by Michael Sims
Having shown her mother’s skepticism about Fern’s report of barnyard gossip, Andy invented a doctor for Mrs. Arable to consult about Fern’s mental well-being. His name, like most other characters’ names, evolved. He began as Dr. Lacey and turned into Dr. Barton and then Dr. Goudy. But eventually Andy decided to sneak in another symbolic name. After painting his bountiful arcadian landscape and naming the farm owner for a Greek epic poet, he continued his classical theme by rechristening the medical man Dorian, after the ancient Greeks who inhabited the bucolic, half-legendary Arcadia. Andy’s education at Cornell during World War I had been steeped in classical literature, and one of his early books bore the title Quo Vadimus? (Where Are We Going?). In such venerable allusions Andy was again following in Don Marquis’s footsteps. The Archy chronicles were rife with classical references of all sorts, from casual puns on the name of the emperor Valerian to the ongoing theme of Mehitabel’s former life as Cleopatra.
Other words were going to be as important as the characters’ names. Ever since the fateful day when he walked down through the woods to the pig pen, Andy had known that he wanted Charlotte to write something in her web. He debated, however, about how the other animals might deliver words for her to copy. At one point he considered reusing the unnamed dog who snaps at Wilbur’s leg during his raucous escape attempt. They get the cocker spaniel, he scribbled to himself, to bring Charlotte a spelling book from the boy’s room. But he decided that the rat could find the words, if bribed.
Then there was the question of what Charlotte might spell out in her web to convince the community of Wilbur’s innate wonderfulness. Andy looked around at words the animals could borrow from labels on farm and household products. Crunchy. Prepotent. Terrific. From a shirt label they could find pre-shrunk, which would be funny. He examined packages of Ivory soap flakes and Hygrade machine oil. A few terms might be amusing for the animals to consider but they would quickly reject them, such as delicious and nutritious. He wrote down Pig Supreme and then added, (Sounds like a dessert). He wrote, “With new Radiant Action,” then under it, they settle for just the word RADIANT. One day when he wasn’t at his desk he had another idea and wrote it out on a card to insert into the growing manuscript—at the fair, Templeton returning to Wilbur’s stall with a piece of cardboard reading, Low cost, all-purpose power unit—here is the answer to your problem. Take a good look at this handy power-package. Plenty of clearance, turns on a dime. He wrote down a couple of amusing ways that Wilbur might respond, then abandoned the idea.
Andy didn’t worry about consistency. Charlotte would toss off words such as untenable and sedentary and recite scientific names for the parts of her leg (once Andy learned these terms, he couldn’t resist placing them in her mouth), but be unable to write humble in her web without Templeton’s fetching a model. In having Charlotte define sedentary, Andy wrote that it means she doesn’t “go wandering.” Then he wrote three fancier words to the side and circled them: promenading, prancing, gallivanting. Wilbur is equally inconsistent. After needing sedentary defined he immediately uses the word delectable. He is also born with the porcine dream of searching for truffles. Andy sketched out a scene in which Wilbur explains his philosophy and defines himself as a sensualist (“I like to be warm and I like to be full”), but he abandoned it. It would have been too self-aware for his innocent protagonist. Although up until then all the characters had been animals or people, in a moment of Disneyesque whimsy Andy wrote that a maple tree down in the swamp suddenly turned red because it became so anxious about the crickets’ warning of impending autumn.
After wrestling to get sections of the book right, he often later cut them out of the story or changed them entirely. He wrote a scene in which Avery spies Charlotte and decides to knock her down with a stick, but as he climbs over the pig pen Wilbur rushes up and grabs the stick in his mouth and wrestles it away from Avery. It would have been satisfying in some ways to have Wilbur rescue Charlotte in turn, but Andy decided instead to keep Wilbur passive and not heroic. He changed the scene and made it more ironic: it is Templeton, the villain, whose greed saves the day. Avery falls and breaks open the rotten egg that the rat hoarded. Its stench clears everyone out of the barn. Andy also considered having Charlotte hint that she had eaten her husband, who was an entertaining rascal and great dancer—but she said she tired of him: “What ever happened to him?” “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” He rejected this idea.
