The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  Some of the surprising childhood reaction had been within the author’s own family. Roger Angell read Charlotte’s Web aloud to his quiet four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Caroline, who listened thoughtfully. When the story was over, she said to her father, “I think there was an easier way to save Wilbur, without all that trouble. Charlotte should have told him not to eat, then he wouldn’t have been killed because he would have been too thin.”

  When Andy recounted this story to Nordstrom, he added, “Trust an author to go to a lot of unnecessary trouble.”

  By December, however, Andy was already receiving responses from children far beyond his own family. When the students of Mrs. Bard’s fifth-grade class at a Larchmont school sent a collection of letters asking about the author behind Charlotte’s Web, and asking if E. B. White really lived on a farm, he replied in detail. As he had always loved to do, he listed again the many animal neighbors who populated his forty acres. First he took a census of the barn: the eighteen hens and ten sheep, a pair of geese, the bull calf on whose stall Charlotte’s daughter had built her web, and a chipmunk. Although Andy unrealistically listed only a single rat, he admitted that the real barn held “many spiders.” Then he listed the wild animals, from skunk to frog. The letters came just as Ursula Nordstrom informed Andy that Harper & Brothers’ first printing of fifty thousand copies had not been too optimistic, and that she had just ordered a second printing.

  Soon the influx of cards and letters from readers became more than Andy could even consider answering personally. Finally Nordstrom asked him to write a public letter that they could print many copies of and keep on hand to mail to readers. He wrote a chatty two-page account of how he came to think of the story of Charlotte’s Web. In this note as in the novel, he didn’t speak down to children. He told how he began to feel guilty about his relationship with pigs, that it made him feel treacherous, the daily feedings and ever greater familiarity ending up with a sudden murder. “I do not like to betray a person or a creature,” he wrote, “and I tend to agree with Mr. E. M. Forster that in these times it is the duty of a man, above all else, to be reliable.” About Charlotte he said, “Once you begin watching spiders, you haven’t time for much else—the world is really loaded with them. I do not find them repulsive or revolting, and I think it is too bad that children are often corrupted by their elders in this hate campaign.”

  Closer to home, Roger’s ten-year-old daughter, Alice, found a way to convey to the author the power of his compassionate story in Charlotte’s Web. The next summer, after she had read the book several times, she was spending the summer in Brooklin—staying with her father and mother at a nearby cottage—when she learned that her grandfather was planning to slaughter a pig. It was a spring pig and apparently it was doomed to die in the fall, just like Wilbur—in September, sometime after Alice left Maine. Horrified, she connived a clever plan to remind her grandfather of his own book. She got out her crayons and drew a large copy of the SOME PIG illustration, the first hint that Wilbur was either extraordinary himself or had extraordinary friends. Then she persuaded her father to drive her to her grandparents’ farm in the night. Quietly Alice and Roger went down the dark lane to the pigpen, with Allen Cove visible beyond it. There Alice thumbtacked her poster to the boards of the pen.

  The next morning, when Andy carried a pail of slops down to feed the pig, he was surprised and amused to find the drawing. But the pig’s destiny lay in the future. For now there were other animals to feed and other chores to do, and he was eager to tell Katharine about this sign that had appeared during the night. The pig was eating happily when Andy walked back up to the barn.

  Coda

  AFTER CHARLOTTE

  E. B. WHITE’S colleagues in the creation of Charlotte’s Web continued to rise in their fields after its publication in 1952.

  The next year, after the book had proved to be one of Harper & Brothers’ great successes, a company executive treated Ursula Nordstrom to a grand lunch and made a show of offering her a position in the adult division. Offended at the implication that the department to which she had devoted so much passion was merely a stepping-stone to adult publishing, she resisted the urge to push the restaurant table “into the lap of the pompous gentleman opposite,” as she said later. Instead she calmly explained that her job was publishing children’s books. She insisted that she could not imagine being interested in publishing books for “dead dull finished adults.”

