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Letters of E. B. White

Page 23

by E. B. White


  I’ll probably leave by car about the 16th, taking Joe, Freddie, Ezekiel (a new puppy), Nick (a bird), Hattie (a rubber plant), and a sack of middlings. Kay will depart a couple of days later, by train, after closing the house and mopping up. (I must remember to get that girl a mop.)

  My piece “Memoirs of a Master” which you mentioned in your letter wasn’t a brilliant success. The Saturday Evening Post canned it, so I retired it to stud. I am an easily discouraged fellow.

  See you soon.

  Andy

  • White writes: “Ik Shuman was the current ‘Jesus’ at The New Yorker. Ross was always hiring someone to run the magazine—and then not letting him run it.”

  To IK SHUMAN

  North Brooklin, Maine

  [July 1938]

  Sunday

  Dear Ik:

  As to yrs of July 14 regarding my sending some timely comment the weeks of Aug. 27 and Sept. 3, I would say that I believe I can do this all right. If I can’t I am not the same old White. Maybe I am not. Lying under a range shelter holding a clinching iron against the roost supports, I sometimes wonder. You didn’t say what quantity of this comment, or “guano,” you wanted. You mean two whole departments, or what? I would like some comment suggestions to work from in the event that I undertake this writing job. Writing is at best menial work, and I need suggestions, or the “folder.”

  My black dog got a woodchuck yesterday and ate most of it. Later he was sick.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To IK SHUMAN

  North Brooklin, Maine

  [Summer 1938]

  Dear Ik:

  I thought the check for the answers to hard questions was a fine thing, no complaints. Any money at all that I can get my hands on these days seems like a fine thing, and nobody gets any back talk from me. I am trying to finish a piece about Daniel Webster and the hay fever, which I hope to send to the NYer, for money.1 Not many people know what a bad time Webster had with his mucous membrane, but he kept writing President Fillmore about it, and I have my hands on most of the evidence. I have just had a very bad time with my own hay fever, but have kept it out of my correspondence, mainly.

  My four Bourbon Red poults are doing all right, also my flock of 83 New Hampshires, now in their ninth week. I am a little godsend to the grain company in Ellsworth, as I have never been able to refuse a bird anything. I gratify their slightest whim. The Park & Pollard growing mash rolls in here by the hundred pound bag, in a steady stream. Joe’s bantams have increased and I can send you a nice trio at the drop of a foulard tie.

  Regards to all,

  Andy

  To H.K. RIGG

  North Brooklin, Maine

  15 September 1938

  Dear Bun:

  I liked your S.S. Princess Anne very much, and think she looks like an ocarina.1 My own Palatial Ferry has a dead engine at the moment, the base being full of water instead of cylinder oil. I haven’t found out where the water comes from, but the barbershop opinion around here is that the jacket has rusted through. Doubt very much that she was properly laid up last fall, as the boatyard man had a mad on. I am the one that has the mad on now, and am thinking of hauling her on my own beach. . . .Astrid’s new mainsail has had a nice workout this summer and sets good. She also sports a new jumbo which I had cut here in Sargentville, for thirteen bucks. We had a lousy summer on the whole, with plenty of rain and all kinds of goings on, structural and otherwise. The new cellar wasn’t used to her concrete floor, and proceeded to fill up with water so that we had to go after a jar of jam in hip boots. The chimneys work all right but they go through the attic at the god damnedest angle you ever saw in a chimney. I am scared of earthquakes. Right now I am shingling the barn, which is nice clean work if you don’t slip. On the whole the general situation is improving—Joe has started school already, and there is no longer any low hum of guests around the place. The Eureka Pavilion2 (“Amusements of All Kinds”) is settling into its stride, roller skating on Monday and Thursday nights until further notice, coming soon Harold Lloyd in “Professor Beware.” My broilers are now roasters and very good eating. One of these days I am going wild bee hunting, as one of my pals is an expert. Yesterday morning the cove was full of coots.

