Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  I have just read the New Yorker’s motor show department, and it is a lot of crap. The fact is, cars are less good looking than they were in 1926. They look like a badly laid egg, or a torpedo that didn’t quite jell. They are a mass of unrelated chromium bands and miscellaneous ellipses. Mechanically they are practically perfect (except that they haven’t enough clearance and get badly injured the minute they leave the tar) but what good is a mechanically perfect thing if the operator is victimized by it?

  Greyhound buses, and some trucks, have seen the light and are putting the driver in a forward position where he can have a look around. But I can’t afford a Greyhound bus. My automobile doesn’t allow me a view of the road, and my magazine doesn’t allow me to get sore about it. As Bert Lahr used to say, I’m in a quarry.

  Andy

  As punishment for your removing two sentences that were not libelous and that you were scared to print on account of hurting advertisers’ feelings, I am enclosing some extra homework for you.

  To GLUYAS WILLIAMS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  [December 25, 1940]

  Christmas night

  Dear Gluyas:

  Have just been through “Fellow Citizens” (by Gluyas Williams, Doubleday, Doran) and I am impressed and felt I should tell you so, even at the tag end of this feast day. Probably a million American males have known the child in the seat ahead, but you were the guy that got it down on paper. Benchley certainly did a nice clean cut job in the introduction and to it we would like to add our amen. May the Lord give you strength forever!

  We’ve had quite a nice Christmas (I spent mine mostly with animals, which is a help); a complete attendance and a white countryside, with enough snow on the roads for sleigh riding behind an old horse named Fanny—not without reason. Many rather simple people presented us with many rather simple gifts, which pleased us inordinately (Kay has just this minute opened a box containing a venison pie and 2 cactus blossoms, from the lady who does our washing), and if it weren’t for the generally diseased condition of the world, we would feel that our cup runneth over. Ate our own goose and drank some American “burgundy.”

  Lots of luck to your book and a happy new year to all,

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  North Brooklin, Maine

  [Spring 1941]

  Tues morning

  Dear K:

  This is one of those mornings, the decibels working up to a crescendo, with many visiting boys all of them named Hawless. Dogs bark, sheep cry, domestics chatter, Howard and I stand three feet apart and yell directions at each other, the water pump and the coffee grinder run incessantly, and the young crows cry for the old life they once knew. You don’t know about the crows, I guess. We have crows, now. Joe located a nest (in the tallest spruce in the county), ascended, and brought back two babies, one for himself and one for Lawrence. He immediately sat down and wrote Lawrence the triumphal news. The crows live in the woodshed, in a crow’s nest. Fred knows about it.

  Your letter just came, and I’ll be in Ellsworth at 8:40 on Saturday. I sent off what mail there was for you yesterday, and today there seems to be nothing of any consequence. I’m keeping right after the anthology work, and so far have eliminated a lot of stuff but haven’t turned up much of any value. I have out practically every bound volume in the place, and am working on them day times, and the smaller lighter books at night, when I can’t hold such heavy weights. . . .

  Everything is fine here and will be finer when we get you back again. My neck is gradually solidifying [from arthritis], and I look forward (but not much) to a life of looking straight ahead.

  The crows have pale blue eyes.

  My goodness, the boys are now cutting the lawn.

  Lots of love,

  Andy

  To GEOFFREY HELLMAN

  North Brooklin, Maine

  24 June 1941

  Dear Hellman:

  Maybe we haven’t mentioned that we (my wife and I) are getting together a fine large book of American humor. Anyway, we are. We’d like to use the first half of your profile of Dr. Chapman, the bullfinch man, ending with the sentence “He had decided to become a full time birdman.” Also your casual about the lost Taft alumni. Will you permit us to?

  The payment is like New Yorker scrapbook and album payment—royalties being divvied up among the contributors. This is (I think) to be a three dollar book, with fifteen percent royalty. Editors get half, writers get half. It ought to make you very very rich and happy. It is, conservatively speaking, driving us nuts. But even so, I think maybe it will turn out to be a good book. Title: A Subtreasury of American Humor.

  You will probably soon receive the customary permission request from Coward-McCann, but I am writing you direct to put the old personal squeeze on you. In a sense you have us in a corner, as I would not consider issuing a book of humor which did not contain Dr. Chapman occupying the nests of some of the larger birds himself.

  White

  To HAROLD ROSS

  North Brooklin

  25 June [1941?]

  Dear Mr. Ross:

  Thanks for offering me the chance to write the foreword for the soldier drawing book, but I think somebody else better do it. I feel out of touch with the drawing situation and with soldiers, too.

  Your other letter received, about my covering the war for N&C. I have been turning this over for two or three days, hoping I might see some way it could be managed but I don’t. In one respect I would like to do it, because quite often in the last three years I have wished for a more immediate outlet than a monthly column; when I get steamed up about something I don’t like to wait five weeks, or is it seven. Seven. On the other hand I find it very difficult to write comment from here. Most of the stuff I have written for Harper’s has not been commentary—it has been description or narration or specialized criticism. Based on what is happening to me where I am.

  But there are other reasons why the thing seems impossible. I think the comment page, as presently managed, is discouraging for a writer. (I have thought this for a long time, maybe ten years.) I believe that an editorial page should be one of two things: either a signed page, for which one man would take the responsibility, or an unsigned page designed to express a sort of group opinion and which would be considered sufficiently important to warrant the managerial staff’s meeting and discussing it each week, to give aid and counsel and ideas, and where opinions would generalize in group fashion. For a while in the early days, this was done. But then when the magazine got into long pants, Comment was just handed over to somebody (eventually me) and except for a perfunctory clipping service no other aid or stimulus was provided. After a while it got to be a curiously demoralizing literary exercise, because it was impossible to tell who was talking. When I write something I like to be out in the open—either as an individual or as the interpreter for an articulate group. But comment gave me a cloudy feeling all the time, and still does when I try it. A comment paragraph seems about 90 percent me, and 10 percent Santa Claus or something. I feel like an overcoat with a velvet collar.

  I’m sure I’ve gone over this ground with you before, but still feel the same and am repeating because your letter seems to call for an answer. For my own part, I don’t see any solution. I am, I guess, a one-paper man. When I was doing Comment for you, I put everything into it and wrote nothing for any other paper. Now I’m doing this Harper column, and am putting my stuff into that. I’m no good at spreading myself around. Very concentrated fellow.

  Lately I haven’t felt sympathetic enough toward the NYer to make me hot to produce anything. Sometimes it says things that annoy me—usually not because of what they are but because of the way they are said. And other times it fails to say things that seem to need saying. The war is so damn near that it is no longer possible to use printer’s ink in place of blood in a man’s circulatory system, and Tilley’s hat and butterfly return to plague us all. I couldn’t bounce off a paragraph a w
eek on the subject of the war, full of “we’s” and “us’s,” when I wasn’t sure what key we were all trying to play in.

  Writing anything at all is a hell of a chore for me, closely related to acid indigestion, and I take it seriously enough so that I don’t want to maneuver myself into any literary stance which is as indistinct and badly defined as comment-writing, because I know it would make me quite sick, and probably my readers, too. Harper’s isn’t as much fun, and I sometimes feel like a stranger and lonely, but at least I seem to know who is writing and it isn’t Jack Frost.

  Thanks again for the offer, which I set store by.

  White

  To HAROLD ROSS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [June 26? 1941]

  Thursday night

  Dear Ross:

  I think I will come Sunday night, getting to New York on Monday morning. I won’t be able to do a great deal of work on comment, but maybe can help out. Primarily I have to finish up the book we are working on and will be putting in practically all my time on that.

  Got your letter. As far as New Yorker policy goes, I am as bewildered as anybody else. I believe in certain principles of life and thought, and in times like these all I can do is reaffirm this belief insofar as it seems to bear on the news, or the news on it. Sometimes this “moral” frame seems incompatible, or inconsistent, with skepticism. A skeptic doesn’t like to believe anything, for fear it will ruin his intelligence (or his backhand drive), and on the other hand, a believer can’t be too skeptical or it affects his faith. That is why everybody is all mixed up.

  The way to do, if I write any comment, is to print what you believe in and throw the rest to hell. It is the American system and I like it.

  White

  P.S. I will be domiciled in town, not in country. I might, however, like to take a quick browse through your library of humor, if such exists.

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  Hotel New Weston

  New York

  [July 1, 1941]

  Tuesday night

  Dear K:

  Things are progressing—I have my Harper piece half done and hope to finish it tomorrow. If I do it will be the first time in history it has been completed before the fateful 10th.

  The heat is tremendous, extremely moist and oppressive and thundery, but I haven’t minded it much, just sitting around the hotel room in a pair of drawers. There is a cross draft, like a sirocco (or is it a simoon?) through the areaway. The air-cooled places are almost untenable, the difference is so great.

  Had dinner with Ik last night and Ross is taking me tomorrow. He invited me to the country but I declined. He wants me to write some comment for them this week, but it is early closing and I don’t see how I’m going to do any. . . .

  Saw Gus today and he tells me that the New Yorker had a cancellation yesterday—too pro-British and too pro-war. My! However, in the newsreel I observed that the audience hissed the German troops and clapped the British tanks. Dr. Flick1 reports (from Hyde Park) that the President looks quite ill. . . .

  Ik has bought a food freezer (sort of a home Birdseye unit) and he and Betty are solidifying their peas and beans and chickens, sub zero, instead of canning them. All right until the electricity goes off some balmy spring evening, and botulism sets in. Ik has offered me a job on the New Yorker Magazine, which I thought was white of him. Made me feel like a boy again.

  Lots of love to you and Joe, and I’ll be looking for you next week.

  Andy

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  Hotel New Weston

  New York

  [July 5, 1941]

  Saturday

  Dear K:

  . . .Don’t fret about the hay, and if Joe’s crow is disturbing everybody, it should be got rid of. You sounded so harassed and turbulent this morning over the phone, I worry about you.

  After the broadcast [“Information Please”] last night, Ross took me along with Gunther, Fadiman, Duranty, Pringle, Pringle’s Miss Emery, the other Surry girl, and a Mr. Balderston, author of Berkeley Square. Fadiman was simply swell, and while everybody else was shouting and arguing, he quietly gave me dozens of tips for the anthology, which I carefully noted down with a pencil borrowed from Duranty who was on pins and needles for fear he wasn’t going to get it (the pencil) back. He’s a fussy little man. He and Gunther are not pessimistic about the war, but differ widely as to strategy and aims.

  Love,

  Andy

  • White often had an urge to revisit places he had known at an earlier time. In the summer of 1941 he went back to the Belgrade Lakes, taking with him his young son. It was after this visit that White wrote “Once More to the Lake,” for his column in Harper’s (October, 1941). The piece has been one of the most widely reprinted of White’s essays.

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  Bear Spring Camps

  [July 24, 1941]

  Thurs. afternoon

  Dear K:

  Very hot here today, and everyone is in the lake, lying around in the shallows like so many frogs. Joe has been in for more than an hour without showing the slightest tendency to come out. He is a devotee of fresh water swimming at the moment, and it really does seem good to have warm bathing for a change. Very relaxing.

  Got your letter this morning, and it was nice to hear from home. If Joe has any head lice, they are a waterlogged lot at the moment. But if the crow is a nuisance, I would like you to get rid of him. There is no point in harboring anything that just gives people trouble. Get Howard to take the crow away and turn it loose.

  Joe and I went fishing last night after supper and caught 5 white perch. We have been eating fish steadily—of our own catching. We now have a perfectly enormous outboard motor on our rowboat, which I am unable to start, except semi-occasionally. This is deeply disappointing to Joe. When the motor does choose to start, it leaps into a frightful speed, usually knocking us both down in the boat. Negotiations are under way to exchange it for a smaller pet. I must say I miss the old one-cylinder gas engine of yesteryear which made a fine peaceful sound across the water. This is too much like living on the edge of an airfield.

  I haven’t started on the preface [to A Subtreasury of American Humor] yet, but will soon. I’m not going to read your notes until I’ve written something, as it is easier for me that way.

  This place is as American as a drink of Coca Cola. The white collar family having its annual liberty. I must say it seems sort of good. Raymond Duncan is here in a brown smock, and Dorothy Lamour, and Eddie Cantor and the Peterkins. Everybody you’ve ever seen on Main Street or on Elm Avenue is here. Gebert is here.1 He just came in with 5 bass and his little girl carrying the landing net.

  News is now being spread all through the camp that it is 106° in Bangor. Bangor is a great comfort to Maine people in hot weather.

  Lots of love from us both. Please relax and take life easy. This is vacation time in the U.S.

  Andy

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [Summer 1941]

  Monday night

  Dear K

  Here it is, and if my bones weren’t proliferating it would be better, but it is the best I can do in this summer of 1941. Get right after it and give it the works. I trust you absolutely to doctor it any way you think it should be doctored. There are probably parts which should come out and things that should go in, so pull them out and put them in. My only request is this: that if you have any additions that could as well go into a sectional preface as into this general preface, you save them for the sections.1

  The most important thing, of course, is that you bring a ruthlessly critical mind to my facts and my theories in this preface. I haven’t had much time to think things over and I am probably all wet on a lot of things in here. If a lot of this stuff seems wrong or foolish or childish, just take it out. I would much prefer that the preface be short and contain one or two incontestable facts and a sound observation or two, than that it run alon
g at some length and just be a lot of twaddle. In my present state of mind, I can’t tell how much of this is sound or true.

  I had a somewhat longer and more elaborate ending to the piece, but took it off, and I think it is better this way. . . .

  I decided that the way to handle Irvin Cobb was with a deep silence, like the grave. I didn’t even get the word “genial” in anywhere, although I fully intended to, and perhaps can yet.

  I’ll send along the short prefaces as soon as I can knock them out, which ought to be tomorrow morning. Things are OK here, although I had a nightmare last night which did me in—all about a rat that wouldn’t go away from me because it wasn’t afraid of me. I awoke with a wrench and a start and a terrible buzzing in the head, and for a while I thought perhaps the Chair of Belgrade had really got in its work.2 But the buzzing left before morning. Min and the pups are fine. I weighed them today. Both girls weigh 16 ounces. Boy weighs 18. They are just one week old. Min eats well, ate all her own supper tonight and hooked part of Raffles’.3 Walter Pierce mowed the field today and it looks like a golf green tonight. The rain has helped it a lot and it is going to come out better than I had hoped. Even the upper piece has begun to catch on. Joe is fine and is crazy about “The Yearling.” Gives it highest praise. He already wants to sleep in the woods again, and he and Lawrence were bug-proofing their igloo today. I told him he would have to wait till you get back, as I think he needs a few more nights sleep before another bender.

  Lots of love,

  Andy

  • Harry Lyford’s friendship with White dated from 1918, when Lyford was a private and White a corporal in the Student Army Training Corps at Cornell, where the soldiers were housed in fraternity houses converted to barracks. After Pearl Harbor, Lyford wrote his corporal, suggesting that they again stand firm against the enemy.