  Nordstrom wound up legendary in her field. She edited everyone from Laura Ingalls Wilder to Shel Silverstein, and her own children’s book, The Secret Language, appeared in 1960. Nordstrom fearlessly championed many controversial innovations in books that she edited: the first mention of menstruation in a book for girls in Louise Fitzhugh’s Long Secret in 1965; John Donovan’s references to homosexual experiences in his 1969 novel, I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip; Maurice Sendak’s naked boy floating through In the Night Kitchen in 1970; and M. E. Kerr’s drug background in the 1972 novel Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! Loyal authors whose work had been supported by Nordstrom responded with affectionate nicknames. Margaret Wise Brown called her Ursula Maelstrom; to Russell Hoban, author of Bedtime for Frances and its sequels, she was Ursa Major. Eventually Harper & Row, the company’s later incarnation, offered their in-house legend her own imprint, Ursula Nordstrom Books. She retired in 1973 and died in 1988 at the age of seventy-eight, leaving behind her longtime companion, Mary Griffith.

  Garth Williams became one of the most renowned illustrators in twentieth-century children’s literature. In 1947, after his success with Stuart Little and a couple of other books, Nordstrom had approached him about creating new illustrations for a uniform edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. He confessed that he felt more comfortable drawing animals than people, but he dived into research, including a visit to the eighty-year-old Wilder herself on Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. The new edition was published the year after Charlotte’s Web. Williams also wrote several books and illustrated them. The most controversial was The Rabbits’ Wedding, a 1958 picture book. To Williams’s astonishment, his lyrical color illustrations of the romance between a black rabbit and a white rabbit were denounced as “integrationist propaganda” in Alabama, where the state library system withdrew the book from circulation.

  Williams went on to illustrate Margery Sharp’s charming 1959 novel The Rescuers and its sequels about Miss Bianca and the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society. His masterpiece may have been his beautiful illustrations for George Selden’s Newbery Honor Award–winning Cricket in Times Square and its sequels. When E. B. White completed his third children’s book, The Trumpet of the Swan, in 1969, both he and Nordstrom were disappointed to find that the by then hugely popular Williams was unavailable to illustrate it. (The job went to Edward Frascino, who would later illustrate a collection of previously unpublished Archy and Mehitabel adventures, Archyology.) Garth Williams died in 1996 at the age of eighty-four. In 2010, his original drawing for the cover of Charlotte’s Web was sold at auction for $155,000, more than five times the auction house’s advance estimate. Forty-one other pieces of his original artwork, including other images from White’s novel, were sold at the same time, for a total of $780,000.

  IN 1957 ANDY and Katharine finally moved permanently to the farm in Maine. Katharine’s favorite pastime there was gardening. Andy noticed that when she was in the mood to garden, she simply went out to the flower beds, sometimes even in a tweed suit and Ferragamo pumps. The next March, Katharine launched an occasional New Yorker column, “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” employing a style of title used in other contexts in the magazine. On the last day of 1960, after thirty-five and a half years at The New Yorker, she officially retired. Other than for an occasional consultation, she was out of the office for good. William Shawn had been editor for a decade and the magazine was flourishing, and from every direction came letters and articles praising Katharine’s contributions to literature. The young John Updike, w
hose work she had edited since his first appearance in The New Yorker, wrote, “I am very sad, for myself and for the magazine, for I think as an editor you are irreplaceable, and probably personally responsible for a giant part of the magazine’s excellence in the last thirty years.”

  Unfortunately retirement was not a time of relaxation for Katharine. “I must say,” Andy wrote to a friend on January 2, 1961, “she looks a little as though she were entering Leavenworth.” Two days later, she began experiencing dizziness, numbness in her arm, and headaches. Doctors theorized neurological disorders and tumors; finally she underwent an angiogram, which revealed a blocked artery. Later she had to have an emergency appendectomy, wound up with terribly painful dermatitis, and contracted osteoporosis of the spine from medication for her skin disorder. She was in pain for much of the last several years of her life, but nonetheless enjoyed her role as a doting if old-fashioned grandmother. She died in 1977, to glowing obituaries about her crucial position at The New Yorker. Two years later, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published an acclaimed collection of her garden essays under the same title as the column, Onward and Upward in the Garden.

