Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  Got your letter this morning, and I think you did perfectly right to give all the money you want to to your aunt. Money is no good anyway except to hand around. You can’t take it with you, as Ol’ Sage Kaufman pointed out (at considerable profit to himself, I understand). My interest in money is at an extremely low ebb at the moment—I am surrounded by hundreds of bottles of new crabapple jelly, and pears in jars, and ripening cranberries, and turkeys on the hoof, and ducks in the cove, and deer in the alders, and my own mackerel shining in airtight glory. I wouldn’t know what to do with a dollar even if I could remember which pants it was in. As for Elsie,1 I guess everybody has crazy brothers and sisters. I know I have. Stan, by the way, has taken out a patent on an invention of his called “Botanical Bricks,” which are simply plant units (like window boxes) capable of being built up to any height, for quick landscape effects, with the vertical surfaces covered with flowering vines, or the like. He thinks that the idea has great possibilities for such things as the World’s Fair, etc., where sudden and transient greenery is necessary, also for sidewalk cafes, small city yards, indoor gardens, and many other projects. I think perhaps he has got hold of something, and have written him for more information. He certainly deserves a break.

  My days go simply by. I have given up the nine to one schedule, as it was just making me irritable, and when I got thinking about it I remembered that I had never written anything between nine and one anyway. Monday visited John Allen, the smith of Sargentville, to get my pole ax drawed out. Mr. Allen is around and about again after an appendectomy. Been coming on him for twenty years—then all of a sudden she exploded. He had plenty of chance to just lie there and think about things when he was in the Bluehill Hospital, and although he had formerly been opposed to the Automobile, because it had driven out the horses and spoiled a smith’s trade, he remembered that it was an automobile that got him to Dr. Bliss in time to save his life. Has changed his mind about motor cars. I pointed out, however, that automobiles were killing people awful fast, too. “By gorry,” he said, “I hadn’t thought about that. Now I’ll have to think it all out again.” He said his strength was slow coming back, and this was the first ax he’d upset in a long time. Moses [a Labrador retriever] had a fine visit, eating hoof parings.

  Tuesday in the rain set about making an ax handle out of a piece of ash which Howard had, but was getting nowhere with my jack knife, so journeyed to the Slaven barn, where Percy provided me with a wood rasp, a cabinet scraper, and a vise, and built a little fire in the stove, and made a little handle for the wood rasp, and gave me a little box to stand on so the workbench would be more my height. He said not everybody could make an ax handle. . . .

  Yesterday was lowery, and I dug clams and ground up my toll bait. Wormed Mose, and got eleven fine roundworms—six inches long each. Thought some of going to the Union Fair, over behind Camden, but the weather was unpleasant. Frank tells me he went and it was great. A much more genuine country fair than the Bluehill one, with lots of horse pulling contests and cattle judging, etc. We must surely go next year.

  Howard and I cleaned up the vegetable garden this morning, ready for the plowing tomorrow, if he can get a team. Cut the heads off the sunflowers and made a compost of the bean vines and other leftovers. We’re going to take the dock down pretty soon, before the elements do. You can hear it groaning clear up to the house these days, with the wind from the north.

  Miss Anderson has a motorbike.

  The Burrows girls (whom I still don’t believe in) have bicycles but can’t ride and are practicing on the back roads. . . .

  Newbury Neck has been bought by Seth Parker.2 (You are now 14 miles from the home of Seth Parker.) No kidding it has.

  Daylight Saving Time has been discontinued, and Mr. Pervear arrives at seven and departs at four. . . .

  There’s a bounty on seals. One dollar.

  Mr. Pervear does his nooning indoors these days. . . .

  Must climb up now, with my black companion, to the bedchamber, there to doze, rather coldly, till 1:30 a.m., at which hour Moses celebrates his matins. From 1:30 till daybreak, it is anybody’s ballgame, with a good deal of heavy-footed fooling around, intestinal gas, revulsion against Freddie’s closet lair, and general dawn pageantry. Am thinking some of giving up the bedroom for night occupancy, and just curling up on the living room sofa, where the remains of the fire in the Franklin stove spread a certain calm across the night.