He introduced endless small changes along the way. Charlotte brings up the Queensboro Bridge, points out that it took humans two years to build it, and that in contrast she can build a web in a single evening. For the final manuscript, he looked up the number of years and changed two to eight. He altered ways in which the heroine might be defensive or unrepentant about her bloodsucking habits, surrounded as she was by domesticated herbivores.
A man who is dealing in fantasy doesn’t worry about contradictions or inconsistencies.
ANDY DIDN’T ENVISION for his book the kind of bustling, contentious society that Don Marquis had created for Archy, with his hero only one of numerous cockroaches and Mehitabel a cat among peers and rivals. Charlotte, in contrast, would live her solo invertebrate life among mammals and birds. Andy represented most species by a single individual, as if it were the type specimen of its race—Templeton the sole rat on the farm, Charlotte the only spider in the barn. This decision was firmly in the tradition of talking-animal stories dating back to Aesop, and it had also been the custom in more recent tales. In 1908, when Andy was nine, Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows was published, with Mole and Rat representing their kind by the mythic River. About the time Andy graduated from college, A. A. Milne populated the Hundred Acre Wood with one boy, one bear, one owl, one donkey—and one exotic invasive, a kangaroo. But Grahame had his animals live in mansions and drive automobiles and brew a cozy pot of tea by the fire, while Milne based his characters upon his son’s toys, not real animals. Andy had different inspirations and different goals.
In keeping with his particular anthropomorphic view of his farm community, to each group of animals who demonstrated a distinct herd mentality—the sheep, the geese—Andy assigned a collective identity with no named individuals. A geese’s repetitive cackle he interpreted as a stammer. One of the parts of the book he particularly liked was the goose’s remark beginning, “At-at-at, at the risk of repeating myself.” He also decided to ignore the sad fate of Wilbur’s siblings, and to have no other pig show up until the fair, when Wilbur competes with the rude and obese Uncle.
Andy was too much an experienced farmer to allow his pastoral ode to get by on merely golden nostalgia. He had to inject some potent real-world issues—greed and apathy in the form of a rat, the paradoxical fate of most farm pigs, the threat of execution hanging over Wilbur, and the inevitability of Charlotte’s own natural death. Mortality stalked the scene from the first line: “Where is Papa going with that ax?” The farm animals spoke with casual familiarity of trouble and death. Andy had learned that spiders don’t usually eat dead prey, so Charlotte says that she gives her fly victims an anesthetic as a little free service she throws in. In one draft, Andy had the sheep describe in considerable detail how Wilbur is likely to die—that he would be shot behind the ear, then knifed. Such specificity was too ghoulish even for Andy, so he changed it to having the sheep begin, “Arable arrives with his .22, shoots the—” only to be interrupted by Wilbur’s anguished scream that he doesn’t want to die. Besides mortality itself, throughout many idyllic scenes Andy dabbed colorful spots of melancholy. He translated the song sparrow’s aria as “sweet, sweet, sweet interlude” and informed the reader that it referred to life’s brevity. Crickets harped on the same theme. But overall Andy’s theme was the joy of being alive, of reveling in the moment with visceral attention. What seemed like two themes were really one.
On these scribbled-over, endlessly revised pages, he spent a lot of his own time on his portrayal of the natural progression of the seaso
ns. He needed time itself to move through the story, with seasonal rhythms determining the arc of the narrative—Wilbur’s birth in spring, Charlotte’s instinctive urge to lay eggs in fall, her own children’s hatching in a new spring. Therefore he had the opportunity to include the kinds of fleeting phenomena he loved about each season, from the secret milk in dandelion stems to the tiny orange eggs of potato bugs. He included the rope swing that he had made for Joe (and himself) that still dangled from the beam over the barn doorway. Early on Andy had listed for himself the ingredients in a pig’s food and also the animal’s daily schedule. Readers learned that it takes a goose egg a month to hatch, that buttermilk is great for washing pigs. Andy wrote an ode to rain, which he had always enjoyed—he had often wondered in print why meteorologists act as if rain is unnatural—but then trimmed it down considerably from its survey of the fields and house and kept it focused on the barn.
