by E. B. White
I don’t think you can mistake my meaning, and I’m not going to let you. If there were anything to talk about, I would certainly come to see you. But there’s nothing that I can’t say or won’t say in this letter. After all, what you may think of me now will be no worse than what you have been thinking. Your imagination has overemphasized things: I’m not as bad as you think, and I’m not as good. I didn’t intend to play any trick on you or to take any advantage; I have too much respect for your intelligence to suppose that you want any sort of apology or sidestepping. I think you wanted a lot of facts, and I guess they’re all set down. It wasn’t exactly easy. If I had to write another letter like this I’d turn my few little hairs quite grey. The only unfortunate part is that your letter was not forwarded so that I could have answered right away.
Andy
Monday
I was so tired last night, my letter didn’t contain quite all that I wanted. It sounds chopped off at the end. The thing I want you to believe is that I am sorry. It isn’t hard for me to endure my bungling ways because I am used to them by this time; but I can understand that it’s hard on the other people. My thoughts, like persons in a doorway, crowd forward and won’t let each other through. It’s strange that you—the last person in the world I’d wish to hurt—are the one I’ve treated worst. And of course the damnable part is that there’s nothing that can be done about it. If there had been, I would have come to Buffalo a long while ago whether you invited me or not.
I haven’t the slightest suspicion that I played fair with you; but I don’t want you to have the slightest suspicion that I tried anything else. Failing to understand the game, I should have kept out. Nobody ever does keep out, though, and that’s why it remains perpetually interesting and eternally comic. It’s lucky you wrote me letters enough to precipitate this one, because it’s better written than unwritten, and it’s certainly going to be sent.
Make lots of money and treat me to a show when you come to New York: I haven’t got a job.
A.
III
THE NEW YORKER—EARLY DAYS
1926–1928
* * *
• On his return from the West in the fall of 1923, White went to work in the advertising business, first with Frank Seaman & Company at $25 a week, then with J. H. Newmark at $30. For two years he lived with his parents in Mount Vernon and commuted to work, but life at home was irksome and White did not like commuting. One of his first poems in The New Yorker was a quatrain about the commuting life: COMMUTER—one who spends his life/ In riding to and from his wife;/ A man who shaves and takes a train/ And then rides back to shave again.
In November 1925, he moved into 112 West 13th Street, which he describes as “a Manhattan refuge for struggling Cornellians.” For quite a while, the four occupants of the apartment were White, Gus Lobrano, Burke Dowling (Bob) Adams, and Mitchell T. (Mike) Galbreath. The place was a typical Pullman flat—living room on the street side, bedroom in back with two double-decker beds, and, in between the two rooms, an illegal kitchen. This was White’s first experience of life in Manhattan. “Everything was great,” he later said, “everything was exciting, except that for much of the time I didn’t have a job, having drifted out of advertising, which I hated. Galbreath worked for McGraw-Hill, Adams and Lobrano worked for the Cunard Line. They would depart for work in the morning, leaving me to do the breakfast dishes and tidy up the joint. I acquired a caged bird to keep me company and tried my hand at free lancing—nothing new for me, as I had been submitting poems and sketches to newspapers and magazines for years. F. P. A. had used a poem or two in the Conning Tower, Christopher Morley had published a sonnet to a bantam rooster—for which I won a prize, competing with other sonneteers. To appear in the Conning Tower gave a young poet a great lift to the spirit: it did not give him any money. The arrival on the scene of Harold Ross’s New Yorker, February 21, 1925, was a turning point in my life, although I did not know it at the time. I bought a copy of the first issue at a newsstand in Grand Central, examined Eustace Tilley and his butterfly on the cover, and was attracted to the newborn magazine not because it had any great merit but because the items were short, relaxed, and sometimes funny. I was a ‘short’ writer, and I lost no time in submitting squibs and poems. In return I received a few small checks and the satisfaction of seeing myself in print as a pro.”
By 1926, Ross was encouraging White to join the staff and asking him to drop in at the office. One day, he later remembered, he did drop in, and the editor who came into the reception room to greet him was Katharine (Mrs. Ernest) Angell. “I noted that she had a lot of back hair [a bun] and the knack of making a young contributor feel at ease. I sat there peacefully gazing at the classic features of my future wife without, as usual, knowing what I was doing.”
For a writer the lowliest job on the magazine was the newsbreak job—editing the little fillers from other papers and writing punchlines for them. White was given a batch to try, and Ross was so pleased with the results he phoned White to tell him so. In 1926, however, White was not chiefly preoccupied either with The New Yorker or with his future wife—he was preoccupied with a dark-haired girl from Birmingham, Alabama, named Mary Osborn. She lived on Jones Street. He was in love again, and, true to form, spent a good bit of time that year avoiding love’s entanglements. He visited Ithaca, he walked through the Shenandoah Valley, he made a trip to Washington, D.C., and finally, in July, he sailed for Europe aboard the Cunard Line’s Andania—a free trip abroad in return for his writing the script for a promotional film for Cunard. He says that he communicated his more passionate feelings to Mary chiefly in poems, which he dispatched to the newspaper columnists of the day in hopes that they would be published and that she would see them. At least two of these love poems—“The Circus” and “Coldly, to the Bronze Bust of Holley in Washington Square”—were published and (presumably) seen by the lady in question; both were subsequently included in his first book, The Lady Is Cold. After more than a year of trying to figure White out, the young woman resolved the matter by marrying a West Point cadet.
