Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976

by E. B. White

  Our friend also informs us that in this business they no longer use the term “to sign” a thing; they say: “to write your name.” The word “sign” has come to have a sinister tone. Don’t let this trick fool you—writing your name is just as binding.

  TADPOLES AND TELEPHONES

  6/2/28

  THERE WAS A LARGE BOWL of tadpoles in the window of the Telephone Building as we came wandering along, lonely as a cloud. We stopped of course—we stop for anything in windows, particularly tadpoles. A sign said: THE TADPOLE REMINDS US. It told how the unfortunate creature, gloomily metamorphic, is forced to rise at intervals to the surface of the water in order to breathe; and it compared his fate to that of the unfortunate business man who has no telephone on his desk and has to rise and leave his work whenever there is a call. It was a fine and a beautiful little object lesson, and we stood enthralled for fifteen minutes, hoping to verify the truth of this neat biological phenomenon, brooding on its neat analogy. The tadpoles, how-ever, seemed not to rise: they rested lazily on the bottom. After ten minutes of waiting we began to shift uneasily from one foot to the other. Still no tadpoles rose to the surface. Could the Telephone Company be wrong? The truth finally seeped into our consciousness: the tadpoles had sensibly given up rising to the surface, wise little frogs! We departed, vowing never to answer the phone again.

  TRUTH-IN-ADVERTISING

  7/11/36

  THE TRUTH-IN-ADVERTISING movement has just celebrated its silver jubilee, and everybody laughed when it stepped up to the piano. Advertising is almost the only profession which has spent twenty-five years worrying about its own good character. Most types of enterprise never give truth a second thought, but advertising people are not like that: they keep truth in front of them all the time, brooding dreamily about it while writing the long, long drama of mouth hygiene. They worry so furiously about truth, one suspects they read each other’s copy. All this is confusing to the consumer, who has a double responsibility toward advertising, being obliged to read it and keep up with it and buy products on the strength of it, and at the same time sympathize with the advertiser’s devotion to truth.

  In our opinion, nobody has done justice, artistically, to advertising. It is patently America’s major contribution to present-day culture; yet the only books, analytical or critical, we have seen on the subject have been either textbooks, which are dull and special, or books debunking advertising, which are ill-tempered, humorless, and out-of-date before they get into print. The key to the advertising heart (and none of the writers on the subject seems to have grasped this) is this very search for elusive truth, the kind of search that took Byrd to the South Pole even though he knew there was nothing there, the kind of search which after twenty-five years still takes its pilgrims to Boston to a meeting of the Advertising Federation of America, there to rededicate themselves to the principles of the Baltimore convention of 1931. It is this feeling for truth which sets up a local irritation in the breasts of those who have given themselves to the fantasia of depilatories and emollients. They know that the hair must be removed from ladies’ arms and men’s jowls, yet in the pain of literary composition they find themselves kin to Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Guy Empey. They are obliged to express an idea on paper, and this takes them into the world of literary creation, artistic jealousy, and truth.

  The consumer, if left to his own devices, would no more expect truth in advertising than he would expect honesty in parenthood; after all, it is reasonable to suppose that a manufacturer is biassed about his own product, in the same way that a parent is over-appreciative of his own child. “Advertising,” said Mrs. William Brown Meloney at the silver jubilee of truth, “must be the herald of the new and greater world into which we are entering.” And one suddenly gets a picture of the devotees exhausted by their zeal, entering into the new and greater world by getting a lift from a nationally advertised cigarette.

  Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams—Joseph interpreting for Pharoah. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept bright as a sword. We rise to eat a breakfast cereal which will give us strength for the tasks of the day; we vanquish the excesses of the night with an alkaline fizz; we cleanse our gums, stifle our bad odors, adorn our diseased bodies, and go forth to conquer—cheered on with a thousand slogans, devices, lucubrations. What folly for our leaders to meet in Boston in quest of an unwonted truth! We live by fiction. By fiction alone can Man get through the day.

