Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976

by E. B. White

  HIPPODROME

  2/9/29

  THERE IS SOMETHING ineffably melancholy about the senescence of the Hippodrome—that once gorgeous place. Lately it has catered to the Sixth Avenue trade with such gray trifles as movies, sword swallowers, and pieces of the Wright Whirlwind motors on display in the lobby. Although we know by reading the papers that Sarah Bernhardt, Billy Sunday, and Captain George Fried have trod the Hippodrome’s boards, we happen to belong to the generation to whom the Hippodrome means only one thing—the place where, in the long ago, marvellously beautiful maidens used to walk down a flight of stairs into the water, remain for several minutes, and later appear dripping and nymphlike from the unthinkable depths. Incidentally, it is the mansion where we lost, forever, our childlike faith in our father’s all-embracing knowledge; for when we asked him point-blank what happened to the ladies while they were under the water, his answer was so vague, so evasive, so palpably out of accord with even the simplest laws of physics, that even our child mind sensed its imbecility, and we went our way thereafter alone in the world, seeking for truth.

  OLD COAT

  10/24/31

  “IT IS NOT EVERY MAN,” our tailor writes, “that can afford to wear a shabby coat.” He hit home; for a shabby coat is our one extravagance, the one luxury we have been able to affect. Four winters, now, we have crept about the streets in the cold un-kempt security of a battered Burberry—a thin, inadequate garment, pneumonia written in every seam, a disreputable coat, the despair of friends, the byword of enemies, a coat grown so gossamerlike in texture that merely to catch sight of it hanging in the closet is to feel the chill in one’s marrows. What its peculiar charm is we don’t quite know—whether it is a sop to inelegance, a faint bid for a lost virility, or the simple gesture of the compleat snob. Whatever its hold on us, it has gradually acquired the authentic gentility of an old lady’s limousine, but without any of the limousine’s protection against draughts. All we know is that every icy blast that grips our blue abdomen, every breeze that climbs the shin, feeds the dying fires of our once great spirit; and that as we shrink deeper into the shabbiness of this appalling garment, we find a certain contentment that no tailor could possibly afford us, for all his engraved announcements.

  COLONIZATION

  5/23/36

  AMONG THE UNACCEPTED INVITATIONS that have been kicking around our desk for a couple of weeks is one asking us if we would like to become a member of an island colony—a place “where eugenic considerations would always be central.” The letter seems to be from a Mr. Elmer Pendell, of DuBois, Pa., who points out that the typical community in America has now become atrophied and it is high time for us to colonize another land. He is not without his reasonable doubts as to the success of any such venture, for he candidly poses certain questions. “Would we,” he asks us, “need to make arrangements to supply tobacco, coffee, tea, wine, beer, salt, pepper, other spices—or could these or some of them be left out?” It is the kind of challenge that keeps us pacing around our room when we should be at our work—pacing, pacing, wondering whether we could be eugenic without mace, whether we could pioneer sans paprika.

  FRONTIER

  8/26/39

  A NOTE HAS ARRIVED from the Department of the Interior regarding the Great Smokies, last frontier of the East. Secretary Ickes,* it appears, has decided that the characteristics and habits of the mountain folk must be preserved, along with other natural features of the region—birds, trees, animals. A student of linguistics is at work collecting songs and ballads, and there is a definite movement afoot to encourage the Great Smoky people to continue speaking and acting in a distinctly Early American manner.

  Our government, with its youthful hopes and fears, is some-times hard to follow. Mr. Roosevelt has dwelt at length on the plight of the underprivileged third—ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. But this note from Ickes describes a toothless old grandmother who, though she sleeps on a cornhusk bed and wears no shoes, is apparently the Ideal Woman of the Interior Department. They want to preserve her just as she is—her speech, her homespun garments, her bare feet, her primitive customs, even her rebellious nature (she doesn’t like the North). Well, who’s right? If business is to revive, this old lady has got to buy our American products; she’s got to spruce up her person and her home. She’s got to have an electric orange-squeezer and a suitable tray for serving canapés. She’s got to quit grinding her own meal and buy herself a bag of Gold Medal. She’s got to trade the ox for a Pontiac, and she certainly must quit talking like a hick and get herself a radio, so that she can hear the pure accents of the American merchandiser. Yet if she does, the Great Smokies will be spoiled for Ickes and presumably for the rest of us. What quaint mountains will we drive to, in our restless sedans? What hillbilly program will we tune in on, with our insatiable radios? Truly, a nation in search of a frontier is in the devil of a fine fix.

