Letters of E. B. White
Page 24
I trust that you are enjoying, as I am, the barbarous pleasures which surround a winning football team, and that we will meet in the not too impossible future. Kay and I send our best to Alison,1 you, and the small Bishop.
Sincerely,
Andy
• Cass Canfield first worked with White on Quo Vadimus? When Eugene Saxton died in 1942, Canfield became White’s editor at Harper & Brothers.
To CASS CANFIELD
[North Brooklin, Maine]
November 3, 1938
[Telegram]
WHY NOT USE TITLE QUO VADIMUS PLUS SUB TITLE QUOTE OR THE CASE FOR THE BICYCLE UNQUOTE TITLE YOU ARE GOING AHEAD WITH IS OBVIOUSLY MISLEADING SINCE YOU TOOK IT TO MEAN BEWILDERMENT IF YOU ARE SCARED OF A LATIN TITLE REMEMBER THAT A BOOK CALLED QUO VADIS USED TO RUN NECK AND NECK WITH THE BIBLE AND THE BOY SCOUTS HANDBOOK WHAT IS SO TERRIBLE ABOUT LATIN? ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE A SUB TITLE WHICH REMOVES ALL DOUBT
E B WHITE
To JAMES THURBER
North Brooklin, Maine
18 November 1938
Dear Jim:
Thanksgiving won’t seem like Thanksgiving to us away from the Thurber house, but we didn’t see how we could make it. It turns out Elsie [Sergeant] is coming here for a week’s visit, and anyway Woodbury isn’t within our weekend range, even with me at the wheel. There are something like 452 miles separating you and yours from us and ourn. I am getting to be more realistic about mileage than I used to be: even to go to the movies we must drive 28 miles there and 28 miles back. Joe goes 2.5 miles to school—partly on the hoof, partly motor-driven. Kay goes 46.6 to get her hair washed—and is lucky even at that. We go 51 miles to meet trains, 28 miles to buy a bottle of Amontillado, 9 miles to a package of Kleenex, 13.6 miles to a cord of slabwood; and even to harvest the two dozen eggs which my pullets lay daily (at no prearranged signal from me) I have to walk 100 feet. My pullets are laying fools, but they have a strange thing the matter with them which causes them to shake their heads. I have looked this up in my pamphlets, but I can’t find out much. It’s like a dog biting himself viciously in the pocket under his hind leg—you can’t tell much about it, whether it’s worms or fleas or eczema. These birds of mine never stop shaking their heads and it is beginning to get to me. Sometimes I stand there and get thinking that maybe they are shaking their heads over me. “Poor old White,” they say, shaking their heads. I asked Lennie Candage what it meant when they started shaking their heads. (Lennie was over here building a new foundation wall under the north end of the barn so it wouldn’t be too cold for the pig in the barn cellar: and there is a story in that, too, it’s what always happens to me—I get a pig so that we won’t have to buy hams, and then I rebuild my barn around the pig at an expense of perhaps a thousand hams, or more than you and I could eat (with mustard) during the rest of our natural lives, if you can call mine a natural life.) End parenthesis. Anyway, Lennie was here, his old felt hat a mass of spider webs where he’d been walking around in cellars doing foundation work, and when I put it right up to him about my pullets shaking their heads he said, “God, I dunno nuthin’ ’bout chickens. I just feed ’em, and if they do good I take the money; if they sicken, I dump ’em. That’s all I know ’bout chickens.” Just the same, I wish they’d stop shaking their heads.1
On the whole we are getting along here pretty well and liking it. There is something in me that keeps making me want to do things I am not very good at, and of course the country is the ideal place for that. I have made things about as hard for myself as anybody conceivably could, I guess, what with installing a coal furnace that has to be handfired (by me), and acquiring a lot of miscellaneous live animals that have to be fed, watered, nursed, wormed, bedded, scolded, and worried about. This place teems with trouble, of one sort and another. I am up every morning at twenty past six, trouble shooting. The community here is a very strange box of bon bons, with a surprise in every layer. In summer time it is impossible to find out much about what goes on but in winter you begin to get to know people.
(Later, Sat. the 26) We had a light fall of snow for Thanksgiving Day, and yesterday we awoke to a N.E. blizzard, a gale of wind and plenty of what the sportswriter on the Bangor News calls the fine white particles. The wind was blowing so hard the snow never hit the ground at all, just went along till it brought up against something. When Kay learned that no milk had come and that the power lines were down, she was just like Mrs. Peterkin on the famous morning when the Peterkins arose to find a white world and no butcher. I spent most of the morning applying hot towels to frozen pipes in the woodshed, rescuing small animals and birds from strange unsuitable locations, stoking fires, and battening down barn doors. We soon were without water, the power being off, and this suggested a trip to the spring—which is across the road in an alder thicket, about three hundred and fifty feet away. I remembered that I had equipped the spring with a concrete cover, and that in my zeal I had fitted this cover with a large, cheap padlock—the sort of elaborate, fussy gesture which a city man makes when he first comes to the country and begins tampering with fundamental matters, like water. It is an exciting moment, when you renew your acquaintance with a spring (a locked spring) during a driving snowstorm. Joe and I and the hired man fought our way through drifts groin high, dragging our buckets. Things were a little quieter in the woods, and we scraped the snow off the spring top and Joe applied oil to the lock. I had brought a hack saw along. It seemed an odd thing to approach a pure spring of water with, a hack saw. To my surprise the lock gradually loosened up and admitted us to my water, which we scooped out in enamel pails and lugged back through the blizzard to the house. It wasn’t that anybody particularly wanted any water, either. Nobody wanted any water. Six hours later the power came on again, and with it the full pipe, the pure-flowing tap.
Yesterday was the day, too, when Ethelbert (“Mighty Lak a Rose”) Nevin’s daughter Doris had invited us to dinner to meet Mary Ellen Chase. But not even as idyllic a literary occasion as that could take place in such a great storm: the snowplow hadn’t come through, and there was just no getting authors together. We’ve got another storm in our lap, but are taking it quietly—we have laid down our hack saws and will beat them into plowshares come spring.
We are very lucky in our “help” this fall, our dinners being cooked for us by Miss Milly Gray, a kindly white-haired lady . . . [who] is full of prophecy and lore of all kinds. She looks under the lid of the stove for signs of milder weather. She has a humorous regard for a set of deities called “they.” Her references to these spirits are always made with a half deprecatory manner, as though they were a rather troublesome, quirky, ill-tempered group of gods. “I was thinkin’ one snowstorm might be enough for one week,” she said this morning, “but they didn’t think that way.” Or, commenting on my Labrador retriever, “They didn’t skimp any, when they made that one, did they?” She keeps up a running stream of conversation with herself, alone in the kitchen, and has a lively interest in wild flowers.
Life is just about alarming as it ever was, it seems to me. I worry some about my brothers and sisters, most of whom are in one sort of trouble or another. The piano business has folded, leaving Albert clean. My Washington sister [Clara Wyvell] is giving up her boarding house and going to a small town in upstate New York to live with a sister-in-law. Art Illian has moved from Chicago to Kew Gardens—which somehow sounds unpropitious. And my brother Stanley, while still teaching landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, is fooling with a patent on something called Botanical Bricks. My book of poems has brought me a handful of letters, from people like Ada Trimingham and the man I bought the touring car from. But it is apparent from reviews and sales that I will have to write something a whole lot better than that if I am to continue in this game. I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens. Roup, favus, thrush, range paralysis, the spiral stomach worm, the incessant shaking of the head—these specters take their place alongside rejected newsbreaks, teeny books of poems, a
nd the exhaustion which comes with the fortieth birthday. Incidentally, my fear of mold, which you mentioned in your piece, is still strong; and I am delighted to learn in my poultry bulletin that my birds and I may be called away together. There are several poultry diseases caused by fungi (molds), the most common being Aspergillosis. The causative agents are the common green mold, Aspergillus fumigatus, and the black mold, A. niger, which grow on vegetables and other kinds of matter. The affected birds mope, separate themselves from the remainder of the flock, or remain in a sitting posture. The difficulty of breathing increases rapidly; they gasp for breath and make movements of the head and neck as if choking; there are fever, diarrhea, drooping wings, great depression, a tendency to sleep, and finally suffocation and death. Thrush is another fungi trouble. In bad thrush cases, you have to flush out the crop with a 2-percent boric acid solution. I haven’t yet met the chicken which would let me flush out its crop, but a man never knows.
You and Helen must pay us a call soon. It is bleak here for visitors, and uninteresting, but we expect them to come just the same. I will try to have my ice boats made by the time you arrive. An ice boat is a good way to get away from mold—except, of course, the sail. The sail gets moldy, and you have to watch it.
Lots of love, and thanks for the invitation to Thanksgiving.
Yrs,
Andy
To DAISE TERRY
North Brooklin, Maine
14 December [1938]
Dear Miss Terry:
Would you have your office order me a copy of “Last Poems” by A. E. Housman? I want to give it to Roger for Christmas. He asked for Housman poems, a bottle of Amontillado, and a top hat. I can only assume that he is going to sit around in the hat, drinking the sherry, reading the poems, and dreaming the long long dreams of youth.
Yr distant friend,
E. B. White
To FRANK SULLIVAN
North Brooklin, Maine
20 December 1938
Dear Frank:
I got your letter (October 19, 1938) and your clipbook1 (“Oyster of Great Price”) and will now sit down and thank you for them. It is great to be sitting down. There is not enough of that done here on my place—in fact, the turbulence of country life is a disillusioning, or at any rate, an unexpected factor in this change of residence. I had looked forward to long cozy evenings around the blazing birch fire, with my dog dozing at my feet and in my hands a good book (“How to Raise an Oyster,” by Frank Sullivan) but the fact is we spend most of the 24 hours on a quick scamper and my room is clogged with unopened copies of the New York Times, probably full of rather nasty news. I’m up about six every morning, and immediately after breakfast I take a mild sedative to keep from getting too damn stirred up over the events of the day, the heady rhythm of earth, the intoxicating wine-dark sea which laps my pasture, the thousand and one exciting little necessities which spring from a 12-room steam-heated house standing all alone in a big world. There is a strong likelihood that the country will be my undoing, as I like it too well and take it too seriously. I have taken these 40 acres to be my bride, and of course that can be exhausting. I dance attendance on my attractive holdings, all day long. Kay and I are both drawing closer and closer to an electric water pump, farther and farther from the world of books (“With Pearls in Arabia”). I don’t even have my dog dozing at my feet in the evening because we’ve got it figured out that if he is going to sleep in the cold barn after we go to bed, he ought not lay around in the living room getting overheated. So we put the poor bastard out right after supper, to shiver in his straw pile twelve hours instead of only eight. All kinds of odd complications like that about Maine life. This afternoon I ought to do newsbreaks, but instead of that I have to make a motor trip of 54 miles to buy some tiny cardboard boxes in which the members of the Parent-Teacher Association will place the popcorn and candy for the children of Brooklin. In New York I never indulged in any charitable nonsense like that, but in this town we are at the moment the No. 1 glamour family, the family to which the leading citizens instinctively turn in any crisis. In NY I never attended a PTA meeting, figuring that a parent went through enough hell right in his own home—and besides, there was always some other place you could go, like to a professional hockey game; but I wouldn’t miss the PTA meetings here. It was at the last meeting that they voted to raise the salary of the librarian in the Brooklin library. She now gets $13 a year. I believe it’s to be almost doubled. They’re even talking of putting lights in the library, so people can see to read after dark. (It gets dark here at ten past three in the afternoon.)
The trouble with Maine is it has too distinguished a past. Every day the Bangor Daily News runs a long feature piece on Maine lore or history, usually an interview with an octogenarian who still thinks of himself as returning from the China Seas with a sandalwood box for his bride—or a bride for his sandalwood box. Or he is in a clipper ship in a gale off the Horn. I think this kind of reading makes the present generation restless and unhappy, and they are always looking for something bold to do. We had a blizzard on Thanksgiving, and somebody suddenly remembered that there were a lot of deer hunters in the woods, so the state cops rounded up a squadron of snowplows (which were badly needed right where they stood) and went bursting through a woods road on a rescue expedition which would have been a lifesaver for a cliché expert dying of exposure. Giant planes roared from the Bangor airport and swooped down to drop bundles of food and first aid supplies to stormbound hunters. The Field Artillery horned in on the fun, and as near as I can make out held up the operations considerably by insisting on establishing short wave radio communication between the tractor plows and the Artillery base in Bangor. (I have often wondered what an artilleryman says to a driver of a snowplow, but apparently he has a message.) The story made great reading and got better and better, until, toward the end of the fifth column on Page 2, it turned out that quite a few of the hunters wanted to stay in the woods “until later in the week.” The hunting was just getting good, and all the hunters from around here have enough rye in camp to keep them till spring anyway.
On the whole we are getting along fine, miss our friends some, but not too much; we have pork chops hanging by strings in the garage, apples in the attic, jams and thermostats in the root cellar, and a spruce tree waiting for me to chop it. I also have an instep waiting for the first merry axblow. We were tickled to get your book, and your Hollywood visit piece (which I had never read) wowed me. Would like to be in the pool with you now, treading champagne. K sends love.
Merry Christmas,
Andy
To EUGENE SAXTON and CASS CANFIELD
North Brooklin, Maine
18 January 1939
Dear Messrs. Saxton and Canfield:
I am deeply grateful for the pretty books you sent me at Christmas time, which I have already woven into a song.
Said Garamond to Tomlinson,
Said Caslon to Millay,
We feel we are the very type
You need on Christmas day.
I had never read “Illusion: 1915” and was much amused and instructed. Sometimes the imminence of war, long drawn out, such as we have been fretting under, seems as illusory and incredible as war itself—and I expect a French colonel wearing a hunting horn to break into the scene. At any rate, the past year has seemed dreamlike to me, and I am waiting for someone to take me aside and tell me that it isn’t true about Austria. But nobody does. Part of the illusion is the perfectly true fact that my wife has an old aunt living in Tokyo, who gives garden parties for the Japanese wounded.1 I just go out and mix up another hot mash for my hens. I can’t even drink very much (which would help out) as liquor has taken to going straight to my nose, cutting off my breath. It used to just go to my stomach—but that was before the pogroms.
Our immediate household, now in the eighth month of its confinement, is thriving, on the whole. We are beginning to get things in hand: the fires burn with steadier heat and less popping and sparkling; the dogs ha
ve reached a working agreement with the black-and-white kitten; and when I want a hammer I can find a hammer, not a brad awl. There is some slight advantage in living as a recluse, in that one makes one’s own crises, instead of getting them out of the newspaper. Tomorrow we will have the cat altered. That takes care of another day.
We are probably coming to town for a few weeks along about March, and shall hope to see you then. Again thanks for the good books.
Yrs,
Andy White
• Anne Carroll Moore was the New York Public Library’s first librarian for children’s books and a power in the children’s book world. An admirer of White’s prose, she was delighted at the rumor that he was writing a book for young readers. The book was Stuart Little. (Although in the following letter White says he started the book “about two years ago,” he was not being accurate. The first two or three chapters were written in the early 1930s.)
To ANNE CARROLL MOORE
North Brooklin, Maine
15 February 1939
Dear Miss Moore:
It was good of you to write me about the piece in Harper’s and I’m glad if it gave you any pleasure. I started to write a book for children about two years ago, and have it about half done. Perhaps with your encouragement I will get round to working some more on it. I really only go at it when I am laid up in bed, sick, and lately I have been enjoying fine health. My fears about writing for children are great—one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness. I don’t trust myself in this treacherous field unless I am running a degree of fever.