  RAVISHED LIPS

  4/10/37

  WE DO NOT PROFESS TO understand the philosophy of merchandising, but we are willing to go on studying it, just as we have for many years. On the radio we heard a voice say that Angelus lipstick kept lips “ravishing yet virginal.” It seems to us highly important to examine this apparent contradiction and to find out where the manufacturer really stands on the question, what his desires and hopes are for the girls who use his product. Does he want them to be ravished, or does he want them to remain virgins? If his desire is that they look ravishing, yet remain untarnished, then what are his feelings, if any, toward the males for whose benefit the cosmetic is applied and whose lot it is to be attracted yet repelled? We think the public has a right to inquire into these things, and be instructed. It is possible that a manufacturer of lipstick has no genuine interest in the potentials of his product. It is also possible that we men, faced with women who are equipped to be both maid and wanton, are deliberately being taken for a sleigh ride.

  Bourjois, the scent-maker, points out that romance doesn’t just happen: it is won by wearing a perfume called Evening in Paris. And there is the daring new odeur, Gabilla’s Sinful Soul, exotic and naughty. One would say that ladies are now enabled to ask, in the language of the odeur, for love licit or illicit, for enduring fidelity or for the wanton tweak. Let us hope that the ladies, with their fragrances, are not embarrassed by a too great confidence in the New York male’s sense of smell, debauched as it is by blowing dust, burned motor fuels, and desiccating office heat. How can the ladies tell, anyway, what smells are associated with romance in a gentleman’s subconscious? For one is the torpid, alkaline smell of the Interborough; for an-other, the pure prickle of new linen unfolded by hands suddenly adored; for another, the drying of wet wool before a great fire. Perhaps Elizabeth Arden is wisest—she wants the ladies to smell like a rolling Kentucky landscape, which really takes in quite a lot.

  WHAT? THEY DON’T WORK?

  7/3/43

  THE PAPERS CARRIED only the most modest account of the Federal Trade Commission’s complaint against Carter’s Little Liver Pills; to wit, that they had no therapeutic effect on the liver. We don’t understand the complacency with which the nation received this news, threatening, as it does, to affect millions of Uves and organs. From the early days of medicine men and snake oil, the sluggish liver has been an inseparable part of the American dream—the sluggish liver, the healing pill. Our mountains and plains, our cities and villages, were conquered and built by men who had sluggish livers and the means of curing them. The famous little pills travelled the uncharted alimentary canal by the untold billions, and their fame shone forth from the sides of barns and warehouses from one end to the other of this vast and bilious empire. Suddenly we are informed, in one blinding sentence of our government’s charge, that not one pill ever reached its destination, not one ever made contact with the human liver, and that the whole thing has been a magnificent delusion. It was as though we had heard one morning that Broadway had in reality never made contact with Forty-second Street, or that Niagara Falls had no actuality but was a mere fiction of lovers. We fail to see why the Times didn’t give the story what it was worth—an eight-column head on the first page: CHARGE CARTER’S PILLS MISSED VITAL ORGAN—130,000,000 PEOPLE REPORTED STILL SLUGGISH.

  If the Federal Trade Commission’s charges are proved, the early
advertising man who first had the Carter’s Little Liver Pills account should certainly receive some sort of Congressional decoration for his unique contribution to American hokum. He should be posthumously awarded the coveted ribbon of the Order of the Purple Phrase.

