The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  For this reason, he spent many months researching spiders. More than once on his trips to Manhattan during late 1949 and early 1950, Andy returned carrying trophies from a research safari. When he walked down the marble steps of the New York Public Library, past the regal lions with their forepaws like clenched fists, he was carrying scientific tomes full of illustrations of monstrous spider faces and enough Gothic webs to satisfy Dracula. At the apartment in New York or back home in Maine, he eagerly delved into these sources for background information about Charlotte. He was ready to merge his tentative early scenes, his eavesdropped snippets of dialogue and stage notes of action, with the factual support that he craved this time. He hadn’t felt this compulsion for natural-history research when writing Stuart Little, but then Stuart wasn’t really a mouse; he only looked like one.

  From the first, Andy’s scientific research and his whimsical imagination encouraged each other. He envisioned Charlotte performing certain actions in her web, such as writing letters that showed up well enough for people to see, and immediately turned to the scientists to learn by what chemistry and acrobatics she might accomplish what he had in mind. He pounced upon an unexpected tidbit of information in a source book, such as the detail that some stream-side spiders have been known to catch small leaping fish in their webs, and soon Charlotte was retailing these facts as anecdotes about her extraordinary family.

  Chapter 14

  SPINNINGWORK

  In writing of a spider, I did not make the spider adapt her ways to my scheme. I spent a year studying spiders before I ever started writing the book. In this, I think I found the key to the story.

  THE OLDEST BOOK of the three research sources that Andy brought home was American Spiders and Their Spinningwork, by Henry C. McCook, who had died when Andy was twelve. McCook did the work that made him a popular naturalist and author—he even published a series of children’s nature books—on summer holidays and in stolen moments, because he also served as a Presbyterian minister and a leader in the Sunday-school movement. He self-published the three volumes of American Spiders over a four-year period beginning in 1889.

  McCook’s title page showed the interesting detail “Published by the Author, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.” The old-fashioned subtitle read A Natural History of the Orbweaving Spiders of the United States with Special Regard to Their Industry and Habits. McCook’s preface had intriguing subheads running down the left margin—A Field Naturalist’s Difficulties, The Spider’s Solitary Nature, Study of Spinning Organs, even Why the Author Is Publisher. The contents page revealed an antique anthropomorphism in McCook’s thinking, no matter how rigorous his observations. Like Andy, he couldn’t resist assigning human personality to animals. Volume II’s contents page included phrases such as Wooing and Mating, Maternal Industry, Cocoon Life, and Babyhood, even the outrageously unscientific word Toilet to describe how the spiders disposed of their waste.

  In the preface, McCook bragged about his accomplishment by emphasizing its difficulties: “Summer vacations, and such leisure hours as a most busy life would allow, have been given to the pleasant task of following my little friends of the aranead world into their retreats, and watching at the doors of their fragile domiciles for such secrets of their career as they might happen to uncover.” Farther down the page, McCook commented upon one of the spider’s traits that had always appealed to Andy, and one he would emphasize in Charlotte’s character—their writerlike reclusive industry: “The natural disposition of the spider is a great hindrance to the prosecution of field studies. It is a solitary and secretive animal.”

  Almost every page also featured an illustration, some in color, from diagrams of web patterns among different species to a double web created by two spiders engaged upon what McCook called “cooperative housekeeping.” In a similar Victorian vein, one subhead read, “A Love Bower.” Following a long tradition of projecting onto spiders human and even divine traits, McCook opened his main text with an explanation of why joint-legged invertebrate animals are called arachnids, although Andy surely remembered from his studies at Cornell: “According to the Greek myth, Arachne was transformed into a spider by Pallas Minerva because she had boasted her superiority over that goddess in the use of the distaff.” Then McCook added the surprising detail that the word spider even derives from spinder, “the spinning one,” root of both spindle and spinster—“by which,” remarked McCook, “the virgin mistress of the distaff was commonly known in the days of our grandsires.” In this context, a spider as heroine of a novel seems less eccentric and more classical.

