Letters of E. B. White
Page 43
Louis de Rochemont wants to buy the motion picture rights of “Charlotte’s Web” offen me for a full-length animated film, but I am being coy about it, so far.1 In an attempt to soften me up, he threw a small, heavily-loaded luncheon party for me the other day in the Cloud Club, which is at the top of the Chrysler Building just beneath the needle, and when I arrived there it looked faintly familiar, and I remembered that I had reached that floor twenty-three years ago by climbing the wooden ladder of a 2-inch pipe scaffolding. “Jesus,” I thought to myself, “I’m getting ahead.” The earlier visit was on the whole more fun, and more windswept.2
That girl I used to skate with was Mildred Hesse, and she turned up, in a completely unrecognizable form, at Noel Illian’s wedding last June which I attended. She had been briefed about my presence, but I hadn’t been briefed about hers, and I had a 5-minute conversation with her in which she knew who I was and I didn’t know who she was except that she was a Mrs. Smith. It was a hot afternoon, no ice on the pond. . . .
En
To ALEXANDER L. CROSBY
[New York]
January 22, 1953
Dear Mr. Crosby:
The paragraph [in Comment] that bothered you was not meant to be either blustery or threatening. What we were trying to say is rather hopeful—that the consequences of using modern weapons are so grave as to be a real deterrent to anyone’s starting a war—on either side.
As far as the cockroach is concerned, he is definitely a contender and will bear watching. It is an odd thing about humans that they assume a sort of natural dominance, or ascendancy. Yet they are newcomers, relatively speaking, and are not as well adjusted to their environment (from present indications) as many older forms. I think it’s quite all right to point out, once in a while, that man’s ingenuity may be his worst enemy. And I certainly agree with you that we’ve got to live in peace if we’re going to live at all.
Sincerely yours,
E. B. White
• Colson Henry Allen, a Brooklin neighbor and a man of many talents, came to work for the Whites as caretaker in August 1952. He had applied for the job some years earlier and been turned down—a decision White later regarded as the craziest mistake he ever made in his life. Allen remained with the Whites—a long and happy association—and continued to work on the farm even after EBW’s death in 1985.
To HENRY ALLEN
[New York]
[February 1953]
Monday
Dear Henry:
I don’t know yet whether I’m coming. . . . In case I don’t get there, here are some suggestions that may help you in setting up the brooder pen for the chicks. The shipping date is March 1—which probably means that they will land in Ellsworth at the express office on Monday or Tuesday. At any rate, you’d better have your brooder pen ready by Saturday afternoon.
Sweep out the room, install the roosts (if they are not already there) and hook the roosting frame up against the east wall, where it’s out of the way. The parts to the brooder stove are in a carton in the attic of the house, I am pretty sure. The carton contains the motor, the red cap to the motor, the thermometer, the wafer for the thermostat, the curtains, the legs, and a couple of bulbs. Install the legs and curtains first. You can do this best with the stove suspended in air. The legs want to be in the first position, so the curtain will just about touch the floor when the stove is lowered. Don’t ever lower the stove without its legs, or you’ll bust the little switch underneath.
Bolt the thermometer to its bracket. Screw the wafer onto the spindle. Put a white bulb in the socket in the top of the stove, and a red bulb in the socket underneath—for an attraction light. (I’m not sure there is a red bulb that works, but if there isn’t, it doesn’t make much difference—you don’t have to have an attraction light.) To install the motor, lower the stove to the floor, remove the metal strap that covers the motor hole, set the motor in place, and bolt the strap on again. Test the motor and give it a couple drops of thin oil in two places. The stove can now be hoisted out of the way.
Spread litter, preferably Servall. I would make the litter fairly deep. Get all the lumps out of the litter and rake it till it is smooth and level. Then spread a lot of newspapers underneath where the stove will be, covering all the area shown by the ring on my sketch. In the attic of the garage I think you will find a roll of hardware cloth about 18 inches wide, tied with a string. This is the guard wire, to be put around the stove to control the chicks for the first few days. I staple this wire to the north wall as shown, and let it come around the stove so there is just enough room for you to get by on the south side, where you can look into the peek-hole in the stove and read the thermometer. The thermometer wants to be adjusted so it is about an inch from the floor and so you can see it by looking through the hole. I always keep a flashlight on the window-sill to enable me to read the temperature of the stove.
The motor is simply a blower, to carry air downward into the stove. It can be left plugged in for the entire period of brooding. Once a week give it a shot of thin oil.
To adjust the temperature of the stove, simply back the spindle off so that the wafer doesn’t touch the switch, and let the stove heat up. Keep watch of it, and when it reaches 95°, set the spindle up till it touches the switch-point and breaks the contact. You can tell when this has happened because the white light will go off. In very cold weather, it may take quite a while before you can get your stove up to 95°. In case of extreme weather—below zero—you may even have to light a fire in the drum stove to warm the building up. The only real trouble with an electric brooder stove is that it doesn’t have what it takes in extreme weather—but it is wonderful in normal weather. Usually, I have not ordered my chicks till April 1, and the stove has done the business all right. I hope it will be all right in March weather, too, but you’ll have to watch it for a few days, and give it a lift with the drum stove if necessary.
The thermometer has marks on it, showing proper temperatures for first week, second week, third week, etc. Follow the markings and you’ll be all right. I think a drop of about five degrees per week during the brooding period is O.K. The way to cool off the stove is to set up on the spindle.
I put four little wooden half-inch blocks in the litter for the four legs of the stove to rest on, but you can suit yourself. Anyway, the curtain wants to almost touch the litter during the first few days. Then, as the chicks grow, you raise the legs.
I guess you are sick of this letter by this time, so I won’t make it much longer. I know that you know how to brood chicks as well or better than I do, and I have only written this because I thought, with a new stove and all, it might be a help. You will find chick waterers in the garage, up overhead. Also, I think you will find cardboard feeders either in the garage or in the house attic, that are useful for the first few days. I feed chick feed (fine grain) for the first couple of days, to prevent their pasting up; and then go right onto starter mash. My experience with chicks is that if you have everything fixed up pretty good to begin with, they take hardly any effort and you have good luck. And if you don’t have things fixed good, they cause plenty of trouble.
Newspapers are useful only for the first two or three days. The guard wire can be eliminated as soon as the chicks know their way to the stove.
E. B. White
To JOHN DETMOLD
25 West 43rd Street
February 10, 1953
Dear John:
I shall of course sign the book for your mother, and will deliver it to Peter for presentation on February 20.1
As to your notion of an allegory, there is none. “Charlotte’s Web” is a tale of the animals in my barn, not of the people in my life. When you read it, just relax. Any attempt to find allegorical meanings is bound to end disastrously, for no meanings are in there. I ought to know.
Sincerely,
Andy White
To RICHARD DE ROCHEMONT
[New York]
March 19, 1953
Dear Mr. de
Rochemont:
I was glad to get your letter and learn that you’re still thinking about the picture. I don’t know Zeckendorf,1 but know enough about his energy and his dreams to be worried. I think that if he should seem inclined to put up the money, we’d have to find out how much he would insist on throwing his weight around. He weighs 250, and I’m only 140 with my adjectives on.
Money is money, and it is what we need to make a picture. But I naturally don’t want to get involved (and I don’t believe you do either) with a situation that would turn the springtime of 1953 into a carnival of real estate values. I think that to make the New York piece into a decent, and even a profitable movie, we would have to stick to the literary and pictorial values inherent in it, if any, and not get ourselves in telephone connection with Bill Zeckendorf’s publicity department, alert though it may be to the vision of the future metropolis.
I’m willing to try writing the script, although I’m scared of it, simply because I’ve never attempted scene-writing and am likely to prove a washout. I think I can handle the dialogue all right, but will need a certain amount of help from you or from somebody in the business of devising the sequence of events and the events themselves. I think basically the treatment I submitted is a sound setup for the New York piece, but I’m very sure that it will not be an easy thing to get on celluloid. In a way it offers the sort of challenge that Mr. Zeckendorf is said to relish, and maybe he’s just our man. Whatever he is, he’s the author of one of my favorite remarks: he said that every business man can add two and two and get four, but damned few of them can add two million and two million and get four million, because they get scared. That is a profound observation and shows intellect of high order.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
• While Joel was a Naval Architecture student at MIT and living in Boston, he met and married Allene Messer, who was born in Claremont, New Hampshire, attended Boston University, and was working in Boston. Joel and his wife rented an apartment on Charles Street.
To ALLENE MESSER
[New York]
Tuesday [March 24, 1953]
Dear Allene:
I’ve been wanting to send you a note since Joe gave us the news last week that you and he planned to be married. I guess that, at long distance anyway, I’ve seemed unsympathetic but I want to assure you that my feelings are mixed, and that for every ounce of apprehension I have about Joe’s getting married while still in school, I have an equal measure of delight in his apparent confidence in you. His letter to me said that he was reporting “good news,” and I have usually found him a reliable prophet, and you can be very sure that what is good news to him is good news to me.
I thought some of going over to Boston last Saturday to meet you but decided it might seem too much like a Congressional investigation if we both went, and that it would be easier for you to talk to one parent at a time. It’s fine that you’re able to get to Maine with us this week, as it will be really a chance to get acquainted. I run a zoo, and Joe runs a trapping business, and my wife runs a magazine by mail, and so there is usually something going on. This, of course, is mudtime in North Brooklin, and what you will principally see is mud—mud under foot, grey skies over head, and a chill wind eating away at your bones. If you’re from New Hampshire you know all about it, all except the sea. The sea is pervasive and wonderful. And cold.
I could write you a brief description of the man you are intending to marry, but you could probably write one yourself, and I shall spare you the essay. I think highly of him, and it has been a peculiar satisfaction to me that he is essentially creative by nature, because I know that creative people, even when they come out at the little end of the stick, have inner satisfactions that are abiding and sustaining. Joe is, best of all, reliable—and I see I am writing that essay, so will stop.
I send my love and best wishes, and I hope that the words you say together on Thursday evening will always return to bless you both, and bring you happiness forever and ever.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
• White had been a patient of Dr. Carl Binger, a psychiatrist, for a brief period. It was following one of his visits to Binger that White wrote his short story “The Second Tree From the Corner.”
To CARL BINGER
[New York]
March 25, 1953
Dear Carl:
I sound about as good in German as I feel in English. But there isn’t anything the matter with me that a guillotine couldn’t cure. My only trouble is in my head, and even that is improving. By the time I’m 90 I’ll be as sound as a dollar, and the dollar will be completely gone to pieces.
Sincerely,
Andy
• When White went to Alaska in 1923 as a member of the crew of the S. S. Buford, his bunkmate was a saloonsman named J. Wilbur Wolf. Wolf, like White, was a college graduate knocking about the world. He appears, seasick, in White’s essay “The Years of Wonder,” being tended by White in their quarters in the ship’s brig.
To J. WILBUR WOLF
[New York]
March 25, 1953
Dear Wilbur:
Your description of Valentine’s Day in Nebraska, with your receiving a book from a retired professional librarian, is wonderful. And of course I’d be delighted to sign the book.
The Wilbur of the book was named not after you but after a pig I used to have named Wilbur. It’s that simple. So help me, I used to have a pig named Wilbur, and he was a fine pig, too. I can’t say whether the name is beautiful or not, but I’m sure Fern thought so, and that is all that matters.
As for your having the keys to the pantry in the Buford, the plain fact is that it was I who had the virility and the stamina to reach the pantry during the storm, and thus save lives. You were so flat you couldn’t have reached the door of the brig. Worst pukin’ spell I ever saw. But I had one almost as bad myself this winter, earlier, in Maine, when I got the flu and had to be revived with an infusion. I thought of you.
Sincerely,
Andy
To MRS. B. J. KASTON
[New York]
April 10, 1953
Dear Mrs. Kaston:
Thanks for the letter and the picture of Charlotte’s cousin, which is very pretty.
The idea of the writing in Charlotte’s Web came to me one day when I was on my way down through the orchard carrying a pail of slops to my pig. I had made up my mind to write a children’s book about animals, and I needed a way to save a pig’s life, and I had been watching a large spider in the backhouse, and what with one thing and another, the idea came to me.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To JAMES THURBER
[New York]
19 April 1953
Dear Jim:
This is the latest vista opening up for “Is Sex Necessary?” but I’m beginning to get suspicious that these vistas are just peepholes and that the book is being peddled in foreign countries as spicy reading. I think that if this is the case, it can eventually hurt our other books. Maybe I underestimate the capacity of Argentinians and Japanese to appreciate American satire of the 1920’s, and I certainly have nothing tangible to base my feeling on. It’s just a hunch. At any rate, I’ve talked it over with Milton Greenstein and with Katharine, and they are inclined to agree that the old sex book, in translation, is beginning to look sour.
Then Mr. Smith who signs this letter says he is in touch with “a good Argentine publisher.” I don’t know just what that means, either. I suppose a “good” publisher is one who doesn’t talk back to Mr. Peron. And the letter ends: “Considering the importance of this subject to Latin Americans I am sure you will be eager to bring them the benefits of your research.” This sounds either awfully cute or awfully naïve, and I tend to think it is cute. Anyway, it doesn’t fill me with a desire to cooperate. If we decline this invitation, we each stand to lose about seventy-five bucks, but I have an idea it is money well lost. I just don’t want you and me to be introduced to
the Patagonians as the Chick Sales of the pampas, and I don’t trust publishers out of my sight. It is hard enough to trust them when they are plainly visible. Let me know.
Andy
To MARGARET HALSEY
[New York]
23 April [1953]
Dear Miss Halsey:
I had just read your piece in the ALA Bulletin about taking your daughter to the public library, where she liked “the little chairs and the books about fierce things,” when your letter arrived protesting the editorial in the April 18th issue about human rights. Since I am the author of the offending remarks, it is up to me to answer your complaints.
The New Yorker isn’t against freedom from want and didn’t attack it or minimize it as a goal. But we’re against associating freedom from want (which is an economic goal) with freedom of speech (which is an exact political principle). There is, I believe, a very real and discernible danger, to a country like ours, in an international covenant that equates human rights with human desires, and that attempts to satisfy, in a single document, governments and philosophies that are essentially irreconcilable. I do not think it safe or wise to confuse, or combine, the principle of freedom of religion or the principle of freedom of the press with any economic goal whatsoever, because of the likelihood that in guaranteeing the goal, you abandon the principle. This has happened over and over again. Eva Peron was a great freedom-from-want girl (specially at Christmas time), but it also happened that La Prensa died and the Argentinians were left with nothing to read but government handouts.
If you were to pack croquet balls and eggs in a single container, and take them travelling, you would probably end your journey with some broken eggs. I believe that if you put a free press into the same bill with a full belly, you will likely end the journey with a controlled press.