Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  Afterwards Allan and Arnold and I to dinner at Keeler’s [a restaurant], and then driving home through the clear storm-cooled evening a red sunset sky and white mist rising in all the swamps around the trunks of the birches and tamaracks. Crossing the lake, the red glow had gone, the full moon had come up, and the northern lights were sending bright shafts high into the dome.

  Your letters came in the reverse order from which they were written and I have pieced together the news. How marvelous that you are in the midst of kittens and calendulas, and Daisy safe1—but it is foolish of you to be anywhere but here, with your tumultuous little Joe whom I love so and who must hear the great frogs of July at their love-making and see the lights in the north. Even at long distance it’s so good to know you.

  A.

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [Dorset, Ontario]

  [July 21, 1930]

  Monday morning

  Dear K:

  It is a gray morning. Thurber is drawing animals for Harper’s, the tennis court is being rolled with the squeaky roller, and Gretchen has lost a red ball in the calm lake. The trips are back in camp and preliminary swimming races start this afternoon.

  In Peterborough we bought a rowing skiff and a small sail boat and I had hay fever pretty bad from driving all afternoon through the hay harvest. I was so tickled to get your letter with the drawing of Daisy’s insides. Have they set the bone, and will she be well enough to come up here with us? I feel very guilty to have been away through it all, when it must have been so much work and so upsetting to you. But I am glad she is alive and you are alive. . . .

  Parents drift in and out of camp, always with minor discomforts or accidents. Bob Howe’s people came for a day last week, didn’t know how to get to camp, tried to drive their car around the lake on an old lumber road, finally got out and walked right on past camp two miles through the woods and landed at another lake to the north of here. Saturday Joe Archibald’s mother and father showed up: their car had blown a gasket in Gravenhurst and they had hired another car to bring them the rest of the way. I drove them back to Gravenhurst last night in the Pierce. Bob and Louise [Hubbard] went along for the ride . . . and coming back I ditched the Pierce trying to pass another car in the narrow dark rainy road, and we had to get pulled out.

  Camp is really going very well and everybody is happy. The morning dip parties have started at Sandy Beach, and the whole camp rushes naked into the still cold lake to Hubbard’s bellowing. The weather has been warm and good, with the most beautiful skies at night. I took Jim over to the peat bog the other evening (the first time I had carried my own canoe) and we drifted around in the twilight hopeful of seeing a deer. The white water lilies are out in the streams, and the huckleberries will be ready on the island in a few days. Another trip goes out this afternoon, into Algonquin. I want you up here for all these things. Friday night I wished you could be here . . . Jim Wright and John Duerr and I went to a private dance at the Russells’ on the Hollow Lake road.1 (Thurber didn’t go because he was afraid of getting shot.) The party was given for one of the Russells who showed up after being gone thirty years. (He has gone away again, this time, he says, never to come back.) I had been to several dances at the grange but this was the first private dance I’d ever seen. It was marvelous, all square dances, with women feeding their babies in the kitchen and the men drinking home-made beer in the dirt cellar. Mr. Cameron, of the fire tower, was one of the fiddlers, and a Russell was the other. We arrived at the party at half past eleven and it was just beginning to get under way. The rooms of the old house had been cleared of furniture, and planks had been laid along chairs along the wall for people to sit on. The men wore suspenders and some of them had on clean shirts. Hughie McEachern called the dances, wearing a jacket and tie. When we arrived Len Russell took us over and introduced us to the Russell who was fiddling. He shook hands very solemnly, and said he was happy to meet us and we should make ourselves at home. At one o’clock some of the men were beginning to get lively with beer, and the women passed refreshments. First they passed a wash tub filled with empty cups. Then they came around with hot tea and plates of canned salmon sandwiches. . . .

