Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976

by E. B. White

  ANIMAL VOICES

  2/8/30

  WHEN THE NOON WHISTLE BLOWS in Bronx Zoo, it starts the wolves howling. They point their noses high, their breath curls upward on the cold air, and they give tongue in the primeval forests of their cage. Movie people have been trying to record this performance in sound pictures, but without any luck—the wolves refuse to howl into a microphone. It’s one of the little city problems that haven’t been solved yet.

  Animals are rather hard to take in sound pictures, Dr. Ditmars, the snake man, tells us. He has been making sound records of their voices for synchronization with his own moving pictures, and has recorded the sounds of most of the animals in the Park. Lions are disappointing—they sound like a cow, no majesty, only vaguely sad. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made a sound record, for its trademark lion, but gave it up, it sounded so feeble and un-metro-goldwyn-mayer. Camels are difficult, and better results are obtained by having a man make a noise like a camel than by taking the camel’s voice itself. Strangely enough, one of the best sound artists is the rattlesnake—the sound record of a rattler is perfect. Dr. Ditmars experimented with a wooden rattle in front of the microphone, but could get nothing as good as the real thing. The hiss of the cobra is also rather nice.

  A major difficulty is getting the animal to make any sound at all, animals having a penchant for absolute silence. There are different ways of stimulating them. To make a monkey scream with horror, you show it a live snake. To make it chatter with glee, you show it a banana. Tree toads won’t perform until you begin sawing up a piece of bronze with a hacksaw—and that spoils the record. Dr. Ditmars wanted to make a katydid record and found that the only way he could induce the katydids to make their monotonous music was by placing other katydids on the outside of his studio, so that his subjects could hear the low distant sound of their love-making. This required a lot of katydids, and necessitated a trip to Wurtsborough Mountain in Jersey, where katydids can be captured at night in the scrub oaks on the mountainside.

  According to Dr. Ditmars, the cleanest and most satisfactory way to record animal sounds is to stay away from the animals altogether, and summon a man named Phil Dwyer, who will make any noise you ask for, and who doesn’t require any stimulus such as bananas or distant love-making. This Mr. Dwyer was the camel in a fine camel picture made by one of the movie companies. It would have been a great success as a topical picture except that in making up the film they put the camel voice (a mournful and very loud braying noise) on a kangaroo record. The result was surprising, zoologically, but the braying kangaroo appeared in two Broadway houses before the film company discovered its mistake. Natural history note: kangaroos do not make any noise.

  THEN AND NOW

  12/9/33

  WE RAN ACROSS A 1908 Schwartz catalogue in the course of the week, and it was a lot of fun to compare it with the 1933 catalogue. Fundamentally, toys don’t change as much as we imagine. In the current catalogue, for example, you read about a submarine “that dives and rises just like real ones.” This seems like ultra-modernity till you turn to the 1908 list and find the same submarine, for slightly less money. The same is true of a diver—a little man who goes to the bottom. Schwartz has one today for $1.50. You could have had a nice five-inch diver in 1908 for forty cents. There was a swimming doll in 1908, identical with today’s swimming doll except for her bathing suit, which had a long skirt. There was a very good fireboat in 1908, which threw a stream of water, and a very good cow which gave milk. The 1933 catalogue speaks of a doll that “breathes,” but that idea isn’t new, either. There used to be a doll that drank milk and wet its pants, and there still is. Farm sets haven’t changed; and 1908 was full of jigsaw puzzles, bagatelle, and steam launches. Anchor blocks, those memorable little stone building blocks whose yellow arches, blue turrets, and red cubes formed the framework of our own childhood, are still going strong today; and to our notion nothing has come along which can touch them, in either beauty or practical possibilities.