  Zeke has turned out to be quite a dog, and is far and away the best clown on the place. He had a field day when the Northeast [Harbor] cruise was in here, cleaning up after them on the shore. For three days I never saw him when he didn’t have a Lily cup or a thermos bottle in his mouth. He is very quick and big, and those young sailors, broiling their lobsters and opening their hard boiled eggs, hardly stood a chance, Right now he has a fine black coat, beautifully marked with red lead.3 He hasn’t got the amiable and noble disposition that Moses had, but is a lot gayer and brighter.

  If you get tired of the ‘untin’ set, and can’t locate another coon dog named Rock, you better drift down here and we’ll catch a mackerel, or a wild bee. Kay says to tell Frances she saw her aunt Mrs. Clark at a brawl right here in Brooklin. How is everything on 49th Street, or even 48th? I am supposed to be doing a monthly department for Harper’s and what with a deadline of 40 days, and war trouble in Czechoslovakia, it is a tough life. I never should have got into this monthly racket.

  Love to all,

  Andy

  • Soon after White began contributing his “One Man’s Meat” department, Harper’s magazine placed a display advertisement in The New Yorker announcing the new feature. White was embarrassed and irritated by the ad copy, which implied he had defected from The New Yorker.

  To HAROLD ROSS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  16 September [1938]

  Dear Mr. Ross:

  I am sorry and sore about the Harper promotion which Ik phoned me about today. I hadn’t anticipated anything like this but I guess I am not an anticipator. Or maybe it was because the publishing side of the Harper organization has always kept so mum about my books: that may have thrown me off. I told Ik that I couldn’t very well tell Harper’s they couldn’t insert an ad about me in the NYer, but that I would object strenuously if there was any implication that I had quit the NYer. I was just trying to be fair to all parties in this unattractive matter. I also sent a wire to Lee Hartman asking him please not to use my photograph in a NYer ad, but to use a caricature instead if he insisted on stressing the pictorial side of me.

  I find it very disturbing to be advertised, as I have noticed that it is the advertised authors that stink. I am pretty sure I am going to stink from now on, and it might just as well be in Harper’s as anywhere, I suppose. A writer is like a beanplant—he has his little day, and then gets stringy. I gather from your letter that you don’t see why I should be writing 2500 words a month for Harper’s rather than the same amount for the NYer. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is, in a department like N & C there are certain limitations in subject matter and in manner of expressing yourself which, after ten years, become formidable and sometimes oppressive. With a signed department, using “I” instead of “we,” I can cover new ground, which is necessary at this stage. The other is, a monthly department gives me about three weeks of off time, which I can devote to a sustained project, like shingling a barn or sandpapering an old idea. I want this interval during which I don’t have to produce anything for publication. I can’t get it with Notes & C. because they come along every Friday, rain or shine. Those are the reasons I grabbed off a job with a quality monthly. (See Time for an account of how Harper’s is giving up quality and taking me instead.)

  It is not all velvet, this monthly life. I think on the whole they worry more about it than I do—anyway they keep writing me letters, telling me how to go about everything. It seems that the big trick is to fill exactly four pages without any white space on P. 4. This goal is arrived at by a bit of wizardry which I haven’t yet mastered but which I study every night before retiring. The deadline they have given me is the tenth of the month for the second month following. Fancy me in a Christmas mood by
Columbus Day. I stuck a turkey in my November department and it was greeted with a roar of approval because it was the right bird. Luckily I happened to have a turkey on hand that I could stick in.

  Answering your question about my doing some Comment, my intentions have been to do some provided it didn’t interfere too much with this 3-week lull that I spoke about above. I have not been getting many comment ideas here on my own hook, and probably won’t until I take to reading the papers again. I expect to start reading the papers again when I get back from the Cornell-Harvard game in Cambridge (Cornell 12—Harvard 0). I will pick up the paper and read about the game, and the first thing you know my eye will rove over to Berchtesgaden and away we’ll go. I don’t dare read the papers for my Harper’s column because I would get a mild dysentery worrying about what fifty days lapse was going to do to my stuff. Fifty days is almost three years, pal.