  Old Mrs. McEachern, mother of Hughie, spelled one of the fiddlers along about midnight, holding the fiddle down on her breast. She wore a black dress and a lace collar and sat rigid and unsmiling, not even tapping her toe, but playing very fast and always right in time with the fiddler. Mr. Dagg was there, in peg top trousers, his seventy years adding finish to his dancing. After a while he lost track of Mrs. Dagg, and went about looking for her with a flashlight. Since the death of Freddie McKey, Mr. Dagg has taken over the burden of bootlegging for Dorset. At half past one we descended into the cellar and were offered a bottle of the yeasty beer while somebody held a match.

  I wish you could have accompanied us to that dance.

  Bob has just passed by my cabin and asked me if I want to drive to Rochester with him tomorrow, but I am afraid of hay fever and think I’ll wait a day or two and come on the train. At any rate, I’ll be seeing you this week. (Thurber has just been discussing his bowels and comparing them to mine, claiming that his are better than mine, adding that of course he is older and taller than I am.). . . .

  We are building a ping pong table down in Tent 8.

  The first issue of the Otter Bee 2 was out Saturday, containing a special Thurber rotogravure section. . . .

  Love to you all.

  Andy

  I will be awfully glad to see you.

  To JAMES A. WRIGHT

  St. Luke’s Hospital,

  overlooking Harlem,

  New York City,

  Sept. 12, 1930

  Dear Jim,

  They’ve got me down now and the only escape from a hospital is the grave. I got sick the second day after returning to New York, and after a good deal of sparring the doctor pronounced it Paratyphoid1 and shipped me to this dump, where I made an instant hit with the day-nurse by kicking over a basin of trichloride solution. My room commands a very pretty view of Harlem, including the Hell Gate railroad bridge, a Castoria sign, and the Sixth Avenue “L.” Every two hours a Greek orderly named Nick comes wandering into the room and takes my temperature by pushing a thermometer up my bunghole. My temperature is normal. The chances of my recovery are said to be good, although there is a whispering campaign among the internes to the effect that I have pernicious anemia and am a goner. They took my blood-count and found it was only 3,600 when it should be 8,000, thus strengthening their theory that I wouldn’t last long.

  We had a great trip down in the Pierce, which developed a strange and alarming ineffectualness just after leaving Orillia. It finally burned out its two little resistance coils and we missed the Cobourg boat, and spent the night in Oshawa. The Pierce is at the moment in the hands of the Bedford police, who confiscated it after it had stood three days parked on the main street by the railroad station, where I left it on the morning I took sick.

  I hope Paul2 remembered to give you the half bottle of Golden Wedding which I cached for you in a roll of roofing paper in the boathouse. You better try to get down to New York this fall—we will put you up at the best hospital in town. We received your pretty card of Highland Inn and were glad to know you were still alive at that point. I will never forget the merry scene at Hardwood where you stood surrounded by 3 women, each applying a tourniquet. I pray God I may live to see such sights again.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [October? 1930]

  [Interoffice memo]

  K.

  My publishers settled up this morning, & the 5th Avenue shops could hardly hold me.

  This flower was bought with the smaller of the 2 checks—the one for $13.30 “Lady Is Cold.”

  Love

  Andy

  To GUSTAVE S. LOBRANO

  [New York]

  [December 1930]

  Sunday

  You lie, you rotter—I write you all t
he time. It’s a crime the way I’m always writing you. Katharine was saying only yesterday: “All you ever do is write that Mr. Lobrano.” We both think you ought to come down again, as it would save us all a lot of trouble and I could take you to the Cameo again, an experience which I know you must have thoroughly enjoyed. I met Jack Koffler on the street yesterday—he said the yacht was going fairly well in spite of people being broke.1 He asked for you and I said you were fine. Said you were up in Albany cutting your teeth out of whole cloth.

