Letters of E. B. White
Page 37
The principal character in our winning float was our neighbor Mrs. Charles Henderson, dressed in my wife’s grandmother’s dress. There was a very nice picture of her in yesterday’s Portland Sunday Telegram, on the same page with a picture of another friend of mine, Ginger Rogers. The latter is separating from her husband, of whom she once said: “He is everything I ever dreamed of.” I met him once, and he was everything I ever dreamed of, too.
Rgds to Greenstein1 & the mesdames.
White
To JOHN MCNULTY
21 August 1949—Sun night
North Brooklin, so named because the boundary on one side follows the line of the brook
Dear John:
Regarding Colinus virginianus virginianus (or Bob White) I am glad you are keeping your ears open. No use sitting around the smallest state in the Union not listening. When I got your letter I turned right to Forbush (“Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States,” 3 volumes). This is the set of books my wife once gave fifty bucks for. I was impressed. Most of the females I know, they get fifty dollars together it don’t go to no set of bird books. Anyway, Forbush backs you to the hilt in regards the Bob White.
“VOICE.—Common call, an interrogative whistle wha-whoi? or wha-wha-whoi? the last note with a rising inflection. Usually translated as Bob-white, ah Bob-white or buck-wheat-ripe, more-wet or some-more-wet, head thrown upward and backward on the final interrogative note; the gathering cry, ka-loi-kee?; the reply, whoil-kee Ryall (apparently at this point the bird is working up to saying er-George-Ryall1); etc., etc.”
In the nineteen years I have been coming to this part of Maine I have heard a Bob White only once. According to Forbush, the greatest danger these birds face in winter is getting stuck under a hard crust of snow. They form coveys and let themselves get snowed under, on purpose, but then a rain comes, followed by a freeze, and they are licked. I am just showing off, now.
The thing I like best in Forbush is the way he ends up each section with a plug for the bird. He heads this “Economic Status,” and it usually consists of a detailed account of the contents of an individual’s stomach, showing how he befriends the farmer by destroying harmful insects. Forbush struggles to be strictly impartial in his “Economic Status” windup, but his passion for birds is so great that it is always a losing battle. When he got around to defending the Belted Kingfisher, he just had to put his head down and throw punches in all directions. But his conscience got the best of him finally, and he ended up: “The mice and grass-eating insects on which it feeds surely count in its favor, and the bird probably deserves protection by law, except about fish hatcheries.” The italics are mine.
The only work I have done this summer is write an introduction to a new edition of “archy and mehitabel,” which I guess will just about put a new sole on my sneakers. I have lost the knack of earning money by putting one word after another. For a little while, there, I was catching some 3 pound flounders (toward the end of July), and money seemed silly. Now the flounders have left and I don’t know—maybe money is the thing. I blow hot and cold about it all the time. I understand Ross is on his way to New Brunswick, to fish. Ross fishing is one thing I have always wanted to see. Can you imagine how he would rile up a stream?
Yrs,
Andy
To MORRIS BISHOP
25 West 43
Columbus Day and the drum’s
ugly sound in the sidestreet
[1949]
Dear Morris:
I would have got this back quicker only you caught me in transit, driving a green sedan through yellow valleys, with no appreciable effect on the poetic midform. I am delighted, not to say touched, by your interesting (and I trust perceptive) estimate of little old me.1 I have inserted Times after Seattle, changed four years in Maine to five years, which I believe to be the correct number. (I doubt that Joe could have got to Exeter in four years from Brooklin’s third grade, and I sometimes wonder how he managed to do it in five.) I have inserted the words “part of” on Page 6, as being a more moderate and more truthful statement of the case. The last couple of chapters of “Stuart Little” were no dream, they were a nightmare: I wrote them doggedly and while under the impression that I was at death’s door and should catch up on loose ends.
I had no idea you were at work on a study of White, in fact I thought Irwin Edman had been tapped for it. But maybe that is another edition. At any rate, I hope the pain was not unbearable and that the pay was decent. I like your piece very much and feel slightly stripped, or shucked—pleasantly so, as I imagine a plain girl might feel (in dream, of course) when she gets undressed and everything goes all right. I have dared transpose pholgiston. (My first time, too.)
I had a feeling, when I read on Page 7 “He has made bourgeois idealism respectable” that the word “respectable” was unfortunate. This is your business, not mine. But isn’t your word there some word like “tenable,” or “plausible”? The word “respectable” would be all right in its pure sense (assuming that I have indeed done anything to bourgeois idealism) but “respectable” has become a tainted word, thanks to the nature of respectability. End suggestion.
Jumping to the bourgeois game of football (Columbia at Ithaca, Oct. 29), there is some talk of it. The beating we gave you last time, when we arrived afoot and minus one spinal column, still lingers in our minds if not in yours. If we try a repeat on you, it will at least not be afoot, it will be aDeSoto.
Many, many thanks for “An Introduction.”
Yrs proudly,
Andy
P.S. I think there should be an aside, somewhere, by the subject himself, to the effect that he first gazed upon the midform of poetry when he looked upon Bishop’s Incomplete Works.