  Toys have, of course, been deluxed up considerably. Take the Irish Mail, a standard juvenile vehicle even in this scooter age. In 1908, evidences of effeteness were already apparent in the Irish Mail: a model came out called the Fairy Auto Car, which we remember very well because it had a clutch. Equipped with “cushion tires,” it sold for $13.50. Today, Schwartz sells a deluxe Mail, equipped with Goodyear pneumatic balloon tires, electric lights and horn, and front-wheel drive, for $38. The 1933 express wagon has streamlined wheel housings, like a pursuit plane, and one of the 1933 toy coupés is radio-equipped—that is, it gives forth music, like a taxicab. Locomotives on the modern electric railways give forth a chugging noise.

  The toy that seems to have gone completely by the board is the tricycle, and by tricycle we don’t mean velocipede. We mean the tricycle your sister had, with the two big rear wheels and the one little front wheel and the sway-back frame which gave it its ladylike appearance. The 1908 catalogue featured tricycles, but you never see one today. It took little girls many years to discover that the tricycle was a mechanically inefficient device requiring four times the steam to make it go that it ought to, but they finally found out.

  Toys now are sanitary, de-luxe, and faithful miniatures; and a good many of life’s little hazards have been eliminated for today’s batch of youngsters. We are thinking particularly of the motorboat which goes a hundred and fifty feet, “then turns around and comes back.” Maybe we are crazy, but for us the rich charm of a mechanical boat used to be the delicious problem of retrieving it from mid-pond.

  FITTING IN

  6/9/34

  THE COMPLAINT ONE OF OUR FRIENDS makes about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars, and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances. Our professors of eugenics have dodged the whole issue. At the Chicago Fair, the noticeable thing about the circular houses of tomorrow was not how funny the houses looked but how funny the people looked in them. Must the next generation be as structurally inefficient, as architecturally inappropriate, as the present? Babies even at this late date are born with ears that stick out and catch the wind; the back of their head fails to come to a long sharp point. It often seems to us that the only people who really fit into the modern picture are certain department-store dummies and occasionally a pattern figure in a fashion magazine. The rest of us definitely don’t belong.

  SOOTHING THE CHICKENS

  5/15/37

  THE IMPERSONAL, disjointed sound which radio in large doses makes immunizes the listener. We happen to know one set-owner who has found a practical use for this curious property. He is a Massachusetts poultry farmer who goes in for large-scale egg-raising. He discovered that if his hens were disturbed by a sudden noise in the night, egg production fell off sharply next day. So now he keeps a radio going quietly night and day among his hens, immunizing them against the virus of sound. It works perfectly. Let a door squeak on its hinges; the hens accept it as a sound effect. Somehow it gives us a secret, deep pleasure to know that a dramatized news broadcast, aimed to unnerve the rest of us, is definitely reassuring to a lot of sleepy fowl, dreaming of hawks and weasels in a henhouse far away.

  THE OLD AND THE NEW

  6/19/37

  IN AN EXCURSION along U. S. Highway É last weekend, we noted two interesting building operations. One was a theatre being built in the shape of a barn. The other was a restaurant being built in the shape of a diner. It is amusing to see these American forms, which were the result of vicissitudes, being perpetuated after the need is over. Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has some little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

  REVOLVING DOORS

  4/1/44

  SOMEBODY HAS PATENTED a revol
ving door equipped with an electric eye to start it going at “the right moment.” In our opinion there is no “right moment” for a door to begin revolving; almost always it’s an unhappy compromise between two opposing factions, one trying to get into the building, the other trying to get out. The “right moment” never arrives, although we have seen neurotics hanging around the outskirts hopefully waiting for it. A revolving door is simply an ingenious trap which most people have learned to spring without getting killed. What a revolving door needs is not an electric eye but a steel grabhook to help hesitant ladies and a centrifugal governor to foil the ambitions of human dynamos. An electric eye for a revolving door would need to be fitted with bifocals, because one person’s right moment is another person’s Dunkirk.*