  BARRYMORE’S IDEAL

  8/26/39

  WE WERE GLAD TO LEARN in the Mirror that John Barrymore has never been in love in his life but is still in search of the Ideal Woman. This incurable romantic streak in Mr. Barrymore, which enables him to be both discourteous to the four women of his ex-choice and idealistic toward the yet unattained she, is a challenge to all males. Furthermore, Mr. Barrymore gave the reporter who interviewed him a description of his ideal, a description which enriches and enlarges the field of American love. He said her aura of glamour would trump the noonday sun, her oomph would be a symphony of tuba horns. With this definition from a member of the Royal Family, Love emerges from old moon-haunted glades and comes out into the broiling sun, where it belongs, among mad dogs and Englishmen. Hark, Chloë, is that the sound of distant tubas?

  BOAT SHOWS

  1/19/52

  THE HEAVIEST CONCENTRATION of New York’s dream life is almost certainly to be found under the roof at the annual Boat Show. Here is where more men can gaze at what they are never going to possess than in any other gathering. A man who is born boat-happy dies boat-happy, and the intervening years are a voyage that may never take him afloat but that keeps him alive. Much of the time, he is in exquisite torture from unfulfilled desire, and spends his hours reading books about the sea. The boating world contains, of course, tiny coracles that are cheap enough to be within the means of practically anybody. But it also contains, as many a man knows, the dream ship that is always just out of sight over the horizon. The second-hand market is not much help. A good boat, strongly built and well maintained, doesn’t depreciate greatly in value, as a car does, and a man may wait thirty years to realize his dream, only to find that by the time he is wealthy enough to buy the boat, he has become too emaciated to hoist sail and get the anchor. A man feels about a boat entirely differently from the way he feels about a car: he falls in love with it, often from afar, and the affair is a secret one—comparable to that of a young girl who sleeps with an actor’s photograph under her pillow. Many an otherwise normal man falls in love with a boat at the age of fourteen, guards his secret well, and dies with it; and the boat is just as beautiful, her profile as lovely, her sheer line as tantalizing, at the time of his death as at the beginning of the affair. When you encounter this poor fellow in Grand Central Palace, poking around among the booths and twiddling with the sheaves of blocks, you would never suspect him of being the Great Lover that he is. He looks just like the next man—which isn’t surprising, for the next man is suffering too.

  LEISURE CLASS

  8/8/53

  WE RAN ACROSS the phrase “leisure class” the other day and it stopped us cold, so quaint did it sound, so fragrant with the spice of yesteryear. You used to read a good deal about the leisure class, but something seems to have happened to it. One thing that may have happened to it is that too many people joined it and the point went out of it. In the big cities, every-body quits work now on Friday, climbs into a car, and beats it. That much is sure. Where these elusive people go we aren’t quite sure, but they do go away, and presumably on the wings of l
eisure. A switchboard operator disappears from the switch-board on a Friday, and the next time you see her a lot of water has gone over the dam and she is unrecognizable because of leisure and exposure to the sun, which serves all classes equally. If your refrigerator quits making ice cubes on a Saturday after-noon (as ours did recently) or if you lose a gall bladder on Times Square after the Saturday-evening show, you might just as well walk over to the river, tie a rock to your foot, and jump in. Your repairman and your doctor are in the Catskills, probably fishing from the same boat. The few glimpses we have had lately of highways, beaches, and mountain-house porches have not been reassuring; these are the classic habitats of the leisure class, but the scenes have been confused and incredibly scrambled, like an infield during a bunt. Leisure used to have a direct relation-ship to wealth, but even that seems to have changed. A lot of people who are independently wealthy cannot properly claim to belong to the leisure class anymore: they are too nerved up to be leisurely and too heavily taxed to be completely relieved of the vulgar burden of finding a livelihood. They, too, swarm out of town on Friday, along with their switchboard operator, and they show up again a few days later, burned and exhausted, ready for another short, feverish period of steady gain, at desk, at dictaphone, at wit’s end.

