Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  [New York]

  17 January [1946]

  Dear Christine:

  I have a stuffy habit of putting aside books I think I am going to like, waiting for a chance to read under decent conditions. Yesterday was Bhimsa Day in Fhorty Ehieghth Shtreet.1 I have a nice little fever of 99—the flu kissed me as delicately as a frightened girl, and I lay in bed feeling really quite well. It is a luxury to me to read in the morning, because usually I haven’t the strength of character for that, and I went unerringly to Bhimsa and had such a wonderful time that I can’t not tell you about it, the way I carried on with the drums and the cymbals (I get reading aloud when I am feverish in the morning) and sniffing the aromatic old sheets and blankets under which I was hiding in my bullock cart. The robber dance contest stirred me up so that I was dubbity dubbing myself right out onto the floor, and I think I was heard through the walls, because someone in the next house shouted: “Bears?” Anyway, it seems not to have done me any harm—today I am normal again. Furthermore, I want a bear. I wish the next time Robert finds a cub in the woods, he would let me have it, and meantime I will try to pick up a drum second hand, and a couple of clashers. One wonderful thing about your book is the feeling it gives that if you just have a bear nothing will get you—a reversal of the old childhood fancy that something is going to get you and that in all probability it will be a bear.

  I suppose now that you are running with twentienth century foxes, you are a little snooty about other animals, and perhaps brush off your old friends with a nhod. But I LOVE BHIMSA!!

  Andy Dubbity White

  To DOROTHY NIELSEN

  [New York]

  April 5, 1946

  Dear Mrs. Nielsen:

  There is no sequel to “Stuart Little.” A lot of children seem to want one but there isn’t any. I think many readers find the end inconclusive but I have always found life inconclusive, and I guess it shows up in my work.

  Thanks very much for your letter. I am glad that your children liked the book.

  Sincerely yours,

  E. B. White

  • About the following letter, White wrote: “I spent hundreds of hours (it became almost an obsession with me) observing the United Nations—first at Hunter College (a subway trip), then at Lake Success (train and bus), then in Turtle Bay (an easy walk). Considering the amount of time I put in, I wrote very few pieces.”

  To HAROLD ROSS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  19 Aug [1946]

  Dear Mr. R,

  I have received from the United Nations (Nations Unies) an application for accreditation (Demande d’Admission). I mean they sent me the blank, to fill in. The letter accompanying it says that in anticipation of the General Assembly, a new system of accreditation for the Press will be put into effect on Sept. 1.

  I don’t know whether you want me to apply or not, and am writing to ask. If The New Yorker is to have only one accredited reporter, for instance, it probably ought to be a more reliable journalist (less spotty) than me. If, on the other hand, the NYer is allowed more than one man, maybe I should apply. Kindly let me know your wishes in this matter.

  Yrs for a united world,

  EB White

  Division de la Presse

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  North Brooklin

  12 September [1946]

  Dear Bun:

  I have done no work and written no letters this summer, and it has felt pretty good—except that I kept doing a lot of other equally nerve-bouncing things, such as deciding whether Joe could or couldn’t take the car out each evening. (The State of Maine lets 15-year-olds have driver’s licenses, probably on the theory that the younger they are the softer their bones.) It is hard on the parents, who sit home in a brittle condition hoping that the oil reserves of earth will soon peter out. The summer reached a sort of peak the day we went to the Blue Hill Fair and K tried to take a leak in the bushes just as the trap-shoot started. She came out with only a minor flesh wound, but she might as well have been through Anzio. We all thought it was very comical, and one shooter (I heard later) got 25 pigeons out of a possible 25.

  The next night Joe took a thirteen-year-old girl to the Fair, and she got sick on the swings, vomiting with centrifugal force.

  We are starting for Boston tomorrow morning early, to attend a wedding in Louisburg Square and to put Joe back in school. It always amazes me that the idea of weddings has persisted the way it has. Considering the amount of disturbance and trouble a wedding causes, as well as the expense and the danger of everybody getting poisoned on chicken salad that has been eked out by adding five pounds of bad veal, you wonder anybody has the guts to stage it. I think weddings would die in no time at all, if it weren’t for women, who seem to get some inner (and probably shabby) excitement out of the occasion.

  Boston

  14 September

  We got into a taxicab on Charles Street a few minutes ago, and discovered that it was driven by a grey-haired woman and a dog. The woman shifted and made change and the dog steered. Boston is perennially surprising and enjoyable. Mayor Curley’s name is part of a flower arrangement in the Public Garden—welcoming the Veterans of Foreign Wars. And the ducks still follow the swan boat around the lake, picking up a living from the first class passengers.

  K and I are planning to go back to Maine for a couple of weeks and then to New York for the winter. We have taken an apartment at 229 E. 48 Street. I have a book coming out this fall called “The Wild Flag”—a collection of New Yorker paragraphs on tremendous themes. In it I make my debut as a THINKER, which in these days is like stepping up on the guillotine platform wearing a faint smile.