  STOCK MARKET ZIGZAGS

  3/26/55

  WE DON’T FULLY SUBSCRIBE to the bald statement that confidence in this country’s economy can be lost in a day. There are tangible assets that are not easily wiped out—the soil, the climate, the industrial vigor, the immense spirit of a people who won freedom through revolutionary zeal and are still willing to work at it. And there are intangibles that give the economy fertility and vitality. The stock market, which is a sort of horse track without the horses, does not deserve its wide reputation as a barometer. It sometimes sows the hurricane, instead of reporting the breeze. It is naturally flighty, because traders are noncreative people who rely for their security on the creativeness of others and who are therefore uneasy. Winchell* mentions a stock by name and a rainbow appears in the sky over Wall Street. But what the market does symbolize, in its nervous way, is the health-giving flexibility of capitalism—the trait that keeps our economy delicately balanced but that makes it a far better servant of the people than the state-driven economies that have hardly any elasticity at all. The other day, in San Diego, the American economy even adjusted to spring-time: work was halted on a seven-million-dollar building project to give a dove time to hatch her eggs. Our confidence in a society that observes this sentimental ritual and practices this fiscal folly cannot be toppled in a day. To talk of peace is not enough; we must hatch the egg of the dove.

  SPLIT PERSONALITIES

  2/19/55

  IN THIS AGE OF TELEVISION, this day of the spoken word and the fleeting image, we find ourself taking satisfaction in the printed word, which has a natural durability. Whenever we watch TV, we are impressed by two things: its effectiveness and its evanescence. It glides by and is lost. The printed word sticks around—you can walk into any library thirty years later, and there (for what it may be worth) it is.

  The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler. This is evident everywhere. The voices of radio and television are the voices of quick-change artists; they move rapidly from selling to telling and back to selling again. They are losing their sharpness because they have divided their allegiance. In 1925, when The New Yorker was born, an artist was an artist, a writer was a writer, a newsman was a newsman, an actor was an actor. Today, every one of these people has developed a split personality and is hawking something besides his talent. A newscaster appears on the screen, and for a moment you don’t know whether he has tidings about some offshore islands or tidings about an automobile’s rear end. Usually he has both. A girl breaks into song, and for a moment you can’t quite pin down the source of her lyrical passion. It could be love, it could be something that comes in ajar. Conscious or unconscious, there is an attempt to blur the line that the press has fought to hold. The line would have disappeared long since were the human voice capable of sounding the same in both its roles, but it isn’t. When a man speaks words he has been paid to utter, praises something he gets money for praising, his voice invariably gives him away; it simply lacks the accents that reinforce a voice when it is expressing something that comes straight from head or heart. It seems odd to us that commerce should aspire to violate the line, blend the two voices. Yet it does. If the line were to disappear, if the voices should become indistinguishable, the show would be over.

  MARKET WATCHERS

  12/18/54

  ON OUR WAY TO WORK in the morning, we sometimes pass one of those temples where men sit meditating with their hats on, watching ticker reports projected on a screen. We stopped for a moment the other morning to kibitz: through the window we watched the watchers at their watching. The ticker was bringing news of cloudy conditions in the Middle West; rain was expected within forty eight hours and might have an effect on winter wheat. The watchers, some of whom looked as though they were merely taking refuge indoors from a rain of their own making, absorbed this piece of information solemnly. One man, nursing a cigar, closed his eyes as he tried to conjure up the significance of distant rain on distant wheat. What a strange little band of tardy pioneers they seemed, sifting the wind that failed to touch their cheeks as it blew across prairies they would never see! How sad they looked, these early-morning waifs—no parents, no homes, only a lighted screen on which prices rose and fell amid tidings of great gain!

  11

  Curiosities and Inventions

  HOTSPUR THE SWIFT

  3/16/29

  TO TELL YOU WHAT make of car Hotspur is, would be to make General Motors insanely jealous. That I must not do. Suffice it to say that Hotspur is a small car, whose leather seats smell. Even the rumble-seat smells, although it is right out in the open.

  “Do the seats smell that way just while they are new,” I asked the salesman, “or will they always smell that way?”

  “You won’t notice it after the first five hundred miles,” he replied.

  “I think my friends will, though,” I said.

