Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  Dear Chris:

  Date of my birth is July 11, 1899. I can’t imagine what you’re doing with me in Bartlett’s, but if it’s the spinach joke I hope you quote it right. Only about twice has it been quoted right.1

  I can’t think of a book to review right now but I shall watch the lists closely. Many thanks for the offer.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  • White had met Jack Fleming at Professor Bristow Adams’ house at Cornell when Fleming was an editor of the Cornell Countryman. After he graduated, he went to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

  To JOHN R. FLEMING

  [New York]

  3 February 1937

  Dear Jack:

  I am going to set a hen on some turkey eggs this spring to tone myself up and prove that a man can fail at more things than one. Your department got any turkey information that might prove valuable, or disastrous, to me? Don’t tell me I have to keep their feet off the ground—my turkey poults are going to have their feet right on the ground and like it.

  I have a bet with my wife that I can raise our Thanksgiving bird this year, and am anxious to win. My dander is up. Send me your stuff.

  Yrs frantically,

  Andy

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  [New York]

  13 March [1937]

  Dear Bun:

  Thanks for the letter about Christmas. I haven’t done anything about Christmas yet because my system is to let it go until I can no longer see the red on a poinsettia and I have discovered that if you trim back a poinsettia to within a couple of inches of the roots soon after New Year’s it will bloom again, in fact I have one flowering in the window now. Your study is nothing compared to mine, which is full of live birds. I was in Bloomingdale’s one day and happened to discover a hen canary laying an egg—a show of spirit which was too much for an old canary breeder like me, so I took her home ($1.98 including sales tax) and what with the cockbird that belongs to Joe and another hen named Buttercup, the room is little more than an incubator. Birds are all right except you get practically nothing done, as they make everything else seem so unimportant.

  Was interested to learn that you, too, are a Tarzan devotee. I have long been a student of Weismuller and his tailor-made jungle, and when I come to make my definitive study of the movies, a whole chapter will be given over to Africa. I am also planning a chapter on “Sound,” which will be mostly a description of what film noises are like if you close your eyes and don’t look at the picture, and a chapter on “Hollywood trees,” which will include the hollow tree, the soft focus tree, the vine (or rope ladder) tree, the all-purpose tree, and the flat crotch tree for Janet Gaynor and one other. It is extremely encouraging to me to realize that, with hundreds of movie critics working like beavers in all the big cities, hardly a word of cinema criticism has yet been written. It’s an untouched field, and makes me think there will still be something for me to work out on in my old age. The attempt to combine human speech with animated images has really led to nothing, unless you want to call America’s second largest industry something.

  We have had what I believe is called a mild winter, although it hasn’t seemed mild to me, what with nausea and Nancy’s appendectomy and Joe’s cut chin and Kay getting a toothbrush bristle stuck in a tonsil divot. Kay was very funny that night—the bristle, securely lodged in her throat, made her vomit up a dollar and a quarter dinner, but the circumstance struck her as so comical that she was in gales of laughter while throwing up, and I had to hold her hair back, which is three feet ten inches long by the most conservative measure, and the whole affair was most grotesque. It was a Doctor West’s toothbrush, during the moult. . . .

  Bun, there is one matter which has been on my mind, and I can’t recall whether I mentioned it to you before. I wish you would let me have the address of the stonecutter who made the marker for Father’s grave, together with instructions for having a similar stone made for Mother. (Unless, of course, you have already done something about it.) I haven’t been out to Ferncliff this winter, but expect to go soon. I think we should have the two stones the same, and we shouldn’t let it go any longer. Will you please let me have the necessary information as soon as possible?

  Some time this summer I am quitting the New Yorker for at least a year—sort of a delayed sabbatical—and am looking forward to it with some relish. I want to see what it feels like, again, to let a week pass by without having an editorial bowel movement. It is terrible to have to write down one’s thoughts before they even get their pin-feathers, and I have been doing that for quite a while. So toward the end of the summer I shall give up my job and devote myself to the miasma of leisure and to the backwash of the spirit. I don’t know what I’ll live off of, but they say it is called the fat of the land. I can always kill a nice fat canary.

