by E. B. White
The two of them have just passed through the lobby on their way out for their evening walk. It is raining, and D. is constipated by travel, I suspect—so they will probably be back about midnight.
Also registered at the Rockingham is a span of Cairns.
See you Tuesday—Love,
Andy
• White had come to New York for a few days to catch up on work when the following was written, while his wife and infant son stayed in Maine. The Broadway show to which White took his sister Lillian was a revue called “Shoot the Works,” put together by Heywood Broun. White’s New Yorker piece “The Near-Demise of Mrs. Coe” was used as one of the sketches.
TO KATHARINE S. WHITE
[Mount Vernon, New York]
[July 21, 1931]
Tues morn
Dear K
They say it isn’t hot, but the salt sticks and the windows stick and the air smells like factory exhaust. Even the roaches have turned their feet up and lie on their backs, breathing heavily. Last night I slept in father’s flannel pajamas on the velvet couch in the living room. Father has nothing but flannel pajamas.
Here is an item from this morning’s Tribune, daughter to Mr. Pepys [Franklin P. Adams]—a surprise to me. Noel [Illian] is enchanting—quite petite and feminine, trying hard to say something and not quite saying it. Won’t eat and never has.
The usual vapors hang over the office, Mosher has another red face from physical exposure, Ross full of interminable accounts of Hollywood. He says he’s only been out once to Bedford but everything is all right. Mosher took me at once to lunch in an effort to learn bits of news: he has sold three stories to the North German Lloyd magazine in partial exchange for passage, and says they represent his best work—all of them New Yorker rejections. . . .
The folks leave tomorrow morning for a hotel in Lake George, chosen by the usual methods—writing the Chamber of Commerce to get the names of hotels, then corresponding at great length with about six, finally choosing one because of the way the correspondent expressed himself. It is a stucco building, meals on the European plan. They won’t say anything about coming to Maine. I’m taking Lilly to the show tonight, and she has presented us with a two-piece hand-knitted white suit for Joe, bought in England when Mother was there, and no good for Noel.
I am cordially hated at the office, treated in a surly manner as the perpetual vacationist. Last night [in a dream] the timber at the top of the gangway split in two, the bottom slid off the float, and the float foundered. I’ll be loving you always.
A.
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
[New York]
[July 23, 1931]
Thurs morn
Dear K
Saw the Toy Bulldog fight the Sailor to a draw at Ebbet’s Field last night—my first prize fight. Honey1 went with me and enjoyed the spectacle. Tonight Mr. R is taking me to Private Lives, and I suppose I will have to go through the ordeal of going backstage with him to pay court to Madge,2 always a dreaded experience. The Broun show—to which I took Lilly—is not much. The critics were fairly kind to it, on the score of its being a benevolent adventure, but the entertainment value isn’t so high. Broun messes around in his old pants, sweating and filling stage waits with patter. The E. B. White-Sig Herzig-Mrs. Coe sketch was about par with the rest of the show. Collaborator Herzig has completely rewritten it, putting in a couple of dirty lines to make it in tone with the rest of the performance, and adding a rather bright ending: the doctor inadvertently swallows a glass of sterile solution, and realizing that he has been poisoned, calls for the whites of two eggs. This pleases Mr. Coe (who is in the egg business) and he tells the stricken doctor that he deals only in the yolks. Curtain.
The weather is fiendish—humid and hot, the air unbreathable. I’ve been able to get a fair amount of work done, nevertheless: more than two weeks’ batch of comment, and some Talk rewrite. Benchley is going to do a couple of Comment departments for me, Ross thinks. Apparently he backed out of going to the Broun show, as being too embarrassing. I wrote a review of it, as nothing embarrasses me.
It’s been fun being in town for a few days. The apartment is a sanctuary, still and dark and cool. Yellow cannas and zinnias attest the diligence of Mr. Gerard [the super] in the garden, and a perennial border of cockroach powder around the bowl in the bathroom shows that Mrs. Carroll has passed that way. From the ground floor I have heard, now and then, the tick of R. Lord’s typewriter, but haven’t paid a call yet. In this slumberous, midsummer condition, one has time to wander about the rooms, taking root and enjoying the memories of activity. The amaryllis went up a foot, and then fell away, despairing.
. . .It still seems a long time till Saturday morning when I’ll see you all again. I miss Joe’s comical face and his STRAIGHT white hair and his gaiety. Hope he will recall having seen me before, when I return.
Love,
Andy
• The following letter was written when Katharine White was at the Ellsworth Bunkers’ in Putney, Vermont, where her son Roger had come down with pneumonia while visiting the Bunker children. White had attended the Danbury Fair with his friends Robert and Elsa Coates.
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
Cross River Road—Tues morn
[Bedford Village, New York]
[October 6, 1931]
Dear K
Another excellent day, with P. Lewis up already whacking the shingles from the roof of the littlest cottage and making a mighty noise out of it. The only louder thing in the neighborhood is Joe, who doesn’t need any shingles. In my dream last night, Joe had chicken pox; so I awoke to the extra pleasure of finding that his face wasn’t covered with welts.
The Fair was very diverting, Coateses and myself having eaten well under the same tree where you and I parked the Pierce last year. Bob was in white trousers and blue work-shirt open at the throat, Elsa in a close fitting white cap with no hair showing. Two autogiros circled above, completing the ensemble. Bob had never seen a giro before, and was trembling with excitement. During the races, one of the machines kept dropping down to within a few yards of the infield, and then whisking away again—apparently the pilot wanted to watch the trotting. The races were without incident, but the track was in such good shape and there were so many fine horses entered that two track records were broken. The vaudeville attractions were marvelous: Max Kruger and his oddities (elephant, zebra, and Great Dane), a “combination never before seen in any ring together”; also a troupe introduced by the announcer as “a famous Artex explorer and his huskies,” several malamutes and a man in a white parka; also a pickaninny band, the pickaninnies so small that the one who played the bass horn had to sit on the floor beside his instrument.
On the way to the Coateses’, we stopped at Sears Roebuck in Danbury, where Mr. Coates bought a furnace for $116, and I bought Joe a pair of sandals for 78¢. Then we sped on to the Coateses’ little wilderness home, through country that I hadn’t imagined existed so near at hand—beautiful valleys and quite good sized hills, almost mountains, and very little sign of any human settlement. Their house is on a steep hillside, looking down a valley, and with a brook at the foot of the slope. The house has one large room, finished roughly, like a camp; also kitchen, bedroom, and attic. A steak was broiled on a grate made out of an old horse manger, water was pumped up from the well by Bob, who ran down the slope to the well beside the brook, and gave a few lusty pulls at a long handle, and we dined well though late. Matthew Josephson was a guest, quite deaf; and we all talked at great length on modern education, Josephson championing it, and the Coateses and I taking a middle course.
Have just driven in town, carrying our cook and our cook’s dog. Gave the one $300 in currency and placed the other in the infirmary, with eczema. What an odd pair they are, wandering happily together on the brink of sanity! It was all I could do to keep Mrs. L. from registering at Speyer’s overnight too.
I forgot to tell you that Coates was held up at two o’clock the other morning on Waverly
Place, just off Sixth. He was coming back from Sam Schwartz’s [the restaurant] with Jap Gude’s wife, and a man stepped out and asked them to step into the nearest doorway. The man held his right hand in his coat pocket, as though concealing a gun. Bob took a few steps toward Sixth Avenue, hoping to get nearer some traffic, but the man kept edging him in, and saying “Get into a doorway before I plug you full of lead.” So Bob said: “L-et me se-ee-ee the gun.” Stuttering very hard. The man said he didn’t need to see the gun. “But,” said Bob, “I re-ee-really think we ought-ought to have a lo-oook at the gun.” With that the man pulled his hand out of his pocket and showed Bob that he didn’t have any gun, and then put on a great cock-and-bull story about his sick wife and no work and so forth. It ended by Bob and he walking arm and arm up Sixth Avenue, and Bob giving him two dollars from sheer gratitude at his not having a gun.
Joe has a new trick—he feeds crackers to Daisy, chuckling softly to himself. A very pretty sight. The Sears Roebuck sandals fit him excellently.
. . .Gibbs is in, looking healthy and happy. Thurber is in carrying a stick. He is entertaining this p.m. for Mr. Nash.1 A letter is at hand from Bob Hubbard, unintelligible and asking for five hundred dollars which I shall not send. . . .
I hope Roger is getting on, and please give him my best. Joe and I send lots of love, and hope you’ll be back soon.