  PERILS OF THE SEA

  10/7/44

  OWNERS OF SMALL BOATS know that yachting on Long Is-land Sound has its perilous moments—the sudden squall, the untried guest, the parted halyard, the accidental jibe, the over-shot mooring, the eagle-eyed audience on the clubhouse porch. It has its terrible overheated days, too, when the sail mildews because nobody is there to dry it, afternoons when the wind dies and the tide runs foul at the harbor mouth. Having come safely through a summer of trials and dangers afloat, a lady we know, captain of an eighteen-foot sailboat, sat down the other evening in the lee of her radio to refresh her memory by reading over the insurance policy she had blithely taken out last spring. For twenty-seven dollars the company had watched over her all season and would continue to watch until the policy expired. “Touching the adventures and perils,” she read, “which we, the Assurers, are contented to bear, and do take upon us, they are of the seas, men-of-war, fire, enemies, pirates, rovers, assailing thieves, jettisons, letters of mart and counter-mart, reprisals, takings at sea, arrests, restraints and detainments of kings, princes, and people, of what nation, condition, or quality soever, barratry of the Master and Mariners, and of all other like perils, losses, and misfortunes that have or shall come to the hurt, detriment, or damage of said yacht or any part thereof.” Well, it had been quite a summer. The detainment of a prince, she decided, must have been the day she took that Rye man for a sail and his right arm became unmanageable.

  MAKING DO

  8/11/45

  A FEMALE FRIEND of ours recently moved into a small apartment so full of defects as to be really quite charming. One rather obvious feature was that the place lacked kitchen shelves. After watching the pitiful and on the whole rather frightening preparations her husband made for remedying this defect (he went out and bought some twenty-penny spikes and a bottle of New England rum), our friend decided she would manage without kitchen shelves. She got looking around the apartment and observed that the bookshelves in the living room had four or five inches of space behind the books. Quieting her husband, she arranged her supply of canned goods neatly. For extra convenience, she alphabetized everything. Asparagus is behind Sherwood Anderson, cherries behind Conrad, peaches behind Proust. She is as happy as a child about all this.

  GET A HANDLE ON IT

  3/13/48

  TOO OFTEN WHEN YOU LIFT SOMETHING, your hand clutches an unsuitable shape. Seize any teapot, tennis racket, or oxyacetylene blowpipe, and what have you got? A plain handle. Your own marvellously curved digits are wrapped around an unmolded surface, stresses and strains all wrong, and the tea (or oxyacetylene gas) nothing but an awkward struggle. Happily, this state of affairs is about to end. A man named Thomas Lamb has invented a handle consistent with America’s destiny, a handle to fit the hand. Soon you will be lifting something—a coal shovel, a machete—and your cunning digits will enfold the new Lamb Wedge-Lock Handle, designed to meet the human grasp as intimately as an ice skater’s tights meet a cold leg.

  We attended the unveiling of the Lamb handle last week in a small, white, odorless Prest-Glass room in the Museum of Modern Art. The Modern has a rather dreadful knack of giving an oversoul to a ripsaw and imbuing the future with undigested beauty. The blood pounded in our temples as we stared at a diagram of a gorilla’s paw and heard the bells of St. Thomas next door, scattering “Lead, Kindly Light” into Fiftythird Street. As far into the future as we could see, there were only perfect handles. Man, the sign said, has achieved dominance through brain and hand, but his hand is still wrapped around the most outrageous old surfaces—plain old suitcase handles, plain old canoe paddles, plain old telephone receivers. No shape to anything the hand slips around unless you want to count a woman’s waist. Fitted with the new Lamb Wedge-Lock Handle, your stewpot, your golf club, your castrating knife will take on new meaning. Fatigue and strain noticeably reduced.

  We can report that the Lamb looks like any other handle except that it is grooved to take thumb and forefinger and is a bit thicker in some places than in others. It looks like a handle that has softened in the hot weather, been used, and then hardened again in the cold. The Modern always does things up brown, and there was a wall with projecting Wedge-Lock handles, where you could push with a Wedge-Lock handle, pull with a Wedge-Lock handle, and twist with a Wedge-Lock handle. People gravely pushed, pulled, twisted. The handles soon grew sweaty and gave us a queer feeling of the New Sweat. When your hand is around a Lamb, it feels almost too good—a little too pat, you might say. Also, it gives a slight trapped sensation, as when you grasp a bowling ball.

