Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  A little later in the spring the smelt will be running up the brooks at night to spawn, and you go out when the tide is coming and haul smelt out with your fingers.

  This letter seems to be about smelt.

  My head has been pretty good since my return to Maine. I am encouraged, and think maybe it will come around all right. Joe has had a great time this week. This is really home to him, and he hasn’t been here, much, since last July when he started summer school at Exeter.

  My old black sheep had twin lambs night before last, but she has been failing for the last couple of years, and I doubt if she gets through the spring. She has lung trouble, and it is beginning to get her. My prettiest lamb so far came yesterday morning about three o’clock, a very neat parcel, and everything shipshape. Shepherding is nice work if you like it, and I like it. Everything about a sheep smells good, except the infected scrotum of a castrated lamb. (I usually have a couple of such cases each spring, because the fellow that cuts my buck lambs for me is loyal to his grandfather’s method and to his grandfather’s memory. I usually have to perform a second operation a couple of days later myself, with a safety razor blade, to let the pus out. I also do all the docking of tails myself, with a dull ax.) One farmer near here always saves the nuts of his little pigs, when they are cut. They are about the size of almonds. I have held so many pigs, for a castration, that I am now in demand around here as a holder. Not everybody holds a pig just right when it is being cut, but I do. It is a good idea in the country to be able to do one thing well, and that seems to be my thing. Never would have thought it.

  We’re returning to New York tomorrow night for a couple of weeks, and Joe goes back to school for the spring term. I’ve been glad to hear from your letters that you are improving, and I trust they will soon kick you out. Give my best to Blanche and Janice, and tell Janice my barnyard has the Chicago zoo backed off the map, at the moment.

  Andy

  To HAROLD ROSS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  15 May 1944

  Dear Mr. Ross:

  I was glad to hear in this morning’s mail that you were probably not going to skip any issues.1 My reasons for being glad are dull and I will let them go. Am writing to say that if there is anything I can do to help during the lean period when other people are on vacation, let me know. My head doesn’t knock so much as it did last fall.

  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that it would be generally regarded as a sissy thing for the NYer to go dead on a couple of issues, particularly this summer. I would hate to have to phrase an explanatory announcement telling the public how exhausting it is to publish a magazine. The public’s response to any such announcement would be nuts. I am sure that this would be a very bad time to pull our exhaustion on our readers, a lot of whom are pretty well pooped out themselves for one reason or another. However, I have not wanted to say much about this matter, as I am not exactly in a position to.

  White

  To HAROLD ROSS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  [June 1944]

  Dear Mr. Ross:

  Would you be good enough to sign this, in the role of my employer? I am applying for gas to enable me to drive to the Post Office to mail comment.

  Sign where the red check mark is. Please recommend 72 miles, where it says “recommended mileage.” The finished product would look something like this:

  H. W. ROSS 72 The New Yorker Magazine

  Please return this promptly, like a good employer. And as a reward I will try to write you a casual called “About Myself,” beginning “I am a man of medium height.” The piece would then go on to tell other things about me, taken directly from forms such as the enclosed. It would be a fascinating record.1

  Thank you.

  E. B. White

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  June [1944]

  Friday

  Dear Bun:

  Any time you feel in the mood for it, I hope you will come on to Maine for a visit. We have a table seating six, and I noted yesterday that there were only five people at it. The only time K and I expect to be away from home this summer is the first two weeks in August, when we are going into retirement north of here. I don’t know whether you would find anything to do on this place, but you would be very welcome, and there is a quality of insanity about the whole thing not unlike the Polk Street joint [Illinois Research and Educational Hospital]. . . The latest addition to the group is a horse, a comic prop if ever there was one. It is a young mare who saw through me the first time she laid eyes on me. I see no good coming out of this relationship.

  I was very glad to hear that your health is improved and hope that you can hold the gain. My head has spells of being pretty good, and then it starts knocking again. I am not sure but that it is the result of a lifetime of thumbing my nose at my allergy. What used to be spasmodic hay fever, limited to a certain season of the year, now seems to have gone into a chronic disease of the mucous membranes (the Bronx Concourse of the head) and this seems to cause a deterioration of all surrounding nerves, fibers, and other pieces of string. I meet this dismal situation by bringing a horse into the picture—horses having always been the most active and violent stimulus or aggravation. I got the horse to cut the hay that feeds the horse. (That cuts the hay.) Grass is indeed, as Whitman so well knew, the very heart of life, and although my sensitivity to grass will be the death of me, I wouldn’t trade it for anything there is. Hay fever is like a love affair with a destructive but irresistible woman—there is the quality of fatality about it, as insistent as a June afternoon.

