by E. B. White
A young man who liked to rock boats
In order to get people’s goats
Gave just one more rock
Then suffered a shock
To thousands of residents of Minneapolis, this was a poser, but it was just my oyster. I sent in the surefire line “A bubble the spot now denotes.” It rhymed, it was the right metre, and it was catchy. It had the mark on it of an experienced prize-winner. Apparently there was no question among the judges, once they came upon it. From among the thousands of other entries, it stood out as though etched in flame. The money was very welcome, when I received it, and as a matter of fact I could have used fifty rather than twenty-five, because I managed to dislocate my elbow about that time (no contest, just straight sailing) and was in the clutches of a medical man. I often think of those other Minneapolitans who got only honorable mention from all the effort they put into that contest—Stephen H. Brown, O. A. Glasow, Minnie R. Long, V. M. Arbogast, Ì. D. Rudolph. Talented people, all of them, but lacking that curious spark that touches off a genuine money-winner.
After my Minneapolis triumph there was a lapse of several years, a dull period, Fine, when I lay fallow and roused myself only long enough to produce a few listless pentameters in praise of coffee for some sort of promotion scheme cooked up by the caffeine interests. But once a contestant always a contestant. In 1929 I was again active in prize circles. I won the gold watch offered by Franklin P. Adams for the best “Conning Tower” poem of the year.* What if the watch doesn’t keep time any more, I won it, didn’t I? Who wants to know what time it is? It’s no trick, in this world, to find out what time it is—you can glance into any barbershop—the trick is to win something. Then the beer concern came along and I ran away with that. The end is not in sight. About a year ago I spent a good deal of time working on the Ten Crown Activated Charcoal Gum gold-watch award for the best line to go with “Ten Crown Gum Helps Keep Teeth White” but got distracted by the Harper-i25th-anniversary-twelve-thousand-dollar prize for the best piece of non-fiction. I hung fire so long I missed the bus in both contests. Chewing gum got scarce and the Ten Crown people either went off the air entirely or else my battery set got so run down I couldn’t hear it any more, and the Harper offer expired.
This year, as I say, I am hesitating between the Alex Smith Dream Home contest and the Harper fiction thing. As I write this, I have only sixteen days to go on the Harper novel, but I have thought of a last line and I figure that if a man has a good last line he can build up the preliminary stuff in short order. I am also in line for an award from “Information Please”—they still have a question of mine. I asked them if they could tell the difference between a sow, a shoat, a boar, a pig, a hog, a gilt, and a barrow. So far they have not used the question and I can only assume that it is a little too hard for them. They’re always shying away from things they don’t know and getting back to Gilbert and Sullivan.
Well, I have spread my record before you, Fine. I’m not making any exorbitant claims for myself. In fact, I’m just an ordinary fellow in many ways, but I want to make it plain that this is not the record of a quitter and I shall expect you to stop using that word about me. When I decide to quit in the great contest of life, I’ll drop you a card. Maybe I’ll sign it Aunt Janet. Meantime, I’ll thank you to mind your manners.
DOOMSDAY
11/17/45
THE WORLD, says Wells,* is at the end of its tether. “The end of everything we call life is close at hand,” he writes in his last literary statement, distributed by International News Service. We note, however, that Mr. Wells went to the trouble of taking out a world copyright on his world’s-end article. A prophet who was firmly convinced that the jig was up wouldn’t feel any need of protecting his rights. We charge Mr. Wells with trying to play doom both ways.
Wells has been a good prophet, as prophets go, and his crystal-gazing is not to be sniffed at. And even lesser prophets, these days, can feel that “frightful queerness” that he says has come into life. At the risk, however, of seeming to suggest the continuance of life on earth, we must admit that we found the Wells article unconvincing in places. It is not clear yet, at any rate, whether the world is at the end of its tether or whether Wells is merely at the end of his. His description is not so much of the end of life in the world as of the end of his ability to figure life out. The two are not necessarily identical.
Wells is seventy-nine, and it is possible, of course, that he confuses his own terminal sensations with universal twilight, and that his doom is merely a case of mistaken identity. Most writers find the world and themselves practically interchangeable, and in a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs. We hope Mr. Wells is wrong for once and that man is not the suicide he looks at the moment. Man is unpredictable, despite Mr. Wells’ good record. On Monday, man may be hysterical with doom, and on Tuesday you will find him opening the Doomsday Bar & Grill and settling down for another thousand years of terrifying queerness.
H. W. ROSS
12/15/51
ROSS* DIED IN BOSTON, unexpectedly, on the night of December 6th, and we are writing this in New York (unexpectedly) on the morning of December 7th. This is known, in these offices that Ross was so fond of, as a jam. Ross always knew when we were in a jam, and usually got on the phone to offer advice and comfort and support. When our phone rang just now, and in that split second before the mind focusses, we thought, “Good! Here it comes!” But this old connection is broken beyond fixing. The phone has lost its power to explode at the right moment and in the right way.