  Lots of love to you and Joe. Was glad to get the good news about your health. Don’t work too hard. It would embarrass me to have you working too hard. We have jelly enough to last us for five years, so take it easy. I have had an entirely new feeling about life ever since making an ax handle.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  P.S. Please send me a pair of long underdrawers from the bottom drawer of my bureau. Get Mr. Hoyt to wrap them up for you, he hasn’t anything else to do.3

  How’s Hattie?4

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [October 8, 1937]

  Friday afternoon

  Dear Kay:

  . . .I think Joe’s musical education might be interrupted without cataclysmic results. I really am trying to spend as little as possible this year, in order not to eat too deeply into my savings. I will try to instruct Joey on the piano, if he shows a desire to learn. If, however, you feel strongly about keeping him in the Mannes school, I’ll chip in my share. I don’t think a half hour lesson once a week is any good—too scattered. And I think I am definitely against a Saturday lesson—more important that he should get some sunshine and outdoor play.

  Life goes on here pleasantly, the only sad part being that you can’t share these spectacular October days. The maple in the corner of the yard is the most extraordinary red, all over, that I’ve ever seen on a tree. Even Howard is impressed. The maple right next to it is still solidly green, for some reason. . . .

  You would not feel bad about the state of the world if you could see the state of this part of the world, which is almost more beautiful than the eye can bear. Even the gruelling wars in the East are not without balm, for they have given us Emily Hahn in apotheosis. That Reporter piece was peerless fun, and I think we should have a weekly serial called “At the Front with Emily Hahn,” in war or in peace. With Sweetie Pie at Gallipoli. I look forward to Lois Long doing the second coming of Christ, and a feature by Sheila Hibben from the famine areas.

  Today there arrived by post a gold medal from the Northeast Harbor Fleet approximately two and one half inches in diameter.1 On the obverse a map of Mount Desert, overlaid with a triangular pennant, and the inscription, engraved in gold: “Mr. and Mrs. E. B. White.” On the reverse, this inscription: “A Token of Appreciation of Your Many Kindnesses to the Northeast Harbor Fleet.” It is the first medal I have received since I won the St. Nicholas League gold award, and I am as happy as a boy.

  Must go to bed now, this letter having been continued after supper. Mose and I have gone back to sleeping upstairs, since he has taken to resting more easily at night. I just couldn’t stand his 2:30 a.m. reveille. In all the time he has been living in the house, he has messed only once, so that’s a lot of bunk about the McKelway bitch being better house trained. She isn’t better in any particular.

  It was in your study.

  Lots of love,

  Andy

  P.S. Am enclosing the last pansy of the year, which bloomed not in any of your pretty borders, but right in the driveway. Also a sample of the maple.

  To JAMES THURBER

  245 East 48 Street

  [October? 1937]

  Sunday afternoon

  Dear Jim:

  Sunday afternoons are about the same as when you left, people walking their dog out, and the dog not doing anything, the sky grey and terrible, and the L making the noise that you hear when you are under ether. The middle of the afternoon is the saddest time, because it is neither right after lunch nor right before supper, it is not time to ha
ve a drink yet, and if you call someone on the phone, the phone just rings. It is the time little boys come in from the garden and say that there is nothing doing out there. I got back from Maine a week ago, but all this week I have been looking around and wondering why I came away.

  I made the drive in an open car with a turkey in the back seat and a retriever in the front. Stopped off at the Coateses’ and we ate the bird and freshened up the dog. Els and Bob are all right, and the valley where they live is still full of cowleys and blumes, as always, and the Rehacks’ cows and now and then a pheasant. Bob is quitting his job doing Time book reviews and has started in doing an art column for the weekly New Yorker, where I used to work when I could think of anything to say. He is looking for a furnished apartment in town. Joe Sayre is back from the Vineyard with third act trouble. . . . McKelway is in Ford’s with booze gloom. Walter Lippmann and Mrs. Lippmann are getting a divorce. Ruth Fleischmann is now Mrs. Peter Vischer, and (as Ross put it) we now have another little mouth to feed.