  Must get back, now, to my Saturday afternoon inactivity, which this letter has too long interrupted. My best to all

  Yrs,

  Andy

  • White’s P. B. Publico piece in the March 6 issue of The New Yorker lamenting the disappearance of the “touring car” from the American scene generated a lot of mail from motorcar buffs. J. Thomas Stewart II, an automobile dealer in Omaha, saw the piece and wrote “Publico” that he had a 1930 seven-passenger Lincoln tourer in mint condition. The price was $300. White bought it, sight unseen, and sent an office boy named Wilbur Young to get it. An Omaha paper got wind of the transaction, played it for laughs, and gave Wilbur a sendoff when he rolled out of town at the wheel of the Lincoln. The car proved to be everything Stewart said it was—a dazzling beauty, pearl gray, not a scratch, leather upholstery, a built-in tire pump powered by the engine, and a set of tools alone worth $300.

  To J. T. STEWART

  [New York]

  May 21, 1937

  [Telegram]

  WILL BUY THE NINETEEN THIRTY CAR AT YOUR FIGURE BUT WILL NOT GO THROUGH THE LEAD SMELTER STOP HOLD THE CAR FOR ME AND I WILL SEND WILBUR FOR IT STOP WILBUR HOLDS THE RECORD IN QUEENS COUNTY FOR MAKING FIRE BY RUBBING STICKS TOGETHER LOTS OF LOVE TO ALL

  E. B. WHITE

  • During his “year off” White hoped to write a long autobiographical poem. His reluctance—evident in the following letter—to discuss the project with his wife stemmed from his having learned the uses of secrecy: when he talked about something, it didn’t get written; when he kept it to himself, it stood a better chance.

  Some of the poem did get written, but White soon wearied of it, or fell short of being able to sustain it. When The Second Tree from the Corner was being assembled, White included a section of the poem under the title “Zoo Revisited.”

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [New York]

  31 May [1937]

  My dear Mrs. White:

  It has occurred to me that perhaps I should attempt to clarify, for your benefit, the whole subject of my year of grace—or, as I call it, My Year. Whenever the subject has come up, I have noticed an ever so slight chill seize you, as though you felt a draught and wished someone would shut a door. I look upon this delicate spiritual tremor as completely natural, under the circumstances, and suggestive only of affectionate regard, tinged with womanly suspicion. In the world as now constituted, anybody who resigns a paying job is suspect; furthermore, in a well-ordered family, any departure from routine is cause for alarm. Having signified my intention to quit my accustomed ways, I shall do you the service of sketching, roughly, what is in my heart and mind—so that you may know in a general way what to expect of me and what not to expect. It is much easier for me to do this in a letter, typing away, word after word, than to try to tell you over a cup of coffee, when I would only stutter and grow angry at myself for inexactitudes of meanings (and probably at you, too, for misinterpreting my muddy speech).

  First, there is the question of why I am giving up my job. This is easy to answer. I am quitting partly because I am not satisfied with the use I am making of my talents, such as they are; partly because I a
m not having fun working at my job—and am in a rut there; partly because I long to recapture something which everyone loses when he agrees to perform certain creative miracles on specified dates for a particular sum. (I don’t know whether you know what this thing is, but you’ll just have to take my word that it is real. To you it may be just another Loch Ness monster, but to me it is as real as a dachshund.)

  Now there comes the question of what I am going to do, having given up the job. I suppose this is a fair question—also the question of what I intend to use for money. These matters naturally concern you, and Esposito [grocer], and everybody. Dozens of people have asked: “What are you going to do?” so strong is their faith in the herb activity. I know better what I am not going to do. But I won’t try to pretend (to you, anyway) that that is the whole story either. In the main, my plan is to have none. But everyone has secret projects, and I am no exception. Writing is a secret vice, like self abuse. A person afflicted with poetic longings of one sort or another searches for a kind of intellectual and spiritual privacy in which to indulge his strange excesses. To achieve this sort of privacy—this aerial suspension of the lyrical spirit—he does not necessarily have to wrench himself away, physically, from everybody and everything in his life (this, I suspect, often defeats him at his own game), but he does have to forswear certain easy rituals, such as earning a living and running the world’s errands. That is what I intend to “do” in my year. I am quitting my job. In a sense, I am also quitting my family—which is a much more serious matter, and which is why I am taking the trouble to write this letter. For a long time I have been taking notes—sometimes on bits of paper, sometimes on the mind’s disordered pad—on a theme which engrosses me. I intend to devote my year to assembling these notes, if I can, and possibly putting them on paper of the standard typewriter size. In short, a simple literary project. I am not particularly hopeful of it, but I am willing to meet it half way. If at the end of the year, I have nothing but a bowlful of cigarette stubs to show for my time, I shall not begrudge a moment of it and I hope you won’t. They say a dirigible, after it has been in the air for a while, becomes charged with static electricity, which is not discharged till the landing ropes touch the field and ground it. I have been storing up an inner turbulence, during my long apprenticeship in the weekly gaiety field, and it is time I came down to earth.

  I am not telling people, when they ask, that I am proposing to write anything during My Year. As I said above, nothing may come of it, and it is easier to make a simple denial at the start, than to invent excuses and explanations at the end. I wish you would please do the same. Say I am taking a Sabbatical and doing nothing much of anything—which will come perilously near the truth, probably.

  When I say I am quitting my family, I do not mean I am not going to be around. I simply mean that I shall invoke Man’s ancient privilege of going and coming in a whimsical, rather than a reasonable, manner. I have some pilgrimages to make. To the zoo. To Mount Vernon. To Belgrade, and Bellport,1 and other places where my spoor is still to be found. I shall probably spend a good deal of time in parks, libraries, and the waiting rooms of railway stations—which is where I hung out before I espoused this more congenial life. My attendance at meals may be a little spotty—for a twelvemonth I shall not adjust my steps to a soufflé. I hope this doesn’t sound ungrateful, or like a declaration of independence—I intend it merely to inform you of a new allegiance—to a routine of my own spirit rather than to a fixed household & office routine. I seek the important privilege of not coming home to supper unless I happen to. I plan no absences, I plan no attendances. No plans.

  The financial aspect of this escapade does not seem portentous, or ominous. I’m going to have Arty send me the money which comes in from my securities.2 I’m going to sell the P.A. [Pierce Arrow], which should bring $2,000, of which you get $1500. My taxes are paid, and I have enough money in the bank to continue in the same fifty-fifty arrangement with you in all matters of maintenance, recreation, and love. My luncheons will be 50 centers, instead of the dollar and a quarter number, and I will be riding common carriers, not Sunshine cabs. Instead of keeping a car on service at a garage, I would like your permission to keep the Plymouth nearby at some cheap lodging. I don’t anticipate laying in a cellar of wine, or buying any new broadloom carpets. I think if I pull in my ears and you watch your artichokes, we can still stay solvent. I think it is better to do it this way than to try some possibly abortive rearrangement of our way of living, such as letting out the top floor to a Bingo society, or going to France to take advantage of the cheap wines. I notice Joe is already starting to sell his paintings.

  Well, this about covers my Year. I urge you not to take it too seriously, or me. I am the same old fellow. I hope I shall give and receive the same old attentions and trifles. I don’t want you tiptoeing around the halls telling people not to annoy me—the chances are I won’t be doing anything anyway, except changing a bird’s water. But I do want you to have some general conception of my internal processes during this odd term of grace. I want you to be able to face my departure for Bellport on a rainy Thursday afternoon with an equanimity of spirit bordering on coma.

  Yrs with love and grace,

  Mr. White

  P.S. This letter is rather long, but I didn’t have time to make it shorter, such are the many demands on me these days from so many points of the compass. I realize, too, that the whole plan sounds selfish and not much fun for you; but that’s the way art goes. You let yourself in for this, marrying a man who is supposed to write something, even though he never does.

  P.P.S. Unnecessary to answer this communication. Would be a drain on your valuable time. Just signify your good will with a package of Beemans—one if by land, two if by sea.