Actually, things are not going as badly as they might; the sheet of copy paper in the machine is not as hard to face as we feared. Sometimes a love letter writes itself, and we love Ross so, and bear him such respect, that these quick notes, which purport to record the sorrow that runs through here and dissolves so many people, cannot possibly seem overstated or silly. Ross, even on this terrible day, is a hard man to keep quiet; he obtrudes—his face, his voice, his manner, even his amused interest in the critical proceedings. If he were accorded the questionable privilege of stopping by here for a few minutes, he would gorge himself on the minor technical problems that a magazine faces when it must do something in a hurry and against some sort of odds—in this case, emotional ones of al-most overpowering weight. He would be far more interested in the grinding of the machinery than in what was being said about him.
All morning, people have wandered in and out of our cell, some tearfully, some guardedly, some boisterously, most of them long-time friends in various stages of repair. We have amused ourself thinking of Ross’s reaction to this flow. “Never bother a writer” was one of his strongest principles. He used to love to drop in, himself, and sit around, but was uneasy the whole time because of the carking feeling that if only he would get up and go away, we might settle down to work and produce something. To him, a writer at work, whether in the office or anywhere in the outside world, was an extraordinarily interesting, valuable, but fragile object; and he half expected it to fall into a thousand pieces at any moment.
The report of Ross’s death came over the telephone in a three-word sentence that somehow managed to embody all the faults that Ross devoted his life to correcting. A grief-stricken friend in Boston, charged with the task of spreading the news but too dazed to talk sensibly, said, “It’s all over.” He meant that Ross was dead, but the listener took it to mean that the operation was over. Here, in three easy words, were the ambiguity, the euphemistic softness, the verbal infirmity that Harold W. Ross spent his life thrusting at. Ross regarded every sentence as the enemy, and believed that if a man watched closely enough, he would discover the vulnerable spot, the essential weakness. He devoted his life to making the weak strong—a rather specialized form of blood transfusion, to be sure, but one that he believed i
n with such a consuming passion that his spirit infected others and inspired them, and lifted them. Whatever it was, this contagion, this vapor in these marshes, it spread. None escaped it. Nor is it likely to be dissipated in a hurry.
His ambition was to publish one good magazine, not a string of successful ones, and he thought of The New Yorker as a sort of movement. He came equipped with not much knowledge and only two books—Webster’s Dictionary and Fowler’s “Modern English Usage.” These books were his history, his geography, his literature, his art, his music, his everything. Some people found Ross’s scholastic deficiencies quite appalling, and were not sure they had met the right man. But he was the right man, and the only question was whether the other fellow was capable of being tuned to Ross’s vibrations. Ross had a thing that is at least as good as, and sometimes better than, knowledge: he had a sort of natural drive in the right direction, plus a complete respect for the work and ideas and opinions of others. It took a little while to get on to the fact that Ross, more violently than almost anybody, was proceeding in a good direction, and carrying others along with him, under torrential conditions. He was like a boat being driven at the mercy of some internal squall, a disturbance he himself only half understood, and of which he was at times suspicious.
In a way, he was a lucky man. For a monument he has the magazine to date—one thousand three hundred and ninety-nine issues, born in the toil and pain that can be appreciated only by those who helped in the delivery room. These are his. They stand, unchangeable and open for inspection. We are, of course, not in a position to estimate the monument, even if we were in the mood to. But we are able to state one thing un-equivocally: Ross set up a great target and pounded himself to pieces trying to hit it square in the middle. His dream was a simple dream; it was pure and had no frills: he wanted the magazine to be good, to be funny, and to be fair.
We say he was lucky. Some people cordially disliked him. Some were amused but not impressed. And then, last, there are the ones we have been seeing today, the ones who loved him and had him for a friend—people he looked after, and who looked after him. These last are the ones who worked close enough to him, and long enough with him, to cross over the barrier reef of noisy shallows that ringed him, into the lagoon that was Ross himself—a rewarding, and even enchanting, and relatively quiet place, utterly trustworthy as an anchorage. Maybe these people had all the luck. The entrance wasn’t al-ways easy to find.
He left a note on our desk one day apropos of something that had pleased him in the magazine. The note simply said, “I am encouraged to go on.” That is about the way we feel today, because of his contribution. We are encouraged to go on.
When you took leave of Ross, after a calm or stormy meeting, he always ended with the phrase that has become as much a part of the office as the paint on the walls. He would wave his limp hand, gesturing you away. “All right,” he would say. “God bless you.” Considering Ross’s temperament and habits, this was a rather odd expression. He usually took God’s name in vain if he took it at all. But when he sent you away with this benediction, which he uttered briskly and affectionately, and in which he and God seemed all scrambled together, it carried a warmth and sincerity that never failed to carry over. The words are so familiar to his helpers and friends here that they provide the only possible way to conclude this hasty notice and to take our leave. We cannot convey his manner. But with much love in our heart, we say, for everybody, “All right, Ross. God bless you!”