  K. is fine and young White will turn up in a fortnight, at the Harbor hospital, 61st and Madison. The suitcases are packed, and the nursery is in order—ping pong table, commode, drawers with little shirts laid neatly. All that remains to be done is for me, the father, to construct some bathing facilities for the baby, which is to have a bath every day. If it is a girl it is to be Serena; if a boy heaven knows what name he will go by. We thought of Gustave and dropped it like a hot iron. Please check one:

  Joel

  Seth

  Cornelius

  Shepley

  Samuel

  Angus

  Oliver Partridge

  James

  Matthew

  Eric

  I remember the letter you wrote me when Dottie was born, on the excitements and limitations of sudden fatherhood, and I am beginning to feel something of it already. Aside from the simple satisfaction which most parents derive from seeing a new person created more or less in one’s own image, I seem to enjoy a warm glow at the idea of helping to people the earth—this despite the tricks earth knows how to play on its people, despite even some of the people themselves. Also, to a writer, a child is an alibi. If I should never in all my years write anything worth reading, I can always explain that by pointing to my child. I was concerned with larger affairs than literature: I was peopling the earth. A soothsayer out west told K. last year that this child (not even conceived, I might add, at that time) was destined to become a good musician, and would take us, its parents, to all the capitals of Europe. Courtesy of the Flick Travel Service, maybe?. . . .

  Love,

  Andy

  Remember “Dr. Vinton”? I’ve just resurrected it and sold it to The Adelphi (London). Hah!

  V

  16 EAST 8TH STREET

  1931–1936

  * * *

  • The years at 16 East 8th Street—the first six years of his marriage—were remembered by White as among the happiest and busiest of his life. His wanderings were over, he had acquired a lovely wife and an amiable infant son, and he was enjoying the cachet of being published in The New Yorker.

  The Village was home to him. Eighth Street, with its crosstown streetcar, was a relatively tranquil spot in that decade, and good friends, old and new, lived nearby: Jim and Althea Thurber, Jap and Helen Gude, Bob and Elsa Coates, Russell and Kate Lord, Joel Sayre, St. Clair McKelway.

  White liked to begin the day on the top deck of a Fifth Avenue bus, riding uptown to the office. The Depression was on, but The New Yorker, perversely, had begun to prosper. When many publications were plunging downhill or hanging on by their fingernails, The New Yorker was climbing steadily, gaining literary acclaim and enjoying a moderate financial success.

  The staff of the magazine grew and became more specialized. Robert Benchley was theater critic and started The Wayward Press department. Clifton Fadiman reviewed books. Geoffrey Hellman joined up as staff writer and contributor in the Fact department, which in 1935 was separated from Fiction and edited by St. Clair McKelway. Frequent contributors to the magazine included Frank Sullivan, Clarence Day, S. J. Perelman, Lewis Mumford, Robert Coates, John O’Hara, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley, Ring Lardner, John McNulty. Artists included, besides the redoubtable Thurber, Arno, and Irvin, Mary Petty and her husband, Alan Dunn, Whitney Darrow, Gluyas Williams, Helen Hokinson. Alexander Woollcott’s Shouts and Murmurs department was the only feature in the history of the magazine that was cut to fit. One critical addition, for the Whites, was Daise Terry, who arrived in 1929 as secretary to Katharine and later headed a pool of stenographers and typists. Other notable arrivals were John Mosher, first reader and contributor of fiction; William Shawn, who signed on as a Talk reporter and was soon Ross’s right-hand man in the Fact department; and Wolcott Gibbs, who gave up a job as brakeman on the Long Island Railroad to help Katharine edit fiction.

  In January 1931, White’s weekly pay check was $240. For this sum he wrote the Comment page, edited the Newsbreaks, did some Talk rewrite, and doctored picture captions. By turning out a couple of pieces, he could double his weekly take. Katharine, too, was earning well and liking her work more and more. “It was a peculiarly lucky time for us,” White said. “Both of us were so busy with writing and editing, we had little time or inclination for spending money. We just took our money and turned it over without comment to the bank. Later, when we decided to buy a house in Maine, there the money was.” In 1934 White’s third book, Every Day Is Saturday—a collection of Comments from The New Yorker—was published.

  In the summer of 1930, the Whites rented a cottage in East Blue Hill, Maine, on a property called “the Granite.” Miss Nila Slaven was their landlady; Percy Moore and Herman Gray, caretakers for Miss Slaven, became their friends. Here, in coastal Maine, the children—Nancy and Roger Angell and Joel White—were united for the summer. Both the Whites carried their work along with them: Katharine edited manuscripts by day and by night, White ground out Comment pages and Newsbreaks from a small room over the garage. Maine worked well as a retreat, and after three years of renting, the Whites drifted a few miles south into Brooklin and bought the farm where they spent a good part of their lives.