  I saw the David Garnett piece about you. I can’t think how I happened to see it but I did. I doubt if you are the most original writer living, but I doubt whether anybody is. I am the second most inactive writer living, and the third most discouraged. The greatest living writer is Morris Markey,1 and the greatest living woman is Helen. If you want the names of the other living writers I can probably get Brayshaw to get them for you. And before I forget it, I better tell you what Josephine, who is the most original living North Italian woman, calls my Labrador retriever. She heard us calling him Moses, which is his name, but she apparently didn’t quite catch the sound because she invariably addresses the dog as Mosher. “Come, Mosher, come on, naah?” Every once in a while she puts a “Mr.” in front of it, and calls him Mr. Mosher. He so hoppy.

  I, too, know that the individual plight is the thing. I knew it when I stayed with my mother while she died in a hospital in Georgetown. I knew it day before yesterday when Joe (looking suspiciously like me) stood up in meeting house and recited the 117th psalm before the elementary school. You beget a son when your mind is not on that at all, and seven years later he is there in a clean white shirt, praising the Lord. You spend your days chuckling at the obstinacies of French waiters and Italian cooks, but always knowing that much of life is insupportable and that no individual play can have a happy ending. If you have the poetic temperament you go on groping toward something which will express all this in a burst of choir music, and your own inarticulateness only hastens the final heart attack. Even when an artist has the ability and the strength to assemble something of the beauty and the consternation which he feels, he is usually so jealous of other artists that he has no time for pure expression. Today with the radio yammering at you and the movies turning all human emotions into cup custard, the going is tough. Or I find it tough.

  If you go to Corse, you can either take the little paqueboat from Marseilles or the plane from Antibes. I took the boat one time, stayed up all night on deck to escape the cackaroachies in the bed, and saw Ajaccio just at sunrise. I have never seen anything like that since. There is a good small hotel called Hotel des Etrangers with a pretty garden full of lizards and sweet smelling vines. I suppose there are still vines in the garden of the Hotel and that they still smell sweet. Give my regards to Victor, who will not remember me.

  I passed through Litchfield, for the first time in my life, last Saturday, and bought two pairs of boxing gloves in Torrington, junior size, for the wars. It’ll be nineteen years come December that I was discharged from the army. Or is it twenty? Litchfield seemed beautiful, and Tony Coates and Joe White liked the boxing gloves. All towns should have a common, sheep or no sheep. George Horace Lorimer and Osgood Perkins are dead. Lots of love to you and Helen from us’ns.

  Andy

  To JOSEPH BRYAN III

  245 East 48 Street

  30 November 1937

  Dear Joe:

  Here it is. I had no idea it was going to come out as long as this, but we Detweilers are wordy folk, and don’t know where to stop.1

  The piece precipitated a minor emotional crisis in my little family, for with inspired timing I showed it to Katharine on the same day that our brand new cook from Nova Scotia told Josephine (the Piedmontese lady who scuffles around the house imitating dogs) that it was a dirty trick to throw garbage into the garbage can until it was properly lined with newspaper. Hell broke loose downstairs and Katharine finished reading the piece in tears, saying that she was no good as a housewife (she said she was no good as a mother either, just for heightened effect) and that she would have to give up her job and make a decent home for me. I told her to get the hell over to the office and win some more bread and stop her blubbering.

  If you reject this piece I hope all your pantrymen are typhoid carriers.

  Yr lurid old chum,

  Andy

  • White took his son Joe, then in the second grade at Friends Seminary School in New York City, to spend a few days in Maine during the Christmas vacation. The Whites’ Brooklin house was not winterized, so they stayed at the home of Captain Percy Moore, in Blue Hill.

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [Blue Hill, Maine]

  [December 31, 1937]

  Friday morning

  Dear Kay:

  I don’t know when I’ve had a better time, sick or well. If you were here it would be perfect. Had a good night’s sleep, and this morning am almost whole—no more throat. The snow stopped at nightfall and this morning is bright, clear, cold & gorgeous—the harbor (half frozen over) shining in the sun; the little boys, too, shining in the sun. Joe has friends on the block, is called “Joe” by the larger and more important boys, and his skiing technique has won the respect of everybody. I was feeling too bad to pay any attention to Joe when I first got here, & merely turned him out & told him he could go anywhere in town and do anything he wanted to. He began cautiously, behind the schoolhouse, but by midafternoon was zooming down the hill & out onto Main Street, and today he is roistering all over the village with his pals, most of whom seem to have whooping cough but all of whom are alive and happy. In a single day, Joe has become car conscious, and crosses the road with the alertness of a bird. He and I are going over to the Slavens’ this afternoon, to superintend cutting a little wood. (Percy always refers to the Slaven place as “the granite”—which has a pleasant note of rockbound eternity, with a touch of Irish.)

  As soon as this letter is done I’m going calling—Dr. Bliss, Max Hinckley, etc. Percy said at breakfast he thought maybe Max had begun already to celebrate New Year’s Eve. “And by God he enjoys it,” he added, with a kind of wistful note. Tomorrow I think I’ll take a sandwich lunch & go down to N. Brooklin for the day—& maybe get some skating on the frog pond, which, after all, is as big as Radio City. . . .

  This is the last day of 1937, and this letter is full of my love for you and my hopes for the new year. I have had plenty of time for reflection in the last day or two and have decided that you are right about the necessity for planning. A single person can act aimlessly, but where lives mingle and merge there has to be a scheme in advance. Half the fun in life is in anticipation, anyway; & plans are exciting in themselves. A country town on a snowy morning is agreeably deceptive—it leads one to believe there can be no bad in the world—even the dogs feel the extra gaiety and goodness. But deception or not, I feel ready and eager for the new year, and here are my love and hopes and greetings.

  Andy

  Happy New Year, Mother

  Joe

  To JAMES THURBER

  245 East 48 Street

  8 January 1938

  Dear Jim:

  Katharine and I have just been going over our stack of Christmas cards (we keep them in a big bowl in the hall near the box of hard candies which the Coateses gave Nancy and Roger) and have re-read the stale polite little greetings and thrown most of the cards away. . . .

  Sayre, for whom you inquired, is still around town as far as I know. He was last seen
at a Christmas entertainment given by the pupils of Friends Seminary, where his daughter, Nora Sayre, is in kindergarten. That particular entertainment established a record of a sort, because one of the angels fainted and had to be carried out by a shepherd and the principal of the school. I wasn’t present myself, but heard about it from my lad Joel, who came bursting home with a special radiance all about his head, shouting “Some Christmas! What a mess!” and proceeded to give an imitation of the fallen angel. He was so pleased with this, that he kept giving repeat performances all afternoon, and will still do the angel for you, with any encouragement at all.

  You don’t have to be in a stalled car near Naples to be out of touch with Joe Sayre, you can be sitting right next to him at Bleeks and get the same remote abandoned feelings. I have encountered him a couple of times at parties, but he just stares at you steadily for a minute and then goes phaaf, like your car, and sits down in a dark corner somewhere to continue brooding. You are precisely right about what playwrighting or playwriting does to people, and I think, also, that Joe waited till pretty late in life to discover that even after you have written a play, it still has to be all done over again by a man named Sig Herzig. You can stand a blow like that when you are 25, but it comes harder after your joints have begun to ankylose and Hollywood has hung rhinestones all over your vest. Plays, as you pointed out, come about as close to literature as a problem in solid geometry. I was looking through a big book which Carl Van Doren got together, called “Great Prose of the World” or some such thing, and suddenly, after emerging from a heaving sea of words which rose and fell with immortal cadences, I fell into the middle of a play by Eugene O’Neill—which I guess Van Doren thought he had to bring in there somehow—and got hung up right away on a Great Prose passage that went “Will you kindly close the door” or words to that effect.