A——
To GUSTAVE S. LOBRANO
[New York]
[December 1931]
Monday
Dear Gus:
The only Earp I ever knew was neither Wyatt nor Henry—he was Fred Earp, a copyreader on the Seattle Times. All this is getting us nowhere, all this Earp business. It earps me. I suspect it earps you, too.1. . . .
Since you have visited us we have made certain amusing alterations in the apartment. By chopping a hole in the ceiling of the living room, we effected an entrance into the apartment directly above ours, dispossessed the tenants, and moved in ourselves with much noise and flourish. Thus we now live more compactly, more like a family—and are seen less frequently wandering about the hallways trying to establish communication between upstairs and downstairs. It would be worth your while to come to New York, to study our abode. I wish you would. I have some sherry wine that is excellent, and we could sit around drinking it and making merry.
Hard times have dealt lightly with The New Yorker, and I still find myself in comfortable circumstances, with a soft seat under my bottom. While Mr. Benchley is away, I am attempting the theater job in addition to my other duties—mostly in the hopes of earning a vast store of wealth against the time when I will be too indigent, or too inept, to be able to make a farthing. Incidentally, it looks as though there is a good show in the offing—the Kaufman-Gershwin musical comedy (light opera, rather) called “Of Thee I Sing.” I have heard from people in Boston, where it now is, that it comes closer to being a Gilbert & Sullivan show than anything this land has yet produced. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could be here for the opening? Which, I may add, is an invitation and not just a piece of whimsy. The date hasn’t been fixed definitely, but it is some day next week.
Among the people who have turned up recently out of a job, is B. D. Adams, whose aircraft company is in a state of collapse.2 Bob hasn’t changed much—is still tall, healthy, uneasy. He’s living at the Phi Gamma Delta Club somewhat dismally, and talks of starting a manufacturing business in Brooklyn.
Joe thrives, on a well rounded diet of small objects that he picks up and swallows—cigarette butts, erasers, wooden letters from the anagram set, and the like. He walks now, a bit of mischief he picked up only last week—from associating with elders. He is a handsome, enthusiastic son and we get on well. We celebrate his first birthday next Monday with cake, prayers, and thanksgiving.
K sends her love, which includes the hope that you can come down soon. We dined the other evening with Mr. and Mrs. Galbreath in their Abingdon Square apartment, very new and tidy, with Mr. Galbreath doing most of the cooking, and pretty good too.3 Mostly we have been going to the theater a good deal, in line of duty. Many bad shows, and one or two good ones. I am discovering that criticism is about the most difficult kind of writing—has to be more accurate, more just, and less self-conscious than most scrivening. Takes a lot out of a man.
Best to Jean and the wee bairns. Write soon.
Andy
To HAROLD ROSS
[January? 1932]
[Interoffice memo]
Mr. Ross:
As a small, worried stockholder, and as the author of one of the pieces quoted, I feel impelled to say that this ad makes the current issue of the New Yorker sound strangely dull. I don’t think we should present reasons why an Alva Johnston profile is good, or draw a diagram of a Gluyas Williams drawing, or pull one sentence out of an obituary, or describe Woollcott as having “a considerable playgoing following.”
In other words, it seems in bad taste to have the contents of one issue of the New Yorker described by someone who seems not to catch its meaning. I think weekly ads cataloguing the contents of the issue are good; but the contents should be catalogued, and not described—unless by someone whose powers of description are greater than in the attached.
Yrs in deep purple,
Mr. W
To GUSTAVE S. LOBRANO
[New York]
Feb. 10 [1932]
Dear Gus:
On the back of the envelope containing your last letter, I find the following two lines.
Gall, amant de la reine, alla, tour magnanime
Gallamment de l’Arène à la Tour Magne, à Nîmes.
The lines are in the meticulous hand of Will Strunk, who was a visitor here, and who carries a little store of such oddities about with him in his head for the entertainment of his hosts. A French poet, after thinking hard, composed the lines to prove to his satisfaction the possibility of two lines of Alexandrine verse which would be identical, syllable for syllable. Poets were less busy then. . . .