  To GUSTAVE S. LOBRANO

  16 East 8 Street

  [Early 1931]

  Monday

  Dear Gus:

  Sex is male, color white, and a dandy son all right all right. First name Joel, then McCoun, and all in all he’s such a boon. Now I’ll slip into prose, naturally and easily. I should, yes I should, have told you all about this before, but I have not had a minute. You know how fathers are when they are pressed for time. Kay had a miserable time on December 21st; the doctor discovered in the midst of things that she would have to have a Caesarian operation, so they bustled her up to the operating room, produced a live baby, and then later gave her a blood transfusion to save her life. It was pretty agonizing for everybody concerned except Little Joe, who got out easy. Kay made a quick recovery and came home ten days ago, only to be laid low by a strange malady called pilitis, accent on second syllable. She had to return to the hospital, or rather to another hospital, and is still there—feeling defeated, whipped, and mad. She runs a low fever, but isn’t in any particular pain or danger. Just awfully blue from being six weeks in bed.

  . . .Was it really true about that pewter cup? Joe has a cup made from old silver coins—quite a beautiful thing and a genuine antique, but I don’t know how good it would be to drink from. I can now mix his formula—no harder than mixing a good Martini—and am in complete charge of his life and character; he has plenty of both. He weighs, at this writing, eleven pounds no ounces. Much of the time he spends in Washington Square, with the rest of the unemployed. When, after a cry, he stares at me with a critical and resentful gaze, just out of focus, I feel the mixed pride and oppression of fatherhood in the very base of my spine. This small man, so challengingly complete and so devastatingly remote! But you know about that. In fact I think it was you who told me about it.

  When are you coming to town? Being in business I should think you would have plenty of excuses to come to New York, whereas the only reason I could give for visiting Albany outside of paying a social call would be unemployment relief. “I got to see the Governor about something.” You know how well that gets across. . . .

  Yrs,

  Andy

  • The Whites were off for their first summer in Maine. It was decided that White would drive the car, taking along their cook, Mrs. Lardner, their
Scottish terrier, Daisy, and most of the luggage. Katharine and the baby would follow in a day or two by train, which in those days, White remembered, “was a far easier and quicker journey than the motor trip. Mrs. Lardner, an elderly Irish woman with strong maternal feelings, was quite vague about where this place called ‘Maine’ was, and it seemed unlikely to her that I really knew where I was going. Crossing the Penobscot River on the little scow ferry to Bucksport, she closed her eyes and prayed aloud until we reached the far shore.”

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  Rockingham Hotel

  Portsmouth, New Hampshire

  [June 27, 1931]

  Saturday night

  Dear K:

  We are camped here for the night, Daisy and Mrs. L. in their Sink of Loneliness, #37; I in quieter diggings one flight up. The two women dined in their room, as the expedient solution of their special wants: a pot of tea and a beef bone. I dined alone in the Oak Room, below. This being my first major trip with a terrier and a domestic, I have got along fairly well—thus far the chief difficulty is that they roam away from the main body and are found far afield, fooling with each other. It is as hard to catch Mrs. L. in a field of buttercups as it is to catch a butterfly.

  Luncheon (at Stafford Springs) was a great personal triumph, if not a moral victory. The restaurant insisted that the dog be tied outside, to a tree. Mrs. L. would hear of no such arrangement—said Daisy would be prostrated with fright and loneliness, the little darlin’, and insisted that I eat my lunch while she waited outside with D. and then I could wait with Daisy while she ate. It was clear to me that a double-shift arrangement like that would increase our running time to about two weeks; but Mrs. L. was adamant. Luckily I discovered a table so situated that Daisy could be tied on the porch yet separated from Mrs. L. by only the thickness of a screen door. This worked perfectly.