This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  “What!” he cried. “What was that?” Nuclear fission had not yet been discovered, but the explosion before us now mounted and thickened abruptly, darkening around its whitish inner fires, and drooping foully along the top. Rumbling and squeaking by turns, waving his arms, the Mayor unloaded his full package. Why, the New York public-school system was the envy of the entire United States—no, the envy of the free world. Boys and girls of all races and origins and from every neighborhood came to it, flourished and grew wise, and were set free. Didn’t spoiled kids like us know anything? Look at Billy Rose! Look at Justice Pecora, Eddie Cantor, Elmer Rice—New York public-school kids all. Borough President Lyons. Jimmy Cagney. Ira Gershwin, Ethel Merman. What about his own wife, Marie La Guardia, who had gone to school on the Lower East Side? Why, he himself, born on Sullivan Street but exiled to distant outposts in his youth (the Mayor’s father had been a United States Army bandmaster), had passed his boyhood yearning only to come back and go to public school in New York. Scrawling excitedly, flipping pages, underlining, David and I tried to capture fragments of the oratory on our narrow notebook pages. Famous city schools abounded, the Little Flower went on—Erasmus Hall, Curtis High, Stuyvesant. Art and music instruction flourished here, as in Athens. Had he mentioned Eddie Cantor? By the third grade, talented city kids were already playing on municipal violins and clarinets, not to mention enjoying a nutritious and delicious hot lunch every day. High-school swimming pools! Foreign languages! Chess clubs! Greek and Latin, even! Football. Calculus— There was a pause, and we looked up to see the Mayor staring at us.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Wayddd a minute! Did you two…?” He pointed a finger. “Why, you kids set me up, didn’t you? You got me going—right?”

  David and I exchanged guilty smiles. My face was hot.

  The Mayor threw up his hands. “Ya got me,” he said. “I’ll be God-damned—I can’t believe it.” He shook his head. “Good night, boys,” he said, picking up some papers. “You got a hell of a story.”

  Yelling and gabbling, David and I crowded onto the rush-hour I.R.T. and rode home in triumph. Each of our La Guardia stories subsequently saw print, and each of us made the paper. Was it that same week or later on, I wonder, when our exploit began to gnaw at me? Why should it have stayed with me all this time? All we had done was to strike an ugly pose, tell a trifling lie, in order to chivy some quotes out of an obliging public figure. How could we have let him down this way? We had behaved like little wise guys, just to get a story. We had become reporters.

  Talk, February, 1999

  ME AND PREW

  The U.S. Open tees off again Thursday, at the Congressional Country Club, in Bethesda, Maryland, and just the other day the Times had a piece revealing that during the Second World War Congressional’s svelte green layout and florid Italianate clubhouse had been the secret training grounds for commandos operating under the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor of the C.I.A. War and golf are strange partners, but not to me. As an Army Air Corps sergeant stationed at Hickam Field, outside Honolulu, in 1944 and 1945, I soon discovered that the private Waialae Country Club, the best course in Hawaii, was reserved for Army enlisted men over the weekends. No officers allowed. I was an editor with the Seventh Air Force G.I. magazine Brief, a lively weekly with a westward beat of about two million square miles. We closed late on Friday night; Saturdays were workdays, but early Sunday often found three or four of us desk guys back at Waialae, where decent rental clubs and open tee times were miraculously available. The course, still the site of the Sony Open on the P.G.A. tour, nestles along the shore near Diamond Head, and it offered windblown palms, stunning surf and skies, and a chance for us to work on our hackers’ games without embarrassment. The left-hand side of one of the outbound holes was weirdly occupied by a spacious fenced-off zoo, and I can still recall setting up for my 7-iron recovery from another drive hooked into the weeds while under scrutiny by an adjacent kudu or giraffe.