K and I are just back from Lake Placid, which is not so much a sign of great wealth as it is a sign of daddy’s willingness to write a long, rather tedious, story about the winter games for the New Yorker. Daddy gladly did it, however, for we had a grand time and enjoyed Nature’s Masterpiece very much. You in Albany are doubtless visited with snow and ice occasionally, but we in New York have to go and find ours. We had good skiing and good weather, we wore long woollies, we saw the patinage de vitesse and the skisprünglauf, we saw a sled dog team stop short in midrace to allow the pole dog to go to the b-thr—m, we stayed at the Club where everything is spelled in simplified spelling and where “the liquor law can not be treated as a joke or defyd by any Club member, gest, or employe,” we defyd the liquor law, we walked in the chill dusk and made scrunchy noises in the well-packed snow, and we wished you were along. This is just a line to let you know. Love from all.
Andy
To BERNARD BERGMAN
[East Blue Hill, Maine]
[Summer 1932?]
Sunday
Dear Bergie:
I have taken up the matter of my vacation payment with all the natives here, and they think it is perfectly satisfactory.1 On the strength of it, Les Eaton is going to rig a mooring for me provided I cut the cedar for the pole, Mrs. Dan Trewargy is going to continue letting us have eggs Tuesdays and Fridays if the hens think well of the arrangement, and I am going to make a rent payment on the Christopher Columbus—a black sloop built by a man with no fingers. To cross the Atlantic. She tends to broach to in heavy weather, but is tight.2
There is an east wind today and Mrs. White has taken advantage of it to drive the cook to mass. I always hang a medallion of St. Christopher right next to the gear-shift, as they say he watches over women drivers; but I worry a good bit, and the cook uses the whole mass praying for her safe return. The hay is all in, and the county agents are busy condemning the blueberry crop, on account of maggots. There is no more granite shipped out, and it is simply used locally for grave stones. I
hope everybody is well but I have never seen the time when they were. Anyway I am glad to know that you have straightened out my vacation payment, as it must have been a courageous move, with Lippmann holding out for cancellation.
Yrs,
Andy
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
[January? 1933]
[Interoffice memo]
Dear Mrs. White—
Sympathizing with you in your recent dilemma when you found yourself sandwiched in between two old-line coupon clippers, and aware of your humiliation, I made so bold as to seek out the enclosed pamphlet from the Fifth Avenue Bank, explaining how such embarrassments may be avoided—at a slight charge. A cheerful fire was burning in the hearth, and it was warm and cozy inside the Bank even though I was immediately under suspicion because of my odd clothes. I do not know that it is at all necessary for you to have a Custody Account, but what with Mrs. Lardner so sick and Willy [Buffa] growing up and Daisy dead1 and Nancy off to school and Joe’s cough and everything I didn’t know but what you might like to consider it. Ever since I found the railroad tickets in with the sliced bananas and yesterday’s melons, I have wondered.2
Yrs lovingly,
Mr. White
To GUSTAVE S. LOBRANO
[New York]
[March 1933]
Saturday afternoon
Dear Gus:
A moment’s calm has settled like dust over this apartment, and it looks as though I might be able to manage a letter before sunset gun. I was glad to get yours, and to learn of your increasing influence in the life of the state capital—memorable as the city from which emerged the superman who quietly picked up the pieces of our shattered republic. All through the campaign I thought Mr. R. was something of a pain; but the pain is gone, and it feels so good. You talk of stirring times: you should have been in New York that crazy March 4. There was, all through the town, the feeling not so much of financial disintegration, as of disunion. It was a question of who was your friend any more. Was the cop on the corner on your side, or on the other side? I found myself busy with all sorts of fantastic conjectures and solutions, and mostly very envious of my remote grandsires, who could attack the problem of existence directly, with plow and musket. At noon I happened to be driving north on Fourth Avenue, and got held up in a traffic snarl caused by the parade of the radical groups. There were thousands of them, and with the usual ill-assorted banners and slogans, flaunting the most various and diverse complaints and demands. There was no common enemy, as there is in war; and I have never seen a red demonstration that seemed to hold so much dynamite ready to go off. The cops were as polite as ladies at a garden party. I really believe that if anything untoward had happened, some minor spark somewhere, New York would have had one of the damndest riots in history—not because anybody knew what he wanted, but because nobody did. Driving my capitalistic limousine through the town, I felt like a noble in the French revolution, and expected at any minute to run down a child and have to use my whip on the rabble.