  The handle is in production and you will soon be meeting up with it if you are the sort of person that ever takes hold of anything. We found, on trial, that the handle has one disadvantage: unless you seize it in the right place, you’re out of the groove and might as well have hold of the wrong end of a gimlet. We strongly recommend, though, that the Brooklyn Dodgers look into it and try a Lamb Wedge-Lock bat handle. If the claims mean anything, it ought to add a hundred feet to any clean drive. Might mean the pennant.

  We rode home, after the unveiling, in a crosstown bus, wedged in and hanging fast to an old, unmolded metal strap. Our palm resented every inch of the journey. Hardly anyone in the bus seemed truly happy.

  HAND THROTTLE

  9/25/48

  THIS TOWN IS FULL of persons who sleep fitfully on expensive innerspring mattresses that have been stiffened (or decontaminated) by expensive plywood bedboards, thus giving the sleepers’ spines a solid support. These same bewitched persons, who paid through the nose for one slice of modernity only to discover that they had to go back and buy another slice to take the curse off it—these same persons, having brought their beds up to date with a bedboard, may now bring their automobiles up to date with a gadget called a Hande-Feed Finger Tip Gas Control. A mail-order firm in St. Louis is advertising it. It is installed in fifteen minutes. It costs $5.95. The manufacturer claims that it will enable you to relax while you drive—no toe on the accelerator. And if you are an old, old man, it may occur to you that what you are buying as an extra for your modern car is simply the hand throttle that used to be standard equipment on all cars in the days before streamlining set in. These are gay times. A man pays three thousand dollars for a new car, and then shells out an additional $5.95 for a hand throttle. Still, it’s a hopeful sign. If auto-gadget makers are beginning to dig into the past for new ideas, maybe they’ll come up with a lot of things. We may yet be able to buy special mail-order fenders that permit a car to be parked without the help of radar, and a special mail-order driver’s seat that affords the pilot a view of the thirty feet of road immediately ahead of his front bumper.

  TAKING IT WITH YOU

  10/16/48

  IN A RECENT ISSUE OF The New Yorker, an advertisement of Oshkosh luggage mentioned that prices ranged “from $25 to $5,000.” It seemed like a sweet range, so we wrote Oshkosh and asked which unit they were holding for five thousand dollars. We got back a nice letter saying that it is a special trunk made of alligators and goats. It has thirty-two hangers. Bottom slats are hickory. Covering is alligator. Hardware is triple gold-plated. Lining is imported goatskin, color of Dubonnet. Oshkosh didn’t say where the goatskins are from, but we assume t
hey’re from Greece, from the original Raymond Duncan milking herd. The trunk enjoys the following equipment, and so would you if you owned the trunk: gold-plated rib-rod trolley, electric iron, ironing board, tilting shoe boxes, corduroy laundry bag, silk curtains, built-in radio with self-charging battery, and a small bar. Every rivet is gold-plated, and the best thing of all is that the trunk has twelve ball-bearing roller casters. “A child can push it around.” Oshkosh introduced this child rather suddenly and we didn’t catch the little fellow’s name, but we can see him at his deadly work—pushing the trunk around and around the room in Shepheard’s Hotel while the trunk’s radio blares the latest news of inflation in America and the child’s father tries to overtake the trunk’s bar so that he can pour himself a drink and the child’s mother stands in the vortex wondering whether they hadn’t better try to sell the trunk to a Cairo dentist for the gold there is in it.

  TELEVISION

  12/4/48

  LIKE RADIO, television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing. Already you can detect the first faint signs of this apathy. Already manufacturers are trying to anticipate it, by providing the public with combination sets that offer a triple threat: radio, record playing, and television—all three to be turned on at once, we presume.