Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  I’m worried about old man Thurber and hope you can make him take a decent vacation. He needs fancy bookkeeping more than I do, who don’t need it at all. . . .

  This report on me is a bit sketchy, but you asked for it and it’s the best I can do in the hour between breakfast and the time I have to row over and get the milk.

  Yrs with love,

  White

  Tell Thurber to write me.

  To KATHARINE SERGEANT ANGELL

  [Dorset, Ontario]

  [August 1929]

  Tuesday

  Dear Katharine:

  If my calculations are correct (one arrives at the day of the month by taking shots at the stars and computing from old newspapers discovered in the privy) you are on the way home [from Reno]. Probably none too soon. I have an anguished letter from Ross that sounds as though he could only hang on three days longer. He takes things too hard. If he thinks the New Yorker is complicated he ought to see a boys’ camp. Lost blankets, heart-aches, fallings-in-the-lake—a marvelous confusion, always comical because kids are so funny. Hub just showed me a letter he received from a frightened parent; the letter enclosed another that the parent had got from his small son in camp: “Dear Daddy, Please come up at once as I am so homesick and I will die if you don’t come up here right away.” Hub, on investigating, found out that the boy had written the letter just after being hit on the head with a broom by a tent-mate, and had forgotten the whole affair ten minutes later. But he had mailed the letter home, just as a matter of routine.

  The boys leave a week from today and grown people begin to drift in. Hub and I are going into the bush again, probably with Hub’s wife and a kid who is staying after camp closes because of hay fever. Our trip last week was grand, through the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen. Nights are freezing now (frost almost every night) but the days heat up just as in July. The trees are turning early this year, and it looks like fall already. I haven’t heard from you in a dog’s age, but my mail seems to be scattered around a bit anyway. I have succeeded in losing track of about everything—people, dates, friends, mail, jobs, home. And it feels good. The sun beats in. Yesterday Hubbard gave me a haircut with the camp clippers. Things are much as they were in the days when I was here before—the clanging gong that gets you up, the kids trading desserts for nickel candy bars, the still shore where you brush your teeth, the little lakes nearby where you can watch blue herons catch frogs, the lumber camp and the peat bog. Ontario is wonderful (haven’t you been up here, I seem to remember that you have). I envy Hub his job even though it is a lot of work and a lot of responsibility. . . .

  There’s a marvelous doubles game going on right outside, making it impossible to write. It’s impossible to write up here anyway. Love to everybody, and keep the home fires burning.

  Andy

  To KATHARINE SERGEANT ANGELL

  [Dorset, Ontario]

  [September 11, 1929]

  Wednesday

  Dear Katharine:

  I once started a letter to you (date uncertain) but it dried up and got crumbly. Later I started another, but it got wet and mouldy. I intend to get this one down on the floor with my knees on it and push it into an envelope even if it’s got maggots. The last letter I wrote was a beauty—four typewritten pages, which so exhausted me I couldn’t reach for a stamp—vivid word pictures of lakes, streams, fish, men and women, seasonal changes, statistical matter, references, addenda, all kinds of advice, charts, marginal notations, and brisk passages designed to stimulate and exalt. It got wet.

  This afternoon I get the last trout of the year and carry the canoe back from Harvey Lake (one mile through swamp). Tomorrow the third coat will be dry on my handsome new canoe which Hughie McEachern [a local craftsman] has built for me. I’ve decided to go in business with Hubbard and we’re going to Ithaca to settle matters. He’s going to incorporate, and we are going to hold directors’ meetings on top of the diving tower. This camp is much better than it used to be, and it used to be very good. It’s got everything now, including a live Chippewa Indian, a sugar bush, a 1917 Dodge truck, a marauding bear, and a family of worms in the tennis court. If I can, I’m going to leave [the car] in Ithaca with Bob [Hubbard] and paddle my shiny new canoe down the Erie canal and Hudson to surprise central New York people and to give myself a good time.

  Camp has been wonderful the last couple of weeks. No adults came (I misunderstood what Bob said about adults—he meant that some of the grown-up persons in camp would remain) and the woods are beautiful. Ray Wattles (age nine) lives with me in my shack. Hunting will start soon and Bob is coming back up for deer season. He hunts with Sam Beaver, his private Indian.1 Sam lives in camp the year round to keep the snow off the roofs. Ray’s hunting season has started already: he has his eye on woodchuck—wants the fur.

  Give my best to Jim.

  Andy

  • Because they worked in the same building, the Whites often communicated by interoffice memo. Soon after their marriage, White cut from an old issue of The New Yorker a fragment of a Rea Irvin drawing whose caption was a quote from Albert Einstein—“People slowly accustomed themselves to the idea that the physical states of space itself were the final physical reality.” White wrote a new caption and placed the result on his wife’s desk.

