Letters of E. B. White
Page 38
[New York]
[Collect telegram]
DOUGLAS M. FOUQUET
HARVARD CRIMSON
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
SORRY CANNOT SPEAK DO NOT KNOW HOW MANY THANKS
E. B. WHITE
To EDWIN WAY TEALE
[New York]
May 3, 1950
Dear Mr. Teale:
Yes, I remember the passage in the [Thoreau] journals, and was amused to read it again. I’m afraid it doesn’t quite fit our “Fascinating News Story” department but thanks for sending it.
Saw a brown thrasher in my backyard in 48th Street this morning, between Second and Third Avenue. Each year I see about a dozen migrants in this small green enclosure—robin, jay, scarlet tanager, hermit or olive backed thrush, towhee, thrasher, white-throat (he was here three days ago) and a few warblers. They arrive like traveling salesmen, spend a night or two, and then depart, and I always wonder whether I’m looking at the same individual that I saw a year ago. Am I?
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To JAMES THURBER
North Brooklin, Maine
6 June 1950
Dear Jim:
I think “The Thirteen Clocks” is indeed a wondrous tale and very musical and melancholy. I’m sorry to be a bit late in getting this letter off to you but have been laboring over a few local todals and thrins of a Maine springtime, with black snappers gnawing the chard and black bitches only half defending their honor.
I’ve read the story twice and think its only fault, if it is a fault at all, is that it is so concentrated a diet, with new characters and events and twists appearing in almost every sentence. This, plus the similarity of names—Mark, Mock, Hark—makes it occasionally hard to follow in a narrative sense, and I found myself working at it as I would at a double crostic. Doubtless this is your intent, or at any rate it is perhaps necessary to the nature and manner of the narrative.
In several places your system of not paragraphing to indicate conversational shifts makes tough reading, for this reason: when you follow a quote with “said the Prince” and then begin another quote within the same paragraph, the reader in most instances has no positive way of knowing whether the new quote is a continuation of the Prince’s remarks or the beginning of some other person’s remarks.
Being a poetical work essentially, the tale has to be concentrated. I wonder, though, whether in its main moments you haven’t sacrificed the simple fluency of tale telling in order to add another ounce of fantasy or fun. I think the final winning of Saralinda might well be stated with greater ease and simplicity and clarity, and I’m also not sure that you have made Saralinda say or do anything that convinces the reader that she is as hot as you say she is.
I have a minor suggestion about the foreword. The first part of it sounds as though you were on the defensive—as though you were prematurely sore because the wrong people were reading your book or the right people weren’t. And the second part, where you explain what the book is and what it isn’t, is to my mind a questionable tactic, and I think you are just sticking out your zatch, and many a tosspan and strutfart will run you through.
Lots of love, and a happy hooding at Kenyon.
Yrs,
Andy
To H. K. RIGG
[New York]
[June? 1950]
Wednesday
Dear Bun:
Good to hear from you and am enclosing the description of a dachshund descending the stairs. Also a photograph that somebody sent me, to illustrate. Would like the picture back, eventually. My advice, if you have a dachshund puppy, is to subscribe to the New York Times, and instead of reading it just distribute it liberally all over the house. In my opinion it is impossible to housebreak a puppy three months old. When they get so they lift their leg, they begin to like the great outdoors. Up until then, it’s largely wasted effort. Fred, who died last year at the age of 13, was so tough and lascivious that I never hesitated to beat the tar out of him for his crimes of one sort and another. Minnie, who is now pushing eleven, is so sensitive and considerate that I don’t dare speak a hard word to her, for fear it will bring on a spell of diarrhea. You have to watch out about dachshunds—some of them are as delicately balanced as a watch. . . .
Best regards,
Andy
P.S. That business about stairs is no joke. We have a flight of rather steep back stairs in Maine, and Fred nosed over twice. After that he refused the stairs, and always went around and used the front stairs (which were much flatter) even when he was in a hell of a hurry.
[White liked the photograph mentioned in this letter so much that he later made a sketch and used it as a Christmas card. See p. 297.]
• Dale Kramer was writing Ross and The New Yorker, published by Doubleday in 1951. Ross himself did not cooperate with Kramer but told members of his staff to do as they pleased.
To DALE KRAMER
North Brooklin, Maine
25 August 1950
Dear Mr. Kramer:
I don’t expect to be in New York for quite a while—maybe the middle of October. I guess it’s true that The New Yorker has had more of an effect on American letters than some other magazines, but opinions differ widely whether the effect has been good. You can find a couple of very scholarly treatises in the quarterlies showing that the whole business is largely degenerative.
