The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  Andy had also delivered piglets, taking each in hand as it slithered out into the glow of a lantern in the shadowy barn. He had seen both ends of life. He knew the cycle as well as he knew his own breathing. Still, this loss preyed disproportionately upon his mind, and finally he mused over it in a Harper’s essay, exploring his new job as failed savior and also his usual role as tender executioner. “The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig,” he wrote. “He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.”

  A SENSE OF loss, the pig’s eventual fate had it survived illness, a farmer’s dual role in this ancient drama—these worries had been circling around in Andy’s mind for months when, in early 1949, an editor at Doubleday and Company invited him to take a trip down memory lane. Doubleday had been the original publisher of Don Marquis’s three volumes about Andy’s favorite fictional characters—Archy and Mehitabel in 1927, Archy’s Life of Mehitabel in 1933, and Archy Does His Part in 1935. In 1940, three years after Marquis’s death, Doubleday had combined all three in a handsome fat omnibus volume, retaining the rakish illustrations by George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat. Now they wanted a new edition and they offered Andy five hundred dollars to write an introduction for it. This pleasurable assignment took him several weeks. In late August, he wrote to a friend that the Archy introduction was all he had written during the summer.

  Although Andy had referred to Marquis numerous times, quoted him, honored him, he had never devoted a full-length essay to him. In 1939 he had been writing a Comment paragraph when he decided to divide its sections with asterisks. He typed

  * * *

  across the page and then asked, “Asterisks? So soon?” and typed three more.

  * * *

  The look of the page then reminded him of Don Marquis’s punctuational and other acrobatics in his newspaper columns. “The heavy pauses between his paragraphs,” Andy wrote, “could they find a translator, would make a book for the ages.” Andy had typed more asterisks of his own and then remarked out of nowhere, “Don knew how lonely everybody is.” Andy suggested to the reader that loneliness might drive reading itself: “You’re not out to learn anything, certainly. You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration.” A few weeks after Marquis’s death Andy had written to James Thurber, “What a kick in the pants life gave that guy!” and described Marquis as “one of the saddest people of our generation.”

  When thinking about politics, Andy often returned to Marquis. He referred to his own vision of ideal government as “the perfect state,” after Marquis’s satirical essay “The Almost Perfect State.” In a passionate but playful 1940 Harper’s essay called “Compost,” Andy wrote the line “A seer a day keeps Armageddon away,” only to interrupt himself with a question: “You’re trying to sound like Don Marquis, aren’t you?” He admitted to himself and to the reader that he was indeed.

  In the spring of 1946 Andy had invoked Archy and Marquis again. While contemplating the news about Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, where the native islanders were being forcibly relocated so that the U.S. military could test nuclear weapons as part of Operation Crossroads, Andy read naturalist Edwin Way Teale’s recent book Near Horizons. “If you sat up nights trying to invent an indestructible bug, especially fitted to survive,” wrote Teale, “you would have a hard time outdoing the roach.” Andy realized that cockroaches, which were already considered one of the most ancient forms of life, might be the creatures likeliest to survive a nuclear holocaust. “Well,” he sighed, “Archy’s boss is dead, God rest his untransmigrated soul, but Archy himself is probably good for another hundred million years.” Clearly the same couldn’t be said for human beings.

  Thus Andy responded congenially, even gratefully, to the need to re-immerse himself in Marquis’s skeptical but compassionate view of life. While writing his introduction for Doubleday, Andy lingered nostalgically over the virtues of the era’s newspapers, especially the Evening Sun itself, and Marquis’s decades of contributions. In doing so Andy was forcefully reminded of how Marquis had freed his own antic imagination, had created what were unquestionably his greatest writings, his funniest and most perceptive and most original, by creating animal characters, especially the humble vermin who served as his avatar. “Archy and Mehitabel, between the two of them,” he wrote, “performed the inestimable service of enabling their boss to be profound without sounding self-important, or even self-conscious.” Of Archy he said, “The details of his creative life make him blood brother to writing men. He cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward. So do we all.” But Andy couldn’t explain the depth and resonance of Marquis’s humor. Instead he came back around to his own ongoing preoccupation with a particular kind of animal by stating flatly, “To interpret humor is as futile as explaining a spider’s web in terms of geometry.”

  The doomed pig, and the relationship between humans and animals on a farm, kept running through his mind. Finally, thanks to these natural and literary nudges, Andy began to consider exploring these events in another children’s book. Already he envisioned the farm animals’ lives as much like his own, half comical and half melancholy. But how might a pig’s life be saved from the dastardly farmer’s plan?

  THE SPIDER LIVED on the underside of the barn’s roof. Sheltered from the elements by an overhang, her web was an elegant orb whose loops and strands glittered on dewy mornings like an antique necklace. Every night she made the rounds of her miniature cosmos, tightly wrapping prey, cutting loose and jettisoning debris, reweaving broken strands.

  By the time Andy came outdoors in the dawn, she had retired to a corner of the web and only her handiwork was visible. Each morning he was impressed all over again with the spider’s industry. That busy autumn of 1948, as Andy went in and out of the shed during the endless daily routine of farm chores, he kept an admiring eye on the work of the tiny creature who lived her equally conscientious life above his head. He had been observing her for several days, watching the dew glitter in the mornings and the web almost disappear as the moisture evaporated by midday, glimpsing the spider herself as she emerged in the twilight to begin the night shift. In the evening he stood below her web and peered up at it, watching his gumdrop-size neighbor scurry toward prey or hang upside down in the center of the web, patiently waiting.

  Then one cold October evening he saw that she was clinging to a little roundish object, which upon closer examination turned out to be neither an insect nor another spider. Finally Andy realized that his spider must be spinning an egg sac. This new development required a closer look. He went to get a stepladder and an extension light—a shielded bulb with a hook for hanging, an essential item in every barn—and carried them out to the barn doorway. He climbed up the few steps and hung the lamp nearby and peered closely at the spider’s now spotlit trophy. Never having found spiders frightening or repellent, Andy decided that this one was rather beautiful. Her body was an elegant gray and brown, her legs dramatically striped. Now and then as she moved, he could glimpse a curious pattern on her underside reminiscent of the hourglass on a black widow’s belly. Andy watched her for a long time. Finally she merely perched atop the object with her eight legs spread over it, and he assumed that she must be laying eggs inside it. She attached the sac to the wood of the projecting roof, not to the web itself. Rounded and soft-looking, the egg sac seemed to have been spun out of peach-colored cotton candy. Finally Andy climbed down from the ladder, put away the light, and left the spider alone in the darkness that was home to her. The next morning her egg sac hung secure under the shed roof, but the spider herself was not in sight. He didn’t see her again.

  Only a few days after this provocative reminder of the overlooked life-and-death dramas surrounding him every day, Andy had to return to New York for work. Unwilling to leave his new discovery behind, he got out the ladder again, this time bringing along a razor blade. He carefully cut the bind
ing strands of web that held the egg sac to the wood of the barn door and carried it indoors. The sac’s material felt like a cross between silk and paper and seemed to weigh nothing at all, but it looked sturdy. He found an empty candy box, punched a few holes in the lid, tucked the egg case inside, and took it with him to the apartment on East Forty-eighth Street. There he put the box on his bureau and forgot about it.

  But as he went about his urban business, riding in elevators and dodging cabs and typing at his desk at The New Yorker, alchemical mysteries were taking care of themselves inside the candy box. One day several weeks later, he noticed on the bureau a movement so slight it might have been imaginary. He bent down and peered more closely at the box. Tiny spiderlings, so small they were barely visible, were climbing up through the air holes he had punched in the lid. Delighted with this renewal of life so many weeks after the mother’s apparent death, Andy stood at the bureau and watched the latest generation of spiders. Even newly hatched, they seemed as busy as a Lilliputian construction crew. Bustling across his daily artifacts, they strung almost invisible web lines from nail scissors to hairbrush, from mirror to comb. Deciding that barn spiders were unlikely to be dangerous to people, Andy let the hundreds of spiderlings cavort across the bureau for the next week or two. Some had departed by the time that he reluctantly evicted the rest because the maid who came in to clean refused to work around a spider refugee camp.

  After the spiders left the bureau, they continued to scurry around in Andy’s imagination. From childhood he had admired spiders and their webs—the flytraps in the corners of the stable in Mount Vernon, the gleaming tents he found spread in the fields around the Belgrade summer cabins, and nowadays the elaborate webs in his farm buildings on Allen Cove. As early as the St. Nicholas days on Summit Avenue, he had seen science-minded but admiring photographs of spiders. In his writing over the decades since, he had often invoked the elegance of their creations. “Nobody styled the orb web of a spider,” he acknowledged, but he insisted that it is beautiful because it is “designed to perform a special task under special conditions,” like a canoe or (he added in what had become his trademark sudden left turn in sentences) a guillotine. Even in his now extensive political writings, he turned to spiders for his metaphors. In one longer-than-usual Comment piece on academic freedom, he made the analogy that “the elasticity of democracy is its strength—like the web of a spider, which bends but holds.”

  In his idiosyncratic poem to Katharine, “Natural History,” he had seen affection and commitment in the spider’s tightrope daring. But it was more than a romantic fancy. In the poem he admitted that he saw himself as the spider, groping his way on a tenuous thread of his own creation, hoping eventually that—by trusting the very act of making the web—he would find his way home to where he started.

  Chapter 13

  ZUCKERMAN’S BARN

  I discovered, quite by accident, that reality and fantasy make good bedfellows.

  BY THE END of 1949, Andy was moving forward on research for the book he was calling Charlotte’s Web in his notes. His longtime editor at Harper & Brothers, the legendary Cass Canfield, who had been president or board chairman since 1931, had encouraged Andy to pull together another collection of New Yorker pieces. It had been eight years since the publication of One Man’s Meat, and Canfield argued that in the interim Andy had written many essays worthy of preservation between the pages of a book.

  Early in the writing of Charlotte’s Web, however, Andy was preoccupied with this exciting new story about a spider and a pig. With unusual optimism, he wrote to Canfield that he couldn’t find time to think about work that he had published years ago, but that by fall he might be sending Harper an entirely different kind of book than they had planned, although he remained coy about the subject matter. “I guess it depends on how many rainy mornings we get between now and fall,” he added, “rain being about the only thing that brings me and a typewriter together.” Rather than a gentleman farmer, Andy liked to pretend that he was a full-time farmer and a gentleman writer.

  It turned out to be a hectic year, genuinely busier with farming than with writing. That summer he wrote nothing for “Notes and Comment” and made no progress toward his hypothetical essay collection. Harold Ross was suddenly ill with lung cancer, often unable to be at the office, but keeping up his correspondence as much as possible. He and Andy exchanged letters on various topics, including Andy’s new windmill at which to tilt—a campaign for larger taxicabs in New York City. Andy had actually gone so far as to measure the height of the door in cabs. He complained that thirty-eight inches was half the height of a man and a doorway of that size respectable only on an igloo.

  That busy summer he didn’t completely ignore the world of publishing. He sent a poem to Gus Lobrano at The New Yorker, but it was light verse inspired by his experience of sowing rye grass seed that cost an astronomical forty cents per pound. He judiciously critiqued a new manuscript that Jim Thurber had written during his recent stint in the Bahamas, while he was supposed to be writing something else. It was a lyrical fairy tale called The Thirteen Clocks. Andy told Thurber that he thought at times the plot might be too fantastic and action-packed for its own good and that the characters’ names were confusingly similar; and he complained again about Thurber’s muddy habit of not starting a new paragraph for each new speaker in a dialogue. Always Andy advised clarity and straightforwardness.

  He aimed for the same goal in his new book. He had faith in clarity of expression even on those days when he lacked any other faith in life. Directness and honesty would carry the day, he believed, bringing alive the story whose mythological simplicity became more compelling for him every day. Two years before, he had found himself empathizing at an almost frightening level with the pig whose demise he chronicled in his Atlantic Monthly essay. That story had been true. In Charlotte’s Web he was free to make everything up as he went along, which meant that he could change the outcome. This time the pig wouldn’t die.

  It is a straight report from the barn cellar, which I dearly love, having spent so many fine hours there, winter and summer, spring and fall, good times and bad times.

  FOR HIS OWN reference, Andy decided, he needed a layout of the stage for his animal drama. He folded a piece of typing paper in half, then in half again to pocket-size, and took it out to the barn. There he diagrammed the barnyard. He drew a horizontal rectangle filling most of this now small page. In its lower right eighth he drew a smaller vertical rectangle and labeled it Pig. Outside it to the left he wrote Sheep + geese. He drew two small lines indicating the door and faintly sketched a square outside it, which he labeled Pig pen. A tiny flat rectangle at the bottom he labeled trough. Underneath it all he scribbled Barnyard.

  For the story he drew a three-dimensional view rather than a diagram. On a small piece of pink scratch paper, about three inches by five, he sketched the barn’s southward-facing façade, the left door with a slanting plank ramp, the right with its double doors. He added a hint of a wind vane, a punctuational flourish, atop the steeply slanting roof, and in the upper right corner of the drawing he even sketched in the sycamore tree at the northeast corner of the barn. In cursive he labeled everything—the open gate, its door angling outward; the Barnyard itself. He drew an arrow pointing toward the ramp and wrote Cows and one toward the double door that he labeled Sheep.

  Realizing that the sketch was growing and would require more space than the small piece of paper could accommodate, he pasted the sheet inside the front cover of the old manila envelope on the front of which he had penciled Charlotte’s Web. Then he extended the drawing outward from the edges of the pink paper. He added more labels: Pig pen, with an arrow pointing toward it on the upper right, and Lane to pasture moving toward the lower right. Underneath all of it he wrote Zuckerman’s Barn.

  The setting was now vivid in his mind. His characters were coming insistently to life. He was able to conjure the behavior of the creatures he dealt with every day. Helpless pigs, sill
y geese, clever spiders, greedy rats—Andy knew all of these characters. He had participated in countless life-and-death dramas and last-minute rescues. He could sit on a three-legged milking stool in the barn, admiring the slapstick of lambs and the gluttony of pigs, while warm sunlight slanted through the doorway and across his back and chattering swallows flitted in and out of the big open doorway. He could recite the ingredients in a pig’s daily slop. He could close his eyes and still see every lurking step of a rat—the dastardly thieves on whom he had focused his despair and his .22 rifle during the war, imagining them as Nazis. As long ago as the stable on Summit Avenue, rats had crept into the subterranean pathways of his subconscious as the embodiment of gluttonous dishonesty.

  But, try as he might, Andy couldn’t envision the intimate details of a spider’s life. He could stand in the barn and peer respectfully at one. But she wouldn’t sit still for microscopic examination—and even if she did, he wouldn’t know what to look for. He didn’t have on file in his mind the kind of details about spiders that he possessed about the other characters. He was an observant farmer, not a scientist. What was the spider doing out there in the barn all night by herself? How did she actually go about spinning the web that would be so important in this story? He needed more information. This book would require actual research.