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [New York]

  [Late November 1929]

  Saturday night

  Dear Katharine (very dear):

  I’ve had moments of despair during the last week which have added years to my life and put many new thoughts in my head. Always, however, I have ended on a cheerful note of hope, based on the realization that you are the person to whom I return and that you are the recurrent phrase in my life. I realized that so strongly one day a couple of weeks ago when, after being away among people I wasn’t sure of and in circumstances I had doubts about, I came back and walked into your office and saw how real and incontrovertible you seemed. I don’t know whether you know just what I mean or whether you experience, ever, the same feeling; but what I mean is, that being with you is like walking on a very clear morning—definitely the sensation of belonging there.

  This marriage is a terrible challenge: everyone wishing us well, and all with their tongues in their cheeks. What other people think, or wish, or prophesy, is not particularly important, except as it tends to work on our minds. I think you have the same intuitive hesitancy that I have—about pushing anything too hard, and the immediate problem surely is that we recognize & respect each other’s identity. That I could assimilate Nancy overnight is obviously out of the question—or that she could me. In things like that we gain ground slowly. By and large, our respective families had probably best be kept in their respective places during the pumpkin weather—and gradually, like the Einstein drawing of Rea Irvin’s, people will become accustomed to the idea that etc. etc.

  I’m just writing this haphazard for no reason other than that I felt like awriting you a letter before going to bed.

  I love you. And that’s a break.

  Andy

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [King Edward Hotel]

  [Toronto]

  [November 30, 1929]

  Natural History

  The spider, dropping down from twig,

  Unwinds a thread of his devising:

  A thin, premeditated rig

  To use in rising.

  And all the journey down through space,

  In cool descent, and loyal-hearted,

  He builds a ladder to the place

  From which he started.

  Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,

  In spider’s web a truth discerning,

  Attach one silken strand to you

  For my returning.

  • White sometimes engaged Daisy, the Scottish terrier, to write to Katharine, “thus enabling me to refer to myself in the third person—a common device of politicians and tyrants.” Daisy was, according to White, “an opinionated little bitch,” the daug
hter of a female named Jeannie, owned by Thurber.

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [Bedford Village, New York]

  [Spring 1930]

  Dear Mrs. White:

  I like having Josephine1 here in the morning, although I suppose I will get less actual thinking done—as I used to do my thinking mornings in the bathroom. White has been stewing around for two days now, a little bit worried because he is not sure that he has made you realize how glad he is that there is to be what the column writer in the Mirror calls a blessed event. So I am taking this opportunity, Mrs. White, to help him out to the extent of writing you a brief note which I haven’t done in quite a long time but have been a little sick myself as you know. Well, the truth is White is beside himself and would have said more about it but is holding himself back, not wanting to appear ludicrous to a veteran mother. What he feels, he told me, is a strange queer tight little twitchy feeling around the inside of his throat whenever he thinks that something is happening which will require so much love and all on account of you being so wonderful. (I am not making myself clear I am afraid, but on the occasions when White has spoken privately with me about this he was in no condition to make himself clear either and I am just doing the best I can in my own way.) I know White so well that I always know what is the matter with him, and it always comes to the same thing—he gets thinking that nothing that he writes or says ever quite expresses his feeling, and he worries about his inarticulateness just the same as he does about his bowels, except it is worse, and it makes him either mad, or sick, or with a prickly sensation in the head. But my, my, my, last Sunday he was so full of this matter which he couldn’t talk about, and he was what Josephine in her simple way would call hoppy, and particularly so because it seemed so good that everything was starting at once—I mean those things, whatever they are, that are making such a noise over in the pond by Palmer Lewis’s house,2 and the song sparrow that even I could hear from my confinement in the house, and those little seeds that you were sprinkling up where the cut glass and bones used to be—all starting at the same time as the baby, which he seems to think exists already by the way he stands around staring at you and muttering little prayers. Of course he is also very worried for fear you will get the idea that he is regarding you merely as a future mother and not as a present person, or that he wants a child merely as a vindication of his vanity. I doubt if those things are true; White enjoys animal husbandry of all kinds including his own; and as for his regard for you, he has told me that, quite apart from this fertility, he admires you in all kinds of situations or dilemmas, some of which he says have been quite dirty.

  Well, Mrs. White, I expect I am tiring you with this long letter, but as you often say yourself, a husband and wife should tell each other about the things that are on their mind, otherwise you get nowhere, and White didn’t seem to be able to tell you about his happiness, so thought I would attempt to put in a word.

  White is getting me a new blanket, as the cushion in the bathroom is soiled.

