by Michael Sims
Katharine later claimed she was shocked that Ernest would suggest such a thing, but she was already falling in love with the playful, gentle, eccentric young Andy White at the office. Naturally they had learned a great deal about each other during their work. They had a compatible sense of humor and, they gradually realized, had many things in common, from well-educated, upper-middle-class upbringing to youthful interest in writing. Katharine had also been a prizewinner in the St. Nicholas league, capturing a silver badge with her entry on trapdoor spiders. Soon they were manufacturing reasons to chat together, and from there the relationship blossomed.
As early as January 1928, The New Yorker ran a lighthearted romantic poem, apparently addressed to Katharine, who may also have been the editor who accepted it. Called “Desk Calendar,” it hinted at the secret emotions swirling around the magazine’s offices. The entry for Monday begins “Now grows my heart unruly / at mention of your name,” and each day ends with a variation of “No answer required.” It was signed with a pseudonym—Beppo, the name of Andy’s childhood Irish setter. But this time Andy’s choice of pen name may have been more than his usual hiding behind animals. As widely as Andy read (despite his disclaimers), surely he knew now what he didn’t know in childhood, that “Beppo” was the title of a satirical poem by Lord Byron that contrasted English and Italian attitudes toward adultery, arguing that the intolerant English version was hypocritical, that there was nothing wrong with a woman having one husband and one lover.
While Katharine and Ernest were in Europe in the early summer of 1928, Andy was there too, traveling with his roommate and old Cornell alum Gus Lobrano. (Andy claimed that when French prostitutes approached him on the street and asked if he was lonely and wanted to get a drink, his deadpan reply “No man is lonely who has Jesus on his side” sent them quickly away—but actually he didn’t speak French.) For a while Katharine and Ernest were apart, perhaps so that he could meet another woman, and Katharine wound up in a brief romantic rendezvous with Andy, in St.-Tropez and Corsica. They recalled later the Hôtel des Étrangers, with its aromatic, vine-draped garden populated with singing birds and scurrying lizards. Then it was back home to New York City and The New Yorker and her attempts to make a marriage work and his attempts to avoid commitment.
There were many other stresses on the Angells’ marriage. They spent well beyond their financial means, sending their children to expensive schools in New York, employing various servants, renting a country house year-round, throwing lavish parties, even ordering all their groceries by telephone. In December 1925, a few months after Harold Ross hired her, Katharine had published a rather desperate-sounding anonymous article in Harper’s describing the financial and social challenges faced by a working wife and mother. The stresses continued to build. Ernest was loud and argumentative, with a volatile temper, and shouting fights sometimes resulted in his slapping Katharine. The children would awaken in the night, terrified by the screaming and crying. Once, to let his parents know that he could hear and was afraid, Roger innocently called out that he was just getting up to get a drink of water. Then one day early in 1929 Ernest slapped Katharine hard and knocked her down. She moved out.
At the time women had little legal recourse, and shared custody meant that the children would spend most of their time with their father, having only weekends with Katharine. To tell eight-year-old Roger about the impending breakup, Katharine took him for a walk at Sneden’s Landing, the Sergeant family’s summer place on the shore of the Hudson River fifteen miles upriver from New York. They walked down the narrow path to where a brook rushed down ledges and became a waterfall. Roger loved this area and was pleased to have a rare opportunity to be alone with his mother. Naturally Katharine had trouble bringing up the terrible news. They were on their way back before she led Roger across a neglected lawn and sat him down on the steps of an unoccupied Victorian house. They sat side by side facing the lawn; Katharine’s family, like Andy’s, did not hug and were awkward in expressing affection. Slowly she explained that she and Ernest were going to live apart. Then came the most alarming news of all for Roger: he and Nancy, who was twelve, would live most of the time with their father. Katharine assured Roger that she would still see them constantly and be in their lives, and that they would come to stay with her every weekend and on summer vacation and holidays. “No, no, I want to stay with you!” Roger exclaimed. “I’ll come too. Nancy can stay with Father—I don’t mind.” But it didn’t work out that way. Roger kept watching for signs that his parents still cared for each other, but Nancy became angry at both—particularly, at first, at her mother.
