Letters of E. B. White
Page 28
To HARRY LYFORD
North Brooklin, Maine
28 December 1941
Private Lyford, step forward and take that cheese out of your mouth. At ease, men, this is another war (and another Lyford)—oh the same distant sound of carnage, the same revelry in the canteens, but still, another war. What a day it was for me, Lyford, when you went Deke, my rear rank pillaged, robbed of its punch. They were always tricking me that way: I would develop a Lyford from raw stuff, groom him, sharpen his nerves, toughen him so his spine crackled from the rigidity of every occasion—and then poof, he would be hustled across the street to another Greek letter society. That was my war. I presume it was your war, too. So you liked old L Company better, did you? Well, I did time in the Chi Psi house, too, although I’m darned if I can remember what letter of the alphabet it was. All I remember was the palatial privies, and the enormous responsibility of being NCOICQ among those endless urinals. The war was made of porcelain, in those days.
I don’t know quite what it is made of today and am trying to find out, as I take it you are too. My wife and boy and I have been living in this little village in Maine for the past four years. We used to come here in summer, and got more and more negligent about returning to town in the fall, until one year we just never did go back. My wife quit her New Yorker job, retaining only a sort of half time long range connection, and I quit mine except for the newsbreaks, or justifiers, which come in by the thousands and which I have always edited. Harper’s gave me a department in their dignified rag, and I have been making my living by describing my antics with sheep and poultry to an audience which appears to be half envious, half contemptuous. Our farm is a salt water one, the pasture ends in clam flats. Across the bay are the high peaks of Mount Desert Island, where rich folks rusticate in summertime in their yachting caps and their memories of Victorian pomp. Here on this side of the bay are lobstermen and scallop fishermen and farmers, a rather down-at-the-heel place which we are very fond of. The pastures are rocky and poor, and there is none of Wisconsin’s lush and fertile beauty. (I sometimes wish there were about three acres of it mixed in with my fifty acre place.)
I’m in a quandary about the war—or, as Bert Lahr says, I’m in a quarry. Maine suddenly seems too remote to satisfy my nervous desire to help in a bad situation. My reason tells me that I can contribute most effectively by staying right here and continuing to produce large quantities of hens’ eggs and to write my stuff every month; but the human system seems to demand something which has more of the air of bustle and confusion. I may try for a job in Washington, in the high realms of propaganda. Or the draft board, locally, may settle the whole matter for me with one quick swoop. I’m only 42, and most of my teeth still show through the gooms. Here, anybody with natural teeth is taken for the army. There are only three or four of us in the whole county. My wife being an earning girl, gives me no deferment, and I expect none. The corporal may indeed rise again. I pray God you will be standing behind me. Wearing a white plume. A bold white plume, my Cyrano!
It was swell to hear from you.
Corporal White
VII
THE WAR YEARS
1942–1945
* * *
• The war brought the Whites back to New York to a series of furnished apartments, and to The New Yorker, whose editorial staff had been decimated by the mobilization. In the spring of 1943, White notified Frederick Lewis Allen that he was quitting the column “One Man’s Meat.” He had had almost five years of it, had lived continuously in Maine during that period, and some of the essays were out in book form.
The family was growing up. Nancy had married Louis Stableford in 1941 and followed him from one military base to another. Kitty (Katharine S.) Stableford, the first grandchild, was born in Topeka. Roger married Evelyn Baker, a Boston girl, in 1942 and after a stretch at Lowry Field in Denver disappeared overseas—to Hickam Field in Hawaii, where he became an editor of the Air Force magazine, Brief. Joel enrolled in Exeter in the fall of 1943.
During the war White began experimenting with short editorials on world government. The New Yorker ran most of them, although Ross regarded White’s position as Utopian and impractical. “As for me,” White said, “I also regarded world government as a Utopian idea, but it struck me that absolute national sovereignty was about as impractical as anything that could be dreamed up, and I still think so.” One of the Comments, which ran in the December 25, 1943, issue of the magazine, became the title essay of a collection—The Wild Flag—put together in 1946 by Houghton Mifflin.
It was during the war years, too, that White finally completed the first of his books for children, Stuart Little, which was published in 1945.
To EUGENE SAXTON
North Brooklin, Maine
28 January 1942
Dear Gene:
I’m coming to town with my book under my arm next week and hope to see you. Am pleased with the way the thing has shaped up, after some preliminary confusion and discouragement.
As it now stands, the book is made up of about a 75% selection from my total Harper’s Magazine output, plus two pieces from the New Yorker which seemed to fit into the scheme, namely a piece about Daniel Webster and the Hay Fever, and a piece about the opening of the World of Tomorrow in Flushing. Both pieces were written within the period of my Harper department, and both are written in the first person singular.
Thus the book shapes up as a sort of informal journal of the three years before the war. It is arranged chronologically. Each piece will have a date and a title. The length, roughly estimated, is around 75,000 words. I have written a total of about 100,000 words for the Meat department and, as I say, this selection will use about three-fourths of the whole amount.