  Did you see in the Times the other day that my book [One Man’s Meat] was one of several that have been banned by the Army and Navy and disallowed for the Armed Services Edition? The Adjutant General of the Army found that it contained certain “political implications.” This has given me more pleasure than anything that has happened in a long time, although it costs me 90,000 copies at approximately nothing per copy. At least the soldier vote is now safe, and the boys can pick up their presidential preferences from the comic strips and other reliable American sources. I am beginning to feel a little more like an author now that I have had a book banned. The literary life, in this country, begins in jail . . .1

  Yrs,

  En

  To HAROLD ROSS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  8/1/44

  Mr. Ross:

  Could you put a little notice on the bulletin board asking people not to use a stapling machine on newsbreaks? I have to unstaple them with my finger nails. I bleed quite freely, and it all runs into time, too. There is no way of preventing contributors from using staples, but you ought to be able to stop paid employees from doing it.

  No staples, please.

  EBW

  To HAROLD ROSS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  13 Aug. [1944]

  [Postcard]

  Dear Ross:

  Hope you can handle the stapling threat, but I wouldn’t be too optimistic. Once machines get going, once people feel the throb and the excitement of the metallic clinch, there is little likelihood that you can call them off. I suspect that more and more things are going to be stapled together in the world. I think stapling machines are going to get bigger, and quicker. It is going to be very hard, from now on, to do newsbreaks, because the clipping is going to be inseparable from the letter. I am bloody but uncowed. No staples.

  E. B. White

  To HAROLD ROSS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  18 Aug. [1944]

  Dear Ross:

  The unstapling machine arrived yesterday and has given me new courage to go on. So far, the only thing I have had to unstaple is the card marked “Mr. H. W. Ross,” which was attached by staple. Anyway, it gave me a nice workout, although in order to hold the box properly, I had to cover the instructions with my hand, which made it necessary for me to memorize the instructions, instead of reading them as I went alo
ng. The “Mr.” in front of your name sounds like a phony, by the way. Sounds like the “Prince” in front of Romanoff. I suspect you are an impostor—have all along.

  If they can invent a thing to remove staples, it is conceivable that they can eventually find something to emasculate a rocket bomb. Anything is possible today, as you know.

  This is just to thank you for the Ace Staple Remover.

  Brig. Gen. White

  To HAROLD ROSS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [August 28, 1944]

  Mr. Ross:

  Thanks for the Harper advt. from your valued magazine. I would have seen it anyway, but was glad to get it hot from your stapling department. The firm of Harper, I have discovered over a period of years which might roughly be described as too long, is feeble-minded, but it is the sort of feeble-mindedness which holds a man in thrall. For instance, lots of publishers’ ads are feeble-minded, but very few of them can work as much incompetence into a single column space as this ad does. You will notice that in presenting the new Harper quartet of essayists (Rebecca West, Adams, Ferril, and Martin) the firm carefully pointed out, a little lower down in the column, that “Mr. White is our finest essayist, perhaps our only one.” This should not only be pretty discouraging to a prospective Harper reader, but should give Rebecca West a great lift in preparing her copy. Harper is the only firm I know of that deliberately pays out good money to cut their own throats. Not to speak of the throats of their authors. I have had my throat cut by Harper’s for so many years I hardly notice the blood any more. Just a thin trickle that scarcely stains a man’s shirt.

  I would have changed publishers fifteen years ago, only I don’t know how you change publishers. The first half of my life I didn’t know how babies came, and now, in my declining years, I don’t know how you change publishers. I guess I will always be in some sort of quandary.

  White

  P.S. The de-stapling machine works better than I would have believed possible.

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  North Brooklin

  Friday, Sept. 1 [1944]

  Dear Stan:

  I had just gone out when you phoned last night, and Aunt Caroline took the call. She is slightly deaf, and probably had to make up all the answers. The reason nobody else was in the house was that we were all out returning a visiting pig to its owner. When the owner came along the road to meet us, he looked accusingly at the pig and said: “Hell, everything I own is adrift tonight.”

  We are darn glad you are coming. I wrote you yesterday, pointing out that the railroad might offer you an easier journey. I am a firm believer in the rails. They lie solid and purposeful, and they cut right through the country as though they owned it. I am a great rail man—do not like planes or buses but am fond of the cars. In fact, I am hoping this fall to ride on a railroad I have always intended to try—the Belfast and Moosehead, so called because it starts at Belfast and doesn’t go anywhere near Moosehead. The whole run is only forty miles, from the beginning of the line to the end, which is just a nice distance. One of the cars, I am told, has had its seats removed and kitchen chairs installed, as more practical. I will show you the timetable when you are here.

