Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976

by E. B. White

  Our reconstructed journey was not encouraging. The wonder is we arrived at all.

  THE LURE OF NEW YORK

  7/3/37

  THE INQUIRING PHOTOGRAPHER of the Daily News stopped six people the other day and asked them why they loved New York. He got six different answers. One lady said she loved New York because it was vibrant. One man said he loved it because business was good here. These replies made us think of the fine, clear answer which a friend of ours, a Greek shoe-black, once gave to the same question. This gentleman had got sick of New York, had wearied of his little shoe-and-hat parlor with its smell of polish and gasoline, and had gone back to his native island of Keos, where, he told us, he would just swim and fish and lie in the grass while beautiful girls fed him fruit. He was back in town in about four months. We asked him what there was about this city, what mysterious property, that had lured him back from the heaven that was Keos. He thought for a minute. Then he said, “In New York you can buy things so late at night.”

  NEW YORK SOIL

  9/30/50

  AS WE GO TO PRESS we discover that the Friends of the Land are about to hold their harvest-home supper right here in town, in the Statler, across from the depot. Louis Bromfield, the dirt farmer, and Dr. Hugh Bennett, chief of the Soil Conservation Service, are scheduled to speak. We don’t know what the soil is like down there near the Statler but it is probably a heavy clay with a lot of Consolidated Edison roots that haven’t rotted up yet, and it undoubtedly needs top dressing to bring it back. This is a good month to top-dress, and there is no better man on a manure spreader than Bromfield.

  If the Friends of the Land weren’t so numerous, we would invite them to our apartment and take them to our bedroom, so they could look out the window by our desk and study a most inspiring example of Nature’s soil-building. Just outside the window there is a stone coping that forms the top of a high wall. Three years ago an ailanthus seed came to rest on this bare ledge twenty feet above the ground. Encouraged by light rains and heavy sootfall, it germinated. Its root immediately struck solid rock, turned quickly, and found two dead vine leaves, a cigarette butt, and a paper clip. Here were perfect conditions for ailanthus growth. The little tree sprang toward heaven. Through a long, dry summer, watered by occasional fogs from the East River, nourished by mop dust and the slow drift of falling vine leaves, the sapling took hold. Today it stands a stalwart forest giant, as big around as our thumb, lively as a grig, covering its roots a living soil rich in those minerals and organic substances that only the fairest city in the world can scrape together to take care of its own.

  NEW YORK’S COCKTAIL

  1/30/54

  THIS IS A DAY of fog and smoke in equal parts—a city cocktail familiar to all, the pure ingredient contributed by nature, the poisonous one contributed by Man, the mixture served slightly chilled, with a twist of irony. On our way to the office we heard complaints on every hand: the barber, the bus driver, the store-keeper, the elevator operator, all of them clearing their throats nervously, each indignant that pure air was denied him. One of them said, “Nobody does anything. Maybe you write a letter to the paper and it gets printed—so what happens? Nothing.” The city has a debased feeling on its smog days, ill temper and foul air combining to form an unwholesomeness. Buildings fade out in their upper reaches, escarpments grow soft in the yellow haze. Chimneys discharge sable smoke in luscious folds, as when the rich intestines of an animal are exposed by the slaughterer’s knife, and the sulphurous smoke, curling upward, quickly feels the control of the ceiling, turns, and drifts down instead, filling streets, alleys, areaways, parks, sifting through windows and doors, entering the rooms and the offices, even invading the oxygen tents where patients struggle for breath. Being in the city on such a day is like waiting, condemned, in a lethal chamber for the release that has not yet come. Certainly no other animal fouls its nest so cheerfully and persistently as Man, or acts so surprised and sore about it afterward. Everywhere common sense and general welfare await the indulgence of the special business and the particular chimney.

  COPING WITH SOOTFALL

  9/11/54

  A PLAN TO BUILD an outdoor dining terrace at the headquarters of the United Nations, in Turtle Bay, has been abandoned because of “atmospheric conditions”—which is a diplomatic term for sootfall. We happen to be a student of atmospheric conditions in Turtle Bay, having dwelt there happily for many years, and we can testify that sootfall does not preclude terrace life if you have any guts. Our own terrace—a small, decadent structure a few blocks from the U. N.—is a howling success as far as we are concerned, and we are in a good position to give the U. N. a few helpful hints on terrace living under heavy sootfall. First of all, you have to get an awning. The awning is not to ward off soot but merely to give the terrace dweller a cozy feeling. It soon catches fire from cigarettes tossed out of upper windows, but the fire is a clubby affair and you get to know your neighbors (a valuable experience for the United Nations, if you ask us). Next, you’ve got to have a glass-top table and some iron chairs with little thin detachable cushions that fade. Every time you come indoors from the terrace, even if only for a moment, you pick up your cushion and heave it ahead of you through the open door into the living room. If you leave a drink standing on the table to go inside and answer the phone, you simply drape your handkerchief over the glass, and when you come back you dump the soot out of the handkerchief and resume drinking. If the drinks are properly mixed, the soot can lie roundabout, deep and crisp and even, and nobody will mind. Soot is the topsoil of New York, giving plants a foothold, or soothold, on ramparts far above street level. We have a five-year-old ailanthus, a lovely tree, rooted in soot, and we are shocked and discouraged at the capitulation of the United Nations in the face of this mild threat—an organization created to bring peace to the world yet scared to death that some tiny foreign particle is going to fall into its drink.

