 per week. Andy had left Frank Seaman and was now working part-time at a different advertising agency, J. H. Newmark, where he earned the same amount. Surely a frugal young man could live on $60 a week, especially while still rooming with three others. More important than the money, about which Andy had an almost cavalier attitude, was that at twenty-seven he had suddenly become a salaried professional writer.

  Chapter 7

  INTERVIEW WITH A SPARROW

  New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country … People are animals, and the city is full of people in strange plumage, defending their territorial rights, digging for their supper.

  AND
Y SOON EVOLVED into a professional chronicler of everyday life. Finally he had a venue for airing his observations of the city’s miniature dramas, its sparkling elevators and dustbin alleys, its quiet and largely unnoticed wildlife. The mental snapshots that he had portioned out in letters to friends and family he now wrote up for a larger audience. Over the next few months Andy indulged his zest for observation and his bent for rambling. Any experience or observation, no matter how small, might be distilled from his daily life in staccato bursts of typing at his heavy iron typewriter, the smudged carbons and X-d out errors soon to metamorphose on the pages of the magazine that quickly became the center of his city life. Now in his late twenties, he was ready for his first big intellectual romance. It was invigorating, practicing a craft that demanded weekly production but also welcomed a dynamic writing style not permitted to journalists on daily newspapers.