Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976

by E. B. White

  SIX MONTHS AGO I began to suffer from dizziness. It is an unhinging of the equilibrium, a condition of the body which gives rise to queer street effects, dreams, and fancies. I will be walking along the street, say, and will take three normal steps in a forward direction; then, as I am about to set my foot down for the fourth step, the pavement moves an inch or two to the right and drops off three-quarters of an inch, and I am not quick enough for it. This results in my jostling somebody on my left, or hitting the corner of the Fred F. French Building a glancing blow. It was fun for a few days, but I have recovered from the first fine ecstasy of dizziness, and am getting bored with it. Once I sidled into a police horse, and he gave me back as good as I gave him.

  Although I am sick of my dizziness, I can’t say my friends are. They still go into gales of laughter over my infirmity, and if I had lost both legs and travelled in a tiny cart drawn by a span of Baltimore orioles, I don’t think I could give them more pleasure. I have consulted doctors, but doctors lose interest in any man who sticks to the same story. At first they were suspicious of my teeth, so I let them have a couple to calm them down. Then they fooled around with some flora they claim grow in the intestines, but they soon learned they were in a blind alley. Several of my friends have tried amateur witchcraft on me, including one lady who insists that my trouble is psycho-logical; she says I stagger through streets because, deep in my heart, I loathe streets. She is, of course, a mad woman. If there’s anything I enjoy (or used to), it’s messing around the streets.

  After listening to friends and doctors, I have drawn my own conclusion about my staggering. I am of the opinion that I have simply lost the knack of walking. Is that so incredible? A biped’s ability to get along smoothly on only two legs has always seemed implausible to me. What if I say I’ve lost the trick? I don’t think such an explanation is half so crazy as that I ought to have my tonsils out—which is the most far-fetched idea I ever heard of.

  However, I didn’t sit down to write about my physical disability; I sat down to write about how I amuse myself now that I am handicapped. At first it was no easy matter. I couldn’t work; and while that in itself is amusing, it isn’t everything. For a while I had a bad time, but one day, thumbing through a copy of Hygeia, I ran onto a list of things to do—a page of suggestions called “Suggested Activities for Persons With Impaired Health or Physical Handicaps,” and for the first time I really felt as though I had hold of something.

  The list was alphabetical, and apparently had been running as a serial, because in my copy (the April number) the list started with the “J”s and went through the “P”s. I lit a cigarette, snuggled into the couch, where I wouldn’t feel dizzy, and began in earnest:

  Jail, help families whose father or mother is in

  This suggestion, though ingenious, I discarded. I had never helped anybody whose father or mother was in jail even when I was well, and it would be a queer time to start just because I happened to feel bad myself. I continued:

  Jam, exhibit for state fair

  Journalism, study for

  This was getting closer. I ordered currants, raspberries, gooseberries, ten pounds of sugar. They are still around the house, mute reminders of my jam-making days. But I didn’t stop with the “J”s, I went on to the “K”s.

  Keep watch for the milkwagon horse

  Knit, knit, knit, be one of the millions

  Kitchen aprons, sell to tourists

  I didn’t see why I should sell the only kitchen apron in the house to tourists, especially since I contemplated making jam; but it was fun knitting and being one of the millions. I did that for two or three days, till I got complained about. In odd moments, I watched for the milk horse, and he for me. Life was indeed straightening out.

  Then came the “L”s:

  Languages, study by phonograph records and textbooks

  Lease your barn for a summer theatre

  Leather tooling

  Listening ear (Manhattan cocktail at 5 A.M.)

  And the “M”s:

  Marmosets, breed

  Milkwagon horse, keep watch for the

  Mineralogy, study on your walks in wood (with hammer along)

  Minks, breed

  Missing antiques, hunt for

  Mothers, adult education for young

  Mothers of several small children, watch

  Music, study, compose, teach

  I let my barn, tooled a little leather, and one morning I arose at five o’clock and mixed myself a Manhattan. It made the day. Even the marmosets, breeding steadily among themselves, seemed less quarrelsome seen through alcohol’s beneficent haze. Streets, and street staggering, began to seem a long way off. I found that a man can occupy himself pleasantly without walking all over town. Quietly, through the long spring evenings, 1 watched a mother of several young children, and she returned the stare. My minks were sterile but good company. The only “M” that let me down was the mineralogy walks—for me they would have been only another dizzy stagger. And besides, I never carry a hammer. Not after what I’ve read in the papers.

  I’m down to the “N”s now:

  Newspapers, sell

  Newspapers, send forgotten lines of poem to inquirer in Night popstands at summer theatre, sell hot coffee or sandwiches

  Nurse, have a versatile

  There seems to be something for a handicapped man in all these suggestions. The last one practically has my name written on it.

  LIFE PHASES

  2/20/37

  WE ARE NOT SURE we agree with President Roosevelt that seventy is the age when a Supreme Court judge should retire. If we must establish an arbitrary pension age, it should be either fifty or ninety, but not seventy. At seventy, men are just beginning to grow liberal again, after a decade or two of conservatism. Their usefulness to the state is likely to improve after the span of life which the Bible allows them is complete. The men of eighty whom we know are on the whole a more radical, ripsnorting lot than the men of seventy. They hold life cheaply, and hence are able to entertain generous thoughts about the state. It is in his fifty-to-seventy phase that a man pulls in his ears, lashes down his principles, and gets ready for dirty weather. Octogenarians have a more devil-may-care tactic: they are sometimes quite willing to crowd on some sail and see if they can’t get a burst of speed out of the old hooker yet.

  A man’s liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle-aged, except in rare cases, run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats child-hood—a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.

  GUILTY GUMS

  12/17/49

  NOW THAT CHILDREN’S TEETH can be protected by adding fluorine to their drinking water, dentists are casting around for some new place to sink their drills. It looks as though they may have found it, too. Last week, Dr. Robert S. Gilbert told his fellow-dentists that a patient’s open mouth is a stage on which is enacted the drama of his emotional life. Plenty of people who complain of toothache are just upset, and he (Gilbert) has him-self cured a man whose teeth were hurting because of guilt feelings about a dead sister. This is wonderful news, this broadening of the scope of dentistry. We, in our own lifetime, have seen dentistry come a long way. We recall clearly the days when a cavity was a hole that a dentist could feel by poking about with his pry. Then came X-ray, and a cavity was some-thing that the dentist could see on the negative but the patient couldn’t, and dentists would drill according to a plotted position on a chart, crashing their way through fine, sturdy old walls of enamel to get to some infinitesimal weakness far within. Now dentists are in search of guilt, not caries, and go rummaging around among the gums for signs of emotional instability. The to
othpaste people will undoubtedly follow along—guilt paste, fear paste, and old Doc Lyon’s psychosomatipowder.

  RADIOGRAPHY

  2/24/51

  MODERN MEDICINE has led us down many a dead-end street, up many a stagnant backwater, following health’s gleam. None of our previous excursions, though, can match last week’s trip, which ended in a brand-new radiography room where the operator, a young lady, was unfamiliar with the new, bigger, faster machine and candidly admitted it. It was there, in that fateful chamber, that the old art of healing, long in decline, seemed at last to expire.

  Strangely enough, our journey had started with a simple nosebleed the day before. The bleeding persisted, so our doctor suggested that we get the offending blood vessel cauterized. Obediently, we got it cauterized—a simple, early-morning nasal tuneup in the gay East Seventies. The treatment, of course, induced sneezing, and we sneezed steadily and happily while riding downtown to the office. As we stepped from our cab, we were suddenly stricken with an enormous back pain. (In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.) When our pain failed to subside, we phoned our doctor and reported it, and he ordered us to start upstream again next morning, to be interviewed and photographed. This trip, as it turned out, consumed exactly five hours and wrote a new chapter in ordeal by radiography.