  Our health is neither very good nor very bad. I was delighted to learn that you had a good trip to the West. News of the family has been rather sparse this summer, but I’ll be seeing some of them soon I hope.

  Best to Blanche & Janice,

  En

  • Ursula Nordstrom had written White that sales of Stuart Little had reached 100,000 copies. White responded with this note and a gift of caviar—“guaranteed to contain 100,000 sturgeon eggs.” By 1975 the book had sold over half a million copies, not counting paperback editions. Current sales figures are over four million units sold, excluding foreign sales.

  To URSULA NORDSTROM

  To HENRY S. CANBY

  [New York]

  December 21, 1946

  [Telegram]

  VERY GRATEFUL FOR YOUR INVITATION1 BUT FEEL IT IS TOO EARLY IN LIFE TO JOIN AN INSTITUTE OF LETTERS AS IN MY PRESENT CONDITION I CAN BARELY KEEP UP WITH LETTERS THEMSELVES. THIS IS IN KEEPING WITH MY DISINCLINATION TO BELONG TO CLUBS AND SOCIETIES, EVEN INCLUDING THOSE FOR WHICH I HAVE THE HIGHEST REGARD. WITH MANY THANKS,

  E. B. WHITE

  To HENRY S. CANBY

  [New York]

  22 December 1946

  Dear Dr. Canby:

  I sent you a wire yesterday, to which I feel I should add a few words by way of amplification. I do not decline invitations for the sheer fun of declining them, or because it seems a brisk and cocky thing to do. The fact is, I have no membership in any society or organization, and this non-joining comes naturally to me. I sometimes suspect that I go a little out of my way to stay clear, and that this has the look of attitudinizing.

  I am extremely grateful for your invitation to become a member of the National Institute. But I realized, when I got thinking about it, that the only legitimate reason for joining anything at all is an intention of participating in the work of it. And I long ago discovered that I had neither the energy nor the inclination nor the special talents that belong to membership in a group, whether literary or social.

  That’s the whole of it, and I ask your indulgence and send my thanks.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  25 West 43

  [January 1947]

  Friday

  Dear Bun:

  I’m glad to report that even now, at this late
day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me—more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking “This is where I belong, this is it.” Having dirtied up probably a quarter of a million of them and sent them down drains and through presses, I am exhausted but not done, faithful in my fashion, and fearful only that I will die before one comes out right—as though I had deflowered a quarter of a million virgins and was still expecting the perfect child. What is this terrible infatuation, anyway? Some mild nervous disorder, probably, that compels a man to leave a fiery tail in his wake, like a ten-cent comet, or smell up a pissing post so that the next dog will know who’s been along. I have moments when I wish that I could either take a sheet of paper or leave it alone, and sometimes, in despair and vengeance, I just fold them into airplanes and sail them out of high windows, hoping to get rid of them that way, only to have an updraft (or a change of temper) bring them back in again. As for your gift of so many sheets of white bond, with rag content, I accept them in the spirit with which they were sent and shall write you a book. It will be the Greatest Book that has Ever Been Written. They all are, in the early wonderful stage before the first word gets slid into place.

  Happy New Year!

  En

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  [New York]

  1 March 1947

  Dear Bun:

  Your description of K’s bodyless appearance in the American literary scene amused her very much,1 and you are quite right that she has been lenient about the whole thing. I would be scared to give her more than one dimension, however, for fear she would take six or eight—she is so much brighter and better educated than I am that if I were to let her out of the box she’d give me away in no time. A man who skates on thin ice shouldn’t carry bundles. As a matter of record, I have been brooding for a long time on the possibilities of writing a biography of my wife, based on the amazing assorted-chocolate facts which a husband is bound to pick up about a woman’s past in the course of a marriage. We were in Boston last week, and K looked out of the hotel room at the tower of the Custom House. “When Cousin Mary Perley saw that tower for the first time,” said my wife, “she snorted and said, ‘Humpf. Sticks up like a sore thumb.’” Later we went to Mechanics Hall to the dog show, and K said: “The last time I was in this place I was a child, and some men in canoes were shooting the rapids.” It has occurred to me that if I collected a couple of thousand such items, I would have a biography of a Boston girl.

  My favorite anecdote about K is of a visit she paid to Aunt Poo in Woodstock, Conn. Somewhere she had heard of a flower called “Traveler’s Joy,” and the name and function of this posy excited her so much that she got hold of some seed and went out into a roadside which already teemed with enough wild flowers to make a traveler drunk with ecstasy, and scattered the seeds carefully along the way, to bring joy to travelers.

  I go out a couple times a week to the Security Council meetings in Lake Success (near Great Neck) which are held in a gyroscope plant. Gyroscopes are still being made there—just in case. For relaxation I am reading “Life on the Mississippi,” and Kilvert’s Diary.

  En

  To JOHN B. WENTWORTH

  [New York]

  March 10, 1947

  Dear Mr. Wentworth:

  I still think the American press informs the people, not completely and not without bias, but informs them. I was simply comparing it with a truly kept press where nobody gets any information at all.

  I think that it is not so much the relationship between business office and editorial office that should worry people in a democracy as it is the dwindling of ownership of the press. As [long as] there are a lot of papers and a lot of owners I think the news gets out, even news such as you complain about. . . .

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To RUTH CHAPMAN

  [New York]

  April 10, 1947

  Dear Miss Chapman:

  Thanks for suggesting that I be photographed, but I shall have to decline the invitation. Had all my teeth photographed the other day, and nothing good came of it.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  • The following note was occasioned by the smallpox scare of 1947, when many adults, including Lobrano and White, were vaccinated against the disease. Myrtle Powers and her sister Etta Sawyer, widows, of West Brooklin, Maine, were with the Whites as cook and housekeeper.

  To GUSTAVE S. LOBRANO

  229 East 48

  [April? 1947]

  Tuesday

  Dear Gus:

  It is now quite generally known that you have smallpox and it seems to me ill-advised (and rather immature) to keep up this pretense. I went for vaccination yesterday morning, taking Mrs. Powers and Mrs. Sawyer along; and on the way back from the doctor’s office, in the cab, Mrs. Powers told me the story of her first immunization, some sixty-two years ago, when she was a little girl in West Brooklin, Maine. She reached into a flour barrel one day and managed to tear her upper arm, near the shoulder, on a protruding nail. The thing healed but left a distinct scar. Some weeks later all the children in the village were marched in to old Doctor Herrick’s office (three and a half miles, afoot), to get vaccinated against the pox. Mrs. Powers says that she was frightened at the idea, and that when her turn came she boldly told Dr. Herrick that she “had already been vaccinated.”

  “Have you?” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied, rolling up her sleeve.

  “Why, so you have,” said the good man. And that was all there was to that. Medicine has seen its best days.

  Turtle Bay Garden is in its first mad blush of spring, and as soon as you are no longer contagious, you must come here for a stroll in our leafy setting—or what Bowden Broadwater [a co-worker] calls “this decadent close.”. . .

  Andy

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  North Brooklin, Maine

  [July 1947]

  Saturday

  Dear Bun:

  Got your letter about coming east and was glad to hear the news. My getting to Boston isn’t very likely unless something comes up that would take me to New York. But why don’t you take a little jaunt down here to see us?. . .

  Joe finished Exeter this June and has been admitted to Cornell, but thinks he’ll wait one year before entering. At the moment he is absorbed in boats and girls and sometimes a combination of the two. I haven’t been doing much of anything—just tinkering with a strawberry patch, watching phoebes through binoculars, and mixing drinks. A doctor last spring told me that I would be all right if I quit writing. He said most writers were neurotics—if they weren’t neurotic they wouldn’t go to the trouble, the enormous trouble. I find that Not Writing is very soothing, but haven’t figured out yet what I will use for money.

  Lunch is ready.

  Yrs,

  En

  • In an editorial published on November 27, 1947, the Herald Tribune, though somewhat grudgingly, supported the right of the movie industry to blacklist the “Hollywood Ten” and any others who refused to answer questions before J. Parnell Thomas’s House Un-American Activities Committee. The following letter, White’s reaction to the editorial, was published in the Tribune on December 2.

  To the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

  New York, New York

  November 29, 1947

  To the New York Herald Tribune:

  I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears so much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our Constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic. It’s hard for me to believe that the Herald Tribune is backing away from
the fight, and I can only assume that your editorial writer, in a hurry to get home for Thanksgiving, tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.

  The investigation of alleged Communists by the Thomas committee has been a confusing spectacle for all of us. I believe its implications are widely misunderstood and that the outcome is grave beyond exaggerating. The essence of our political theory in this country is that a man’s conscience shall be a private, not a public affair, and that only his deeds and words shall be open to survey, censure and to punishment. The idea is a decent one, and it works. It is an idea that cannot safely be compromised with, lest it be utterly destroyed. It cannot be modified even under circumstances where, for security reasons, the temptation to modify it is great.

  I think security in critical times takes care of itself if the people and the institutions take care of themselves. First in line is the press. Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn’t need to take anybody else’s temperature to know where he is going. If a newspaper or a motion picture company is in health, it can get rid of Communists and spies simply by reading proof and by watching previews.

  I hold that it would be improper for any committee or any employer to examine my conscience. They wouldn’t know how to get into it, they wouldn’t know what to do when they got in there, and I wouldn’t let them in anyway. Like other Americans, my acts and my words are open to inspection—not my thoughts or my political affiliation. (As I pointed out, I am a member of a party of one.) Your editorialist said he hoped the companies in checking for loyalty would use their powers sparingly and wisely. That is a wistful idea. One need only watch totalitarians at work to see that once men gain power over other men’s minds, that power is never used sparingly and wisely, but lavishly and brutally and with unspeakable results. If I must declare today that I am not a Communist, tomorrow I shall have to testify that I am not a Unitarian. And the day after, that I never belonged to a dahlia club.