  Like Andy himself, McCook brought scenes to life with both a sense of language and a sense of humor:

  I once found a nearly mature Argiope cophinaria hanging in the centre of her orb engaged in sucking the juices from a fly, which she kept underneath her jaws and appeared to be handling entirely by the use of her palps. In the mean while she held attached to her forefeet on either side two swathed flies, one suspended by a single thread, and another by a double one. Evidently she was troubled with what the French call an embarrassment of riches.

  Andy covered many sheets of yellow draft paper with notes of everything that seemed even possibly relevant to his story—that young spiders hatch in the fall but remain inside their cocoon until the following spring, that spiders don’t kill their prey with a sting but merely stun it. Easier to suck blood, probably, he added casually, when prey is still alive. Sometimes new facts fit into the story the moment he encountered them: going to be inconvenient for Charlotte to go to the fair, because she is a sedentary spider. Also, comes about time of egg laying. Finally he began to think in prose more than in facts, although his sentences were still in the tentative present tense in which he wrote notes, not the sculpted past tense of an actual manuscript page: A spider needs eight legs. She uses 2 sets of forelegs for antennae when she is at work laying out lines. He noted that an orb weaver has eight eyes in two rows of four each, and at the bottom of the page he wrote an important short sentence: Charlotte is near-sighted. Later he underlined it with an editorial blue pencil. This detail explained why Charlotte could see to capture and wrap a fly, but she couldn’t see Wilbur himself clearly, down in the straw and manure far below. In the story, he would ask why and she would explain.

  Andy particularly wanted to get right the engineering behind Charlotte’s fly-trapping and pig-saving webs. He printed the heading ORB WEAVERS and wrote under it:

  The first thing a spider does is stretch a thread from some high point. Then from the center of this, it stretches other threads like spokes of a wheel. Uses 2 kinds of thread: dry and tough (for the guy ropes) sticky ( for spiral).

  Such fascinating details inspired new story developments. Web never vertical, Andy noted. She is under. On the back of another sheet he asked questions: Does spinneret have to touch object in order to make an attachment, or can hind leg attach the strand to the object? Does this kind of spider use balloon technique when young? Eventually, having researched the latter point, he returned to the question and answered it with a firm blunt pencil, yes.

  He discovered confirmation of what he had witnessed in his own barn and wrote, The making + repairing of webs almost always takes place just before dark. He jotted down terms without definitions (spinnerets, attachment disk) and self-explanatory terms (sedentary spiders, wandering spiders). He scribbled the detail that an orb weaver’s foundation lines usually form a trapezoid. The Reverend Mr. McCook had a vivid narrative style that fit well with Andy’s close-up view of his diminutive spider character: “The first radii that are inserted bend and sway under the weight of the spider, which, as she clambers over them, suggests the idea of a carpenter engaged upon a scaffolding in its first crude state.” A few pages later Andy found the helpful detail that sometimes a spider, while spinning a web, will pause at the center, to which she has drawn new lines, and anchor them by wrapping reinforcing silk around where they meet the center.

  His notes accumulated on the gr
owing pile of yellow paper.

  First they anchor a dry line.

  The foundation is an irregular polygon.

  The swinging basket

  The trial cables.

  Mature males spin rudimentary webs on outer margin of females webs. Young males spin regular webs—

  Male sends telegrams to female over wires.

  Charlotte’s husband was quarrelsome little chap.

  They pair in spring or summer when weather is serene.

  In various ways, McCook emphasized how valuable spiders are even in the human scheme of things. After describing their fragile domiciles among the porches and boat landings of Atlantic City and Cape May, New Jersey, he added, “The proprietors would do well to encourage their presence and propagation as at least some check upon the flies and mosquitoes.” This was Andy’s own attitude toward his neighborhood spiders. What could attract more flies than dung? Therefore every spider in a barn helped reduce the annoying and unhygienic population of flies.