Ross kept after White, and in January 1927 they worked out an arrangement. White agreed to work half-time for the magazine, keeping a half-time job with J. H. Newmark as insurance. The New Yorker gave him $30 a week and a desk on the thirteenth floor at 25 West 45th Street. Newmark paid him another $30, and he considered himself in clover. Gradually he increased his work at the magazine until it amounted to a full-time job, and then quit Newmark.
White did almost no editing. But like everyone else in those early days at the magazine, he was plunged into a wild variety of duties. He wrote the taglines for newsbreaks and the captions for pictures. He wrote Comment and original pieces for Talk of the Town. He was a rewrite man on Talk, and a consultant on verse. He substituted, when called on, for the drama and movie critics, and did a great deal of writing to fill the gaping holes in every issue. He never, however, construed “full-time” to mean that he was obliged to sit in the office all day, which he seems to have been temperamentally incapable of doing. Other staffers at the magazine toiled from ten to six. White worked long hours or short, when and if he felt like it—and Ross accepted the arrangement. For although footloose, White was conscientious about deadlines, and Ross never had to worry that White would let him down, even though he often did not know where he was.
“The cast of characters in those early days,” White wrote, “was as shifty as the characters in a floating poker game. People drifted in and drifted out. Every week the magazine teetered on the edge of financial ruin. Katharine Angell arrived in 1925. Fillmore Hyde, from the Peapack hunting set, arrived. James Kevin McGuiness, Charles Baskerville, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Joseph Moncure March. Then Ralph McAllister Ingersoll arrived, right out of the social register. Lois Long, Peter Arno, Rogers Whittaker arrived, right out of the subway. Rea Irvin, the art editor, arrived before anybody else. He was the one person around the place who seemed to know what he was doing. Philip Wylie, Morris Mar
key, Carmen Peppe, Ralph Paladino, Elsie Dick, Oliver Claxton. Ross fumed, fussed, broke down partitions, changed the format every issue, strove and strove, cursed and raged. It was chaos, but it was enjoyable. I dropped the name James Thurber, and Ross hired him immediately. ‘I hire anybody,’ he remarked, gloomily. Thurber and I shared a sort of elongated closet, just big enough to hold two desks, two typewriters, and a mountainous stack of yellow copy paper, which the two of us set about covering with words and pictures. Raoul Fleischmann poured money in, Ross fought with Fleischmann and erected an impenetrable barrier between the advertising department and the editorial department. It was known as the Ross Barrier.”
A key figure in those desperate years was Katharine Angell. She was a pleasant, soft-spoken, hard-headed woman who, unbeknownst to herself or anybody else, was starting an important career in an era when that was rare for women. More and more, Ross found himself turning to her for the solutions to the myriad things that bothered him.
Forty years later, in an interview with the Paris Review, White said of his wife: “I have never seen an adequate account of Katharine’s role with The New Yorker. . . . She was one of the first editors to be hired, and I can’t imagine what would have happened to the magazine if she hadn’t turned up. Ross, though something of a genius, had serious gaps. In Katharine he found someone who filled them. No two people were ever more different than Mr. Ross and Mrs. Angell; what he lacked, she had; what she lacked, he had. She complemented him in a way that, in retrospect, seems to me to have been indispensable to the survival of the magazine. She was a product of Miss Winsor’s and Bryn Mawr. Ross was a high school dropout. She had a natural refinement of manner and speech; Ross mumbled and bellowed and swore. She quickly discovered, in this fumbling and impoverished new weekly, something that fascinated her: its quest for humor, its search for excellence, its involvement with young writers and artists. She enjoyed contact with people; Ross, with certain exceptions, despised it—especially during hours. She was patient and quiet; he was impatient and noisy. Katharine was soon sitting in on art sessions and planning sessions, editing fiction and poetry, cheering and steering authors and artists along the paths they were eager to follow, learning makeup, learning pencil editing, heading the Fiction Department, sharing the personal woes and dilemmas of innumerable contributors and staff people who were in trouble or despair, and, in short, accepting the whole unruly business of a tottering magazine with the warmth and dedication of a broody hen.
“I had a bird’s-eye view of all this because, in the midst of it, I became her husband. During the day I saw her in operation at the office. At the end of the day, I watched her bring the whole mess home with her in a cheap and bulging portfolio. The light burned late, our bed was lumpy with page proofs, and our home was alive with laughter and the pervasive spirit of her dedication and her industry. . . . I suspect that one of Ross’s luckiest days was the day a young woman named Mrs. Angell stepped off the elevator, all ready to go to work.”
