by E. B. White
The sentence startled us—as though a bird had flown into the room. Perhaps her statement, so casually spoken yet so poetical, is a useful clue to the grownups’ strange Christmas, the Christmas that often seems so baffling at first, and then so rewarding. At any rate, it suggests the beauty that surrounds the day, the sufficiency of remembrance, the nostalgia that is the source of tears. We are in perfect agreement with the professor at this joyous season; men weep for beauty, for things remembered, for the partridge in the pear tree—the one that their true love brought them and that somehow got mislaid. So we send our greetings to all who laugh or weep or dance or sing, our love to children, our cheers to their embattled parents. To any for whom by some mischance the magical moment fails in reenactment, we give Aunt Caroline’s resolute words: Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.
13
New York
INTERVIEW WITH A SPARROW
4/9/27
YOU HAVE NOTICED, if you go about much with your eyes on the ground, that English sparrows are resident here in great numbers; they are aperch beneath your bench in the Park, they are rather in the way when you are bringing up alongside the curb in crowded streets, they are in evidence generally. At this season the sparrows are particularly conspicuous because they are in love—and love addles any creature and makes him noisy.
As yet the onset of Spring is largely gossip among the spar-rows. Any noon, in Madison Square, you may see one pick up a straw in his beak, put on an air of great business, twisting his head and glancing at the sky. Nothing comes of it. He hops three or four hops, and drops both the straw and the incident.
But it is a sign. Why these birds deliberately endure the hardships of life in town when the wide, fruitful country is theirs for the asking, is a matter of some moment. To content myself on this point I stopped a sparrow recently at the Seventy-second Street entrance of the Park and put the question bluntly.
“Take the matter of food alone,” I suggested. “Certainly the rural districts offer inducements.”
“That,” he replied, “is a common misconception. New York is deceiving. Look at that bench—unpainted, shoddy—and beneath it a drab array of discarded sacks, candy wrappers, and gum labels. But do you (I suppose you don’t) know that thirty-five per cent of all peanuts purchased go uneaten and fall to the ground? They are rich in proteins and carbohydrates.
“Crackerjack is also largely spilled. Every Runkel’s chocolate wrapper contains important fragments. Only a small part of the oats fed horses at noon is eaten by the horses, because nosebags are difficult to manage and the horse ends by tossing the bag high in the air and spilling the contents. I merely mention these as typical.”
The sparrow paused long enough to look into a refuse can.
“Why should I endure the rather stuffy existence in a farm-yard,” he continued, “when I can reside near a bear’s den in a Zoo? Not only is the bear fed out of all proportions to his requirements, leaving me a full crop, but I am also in a position to meet the people, and see them, moreover, in a poor light.
“A man is at his worst when he is standing in front of a bear’s den: he tries to appear contemplative and succeeds only in appearing silly, for he knows nothing about bears or he wouldn’t be there.” I nodded.
“Here in town I can get everything that the country offers, plus the drama, books, the museums, the stimulus of interesting contacts. I took space on a ledge of the Metropolitan two years ago; it afforded an extraordinary outlook on Greek statuary, and influenced my viewpoint. Do you see?”
“But isn’t it crowded here in town?” I asked.
“Living conditions are bad, I admit,” he replied. “The few trees extant are oversubscribed. But one gets along. There is a certain freedom from restraint. I can go any night to Bryant Park, for example, and slip in among the hundreds of birds which roost in the small tree overlooking the newsstand. It is a rowdy bunch (characteristic of Sixth Avenue) but no questions are asked and the next morning I tell my wife I was unavoidably locked in a loft where I had been looking for bits of plaster. Males need to get out of themselves once in a while. Am I making myself clear?” I nodded.
“Besides, people interest me. They are ingenuous to a pleasant degree. I would miss New York were I to make a change. The chimes in the Metropolitan tower—they are mildly amusing; in a way, they get under my feathers. I have even composed words to go with them. Let it go—I won’t bore you with them.
“I go frequently to Gramercy Park, which, as you know, is privately owned. Do you see the humor of it? Sparrows, flying over the fence and perching on the statue of Booth. Merely a crotchet. Have I answered your questions?”
“Yes,” I said, “thanks.”
