Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976

by E. B. White

  Early next morning the craft hit the beach again and resumed loading pulpwood. It was an awesome sight, this tentacle of empire reaching out into so remote and quiet a spot; and it was a fearsome sound, the throbbing engines of an old, dead war furnishing the paper for new conquests in the magazine field. Awesome or not, the LCT proved a handy rig for loading pulpwood, and a pleasant visitor in the cove. We got one flounder. Luce got, we should judge, about sixty cord.

  LATE AUGUST

  9/3/49

  FOR US THE PRETTIEST DAY in all the long year is the day that comes unexpectedly at the end of August in the country. It is a cool day, freshly laundered (as though straight from the Bendix* of the gods), when the airs, the light, and a new sound from the grasses give the world a wholly changed character. On this day, summer, languishing but not really sick, receives her visitors with a certain deliberateness—a pretty girl who knows she doesn’t need to stay in bed. The yellow squash illuminates the aging vine, the black-billed cuckoo taps out his hollow message in code (a series of three dots), and zinnias stand as firm and quiet as old valorous deeds. This is the day the farmer picks up the first pullet egg, a brown and perfect jewel in the grass; the day a car stops and a man gets out and tacks up a poster advertising the county fair. You couldn’t get us to swap this one day for any six other days.

  CHANGE OF SEASON

  10/13/51

  THE CHANGE-OF-SEASON EDITOR of Time sat down the other day, closed his eyes, opened them again, and wrote his mood piece on the coming of autumn to the U. S. The piece was headed “Stain in the Air.” “Autumn,” said Time, “came to the U. S. last week with a souse of wet snow on Denver, a spatter of cold rain on South Dakota’s Black Hills, a chill wind in Chicago that moved on to New York. . . . It was a time of transition and suspension. Along New England’s shores, the squeak of a fisherman’s oars against thole pins sounded lonely and clear in the fog of early morning. . . . On the Pacific Coast, nights had turned cold. . . . In Texas river bottoms the sweet gum trees were tinged with yellow.” Then followed a quick estimate of UStemper* at applefall, ending, “In the uneasy air of 1951’s autumn, a sense of wrong stained the air like smog.”

  This piece, ranging so widely and concluding so sadly, de-pressed us, and we felt wave after wave of Wrongsense lapping at our shingle. But right in the middle of feeling so bad we realized that, by a lucky chance, we were in an excellent position to check one of Time’s items—the one about the squeak of a fisherman’s oars against thole pins along New England’s shores. We just happened to be on a New England shore; furthermore, the hour was early and the morning was foggy. Cocking our ears, we soon picked up the sounds made by a departing fisherman. What we heard, of course, was first the scraping of the conventional galvanized rowlock in its galvanized socket, then, a few moments later, the crisp explosions of a six-cylinder Chevrolet conversion, whose cheerful pistons were soon delivering more thrusts per minute than there are thole pins in all of Maine. The collapse of this single Time item when checked against the facts restored our sense of well-being, and we went in to breakfast wondering whether those Texas sweet-gum trees were tinged with yellow or with robin’s-egg blue.

  6

  One World

  INIMICAL FORCES

  4/8/33

  EINSTEIN IS LOVED because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it. Not long ago Einstein was here and made a speech, not about relativity but about nationalism. “Behind it,” he said, “are the forces inimical to life.” Since he made that speech we have been reading more about those forces: Bruno Walter forbidden by the Leipzig police to conduct a symphony; shops of the Jews posted with labels showing a yellow spot on a black field. Thus in a single day’s developments in Germany we go back a thousand years into the dark, while a great thinker, speaking not as Jew but as philosopher, warns us: these are the forces inimical to life.

  COMMON ENEMY

  10/12/35

  STATESMEN AND HISTORIANS have long known that a common enemy is the most solidifying thing a nation can have, welding all the people into a happy, united mass. We saw how true that was in our own home last week when we discovered that the place we had moved into had cockroaches, or, as the cook calls them, cackaroachies. We discovered them late one night when we went down into the pantry and snapped on a light; since then, the household has warred against them with a high feeling of family unity and solidarity, sniping at them with a Flit gun, rubbing poisonous paste on bits of potatoes for them to eat, the house full of great singleness of purpose and accord. No wonder a dictator, when he feels uneasy, looks around for something for his people to squash.

  SCRAP IRON

  4/3/37

  OLD, DEAD AUTOMOBILES, moidering in roadside graveyards, have long been a worrisome sight in this country. We peer into glade and glen, and find bodies decomposing there, stripped of tires and batteries. Foreigners, visiting us, are appalled at the spectacle, and write letters home to their papers about American wealth and waste. But today these carcasses lie uneasily in their burial grounds, preyed upon by grave robbers of a new sort. The price of scrap iron and steel has risen tremendously—it seems there is a European demand: iron is wanted for the wars, and the stealthy junkman arrives to pluck the ancient Overland from the caress of raspberry vine and nettle. At his approach, field mice flee their nest in the cushions. Iron for the wars! Somewhere a peasant saves his broken spade for the government collector; somewhere a bride melts down her wedding ring for God and country; somewhere someone’s old family sedan goes to its great adventure. The iron we could not quite destroy will serve destruction yet. Scrap iron, scrap steel, scrap gold. Scrap life.