  Andy, now a white-haired eighty, broke his no-interviews rule and talked to the New York Times about Katharine’s book. With a white West Highland terrier named Suzy on his lap, he discussed his few remaining animals on the farm—two noisy geese and eight laying hens—and how much he missed his wife of forty-eight years. He imitated how she used to wind her long hair around and around and hold it in place with hairpins, and how she would reach for the phone with one hand while already holding a cigarette in the other. “This place,” he said of the farm, “doesn’t fit me since Katharine died.”

  Over the years he had published several other books. His essay collection The Second Tree from the Corner came out in 1954, two years after Charlotte’s Web. In 1959, after writing an essay about his old Cornell professor William Strunk Jr., he was invited to write a new introduction to Strunk’s book The Elements of Style, a commitment that resulted in a complete overhaul and his own essay about writing. His 1962 essay collection, The Points of My Compass, showed him in top form, and the next year he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Trumpet of the Swan came in 1970—an adventurous tale of a trumpeter swan, named Louis after Louis Armstrong, who is born mute and must therefore learn to play a trumpet (and write on a portable chalkboard) to replace his natural voice. Andy gave Louis’s father, the regal old cob, his own father’s grandiloquent manner of speech: “Welcome to the pond and the swamp adjacent! Welcome to the world that contains this lonely pond, this splendid marsh, unspoiled and wild!” After her companion, Mary Griffith, commented to Ursula Nordstrom that she always seemed particularly pleased to receive a letter from E. B. White, Nordstrom suggested to him that Harper publish a volume of his collected letters. It appeared in 1976, with a revised edition following in 2006. In 1977, the year of Katharine’s death, Andy’s collected essays were published, and the following year he received an honorary Pulitzer Prize for his lifetime of writings.

  In August 1984, at the age of eighty-five, Andy loaded a canoe onto his car and drove to nearby Walker Pond to paddle around and admire the animals. Later, back at home, he was unloading the canoe from the car’s roof rack when it slipped and hit his head. The next day he went to dinner at the cottage where Roger Angell and his wife, Carol, were staying. During the meal he confessed that he was feeling disoriented and confused. That fall, after Roger and Carol left Brooklin, an ever more confused Andy began spending most of his time in bed. Doctors speculated that what might appear to be sudden onset Alzheimer’s was probably dementia resulting from a concussion inflicted by the canoe.

  Joe, who still lived nearby with his wife Allene—and ran the acclaimed Brooklin Boat Yard that he had founded in 1960—managed medical care for his father during his decline. Joe hired nurses who attended Andy day and night. Often during the next several months he came to read to his father and discovered that Andy seemed to enjoy hearing his own books and essays read to him. But gradually Joe realized that his father couldn’t always remember who wrote the words he was hearing. At times he dismissed the writing with a quick wave of his hand, and Joe would go on to read something else. At other times, seeming more peaceful, as if able to concentrate longer, Andy would listen through to the end.

  Then he would stir and look at Joe and ask again who wrote what had just been read to him.

  “You did, Dad.”

  Andy would think about this odd fact for a moment and sometimes murmur, “Not bad.”

  Although he remained able to identify family members, he became increasingly disoriented. He died on the first day of October 1985. After Katharine’s death eight years earlier, Andy had not accompanied the rest of the family to her private burial service in the Brooklin Cemetery. Knowing Andy’s aversion to public events, no one had been surprised or upset. Now his legendary fear of crowds became part of his own memorial service. “If Andy White could be with us today,” Roger Angell said to the assembled family, “he would not be with us today.”

  ON A WARM early morning in spring, one day in the late 1980s, a yellow school bus pulled into the farm’s circle driveway and parked in front of the barn. The children were already excited and laughing when they came down the steps, peering at the barn and the outbuildings and talking about Charlotte and Wilbur. Would they see Templeton? No geese were in sight. Where was Mr. Zuckerman?