  It’s four weeks since I drove Hotspur out of the agency, his windshield plastered with printed directions, his nickel headlights catching the last gleam of the twilight, his gas swashing around audibly in the gas tank, his right front fender grazing a lady on the sidewalk. They have been four ecstatic weeks. I have obeyed the rules which I found on the windshield, have religiously kept Hotspur down under thirty-five miles an hour, and now my purgatory nears an end, and I will soon be able to open him up to his full forty. The smell still lingers, and even on an open road, brisking right along, I can shut my eyes, inhale, and imagine I am seated in the lobby of a second-rate hotel.

  My friends twit me about this smell, just as I expected they would. At first I was sensitive about it and was at the mercy of my joking passengers, but now I forestall their remarks. The moment a guest enters my automobile I turn immediately to him with my nose in the air and inquire: “Have you been around a stable, by any chance?” or: “Have you, do you suppose, something on the bottom of your shoe?” This unsettles the guest and usually he has a miserable time the entire trip.

  Hotspur has other traits which my friends have found amusing, but it’s surprising how quickly one builds up a defence against jests. Time was when almost anybody could have annoyed me by referring to a certain strange vibrant sound that occurs in Hotspur when he attains a middling speed. It is a noise which comes over him just at twenty-eight miles an hour—it hits him suddenly, and reminds me of the pleasant sound that wagons make when, from afar, you hear them crossing a wooden bridge in the country. When my friends mention the noise, I explain that it is a “harmonic,” a sympathetic over-tone that can occur only at a certain speed; with this as my theme I go on at some length, telling about musical harmonics and how, when you play a note on the piano, the octave will also vibrate, and I recite, too, instances of church windows being broken by organ notes, and other interesting phenomena of sympathetic vibration, until my friends soon become so absorbed in my discourse that they forget Hotspur’s extraordinary unquiet. (Either that or they get out of the car altogether and beat their way home across country.)

  So far, the rumble-seat has been used only by women and children. Opinions have differed about it. For the most part, the children have enjoyed it—welcoming, as children do, the terrible exposure in midwinter, the possibility of pneumonia and release from school, the sense of utter helplessness and bounce. The only lady who ever ventured into the rumble skinned her right knee getting in and her left knee getting out, thus preserving a kind of rough symmetry through it all. A day or two later I happened to be asking her to marry me, and mentioned that if she were my wife she could always ride in the rumble. �
��And open up all the old wounds?” she said, sadly.

  She was a lovely person. I will always remember her. I will remember how she turned to me with a heroic little smile on her lips and said:

  “The seat would be more comfortable if you wouldn’t keep so many empty boxes and crates in there.”

  “But there aren’t any empty boxes and crates in there,” I replied, astounded.

  “No, I suppose not,” she continued, thoughtfully, “and yet that’s the impression one gets, somehow.”

  A month has worked great changes in Hotspur’s appearance. His nickel trimmings, that once blinded me with their early radiance, have toned down to the color and sheen of old candy-wrappers. His fenders, at first richly ebon, are now a pale pavement blue. In spirit, though, he is the same car. Lately it has seemed to me that he senses the approach of spring, for some-times, setting forth with him on one of those clear mornings that bleed the heart with the prick of distant and unmistakable crocuses, I have felt a little earthly shiver run through his frame, and he has leapt ahead with an urgency more than mechanical, an internal expansion not unlike my own.

  BUY A BATTLESHIP?

  11/30/29

  WE ONCE SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED purchasing the Levia-than* when it was on sale. Somehow we never went through with it. Now we see by the papers that the government is going to sell three obsolete cruisers at public auction. One of these would suit our needs even better than the Leviathan. We suspect it would be a lot of fun to own a battleship, be it ever so obsolete. It would bolster our ego. How pleasant to overhear young ladies whispering: “Not the Mr. Tilley who has the battleship?” Pleasant, and advantageous socially. It would be pleasant, too, to make use of our ship in connection with the sporadic activities of the regular Navy. We would like to come on a sham battle on a foggy day and sneak in with our cruiser to participate, first on one side then on the other, annoying admirals, confusing the issue. It may not be too late. About how much would a battleship be?