  VIGIL

  9/2/39

  THIS WILL BE ONE OF THOSE mute paragraphs written de-spite the impossible interim of magazine publication, handed over to a linotyper who has already heard later news. Today is Sunday, August 27th. Perhaps you don’t remember that far back, you who presumably now dwell in a world which is either at peace or at war. It is three o’clock in the morning. The temperature in New York is 70 degrees, sky overcast. The long vigil at the radio is beginning to tell on us. We have been tuned in, off and on, for forty-eight hours, trying to snare intimations of our destiny, as in a butterfly net. Destiny, between musical transcriptions. We still twitch nervously from the likelihood of war at 86 on the dial to the possibility of peace at 100 on the dial. The hours have induced a stupor; we glide from Paris to London to Berlin to Washington—from supposition to supposition, lightly. (But that wasn’t a supposition, that was the Hotel Astor.) The war of nerves, they call it. It is one of those phrases that catch on. Through it all the radio is immense. It is the box we live in. The world seems very close at hand. (“Countless human lives can yet be saved.”) We sit with diners at the darkened tables in the French cafés, we pedal with the cyclists weekending in the beautiful English countryside, we march alongside the German troops approaching the Polish border, we are a schoolboy slipping on his gas mask to take shelter underground from the raid that hasn’t come, we sit at the elbow of Sir Neville* as he presents the message to the British Cabinet (but what does it say?). Hour after hour we experience the debilitating sensation of knowing everything in the world except what we want to know—as a child who listens endlessly to an adult conversation but cannot get the gist, the one word or phrase that would make all clear. The world, on this Sunday morning, seems pleasingly unreal. We’ve been reading (between bulletins) that short story of Tomlinson’s called “Illusion: 1915,” which begins on a summer day in France when the bees were in the limes. But this is Illusion 1939, this radio sandwich on which we chew, two bars of music with an ominous voice in between. And the advertiser, still breaking through: “Have you acquired the safety habit?” Moscow is calling New York. Hello, New York. Let me whisper I love you. They are removing the pic
tures from the museums. There was a time when the mere nonexistence of war was enough. Not any more. The world is in the odd position of being intellectually opposed to war, spiritually committed to it. That is the leaden note. If war comes, it will be war, and no one wants that. If peace is re-stored, it will be another arrangement enlarging not simply the German boundary but the Hitler dream. The world knows it can’t win. Let me whisper I love you while we are dancing and the lights are low.*

  SUPREMACY

  3/27/43

  THE LEAST SATISFYING ESSAY we have seen on the subject of isolation was written by an advertising man for an airplane company. He described the shrinking of the world, the ease with which anyone could hop from one point on the earth to any other point. He concluded with the curious observation that, the world being what it is today, the United States should see to it that it (the U.S.) achieves unquestioned supremacy of the air in the postwar world.

  This conclusion, mystical and spooky though it is, seems to be a fairly common one. We find it hard to arrive at, either logically or superstitiously. If it appears necessary to an American that America should assume control of the air, then presumably it seems necessary to an Englishman that England should, and to a Russian that Russia should, and to a German that Germany should. The postwar world thus becomes simply an extension of the prewar world, same rules, same outlook. We should all get out our little book on logic and study hard. The answer must be in there somewhere.

  LIBERATION OF PARIS

  9/2/44

  PROBABLY ONE OF THE DULLEST stretches of prose in any man’s library is the article on Paris in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Yet when we heard the news of the liberation, being unable to think of anything else to do, we sat down and read it straight through from beginning to end. “Paris,” we began, “capital of France and of the department of Seine, situated on the lie de la Cité, the lie St. Louis, and the lie Louviers, in the Seine, as well as on both banks of the Seine, 233 miles from its mouth and 285 miles S. S. E. of London (by rail and steamer via Dover and Calais).” The words seemed like the beginning of a great poem. A feeling of simple awe overtook us as we slowly turned the page and settled down to a study of the city’s weather graph and the view of the Seine looking east from Notre Dame. “The rainfall is rather evenly distributed,” continued the encyclopaedist. Evenly distributed, we thought to ourself, like the tears of those who love Paris.

  U. N. ARROW

  4/20/46

  THE SUBTLEST SIGN in town is on an “L” pillar at Forty-eighth Street and Third Avenue. The sign reads, “UNITED NATIONS,” and there is an arrow. The arrow is vertical—one of those conventional highway “straight ahead” indications. A hurried motorist probably would interpret this without trouble and would keep going toward the East River Drive; but we were on foot, and far gone in meditation, and for us the arrow distinctly pointed straight up past the dingy railroad tracks and on into Heaven.