To HOWARD CUSHMAN
112 West 13 Street
[September 1926]
Fridee
Sweet Hum:
Now that the harvest moon is on the way, now that I am back from across the sea, now that Yakima pears are being hawked in the quiet cool gutters of Thirteenth Street—I can write you a letter. I got yours in which you avowed you had a swell daughter,1 and really if the truth were known I have been hankering for a sight of her, but seldom get round to calling on other people’s daughters, what with earning my living and keeping the apartment picked up after the boys, and walking round and about in my beloved city, and taking moving pitchers of the Zuider Zee.
Once in a while I meet Gert,2 brisking around a corner in blue, or lolling beneath the Elevated in black, and I say how is Cush and she says he is fine, and that is all the news I get. In fact I don’t even know what paper you are with, or why. I have no job but strange as it may seem I have got along fairly well since the first of the year, partly with the New Yorker, partly with the Cunard Line, and here and there a publicity job or something. The New Yorker has been quite receptive, rejecting little, buying much, and even asking me to lunch once in a while.
Who lives around the corner? Carl Helm and Harriett. They arrived from San Francisco3 via the canal a couple of weeks ago, with the usual amount of dunnage—parakeets, machete, tapestries, piano, and things Nicaraguan for interior decoration. As usual Carl spent the first day writing a musical comedy, a novel, a short story, and a sentimental magazine article—and then gravitated naturally down to Mr. Hearst’s American and got a job on rewrite. They have a room on Twelfth Street.
Yes I have been Europe, or similar goddam phrases. Bob Adams was commissioned by the Cunard Line to make a four reel movie to advertise student tours, or college cabin, or whatever they call the tendency. He was presented with a real live cameraman from Hearst International Newsreel, and was instructed to do something to take the sting out of a travelogue. So one day we went out to the Princeton campus (this was toward the end of June) and we took some preliminary shots, and then Bob hired me to write the gags and the titles and to carry the tripod. I decided to go at nine o’clock one morning and left that afternoon on the Andania at five. Frank Mueller—Phi Gam, little mustache, chin like Jack Holt—was impressed into service as leading man; and the four of us were off, the cameraman and Bob in the saloon cabin, Frank and I in steerage. It was a serene, comical, pleasantly eventful voyage—unique in a way, for we made an honest to god movie with continuity and plot and heart interest and stark realism by the simple (and occasionally complicated) process of conscripting actors and actresses from among the passengers, feeding them rye highballs until they got to the point where they didn’t care whether they were acting for the cinema or not. It’s too bad you can’t be on hand for the premiere. In Europe we followed one of the tours, out of necessity, and made a grand hurried march through the usual points of interest—a dreamlike journey, leaving tiny bright memories: the glint of sun on the Avon, late in the day; the Cornish coast in the blue of morning; the melodious voice of a concierge in Berne, phoning; the way gravel feels under your feet; drinking beer in a garden in Köln; a hayfield above the Lake of Thun; hors d’oeuvres for eight francs. You should have been along, tramping along.
Bob is so infected with the cinema that he has resigned from the Cunard Line and sets out for Hollywood in a new blue Dodge about the first of October. He warns you that he expects a meal in East Aurora, playing your own game on you, sir. Be kind to him—he is only a boy touring the country as others have done before him. I have instructed him in many things. I shall present him with a shiny bowl and my blessing, and advise him of the device of sending post cards on ahead.
Saw B.A. for a fleeting moment at Stamford Bridge in London. He was officiating at the Princeton-Cornell-Oxford-Cambridge affair, manfully pushing the bar up for the pole vault, stoutly rushing forward to catch the pole as it fell, all business, all sincerity. I was in Ithaca last spring and committed the unpardonable sin of NOT continuing to Buffalo, which I would like to have done, for I pine for a sight of Nancy-Elizabeth-Howard. I pine for the tranquility of Casenovia Creek, for the warm hospitality of the house of Cushman. Life is much the same. Probably I shall get a job soon, at something or other. I have been approached by a small publisher who wants me to write a small book; but I seem to have small taste for it, so I guess nothing much will come of that. This very moment I must go to bed, for tomorrow will be full of polo on Long Island with Peter Vischer and others, and my eyes must be bright and sparkling after eight hours’ sleep. I am a bachelor and we crotchety bachelors are fretted if we miss our Postum in the morning, and if we are cheated out of our beauty sleep at night.
With love to all and a prayer for a letter,
Thine,
Ho
I see you are in Life. I meet people on the street and they nod and bow and say “I see your friend Cushman is in Life.”
• In April 1927 Gus Lobrano married Jea
n Flick, who ran a travel bureau in Albany, and soon thereafter he left New York City and joined his wife in running the business. About a year later, with Bob Adams in California and Lobrano in Albany, the apartment at 112 West 13th Street was vacated. White and Mike Galbreath moved into a two-room apartment at 23 West 12th Street.
