Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  In your letter you doubt whether the man who wrote the editorial had given much thought to the matter. Well, I’ve been thinking about human rights for about twenty years, and I was even asked, one time during the war, to rewrite the government pamphlet on the Four Freedoms—which is when I began to realize what strange bedfellows they were. A right is a responsibility in reverse; therefore, a constitutional government of free people should not award any “rights” that it is not in a position to accept full responsibility for. The social conscience and the economic technique of the United States are gaining strength, and each year sees us getting closer to freedom from want. But I’m awfully glad that the “right to work”1 is not stated in our bill of rights, and I hope the government never signs a covenant in which it appears.

  My regards to your daughter, who (human rights or no human rights) is my favorite commentator on the subject of public libraries.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To DOROTHY LOBRANO

  229 East 48

  16 May [1953]

  Dear Dottie:

  I’ve just finished “A Fair Wind Home” and it gave me a fine time. Thanks for sending it and for the other Ruth Moore book. She is certainly a natural story teller and when she gets her hooks in you, there is no escape. I think one reason she’s so good is that she has such affection for the people she’s writing about: there is just no substitute for that kind of emotion. Of course, like all historical novelists, she occasionally gives my credulity an awful shaking up. When Frank Carnavon throws Lizabeth into the sea from the deck of the Turkey Feather, climbs down a rope ladder, cuts the skiff free, and then finds Lizabeth dog-paddling her way to the boat, I began to tremble with the violent intensity of disbelief. I even started to do a little quiet arithmetic on the side. The Turkey Feather was running before a gale, which means that she was probably doing about nine knots—but we will call it eight to be conservative. Eight knots is roughly 48,000 feet per hour, or 800 feet per minute. I figure that Frank Carnavon, a heavy man, must have taken at least a minute to scramble down the ladder and cut himself adrift, but we will give Miss Moore the benefit of the doubt and say that he was able to manage it in 45 seconds—a very credible performance in a gale. That means that when the skiff dropped free of the ship, Lizabeth was left approximately 600 feet behind, or more than six times the distance between third base and home. “God help all,” thought Carnavon, and I echoed his thought. The woman had all her clothes on, presumably didn’t know much about swimming, and was surrounded by cresting waves. Carnavon describes her as “a good, sweet woman, honest as the day,” but I think she was far more than that, if she made it to the skiff. She was practically Esther Williams.

  K and I had a flashy trip to Maine last week, carrying a dachshund puppy in a rented car. Now we are chewing our fingernails waiting to get back on June 1.

  Lots of love,

  Andy

  To JOHN R. FLEMING

  North Brooklin, Maine

  23 May 1953

  Dear Jack:

  Thanks for the good word. I’m afraid my poem1 isn’t as nicely written as “Paradise Lost,” but anyway, it’s shorter. I’m appalled at the goings on in my country, and surprised, too, as I thought that the election of Eisenhower would suffuse the populace with confidence and dispel the vapors, but it seems to have worked just the other way. In the same mail with your letter came one from a lady in San Antonio, saying that the city manager is proposing that all communistic books be taken from the public library and burned. The Library Board protested, and the manager has promised to fire the protestants.

  Stiff upper lip, Mr. Fleming. Hot afternoons have been in Montana, and we’ve ridden them out before. I’ll turn your John Hersey suggestion over to my boss. Many thanks, and I hope we meet sometime soon—these intervals are getting perilously long.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To ROBERT W. WHITE

  June 11, 1953

  Dear Mr. White:

  Thanks for the letter about my visit to the pond.1 I thought I recognized you on the station platform. Thanks, too, for the clipping about Thoreau Heights, or depths. I read through it with snakelike abandon and enjoyed it. I doubt, however, that the development will be cleared by the Loyalty Review Board; after all, Thoreau was a fairly irregular fellow and did a great deal of trespassing on other people’s property, which is un-American.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  • Brooks Beck and his wife Wendy had lived for a while in an apartment above the Whites at 229 East 48th Street.

  To BROOKS BECK

  [New York]

  June 12, 1953

  Dear Brooks:

  Many thanks for the kind words. You ask what is a Republican to do. The answer is, of course, simple—vote democratic.

  Your revelations about the works of Marx being in the Adams House and the Longfellow House touch me closely. Years ago, a friend of mine named John Mosher, who was a cutup, presented all his friends at Christmas with a copy of Das Kapital, because (he said) the red jacket was so Christmassy. I still have it on my shelf in Maine, and I suppose it has been dusted time and time again by our housekeeper. I’m beginning to get uneasy about it. The only reason I don’t take it out and burn it is because I haven’t yet got around to reading it, and I hate to burn anything I haven’t at least skimmed through. Also, it reminds me of Mosher.

  My best to Wendy.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  To JAMES THURBER

  [New York]

  [July 6, 1953]

  Monday

  Dear Jim:

  Do you like the title: “The E. B. White Papers”? Would appreciate your opinion. It occurs to me that there are a hell of a lot of writers named White, and that one of them may have already worked this gag.

  I flew a kite without a tail around the year 1912. It was not called a jet kite, it was called a tailless kite, and the crossarm had to be bent bow-shaped and held in a curved shape by tying the ends of the crossarm together with a piece of string. Tailless kites flew all right once you got the adjustment on them, but they were as high spirited as a fox terrier and you had to watch them.

  We came to New York in July because it seemed like a quiet, serene place to be. Katharine and I were right in our seats on the first base line at the Polo Grounds yesterday and saw the Giants beat the Dodgers 20–6. It was like watching Bowden Broadwater knock out Dempsey in the second. My only trouble in New York now is that I am beginning to get a closed-in feeling in the subway—the threshold of claustrophobia. I am at that bad age when I can’t afford to ride to the Polo Grounds in a taxicab but am too shaky to enjoy the underground. I figure that after I have published seven more books I will be able to go to the Polo Grounds in a cab but will not be able to make out the figures on the scoreboard.

  Andy

  To CASS CANFIELD

  25 West 43rd Street

  20 July 1953

  Dear Cass:

  Sorry to be a little late with the enclosed information. Maybe it’s the heat.

  I estimate that the book will be roughly 50,000 words. I haven’t got a title yet, but am referring to it—somewhat glibly—as “The E. B. White Papers,” which would be fine if my name were Somerset Maugham. I will try to come up with a title in the next few days. . . .

  I’ll be leaving for Maine on the 29th. At this writing, I don’t know whether I’ll deliver the manuscript before I go, or take it along with me for another few days of polishing up and removal of bugs. It’s going to be a queer book—a sort of dog’s breakfast—but I think it will contain some good things and will be arranged in an amusing way (by my wife, who is good at arrangement). If you are to be in town before the 29th, let’s get together.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To URSULA NORDSTROM

  North Brooklin, Maine

  4 August 1953

  Dear Ursula:

  I am perfectly free to go to Cleveland on November 1st
, and I would do anything to satisfy Arbuthnot the Radiant,1 but the plain fact is I have nothing to say to parents beyond what is in the book and I therefore cannot put on any such show. My feeling about the world of books is fairly simple: I will engage to write a book but I will not engage to promote one—no matter who the author is. I know that the reading public has an unhealthy curiosity about authors-in-the-flesh, and I think that nothing really sensible ever comes of it. I have a sort of vague curiosity about Dorothy Lamour, but I’m sure that the place for me is in the second row mezzanine, in nearly total darkness, on a paid admission. The same goes for parents, Arbuthnot or no Arbuthnot. If I ever got face to face with a parent, I would probably insult him. Or her. It would not be safe to turn me loose in a Book Fair—it might take Harpers ten years to live it down.

  The gift box of books arrived, and Katharine, I am sure, is writing you in appreciation. It is a lovely gift and I wish you could see the Brooklin Library, where the books will live.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To MILTON GREENSTEIN

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  11 Aug [1953]

  Dear Milt:

  I have a section in my forthcoming book called Answers to Hard Questions and am wondering whether it’s all right to include the following one:

  Q.: I took out a marriage license in Camden and we lived together for 15 years. Then he left me. Another man wants to marry me. I remember now that some way we forgot to get married. Do I need a divorce? M.F.—Philadelphia Record.

  No, honey. Some way you just won’t need a divorce.

  What think?

  Andy

  To FRANK SULLIVAN

  North Brooklin, Maine

  Columbus Day [1953]

  Dear Frank:

  Of the Important Fall Authors pictured in my last Tribune, I thought you were perhaps the least lovely. (I am thinking particularly of Nadine Gordimer.) But no, I guess Christopher La Farge is less lovely than you, and there is not really enough of Lin Yutang showing. He looks like the Theodore Pratt of the Far East, except he is never there. My wife keeps writing to Nadine Gordimer—always about matters of syntax if you can tie that. Anyway, it was a nice issue of the paper and was also a painful reminder that I hadn’t yet thanked you for “The Night.”1 You were not only an Important Summer Author for me, I might almost say you were my only summer author. I love “The Night” and I love your inscription in the front, and I love you. Your sword—which you call little and wooden—is the best sword there is, and the only one I have any confidence in, and you are the one that can swing it the way I like to see it swung.

  I felt my age here and there in your book—I couldn’t remember, for instance, which [Conning] Tower contributor it was who said, “All work and no play makes jack.” I guess I must have known once. But it isn’t as funny as “An apple a day is the evil thereof.” I am extremely fond of that one, and it stays with me as I walk in my orchard on these golden afternoons, testing the leaves for scab, rarely eating a piece of fruit. Apples have never agreed with me, and that makes it perfect. As for front porches, my wife, Katharine, if grilled, will tell you that she once lived in a house in Marion, Mass., that had a front porch with a Dutchman’s Pipe vine on it. My house, 101 Summit Avenue, Mount Vernon, N.Y., had a front porch that rambled around onto the north side, next to Billy Denman’s yard, and part of the porch was screened and was covered with a honeysuckle vine so that we could pinch the butt end of the honeysuckle blossoms and pull the pistil through, with its one drop of nectar, and drink the nectar. The screened portion of my front porch was called “the Togo,” named for Admiral Togo. This was before Pearl Harbor. We children never called the porch anything but “the Togo,” and our playmates, who at first thought we were crazy, got used to it after a while. July nights in the Togo were the best of all, with the mosquitoes buzzing outside, and school all over with for the year, and the smell of honeysuckle.

  I expect to be an Important Winter Author, and if I live that long I will send you a book to get back at you for sending me “The Night.” If I don’t live, I will go straight to heaven and will wait for you there.

  What was in that glass on your bedside table, in the picture? The captions never tell things like that.

  Yrs thankfully,

  Andy

  P. S. Katharine is preparing to read “The Night.” I did not allow her to read it during the summer, as I did not want it moved here and there and everywhere all over the house, the way she does, and my place lost. I keep the upper hand here. Give a woman an inch and she’ll take an ell that hath no fury.

  • When the Book-of-the-Month Club offered a guarantee of $20,000 for The Second Tree From the Corner on condition that the publication of the book be delayed for six months, White balked. His refusal surprised Harper’s—offers from BOM are almost never declined.

  To CASS CANFIELD

  North Brooklin, Maine

  18 October 1953

  Dear Cass:

  About the offer from the Book-of-the-Month, I feel disinclined to put off the publication of the book for a half year—which is about what it amounts to if they are talking about August 1 as a possible date. I can understand their desire to have a flexible book, but I think they should recognize an author’s predicament in the matter of topical pieces. I can think of a lot of events that would necessitate my yanking things out of the book, if the events were to occur. The book is ready to go now, and by its nature it ought to go with reasonable promptness, not sit around for six months waiting for history to catch up with me. I have already had to eliminate some stuff from the book because of the passage of time—stuff I hated to take out. It strikes me that the BOM people are probably not nearly as well aware of the character of the material, in its relationship to time, as I am, and that if the matter is pointed out to them they might be willing to step up their date, if indeed they want the book as is. My pregnancy is something like a sheep’s—when my time is come, I drop the lamb, even though it’s snowing outside. And I am now ready (after a 20-year gestation period) to produce. I don’t want to wait around to suit a book club’s fancy. Hell, I’ve already had to revise my book club poem, and remove my arm from the shoulder of Hendrik Van Loon, because the poor fellow is dead.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To CASS CANFIELD

  North Brooklin, Maine

  28 October 1953

  Dear Cass:

  After mulling over the Book-of-the-Distant-Month Club proposal, I’ve decided not to accept it. If they want to publish me by May, I’m willing to wait that long, but I don’t want to agree to August.

  Am sorry about this but am trusting to my instinct in the matter, rather than to any reasoning. I feel we should go ahead and publish the book in January, and let book clubs catch us if they can. My books never seem quite to meet the needs of BOM, and I am always some sort of “dual” or “dividend” man, never a bride. But I always feel like a bride when I have a book, and I cannot let a book club make all the arrangements for the wedding. I plan to set the date myself, and maybe mix the punch. This, I know, is expensive for Harper (not to mention me),1 but I count heavily on you in these pinches, and you have never failed me.

  I think The Second Tree will do all right without club sponsorship, and that there will be pleasure and profit in it for both of us. There are other things in life besides twenty thousand dollars—although not many.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To KATHARINE S. WHITE

  The Ritz-Carlton

  Boston

  [December 1953]

  Wednesday night

  Dear K:

  I’ve just come from dinner at 81 Charles, and it was a very fine occasion. Steve is a charmer—quite big for his age, very friendly and responsive, contented with life, and obviously well cared for by Allene, who looked pretty and happy. The baby is full of smiles and good humor, and seems to love people. He looks a good deal the way Joe looked in some of his baby pictures, but is quieter. Joe
is very proud of him and produced a weight chart showing his progress carefully recorded on graph paper. All in all a grandchild that should make you happy. Allene has a device that enables the baby to take his bottle unassisted—they simply put him down on the floor and he feeds himself, the bottle being encased in a sort of pin-cushion affair that he is able to hold on to.

  Joe hasn’t heard yet from Newport News but he expects to shortly.1 He showed me pictures of the place and it is enormous—the biggest in the country, I believe.

  Met Ursula Nordstrom on the train—she on her way to visit the Editor of the Horn Book. She told me that my turning down the B of the M Club was the breeziest thing that had happened to Harpers in her time, and had people standing out on the fire escapes talking it over. . . .

  Love,

  Andy

  To ROBERTA STRAUSS

  [New York]

  January 21, 1954

  Dear Miss Strauss:

  Sorry to have taken so long, getting an answer to you.

  Your proposal is certainly challenging enough for anybody. It had never occurred to me that the life of Christ could be a subject for a comic book—probably because it doesn’t seem funny. Now that I have adjusted to the idea, I still don’t want to undertake it, as it is primarily a labor of adaptation, rather than of creation, and I’m not a very adaptable man.

  Thanks very much for giving me the chance.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To ELIZABETH AMES

  [New York]