  Lovingly,

  Daisy

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  Hotel Genosha

  Oshawa, Ontario

  [July 4, 1930]

  Friday night

  Dear K:

  We are in Oshawa, suffering from Oshawa. Across the street a Tiny Tim miniature golf course is being constructed, the men working overtime, pushing hand rollers and installing small hazards. This morning we crossed Lake Ontario and would have gone right on to camp but the Pierce, after some brilliant road work, burned out a generator—which will cost me a pretty penny and will land us in Dorset tomorrow night. God is also striking me a full blow across the eyes—the hay being ripe on every side.

  You really should have seen the Pierce being put aboard the S.S. Ontario of the B.R.&R. this morning at the Genesee Dock in Rochester. The ship is built to carry railroad freight cars, and when occasionally someone comes along wanting to take his automobile, the automobile (even if there’s only one, as there was this morning) is loaded onto a freight car, and the whole business is pushed by a steam locomotive onto the boat. The Pierce never looked so small and I never felt so impressive as when I found the locomotive and one car waiting for me, steam up, engineer at attention, and a crew of three to do the switching and the coupling. All this—services of a private standard-size locomotive at both ends plus trip across—only $10.50.

  The boy we took on in Ithaca is eleven, a squirming jumpy little brat who seems never to go to the bathroom. He is in bed beside me, after having refused a Milnesia wafer. Yesterday’s ride to Ithaca was fine—a swell day, cool and sunny—and we went at a good clip, the Pierce’s tin horn shrill in the green valleys. Conrad Wyvell1 was equipped with torpedoes for the dull silences of Sullivan County.

  Love to you, Serena, Daisy, Roger, Nancy, Josephine, Willy, Miss Heyl, your father, and the two cats.2 Or is it eleven cats?

  A.

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  Camp Otter

  Dorset, Ontario

  [July 10, 1930]

  Dear K:

  Just have time for a small greeting before taking some parents across the lake. Jim [Thurber] is here, wandering aimlessly about camp, a tall misty visitor about whom nothing much is known. He arrived yesterday in Bracebridge, his suitcase collapsing on the platform just as he detrained. I found him picking up shirts and neckties, the blood rushing to his head.

  He brought your letter and also tidings, and I’m so glad you are well, you and yours. I want Little Joe1 and Serena up here with me: the place is all reserved in the green canoe for you and them. This morning I took Jim across the lake to see about a loon’s nest on Huckleberry Island. . . . I took the movie camera and set up the birthday tripod right in the canoe in back of Thurber’s head, where I could operate it. There was just a faint east wind, and when we got round the other side of the island, the mother was on the nest. I got the canoe in close and she came off like a streak and I could see the day-old chick and the unhatched egg. Then the loon, calling at the top of her lungs, splashed up and down right in front of the camera, trying to attract us away from the nest. I got a lot of shots and then the chick, hearing his mother crying, came off the nest and set out on his first big trip. His mother joined him (all this just a few yards away from the canoe where I could photograph everything that went on) and together they beat it down the lake. I don’t see how I can wait to see the picture.

  Jim and I are going to walk up the Hollow Lake road this afternoon in hopes of finding Sam Beaver home. Somebody saw him in Dorset the other day and the report is that he wants to come back to camp.

  Bob still hasn’t showed up, and the camp lacks the gaiety that he supplies. He is due tonight.

  The parents are waiting. I love you too.

  Andy

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [Dorset, Ontario]

  [July 1930]

  Wednesday night

  Dear K:

  This has been a wonderful day, full of great doings. All morning with Allan [camp handyman], pulling the propeller shaft out of the motor boat, and this afternoon driving Allan and his small son Arnold to Bracebridge—Arnold with his tiny country voice and his little country smell. In Bracebridge I went to the foundry to get a new shaft and in the middle of things a terrific storm broke—hail, thunder and lightning. One of the workmen came running in to show off a hailstone, and just as I reached the doorway and stood for a moment, a beautiful green-blue bolt of lightning crackled down and struck a telegraph pole about two hundred feet away, setting fire to the transformer, which went up in a green flame. We all jumped out of the doorway and one of the men ran and threw the switch in the foundry, cutting off the current. The thunder clap that accompanied the flash was simply deafening and I could feel the electricity. About three minutes later we heard people running and somebody shouted that Shier’s lumber mill was on fire. All the men in the foundry piled into the Pierce and I drove them to the mill, with the whole town of Bracebridge streaming along.
The fire gong in the town was ringing a steady call, and all the sky was red with flames. The mill had caught like so much kindling, and the place was shooting into the air higher than the four tall black smokestacks that still stood upright. The Bracebridge fire department arrived—a hose cart towed behind a Studebaker sedan, and a horse drawn pumper. All it could do was spray water on nearby buildings. The blaze was so hot that although I stood in the rain, my clothes stayed dry. Finally the heat melted the guy wires that supported the chimneys, and all four of them went toppling down together.