Letters of E. B. White
Page 40
Page 3. The Phi Gam at Elyria was George Calvert, but I would imagine that his name is infinitely irrelevant, and I don’t remember whether it was toilet bowls or what. Repairs to the Ford at this juncture were seventy-five cents—50 cents for a busted radiator and 25 cents for a fan belt. Relevant indeed. . . .
Page 13. The limerick last-line contest netted us $25, much better pay than sonneteering in Louisville. The 25 bucks was awarded to
“E. B. White, Beta Theta Pi house, 1625 University Avenue SE, Minneapolis.” Honorable mention went to Stephen H. Brown, O. A. Glasow, Minnie R. Long, V. M. Arbogast, and M. D. Rudolph. Just in case you’ve forgotten.
In Minneapolis, I peddled roach powder for a day or two, but it was not a success. I was a lousy peddler, and the powder itself may have been inferior. I don’t know.
Page 14. I did not spend a night in the hospital. The doctor gave me ether (on top of a quick slug of corn whiskey that I drank while being carried in to the sanitarium by a kind fellow with an automobile) and he re-set my arm in the afternoon. I came out of the moonshine-ether treatment with the highest jag I ever had, and the most articulate. There is a nurse in that hospital, if she is still alive, who has heard everything, about everything. I left out nothing. But they sprung me, and you and I went back to the soil, and I slept on the ground that night, waking at about four A.M. with an intolerable pain in my arm, caused by the swelling of same inside the tight bandage or cast. I handed you my hunting knife and instructed you to cut me adrift, which you did, muttering and grumbling the whole way, being deprived of your sleep at an unholy hour.
I think it was you, not me, that landed the great Hotel Room Card job, with the friendly printer. I was knocked out with the arm, and I think you met up with the printer and started the wheels turning. I’ve always been very thankful that I once saw a Tom show. Unique.
“Monday we made fifteen dollars. Cush had been talking with the editor of the Cass County Pioneer—a typical country weekly. The editor put him next to some dope—so the editor said. Anyway, it worked. A new hotel had recently been erected on Leech Lake. Cush went to the manager and told him that he (Cush) would supply the room cards, containing rules and regulations, free of charge if the manager would let him solicit small ads for the margins. So we drew up a dummy, and out of about thirty business men in Walker (you ought to see a Walker business man) we sold fifteen. That netted $26.50 and the printing bill was $11.00. The whole thing consumed less than twenty-four hours, and we shook the dust of Walker Tuesday noon.” (And a little later in my journal) “Every curve in the road brought forth a new lake to view, shining blue and peaceful and unmolested. It was a day of very white clouds, and very blue skies, and very dark green spruces behind their lighter hardwoods. Wild roses lined the road timidly all of the way.”
Page 16. Can’t recall the reason for our going down to Hardin from Billings. It was in Hardin that I played the piano for two (I think) nights in a cafe, for meals. This, in retrospect, seems really quite wonderful to me. Can a fellow still wander in to a small town cafe in America, with merely the ability to knock out a couple of tunes on a piano, and persuade the management to set him up to a few meals? Seems to me unlikely. We must have hit America at a particularly vulnerable time.
Page 20. Beg to correct you here. Hotspur’s rear end collapsed when we were boarding the ferry. The incline was very steep, and I’ll never forget the feeling when Hotspur suddenly lost his bowels, and we slid back down. The ferryman suggested that we “pull the son of a bitch up onto the boat” and he would help us fix her while going back and forth on the river. This we did. I think the money we lost while taking a cooling swim in the Columbia River was on the eastern (Kennewick) shore, and I think it was two silver dollars. It was not a five dollar bill, because you wouldn’t be diving for a five dollar bill, and I remember diving over and over again. It was silver. And the ferryman took pity on us, and produced a couple bucks from his own pocket, pretending that somebody had come up with them. He was a real guy, that ferryman. Hotspur’s ailment, incidentally, was a broken pinion gear in the rear end—a fairly costly little item.
