Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  EBW

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  [New York]

  [January 1945]

  Sunday

  Dear Bun:

  Don’t worry about my health—I am a lot better and plenty good enough for my purposes. I had two things the matter with me—mice in the subconscious and spurs in the cervical spine. Of the two the spine trouble was less bothersome. It took me eighteen months to find out how you get rid of mice and if you ever need to know I’ll be glad to give you the instructions. The whole key to the neurotic life is simple; in fact the simplicity of it is the greatest hurdle, because it tends to make it impossible or unacceptable to highly complex natures, who insist on meeting their troubles with suitably devious devices and cures. Anyway, here I am, in the clear again and damned thankful to be there. I can work without falling all apart, and can sleep—which is quite refreshing after a year and a half.

  Joe has been here for the holidays and has enjoyed going out around the city on his own. He disapproves of cities, on the whole, however, and is almost too fiercely addicted to the Maine coast. One day I went up to the Bronx Zoo with him. We viewed tigers from Bengal, bears from the Pole, gaudy birds from tropical forests, and a whole assortment of strange and wonderful snakes. Joe didn’t say much about any of them—but we finally wound up at the sea-lion pond where a keeper was throwing fish to the sea-lions. Overhead were half a dozen sea gulls which had turned up on the chance of a fish. One of the gulls let out a scream, and Joe looked up in sudden recognition and said: “Oh boy!” (Successful trip.)

  Christmas was quiet but we had a good time. Thanks for the stamps which you sent—they were much appreciated. Lil, Arty, Noel and Sid were here for dinner the other night—I was amazed to see how the girls had grown. Art has gout, but Lil looked exceedingly well. K sends her best and with lots of love to Blanche & Janice. I was delighted to learn that you are so much better.

  En

  To WILLIAM SHAWN

  [February 1945]

  [Interoffice memo]

  Shawn:

  In the comment on Life’s storage wall, I wrote: “. . .a pretty good case can be made out for setting fire to it and starting fresh.” Some studious person, alone with his God in the deep of night, came upon the word “fresh” and saw how easily it could be changed to the word “afresh,” a simple matter of affixing an “a.” So the phrase became “starting afresh” and acquired refinement, and a sort of grammatical excellence.

  I still think people say “start fresh.” I shall continue to write “start fresh,” to say “start fresh,” and, in circumstances which require a restart, I shall actually start fresh. I don’t ever intend to start afresh. Anybody who prefers to start afresh is at liberty to do so, but I don’t recommend it.

  An afresh starter is likely to be a person who wants to get agoing. He doesn’t just want to get going, he wants to get agoing. An afresh starter is also likely to be a person who feels acold when he steps out of the tub.

  Some of my best friends lie abed and run amuck, but they do not start afresh. Never do. However, if there is to be a growing tendency in the New Yorker office to improve words by affixing an “a,” I shall try to adjust myself to this amusing situation. Characters in my stories will henceforth go afishing, and they will read Afield & Astream. They will not be typical people, they will all be atypical. Some of them, perhaps all of them, will be asexual, even amoral.

  Amen.

  E. B. White

  To URSULA NORDSTROM

  North Brooklin, Maine

  29 May 1945

  Dear Miss Nordstrom:

  I’m returning the picture under separate cover. I like Stuart’s crawl stroke very much, but I agree with you that Harriet isn’t right. Her hair should be smoother and neater, also her legs should look more attractive (Harriet has beautiful legs), and her skirt should be fuller. I am enclosing a clipping from a Sears Roebuck catalogue showing a girl that looks like Harriet. Also Montgomery Ward’s No. 21, which I suspect is the same girl. I hope Mr. Williams can save the Stuart part of this drawing and insert a new Harriet without having to redraw the whole thing. . . .

  Sincerely,

  EBWhite

  To URSULA NORDSTROM

  North Brooklin, Maine

  7 July 1945

  Dear Miss Nordstrom:

  Dr. Carey looks a lot like President Truman.

  Sincerely,

  EBW

  To HAROLD ROSS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  10 July 1945

  Dear Mr. Ross:

  You and your checking department and your proofroom have tangled with the wrong man in the matter of pigeons. I know about pigeons not from ornithologists but from the birds themselves—that is, from observing them, raising them, tending them, and living closely with them. A squab is fully grown when it is about four weeks old. At that age, it is fully feathered, is still being mouth-fed by the parent birds, and is ready to leave the nest. If mouth-feeding were to cease after ten days, as your ornithologist so glibly informs you, the squab would certainly die, as it is incapable of leaving the nest at 10 days, and is therefore incapable of getting any food for itself. The squab which I saw from the hotel room in NY was full-grown. It had left the nest and was being fed by one of the parent birds. It was a blue Homer. It was fully feathered. It was approximately four and a half weeks old. It was not “new born,” for two reasons. The first reason is that, like all feathered creatures, it had never been born, it had been hatched. If you understood birds, birth, and such matters, you would know that chicks and squabs are not born. Eggs (in a manner of speaking) are born, but not chicks. Chicks, squabs, etc. are incubated and hatched. The second reason is that it was about four and a half weeks old, and was a full grown squab.