  PPPPPS. Will be glad to answer any questions, or argue the whole matter out if it fails to meet with your approval or pleasure. I do not, however, want to discuss the literary nature of the project: for altho you are my b.f. and s.c.,3 I will just have to do my own writing, as always.

  • Before beginning his “year off” in earnest, White planned a cruise in Astrid, to unwind. Charlie Muller was a Cornell friend, a public relations man and the author of books for children. He liked to sail and was a good hand on a boat.

  To CHARLES G. MULLER

  North Brooklin, Maine

  11 July 1937

  Dear Charlie:

  I was thirty-eight years old today, and spent most of the day trying to build a henyard—which seems an odd milestone. The planks seemed heavy, and I noticed that I quit early and took a drink. We’ve been here just a week, and I haven’t had a sail yet, Astrid having blown the bJesus out of her muffler, or what the boatyard man calls her “maximum silencer.” We finally located a new maximum silencer, and she is afloat in the Benjamin River, ready to go. . . .

  We’ve had terrifically hot weather here, and for the first time the swimming has seemed actually alluring. Eight broiling sunny days, with very light wind, if any. The pollen count has been high, and my hay fever has raged quietly all through the customary membranes. It’s suicide for me to arrive here on July first, but I do it anyway. I would really rather feel bad in Maine than good anywhere else. Maybe I should warn you what a madhouse you are stepping into here. I have ten turkeys, three dogs, three children, three or four in help at the last count (including the postmaster, who grows wonderful salpiglossis and scabiosa), two water systems, a cesspool, a chimney swift, a moosehead covered with swallow crap, a frogpond, a family of bantams, a Sears Roebuck catalogue, and one hundred and sixty-five chairs. There is also a fine view of Mount Desert. Roger’s old bulldog, Tunney, who is twelve and has the worst breath of any dog in Hancock County, is in love again, and goes sobbing all over the house, playing his violin. He located a Scotty bitch down on the shore last summer, and nine weeks later she underwent a Caesarian section, which my wife tells me is no fun. They spayed her while they were at it, but even that doesn’t quiet our old bulldog, who apparently lives for
his memories. We also have a 7-year-old 7-passenger touring car which I bought by mail this spring from a guy in Omaha, Nebraska. If you would still like to come, I hope you do.

  My last stint for the New Yorker gets mailed on July 28th, so I’m free any time after that date, but would prefer not to go cruising till about August 1 or 2, as Nancy (Kay’s daughter) who is spending this month at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole is arriving here the 29th or 30th, and I don’t want to disappear with her favorite 30-foot boat too abruptly. I should think if you got here either Saturday or Sunday, whichever day is best for you, it would be O.K. for us. You will probably like to park your tail here for a couple of square meals, to fatten you up against Astrid’s diet of beer and stewed periwinkles, and then we can shove off. I have nothing in mind except to poke around this beautiful coast, do a little exploring and plenty of loafing. I don’t want to be gone for more than about ten days, on account of the extra load my absence puts on Kay, but ten days ought to give us some sunshine, indolence, and derring do. . . .

  Andy

  To HAROLD ROSS

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [Early September 1937]

  Thursday night

  Dear Kay:

  I fell asleep after supper and now I have woken up, but not very up. Have just been mackereling with Frank Teagle and Herm Gray, but no mackerel this time. We went to the exact same spot where Fred and I caught all the fish on Sunday, but not a sign of a fish—only a fine sunset, cold, too; and then a run home under power after dropping Herm at the stone dock. It gets dark quickly these nights—almost no twilight. And usually a night wind springs up to stir up the sea. Frank is near-sighted, and thought South Bluehill was Allen Cove. He is a nice kid, although not much of a hand around a boat. Says he’s not the outdoor type. He is full of photography, and has taken a couple of dandy pictures of this house—neatly labelled on the back, “E. B. White’s house.” I’ll send them to you. He said his New Yorker scrapbook fell a year behind because of his round the world trip, but that he and another boy recently spent four solid days bringing it up to date. What a pal!