Item. The cafe in Hardin was Becker’s Cafe. You were a hay hand in the fields, according to my record. We slept in an oat bin on the ranch where you worked. (I recall that oat bin. Clean place to sleep, though a little hard and unyielding.)
Item. In Cody, I sold my Corona for twenty dollars. We were that far down hill.
Page 21. I never worked for the Seattle Star. Helm got me a job with the Times, which was the rich Blethen paper. I did a short stint for the Post-Intelligencer (Hearst) after my discharge from the Times.
Andy
• When Cornell’s new president, Deane W. Malott, delivered his maiden speech, part of it was word-for-word from a piece by Harold Taylor, president of Sarah Lawrence College, which had been printed in the Spring 1949 issue of Harvard Educational Review. Somebody spotted this, and White, in the line of duty, turned it in to the magazine for the Funny Coincidence Department (November 10, 1951).
To HAROLD ROSS
[New York]
[October? 1951]
[Interoffice memo]
Mr. Ross:
Here’s a college president lifting from another college president, for his maiden speech. Seems incredible, but there it is. Like most Funny Coincidences, it worries me, as to its fairness, because of the implication that the plagiarism is deliberate. In this case, my bet is that Malott (who is an ex-businessman—he used to grow pineapples) assigned a lieutenant in his office to help him get up a speech. And this is what developed. He even uses quotes, in one place, but no mention of what he is quoting from. I guess it’s a public service to publish these things, but there is no question about this being very damaging to Malott. We once flirted, if you recall, with the idea that we could somehow take the accusatory note out of Funny Coincidence, but I have never doped out any way to do it. Just running the stuff, in parallel, is per se accusatory, I guess. Short of a diagrammatic subhead saying that, well, we realize that these things sometimes just happen innocently, I can’t see how to manage it.
E. B. White
To IRITA VAN DOREN
[New York]
November 13, 1951
Dear Mrs. Van Doren:
About that annual request for the names of three books, I wish I might be taken off your list of readers.1 I’m not sure just what it is about naming three books that disquiets me, but there is something. I might prefer to describe three baths I have taken in 1951, or to name three muffins that have satisfied me. Books, no.
Many of my friends are the writers of books, and I find it ruffling to hunt around book titles for a balance (sometimes extremely delicate) between delight and friendship. I could settle for three books every one of them in my circle of friends, or I could starkly rule out all such suspect selections and name three books by total strangers. Or I could get cute, and name the book I happen to be reading and liking (by G. A. Henty). But I prefer merely to keep quiet about my book life.
I do not mean this in any sense as a criticism of the Tribune feature—merely wish to save the Tribune the price of a telegram by establishing myself on your records as a non-book namer. It takes all kinds to make a world.
Very sincerely yours,
E. B. White
To JOHN R. FLEMING
[New York]
4 December 1951
Dear Jack:
Thanks for the pipeline stuff from Ithaca. I had been wondering what, if anything, was happening. A kid who works here, lately graduated from Cornell, told me that there had been a considerable disturbance, but he didn’t know any details.
In the same mail with your letter, I received a copy of last Friday’s Sun, which had it spread all over P.1. (It is known locally as “the New Yorker incident.”) The most recent issue of the Alumni News appears to be sitting on it.
Plagiarism is not a simple phenomenon, and the business of being the Funny Coincidence man for this socialite magazine ha
s sometimes given me pause. There are, I believe, roughly three kinds of plagiarists. There is, first, the thief, who, either because he is emotionally unstable or in desperate need, just goes out and swipes something. Then there is the dope, who is a little vague about the printed word and regards anything in the way of printed matter as mildly miraculous and common property. And the third plagiarist is the total recall guy, who can read something or hear something and later regurgitate it, practically word for word, not knowing he is doing it. This last customer is, of course, an innocent man, and that is why the Funny Coincidence department is an uneasy spot, for although the title doesn’t charge anybody with malfeasance, there is always the implication that somebody is either a bum or a crook. In Malott’s case, my guess is that he is just not very bright. His statement published in the Sun makes no sense, or rather it fails to vindicate him. He says he got his material from “some educational handout or filler paragraph in a weekly newspaper which was printed with no reference to source or authority.” Well, the president of a university ought to know that everything, no matter what, originates somewhere. It has an author, however obscure, however ghostly, and you can’t knock him off, even though it is a convenience and saves work.
I’m mildly depressed by “the New Yorker incident” because I love Cornell and wish that the president’s chair was occupied by a scholar—that is, a man who is serene and magnanimous and doesn’t have to fiddle around among educational handouts and filler paragraphs to supply himself. I’ve never met Malott. Saw Bristow last summer and he told me that he was favorably impressed with the new prexy.
I didn’t know you had a son on the Sun staff. My boy went to Cornell for two years, got fed with trying to be an Arts student, and switched to M.I.T. and naval architecture.
Yrs,
Andy
To ELIZABETH S——
[New York]
December 10, 1951
Dear Miss S——
I’m sorry to be so late answering your letter, but the editor of this magazine died a few days ago, and I’m behind in my work.
I’m not sure, from your letter, what the nature of your unhappiness is, but you sound unhappy. The atmosphere of a college often seems unbearably frivolous and meaningless. And I suppose it sometimes seems unpromising for an incipient writer—if that is what you are. But no matter what environment you are in, you are learning to write if you really care deeply about writing. I cannot think of an uninteresting environment.
Lately I’ve felt a little disturbed about college education—the way it is going, I mean. Scholarship, in the old-fashioned sense, is at low ebb. Science is in the ascendent, and it is veiled in secrecy, much of it. All this makes me uneasy, but I know it is, more than anything, merely a reflection of the times. And you students not only have to take the reflected glare, but you have to be the times and set up a light of your own.
I don’t at all agree with you about frivolity. I should not try to learn to write without learning first to be frivolous. Get yourself a pair of pedal pushers as a start. Also a Webster’s Collegiate dictionary, so that you need never again misspell “apparel.” And remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.
And lots of luck—we all need that!
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To H. K. RIGG
[New York]
11 December 1951
Dear Bunny:
Ross died last week and we have been in something of a scramble here, as well as feeling quite shot. K and I were both awfully fond of him, and we have the sensation of being disembowelled, as he was very much a part of our lives and our work.
Was swell to get your letter in the middle of everything. I had been wondering where you were. Am also greatly tempted to take you up on that idea of coming down to the islands, as I’ve never seen them and everybody says the climate is perfect.
If you’ve got a piece about Nassau under your hat, bring it out and let’s have a look. The New Yorker runs regular letters from big cities like Paris, London, and Washington. It also runs occasional stuff (usually not called a Letter) from anywhere at all. There is, for instance, in the current issue (Dec. 15) a piece by [Richard] Rovere from Key West, which you might like to look at. It runs under the heading “Our Far-Flung Correspondents.” Your piece sounds as if it might belong under that head.
K and I are going to try to get to Maine for a little while in January, during Joe’s midterm vacation. Joe is still naval architecting at M.I.T. He designs dinghies for Rudder readers with one hand, and studies the midsection of the Europa with the other. He is also deep in the middle of love, love, love, and is going to bust out of college if he doesn’t come up for air. He has also bought a lobster boat and built a lot of traps in order to make his fortune next summer so he can marry the girl. He also appears in December Rudder with a design he did for his old man, who was about to go to a watery grave in a 121⁄2-foot Dyer dhow and had the presence of mind to get into something a bit quieter. I had the little boat built by an old guy in SW Harbor last spring, and it worked out fine for me—steady as a church, and with a lug rig that goes up and down like an old umbrella. Another one of Joe’s designs is being built by a dry cleaner named Krushwitz, but Joe hasn’t seen the boat as he fears Krushwitz thinks the designer is a much older man, and doesn’t dare go near him.
Sorry you didn’t get to Allen Cove last summer. We had nothing but rain, though, for most of the time. The fall was nice.
Yrs,
Andy
To ELMER DAVIS
25 West 43rd Street
16 December 1951
Dear Mr. Davis:
It was an odd telegram even before Western Union got to work on it.1 I have an idea your name was on a preferred list to get an invitation to the funeral (it was an invitation affair on account of the small parlor), but then something went wrong, and the telegram was an attempt at rectification. A lot of strange and wonderful things happened that weekend. Ross managed to play his last scene in a mortuary chapel that had been sold out years in advance—it held only 350 people and the staff alone pretty nearly filled it. The scene, incidentally, was quite moving—such a bunch of normally noisy and disorderly people sitting so quietly, so respectfully, and so completely forlorn. While I have you at my mercy, I want to thank you for your emanations from my radio. You couldn’t come at a worse hour, as we are just sitting down to supper. But I am grateful anyway.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To J. D. SALINGER
[New York]
December 17, 1951
Dear Mr. Salinger:
It was good of you to write that note, and I thank you for what you said. I felt worried, as well as sick, attempting to say anything about Ross in his own magazine. A letter like yours helps relieve the worry.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To FRANK SULLIVAN
229 East 48
[December 17?, 1951]
Sunday morn
Dear Frank:
I was damned glad to get your letter as my “beautiful” piece about Ross didn’t seem beautiful at all to me after the third reading and I was quite properly worried about it. It was the kind of piece he would have tagged right away as writer-conscious—an adjective I believe he invented. So your O.K. was very important to me, and I send my thanks.
I felt just the way you did about the funeral. I’m perfectly sure that I never saw such a bunch of fine but essentially disorderly people sitting together in so tranquil and quiet a state of mutual anguish. I’ve been reflecting lately on my own rather curious relationship with Ross. The things that matter a great deal to me, most of them, were of not much interest or importance to Ross, and vice versa, and we really only met at a rather special level and at one place—like a couple of trolley cars hitched together by a small coupling. The thing I thank God for is that that connection proved flawless and was never even strained, not even in the middle of Ross’s toweri
ng rages. His rage, actually, was one of the sustaining things at the magazine because it was usually a sort of cosmic rage directed not at the person he was shouting at but at the enemy. Ross’s private enemy is a study in itself. In retrospect I am beginning to think of him as an Atlas who lacked muscle tone but who God damn well decided he was going to hold the world up anyway.
I liked your piece this morning on humorists and dearth of same, and am making plans to move this week to the Petroleum V. Nasby Home, where I would like to sit on a bench with you and play slapjack.
Hawley came over to our apartment the Saturday after Ross died and told us about the last months of Ross’s life, medically. I don’t know how much you know, and I guess I’m not at liberty at the moment to tell anything. But I can tell you, in case you’re not sure, that in addition to everything else he did, Ross ended up in a blaze of extraordinary personal courage and devotion to certain people and things. I don’t like to think of the noble Ross but I fear his last days were exactly that and when you add it to everything else . . .well you add it.
Yrs,
Andy
P.S. I can’t answer your question about why you opened the book to Aes Triplex because I’ve never read Aes Triplex. One thing Ross and I did have in common—neither of us had ever read anything.
• When he received a letter from a vice-president of Con Ed telling him that his refrigerator might be discharging poisonous gas and that he should leave a window open, White lost no time in getting to his typewriter.
To J. H. AIKEN
[New York]
December 21, 1951
Dear Mr. Aiken:
I am a stockholder in the Consolidated Edison Company, and I rent an apartment at 229 East 48 Street in which there is a gas refrigerator. So I have a double interest in your letter of December 19. It seems to me a very odd letter indeed.