  Evelyn leaves for Boston tomorrow, to go job hunting, so there is no problem about a bed. Her St. Bernard left last week, and the departure of a St. Bernard from a home is one of the finest things that can happen to the home.1 . . . I imagine you will be here in time to dig a few potatoes. We always start digging potatoes right after Labor Day around here. The hired man does the digging, and the rest of us sit around and talk about it, sometimes picking up a spud or two and looking for rot or sunburn or net necrosis. There is a nice view of the bay from the potato patch.

  Unless I hear from you to the contrary, I will meet your bus in Ellsworth on Wednesday night. If you decide on a different system for getting here, you better send me a wire.

  Yrs,

  En

  P.S. (Sunday) Have just discovered this beautiful letter, written two days ago, under a pile of beautiful junk on my desk. Yet I seem to recall addressing an envelope to you and putting it in the mail bag. Now I wonder what was in that? . . .

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  North Brooklin

  8 October the Red [1944]

  Dear Bun:

  K and I are just back from New York and Boston, respectively. K signed us up for the last remaining furnished apartment in Manhattan at a monthly rent that ought to take the Kremlin. Address 37 West 11 after Election Day. I went to a doctor in Boston who turned up the news that I have too many red cells. I don’t know what that means except that I have too many red cells. I also have more pumpkins than I am going to need this winter. The two things together probably have produced my head condition.

  While we were away one of the chimneys caught fire. No damage, except to the cook’s nerves. Also while we were away one of the maples got red all over and is a pretty sight when the fog lifts and lets you get a look at it. I went out to Exeter from Boston and saw Joe at school. He has a room-mate who is a rather neat, tidy kid and likes to have things just so—pictures straight, books in an orderly row on shelf, desk clean. Joe has met this situation by starting construction on a model airplane about the size of a Liberator. The room when I saw it looked like a place the Germans had just withdrawn from in a hurry. I asked Joe how he was doing in English and he said “All right except that every theme comes back with every sentence marked ‘colloquial.’”

  Minnie is in heat and Fred is trying to adjust the demands of passion to the limitations of arthritis. He starts toward her bearing a bouquet of American Beauty roses, and falls on his pan before he gets there. It is wonderful to see his old misshapen frame aglow with Love’s deathless fire. It is also lucky that he hasn’t far to fall.

  I got your letters (one from Polk Street and one from Urbana) and was glad to get the news. Will write again soon, enclosing some spare red cells. Or you can have a pumpkin if you’d rather have a pumpkin.

  Yrs,

  En

  To HAROLD ROSS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  Saturday (Oct. 21, 1944)

  Dear Mr. Ross:

  Thanks for note about comment. . . . I am sometimes amazed that I should be writing these things and that you should be publishing them. I have written literally dozens of such pages and thrown them away, because of self doubts. But on the whole I think it is a good idea to present this sort of argument, if only to sharpen the distinction between diplomacy (which is simply a poker game on a big scale) and government, where the cards are always on the table. A hell of a lot of people have never discerned any essential difference between these two forms of human activity. Already you can see the beginnings of the big post-war poker game, for trade, for air routes and airfields, for insular possessions, and for all the rest of it. I hate to see millions of kids getting their guts blown out because all these things are made the prizes of nationality. Science is universal, music is universal, sex is universal, chow is universal, and by God government better be, too.

  Dewey has been hollering about “secret diplomacy.” But secrecy is the stuff any diplomacy is made of. Hitler is the only honest writer on this subject. He admits in cold type that there are no rules, no laws, and that a nation writes its own ticket. The so-called laws which will go into effect with a security league are not really laws at all, as long as the sovereignty remains in the separate nations and not in the people themselves. Agreements, it seems to me, are not capable of being enforced by police power because the God’s truth is, every nation goes into a league with fingers crossed and with the knowledge that, ultimately, in a pinch, it will have to act independently.

  Federation has the advantage of setting up a true, instead of a phony, government, and still permitting the individual states to have a sort of life of their own. Whether it would work on a global scale, knows God. I conceive it to be my duty at least to throw out the idea and define the words. You will, I am sure, receive some letters
bawling you out for publishing stuff which is the work of a dreamy-eyed schoolboy, but I am not much embarrassed by these charges, because it is impossible for anybody to be dreamy-eyed, by comparison with the Jules Verne stuff that is taking place every day in the war.