  Yrs,

  White

  To GLUYAS WILLIAMS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  [mid-September 1938]

  Dear Gluyas:

  Some of the time we sit dolefully around the radio listening to Czechoslovakia and hurricane victims, but most of the time I am on the barn roof, shingling. The roof, on blue days, commands an unsurpassed view of sea, sky, and mountains—with a patch of yellow pumpkins in the left foreground and a bough of red apples practically in your lap. I am even contemplating a cupola (or what Al Townsend calls a cubalo) as a proper base for a golden arrow weather vane. It is wonderful, how completely a man can occupy himself with a cupola, with Europe hanging in the balance and tidal waves washing decent people out to sea. I trust you and yours were not washed out to sea, as it would make us feel very sad and smug.

  Joe has completed two weeks in the Brooklin school without incident. Mackereling has been unusually good—Astrid took 104 aboard last Sunday afternoon in the rain, off Long Island. Kay is knitting mittens—a clumsy miracle on a par with wireless telegraphy, synchromesh transmission, and the McCormick reaper. Our furnace (steam) is half in, half not in. Radiators sitting around, in approximately (but not quite) the right position. I have done two departments for Harper’s Magazine, but still don’t feel that it is anything but a sort of dream—and haven’t the slightest conviction that I can do another. Wednesday we go to the Union Fair, to watch the horse pulling, then on to Belgrade for a night. And the week after that we trek to Boston for the Cornell-Harvard game—our sop to civilization for the autumn term.

  Yesterday we motored (by high-powered motor car) to Bah Hahba [Bar Harbor], for Kay’s periodical hair washing at the Frances Fox Institute. Dressed nattily in tweeds, we patronized the leading hardware store where we had a very funny time, being waited on by an extremely tony proprietor (in mouse-grey vest and silver handled cane) who doggedly complied with our requests for one large garbage pail with pedal attachment, one agate tureen for scraps to be saved for the pig, two 8-quart galvanized pails (for watering the pullets), a chromium toilet paper holder for the cook’s john, twelve sheets of brown wrapping paper, and a ball of twine. He stood it as long as he could, and then asked: “Have you just arrived?” We said no we’d been here for ages. With that as a parting crack we shouldered our foul containers and marched out.

  One thing I like about the country is the way everything moves indoors with you, come fall. Spiders, flies, hornets, dogs, crickets, bantams, lice, mice, everything. I don’t see how we can be lonely with this company. And to top it all, the Portland Press Herald printed a list of Who’s Who in Maine. There were only nine of us.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To AMY FLASHNER

  North Brooklin, Maine

  30 September [1938]

  Dear Miss Flashner:

  I am listing my choice of titles in the order of which I approve of them. You may take any one.

  1. Quo Vadimus?

  2. Parables and Prophecies

  3. Dr. Vinton and other matters

  4. The Wings of Orville

  5. Dusk in Fierce Pajamas

  I’m sorry I have been so long sending you a title, but I haven’t been able to think of very bright things to call a book.

  The copies of “The Fox of Peapack” have arrived and I think they look fine. Now that the dove hangs over Middle Europe, America ought to be right in the mood for a little book of topical ballads, nicely rhymed and essentially cheerful in tone. Throwing modesty to the winds I sat down and wrote the enclosed suggestion for an advertisement which I would like you to insert in all morning and evening papers in the United States at a cost of only three million dollars. I think it will whet people’s curiosity in great shape. You needn’t sit there and scoff, either: I used to be in the advertising business and was doing very well when something snapped and I began writing ballads. Naturally I don’t believe all those nice things I have said about myself in the ad, but we poets have to get along somehow. I really wrote it because I have always wanted to put William Randolph Hearst next to a concrete septic tank.

  Tell your boss Mr. Saxton that I finally quit thinking about book titles when I arrived at one called “The Pop-Up Book for Sit-Down People.”

  Yrs. rhythmically,

  E. B. White

  To JAMES THURBER

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [mid-October 1938]

  Dear Jim:

  I opened up the Sat Review and got into one of my wincing moods, ready for a good old-fashioned wince, but I’m damned if I didn’t come through in good shape.1 Why I hardly got even so much as a little teeny squirm out of your piece. I am much obliged (yes terribly much obliged) to you for your warm, courteous, and ept treatment of a rather weak, skinny subject. Only here and there were you far off. I do not sail a 30 foot boat expertly. I sail one courageously—a different matter. And the strange dreamlike quality of my interview with Robert Nathan in the reception room will probably never be caught except in my own version called “Journey’s Dead End,” to be published with other matters come spring (Harper & Brothers, h’ya boy?). Of course, all that guff about my shrinking, quiet disposition is a curious hangover from a legend started, I believe, by Alexander Woollcott about ten years ago and perpetuated doggedly ever since. Hell, I was just as hale a fellow, just as well-met, as anybody else who worked around the place; only I passed up a Sunday breakfast invitation one time at the Woollcott home, and since I was the only little-known person who hadn’t shown up promptly, Woollcott had to invent a cock-and-bull story to save his reputation as a salon holder without peer. So he spread it around that I was shy. I doubt if I am shy. I am more on the pushy side, like you. The only reason I am not recognized as I strut through the Algonquin is because, among all the thousands of people around New York whom I have met, not one of them can remember a single thing I have ever said that was either amusing or informing. I am a dull man, personally. Nobody ever seeks me out, not even people who like me or approve of me; because after you have sought me out, you haven’t got anything but a prose writer. I can’t imitate birds, or dogs; I can’t even remember what happened last night. . . .

  However, I think your piece is fine, and I appreciate your doing it. (After all, I know what a selfless and sacrificial mood you have to get into, in order to do anything for the Sat Review. Last spring in Bermuda I put in 53 hours doing a book review for them, and got nine dollars, or 17¢ an hour. That’s small pay even for a Cornell man.)

  Thanks, pal. If you see me in the Algonquin, I want you to smile and nod.

  Lots of love to you and Helen,

  Andy

  To MORRIS BISHOP

  North Brooklin, Maine

  30 October [1938]

  Dear Morris:

  I feel that “gay” is not quite the word for what we are in Maine. Alert, perhaps. Busy certainly. But our mood ranges from bewilderment to a well-disciplined New England rapture. This is not the “gay” phase. I was gay at seven, again at twenty-three, and expect to achieve gaiety once more at eighty, just before the final distemper.

  You
r note was encouraging, and I appreciate your bothering to write me about my somewhat desperate little affair with Harper’s. Reading over my first couple of departments, I am not at all sure that I can make out with this sort of monthly encyclical—I sound like Thomas Mann on the Concord and Merrimac. Now that my pullets are laying well, I have an almost overpowering urge to let pure thought go by the board and write nothing but rather sharp notes to my grain dealer.

  This set-to with the soil, or “earth,” which Katharine and I are engaged in, is a manifestation well worth exploring; whole carloads of creative, impractical people are sprinkling the land of their forebears—or at any rate the land of somebody’s forebears. We examine, with the simple wonderment of a child, the elementary processes of nature, overemphasizing (I dare say) the ignoble properties of the city and the town, emulating the competence of genuine countrymen, and acting often in a thoroughly comical manner. There is something quite funny about the rediscovery of America, if I could just get it down. I suppose it was going on a hundred years ago, in transcendental days, and was just as amusing then as now; but today we have the added absurdities which arise from the attempt to live simple lives with General Electric appliances. The cellar of this old farmhouse is perilously like the boiler room of the Queen Mary: you can hardly see the McIntosh and the Northern Spy for the pressure gauges.

 

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