  McCook’s next-to-last chapter was called “Death and Its Disguises.” It fit well with Andy’s thinking about the ending of his own book. Spiders live short and busy lives. If his story were to continue to the next spring, to cover a full rhythmic year in the life of the pig, then his savior, the spider, might well have to die. After noting that a spider’s eight widespread legs help it feel any vibration on the strands of the web, that Charlotte’s family weave their egg sac under cover of darkness, and that the sac is waterproof and the eggs themselves orange, Andy summed up the arc of his spider heroine’s life with a penciled note about her natural history:

  She dies languishes a few days after egg-laying, does not return to the web, and then dies.

  THE FIRST PAGE of the first volume of McCook showed an orb weaver of the Epeira genus; elsewhere Andy found a dorsal view of another Epeira, and a close-up of an Epeira’s face and one of its leg joints. Page 34 provided a detail that Andy copied precisely: Menge observed the pairing of Epeira marmorea on a warm August evening. Other details made him decide that this was the genus to which he would assign Charlotte. On page 115 Andy found a tidbit he copied onto a sheet of pale yellow paper so thin it was almost onionskin. It was the full scientific identity of his heroine: Epeira sclopetaria (Ep. vulgaris Hentz), the gray Cross spider, I have not found abundant in wooded spots, but more frequently near bodies of water.

  Charlotte’s last name, Andy wrote on another sheet of paper, is Epeira.

  Then, in John Henry Comstock’s volume The Spider Book, another of his research sources, he found a more melodious, and arguably more apt, surname for Charlotte. Comstock’s book had first been published in 1912, when Andy was thirteen. But he found a new edition that had just been published, revised by an entomologist named Willis J. Gertsch, who had written an admiring introduction. Comstock had been an entomology and zoology professor at Cornell, having already put in more than three decades by the time Andy arrived in the fall of 1917. He had married Anna Botsford, a former Cornell student who became a talented illustrator of her husband’s books, as well as a conservationist and activist and a leader of the nature-education movement whose influence included Andy’s own early love of natural history. Most of the time Comstock’s book was more strictly factual and to the point than McCook’s, with only occasional flights of poetic appreciation on the wonders of his subject.

  About the clan that Andy was considering for Charlotte, Comstock wrote, “This genus has been commonly known under the name Epeira; this, however, is a much later name than Aranea, which was proposed by Linnæus in his Systema Naturæ.” Three pages later, Andy found a detailed description of his heroine, who turned out to be a barn spider, not a gray cross spider, as he had thought.

  Aranea cavatica (A. ca-vat’i-ca).—This spider is dirty white in colour with grayish markings. The abdomen is clothed with numerous whitish or gray hairs, which give it in life a grayish appearance; this is not so marked in alcoholic specimens … On the ventral side of the abdomen there is a broad black band extending from the epigastric furrow to the spinnerets; the basal half of this band is bordered by two curved yellow lines; and near the middle of its length there is a pair of yellow spots.

  Andy copied most of this information. A note at the end referred him to Fig. 488, and he found it a couple of pages later: a murky photo in the center of a page, showing a handsomely patterned abdomen but with most other detail lost in the poor quality of reproduction. Rather than changing Charlotte’s surname to Aranea, Andy literally made her scientific identification more specific by changing her name to the mellifluous Charlotte A. Cavatica—her genus name shrunk to a middle initial and her species designation promoted to a jaunty Italian-sounding surname.

  Some of Comstock’s research would prove helpful in Andy’s story: “This species, as its specific name indicates, prefers shady situations. Emerton states that it lives in great numbers about houses and barns in northern New England. I have found it in a tunnel at Ithaca, and on the sides of cliffs in a ravine. Its webs are sometimes very large.”

  On a small white sheet of paper, Andy penciled key aspects of Charlotte’s natural history:

  Name of spider – Aranea cavatica

  Life span – 1 year

  Eggs laid 14 October. When would mating have occurred?