Soon Katharine was spending the requisite three months in Reno, Nevada, to get a divorce. Andy didn’t visit her during this time, nor did he promise love or commitment. Already he had long been feeling claustrophobic about his job and his confusing feelings for Katharine. On the first day of January, in fact, in his annual melancholy soul-searching, he had sat on the roof of his apartment building, just outside the window, and gloomily contemplated his life and work as he stared at the heavy fog that made streetlights look like luminous balloons. He walked around the reservoir in the damp and wondered if he ought to leave town suddenly, without telling anyone where he was headed. A couple of days later, Andy found his romantic poem to Katharine, “Rhyme for a Reasonable Lady”—in which he wrote about “the animal alertness to the other’s heart”—reprinted in F.P.A.’s column in the World. He stayed.
In Nevada, Katharine discovered a renewed sense of vitality and passion for life. She stayed at a dude ranch, rode horses, learned to herd cows, and even bought an old car to use during her time there. As she requested, in her absence Andy sought the perfect lodging for her to return to and found a three-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, on the third floor of an East Eighth walk-up. Its many windows looked out onto the quiet private street of Washington Mews, where tall, arching first-floor windows recalled the street’s origin as stables. The whole season Katharine was away, Andy proved indecisive and noncommittal about what might lie ahead for them after her return. He didn’t visit Nevada. They wrote letters. Once Katharine mailed him a sage blossom and once he clipped to his letter a couple of Baby’s tail feathers.
IN NOVEMBER SHE and Andy were married by a justice of the peace, in an impromptu ceremony in a small town north of New York City. “If it lasts only a year,” Katharine sighed to a friend, “it will be worth it.” She made the mistake of not telling the children beforehand, following so soon after the impact of the divorce. The fallout for these decisions and what she felt as her abandonment of the children haunted her relationship with them. Roger handled it better than Nancy. For one thing, he enjoyed Andy’s company. In December, only a month after the wedding, Katharine took children and new husband to visit her sister Rosie and her husband, John Newberry, in Boston. A couple of days before Christmas, Andy took Roger for a ramble—carrying their skates—down Charles Street and to the iced-over lake in the Public Garden, where they found mittened children and overcoated men already skating. There was no stove-heated shack for putting on skates, so they sat on a park bench, and Andy hid their shoes nearby. Both were good skaters, not inhibited by frozen ripples on the surface, which the wind had cleared of snow in many places. Roger laughed in delight as he and Andy bent low and skated together under an arching bridge. Afterward they found that Andy’s shoes had been stolen—probably, in those hard days just after the crash on Wall Street, by a hobo. Andy had to hobble back to Myrtle Street in tiptoe on his skates. He would try not to meet the eye of amused passersby, but after they were gone, he would double over in laughter at himself. “The Skater,” he said to Roger, as if captioning a satirical New Yorker drawing.
Andy wound up moving into the apartment he had found for Katharine. Soon, to double their elbow room as a newly married couple who both did considerable work at home, they rented the apartment above and convinced the landlord to permit them to build an internal stairway to join the two. Having decided to p
ostpone their planned Bermuda honeymoon until spring, they were back at work the day after their wedding. Working together in the New Yorker offices after they married, they sent many notes to each other. In November 1929, using an interoffice memo form as he often did, Andy tried to show, in his oblique way, how he felt about his new bride. Recently the magazine had published a Rea Irvin cartoon that beautifully responded to recent news stories about the Einsteinian worldview. It showed people on a city street—an array of Irvin’s standard types, from dowager and cop to doorman and working-class immigrant—all looking mournfully thoughtful. Below them ran a quotation from Albert Einstein: “People slowly accustomed themselves to the idea that the physical states of space itself were the final physical reality.” In November Andy copied onto a memo form one of the characters from the cartoon: a knickers- and beret-clad boy who, sitting on the curb in the lower left background, looked rather like himself fifteen years earlier. There were a half dozen adult men in the cartoon, but Andy chose the child to represent himself. He sharpened a pencil and wrote underneath the drawing in his neat, simplified cursive, “E. B. White slowly accustomed himself to the idea that he had made the most beautiful decision of his life.” Even though Katharine called him Andy, as did everyone else in the office, he used his authorial name in this caption, as if he might experience a writerly suspense in not knowing when his audience would read these words or how she might respond.
As always, Andy managed to find all sorts of animals—even spiders—not only inspirational but even romantic. On the last day of the month, a lonely Saturday only three weeks after they were married, he was in Toronto to check on his investment in Camp Otter, an Ontario boys camp at which he had served as counselor during college. While staying in the elegant King Edward Hotel downtown, Andy spent a lot of time thinking about Katharine. Finally he wrote a poem to her that united his close-up observation of nature and his growing sense that their marriage was the right antidote to his rootlessness. Over the three decades of his life, he had spent more time watching spiders than he had experiencing romance. Now, with the easy acceptance of anthropomorphism he had learned in childhood, he used one to see the other more clearly. He called the poem “Natural History.”
The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unwinds a thread of his devising;
A thin, premeditated rig,
To use in rising.
And all the journey down through space
In cool descent, and loyal-hearted,
He builds a ladder to the place
From which he started.
Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken strand to you
For my returning.
In the spring of 1930, a few months after Andy wrote this poem, he went to the Cort Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street in midtown, which had been in operation since before he was a teenager, to see Jed Harris’s revival of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya. Probably seduced in part by the Cort’s marble Louis XVI interior and illuminated proscenium, he sat in the darkened auditorium and surrendered to the spotlit charms of Lillian Gish as Elena and Osgood Perkins as Mikhail. The glamorous memory of them stayed with Andy for weeks: Elena in a floor-length fur-trimmed dress with a purse dangling coquettishly on a long strap as she talked with a mustached and shiny-coiffed Michael. Mostly Andy kept remembering Michael’s expression of unrequited love.
Andy was thinking a lot about love. He agonized about what it meant and how it had changed his life and how it might change it more in the future. Change always frightened him, even when it was thrilling, and the uneasy blend of fear and excitement was almost overwhelming him now. Katharine had told him that she was pregnant.
So glib in his observations about pigeons and nostalgia and strangers passing on the street, Andy was unable to express to Katharine his response to this predictable but still dumbfounding revelation. Both delighted and terrified, he found himself tongue-tied. Not only could he not get around the logjam of words in his mind, but his throat began to tighten up and twitch. He kept finding himself staring at Katharine as she moved around the apartment. He worried about how the pregnancy would affect her health, about the baby’s future, about his lack of experience in this role. He felt that with her considerable experience as a mother—Roger was nine and Nancy thirteen—he in his ignorance ought to defer to her. Deferring to others, however, was not something that Andy did well. As if afraid he might run out of topics to keep him anxious, he finally worried that Katharine would think he now saw her mostly as mother-to-be rather than already-a-person. Yet he was unable to say any of this aloud.
In trying to convey his confusion, he turned to his usual way of figuring out life: he typed up his thoughts. Fleeing the complexities of adult life, again he hid behind animals. Andy and Katharine had a dog, Daisy, whose mother had been Jeannie, Jim Thurber’s Scottish terrier who inspired his 1927 New Yorker story “The Thin Red Leash,” with its memorable opening: “It takes courage for a tall thin man to lead a tiny Scotch terrier pup on a smart red leash in our neighborhood.” Andy called Daisy “an opinionated little bitch,” but he was fond of her—as he wound up feeling about most animals he was around. Using Daisy as a shield and a puppet, he groped his way toward intimate communication with his wife.
“Dear Mrs. White,” the letter began.