To CASS CANFIELD
25 West 43rd Street
19 October [1949]
Dear Cass:
Glad to hear that the book can come out in December, thus alleviating my wife’s holiday distress. She had it ticked off against a lot of names. As for me, not being a bookclub man, I didn’t catch on to what “dual selection” meant and had to have it explained out to me by a literary character.1 I thought you were talking about one of those “dividends” of which I had heard. Am of course glad to have been selected, although I don’t see why they waited till I wrote such a teensy book. However, I guess that is their business, since I’m not one of the judges, having turned down a judgeship years ago in favor of grading eggs—which turned out to be more fun.
After the book has made its first little splash and has been devoured by the club-members, I think you might try placing it in Greyhound Bus Stations and next to the ashtray in motels.
My next book is in sight. I look at it every day. I keep it in a carton, as you would a kitten.
Andy
To HAROLD ROSS
[October 27, 1949]
[Interoffice memo]
Mr. Ross:
Regarding your query of the “which” in the sentence: “He had to be clutching a solitary buck, which he had wheedled from his budget by going without butter.”
I think this is an instance where “which” is the right word, “which” being non-defining. The purpose of the clause is not to define the buck, but to make a further observation about the man.
EBW
[Ross wrote this reply on White’s memo and returned it to him. “White: I was cockeyed. Weekes also told me. I read 20,000 wds on Thursday, or anyhow 10,000.”]
• Ross had received a letter from a relative of Katharine White’s accusing him of firing an employee for being a Communist, and White drafted the following reply. In the end it was Ross, and not White, who answered the accusation, so White’s letter was not sent.
Richard Boyer was a regular contributor to The New Yorker, on a drawing account. He was forthright about his connection with the Communist party, and the editors always picked subjects for him that were nonpolitical. Ross discovered, however, that Boyer was using New Yorker stationery to write personal letters tha
t were essentially political documents. After that, Boyer was not given any more assignments.
To ——
229 East 48 Street
New York City
20 November 1949
[Unsent letter]
Dear ——:
You say Boyer has been fired, but I doubt that you know what you are talking about. I’m just as interested as you in the relationship between an independent magazine and a Communist writer. It is a fascinating relationship and, in these times, an important one. But I don’t believe you know anywhere near as much about the duties and difficulties involved as I do, or as Ross does. The New Yorker disagrees with practically everything Boyer believes in (and when I say The New Yorker it includes me). Nevertheless, it has given Boyer a fair shake, and Boyer (who has always professed his beliefs) has given The New Yorker a fair shake. The only thing that could interrupt this relationship is the nature of the Communist Party itself, which has a much too cozy feeling about its flock and which is always trying to twine itself in a magazine’s hair. In this respect it differs from other political parties.
The New Yorker has never fired a man for his politics. It has never, to my knowledge, tried to tell any contributor what to think or any critic what to feel. It has never tried to “convert” Boyer, or obstruct Boyer, or do anything else with Boyer except buy his stuff when we liked it, and let it lay when we didn’t. The New Yorker is a damned fine magazine and an honest one, and you are a lucky lady to be in a position to buy it and read it (20 cents) along with other journals of varying or opposite opinion. The New Yorker is primarily concerned with putting out a good sheet dissociated from any party or group; and as soon as a party shows signs of wanting to exploit an individual’s connection with the magazine, The New Yorker begins to freeze up, rightly. It is my belief that Boyer has talked these matters over with Ross and is under no misapprehension about how the management looks at life. Furthermore, no contributor is immune from operations of the merit system. When Boyer wrote (for the Daily Worker) some reportorial articles that experienced editors like Bill Shawn and Harold Ross regarded as thoroughly non-objective, it didn’t raise his stock any with the magazine. If there is one thing The New Yorker takes a dim view of, it’s a reporter playing footsy with his facts.
I once wrote a paragraph sniping at Boyer because he sounded off, at the Waldorf, about what a lousy thing the press is in this country. I love the press in this country. For all its faults and deficiencies, for all its Peglers and Winchells, and for all its Whites and Boyers, I don’t think you can beat it anywhere. At any rate, Boyer’s remarks were duly reported in the papers and got read. Mine, too, were published and got read. And that, in short, is what I like about the press.
An independent journal can’t maintain its independence if it ever allows itself to be maneuvered into the position of seeming to accept, or approve, the opinions of an individual with whom it disagrees. That’s all The New Yorker is concerned about in relation to Boyer. We’re not primarily interested in the fate of any individual, although we are emotionally and temperamentally interested in the fate of all writers and artists. We just want to put out what we think is a good magazine. To that end you couldn’t ask for a better man than H. W. Ross. For you to have written him such a frantic letter seems to me typical of the hysteria you were hollering so loud about.
Sincerely,
Andy
To ANN GRAVELY
[New York]
December 8, 1949
Dear Miss Gravely:
I don’t know where to begin. I am five feet eight inches tall—but that’s an odd place to begin. I am fifty years old—but that’s a dreadful place to begin. I ate too much for lunch—but nobody would want to begin there. As for my work, the only thing I can tell you about it is that a lot of it has been published, all of it was hard, and some of it was fun. Haven’t got a photograph. Maine, incidentally, is not my native state: I was born in New York State, but now live much of the time in Maine.