  Back to the war—or ahead, rather, about nine years, to a Rockland County movie theatre, where, a civilian again and a suburbanite, I am watching an early run of the classic Fred Zinnemann film of the James Jones novel “From Here to Eternity,” which, of course, is all about the regular Army in Oahu before and just after Pearl Harbor. My war, I think to myself. Yow, this time they got it right. Burt Lancaster is just like my old First, minus the gut. Those are the Schofield Barracks balconies. Here are the beaten-down Maggio and Prewitt, a.k.a. Frank Sinatra and Montgomery Clift, down on their knees on another chickenshit fatigue duty; here are Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making out on the sand in swimsuits; here’s the sadistic Fatso knifed in the belly; here come the Japanese planes. And here’s Prew again, AWOL and on the lam, bravely trying to rejoin his company under the cover of night, now that we’re at war. It’s a day-for-night scene, actually, with palm trees and a shorefront, and Diamond Head out beyond in silhouette. “Halt!” cries a soldier in a tin hat. (Wisely, our guys are guarding the shore against potential saboteurs.) The soldier raises his rifle and fires. Prew dodges.

  A burst of machine-gun fire. Prew, hit, clutches himself, spins, and disappears over the rim of a little knoll.

  “My God!” I say, rising in the Nyack dark. “That’s the first hole—I was there, I was there! I’ve been in that trap a hundred times!”

  Post, June, 2011

  PAST MASTERS: E. B. WHITE

  FOREWORD TO THE 1997 TILBURY HOUSE EDITION OF “ONE MAN’S MEAT” BY E. B. WHITE

  Modest in its size and presumptions, engaging in tone, E. B. White’s “One Man’s Meat” has resisted becoming historic, even after a nonstop run of fifty-five years in print. Perhaps now, with this fresh edition, we should allow the laurel to descend, although we may be certain (the moment we open its pages) that the author would wince at the ceremony, or simply not attend.

  First published in 1942 and reissued in expanded form two years later, the book was unweighty by design, being not a sustained single work but a compilation of the writer’s monthly columns for Harper’s (which he had begun writing in 1938), along with three casual essays first published in The New Yorker. Because of this format and the format of the author’s mind, the book has always had the heft, the light usefulness, of a bushel basket, carrying a raking of daily or seasonal notions, and, on the next short trip, the heavier burden of an idea. (The image owes much to White himself, whose remembered easy, unstriding walk across a pasture or down the shore road of his Maine farm remains unique, as does his touch with the homely utensils of prose.) Strewn with errands and asterisks, farming tips and changes of weather, notes on animals and neighbors and statesmen, “One Man’s Meat” is too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal. Perhaps it’s a primer: a countryman’s lessons that convey, at each reading, a sense of early-morning clarity and possibility.

  E. B. White in the 1940s (Credit 5.1)

  When White first removed, with his wife and young son, from a walk-up duplex on East Forty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, and went to live on a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, he seemed almost eager, in his early columns, to detect even the smallest signs of awkwardness in himself in his fresh surroundings (as when he found himself crossing the barnyard with a paper napkin in one hand), but the surge of alteration that overtook him and swept him along over the full six-year span of the book quickly did away with these little ironies. Despite its tranquil setting, this is a book about movement—the rush of the day, the flood and ebb of the icy Penobscot Bay tides, the unsettlements of New England weather, the arrival of another season and its quick (or so it seems) dispersal, the birth and death of livestock, and the coming of a world war that is first seen at a distance (White is shingling his barn roof during the Munich crisis), then sweeps across Europe (he is fixing a balky brooder stove during the German spring drive in the Balkans), and at last comes home (he mans a town plane-spotting post and finds a heron) to impose its binding and oddly exu
berant hold on everyone’s attention.