  Some temperaments are probably well adapted to the role of guinea pig—to standing or lying in unnatural poses while some-body tries to get the hang of a new camera—but ours is not one of them. Gowned in the classic cotton tie-back frock of the X-ray victim—the frock with the plunging hipline—we exposed our bony structure for countless takes and retakes while the operator tentatively fooled with the new knobs, fought the new adjustments, and shook her pretty head over the new formulae for exposure. The machine, with its baffling wall charts, was obviously too complex for the human mind to grasp, and our sympathy at this point was with the girl. After all, we told ourself, it’s no worse than taking a trial spin in a space ship, with Ed Wynn at the controls (and his bright, childish laughter at the takeofl).

  An hour passed—with intervals of sitting outside in the hall waiting for plates to be developed. Gradually the idea assailed us that we were absorbing more rays than a Bikini* goat. Our back pain was almost gone—just a memory, really. Our nose showed not a trace of blood. But our condition was bad, and if we had been running the joint we would have placed ourself immediately on the critical list and prescribed massive doses of whiskey.

  When the first two series of pictures failed to reveal a human spine, the operator called for help. A new girl showed up, and a conference was held, in which we were invited to join. “What d’ya say we just forget these new charts,” murmured the consultant, “and use the old one that we always used to use” (the one, we presumed, that went with the other machine—the old, slow, reciprocating job of yesteryear). At this idea the girls brightened perceptibly, and one of them put the matter squarely up to us. “Don’t you think,” she asked, “that there’s nothing like the old tried formulas?”

  We mustered a tiny smile and nodded, and she disappeared behind her lead wall. “Stop breathing!” she commanded, speaking through the slot in the wall. We stopped breathing. The vast machine, goaded by the old, tried formula, retched and wheezed and bored through us. “Breathe!” she cried. But there was no zest for breath any more, no grounds for inhalation, and we walked airily away, trailing the grotesque gown, along the endless corridor, toward the last dressing room.

  If any doctor wants us again, he will first have to start up the breathing.

  THE COLD

  11/10/51

  WE ARE AT THIS WRITING IN BED, entertaining our first cold of the 1951-52 virus season. It would greatly satisfy our curiosity to know at precisely what moment the virus gained entrance and took hold—for there must have been such a moment, such a division point. Prior to that moment, we were a whole man; subsequent to it, and until the symptoms appeared, we were the unwitting host to evil and corruption. One wonders about all such tremendous turning points: the moment when a child is conceived, the moment when the tide stops flooding and starts ebbing. We have often wondered at precisely what moment in life our defenses were successfully breached by another, deadlier virus—the point that marked the exact end of youth’s high innocence and purity of design, the beginning of compromise, acquiescence, conformity, and the general lassitude of maturity. There must in every person’s life (except a few rare ones) have been such a moment. In the case of the cold, the lag between the penetration of the disease and the appearance of the symptoms is a matter of hours; in the case of the other virus, a matter of years.

  Statisticians have computed the very great interruptive strength of the common cold in our society, have shown how it slows the wheels of industry. That is only one side to the virus, however. We are such docile creatures, normally, that it takes a virus to jolt us out of life’s routine. A couple of days in a fever bed are, in a sense, health-giving; the change in body temperature, the change in pulse rate, and the change of scene have a restorative effect on the system equal to the hell they raise. We heard once of a man who went to bed with a cold one day and never got up again. The seizure was soon over and his health restored, but the adventure of being in bed impressed him deeply and he felt that he had discovered his niche at last.

  Medical science understands this paradox of the virus, and virus diseases are now the white hope of cancer research. (It has already been shown that they tend to congregate in cancer cells.) Thermometer in mouth, we await the day of victory, when the common cold, which has long been the butt of our anger, will emerge as the knight that slew the dragon.

  CRICKET-IN-THE-EAR

  9/13/52

  MID-SEPTEMBER, the cricket’s festival, is the hardest time of year for a friend of ours who suffers from a ringing in the ears. He tells us that at this season it is almost impossible, walking or riding in the country, to distinguish between the poetry of earth and the racket inside his own head. The sound of insects has become, for him, completely identified with personal deterioration. He doesn’t know, and hasn’t been able to learn from his doctor, what cricket-in-the-ear signifies, if anything, but he recalls that the Hemingway hero in “Across the River and Into the Trees” was afflicted the same way and only lasted two days—died in the back seat of an automobile after closing the door carefully and well. Our friend can’t disabuse himself of the fear that he is just a day or two from dead, and it is really pitiful to see him shut a door, the care he takes.

