The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  Williams turned over the sheet with the eight-eyed Charlotte and roughly sketched a simpler face on the back. He agreed that if White didn’t like Charlotte with either the human face or the eight eyes, he would draw a new round of samples more along the lines of this sketch.

  Later the same day Nordstrom messengered the sketches to the author. She asked Andy to cover portions of various drawings with a small piece of paper to imagine how they might look revised, but assured him that if he liked Charlotte as she was in these drawings, then Harper was satisfied. Andy didn’t like them. He rejected the first round of spider sketches and Williams submitted more. Finally Andy wrote to him, “You better just draw a spider and forget about a countenance.”

  Charlotte and her habitat weren’t to appear in the book until the twelfth illustration, a view of the barn door with Wilbur standing on his hind trotters to peer up at his new friend. Readers would already have met Fern and Wilbur, Mr. and Mrs. Arable and Avery, the Zuckermans and Lurvy. Williams drew the first of his more close-up pictures to be next in the book, accompanying Charlotte’s explanation to Wilbur of how to catch and kill a fly. He portrayed Charlotte extruding silk from a spinneret on her abdomen and using six of her legs to wrap it around the fly. He carefully drew the two hind legs clinging to radial lines of the web, even showing how her weight and activity stretched the line downward. Nor did Williams ignore the murder victim. Even through the mummy-wrapping of silk, he made visible the fly’s compound eyes and folded wings.

  For Charlotte thinking about how to save Wilbur’s life, Williams drew her hanging head down in the web, its radial strands taut with the weight of her long, spindly legs. With her front leg positioned like an arm resting its elbow below on another strand of web, she leans her head in one hand. Williams drew her roughly diamond-shaped abdomen with something close to the real-life pattern of cavatica on it—“sort of like a keystone,” as Andy said—but below that he left her round face blank. Andy liked this illustration, which showed the spider with smooth legs and abdomen. “Actually,” he wrote later to Nordstrom, “Charlotte’s legs are equipped with fine hairs, and these are mentioned in the book, but the overall effect is of smooth, silk-stocking legs.”

  Finally Andy took it upon himself to revise this latest portrait. To the bottom edge of Charlotte’s blank face he added two tiny dots, barely visible, to serve as eyes. Above them, at the top of the oval, he drew a few short vertical lines that gave the faint impression of hair. With these almost subliminal marks he somehow gave Charlotte a thoughtful expression. But Williams privately thought that doing so was a form of cheating.

  When he designed the cover, Williams took a different approach from what he had used for Andy’s first children’s book. On the jacket of Stuart Little, the two-inch-tall mouse-boy was alone in his souvenir birchbark canoe, Summer Memories, paddling his way down a rushing brook, away from a New England village and toward adventure. The more ambitious and accomplished cover of Charlotte’s Web, in contrast, draws all the characters’ eyes to the pivotal heroine in the plot. Sheep, goose, Wilbur, and Fern all peer hopefully upward at the loyal-hearted spider, as she coolly descends on a silken strand down through space, or at least from the cobwebby initial letter of her own name. These sloppy web strands did not sneak by without notice. When Nordstrom sent Andy a copy of the eleven-by-fourteen cover drawing, Andy grudgingly admitted that the “rather mussy Charles Addams attic web” was acceptable for the cover, but pointed out that it was inaccurate for a book portraying an orb weaver. “I’m sure,” he added, “that Garth realizes that.”

  On June 20, three months after Nordstrom first called him, Williams delivered the finished drawings, except for one he decided at the last minute to revise. As requested, he had made Templeton more scruffy and ratty, further from the possibility that he might be seen as a cute mouse. Nordstrom had questions and he had answers: Was the word TERRIFIC legible enough in the web? He thought so. Why hadn’t he portrayed Wilbur at the fair? Because every time he tried, the picture looked just like the barn scenes.

  Soon Nordstrom was sending Andy “dummy cuts” of the illustrations and even the jacket design. “I like everything,” he replied. Then he complained that the goose on the jacket looked too snakelike and suggested that this herpetological effect might be because her beak was open and her eye too round. He could accept it, but “no goose-lover in this house is satisfied.”

  IN JUNE, NORDSTROM presented Charlotte’s Web to the Harper sales force. Usually the salesmen didn’t have patience for much synopsis of a book, but Nordstrom found to her surprise, as she distributed copies of some of Garth Williams’s illustrations, that the men were examining the pictures closely and asking for more and more details. They seemed to find the premise of the book touching—and they quickly became enthusiastic about its sales potential. Later in the summer, one of the salesmen told Nordstrom that his newfound appreciation for spiders was hampering his home repair. He had been painting his front porch when he discovered a spiderweb on the ceiling. Deciding to not disturb this creative animal at its work, he painted around its web.

  Andy had been having his own new experiences with spiderwebs. Every day in the barn he used a shovel to push fresh manure from the cattle tie-ups to the trapdoor, where it fell down to the barn cellar that he had described with such affection in Charlotte’s Web. Lately a spider—he thought of her as one of Charlotte’s daughters—had taken to weaving her web in the tie-up itself, between posts just behind a bull calf. Each morning Andy would be busily working and forget that the web was there, which meant that yet again he would accidentally tear it down. Consequently, the spider had to spend her time repairing instead of enjoying her painstaking work and waiting for flies to wander into her parlor. Each night she rebuilt the web. Each morning Andy tore it down again. Then one evening she must have had an arachnid brainstorm. The next day, while doing his cleanup chores, Andy realized that he hadn’t encountered a spiderweb yet. He examined the stall. This time the spider had spun her foundation lines to attach to different parts of the stall, outside Andy’s path. He was impressed with what appeared to be her ability to learn from experience.

  When he described this encounter to Nordstrom, Andy added that he was teaching the spider to write in her web. Then, he claimed, he planned to lend her to Brentano’s Bookstore in New York for their display window, where she could weave a web and spell out the words SOME BOOK.

  Chapter 17

  COMPLETION

  the terrible excitement of so great a concentration of books in one place under one roof, each book wanting the completion of being read.

  —E. B. WHITE DESCRIBING A BOOKSTORE

  AS PUBLICATION TIME neared, Andy was busy as usual with a number of other projects. Richard de Rochemont had approached him about making a film based upon Andy’s long essay “Here Is New York,” which had also been published as a small volume. Rochemont was a documentary filmmaker who had worked on the newsreel The March of Time, which had been appearing in theaters since 1935 and had ended in 1951. In 1949 he produced the first documentary series on TV, Crusade in Europe, based upon General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s account of his career in World War II. Rochemont sent Andy a treatment. Andy explained in his usual careful way precisely what he thought was wrong with it, arguing that because the scriptwriter, Lois Jacoby, had been torn between story and spectacle, she had produced something that was “neither fish nor fowl.” The project, like several others based on Andy’s work that occurred to various stage and film people, never reached fruition.

  Family and friends and colleagues occupied much of his time with more serious issues than a documentary film that might not come to pass. Life was swirling around them, as always. Andy’s oldest sister, Marion, who had married when he was not quite three, reached her golden wedding anniversary in April 1952. That spring Andy and Katharine had five grandchildren hunting for Easter eggs in the living room. In the summer, as Andy and Ursula Nordstrom worked out publishing details on Charlotte
’s Web, Katharine was diagnosed with hepatitis, a little-known disease that Andy misspelled when notifying Nordstrom, and after a hospital stay she required a slow convalescence. Andy secretly advised to Gus Lobrano, who had replaced her in much of the fiction department dealings, to accede only slowly if she requested that work be sent to the hospital.

  Harold Ross had died in December 1951, during surgery to remove a tumor from his lung. Andy was saddened and Katharine was devastated. For a quarter of a century, Ross had been like a force of nature in their lives. At the helm of the magazine that had brought Andy and Katharine together and given both the opportunity to develop their talents, Ross had been a friend, a daily presence, the focus of a high percentage of their daily correspondence and phone calls, the inspiration for many of their favorite anecdotes. Now they seemed adrift. Andy told a friend they felt “disemboweled.” The funeral was a dismal affair—so many usually lively, even disorderly, people, sitting quietly in their shared misery. “In retrospect,” Andy wrote of Ross, “I am beginning to think of him as an Atlas who lacked muscle tone but who God damn well decided he was going to hold the world up anyway.” Andy kept thinking aloud about Ross’s impact on his life and career. “The things that matter a great deal to me, most of them, were of not much interest or importance to Ross, and vice versa, and we really only met at a rather special level and at one place—like a couple of trolley cars hitched together by a small coupling. The thing I thank God for is that that connection proved flawless and was never even strained.” With William Shawn, Andy wrote an appreciative eulogy for the magazine, which elicited many encouraging remarks from New Yorker writers. J. D. Salinger, who had been publishing stories in the magazine since “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in 1948, and who had published a novel, The Catcher in the Rye, only the year before, wrote to thank Andy for his comments about Ross.

  In early April 1952 Andy and Katharine hosted a party whose 131 guests showed up to celebrate the appointment of Ross’s heir apparent, William Shawn, as the next editor of The New Yorker. Shawn himself was one of many who took a turn at the piano, and the last to do so was popular cartoonist Peter Arno. Dancing went on erratically during the party, which lasted until almost dawn. At one point a drunken partygoer accidentally opened the wrong door while looking for his coat and found the Whites’ cook in bed. She politely suggested he close the door and go away.

  However much Andy’s opinion of his own work varied from day to day, professional validation kept arriving. Some came from surprising directions, including two in quick succession from England. He graciously turned down an invitation from the British humor magazine Punch to contribute regularly. And after George VI, the British king, died in February 1952, an editor at Hamish Hamilton, Andy’s English publisher, wrote to Cass Canfield at Harper to tell him and Andy that Stuart Little had been one of the king’s favorite books, a copy of which he often carried with him on trips, and that as recently as Christmas the queen had also given him The New Yorker Album. From less exalted directions, strangers occasionally sought Andy’s advice about writing, now that he had acquired a respectable and apparently lasting reputation. A college student wrote to him, expressing dissatisfaction with her education and the frivolity of college life, which seemed unlikely to stimulate her yearning to write. He urged her not to give up on frivolity, to get a dictionary that would enable her to never again misspell the word apparel, and to “remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.”

  I write largely for myself and am content to believe that what is good enough for me is good enough for a youngster.

  CHARLOTTE’S WEB WAS published on October 15, 1952. One of the most important and perceptive reviews came early. It was written by a Mississippi writer named Eudora Welty, who had published several story collections and a couple of novels, most recently Delta Wedding. In the New York Times Book Review, in a review entitled “Along Came a Spider,” she raved about Charlotte’s Web. She found herself unable to distill its meaning, so instead she summarized its themes: “What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time. As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done.”

  Like a comet on an elliptical orbit, Anne Carroll Moore, the New York Public Library librarian who had attacked Stuart Little in 1945, had left Andy alone for years but reappeared in 1952 to complain about Charlotte’s Web. By late October Nordstrom had received advance notice that Moore was expressing her dissatisfaction. “As her reservations about Stuart Little preceded a wonderful success for that book,” Nordstrom joked to Andy, “I am taking all this as good news for Charlotte’s Web.” She pointed out that, because Eudora Welty had declared Charlotte perfect for readers over the age of eight or under the age of eighty, Moore was disqualified because she was eighty-two.

  In December Moore’s review appeared in the column “The Three Owls Notebook,” in Horn Book Magazine, which had become an influential periodical in the field of children’s literature since its founding in 1924. She praised a number of new books, from Esther Averill’s Jenny’s Adopted Brothers to H. A. Rey’s Curious George Rides a Bike. She saved most of her complaints for Charlotte’s Web. She said again that Stuart Little had disappointed her but conceded that “thousands of people liked it.” She explained that she herself grew up on a farm in Maine and that E. B. White portrayed farm animals with “great beauty and rare understanding.” Then she added the almost incoherent qualifying clause “as a children’s book it never came clear from the preoccupation of an adult who had not spent a childhood on a farm.” She liked the opening. She liked Fern but thought her mother an idiot. Then she informed Andy what his story ought to have been:

  Fern, the real center of the book, is never developed. The animals never talk. They speculate. As to Charlotte, her magic and mystery require a different technique to create that lasting interest in spiders which controls childish impulse to do away with them.

  Back when Katharine was first reviewing children’s books for The New Yorker, she had told Andy about the candlelit meetings with librarians that she had attended at the New York Public Library. When he read Moore’s review of Charlotte, he wrote to Nordstrom, “Would it be all right if I sent the librarians some candles for Christmas, for use in their candelight meeting? I mean the kind that explode.”

  In mid-December Newsweek ran a cryptic little note about the book: “Charmingly sentimental tale for children and adults about a spider and a pig, written with many a fearful glance backward for fear of horse laughs from the left.” Unaware of having glanced back for any reason, and unaware of why he might fear the left, and for that matter of what comprised “the left” in this reviewer’s estimation, Andy wrote to Cass Canfield, who later blasted the reviewer for making no sense. Canfield sent Andy the reply letter from Robert Cantwell, Newsweek’s book editor. “I didn’t know while writing Charlotte’s Web,” Andy replied, “I was sitting behind a psychological barrier created by child psychologists, but one lives and learns.”

  Most reviews, however, were quite positive. Bennett Cerf proclaimed that he was glad to know that Wilbur would not suffer the ignominious fate of starring in a Christmas dinner with a candied apple in his mouth. “Though I am not usually attracted by stories that personify animals,” M. F. Kieran wrote in The Atlantic Monthly, “this one is absolutely delicious.” The New Yorker, not surprisingly, raved. “This is really more than a work of sheer fantasy,” wrote Katherine Kinkead, “for it creates not an impossible world of witches and giants and the like but a world that, as Mr. White proceeds to rub his jinni’s lamp, the adult reader begins to feel uneasily might actually exist and that children, of course, know exists.”

  Andy was pleased to note that one perceptive review came from P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins and its sequels—including Mary Poppins in the Park, which had just appeared. She wrote in the New York
Herald Tribune that “such tangible magic is the proper element of childhood,” and that she felt the book had “an absorbed and dreamlike air such as one sometimes surprises in a child playing alone.” Andy also liked a remark that Travers had made elsewhere, that a writer who writes successfully for children is probably actually writing for one child—the writer.

  Like most of Andy’s other projects, Charlotte’s Web attracted some unexpected interest. Louis de Rochemont, brother of the documentary film producer who wanted to adapt “Here Is New York,” and himself a producer of noir films such as The House on 92nd Street and the recent Dana Andrews semidocumentary Boomerang!, was after Andy to sell him movie rights to the story of Charlotte and Wilbur. He threw Andy an expensive luncheon party at the Cloud Club, atop the Chrysler Building. When Andy stepped out of the elevator in such elegantly appointed surroundings, he suddenly remembered an adventure from his early days at The New Yorker. Ralph Ingersoll, the managing editor in 1928, exploited Andy’s comfortable feeling about heights that would dizzy anyone else by suggesting that he go over to the skyward-climbing Chrysler Building, then half built, and see if he could get to the top. Andy had spent many hours climbing up twenty-three floors on the two-inch-pipe scaffolding, surrounded by workmen splattered in white plaster from above, with the East River blinding in the sunlight far below. Now, twenty-four years later, he hadn’t even wrinkled his best suit in the ascent to the top. “Jesus,” he said to himself as he walked in, “I’m getting ahead.”

  IN LATE OCTOBER, Andy wrote to Nordstrom that so far it seemed his book was mostly being read by adults. “I have had only a sprinkling of childhood reaction to the book—those vital and difficult precincts—and will not know for a little while how it sits with the young.” There were glimpses, of course. The New Yorker’s reviewer, Kinkead, described a ten-year-old boy she knew who took time away from football to read Charlotte’s Web: “After a period of unusual silence in his room, broken by occasional loud laughs, he emerged with his face drawn but under rigid control. ‘It’s terrible to have to say goodbye to Charlotte,’ he said.”