  Another change, though we don’t pick it up at first, is in White himself. Early effusions about the beauty of the egg, some Thoreauvian phrasings (“It is not likely that a man who changes his pursuits will ever succeed in taking on the character or appearance of a new man”), or a New Yorkerish dying fall about a faded wooden croquet set give way to more direct and more satisfying stuff about the way to build a dry-mash hopper, the obligations of freedom, and useful stratagems against cold weather. He had grown up (he turns forty in mid-book), and he was too busy around the place to be a full-time stylist. I think “One Man’s Meat” was the making of him as a writer. Freed of the weekly deadlines and the quaintsy first-person plural form of the New Yorker’s Notes and Comment page, which he had written for more than a decade, he discovered his subject (it was himself) and a voice that spoke softly but rang true. “Once More to the Lake,” his 1941 account of a trip with his son back to the freshwater lake where he had vacationed as a boy, is an enduring American essay—and could not have been written until its precise moment. “Stuart Little,” “Charlotte’s Web,” and ten other books and collections were still ahead, but the author had found his feet.

  What also becomes plain in the book is that Andy White was a born farmer—not so much an agriculturist as a handyman. He relished the work and he was good at it. He laughs at his preparations for taking on a cow (the first time he leads her out into the pasture he feels “the way I did the first time I ever took a girl to the theatre—embarrassed but elated”), but he is no gentleman farmer. While reading the late chapters “Winter Diary,” “My Day,” and “Memorandum” (a list of some two hundred chores around the place that demanded immediate attention), you envy him the work but even more the sensual pleasure of its details and the workman’s hoard of expertise. Not much escapes his eye, whether it lights on a loose tailboard or a dopey moment in a movie, the bloated appearance of late-model automobile fenders or some fashionable and ugly trends in thought he finds afloat at the moment when the Nazi armies are overrunning France, but his powers of observation somehow go deeper the moment he concentrates on something small and at hand—the little running sea on the surface of the hens’ watering fountain on a windy morning; the dainty grimace of the dachshund, Fred, as he licks up a fresh-fallen egg on the cellar floor.

  Because White is such a prime noticer it is a while before a reader becomes aware of how much he has chosen to leave out of the book. There is very little here about his wife, Katharine—who was pursuing a demanding job of her own as an editor-by-mail with The New Yorker all this time, as well as running the household—and not much more about their schoolboy son, Joel. The ineffable Fred almost has a larger part in the daily drama, as does the neighbor lobsterman, Dameron. Nor do we hear about the help required to keep an operation of this sort afloat: the full-time hired man and his occasional assistants, and a cook and a housemaid indoors. These gaps have been commented upon in critical and biographical writings about White, but it is not my memory that he was any more heedless of those around him than most authors are; neither was he uneasy or apologetic about the comforts of his multi-income, triple-profession household. The omissions arise from his instinctive, lifelong sense of privacy—a dated, almost Victorian consideration in these confessional times—and must also be attributed to the writer’s sense that this story, however it turned out, was not going to be about the enveloping distractions of family life. The privacy was extended to himself, as well; there is more of Andy White left out of his writings than was ever put in.

  —

  EVEN AS THE WAR engaged the full energies of the Whites’ farm—among his production goals for 1942 are four thousand dozen eggs, ten pigs, and nine thousand pounds of milk—news of it remained thin, by today’s measurements. The engrossing events from Europe and Washington, arriving by radio and mailed newspapers, did not take up much of the day, and the writer, to judge by his pieces, responded by thinking more and more about the world at large and his place in it. Engaging himself in long colloquies about freedom and the chances of world federalism, once peace came, he goes one on one with his government, even as he accedes to its demands on his time and supports its immense gatherings and expenditures of men and matériel. People of my generation are often asked now what it was like to live in a nation engaged in a popular, all-encompassing war, and “One Man’s Meat” provides a vivid answer. White covered the war—at bond rallies, at civilian-defense centers—but also noticed that the passionate new love of Americans for America was a patriotism that would have to be relinquished, at least in part, if the world was ever to achieve a lasting peace. Elsewhere, he wrote that the hardest thing about the war was to maintain a decent sense of indignation about its deadly details.

  Much of this, perhaps most of it, sounds naïve to us now, in our time of instant access to bad news everywhere and surly apathy about it all. If truth be told, White’s passionate essays on world government sounded idealistic and simplistic even in their time—he was not a pundit by nature—but what we can honor him for, then and now, is his clear conviction (no one was ever clearer on the written page) that he is qualified to think about freedom, all on his own, and to address his reader as one citizen to another about such urgent business. Who among us can be certain that when another time as vivid and dangerous sweeps us up we will find an E. B. White somewhere, to talk to us in these quiet and compelling tones?