  When Joe White sold his parents’ farm in 1987, two years after Andy’s death, he stipulated that the property must never be set up as an E. B. White museum or commercialized in any way. His father had hated publicity, and as his fame grew, he had left town every year on his birthday to avoid reporters. (Townspeople knew where he went but refused to reveal the location, even after his death.) Robert and Mary Gallant, a retired couple from South Carolina, were avid E. B. White fans. They had already bought a farm in the area when they learned that the White farm was for sale, but they hastened to buy it too and then sell the first one. They shared the family’s distaste for exploiting the legacy of E. B. White. They had given in, however, to a schoolteacher’s request to host a classroom visit to the farm where Charlotte’s Web had been inspired and written. The school was in an impoverished inland region and the students had helped raise money for the trip.

  The Gallants came out of the house to welcome the children and their teacher. They showed them the barn cellar where pigs were raised, the stalls for sheep, the wide doorway in which Charlotte’s web appeared. They pointed out the rope swing that still hung in the doorway. Soon the kids were gathered in the barn, seated on hay bales, with the big doors open to the farmyard and the sparkle of Allen Cove down beyond the pasture. The Gallants usually invited Joe and Allene to join them for such occasions, but they hadn’t accepted. Today Joe happened to be at the farm to borrow some equipment. He met the children and spoke a little about his father. Mary Gallant asked if he might like to read aloud from Charlotte’s Web, but Joe declined. Then they turned on a recording of Charlotte’s Web being read by the author.

  Having bought this farm because it belonged to E. B. White, Mary and Robert Gallant stood listening to the recording—to Andy’s strong, calm voice with its Northeastern accent—and felt as if the years had vanished. As he casually read the words that had come to him with such effort decades earlier, his real animals seemed to be back in the barn, the silly geese and sly rat, the sheep and cows and pigs. For a moment the Gallants couldn’t tell the difference between fiction and reality, between the spider in the barn that had inspired the story and the fictional spider Andy had created on the page.

  Joe watched as the children sat rapt, transported by the story that embodied the life he had known as a child in this barn—helping feed the pigs and milk the cows, swinging on the rope, going to the Blue Hill Fair. He had tended the pig whose death had helped inspire Charlotte’s Web. Finally in a pause he told the Gallants that he had changed his mind, that he would like to read a li
ttle of the book himself. He stood up and flipped through the pages to find the place in the story where Mary Gallant had turned off the recording. Around him the children looked up and waited expectantly. Then he cleared his throat and began to read. It was as if the recording hadn’t been turned off, as if Andy were still telling the story himself. It was the same voice.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In late 2010 my wife and I were in New York City for Penguin’s Seventy-fifth birthday party. A couple of hours before it began, Laura and I met for a drink at the Algonquin with Heide Lange, my wonderful agent. Heide has been guarding and advising my career for fifteen years. As we sat there talking about The Story of Charlotte’s Web, which I had not yet completed, I said to her, “You have always been behind this idea. You read five drafts of the proposal before we were ready to even show it to anyone!”

  And Heide murmured sweetly, “Only five drafts?”

  Perhaps it was ten. My heartfelt thanks to Heide and to her excellent assistants, Jennifer Linnan and Rachael Fried.

  At some point, anyway, we decided that the proposal was ready to show to editors. George Gibson bought the U.S. rights for Walker & Company, as well as U.K. rights for Bloomsbury, the publisher that is now Walker’s parent company. For at least a decade I had been hearing what an extraordinary editor George is, and his reputation is not exaggerated. Besides his sense of language and nuance, he looks at a manuscript with the eye of a structural engineer. His thoughtful suggestions about matters large and small vastly improved this book. Thanks also to the rest of the fine crew at Walker & Company—George’s assistant, Margaret Maloney, production editor Nathaniel Knaebel, copy editor Steve Boldt, jacket designer Natalie Slocum, and publicist Carrie Majer.