  THE UNIVERSAL THEME

  4/3/48

  THE RESURRECTION IS VISIBLE in the back yard in the green spear breaking ground, and it is audible in the choirs in the churches. The sparrow selects a piece of dull string for the resurrection; the stroller selects a bright necktie. The zealot overhauls his set of ideas and finds rebirth in running his fingers through them, as the gardener takes strength from touching the earth. The theme of freedom emerges like a woodchuck after a long winter of cold and crisis, and is reborn under sombre skies.

  Out at Lake Success,* the peepers celebrate love and the unity of earth, the talkers celebrate hate and division. Professor Cantril, of Princeton, has been named by Unesco* to inquire into tensions and to study ways to stimulate respect among nations for each other’s ideals. He will examine influences that predispose toward nationalism. He will be a busy man. Almost everything one reads and hears these days predisposes toward nationalism; only the peepers and the green spears publish the universal theme. The nation steams like a cup of hot coffee, and the patriot’s spectacles become fogged, so that he sees nothing except through the mind’s eye, merely feels the strong, warm liquid going into his stomach, stimulating his glands.

  In Town Hall the other night, at a radio forum, we heard a man in the audience address the moderator: “Isn’t it true, sir, that in the last analysis this boils down to the old struggle between freedom and tyranny?” All around him heads nodded gratefully, everyone relieved to have life clarified in a moment of revelation. Anti-Communism is strong drink. Already the lines are being drawn tighter; already fear produces symptoms of the very disease we hope to fight off: the preoccupation with loyalty, the tightening of censorship, the control of thought by legislative committee, the readiness to impute guilt by association, the impatience with liberalism. The tyrant fear, pricking us to fight tyranny. This time, we suspect, there is more on the stage than the old familiar conflict between freedom and tyranny. The playwright is subtly ambitious and carries another theme along, and we are about to witness the death scene of nationalism to boot. This is the big act, and we who live in this decade are the favored few.

  A week or two ago, in Life, Dorothy Thompson published a letter she had from Jan Masaryk,* whose suicide pointed the dilemma of millions of free-spirited men who find themselves in circumstances for which they feel partially responsible and from which they see no escape. The letter revealed Masaryk’s self-doubts and his presentiment of the spiritual impasse toward which he was headed. It was dated November 15th. “I have been toying with the idea,” he wrote, “to let myself go at one of the closing sessions of the General Assembly and call out a warning to all those self-centered nationalists assembled in the ‘Flushing-Success’ area. It is the question of timing that worries me.”

  He did not let himself go, and no one is wise enough to say whether his timing would have been good or bad. But most of us can feel something of the paralysis of that doubt, something of the pulsation of that intent.

  The essential antagonism between the Russian world and the Western world is in the emphasis each places on responsibility. Both capitalism and socialism accept certain responsibilities, avoid others. Socialism holds itself responsible to the people for the use and management of resources, and in so doing is likely to wind up (as it has in Russia) by managing everything, including the citizen’s private life, his thoughts, his arts, and his science. This is wholly repugnant to democratic capitalists, whose system accepts the responsibility for guarding civil liberties and is notably cavalier about private concentrations of economic power, despite the fact that the destinies of the people are tied up in them. And so the antagonism grows—each system both ambitious and fearful, largely because of the presence of the other. The argument about responsibility seems ready to boil over into a mess that, for utter irresponsibility, would make the gaudiest robber barons of capitalism and the most ruthless tyrants of Communism look like pikers.

  The question of responsibility is a pervasive one. The United Nations, lacking both money and force, and being merely a set of nations with their fingers crossed, has not been able to assume much responsibility for humanity. The “self-centered nationalists” whom Jan Masaryk hesitated to warn are not all of them deliberately self-centered, but the Charter offers little chance for any delegate to be anything but centered on self and nation.

  We recommend to Professor Cantril, in his search for things that predispose toward nationalism, that he reexamine the principles of the Charter. The Charter specifies “cooperation.” Yet small nations cooperate reluctantly and big nations do not cooperate at all. The Charter advertises “sovereign equality.” But equality is a myth. A voting procedure based on equality is an exasperation to strong nations and not much comfort to weak ones. Ask any western European nation about its sovereign equality when the shadow of Russian expansion stretches across it from the east and the gleam of American dollars strikes it from the west. Ask the ghost of Masaryk. The Charter seeks collective security by the prevention of aggression, but nobody has ever figured out how to prevent aggression
by disciplining nations, and we are all less secure, singly and collectively, than we were three years ago.

  It seems to us that the people of our country and of many other countries believe in the purposes of the United Nations but are baffled and discouraged by its principles. As long as we’re an independent nation, we have to pursue a national policy. But if the people say so, our foreign policy can be broadened to express a universal principle even while acting to preserve a national ideal. Anti-Communism is our necessary foreign policy at the moment, but it is negative and it is incomplete. The long-term policy of the United States should be to end the anarchy of sovereign states and to build the government of free people. We ask the delegates to take a stroll some evening, leave the hall and go over to the lake, and listen to the lovesick little frog, Hyla crucifer, for the sound of the correct principle.

  EAGLES AND BEARS

  11/26/49