  15

  Endings and Farewells

  IMMORTALITY

  3/28/36

  THE PUBLISHERS of a forthcoming volume of poetry have advised us that by subscribing to it we can have our name “incorporated into the front matter of the book” along with the names of the other subscribers. This, of course, would immortalize us as a person who once read a book—or at any rate as a person who once intended to read a book. It is not the sort of immortality we crave, our feeling being that deathlessness should be arrived at in a more haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.

  THE LIFE TRIUMPHANT

  7/17/43

  THERE IS A MAN in Indianapolis named William H. Fine, who writes me letters calling me a quitter. I have suffered under the sting of his lash for two or three years without saying anything in my own defense, but the time has come to reply. I am not a quitter and I feel that such a charge could be brought against me only by a person who is not in possession of the facts. Briefly, the facts are these:

  I came to Fine’s attention in the late nineteen-thirties, when I won a contest sponsored by a beer concern. I had to supply the last line of a poem and I did it satisfactorily. The prize was ten dollars. My success aroused Fine’s interest, although he was clear out in Indianapolis, and he wrote congratulating me on my work and introducing himself as “America’s Foremost Con-test Counselor.” Letter followed letter, and soon he had changed his tune and was upbraiding me for lying back on my oars after my early show of promise. Just this morning I heard from him again. His letter began, “A quitter never won any-thing but regrets” and then went on to describe the two distinct types of service Fine offers to contestants to enable them to win prize money. One type is for persons who enter contests regularly, persons for whom Fine has a real affection. The other type is for the flash-in-the-pan sort, the sort Fine thinks I am, the sort who wins one contest and then rests on his laurels. Fine prefers a plodder with guts and perseverance to a merely talented man who lacks staying quality.

  The whole thing would be laughable if it were any charge but “quitting.” Fine assumes, somewhat presumptuously, that he knows all about me. He has sized me up as a one-timer, a one-prize Johnny. The plain fact is, I am a prize-winning fool, victor of a score of contests. Fine just happened to run across me in the beer job, but he was thirty years late. I began winning prizes in 1909, have been at it steadily ever since, and expect to win many more in years to come. At the moment I am vacillating between the Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Co.’s thousand-dollar award for the best letter on “How We Hope to Fix Up Our Home After the War” and the Harper ten-thousand-dollar prize for the best novel by a writer who had not been published prior to January 1,1924. I shall enter one or the other. But that’s in the future, of course, and has an element of uncertainty about it, whereas the past, my past, is something else again. My past is a kaleidoscope in which triumph follows triumph in intricate patterns of prodigious light. My past is an open book, which Fine obviously has not taken the trouble to read.

  The first award I ever received for meritorious work was from the Woman’s Home Companion. The year, as I say, was 1909, or “Oughty Nine” as it was then known. The prize was a copy of “Rab and His Friends,” by John Brown, M.D. I can’t seem to recall what I had to do to win it, but I think likely it was a literary contest. I was something of a writer in those days, as well as a dabbler in the other arts. I still have the postcard which brought me the tidings of that first victory. It is signed “Aunt Janet.” “Assuring you of my constant interest in your work and hoping to see more of it from time to time, Very affectionately, Aunt Janet.”

  Well, what about that, Fine?

  What about the silver badge I copped from the St. Nicholas League?* What about the gold badge? Let me see your badge, Fine! I have a feeling you never even won honorable mention in the puzzles division. Who are you, anyway, to be calling me a quitter?

  My next smashing success in the contest world came in my high-school days. New York State (or it might have been Cornell University, I can’t seem to remember which) was holding out a pretty plum to the winners of a special examination which had been trumped up out of the entire field of human knowledge. The prize was six hundred dollars’ worth of tuition, or fun, at Ithaca. There were four of these prizes to be distributed, one to each assembly district. I took the exam and finished in fifth place, which would have left me out in the cold but for a most unusual and suspicious occurrence. It seems, Fine, that somebody had just divided one of the assembly districts in two, making five districts. A quick stroke of the pen on a wall map somewhere, and I drew the six hundred dollars. That’s the kind of contestant I am, buddies with Lady Luck, my mouth bulging with silver spoons. I have never known who was responsible for cutting the district in two but have always assumed it was one of my relatives. We were a close bunch and pulled together. Still, it was none of my business and I never pried into it.

  The prize money took me to college, where I would have gone anyway, as I was a well-heeled little customer who had gone after the scholarship from pure greed. At Cornell I promptly set to work entering other contests. I went out for track, and I am sorry to say, Fine, that in this particular field your accusation is justified: I quit track. I quit all right, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t run fast, it was on account of a pair of track shoes I had bought from a merchant named Dick Couch. They didn’t fit, that’s the long and short of it. Whenever I wore them I was in torture, and I kept trying to persuade Couch to change them for another pair but he never would, so I spent all my time racing between Couch’s store and my room in North Baker Hall and never had time to participate in any of the formal athletic contests. Of course, it is not for me to say that I would have won any of those races. Nevertheless, I was a swift thing on two legs and as light as a feather.

  What about the way I came through with the winning sonnet in the Bowling Green contest in the old New York Evening Post? Surely you didn’t miss that tourney, Fine? The track experience had been a hard blow but it didn’t break my spirit and I did not quit. I was right in there pitching when Christopher Morley announced a sonnet contest. The prize was a book—one of his own, as a matter of fact. If you have never read that sonnet, Fine, get it and read it.* It will take your breath away. Meritorious as all hell. Fourteen big lines, every one of them a money-winner. Quitter, eh? Quitter my eye. Have you ever written a sonnet when your feet were killing you? A man who can go four years with a pair of track shoes that bind him across the toe and still turn out a workmanlike poem is no quitter. Not in my dull lexicon.

  What about the first horse I ever bet on? That was in Lexington,
Kentucky, where I had gone to seek my fortune in an atmosphere favorable to the competitive spirit. (I had held three or four jobs around New York that winter, but they were prosy things at best and I felt I was losing my fine edge so I got out.) My first horse was a female named Auntie May. She was an odd-looking animal and an eleven-to-one shot, but there was this to be said for her—she came in first. Perhaps you are the type of man, Fine, who doesn’t recognize betting as a contest. You would if you had to run around the track twice, the way the horses did. Kentucky was lovely that spring. I got twenty-two dollars from the contest and would have let it go at that if I had not changed to fall in with some insatiable people who were on their way to Louisville to enter other contests. Sport of kings, Fine. I went along with them. It seems I got hooked in Louisville. The Derby was a little too big for me, I guess. Easy come, easy go. But I didn’t quit. I was temporarily without money but I still had a sonnet or two up my sleeve. After the race I returned to my hotel (I didn’t say I was registered there, I said I returned to my hotel) and wrote a fourteen-line tribute to Morvich, the winning horse, and later that evening sold it to a surprised but accommodating city editor. If you will look in the Louisville Herald for Sunday, May 14,1922, you will find my sonnet and will see how a young, inexperienced man can lose a horse race but still win enough money to get out of town. You needn’t thumb all through the paper, Fine, it’s right on the front page, in a two-column box.

  Kentucky was indeed lovely that spring. Exhausted from my successes and my trials, I spent quite a while just wandering around the state and will always remember one little valley where the whippoorwills—but don’t let me digress.

  My next contest was in Minneapolis. True to form I blew into town just as a limerick contest was in full swing. I came through magnificently. The Minneapolis Journal was offering twenty-five dollars for a last line for a limerick, and I had that knack. A man has to live. The Journal was in search of a suitable conclusion for the following limerick: