Letters of E. B. White
Page 25
Our house is a little more orderly, now; we gave away most of the review copies at Christmas, and can now make our way about the rooms. We gave quite a few to a small library in this village, where they were much appreciated, I think.1
Thanks again for your letter. I will try to get to work on the book. Meantime, please save shelf space in your library, public though it may be, for a copy of “Quo Vadimus? or The Case of the Bicycle,” to be published in a couple of weeks by Harper. (Advt.)
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To EUGENE SAXTON
Hotel Gramercy Park
New York
1 March [1939]
Dear Gene:
Herewith an unfinished MS of a book called Stuart Little. It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it. You said you wanted to look at this, so I am presenting it thus in its incomplete state. There are about ten or twelve thousand words so far, roughly.
You will be shocked and grieved to discover that the principal character in the story has somewhat the attributes and appearance of a mouse. This does not mean that I am either challenging or denying Mr. Disney’s genius. At the risk of seeming a very whimsical fellow indeed, I will have to break down and confess to you that Stuart Little appeared to me in dream, all complete, with his hat, his cane, and his brisk manner. Since he was the only fictional figure ever to honor and disturb my sleep, I was deeply touched, and felt that I was not free to change him into a grasshopper or a wallaby. Luckily he bears no resemblance, either physically or temperamentally, to Mickey. I guess that’s a break for all of us.
Stop in here for a drink some fine afternoon. We are enjoying room service and would like to see you.
Andy White
• After White had declined the editorship of the Saturday Review, Bernard DeVoto, who had declined the post before it was offered to White, changed his mind and took the job. The following memo was written one afternoon after White had returned to The New Yorker office from lunching at the Seymour Hotel.
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
[Interoffice memo]
[March? 1939]
Dear Mrs. White (“Tootsie”):
Lunching alone at the Seymour (Manhattan cocktail, cream of tomato, turkey club sandwich with fried sweets, meringue glacé, and coffee) who do I see but a party of ten, Miss Loveman1 in charge, arranging, introducing, making all go well, with the Editor of the Review at elbow’s point with the beautiful Martha Gellhorn, so blonde, so young, selling so well, and on the other side the Booky Monthy man with the dandruff, and other authors, critics, writers, full of anecdote and the #3 luncheon, the #5 luncheon; as literary a sight as you could find all along 45th St., and sitting there alone, with last night’s cigar still smouldering in my viscera and today’s glacé untouched in the hard light, I looked at the happy intellectual gathering and said, “There, but for the grace of DeVoto, sit I.”
Ah welladay.
Mr. White
To EUGENE SAXTON
North Brooklin, Maine
11 April 1939
Dear Gene:
I will do my best to make some progress with Stuart Little. I can’t make any promises, as the effect on me of forced labor is sometimes rather dreadful. My wife is nagging me about Stuart, too; in fact today I told her she would have to stop—that she was driving me too hard. I think it made quite an impression on her.
All I can truthfully say about Stuart is that I will keep fall publication in mind as a goal, but that everything depends on whether the finished product turns out pleasing to mine eye. I would rather wait a year than publish a bad children’s book, as I have too much respect for children.
One of the problems, of course, would be to find a satisfactory illustrator, and I wonder if you have any ideas on this subject. It would have to be somebody who likes mice and men, and who knows a little of their hopes, joys, disappointments, etc.
I will keep you informed as to progress, if any, of the book. Right this minute I am wet nurse to 250 small red chicks, and God help my publisher and my readers—all ten of them. . . .
Yrs,
Andy
To STANLEY HART WHITE
North Brooklin, Maine
19 April 1939
Dear Bun:
I am hiding, too. It’s hard though. I feel sure that Italy, Germany, and Japan all know where I am, as well as a lot of people who will drop in about suppertime in summer when the roads are open. Snow keeps a lot of them away at this season. . . .
We have had a nice time here, and I like living in Maine the year round. It gets me pleasantly out of touch with all the things that are well worth being out of touch with. Also it gives me a chance, at last, to play with tools uninterrupted. I never realized how strong this desire is in me: probably inherited from my paternal great-grandfather. Practically the most satisfying thing on earth (specially after fifteen years of trying to put English sentences together against time) is to be able to square off a board of dry white pine, saw to the line (allowing for the thickness of the pencil point) and have the thing fit perfectly. It is best in the late afternoon, when the shop is warm from the brooder stove and the sun comes in the windows and lies along the bench among the curly shavings.
Am going to New York next week for the opening of the World’s Fair, as the NY’er wants me to do a piece on it for them, and are paying my way.1 Putting the World’s Fair into two thousand words ought to tone me up.
Yrs,
Andy
To ANNE CARROLL MOORE
North Brooklin, Maine
25 April 1939
Dear Miss Moore:
I’m very grateful to you for your encouraging letters, and for sending me the Horn Book with your mention of my piece in Harper’s. I agree with you that the Horn Book is an admirable little magazine—intelligent, and certainly pleasing typographically. I enjoyed Wanda Gag’s article, also yours on the river books (which I must read as they are the kind of thing I ordinarily find diverting). The only one of the series which I have seen is Kennebec. Did you ever read Sycamore Shores— a nice rambling river book—on the Ohio & Tennessee.
I am afraid that between you and my publisher and my wife—all of you at me to finish my book—it will never get done; I pull back like a mule at the slightest goading. However, it is a matter of small moment, I’m afraid. Not being an imaginative person essentially I haven’t much hope of turning out a real book that children will enjoy. My friend James Thurber would be the one who could do it.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To FRANK SULLIVAN
North Brooklin, Maine
26 May 1939
Dear Frank:
Thanks for the potassium. I believe that the commercial fertilizer I am using on the vegetable garden contains quite a lot of potassium, and so I’ve been stealing a few mouthfuls now and then. Katharine has been taking some sort of powder in water before breakfast every morning for a year, and that, it turns out, contains potassium. That’s marriage, Frank—the man has the sensitivity, the woman gets the potassium.
I have been trying to get round to writing you in regards to a book of humor, yes humor, which K. and I have agreed to get together for Coward, McCann. Inasmuch as you will some day receive a check for $3.61 representing your share in the royalties of this book, I have no compunctions about asking your advice and help. Can you give us any suggestions about what to include? Name one funny thing you ever read (by an American). We are going to include some verse, but I think the book will be preponderantly prose. What we hope to be able to do is to get together, in one big volume, not just the standard chestnuts of Dooley, Twain, Sullivan and the like, but those lost jewels which lie tarnished in old newspaper files and scrapbooks. (Incidentally, have you any clips of your newspaper pieces that didn’t get into book form and that should be studied by us serious students of humor?) Can you recall, offhand, any outstandingly funny piece of drama criticism, or baseball reporting, or such like by the Wits of the Old W
orld? (I don’t suppose we can include Pete Vischer’s music criticisms, however hilarious. You boys tried hard, but with Pete writing the music reviews you were licked before you started.1)
This book is going to take a lot out of us before the year is up, and my colon is tense in anticipation. I think if we succeed in rounding up the sort of stuff we have our mind on, it ought to be a good book and a handy one. The slightest tipping and hunching we can get from our friends will be of great value, because it is damn hard to remember the pieces that ought to get remembered. I happen to have a peculiarly bad memory, anyway, and things go in one sinus and out the other. . . .
Lots of love,
Andy
To HAROLD ROSS
North Brooklin, Maine
15 June 1939
Dear Ross:
This is in answer to a letter you wrote on a Thursday. I got the stock and wish to thank you very much. You were right in assuming I had forgotten about the agreement.1 I had. But I remember it now, and wonder if I lived up to my end of it. The wording is pretty vague—I mean that part about my contributing “occasional comment.” Mine was so occasional you could count it on the fingers of a millworker. If I didn’t earn my stock let me know.
I approve of your idea of dropping the comment page from the book. Our attempts to draw a line of distinction between page one and the pages which follow has always confused readers (when they heard about it), and I have seen a startled look come into the eyes of persons to whom the news suddenly got broken. I never approved of the idea of illustrating comment, because for one thing the illustrator usually got all the mechanical breaks and for another thing if a comment is any good it not only doesn’t need illustration but often is incapable of being illustrated in the mood in which it was written.
The more people you have writing comment, the better, in my opinion. The more elastic the page (mechanically), the better. The less you think about the structure and problems of the comment page, the better. The more you think about its possible contents, the better. In short, the better.
If I were in your shoes I would forget there ever had been a comment page, a White, a Berry, or even a Hyde or a Gibbs. Just go ahead and do your stuff and let it start and end where and when it naturally does. You will always get comment and you will always run comment, but it shouldn’t be so god damn structural and (as to size and shape) premeditated. A Malman spot is fine. A caricature or a cartoon is fine. And they ease the whole situation instantly.
On Page 2 of your letter you ask whether you could expect of me occasional or frequent comment, or maybe thirty a year. I should say that you could expect thirty. I shall set for myself a goal of one comment a week, a shining goal. Coolidge did it, why can’t I? Incidentally, I think I have devised a way by which I could be hunched from the office without any particular expense or trouble on either side. Whoever receives the stuff in the office known as “comment suggestions” always has a batch of it left over each week. This batch consists partly of material which has to be returned to the owner, partly of press agent stuff. Let Miss Terry send me the press releases, and I can use them and throw them away. If the volume seems too much, she could throw half away, send me half.
As to filling in for Gibbs for a month this summer, I can’t do it. I will start sending in some comments, but I can’t write four departments, complete with commas and funny remarks, this summer.
I don’t want to make any change in my Harper arrangements at present. In some ways I don’t get the fun out of it that I would get out of the equivalent amount of work for the New Yorker, and I also find it rather difficult. I dislike writing an article of a specified length—just as I disliked writing a comment page of a specified length for you. But on the other hand I think it was a good thing for me to have done, and a year is too soon to quit—except for some quite definite reason. My situation in writing for Harper’s may, as you suggest, be psychological; but it is also cushy. It keeps me in fairly good health and gives me enough to live on. If I had no responsibilities or obligations of a domestic sort, I would most certainly arrange my life so that I was not obliged to write anything at any specified time for anybody. I admire people who have the guts to do this. What I am trying to do is to approximate that condition without actually achieving it fully.
There is, then, no immediate likelihood that I will drop the Harper’s department and make a deal with you to do a piece a month. I have no agreement, either written or verbal, with Harper’s, but they merely permitted me to go ahead until further notice and I said I would. I don’t know what they think about the whole thing, and suspect that they are a little surprised that the stuff hasn’t turned out to be in a comment vein. I’m not sure they are entirely delighted with me as a contributor. In some ways I feel a lot more at home in the New Yorker, and get into a stride quicker; also it is a better magazine. More comical and interesting.
Thanks for all your interest in my work and the opportunities which you offer.
Yrs,
White
• White held unorthodox views about the system of payment by anthologists. Often reprinted himself, he felt that the flat fees dreamed up by anthologists were mystical sums and that writers with big names usually got paid more than lesser known writers. White believed in profit sharing, or royalty sharing; he knew that a book is a gamble, and he felt that the contributors should be in on the gamble. When he and Katharine White put together their Subtreasury of American Humor, he insisted that the contributors receive a percentage of the royalties. His publishers—who saw a lot of intricate bookkeeping ahead—reluctantly complied.
To MORRIS BISHOP
North Brooklin, Maine
23 June 1939
Dear Morris:
I have been corresponding with one Raymond F. Howes on the subject of using a piece of mine1 in a book to be called “Our Cornell.” I have not, however, found out from him what I want to know; his letters have a friendly ambiguity which has begun to disturb me. I turn to you for enlightenment.
If by donating my article I would be serving my Alma Mater (that girl!), I would be happy to do so. If, on the other hand, I would simply be helping another anthologist over the rocky road of life, I would just as lief get paid. That is all I want to know—what sort of book this is. Can you tell me?
In Howes’ last letter he said: “Rym Berry and Morris Bishop, for instance, would, I think, feel very uncomfortable if, at this stage of the game, I went to them with an offer to pay them for their contributions.” He then suggests (for me) a lump sum of $25. The implication that you and Rym can be uncomfortable in the presence of money, while I can maintain my famous calm, is what finally got me down. Am I Cornell’s son or ain’t I?
Of course, I brought this all on by answering Howes’ first letter with a request for a statement of what sort of book it was and who was going to get the dough. I am notoriously stern with anthologists, and intend to continue being stern, as I have found, on the whole, that they are a cagey lot (I’m not referring to Howes) and seldom work out their program with fairness to their stable of authors. I am not interested in horse trading and it makes me howl with rage when Mr. Howes extols your loyalty and Rym’s and in the same breath slips me twenty-five bucks. What the hell goes on here, anyway? . . .
Yrs,
Andy
To HAROLD ROSS
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[September 28, 1939]
[Telegram]
SORRY CANNOT SEND ANYTHING TRY RAYMOND GRAM SWING1 WHITE
To GUSTAVE S. LOBRANO
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[November 27, 1939]
Monday
Dear Gus:
A recent communication from the New Yorker stated that you were in the market for scenes and stories of “high life.” I instantly was reminded of my own dead past, and of my former life which was at one time so high that I suffered from dizziness.
At any rate, I searched through my files and extracted “Memoirs of a Master,” which I w
rote while living in high style on 48th Street. I submitted it, at that time, to the Saturday Evening Post, but it was rejected. I didn’t want to submit it to the New Yorker, because I was afraid that the persons then in my employ would read it and perhaps feel hurt. Possibly that danger is now past, and your magazine would like to publish it. It would have to be in two parts; and it would have to be anonymous. Even published anonymously, I feel that there is some question about certain parts of it. But I leave that to you to judge.
Andy
The butt joint where the two caps met at the corner came out perfectly—smooth, clean, and hard. Tomorrow I shall be hanging the gate. The snow is still with us. Joe, with another boy, is constructing a shanty of poles under a big spruce down on the shore, where they plan to work the clam flats and become independently wealthy.
To CLARA WHITE WYVELL
North Brooklin, Maine
14 Jan. [1940?]
Dear Tar:
You can bring anybody except you better not bring that cattle man, as I have sheep here and there is a continual feud between us sheep raisers and those cattle men. Let me know when you are coming and I will send you some road information that ought to be very useful to you, as I am an authority on New England highway pitfalls.
We have had a good winter so far, nobody has broken his neck, and the weather has been cold and clear. The snow we got before New Year’s is still with us, although it is beginning to peter out now. It will be wonderful to see you again, as it seems to me it has been a long while. The place we live in is twenty-five miles from a movie, but I will take you every night just the same. During the daytime you can collect eggs, or you can hunt for gloves. We spend most of our time hunting for gloves, as I have a dachshund puppy who hides them on us. If you have any gloves, don’t bring them, as you will never see them again.