Sincerely yours,
E. B. White
IX
TURTLE BAY
1950–1951
* * *
• Life at The New Yorker was harried during the early fifties. Harold Ross was ill, no longer able to work at his usual pace. On December 6, 1951, he died, suddenly, during surgery for lung cancer.
White wrote, in the issue of December 15: “. . . Ross regarded every sentence as the enemy, and believed that if a man watched closely enough, he would discover the vulnerable spot, the essential weakness. He devoted his life to making the weak strong—a rather specialized form of blood transfusion, to be sure, but one that he believed in with such a consuming passion that his spirit infected others and inspired them, and lifted them. Whatever it was, this contagion, this vapor in these marshes, it spread. None escaped it. Nor is it likely to be dissipated in a hurry.
“His ambition was to publish one good magazine, not a string of successful ones, and he thought of The New Yorker as a sort of movement. He came equipped with not much knowledge and only two books—Webster’s Dictionary and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. These books were his history, his geography, his literature, his art, his music, his everything. Some people found Ross’s scholastic deficiencies quite appalling, and were not sure they had met the right man. But he was the right man, and the only question was whether the other fellow was capable of being tuned to Ross’s vibrations. Ross had a thing that is at least as good as, and sometimes better than, knowledge: he had a sort of natural drive in the right direction, plus a complete respect for the work and ideas and opinions of others. It took a little while to get on to the fact that Ross, more violently than almost anybody, was proceeding in a good direction, and carrying others along with him, under torrential conditions. He was like a boat being driven at the mercy of some internal squall, a disturbance he himself only half understood, and of which he was at times suspicious.
“In a way he was a lucky man. For a monument he has the magazine to date—one thousand three hundred and ninety-nine issues, born in the toil and pain that can be appreciated only by those who helped in the delivery room. These are his. They stand, unchangeable and open for inspection. We are, of course, not in a position to estimate the monument, even if we were in the mood to. But we are able to state one thing unequivocally: Ross set up a great target and pounded himself to pieces trying to hit it square in the middle. His dream was a simple dream; it was pure and had no frills: he wanted the magazine to be good, to be funny, and to be fair . . ..
“When you took leave of Ross after a calm or stormy meeting, he always ended with the phrase that has become as much a part of the office as the paint on the walls. He would wave his limp hand, gesturing you away. ‘All right,’ he would say. ‘God bless you.’ Considering Ross’s temperament and habits, this was a rather odd expression. He usually took God’s name in vain if he took it at all. But when he sent you away with this benediction, which he uttered briskly and affectionately, and in which he and God seemed all scrambled together, it carried a warmth and sincerity that never failed to carry over. The words are so familiar to his helpers and friends here that they provide the only possible way to conclude this hasty notice and to take our leave. We cannot convey his manner. But with much love in our heart, we say, for everybody, ‘All right, Ross, God bless you!’”
• Changing the design of New York taxicabs was a crusade of White’s for many years. Ross encouraged him by passing along anything he came across on the subject.
To HAROLD ROSS
[January? 1950]
[Interoffice memo]
Mr. Ross:
I’ve read this, and thanks. The controversy is muddied up by a lot of irrelevant factors, plus politics. The thing that would benefit New York, or any other city, would be a cab that is properly designed to fulfill the special function it has to perform. These cabs are not so designed. They are simply slight modifications of pleasure cars—and a pleasure car is about the poorest object you could get
, as a model. Taxicabs are long and low because for thirty years automobile manufacturers have been boasting of long, low cars. I have personally measured the opening (vertical distance) of a cab door. It is roughly 38 inches. A taxicab is the only thing I know of that expects its patron to enter and leave by an opening 38 inches high. If you had to enter your apartment, your subway, your saloon, your bank vault, or your hall closet through a 38 inch opening, you would be infuriated, and would rebel. Thirty-eight inches is about one-half the height of a man. It makes sense as the entrance to an igloo because of the temperature factor involved; and it makes sense as the entrance to a small cabin cruiser because a high superstructure has disadvantages at sea. A high roof to a New York taxicab has no disadvantage, it has every advantage. New York cabs should be approximately 16 inches higher, should have a hood approximately 12 inches shorter (slightly smaller motor), and should get shed of all the crap they have inherited in the way of flowing fenders.
Did you know that I had been asked to speak on this subject, and allied subjects, at a symposium on automobile design at the Museum of Modern Art? It is beginning to dawn on people that they are being had.
P.S. I’m not going to speak.
Yrs,
E. B. White
To HENRY SCHUMAN
[New York]
January 23, 1950
Dear Mr. Schuman:
It wouldn’t do any good to send me galleys of a book, because I don’t comment on books—except to my wife under cover of darkness.
With many thanks,
E. B. White
To DOUGLAS M. FOUQUET
April 19, 1950