  As for the “her”-“hen” typo, I guessed that it was a typo and that it would be caught, but from this distance and at this phase of the New Yorker’s development, there was no telling whether it was a typo or a correction. Ten years ago I would have been reasonably sure it was a typo. Today, with pigeon-checking at the pitch it has reached, I can’t be so sure. You may not realize it, not being a writer and contributor, but the impression the magazine now gives anyone turning stuff in, is that the material will first be completely dismantled, then assembled again in the assembling plant. During the process, a full grown squab will be reborn.

  A writer loses confidence in himself. I am not as sure of myself as I used to be, and write rather timidly, staring at each word as it comes out, and wondering what is wrong with it. I don’t know about editing, but my guess is that if the NYer ever reaches that degree of perfection toward which it is tending, when each word will have been taken aside and re-plated with silver, there won’t be much left. I should not live 500 miles away and write about pigeons. It is too far away, and I know too much about pigeons.

  White

  • Toward the end of the following letter to his brother, White mentions that Anne Carroll Moore, doyenne of the children’s book world, was trying to discourage the publication of Stuart Little. Miss Moore had just retired from her job as children’s librarian at the New York Public Library, and still had a great deal of influence at the library and among publishers. After reading the galley proofs of Stuart Little, she wrote a friend saying, “I was never so disappointed in a book in my life” and told Ursula Nordstrom that the book “mustn’t be published.” She also wrote a fourteen-page letter to Katharine White strongly urging her to persuade White to withdraw the book.

  In her reply to Miss Moore’s letter, Katharine said:

  I’m of course very sorry that you do not like Stuart Little and thank you for writing that letter which I realize must have been very hard for you to do. My husband and I both appreciate the interest which made you write it. I can only hope that you are mistaken of course. Andy likes Stuart and so do I, and his publishers have never before been so enthusiastic over any of his other books as they are over Stuart Little . . . .

  You are right, o
f course, that Stuart gets out of hand and it’s true, too, that the story follows none of the conventional patterns for fantasy. But I can’t help feeling that the unpredictable quality of both Stuart, the character, and Stuart, the book, is one of the book’s merits. Didn’t you think it even funny? I can still laugh, reading the proofs, and Ed Aswell of Harper’s reported that he and his eight-year-old son laughed out loud all the way when he read it aloud, though not necessarily always at the same places. So what I hope is that children of all ages may happen to like Stuart for its humor while their elders read it for its satirical and philosophical overtones. Actually, I myself have never known whether this book was a juvenile or a novel. It’s a dream—quite literally—just as Alice is supposed to have been. Just recently the notes Andy made after he had that dream (more than twelve years ago) turned up, and I was surprised to find how clearly the story had followed them. . . . I am honestly not at all afraid of its hurting E.B.W. to have it published, or Harper’s either, whether or not it is a financial or literary success.

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  North Brooklin

  11 July [1945]

  Dear Bun:

  I bet you didn’t know that I have a friend (John McNulty) who is writing a song called “Keep Your Dreams Within Reason.” I saw McNulty for one night in Hollywood when I was on my way home from San Francisco, and he was very depressed about conditions in movieland, and was trying to find relief by writing a new kind of dream song, “Keep Your Dreams Within Reason.” I think you would like McNulty. He used to play the piano in a moving picture theatre in Andover, Mass., during the silent screen days, and can still do “hurry” and “fire” and “mother love” and the others.

  We are having a plague of arthritis and tent caterpillars, also thunder storms. Things look pretty good, though, after all the rains of the spring. Joe has an infected finger and hand, but it doesn’t seem to slow him up any. He sets an alarm for 5 a.m. every night—so he won’t lose any of the summer by oversleeping. It seems that the only time you can pull a lobster trap is between five and seven in the morning, before the fog has lifted.

  I was 46 today, and celebrated the occasion by hanging around a sawmill.

  21 July

  This letter got laid (or pushed) aside. I think I started shingling a building instead. We have been having a fog mull for the past week—the kind of dampness which puts out a cigarette after the third puff, the kind where you leave a pair of sneaks beside your bed at night, and in the morning you have to dump them before putting them on. I have just finished a letter to a professor in West Virginia University, who sent me a reprint of an essay of his on Thoreau, and in the course of writing the letter I remembered something (probably the oddest comment on Thoreau ever made) that a Cornell prof told me twenty-five years ago. He said that Thoreau was “all right, but I wish he had more get-up-and-go.” I treasure that remark, and when the pain in my neck is bad I comfort myself with it, and go around muttering “The god damn son of a bitch had no get-up-and-go.”

  Tell Janice she got out of a lot of work by not getting the job of illustrating my book. It turns out that it is to have between 80 and 90 drawings. The former head of the Children’s Book division of the NY Public Library managed to get hold of some galley proofs, and has written my wife a 14-page letter telling her how lousy it is. K refused to show me her reply, but I suspect it set a new world’s record for poisoned courtesy.

  The thing that has given me the most pleasure here this summer is a Shirley poppy that slipped its mooring and drifted forty feet to a spot in the gravel driveway, where it has bloomed profusely and alone, a brilliant testimonial to my courageous stand against edging. An edger came with the place, but I held out against it, and for years the place had a neat lawn, a neat flower border, and a ragged edge to the drive. With gas rationing the lawn began to encroach on the gravel drive, and the clover came in surprisingly fast, but the thing still looked inconsistent until the poppy turned up one morning. It has been a sensation.

  K and I are taking a vacation from New Yorker work during September. We shall probably stay right here and spear a few flounders. So long, and keep your dreams within reason.

  Yrs,

  En

  To JOHN R. FLEMING

  North Brooklin, Maine

  15 September [1945]

  Dear Jack:

  I dispatched your contribution to the magazine and you will shortly hear from them or me or both. Am surprised that MacArthur sits between Washington and Lincoln, as I had always pictured him between Christ and Daniel Boone.

  In submitting stuff to the New Yorker, send factual stuff to William Shawn, and fictional stuff to G. S. Lobrano. The trouble with sending it to me, aside from the fact that I don’t read anything anyway, is that I am usually in Maine and the trans-mailing delay is scandalous.

  Was surprised to hear that you are leaving the government, and not the way you found it, either. It has often given me a feeling of stability to know that, no matter what sort of shuffling was going on, Fleming was in there looking out for my interests. It will not seem like the same government with you gone. But I hope you like the new job [at U.S. News and World Report] and that Luce doesn’t get you.

  I have discovered, rather too late in life, that there is nothing so much fun as building a boat. The best thing about boat building is that it allows absolutely no time for writing; there isn’t a minute to spare.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To DAISE TERRY

  North Brooklin, Maine

  [October? 1945]

  Dear Miss Terry:

  I know you will be interested to hear that I left New York, by mistake, one day sooner than I intended to. Meant to go Friday, got on the train Thursday in error. Pullman seat was for Friday. I just stood up.

  Yrs in error,

  EBW

  To URSULA NORDSTROM

  North Brooklin, Maine

  21 October [1945]

  Dear Miss Nordstrom:

  . . .Yesterday I dispatched [an autographed] copy of Stuart Little to Stuart Little, an eerie business. The latter, I am glad to say, appears to be an amiable man. It’s just as well.

  Sincerely,

  EBW

  To URSULA NORDSTROM

  25 West 43rd Street

  14 November [1945]

  Dear Miss Nordstrom:

  One or two of the Harper ads referred to Stuart as a “mouse.” This is inaccurate and probably better be abandoned. Nowhere in the book (I think I am right about this) is Stuart described as a mouse. He is a small guy who looks very much like a mouse, but he obviously is not a mouse. He is a second son.

  There are a great many words that your advertising department can summon for this strange emergency: being, creature, party, customer, fellow, person.

  (I am wrong, Stuart is called a mouse on Page 36—I just found it. He should not have been.)

  Anyway, you see what I mean.

  Yrs,

  E. B. White

  • On November 23, 1945, Leonard Lyons wrote in “The Lyons Den,” his column in the New York Post, “There will be a to-do about the New York Public Library’s reluctance to accept Stuart Little, the children’s book by E. B. White.” On reading this, White, who has a low regard for gossip writers because of the way they toss innuendos around, dispatched the following letter to the children’s librarian who had succeeded Anne Carroll Moore.

  To FRANCES CLARKE SAYERS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  24 November 1945

  Dear Mrs. Sayers:

  You have probably seen by this time the Leonard Lyons column in the Post in which he predicts a “to-do” because of the “reluctance” of the Library to put “Stuart Little” on the shelves.

  . . .I thought I had better write and let you know that I am not one of the to-doers—if indeed such there be. Mr. Lyons seems to suggest . . .dark and terrible goings on in the world of juvenile letters. As for me, I don’t believe it and shall continue to support the syste
m by which librarians and book committees are free to select books without pressure from interested parties. I have a little something to do with a small library in North Brooklin, Maine, and it seems to me that libraries are subjected to a steady (and very healthy) pressure from readers themselves, whose wants and whims in the long run have to be satisfied. That is the only sort of pressure I believe in; and I hope you will understand that if there has been any other sort of pressure in behalf of my book, it has been outside of my knowledge and against my wishes.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  P.S. To the best of my knowledge, Harper & Brothers feel in this matter as I do, and I am sure they had nothing to do with the Lyons item.

  VIII

  A PARTY OF ONE

  1946–1949

  * * *

  • During the years following World War II, the Whites continued at The New Yorker, where Katharine was one of the fiction editors. Fed up by the annual frustration of trying to find a furnished apartment in housing-short New York, they rented and remodeled a duplex apartment on Turtle Bay Garden, at 229 East 48th Street.

  White, like many other sensitive writers, began early on to feel the threat of McCarthyism and the loyalty check system and wrote many Comments which spoke out against that form of domestic tyranny. In 1949 Here Is New York was published. A short book, it had been written the year before at the request of Holiday editor Ted Patrick and published in Holiday magazine.

  To CHRISTINE WESTON