White has been stewing around for two days now, a little bit worried because he is not sure that he has made you realize how glad he is that there is to be what the column writer in the Mirror calls a blessed event … I know White so well that I always know what is the matter with him, and it always comes to the same thing—he gets thinking that nothing that he writes or says ever quite expresses his feeling, and he worries about his inarticulateness just the same as he does about his bowels, except it is worse, and it makes him either mad, or sick, or with a prickly sensation in the head.
It was signed, “Lovingly, Daisy.”
In late December, a few days before Christmas, the real Daisy accompanied a nervous Andy on a quick walk around the block. Dog and man stood together in front of the arch on the north side of Washington Square Park and watched an electric star hoisted into place atop the big Christmas tree. Then Andy took Katharine to the hospital to give birth. It was a horrific experience. Katharine wound up having to have a cesarean section. Their son, Joel, was born healthy, but for a while doctors worried that Katharine might not survive. She lost too much blood. Someone went out on the street and talked a taxi driver into donating for a blood transfusion, and in time she rallied.
At one point a worried nurse bent down to whisper in Katharine’s ear, “Do you want to say a little prayer, dearie?”
She snapped back in her Boston accent, “Certainly not,” and a terrified Andy was encouraged to think that they might go home as a new family after all.
Katharine and the baby stayed in the hospital for several days, through Christmas and beyond. On New Year’s Eve, Daisy again served as ambassador between Andy’s emotions and his loved ones. This time the dog wrote a letter to Joel (already nicknamed Joe), wishing him a happy first New Year and encouraging him to come home and see the blossoming narcissus in pots in the apartment. She included a typically Andyesque dollop of melancholy: “White tells me you are already drinking milk diluted with tears—in place of the conventional barley water they used to use in the gay Nineties; so I take it life is real enough for you, tears being a distillation of all melancholy vapors rising from the human heart.”
This letter was signed, “Faithfully yrs, Daisy.”
IN 1931, WITH six-month-old son Joel in tow, Katharine and Andy went to spend the summer on the coast of Maine. Because they always felt they needed servants to help out, they took along both a nursemaid for Joe and a cook. They found a pleasant little cottage, owned by a woman with the Dickensian name of Miss Nila Slaven, in the village of East Blue Hill, across the beautiful Blue Hill Bay from Mount Desert Island and Acadia Nat
ional Park to the southeast. The park had received this name only the year before, having formerly been dubbed Lafayette National Park when, in 1919, it became the first national park east of the Mississippi River. The island really did include both mountain and desert, its peaks providing Olympian views of the region’s bays and coves. South of Bangor and east of the cherished Belgrade Lakes of Andy’s youth, the Blue Hill area was largely undeveloped. Both the people and the landscape were reserved but not unfriendly. Both Andy and Katharine kept working; Andy even went back into New York for some work visits. Maine may first have appeared in the White family’s lives in part because of Andy’s childhood allergies, but as an adult he had discovered that his hay fever actually bothered him more in rural Maine than in downtown Manhattan, so work trips into the city had their virtues. Also he found the urban world more agreeable during the summer, when many natives were out of town.
But he spent most of the summer weeks in Maine with his family. Andy loved this region—the hard-edged outlines of the pines, the softer birch, the rocky shores. Many days dawned with fog that was slow to burn off but eventually vanished to reveal an afternoon of improbably lucid light. Gulls spun overhead. Ospreys hovered above the bay until they plummeted suddenly into the water like a dropped rock, emerging with a wriggling silver fish—or, if they missed, climbing back into the sky to fall again. The boulder-strewn shores were alive with color. Round spiny green sea urchins looked as tooled as a Fabergé egg until a solemn gull opened one up to reveal the vulnerable orange and purple flesh within. Periwinkles crept across granite boulders sheathed in colonies of white barnacles shaped like tiny volcanoes. Plovers stepped delicately among the flaking shells of blue mussels and purple razor clams, amid the tide-flung brownish orange capes of knotted wrack.