  HOSPITAL VISIT

  2/16/57

  MODERN MEDICINE IS A WONDERFUL THING, but we doubt whether it ever catches up with modern man, who is way out in front and running strong. One morning at the hospital, the Times was delivered to our breakfast table (by a woman tall enough to reach to that dizzy height) and we turned idly to an article on tranquillizers, headed “WARNS OF HEALTH PERIL.” Clinicians, the article said, have found some of the effects of the drugs to be Parkinsonism, allergic dermatitis, constipation, diarrhea, jaundice, and depression. We finished our frozen juice and turned to face an entering nurse, who presented us with a tiny paper cup containing a white pill. “Take this,” she said, smiling a knowing smile. We bowed and she left. We picked up the pill, examined it closely, and there, sure enough, was the familiar monogram of Miltown. Dutifully we swallowed it, and immediately felt the first symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, the first faint flush of yellow jaundice. Then we looked back at the tray and noticed that our morning milk had arrived in a waxpaper carton—the same sort of carton that was in the news some months ago, suspected by scientists of being carcinogenic. Recklessly we poured the milk and raised the glass to our image in the mirror. “Cheers!” we croaked, and fell back onto the pillows, in the last stages of allergic dermatitis.

  The curative value of a hospital, for us, is that it keeps us busy. In our normal life in the outside world, we seldom have anything to do
from morning till night and we simply wander about, a writer who rarely writes, lonely and at peace, getting through the day cunningly, the way an alcoholic works his way along from drink to drink, cleverly spaced. But once we’re in a hospital, the nights and days are crowded with events and accomplishment. Supper is at six, breakfast at nine, which means that for about fifteen hours we subsist in a semistarved condition, like a man in a lifeboat; and when our stomach is empty our mind and heart are full, and we are up and about, doing housework, catching up on correspondence, outwitting the air-conditioning system, taking sleeping pills, reading names on nurses’ badges, arranging flowers, picking up after the last tenant, fighting the roller shade that has lost its spring, making plans for death, inventing dodges to circumvent therapy, attaching a string to the bed table to render it accessible to the immobilized patient, flushing undesirable medication down the toilet, prying into the private affairs of the floor nurse, gazing out at the wheeling planets and the lovely arabesques of the Jersey shore. Dawn comes, and an early nurse, to test with her little fingers whether our heart still beats. And then we shave and practice counting to fifteen, so that when they jab us with Sodium Pentothal and ask us to count, we can race them to the knockout. Busyness is really the solution to a man’s life, in this cold sunless clime. And a hospital is the place.

  THE ICE DANCE

  3/23/35

  THE WINTER ends on a clear, high note with the fabulous ice extravaganza at the Garden.* Skating, which has a sort of cold purity anyway, has suddenly come to be one of the most exciting expressions—to us the ice dance is potentially a greater thing than the dance. If we were a student of the dance, we’d sell our little shoon and buy ourself a pair of skates; there is a sublimity about skating, cold as a fountain, warm-blooded as love, extra-dimensional, an ecstatic emancipation which Maude Adams hinted at when, trussed up by a wire, she flew across the stage and translated every child’s dream. A few skaters have begun to realize what can be done in musical interpretation, have given up acrobatics and grapevines, and settled down to set their skates to music. We remember Grafstrom, the Swede; he was an inspired dancer, the first we ever saw. The other night Miss Hulten, also of Sweden, gave a beautiful exhibition, and so did a pair from Toronto, dancing to “Isle of Capri.” The Garden, in half-darkness, seemed to cohere, faces in shadow, the spotlight trailing the silvery course of the dance—a really thrilling thing to watch. Ice is an odd substance to have at last freed the body in its persistent attempt to catch up with the spirit.