Thurber can write you an informative letter about American letters and trends in same, but I can’t, as letters have never been my interest, only my fate. I read farm journals and boating magazines and my favorite authors are people nobody has ever heard of. I can’t very well say whether I brought anything to the early New Yorker, except a certain eagerness (which was characteristic of many of the early employees in that shop) and a certain naiveté, which was particularly characteristic of me as I was late in developing, was ill at ease, and probably fairly perceptive about the city. I was unhappy and unproductive in the jobs I held after getting out of college—I didn’t like advertising, or publicity, and although I liked newspapers and reporting I couldn’t qualify on newspapers or press associations (although I tried hard), as I wasn’t quick enough and wise enough, and was scared of them. So when the New Yorker came along, it proved a more promising receptacle. The piece you mentioned in your letter, “Child’s Play,” is one I haven’t reread in many years, but I recall the incident clearly. A waitress in a Childs restaurant spilled a glass of buttermilk all over me, and I had no difficulty writing a piece about it and selling it to the NYer, and the experience was illuminating and greatly heartening to me, as I felt a sudden burst of confidence and of wellbeing. Writing about the thing had come naturally, and I realized that I had unconsciously stylized the action, and I felt that at last I had produced something that made sense journalistically.
I think The New Yorker was bound to happen, just as another magazine is bound to come along sooner or later to overshadow it. Ross wasn’t so much seeking a formula as he was trying to shake off the formulae of Life, Judge, Puck, Harper’s, and all the rest. Jokes were mostly he-and-she, essays were tweedy, feature writing was at low ebb, humor was barber shop. The NYer took a fresh grip on the bat and swung at everything, unabashed. Ross was as enthusiastic as he was wide-eyed; and his uncompromising nature attracted a lot of good, if inexperienced, people to his side. That’s about all I know about the contribution to letters, except that it was a lot of fun. And a lot of work.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
P.S. My wife, whom you mentioned in your letter, was not primarily concerned with casuals and fiction in the early stage of the magazine. She was messed up with the whole works—as was every editor at that time. For the first ten years, fact and fiction lived together in sin. They became departmentalized gradually. Katharine, over the years, has had a lot to do with fiction people and poets; but in my opinion (and I think in Ross’s opinion) her major contribution was in getting out a funny paper that was also a sound and good paper. She was heavily engaged with
the artists in the years before the magazine had anybody in the office whose job was art. She edited Flanner, Pringle, Alva Johnston and a lot of others before it ever occurred to anybody to label their stuff Fact. She was deep in the dingles of humor, and she was a whiz. No two people in the world could be more different than she and Ross, but they met at one point (they both thought the same things were funny), and the collision at this point sent up sparks.
To GUSTAVE S. LOBRANO
North Brooklin, Maine
5 September 1950
Dear Gus:
Herewith a poem—a sort of brief agricultural history of our times.1 For your information, domestic rye grass is widely used as a cover crop on gardens and fields, so that they won’t lie bare during the winter. Seeding rye grass is a standard practice nowadays, for conservation and soil building.
Super is superphosphate. Everybody in the country calls it super—the way you call the telephone the phone.
If you like the poem and are wondering about scheduling, it should either run soon or a year from now, as rye grass is sown from midsummer to early fall.*. . .
Andy
*A year from now fills me with deep gloom.
To EARLE DAVIS
[New York]
October 27, 1950
Dear Mr. Davis:
I’ve had a number of requests to reprint “The Morning of the Day They Did It,” and have said no to them all.
Got my reasons. One reason is that I am not sure it’s a public service to describe the end of the world, even in a spirit of satire. People are jumpy, right now, and I see no reason to explode paper bags.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To JAMES THURBER
[New York]
2 November [1950]
Dear Jim:
Ross asked me to pass this along to you after I’d read it. This guy accuses you and me of setting sex back a hundred years. Ross pondered that a few moments, in his inquiring way, and then said: “Facts don’t bear the son of a bitch out. Population figures have increased.”
Professor Clark’s personal gods seem to be Freud, Marx, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. He really gets going at the end, when he lauds the “merry maleness of Alexander Woollcott.”
Andy
To STANLEY HART WHITE
25 West 43 Street
12 November [1950]
Dear Bun:
Thanks for the letter (23 September) about the magazine. I guess the New Yorker hangs on, but it is a hell of a different magazine from the one I went to work for in the twenties. Ross worries about this constantly but always ends with the remark: “Ah Jesus Christ it’s still worth 20 cents.”
Lil was here for dinner the other night and we were talking about you. Lil looks fine and seems happy. Her hair has lost most of its red, but she looks young and gay. Last summer she put Sidney in a girls’ camp in Belgrade. Lil dropped in at the rebuilt Gleason farmhouse and saw Millard and Mae [Gleason]. She said Millard is obviously a sick man and won’t be around long. . . .
K and I are both pretty well, if a bit punchy. Both K and Joe had virus pneumonia in September, so the summer ended on a note of terramycin. Joe, after two years at Cornell, is now in M.I.T. where he seems to belong. They work the pants off him but he is liking it and doing well. Is taking naval architecture. Tech has a fleet of sailing dinghies right in front of the joint, in the Charles River. This is Joe’s idea of a proper university: step out of a classroom into a boat. No nonsense about dry land. . . .
Yrs,
En
To HARLAND W. HOISINGTON, JR.