Every few pages, he burst into one of his Whitmanesque inventories—the contents of Wilbur’s food trough, the “rat’s paradise” of a carnival midway after fairgoers have gone home, Templeton’s thesaurus of ways he doesn’t want to be jostled by Wilbur inside the crate. Andy remembered from the day he cut down the spider’s egg sac from the shed wall that its material was peach-colored and looked like cotton candy, a nice image for something to be woven and hidden away at a county fair. He had Templeton cut the strands of web that held the egg sac to the ceiling of Wilbur’s stall at the fair, just as Andy himself had taken a razor blade and cut down the egg sac under the shed roof—except that Templeton would use his ugly rat teeth.
He hadn’t planned the book as a summary of what if felt like to be E. B. White, but by the last page it had preserved in amber his response to the world. He worked in his love of dewy summer mornings and of a lit-up Ferris wheel in an autumn twilight. There were few experiences he enjoyed more than spending an afternoon at a fair, strolling the littered midway, watching a cattle auction, listening to the loudspeaker. Back in the late thirties, he had written a “One Man’s Meat” essay for Harper’s about the worries regarding national security as the United States moved toward what turned out to be World War II. In it he automatically used a Ferris wheel as an everyday symbol of the urge toward transcendence battling with the impulse toward safety. While standing in line with young Joe to board the Ferris wheel at the Blue Hill Fair, Andy had watched people’s expressions—the uncertainty, the flickers of worry or excitement. And he also worked into Charlotte’s Web his first sight of Joe riding a Ferris wheel with a girl. Joe was twenty-two by the time Andy finished the book, but this midway moment from his childhood was one more snapshot of life preserved between its pages like a summer leaf.
THROUGHOUT THE MANY days spent writing the book, Andy kept revising, crossing out, starting over. Even the saddest sentence in the book required lots of tinkering: Nobody, of all the thous hundreds of people in the that had seen the Fair, knew that a grey spider who had played such an the most important part in the Nob No one knew that it she clung when she died. Andy wrote in caps in the left margin FIX and drew an arrow pointing to the sentence. Then he went on to the next chapter.
With this book as with its predecessors, as with every essay and poem, there finally came the question of how to close the story. After the chapter entitled “Charlotte’s Death,” he needed to end on what he saw as the most positive aspect of life—that although death may be inevitable, so is the next round of living creatures, that because of the inevitability of death we must revel in the moment. In the last three paragraphs, Andy quickly pulled themes together—the slow rhythms of the year, the seasons of a life, the endless recycling of living matter through new generations of spiders and lambs and, again and again, through manure, waste matter itself drawn back into the earth to become another generation of living creatures.
He provided a quick glance at the major characters, inviting his actors to parade across the stage before the curtain fell. This decision required that he again adopt the omniscience glimpsed now and then earlier in the text, this time peering into the future. He backed upward and outward from the close-up view of Wilbur talking with Charlotte’s three daughters who decide to remain in the barn with him—Joy, Aranea, and Nellie. He let readers know that Fern soon grows up too much to spend her time in barns listening to animals chat, that throughout Wilbur’s presumably long and happy life Mr. Zuckerman never again considers turning him into bacon, that each year a few of Charlotte’s descendants remain in the barn, maintaining the cycle of life.