I have some ideas concerning this book which I want to discuss with you. For one thing, although the majority of the pieces were written from my home in Maine, I think it would be a mistake to put the book out as another one of those Adventures in Contentment, or as an Escape from the City, or How to Farm with a Portable Corona. This is a book of essays on a wide variety of subjects, both urban and rural; it is not a tract on subsistence farming, and it is not a handbook of retreat. It is, as you know, intensely personal, but not designed to prove anything. It is colored by my New England surroundings, but it is not dedicated to them. In short, it is a book about me-and-life, and should not be tagged with a country label. (You may wish to differ, of course, but I think when you go over the manuscript you’ll see what I mean.)
Is there any chance of spring publication, rather than waiting till fall? It might be a better plan if it were physically possible. I seem to recall that you said fall, but this is a timely book.
My title, so far, is “One Man’s Meat,” but I am trying others in hopes of improving it. Am against prettying the book up with wood cuts, but think probably a wood block jacket of some sort would be right.
I have to be in Washington this Saturday and Sunday on a government job I am doing, but expect to be in New York the first of the week and will probably stay for perhaps ten days. Haven’t thanked you yet for your very generous gift of books at Christmas, but haven’t written any thank-you letters yet this year. We farmers are always behind, you know. If we lived to be a hundred we’d never catch up.
Yrs,
Andy
P.S. Erratum: there are 3 New Yorker pieces, not 2.
• After Pearl Harbor the government decided to get out a pamphlet on the Four Freedoms enunciated by President Roosevelt in his State of the Union speech of January 1941. The pamphlet was to be widely distributed and to be translated into many languages. White was invited to Washington to help with the project, along with Malcolm Cowley, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Max Lerner. Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, was “ringmaster.”
White was recruited to write the Freedom of Speech section; subsequently he was relieved of that task and put to work doing a rewrite job on the whole thing. Two of his friends, Henry Pringle and Jack Fleming, were at
work with the Office of Facts and Figures in Washington, and it was they who advised MacLeish to give White the rewrite assignment.
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
Carlton Hotel, Washington, D.C.
[January 31?, 1942]
Saturday night
Dear K:
This has been quite a day and I still don’t know what to think about our emergency government, which seems at first glimpse frightening and wasteful and ineffective. The four freedoms showed up on time, in the persons of Max Lerner and Reinhold Niebuhr (who is some customer) and Malcolm and me. I could see that the others had been through the mill before—they seemed to know their way around the Office of Facts and Figures. Malcolm greeted me, deafer than ever, wearing an ear instrument. Henry Pringle was sitting at one of the desks, passing things to a stenographer. The place is vast and windy, like a terminal. I was taken around and introduced to dozens of research workers and borrowed writers, including the Miss Wolf (now Mrs. Kuhn) who worked at the New Yorker in the Ingersoll era. Malcolm had an enormous folder, crammed with freedom stuff. At eleven we went into a conference room, vast and terrible, which turned out also to be MacLeish’s office. We sat about a table and the others talked about the project, in vague terms as far as the job went, but in the most awful intellectual detail, all of it over my head. . . . Behind me, MacLeish was sending messages through an automatic speaker to a secretary beyond a glass partition, but the speaker didn’t work and the secretary would keep coming in. The pamphlet which we were supposed to be preparing was, as far as I could make out, intended to give popular form to the President’s war aims, that is, the four freedoms which he mentioned in his speech on the state of the nation; but if the people understand it, they are better than I am. I couldn’t understand anything, and wished I was home. They seemed to wait for me to say something about freedom of speech, but I kept quiet, not knowing anything to say, except I asked about how many words it was supposed to be and when it would have to be in, but nobody knew. Then it turned out we were all going to MacLeish’s house for luncheon. They talked about assigning me some research people to prepare whatever I wanted prepared, so I finally told Jack Fleming that I was probably out of my class, as I wouldn’t know what to ask a research person to look up. He said not to pay any attention to the others. He introduced me to Marty Summers, who is a friend of Joe Sayre’s, and whom I liked. Then we all drove out to Georgetown to the MacLeish house—Fleming, Summers, the 4 freedoms, and our host. MacLeish looks a little like Doctor Devol, and he is some smooth poet. We had sherry and then went in to lunch—a very special noodle dish with sour cream and grated cheese, then ham and mushrooms and Schoonmaker red wine. MacLeish has a very disarming manner, a blend of friendliness and aloofness, guaranteed to set you at ease. He took charge immediately of the conversation and stated the project before ever the first spoonful was spooned up. He made the gathering seem as though history was being written there in that room and that upon our shoulders had fallen the task of translating the greatest document of all time. His most adroit feat of the meal was the way he relieved me, almost imperceptibly, of the job of writing the section on freedom of speech. All of a sudden, it turned out that I had been relieved. It was so painless I hardly knew it was being done myself. He simply turned it over to Lerner, as he ticked off the various parts of the pamphlet. It was, he said, obviously the easiest of the four assignments and Lerner had written it so many times he could turn it out in half an hour. My duties were to go over all four freedoms with an eye to improving the form of the writing.
We withdrew for coffee and more conversation. I couldn’t see any reason why I had come to Washington, and still can’t. I asked Marty Summers afterward why he thought they had taken freedom of speech away from me, and he said he thought it was because Fleming had whispered to MacLeish that I couldn’t get mixed up in any research department.
After coffee we sat around and suggested people who should be “called in” to review the manuscript, people from as far as California were suggested and solemnly noted down. The “methodology” of the preparation of the pamphlet was discussed. It was decided to meet in Washington again in two weeks. (A mere 750 miles, each way, for me.)
At 5:30, Henry Pringle came to the hotel here for a drink, bringing with him Mr. Hamburger of the New Yorker (now of Facts and Figures) and another F&F man whose name I didn’t get. I gather that they are all $8,000 men, and are doing various informational jobs. Henry flashed a transportation pass book, good for any amount of travel at government expense, which he said was the fifth freedom—freedom of egress.
I am bewildered, as I said, about the trip here. It is always sobering to encounter the intellectual idealists at work, for they seem to live in a realm of their own, making their plans for the world in much the same way that any common tyrant does. The conversation today reminded me a little of the early New Deal period when Wallace was talking about one God and one king—and it all seems so far removed from the people, who are all full of tiny faults and virtues and whose name is Schmalz and Henderson. It is really kind of funny: the President, in a time of extreme gravity, draws in skeleton form a wholly Utopian picture and now it is up to the writers to state it more in detail without either embarrassing the government or being so specific as to make it controversial. (This is particularly true of Freedom from Want—which is a nice freedom if you can get it.)
Although the extravagance and the homely pomp of today’s performance has jarred me, it is not a wholly discouraging scene. The President’s technique of surrounding himself with his severest critics has a certain democratic healthiness to it.
[No signature]
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
Hotel New Weston
[New York]
[February 4, 1942]
Wednesday
Dear K:
Just had an idea. You remember the water colors Henry Poor had left over from Ethan Frome—I know he sent us one as a Christmas card, but weren’t there others too? Just occurred to me there might be a jacket there for my book, if there were no conflict as to publishers, etc., and if Henry approved the idea, and if the picture seemed to fit the book. Anyway, if you happen to know where those pictures are, how about digging them out and having a look.1 I am going to see Gene Saxton tomorrow for lunch, or shall we say for “claret.” Last night I worked all evening finishing up the titling and the arranging and numbering, etc. So it is all ready to turn in.
Your two letters have come, and I’m dreadfully sorry to hear about all the pains and colds and everything, it is so discouraging. I had plenty of trouble, too, over the weekend, as you have probably gathered from the nasty little note I managed to get off to you yesterday. The thing would be funny if it were a slightly less responsible sort of job (maybe it is funny anyway), but I am now left with thousands of untranscribed notes—the kind of thing you scribble on your program in a dark theatre—and the burden of collecting these into a document which will suit the President and the Supreme Court Justices and Mr. Churchill and Aunt Poo, and which will explain to a great many young men why they are about to get stuck in the stomach, and which will reconcile Max Lerner with Felix Frankfurter and myself with God. This is a very sobering assignment and only once in a while do I think it is funny. It is dangerous to get playing with words on the very highest of planes, because they become (unless you are careful) like checkers men and eventually take charge. But I am determined that there will be no pretty writing, and an absolute minimum of statements which I do not fully understand myself. Just how I can interpret the concept of freedom from want, when economics are so mysterious to me, is something I have hardly dared think about. But I’ve been brooding some about it, and it seems to me that the promise which was made to the world by the Four Freedoms statement was justified (at least in the “want” clause) by the new feeling of responsibility which is evident in government. The awful tangle of bureaus and offices in Washington is depressing and discouraging, but as you become involved in it you begin to fee
l encouraged when you see what a sustained and determined attempt is being made to solve the old riddles. However clumsy and messy it is, the sheer decency of the program is inescapable, and sometimes impressive.
One of the people called in to offer suggestions was Hamilton Fish Armstrong, whom I liked. I talked to him only rather briefly but he seemed like a person I would get on with, and I’m thinking of looking him up here in New York for a criticism of the manuscript when I get something on paper. Of course, what I fear will happen to this writing job is what always happens to anything that I don’t get going on right away, but let hang around to cool for a week or two. I never have been able to revive anything. But I haven’t written a word on this, largely because of the way MacLeish arranged the whole thing. I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, which is not a bad procedure, because the easiest way to have consecutive thoughts is to start putting them down. But with this project there have been mountains and oceans of talk, and dozens of people and shades of opinion. The manuscripts turned in by the experts are pretty forbidding and dreary, and more are coming. I finally piped up, on Sunday morning when our brilliant company was gathered in the leather and mahogany sanctuary of the Librarian of Congress, and suggested that Malcolm Cowley’s piece be copied and circulated to everybody, and that everyone should turn in a brief comment or criticism of it which would be a help to the man who had to do the writing on “want.” This seemed like a bright idea to the rewrite man in me, as I was hoping to get other people into my own predicament, the necessity of saying the words on paper. It is being done, but I guess it was regarded as a tactless or presumptuous suggestion. Poor Malcolm is taking quite a beating, anyway, with the Dies boys after him and Pegler sniping at him. I’m sorry for him.