“One other thing,” the sparrow said. “You may quote me on this, if you like. The upper cables of the Brooklyn Bridge—they are incomparable! I go there for spiritual release. The town hangs like a crystal drip across the west. It gets up from the sea, erect, on an idea. Very likely a spurious idea—I don’t know. Au revoir.”
“Wait a minute,” I cried. “What about love—I forgot to ask.”
“Why, I’m in love. Why not? Possibly a good thing at this fresh season; they are mulching the soil around the perennials in Union Square. Why shouldn’t I shout? Come around in late September, you’ll find me more myself.”
And the sparrow was off, flying low toward infinity.
ASCENSION
3/17/28
THE MEMORY OF old Madison Square Garden still haunts the Square, but a very tangible and very beautiful building has arisen on the spot to dispel it. One of the stirring adventures of this windy Spring is to approach the still unfinished New York Life Insurance Building across the park, with the blue sky of morning for a backdrop. At first the tower, still a dark web of steel, seems predominant, with the supporting structure gleaming white, rising tier by tier, majestically. Then as you get nearer, the tower becomes lost to view behind the vast ramparts, which swim dizzily forward out of white clouds, and put you in your place.
A mighty climber ourself, we got permission to make the ascent the other morning, and after wandering through tomb-like depths peopled by a race of white and restless immortals who dwelt in a gloomy rain of plaster from above, we were inducted into an elevator made of a packing box, and hoisted twenty-three stories. The rest of the distance to the spidery tower was covered afoot, up dark stairs through interminable garrets that should have been full of old trunks and bats. To emerge, at last, on the hurricane deck, five hundred feet above reality, with no railing between us and the shimmering East River, with blocks of limestone pendulous about our head, with a whole new city of workmen trundling barrows of mortar, chipping stone, cutting tin, with blueprints aloft, with the canvas guards of the scaffolding bellying like sails in the breeze—this was a dream and a delight. “What time is it, buddy?” asked a red-headed bricklayer. “Ten of eleven,” we replied, glancing down on the clock of the Metropolitan Tower.
Out of the strange confusion of dust and men was emerging, right under our feet, the modern pyramid—erect and without flaw and high. After five minutes, the sense of great altitude left us, and we discovered ourself peering inquisitively over the edge and poking around boldly on precipitous ledges. Workmen were nursing the great stone blocks into place, each dangling stone tended by a group of three men, while winch drivers sounded their rope signals and filled the air with bell-notes of progress. As the stones were eased down into seats of mortar and were levelled by eager-eyed constructionists, the whole thing grew, a perceptible upward thrust into the sky. It was magic of the most ethereal sort.
From the stone will rise a tall sloping tower of lead-coated copper, sparkling tourelles, and at the very peak (which an earthy little fellow in the engineer’s office told us would be more than six hundred feet high) a bronze lantern.
It struck us, as we watched, that the workmen aloft there should find a mordant glee in rearing such a grand pile for the use of clerks who’ll write pol
icies for groundlings—to whom life, to be sweet, must be insured.
THE NEW YORK GARBAGEMAN
12/6/30
THERE IS NO ONE in all New York we envy more than the garbageman. Not even a fireman gets so much fun out of life. The jolly, jolly garbageman goes banging down the street without a thought for anyone. He clatters his cans as he listeth; he scatters ashes on the winds with never a thought that the wind-blown ash problem was settled in 1899 when the little old one-horse dump carts had covers put on them. He is shrewd in measuring his pace, and goes down the block bit by bit, innocently keeping just to windward of you. He drives like a ward boss through red lights and green, and backs his truck over the crossing with more privilege than a baby carriage on Fifth Avenue. He is as masterful as a pirate and chock-full of gusto. As we watch a garbage crew at work, we momentarily expect to see them burst into song and clink property beakers. Why shouldn’t they? They have the town by the tail and they know it.
CROSSING THE STREET
7/16/32
POSSIBLY YOU HAVE NOTICED this about New Yorkers: instinctively, crossing a one-way street, they glance in the proper direction to detect approaching cars. They always know, without thinking, which way the traffic flows. They glance in the right direction as naturally as a deer sniffs upwind. Yet after that one glance in the direction from which the cars are coming, they always, just before stepping out into the street, also cast one small, quick, furtive look in the opposite direction—from which no cars could possibly come. That tiny glance (which we have noticed over and over again) is the last sacrifice on the altar of human fallibility; it is an indication that people can never quite trust the self-inflicted cosmos, and that they dimly suspect that some day, in the maze of well-regulated vehicles and strong, straight buildings, something will go completely crazy—something big and red and awful will come tearing through town going the wrong way on the one-ways, mowing down all the faithful and the meek. Even if it’s only a fire engine.
VISITING MOTORISTS
12/2/33
FOR SIX DAYS of the week we find it no trouble at all to drive a car about town. New York’s traffic, however furious, is predictable; and her taxis, even in moments of great verve, are accurate. For six days driving is a pleasure, but on Sundays all is changed: the town, we have discovered, fills up with visiting motorists who have come in from the Oranges and the Pelhams to see a movie. They make driving a hazard almost too great to take on. The minute a red light shows, they stop dead, imperiling everybody behind. The instant a taxi seems about to sideswipe them, they swerve desperately over and sideswipe somebody else, usually us. When they are confronted by a mass of pedestrians at the crossing, instead of charging boldly in and scattering them in the orthodox manner by sheer bluster (which is the only way), they creep timidly up blowing their horns, which lulls the pedestrians and ties up everything. They are easy to spot, these visiting motorists; and the only thing to do, we have found, is to nudge them frequently on the bumper, and chivy them about.
NEW YORK IN MARCH
3/2/35
THIS IS THE MOMENT in the year we are glad we’re not on a tropical island, staring fatuously at a hibiscus flower or watching a lizard scale a white wall. The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss—a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye. There is a look in the clouds, a new power in the shafts of sun that tremble on the roofs of the “L” stations, a seductive whisper between snow flurries, an omen in the cold fire-escape shedding its skin. And when at five o’clock we emerge from the Library, where we are at work on a stark Northern proletarian novel called “So Rose the Red,” we stand for a moment on the steps, looking through Forty-first Street to the chimneys in the east, and New York seems a wonderful brisk girl, whose arm we want to take on the way home.
Our deep affection for this galling and preposterous city is hard for some people to believe. Climatically New York amuses us; but an even stronger reason for the town’s seeming habitable to us is that it is practically devoid of civic pride and wastes almost no time spreading its own gospel. At noon today the citizens of Mansfield, O., and Tacoma, Wash., will gather at luncheon clubs to bite the hard roll and taste the sweet coupe municipale. They will swat each other hopefully on the back and discover a mysterious significance in the latest realty report of freight-car loadings. Here, one doesn’t hear the drum-beat at noontime. Our citizens have no notion of establishing, abetting, or recognizing any municipal puissance. When any-body brings up civic grandeur, New York bites its fingernails and gathers wool. Noons are given over to individual stomach disorders and private gain.
MOVING
10/5/35
GOADED BY restlessness and the delusion of greener pastures, we vacated an apartment where we had lived a long time. Four ape men, appearing in the steamy dawn, rolled up the mattresses, collapsed the beds, and with catlike tread removed all our effects, and our ineffects, to the inquisitive street and there wedged them into a red-devil horseless van. They stripped the place clean, to the eye. But as we sat on an empty fruit crate in the living-room, staring at the beloved walls with their un-bleached rectangles where the pictures and mirrors had been, staring at the radiators whose first winter whisperings we will not hear this year, we knew that not even the stalwart movers could wrench loose something that was still there, invisible and ineradicable; we knew that people must inevitably leave some-thing of themselves behind—something besides the mere residue of dust and bent paper clips and fallen coat hangers. We felt we should post a warning to the new tenants that there was something in the walls, musky and pervasive, as when a skunk vacates a nest under a summer cottage. There is sponginess about plaster, absorbing love. Not even a repaint job can quite rid a place of the people who once lived there.
There seems to be an uncommon amount of moving and shuffling about this October. Even old Mr. Eustace Tilley* has quit the pale-green diggings in West Forty-fifth Street where he lived in squalid terror for more than ten years, amid a rabble of importunate writers and artists. The old scamp was seen late one evening last week, his hat awry, his arms full of old wall mottoes, an andiron in his teeth and an unread poem tucked under his belt like a sword, sneaking through an arcade looking for new quarters. The load was too great: after a scant two blocks he gave up the search and took a year’s lease near the top of a bleak redstone manse opposite the five-and-ten, where he can look out at the Harvard Club from the south, instead of from the north, and see directly into the mouths of patients in a dental school. Downstairs is the Life Extension Institute, and when they make too much noise down there, Tilley can be seen in one of his moods of magnificent irritation, drinking brandy neat and rapping on the floor with his cane.
Possessions breed like mice. A man forgets what a raft of irrelevant junk he has collected about him till he tries to move it. We found ourself one afternoon smothered at the bottom of a pile of ghastly miscellany: envelopes engraved with the wrong address, snapshots that had never been pasted up, a mahogany chip belonging to a broken chair, some high-school examination papers, a can of ski wax, several programs of the Millrose games,* a sneaker for the left foot, a build-it-yourself airplane that had never been built, some samples of curtain material, a catcher’s mitt, and a red-and-silver ashtray made from the head of a piston. These objects suddenly seemed to be the possessor, ourself the possessed. An hour later we were wandering dully in the streets seeking lodging in a hotel and passed a little old fellow with all his worldly goods slung on his back in a burlap sack. In his face was written a strange peace.
THE LOOK OF A NATIVE
1/4/36
“HOW,” writes a man from Atlanta (who perhaps has in mind coming to the Fair), “can a stranger in New York make himself look like a stranger, so that other strangers won’t stop him on the street and ask a lot of questions about New York he can’t answer?” That’s an unusual question, and we doubt that it is an honest on
e. Actually, strangers ache to give the appearance of natives. The average New Yorker can spot a stranger in town easily. Strangers are extremely careful not to look up at tall buildings, for fear they will be spotted. They are unable to board a Fifth Avenue bus except after fearful experimentation. They overtip and are under the impression that the only places that sell theatre tickets are agencies.
Our own problem is to make ourself look like a New Yorker. Somehow, in spite of our fine clothes and worldly ways, nobody ever takes us for a native. Beggars, street photographers, men who have just located a nice fur piece, all spot us instantly as fair game. We are the perfect stranger. Probably it’s because, although we have lived in New York all our life, the place never seems anything but slightly incredible, and we go along with our mouth open and our face unbuttoned.
WALKING TO WORK
2/13/37
FROM OUR HOME in the cinder belt to this Forty-third Street pent-up house where we work is a distance of some nine blocks—in a southwesterly direction. It has sometimes occurred to us that we take an unconscionably long time walking it, the time ranging from fifteen minutes to two hours and a half. Three-quarters of an hour is about par. This morning, arriving at work at eleven-thirty, after being on the road for more than an hour, we felt that perhaps we should attempt to reconstruct the journey to see what the hell went on when we were supposed to be covering ground. There were dim memories of many uninspired shop windows, including an imaginary decision involving a pair of madras pajamas, as between the gray with the narrow stripes and the deep blue. There was a pleasant ten minutes standing quietly with others of our ilk, watching a taxi that had hooked onto a limousine, watching the lady in the limousine pretending she had not been hooked onto by the middle classes. There was the slow, steady perusal of a small bag of humus in front of a flower shop (ten cents) and the weighing of the question whether to buy it now—which would mean lugging it both to and from work—or to buy it on the way home, with the strong chance that we’d forget to. There was the pause in front of the art shop’s nude-of-the-day, in company with the gray little group of men (art lovers all), each of us trying to look as though we were interested in gum erasers and Ô squares. There was the slowing of pace in front of Charles & Ernest’s, to see who was getting his hair cut today. There was the pastry shop, with its fascinating handling of yet undigested material. There was Abercrombie’s, effeteness blended with woodcraft; the side trip into the bookshop to examine new titles; the side trip to Radio City to see how the ice looked; the pause while two cats stared each other down in a parking lot. (And, incidentally, why will men stop and watch cats carrying on; women never? Is it be-cause a torn is an unmistakable rake?)