[New York]
December 15, 1950
Dear Mr. Hoisington:
I agree with you that world federation is the final answer to war. I disagree, however, with your idea that a single legal system can serve free nations and authoritarians. I think such “law” would be unenforceable by its nature, and that the authoritarians would themselves be the law, as they always manage to be. You may be right, but so may I. At any rate, I’m against any proposal that suggests a compromise arrangement, and am in favor only of that type of world government that specifically subscribes to a bill of rights, and denies dictators.
The fact that I am now eating some of the words in “The Wild Flag” doesn’t bother me any, as long as I manage to say exactly what I think at this moment.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To MRS. M. R. RUSSELL
[New York]
December 21, 1950
Dear Mrs. Russell:
Millicent is an imaginary girl that the poet took a walk with.1 It’s just a poem about a young man and a girl taking a walk and enjoying the world in each other’s company. Happens all the time.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
[1950?]
[Interoffice memo]
Mrs White:
Levick used to carry rocks in his pockets to throw at taxis and buses that failed to stop for him. Got this from D. Terry, at lunch.
E. B. White
To MR. AND MRS. ALFRED Z——
[New York]
January 9, 1951
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Z——
The story “Zwarte Piet” was published because we liked it, and for no other reason. I think that people who look for signs of race discrimination in the New Yorker with a magnifying glass will always find those signs, but more often than not the discrimination is in the eye of the beholder. The New Yorker publishes whatever it considers sound and good, and theoretically we include Negroes in the contemporary scene along with whites. In practice, Negroes enjoy a certain immunity to the shafts of satirists and cartoonists. Every week we publish drawings depicting the frailties and idiosyncrasies of the human race, as our artists see them. But we do not feel entirely free to include colored people in comic situations, for the reason that the public is as yet incapable of looking at a Negro as an individual, and persists in looking at him as a symbol.
When we publish a drawing like the Halloween cover, showing a colored woman about to encounter a spook, it immediately draws letters of complaint from high-minded but edgy white people who accuse us of holding Negroes up to ridicule. Our attitude is that the highest respect we can pay the colored race is to hold it up to exactly the same type of spoofing to which we subject the white race and all other races, since this is evidence that we regard people as individuals and all men as equals in the sight of artists as well as of God.
Sincerely yours,
E. B. White
• Ann Kenyon, who knew White’s friend John McNulty, was a sheep breeder in Rhode Island and a reader of White’s books. She had sent him a clipping from the New England Homestead containing the words “rive,” “froe,” “shake,” and “knurl.” A correspondence developed, and White actually did, as proposed in this letter, trade a boat for some bred ewes. He also later bought a ram lamb from Kenyon stock.
To ANN KENYON
New York
11 February [1951]
Dear Miss Kenyon:
To rive a shake, it is a good idea to turn it over, face down, and rive it that way. My froe has two small knurls just below the clevis pin which give it a surface elegance. But I always say that in the long run it’s breeding that counts.
As for McNulty, I can never picture him at sea, and the only body of water that I think he might feel at home on is the East River—which commands a view of Second Avenue. Yesterday afternoon he won $167, and was surprised and pleased.
What kind of sheep do you have? I have a 121⁄2 foot Dyer Dhow fully equipped for sailing that I will trade for some bred ewes.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
P.S. A froe is a cleaving tool, and to rive is to split. As for shake, it may be a typo for stake or it may be a crack in timber. All three words are in Webster. My subscription to the Homestead expired a few years ago, and this ad tempts me to renew.
To ANN KENYON
[New York]<
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24 February 1951
Dear Miss Kenyon:
Never look into a sheep’s past, it is almost always a dark chapter. This projected trade of ours sounds even more involved than most country matters, and the fact that a trout has somehow got into the thing (along with a barren ewe, pronounced “yo” as in yo-yo) gives it an air of real fantasy. The perfect arrangement would be for you to load your dhow with the sheep and start rowing along the coast in an easterly direction, and I rig my dhow and start beating up to the westward. When we met, you could step into my boat and I into yours, and I would try and have a string of trout along to make it all seem legal, and to counterbalance the shoats, the sprinkler, and the Bantams. The sprinkler, incidentally, might well be powered and rigged as a bilge pump.
To get back to Suffolk ewes, from which I rarely stray very far, my ambition is to buy two or three that are not infested with dhows. I know how to cope with worms, but I cannot take on a ewe with a dhow—simply haven’t the facilities or the patience. I am convinced from a careful study of your letter that the sensible thing for me to do is not interrupt any sheep’s springtime but bide my time till fall, then buy unencumbered stock from you—pregnant, perhaps, but roughly unencumbered. The fact that I now know somebody who has Suffolks has lifted my spirits enormously. I’ve never been much for the woolly faces, preferring the smooth and open countenance whether in man or beast.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To URSULA NORDSTROM
25 West 43rd Street
March 1, 1951
Dear Miss Nordstrom:
Thanks for the report . . .
I’ve recently finished another children’s book, but have put it away for a while to ripen (let the body heat go out of it). It doesn’t satisfy me the way it is and I think eventually I shall rewrite it pretty much, in order to shift the emphasis and make other reforms.1