A final ode to the most important character—the barn itself—created the penultimate note that he would sustain through the final paragraph:
It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
Then Andy had to find the closing words. He tried various alternatives for the ending, as he had wrestled with practically every page of the book. In 1943, a writer in the New York Times had complained about Andy’s writing. He had thrown at Andy’s style what Katharine called “fighting words” such as hogwash, soft soap, and racket. Andy had replied and others had joined the fray. Incensed, Katharine fired off a reply. It ended with memorable phrasing:
A’s letter to the Times needs no defense against such words, nor does anything he has ever written. They are not words that should be applied to anyone who is an honest man and an honest writer. Andy is both.
Andy identified closely with Charlotte. Besides her wit and commitment to Wilbur, the spider reminded him of his favorite fictional cockroach. She had been inspired in part by Archy, with whom Andy had felt a kinship since his teen years. She embodied the spirit of the barn, which he had once described as almost a sacred place, a stage for birth and death and the rhythms of life. Over the last couple of years he had gone to as great lengths to learn spiderweb building as he had once done to learn sailing or farming or writing. He had never spent more time on any literary task than in accurately describing the hidden mysteries of spider life. In his poem to Katharine after their wedding, Andy had presented himself as a spider—blindly spinning a web between himself and his newlywed bride. Clearly he hoped that doing so might be a meaningful act in itself, but also that his connection with her would become a greater connection with himself and his origins. Now, in the last moment of Charlotte’s Web, Katharine, whose love and devotion had anchored Andy emotionally and helped him achieve greater satisfaction and deeper work than before, was present again. He closed with a description of Charlotte that he adapted from Katharine’s description of Andy himself:
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
Andy skipped a few lines and wrote firmly in the center of the page, THE END.
Chapter 16
SOME BOOK
The web glistened in the light and made a pattern of loveliness and mystery, like a delicate veil.
—FROM CHARLOTTE’S WEB
THAT’S THE BEST news I’ve had in a long time,” Ursula Nordstrom replied to Andy in March 1951, when he told her that he had completed a draft of a new children’s book but had set it aside to ripen. She went on to say that she didn’t mean to sound pushy but that Harper & Brothers would welcome the manuscript whenever it was finished. In the six years since its publication, Stuart Little had been one of Harper’s bestsellers. “We assume that you will want Garth Williams to illustrate it,” she said, and added that she hoped Williams would be free when the book was ready. Whenever Williams worked for Harper, he always knew that any assignment they had given him could be put on hold if another E. B. White book came in. Other publishers, of course, didn’t have the same rule for him. Since Stuart Little—and with that book as his debut—Williams had become a respected, in-demand illustrator. Simon & Schuster’s popular Golden Books imprint lured him, as well
as other illustrators, with lucrative contracts.
A year later, in March 1952, Nordstrom was, as usual, in her office at Harper & Brothers on Thirty-third Street. She was working back in the labyrinth of old offices that smelled of paper, printer’s ink, and rubber cement, when the receptionist left her desk out front and came back to report that E. B. White had just arrived and was asking to see her. She went out to the large front room, which bookcases and glass walls divided into offices, and found Andy waiting near the elevator, small and neat as always, with a package in his hand. He held it out and said, “I’ve brought you a new manuscript.”
Nordstrom was surprised and delighted. She hadn’t heard any news about Charlotte in many months and hadn’t realized that Andy was even close to finishing the book. Her first thought was that probably it was already too late in the year to have the manuscript edited, illustrated, printed, and bound in time for publication in Harper’s fall list. But possibly she could make it. Realizing that she would have to get Garth Williams to work immediately, she asked, “Have you given me a carbon copy, too, so I can rush it off to Garth?”
“No,” he said casually, “this is the only copy. I didn’t make a carbon copy.” He got back on the elevator to go to his New Yorker office, leaving Nordstrom with the realization that she was holding the only copy in existence of a new book by one of Harper’s favorite authors.
Usually, like most editors, Nordstrom was too busy with correspondence, meetings, and other editorial and production matters to actually find time to read manuscripts at the office. Yet, afraid that she might somehow lose this one on the train if she took the pages home, Nordstrom sat down in her office and began to read:
