Letters of E. B. White
Page 35
It is not a crime to believe anything at all in America. To date it has not been declared illegal to belong to the Communist party. Yet ten men have been convicted not of wrongdoing but of wrong believing. That is news in this country, and if I have not misread history, it is bad news.
E. B. White
• On the same page on the same day that White’s November 29 letter was published in the Tribune, another editorial appeared entitled “The Party of One.” It said that people like Mr. White “have been with us since the dawn of civilization. They have always been highly valuable elements in our civilization and nearly always as destructive as they have been valuable.” Members of the party of one were also characterized as “probably the most dangerous single elements in our confused and complicated society.”
White’s reply to the “Party of One” editorial, appeared on December 9 under the heading “Mr. White Believes Us Needlessly Unkind.”
To the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
New York
Dec. 4, 1947
To the New York Herald Tribune:
The editorial that you wrote about me illustrated what I meant about the loyalty check system and about what would happen if it got going in the industrial world. My letter, expressing a dissenting opinion, was a letter that any conscientious reader might write to his newspaper, and you answered it by saying I belonged to “probably the most dangerous element in our society.” Thus a difference of opinion became suddenly a mark of infamy. A man who disagreed with a Tribune editorial used to be called plucky—now he’s called dangerous. By your own definition I already belong among the unemployables.
You said that in these times we need “new concepts and new principles” to combat subversion. It seems to me the loyalty check in industry is not a new principle at all. It is like the “new look,” which is really the old, old look, slightly tinkered up. The principle of demanding an expression of political conformity as the price of a job is the principle of hundred percentism. It is not new and it is blood brother of witch burning.
I don’t know why I should be bawling out the Herald Tribune or why the Herald Tribune should be bawling out me. I read those Bert Andrews pieces and got a new breath of fresh air. Then I turned in a dissenting opinion about an editorial and got hit over the head with a stick of wood. These times are too edgy. It is obvious to everyone that the fuss about loyalty arises from fear of war with Russia, and from the natural feeling that we should clear our decks of doubtful characters. Well, I happen to believe that we can achieve reasonably clear decks if we continue to apply our civil rights and duties equally to all citizens, even to citizens of opposite belief. That may be a dangerous and false idea, but my holding it does not necessarily make me a dangerous and false man, and I wish that the Herald Tribune next time it sits down to write a piece about me and my party would be good enough to make the distinction. Right now it’s a pretty important distinction to make.
E. B. White
[Determined to have the last word, the Tribune printed a parenthetical editorial comment right underneath White’s letter. The comment began “Perhaps we were over-emphatic in our disagreement with Mr. White, but since the same editorial which suggested that he belonged to a ‘dangerous element’ also said that it was a ‘highly valuable’ element, he can scarcely hold that we were attaching any badge of ‘infamy’ to him.” The editor went on to express the Tribune’s regard for White, to deny that its editors were the slightest bit afraid of war with Russia, and to state that they continued to feel that Communism was “exploiting toleration in order to destroy toleration.” The comment concluded that “We may be misguided in our attempts to deal with it, but it seems to us that Mr. White fails to deal with it at all.”]
To FELIX FRANKFURTER
[New York]
December 12, 1947
Dear Justice Frankfurter:
There are more devils than angels around here at the moment, but I shall continue to give tongue.1 Your letter was most encouraging. My Tribune excursion into the realm of civil liberties covered me with a surprising lot of goat feathers, and I could hardly get my breath and needed a letter like yours.
Many thanks.
Very sincerely yours,
E. B. White
To MAURICE ZOLOTOW
[New York]
December 15, 1947
Dear Mr. Zolotow:
Thanks for the letter—I’m a little late answering. It’s true that I am not well informed on Communist Party maneuvers, but that’s not the point. The point is whether we want the government to step into communications industries and start hiring and firing the employees. I’m against it, because I know where it leads. My editorial1 was not a commentary on the character, motives, or ability of the Hollywood men, it was a warning against industry surrendering its prerogatives to government, and allowing itself to decline to the point where it is incapable of running its own show.
I am firmly on your side about Communism, but I believe that in order to keep it in check, we must not stir the deep fears and hatreds of the American people and make suspects out of millions of innocent citizens. That is just exactly what the Communists are hoping we will do, if my guess is any good.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
• The essay “Death of a Pig” was published in the January 1948 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. On January 7, an article about the piece appeared in the Ellsworth (Maine) American. It implied that White, an outlander, had written unfairly about his veterinarian, E. J. McDonald.
To E. J. MCDONALD
[New York]
January 14, 1948
Dear Doc:
You probably saw that piece in the Ellsworth American calling me down for the pig story. I’m not sure I understand the more cryptic passages, but the last couple of paragraphs seem to indicate that I was deliberately using people’s names with intent to humiliate them. And that disturbs me, because although I am often an inept writer (and pigman) I don’t think of myself as malicious, and I certainly hope I didn’t hurt your feelings or those of your wife. If I did, I am deeply sorry and want to apologize to you and to her in no uncertain terms.
Thirty years of being a writer have convinced me that people are always trying to read something into a man’s motives, and are finding hidden meanings that exist only in the eye of the beholder. I had no ulterior motive for writing that story (unless you want to call a desire to earn a living an ulterior motive), and I was merely attempting to describe as accurately and factually as possible, a curious interlude in my life when comedy and tragedy seemed to cohere.
If the comedy turned out to seem not so funny to you, when you saw yourselves in print, I am truly sorry and am sore at myself. I started out using fictitious names, instead of real ones, but my experience with the use of fictitious names in connection with real events is that the populace manages to hang the wrong name on the wrong character, and that, too, makes for bad feelings and misunderstanding.
One thing I wonder about was whether people thought I was trying to take a quick punch at veterinary medicine in Hancock County. If so, that, too, is just somebody’s imagination at work. I think I made it clear in the story that veterinary medicine was in a healthy condition even though the pig wasn’t.
If you can enlighten me about the “consultation” that the Ellsworth American writer says he knows all about, I’d appreciate it. After you . . .left I took another drink and consulted only with God. Even He didn’t seem to be able to loosen up that pig, and he died before the medicine arrived in the mail.
At any rate, I don’t mind being attacked in the papers—that happens to me almost every week of my life, and I am not even punch-drunk. I do mind, though, if I caused you any embarrassment merely to satisfy my own literary whims. A writer has his problems, the same as a doctor. Sometimes I get so discouraged by writing that I think seriously of giving up the life, and changing to a nice clean line of work, like bailing out cesspools or painting the under side of boats.
Anyway, I wish you and Mrs. McDonald a happy New Year, and a long and fruitful life. And if I got you off to a queer start by rushing you into the public prints via my pighouse, I hope you’ll forgive me.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To STANLEY HART WHITE
229 East 48 Street
24 January 1948
Saturday
Dear Bun:
Many thanks to you and Blanche for the Countryman’s Companion. It seems to be a good collection. . . .
I have had a rather wild fall and winter so far, thanks to my incurable habit of putting practically anything that comes into my head down on paper and getting it published in newspapers and magazines. It is a lousy habit and I would be better off if I were a confirmed drunkard. I got into a little argument with the Herald Tribune on the subject of loyalty-checking, during which they ran an editorial about me saying that I belonged to the most dangerous element in society. I was delighted, as I had not known my own strength up till then. It seems that all you have to do to be tagged “dangerous” nowadays is to stand up for the First Amendment to the Constitution. Then I wrote an editorial in The New Yorker on the subject of the Hollywood purge and the Un-American Activities Committee, and I was soon getting courted by all the Communist front organizations. My desk got so deep in Red literature that I had to fumigate myself every night before going home. It was worse than athlete’s foot. Then a piece of mine came out in the Atlantic Monthly, a simple rustic tale about the death of a pig, and the Ellsworth (Maine) American attacked it as malicious. You can’t even come out against constipation in America any more.
However, things in general are all right, and my head feels rather better than it did a year ago. There’s not much news to report. Roger and Evelyn had a baby girl a couple of weeks ago,1 and Roger is supporting it by working for a magazine called Holiday, a travel publication based on the perfectly sound idea that everybody in the United States would like to be somewhere else. Joe is working for a construction company, helping remodel the Times Annex.2 K still works like ten horses at The New Yorker, but her spine is on the blink and gives her a lot of bad trouble. I was interested in your review of the Fifth Edition of Webster’s. I own a copy inscribed “To Stuart Little” from Robert C. Munroe, the president of G. & C. Merriam Company.
Zoe mou, sas agapo.
En
• When he was writing Comment for The New Yorker, and therefore speaking for the magazine, White felt that it was inappropriate for him to supply publishers with blurbs on books. The galleys in this letter were of William Maxwell’s novel Time Will Darken It.
To CASS CANFIELD
[New York]
June 11, 1948
Dear Cass:
Thanks for the Maxwell galleys. About fifty unborn books a year arrive in the mail for me, accompanied by letters similar to yours of June 4th asking me for comment. I thought perhaps it’s only fair to let you know that I have a long record of silence, or muteness, and don’t give out statements about books in advance of publication, for the bland reason that I don’t like to. So a publisher is presumably wasting money to keep me on his list.
I’m just telling you this as a routine intelligence service, and because you are my severest friend and best publisher.
Yours,
Andy
To BEN AMES WILLIAMS
[New York]
[June 1948]
Dear Ben:
At New Haven they have caps with stiff underbodies—you can put them on one-handed.1 I encountered another sort of trap, however. I was standing with a lot of others in the President’s office, and a stranger tugged my sleeve and said: “Mr. White, I’d like you to meet Dean Acheson.” “How do you do, Dean Acheson,” I replied, courteously.2
Everywhere, traps.
Sincerely,
Andy White
• Harold Ross and E. B. White were against noise. They were particularly against it when the audience was captive. At this time music and ads were being broadcast very loudly in New York’s Grand Central Station and on buses in Washington, D.C., and White’s Comments opposing the practice had been appearing in The New Yorker. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had read the Comments, sent White a copy of an anti-noise opinion he had written, inscribed “For E. B. White, whose judicial opinions are the envy of Felix Frankfurter.”
To FELIX FRANKFURTER
June 29, 1948
Dear Justice Frankfurter:
I was very glad to get the copy of the opinion in the sound truck case, and I prize your inscription and thank you for it. I had read some of the dissent in the papers. Certainly nothing has come along lately with such lovely nuances as this amplification business. At the rate we’re going, in the world of noise, we may shortly be faced with Supreme Court decisions recorded, amplified, and shouted down from low-flying planes—and find even Justice itself getting to be a public nuisance.
Very quietly yours,
E. B. White
• When White happened to witness the birth of twin fawns in the deer park of the Bronx Zoo—“a scene of rare sylvan splendor in one of our five favorite boroughs”—he wrote a Comment about it for The New Yorker. He received many letters, one of them from John Tee-Van, the zoo’s director. The piece appears in The Second Tree From the Corner.
To JOHN TEE-VAN
25 West 43rd Street
New York
June 29, 1948
Dear Mr. Tee-Van:
There is no question about my returning to the Bronx Zoo, as long as I have the use of my legs. I’ve been a visitor since about 1908. At that time I lived in Mount Vernon, and my father sometimes broke the awful spell of Sunday afternoon by a trolley trip to the Bronx—always after a heavy dinner, and with many difficult transfer arrangements. For years I saw the Zoo only on the Sabbath, and it never occurred to me that there were people there on weekdays.
. . .One thing that impressed me that morning at the deer park was how weak are the powers of observation of zoo visitors. I suppose a dozen persons, in all, wandered past while the doe was getting her lambs going, and none noticed the incident of birth. In Maine, most schoolboys would give their right arm to be in the woods and witness an event like that.
The cow moose came along with her calf soon after the second fawn was up, and I was amused to see that the doe didn’t seem to mind the moose (probably an old bridge partner) but she drove the calf away.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To DAISE TERRY
North Brooklin, Maine
14 July [1948]
Dear Miss T:
I’m going to be in New York from July 28 to August 4 as I am very homesick for the heat and stench and tensions of the city. Could you get me a hotel room for the above period? The Algonquin is OK, or any other public house you think suitable.
Also need a berth (lower or upper) on a train called the Bar Harbor Express for the night of August 4. If you have any difficulty with this railroad business, perhaps Mr. Norman can help, as he seems to be thick with the railroad crowd.
Sorry to inject these matters into your day, but I understand you thrive on confusion, complexity, and near-defeat. There is an LCT (Landing Craft Tank) in our cove this morning. It is here to pick up a load of pulpwood for Lightweight Harry Luce, who owns a paper mill in Bucksport. I watched the LCT take the beach on the flood tide last night. It nosed into the shore, lowered its ramp, and instead of disgorging a few tanks it just waited quietly until a truck appeared bearing pulpwood. The truck mounted the ramp, turned around, backed up, and dumped its load. Then went back for more. Thus rolls the course of the Luce empire, riding the throbbing engines of old dead wars. Some day it will crush us all, and you and I will go down together—you clutching a reprint permission request, I an amorphous comment suggestion.
Till then, and even then, I am yrs,
EBW
To WILLIAM SHAWN
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[July 15?, 1948]
Thursday
Dear Bill:
Sorry about that pulpwood. I never would have wired it, only I missed the mail and thought maybe you might want to fill a hole with some sort of fiddle faddle. Almost all the pulp around here goes to the mill at Bucksport, which was bought recently by Time-Life. But after I got back from the telegraph office I got wondering about it, and decided I had better check. So I rowed across to where the LCT was beached (unquestionably the longest single-scull saltwater journey ever made by a New Yorker reporter for checking purposes—2 miles in moderate sea) and learned that the god damn boat was not going to the Harry Luce mill, but was going to pass right by it and continue up the Penobscot River to a mill in Brewer, Me.—probably some rival outfit supplying paper to us or Mademoiselle.
Where do we get our paper, anyway? Or do we just use old paper towels from the men’s room?
Yrs,
Andy
Send me the proof (if you set the piece) and maybe I can get something out of it. It seems kind of interesting that our ex-landing craft are still finding work to do on beaches.1
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
[New York]
[Summer 1948]
Thursday noon
Dear K:
Just finished comment for Comment Day, and now start for lunch with Gus and for dentistry with Jack Miller—to replace small divot removed by the oral hygienist at an earlier sitting for which I paid ten dollars. It was terrifically hot here last night and I writhed at the bottom of one of those Algonquin air shafts, thrashing about and alternately taking off and putting on my pajama top. On the whole, though, my physical condition is good enough, and the city is cooler this morning. Lunched with Ross yesterday, but he said only one funny thing. He said “When Hawley1 and Shawn try to go through a door together, nobody gets through.” I guess we better save that one for the book.