JAMES THURBER
11/11/61
I AM ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES: I knew him before blindness hit him, before fame hit him, and I tend always to think of him as a young artist in a small office in a big city, with all the world still ahead. It was a fine thing to be young and at work in New York for a new magazine when Thurber was young and at work, and I will always be glad that this happened to me.
It was fortunate that we got on well; the office we shared was the size of a hall bedroom. There was just room enough for two men, two typewriters, and a stack of copy paper. The copy paper disappeared at a scandalous rate—not because our production was high (although it was) but because Thurber used copy paper as the natural receptacle for discarded sorrows, immediate joys, stale dreams, golden prophecies, and messages of good cheer to the outside world and to fellow-workers. His mind was never at rest, and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action. The whole world knows what a funny man he was, but you had to sit next to him day after day to understand the extravagance of his clowning, the wildness and subtlety of his thinking, and the intensity of his interest in others and his sympathy for their dilemmas—dilemmas that he instantly enlarged, put in focus, and made immortal, just as he enlarged and made immortal the strange goings on in the Ohio home of his boyhood. His waking dreams and his sleeping dreams commingled shamelessly and uproariously. Ohio was never far from his thoughts, and when he received a medal from his home state in 1953, he wrote, “The clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.” It is a beautiful sentence and a revealing one.
He was both a practitioner of humor and a defender of it. The day he died, I came on a letter from him, dictated to a secretary and signed in pencil with his sightless and enormous “Jim.” “Every dme is a time for humor,” he wrote. “I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.” Once, I remember, he heard someone say that humor is a shield, not a sword, and it made him mad. He wasn’t going to have anyone beating his sword into a shield. That “surgeon,” incidentally, is pure Mitty. During his happiest years, Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
Although he is best known for “Walter Mitty” and “The Male Animal,” the book of his I like best is “The Last Flower.” In it you will find his faith in the renewal of life, his feeling for the beauty and fragility of life on earth. Like all good writers, he fashioned his own best obituary notice. Nobody else can add to the record, much as he might like to. And of all the flowers, real and figurative, that will find their way to Thurber’s last resting place, the one that will remain fresh and wiltproof is the little flower he himself drew, on the last page of that lovely book.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
11/30/63
WHEN WE THINK OF HIM, he is without a hat, standing in the wind and the weather. He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to confront and to enjoy the cold and the wind of these times, whether the winds of nature or the winds of political circumstance and national danger. He died of exposure, but in a way that he would have settled for—in the line of duty, and with his friends and enemies all around, supporting him and shooting at him. It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.
Selective Bibliography
I. PRIMARY SOURCES: E. B. WHITE
A. Books
Another Ho Hum: More Newsbreaks from The New Yorker. New York: Farrar, 1932.
Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper, 1952.
An E. B. White Reader. Ed. William W. Watt and Robert W. Bradford. New York: Harper, 1966.
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. New York: Macmillan, 1959; 2nd rev., 1972; 3rd rev., 1979.
Essays of E. B. White. New York: Harper, 1977.
Every Day Is Saturday. New York: Harper, 1934. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1967.
Farewell to Model Ô by Lee Strout White [pseud.]. New York: Putnam’s, 1936.
The Fox Of Peapack and Other Poems. New York: Harper, 1938. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1967.
Here Is New York. New York: Harper, 1949. New York: Warner, 1988.
&nb
sp; Ho Hum: Newsbreaks from The New Yorker. New York: Farrar, 1931.
Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel the Way You Do by James Thurber and E. B. White. New York: Harper, 1929. With new introduction by White, New York: Harper, 1950. White wrote the Foreword, Chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, “Answers to Hard Questions,” and “A Note on the Drawings in this Book.”
The Lady Is Cold: Poems by E. B. White. New York: Harper, 1929. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1967.
Letters of E. B. White. Ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth. New York: Harper, 1976.
One Man’s Meat. New York: Harper, 1942. One Man’s Meat: A New and Enlarged Edition. New York: Harper, 1944. One Man’s Meat. With Introduction by Morris Bishop, New York: Harper, 1950; with Introduction by Walter Blair, New York: Harper, 1964; with Introduction by E. B. White, New York: Harper, 1983.
Poems and Sketches of E. B. White. New York: Harper, 1981.
The Points of My Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South. New York: Harper, 1962.
Quo Vadimus? Or the Case for the Bicycle. New York: Harper, 1939. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1972.
The Second Tree from the Corner. New York: Harper, 1954; with “E. B. White: An Appreciation” by William W. Watt, New York: Harper, 1962; with new introduction by E. B. White, New York: Harper, 1984.
Stuart Little. New York: Harper, 1945. Stuart Little [first five chapters], Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1963. Stuart Little in the School-room [12th chapter of Stuart Little], New York: Harper, 1962.
The Trumpet of the Swan. New York: Harper, 1970.
The Wild Flag: Editorials from The New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters. Boston: Houghton, 1946. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1967.