  THE RAMBLE

  7/30/55

  JUST SOUTH OF the Seventy-ninth Street transverse in the Park, and lying between the East Drive and the West Drive, there is a tract of wild land called the Ramble. Like most urban jungles, it has a somewhat shabby appearance. It is thickly wooded and rocky, and in the middle of it there is a miniature swamp. Paths twist and turn back upon themselves and peter out in dirt trails leading down to the shores of the Seventy-second Street Lake. Except for one peculiarity, the Ramble is no different from dozens of fairly green mansions inside the city limits. What distinguishes it is the fact that, in the magical moments of migration, birds descend into the place in great numbers and in almost unbelievable variety. They ignore other attractive areas in the Park and drop straight into the Ramble. The reason is simple. The place offers good cover and it has water, the two requisites for the peace of mind of small songsters. Because of its phenomenal popularity among transient birds, the Ramble is known to ornithologists and nature students all over the world. They, too, dive straight into it when they come to New York.

  On a hot, airless afternoon recently, we went up to the Park to take what may be our last look at the Ramble. The place has been marked for “improvement” by the Commissioner of Parks,* who plans to unscramble the Ramble, comb its hair, and build a recreation center there for old people—shuffleboard, croquet, television, lawns, umbrella tables, horse-shoe pitching, the works. This strikes us as an unnecessary blunder. Almost any place in Central Park would lend itself to shuffleboard, but the Ramble has lent itself to more than two hundred species of travelling birds. It is truly a fabulous little coppice. On a still summer’s day, it is nothing to write home about; we found it populated by grackles, house sparrows, rats, gray squirrels, lovers, and one gnarled old editorial writer creeping sadly about. But on a morning in May the Ramble is alive with bright song and shy singers. (Soon it will ring with early TV commercials and the click of quoits.)

  The conversion of the Ramble from a wild place to a civilized place, from an amazingly successful bird cover in the heart of the city to a gaming
court, raises a fundamental question in Park administration. City parks are queer places at best; they must provide a green escape from stone and steel, and they must also provide amusement for the escapees—everything from zoos to swings, from ball fields to band shells. The original design of Central Park emphasized nature. The temptation has been to encroach more and more on the jungle. And the temptation grows stronger as more and more citizens die and leave money for memorial structures. It seems to us that if it’s not too late, Mr. Moses should reconsider the matter of the Ramble and find another site for oldsters and their fun-making.

  Robert Cushman Murphy, birdman emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote a letter to the Times not long ago on this subject. Mr. Murphy made the following statement: “There is probably no equal area of open countryside that can match the urban-bounded Ramble with respect to the concentration of birds that funnels down from the sky just before daybreaks of spring.” Think of it! This minuscule Manhattan wildwood taking first place in the daybreaks of spring! It is no trick to outfit a public park for our winter mornings, our fall afternoons, our summer evenings. But the daybreaks of spring—what will substitute for the Ramble when that happy circumstance is tossed away?

  TUMBLEWEED

  2/23/57

  IN A HALF-DESERTED STREET, on a day of high wind, a discarded Christmas tree came bearing down on us, rolling rapidly. “Tumbleweed!” we muttered, dodging to one side, and were suddenly transported to the Western plains and experienced again, after so many years, the excitement of our first meeting with the weed. New York seems able to reproduce almost any natural phenomenon if it’s in the mood.

  NEW YORK

  6/11/55

  THE TWO MOMENTS when New York seems most desirable, when the splendor falls all round about and the city looks like a girl with leaves in her hair, are just as you are leaving and must say goodbye, and just as you return and can say hello. We had one such moment of infatuation not long ago on a warm, airless evening in town, before taking leave of these shores to try another city and another country for a while. There seemed to be a green tree overhanging our head as we sat in exhaustion. All day the fans had sung in offices, the air-conditioners had blown their clammy breath into the rooms, and the brutal sounds of demolition had stung the ear—from buildings that were being knocked down by the destroyers who have no sense of the past. Above our tree, dimly visible in squares of light, the city rose in air. From an open window above us, a whiff of perfume or bath powder drifted down startlingly in the heavy night, somebody having taken a tub to escape the heat. On the tips of some of the branches, a few semiprecious stars settled themselves to rest. There was nothing about the occasion that distinguished it from many another city evening, nothing in particular that we can point to to corroborate our emotion. Yet we somehow tasted New York on our tongue in a great, over-powering draught, and felt that to sail away from so intoxicating a place would be unbearable, even for a brief spell.

  14

  Whims

  CERTAINTIES

  1/9/37

  SEATED BETWEEN TWO INTELLECTUAL giants after dinner, we were borne lightly along on conversation’s wave, from country to country, dipping into problems of empire, the rise and fall of dynasties, the loves and hates of kings, the warrings in Spain, the trends in Russia, strikes, revolutions, diplomacies, the dissolution of peoples; and without a pause heard everything under the sun made plain. We have the deepest envy for anyone who can feel at home with great matters, and who, armed cap-a-pie with information, can see into the motives of rulers and the hearts of subjects, and can answer Yes to this, No to that. Our envy was so strong that when we returned home at midnight and our wife asked us whether, in our opinion, our dog had worms, we answered with a bold Yes, in a moment of vainglory pretending that here was a thing on which we spoke knowingly—though such was far from the case, as we both secretly knew.

  SEPARATIONS

  6/13/31

  IN THE SHORT SPACE of half a block, coming home from lunch, one encounters enough human dismay to keep one from getting any work done all the rest of the afternoon. In a building that had two entrances we happened to see, in one entrance, a girl waiting with apparent impatience and disappointment for somebody we suspected was a man, and in the other entrance a man waiting with just as great disappointment for somebody we didn’t doubt was a girl. Whether to go up to one of them and whisper: “Go to the other entrance”—that was a problem for a noonday pedestrian who worries, as we do, about life’s haphazards. Further along the block, another incident—this time we happened to encounter a kiss. Not a snippy, wornout kiss, but an important emotional kiss of longing or promise. It was meant to be a kiss in parting, but the trouble was that in attempting to part, the two got held up by crosstown traffic, and had to stand right where they were in a silly fashion, waiting for the cars to pass before they could go their separate and significant ways. This spoiled the kiss and the occasion.

  SALUTATIONS

  9/19/31

  STRANGE AS IT MAY SEEM, we continue to receive letters from people interested in the problem—broached by us last June—of the correct salutation to use in a letter to a girls’ school. (Whether to begin “Dear Ladies,” or “My Dears,” or what.) First there is a communication from Thomas O. Mabbott, Ph.D., assistant professor at Hunter College, who says that the head of his department writes “Dear Colleagues.” Appeals for contributions, he says, are likely to employ the feminine pronoun in the body of the text. An etiquette writer in the World-Telegram, propounding the same problem, by a funny coincidence, advises the use of the French “Mesdames,” followed, the writer goes on, “by the customary dash.” A man in Baltimore writes that the Governor of the Virgin Islands once wrote a letter to Goucher College beginning: “To the director of one group of virgins from another,” which we neither believe nor think funny. A doctor’s secretary writes that she was once faced with a similar problem answering a letter from a divine who had signed himself “Your brother in Christ.” She saw no way out except to begin: “Dear Buddy.” Our liveliest communication, however, was from a School and Camp Specialist—a lady who not only claimed that she could tell, by glancing at her files, the sex of every school principal, matron, dean, or trustee in the country, but that furthermore her office was situated right across the street from ours and that if ever we were really stuck for a salutation, we might write the name of the school on a large piece of cardboard, hold it at the window, and she would gladly flash back the sex of the principal. There, we felt, was help.

  LINDBERGH’S GLORY

  5/28/27

  THE LONELY MB. LINDBEBGH made the hop without a cup of coffee. This fact alone startled fifty million Americans who have never been able to get through a working day without one. Furthermore, the flyer came down in France without saying that he did it for the kiddies—un-American and unusual. We loved him immediately.

  We noted that the Spirit of St. Louis had not left the ground ten minutes before it was joined by the Spirit of Me Too. A certain oil was lubricating the engine, a certain brand of tires was the cause of the safe take-off. When the flyer landed in Paris every newspaper was “first to have a correspondent at the plane.” This was a heartening manifestation of that kinship that is among man’s greatest exaltations. It was beautifully and tenderly expressed by the cable Ambassador Herrick sent the boy’s patient mother: “Your incomparable son has done me the honor to be my guest.” We liked that; and for twenty-four hours the world seemed pretty human. At the end of that time we were made uneasy by the volume of vaudeville contracts, testimonial writing and other offers, made by the alchemists who transmute glory into gold. We settled down to the hope that the youthful hero will capitalize himself for only as much money as he reasonably needs.

  DISILLUSION

  2/16/29

  AS WE GROW OLDER, we find ourself groping toward things that give us a sense of security. Grimly we hang to anything firm, immutable. For that reason we’ve always set great store
by clocks in telegraph offices—other clocks could say what they pleased; to us a clock in a telegraph office was in tune with the planets, was Time Itself. So when we happened to pass a Postal Telegraph office the other morning and saw a great palpable lie written across the face of its clock, life seemed to slip away treacherously from under our feet, and the Naval Observatory (to us a vast marble hall set in concrete on a mountain) slowly crumbled before our eyes, a wet and dripping ruin in a bog of quicksand.