  April, 1997

  FOREWORD TO THE FOURTH EDITION OF “ELEMENTS OF STYLE,” PEARSON/LONGMAN

  The first writer I watched at work was my stepfather, E. B. White. Each Tuesday morning, he would close his study door and sit down to write the Notes and Comment page for The New Yorker. The task was familiar to him—he was required to file a few hundred words of editorial or personal commentary on some topic in or out of the news that week—but the sounds of his typewriter from his room came in hesitant bursts, with long silences in between. Hours went by. Summoned at last for lunch, he was silent and preoccupied, and soon excused himself to get back to the job. When the copy went off at last, in the afternoon R.F.D. pouch—we were in Maine, a day’s mail away from New York—he rarely seemed satisfied. “It isn’t good enough,” he said sometimes. “I wish it were better.”

  Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time. Less frequent practitioners—the job applicant; the business executive with an annual report to get out; the high-school senior with a Faulkner assignment; the graduate-school student with her thesis proposal; the writer of a letter of condolence—often get stuck in an awkward passage or find a muddle on their screens, and then blame themselves. What should be easy and flowing looks tangled or feeble or overblown—not what was meant at all. What’s wrong with me, each one thinks. Why can’t I get this right?

  It was this recurring question, put to himself, that must have inspired White to revive and add to a textbook by a Cornell English professor of his, Will Strunk, Jr., that he had first read in college, and to get it published. The result, this quiet book, has been in print for forty years, and has offered more than ten million writers a helping hand. White knew that a compendium of specific tips—about singular and plural verbs, parentheses, the “that”-“which” scuffle, and many others—could clear up a recalcitrant sentence or subclause when quickly reconsulted, and that the larger principles needed to be kept in plain sight, like a wall sampler.

  How simple they look, set down here in White’s last chapter: “Write in a way that comes naturally,” “Revise and rewrite,” “Do not explain too much,” and the rest; above all, the cleansing, clarion “Be clear.” How often I have turned to them, in the book or in my mind, while trying to start or unblock or revise some piece of my own writing! They help—they really do. They work. They are the way.

  E. B. White’s prose is celebrated for its ease and clarity—just think of “Charlotte’s Web”—but maintaining this standard required endless attention. When the new issue of The New Yorker turned up in Maine
, I sometimes saw him reading his Comment piece over to himself, with only a slightly different expression than the one he’d worn on the day it went off. Well, O.K., he seemed to be saying. At least I got the elements right.

  —

  THIS EDITION HAS BEEN modestly updated, with word processors and air conditioners making their first appearance among White’s references, and with a light redistribution of genders to permit a feminine pronoun or female farmer to take their places among the males who once innocently served him. Sylvia Plath has knocked Keats out of the box, and I notice that “America” has become “this country” in a sample text, to forestall a subsequent and possibly demeaning “she” in the same paragraph. What is not here is anything about e-mail—the rules-free, lower-case flow that cheerfully keeps us in touch these days. E-mail is conversation, and it may be replacing the sweet and endless talking we once sustained (and tucked away) within the informal letter. But we are all writers and readers as well as communicators, with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves (as White put it) with the clear and almost perfect thought.

  1999

  MOOSE TALES

  At lunch yesterday, a friend of mine said she’d almost run into a moose last weekend, on a back road in the Berkshires. It wasn’t till later that I remembered a moose tale told to me by a college classmate, along about 1940. Heading home to Maine on the evening before Thanksgiving, he’d been riding in a local Bangor & Maine passenger car, up in Hancock County, when there was a bang and the train came to a halt in a stretch of silent woods. They’d hit a moose. It took almost forty-five minutes before the crew could get the carcass off the track, and they started up again. Twenty minutes later, the train stopped again, for another twenty minutes or so, then resumed its leisurely journey to Ellsworth.