  How many eggs? 500

  Then he listed key research questions: When will they hatch? When will the young emerge? What does male look like? Later he returned to this list and answered each point in firm dark pencil: Fall. Fall or spring. Like female. One question he didn’t answer: When will the female die after the egg laying? At the bottom of the page was another question that might prove important: If the life span is more than a year, do they produce eggs more than once? He looked up the answer, wrote yes, then reconsidered and marked out the whole line. This detail didn’t have to be relevant. He wanted his story supported by his character’s actual natural history, not enslaved by it.

  GERTSCH, THE EDITOR of the Comstock edition, was also the author of the most up-to-date of Andy’s sources, American Spiders, which had just been published in “The New Illustrated Naturalist” series by Van Nostrand. On the title page, Gertsch was identified as associate curator of the Department of Insects and Spiders at the American Museum of Natural History. Andy checked on him and learned that Gertsch was considered one of the foremost authorities on arachnids in the world. Eventually he visited Gertsch at the museum, to confirm his understanding of spiders and to ask further questions.

  In each book Andy found wonderful details that helped inspire the ending of Charlotte and Wilbur’s story. Both Comstock and Gertsch wrote lyrically about what Gertsch called “the urge toward ballooning.” “Although spiders like man possess only legs as organs of locomotion,” wrote Comstock, “like man they are able to travel through the air by artificial means. Long before the invention of balloons or of aeroplanes, spiders had solved the problem of aerial navigation.” Gertsch was also poetically inspired by this vision:

  Much of the adventure in the life of the spider is crowded into the first few days of freedom when the young spiderlings, having just broken through the egg sac, strike out for themselves in a world completely new to them.… Once the spiderling has reached the summit of the nearest promontory, a weed, a spike of grass, or a fence rail, it turns its face in the direction of the wind, extends its legs to their fullest, and tilts its abdomen upward. The threads from the spinnerets are seized and drawn out by the air currents.

  The balloon builder, Andy scribbled. Stands on forelegs on a fence post with web streaming out behind in the wind. When ready, he balloons. By now Andy was thinking in scenes and dialogue even as he researched. He imagined Charlotte explaining to the young pig that many spiders are aeronauts. He wrote:

  “What is an aeronaut?” asked Wilbur.

  “A balloonist,” said Charlotte. “My cousin used to stand on her head and let out enough thread to form a balloon. Then she’d let go and be lifted into the air and carri
ed upward on the wind.”

  Earthbound Wilbur would express skepticism, but Andy foresaw the spider’s reply: “I have some very remarkable cousins.”

  In all three books Andy found precise information about how orb weavers spin their intricate webs. He distilled some of it into a diagrammatic sketch. He drew a faint line across the middle of a page, labeled the left end of it A, and drew another line coming down from the middle, roughly quartering the lower half of the page. He angled a line from his point A, curving it toward the center of the bottom of the page. Then he wrote over this pale diagram, From the foundation line, the spider makes an attachment and drops down, paying out cable as she goes. She makes this fast to the ground or Something, then climbs back to here—he drew an arrow pointing at the juncture of the straight and curved web lines—and runs a diagonal across by ascending the dropline and carrying another line along to point A.

  On the back of another sheet he diagrammed a different web, with its center labeled hub and a snaking line labeled signal line. He drew two rough diagrams that showed the web in perspective as a flattened oval, with a barely legged circle of a spider body in each, one of them seen from the side. This web engineering was reminiscent of the poem that he had written for Katharine back in 1929, with a spider as unlikely romantic symbol.

  Andy noted that Comstock would be his source for “description of Cavatica” and that Gertsch had a good description on page 23 of how spiders eat their prey. Takes little over an hour to spin orb web, he wrote, and under it, Spider that carries air bubble down + lives under water. Even the facts themselves seemed poetic. On page 2, Gertsch held forth on the glories of spiderwebs: