Letters of E. B. White
Page 46
As I said before, the mail truck is coming. Write and let me know how you are. Sorry to inflict this lousy letter on you but I’ve been wanting to write and my days don’t come out right. I do hope you’re feeling better.
Yrs,
Andy
• Right next to the Brooklin Library was a house called the “Earl Firth” house. It was unoccupied, it belonged to the Library, and it was an eyesore and fire hazard. Katharine White, who feared for the Library, itched to get rid of the house. With the following letter, White gave her a check to cover the demolition costs.
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
[North Brooklin, Maine]
18 July [1954?]
K:
So many times I have felt that I wanted to present you with a fine ruby, or we’ll say a perfect sapphire, or a couple of matched pearls that step along together, yet in the presence of rubies, sapphires, pearls or in almost any jeweled atmosphere whatsoever I have turned away empty, blinded by the glitter probably. This impotence in my relationship with precious stones has left me a rich man, and you are my precious stone, all the more so because you don’t glitter. So I now have the strong desire to make you a gift in lieu of rubies, and it seemed to me the other night that the thing you most wanted was to tear down Earl Firth’s house—so I am giving you that, my love my own. Hit it hard and true!
E. B. White
To DAISE TERRY
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[July 28, 1954]
Monday
Dear Miss T:
I have, in times gone by (and Baby how they’ve gone by!), written comments on the subject of Thoreau’s Walden. I would like clipsheets, or copies, of any of these comments that Miss J.1 can put her rubber finger on without straining.
Have just written a piece for the Yale Review on the subject of Walden and am having nightmares from the fear that I have plagiarized myself. At my age, Miss T., a writer repeats like an onion.
Thanking you in advance for your courtesy, and thanking Miss J. for hers, I remain,
E. B. White
To STANLEY HART WHITE
North Brooklin, Me.
22 September 1954
Dear Bun:
I learned from Al that you have been in the hospital ever since I saw you, or almost. He didn’t give me your address so I’ll send this via Blanche. The way you were sailing Martinis through the air at Locke-Ober, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with your health and I am very sorry to hear that they are pointing Geiger counters at you. However, I can report a very startling thyroid cure, thanks to the atom age—a young girl, daughter of Ted Cook who used to write the syndicated column called Cook-Coos. They hung a few atoms on her, and she bounced back like a rubber ball. Thurber also had the atomic cocktail—and if I know Jim he immediately asked for a re-fill and talked everybody under the table. Anyway, he’s still around and doing fine and I owe him a letter, come to think of it.
My days are as tattered as ever—I got myself embroiled with a documentary film man named Arthur Zegart, to write the script or narration for a TV film on lobstering.1 He is completely disarming and completely exhausting—has flown here three times from New York to get things “lined up”. . . . Not a single foot of the film has been exposed yet, but we now have a fisherman lined up, and if I can ever quiet Arthur down long enough to get a camera turning, maybe something wonderful will happen. I will let you know the date, so you can get your TV screen hooked up to the proper channel, or ditch.
Otherwise I am all right. K is punchy from trying to get Aunt Crully settled somewhere for the winter so we can pull out of here and get back to work. We had two hurricanes hit us right in the teeth, one of which you can read about in the current New Yorker if you can find the place. It’s called “Our Windswept Correspondents” and I am they.
Let me know your address and your progress, and let me know if I can do anything to help you in whatever situation you now find yourself in. One thing I have always intended doing is to re-design the Hospital Bed, which is almost as badly conceived as the Modern Car. (I know just how to do it, too—you have to have three small mattresses instead of one big one, so that when the bed is cranked up or down, it can break squarely into the proper angles, instead of curving like a new moon and breaking every vertebra in your spine. I just need the time, that’s all.)
With love,
En
To CASS CANFIELD
North Brooklin, Maine
4 October 1954
Dear Cass:
About the Bennett Cerf inquiry, I have no interest at the moment in collecting my “early work.” Most of it is in collected form already, a lot of the rest of it isn’t worth collecting, and I’m not in a collecting mood, nor do I want a Modern Library man to start picking around in my spotty past.
And as you say, anything of that sort would be for Harper anyway.
I’m not even sure I’m a writer any more—a TV director of documentaries has been here, and I am sinking in coils. I have a grandson in one room, a 92-year-old aunt in another, a son headed for the Army in another (sharing it with his wife, who will have her second baby in December), and the camera and sound crew strung wildly all over the county, shooting in all directions and waiting for me to write a narrative. So you see I am not collecting early works—I am barely able to swallow my own spit.
Bennett Cerf has been reading the Sunday book sections, that’s what’s the matter with him.
Yrs as ever,
Andy
• Paul Brooks, editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin, had published The Wild Flag. The “Walden piece” in the following letter is “Walden—1954.”
To PAUL BROOKS
[New York]
November 26, 1954
Dear Paul:
Thanks a lot for the kind words about my Walden piece. The Yale Review is a surprising medium. I have had reactions to the piece from exactly four readers (including you). One was from a young woman two doors down the hall, another from a young woman in the Transvaal, and a third from a Philadelphia lady. You are the only living male to speak of it, and I am perfectly sure the South African woman would not have mentioned it had not my wife sent her a marked copy. The Philadelphia lady didn’t like my putting direct quotes into the mouths of moderns, and said so in no uncertain terms.
Yrs,
Andy
To HELEN MARGOLIS
[New York]
December 22, 1954
Dear Miss Margolis:
You ask what happened.1 Nothing much happened. (Which is so often the case.) The man was not cured, I would say. But he experienced, as one sometimes does, a sort of temporary miracle during which courage returned to him with a rush, a sudden influx of earthly beauty—in this case a mere tree as it appeared bathed in light.
As for my remark about sanity in the introduction, I agree with you that it could be misleading, and, as I look it over, on your insistence, I feel rather sorry I dropped it in there at all. I also agree that the story is too short; I was trying to wrap up a complicated thing too hastily. But the story “The Second Tree From the Corner” is not about a man who is insane or about to lose his sanity. It is about a garden variety neurotic who merely feels as though he is going nuts—a common sensation in this century. I think I must have made that prefatory remark because I myself no longer take sanity as seriously as I used to—and have felt a whole lot better since dropping it for the hot potato it is.
I cannot tell from your letter whether you are simply taking a fling in literary curiosity, or whether you are troubled, so I am trying to answer your query with care. Ordinarily I do not feel under any obligation to explain my writings, since they are presumed to be self-explanatory—or at least open to any interpretation anybody wants to put on them. But I do get uneasy when I find that something I have written causes a reader any pain or apprehension. One trouble, of course, in explaining my stuff is that I’m not at all sure I understand it myself. If the “Second Tree” means anything, it merely means
that courage (or reassurance) often comes very unexpectedly, and from a surprising source. For which we should all be, I guess, profoundly grateful.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
XI
WILL STRUNK’S LITTLE BOOK
1955–1959
* * *
• The Whites were still at The New Yorker, where Katharine again became head of the Fiction Department after the death of Gus Lobrano in 1956. But the biannual migration was beginning to take its toll, and White yearned for the continuity of life on the Maine farm. Katharine, too, after fulfilling her responsibilities to the Fiction Department—she had promised William Shawn two years—was beginning to think about at least partial retirement. In 1957 she took the step, and the Whites vacated the apartment in Turtle Bay and returned to Brooklin.
Early in 1957, H. A. Stevenson, editor of the Cornell Alumni News, and a long-time friend of White’s, sent him a gift out of their common past: a copy of Professor William Strunk’s little textbook on usage and style. On seeing the book again, White was inspired to write an affectionate piece about the late Professor Strunk for The New Yorker (A Letter from the East, in the issue of July 27). J. G. Case, editor at Macmillan Company, spotted the piece and wrote asking White whether he would be interested in reviving the book. His original proposition was simply to use White’s essay as an Introduction, but the project expanded and White ended up revising the text as well. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White was published in 1959. Since then, it is estimated to have sold over ten million copies. In 2005, a new edition was illustrated by Maira Kalman. Later that year, she and Nico Muhly, composer, performed it as an opera in the New York Public Library.
To CASS CANFIELD
25 West 43rd Street
20 January 1955
Dear Cass:
There is a short passage in “One Man’s Meat” that cries out to be fixed or dropped. It is the sentence on Page 17 that ends “. . . to remind us daily of dead Christians and living Jews.” How I ever managed to give birth to that one I will never know, but anyway I did, and I keep receiving letters about it—mostly from students, who are very anxious to know what I had in mind. I can’t say I blame them.
Is there any way of making a correction, for subsequent printings if any?
Yrs,
Andy
P.S. I was referring, of course, to the prisoners who were enduring a living death in concentration camps, and to dead soldiers. But the wording is not only infelicitous, it is just plain crazy.1
To FIFTH-GRADERS IN CLEVELAND HEIGHTS
[New York]
January 21, 1955
Dear Members of the Fifth Grade:
When I wrote Mrs. Stevenson the other day, I had not had time to read all your letters, but now I have done so, and they are a fine lot of letters. Thank you for letting me know what you thought about “Charlotte’s Web.”
You asked whether I had kept any animals on a farm. I have raised a good many young pigs, lambs, chicks, and goslings in my barn. I will tell you something that happened to the young geese last winter. There is a small pond down in the pasture and the geese use it for a swimming pool. They start from the barnyard, walking slowly; then as they get nearer the water, they break into a run; and then they spread their wings, take to the air, and land on the pond with a splash. But one night, early last winter, the pond froze during the night. The young geese had never seen ice, and knew nothing about it. They started for the pond, sailed into the air, and when they came down for a landing, their feet struck the ice and they skidded the whole length of the pond and crashed into the opposite bank. That’s how they learned about ice.
Thanks again for your letters.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To STANLEY HART WHITE
229 East 48 Street
6 February 55
Dear Bun:
. . . I’m going into the hospital in about a week for a hernia operation, as I seem to have blown a muscle. Every countryman gets a ruptured gut eventually. I got mine from lifting too many glasses. Also, I think they are congenital. Pop got one when he was about my age, and he never lifted anything heavier than a receipted bill. They say the operation isn’t much, and that the latest technique is to reinforce the wall with wire mesh—probably a Reynolds aluminum product. My only fear is that when they open me up they’re going to find shad roe. It’s just the season.
My new granddaughter is a cutey, name of Martha. She and her Ma and her brother Steven are now living in a small place at 59 River Street, Boston. Joe has about a month more at Dix and then will presumably be shipped away somewhere. If K and I can hold together this spring, we’re planning to ship ourselves to England in the Mauritania for a few weeks. Have booked passage, but I won’t believe it till I see the docking lines being dropped off.
I studied the list of symptoms you sent me, indicating a thyroid condition, and I have every one of them but am disinclined to do anything about it. My tremor is so bad I can’t write longhand any more, but it is not necessary in my line of work. Saw Marion and Art Brittingham not long ago when they dropped in for a short visit between trains. Marion is a bit stiff in the joints but looks fine, and Arthur hasn’t changed in 40 years. Still wears a bow tie and can answer any question right on the button. He is building a greenhouse.
The New Yorker will be thirty next week.
Yrs,
En
• The following letter was written from White’s hospital bed on the eve of surgery. The Misses Forbes, Fox, Robinson, and Cullinan were young secretaries in Miss Terry’s secretarial pool at The New Yorker.
To DAISE TERRY
[Harkness Pavilion]
[February 1955]
Song to Be Sung by Daise Terry and Chorus of Maidens—Greenstein on the Recorder
Lying here at the zero hour,
My thoughts return to Terry’s bower—
Oh, pulsing room! Unstately hall!
Oh, Daisy and her maidens all!
I count you over, one by one,
Miss Forbes, Miss Fox, Miss Robinson,
Miss Cullinan, and Mistress T.
My rosary! My rosary!
Tomorrow when I’m carved to shreds
I’ll see in dream your bobbing heads,
And when they stitch me up with laces
I’ll think of all your pleasing faces,
And as I heal by slow degrees
I’ll hear the clatter of your keys—
And if the gods are not too stern
Why, like MacArthur, I’ll return.
E B W
To ROBERT W. PATTERSON, JR.
[New York]
March 8, 1955
Dear Robert:
I doubt that I’m going to be much help to you in your dilemma, but I’ll do what I can.1
The “primary characteristic” of my writing is something you’ll have to figure out for yourself by reading it. I tend to write about myself, I seldom use a word or phrase from any language except English (because I don’t know any other language), and I don’t make any attempt to please the reader.
Basic likes and dislikes? Strong feelings for or against things? Well, it’s all in the books, and if you have read them you must have picked up a few hints. Every writer likes to think that he’s on the side of the angels and that he tilts against injustice, but you have to form your own opinion. I like inboard motors better than outboard motors—you can say that if you like. And I like sail better than power. I dearly love the natural world.
You can always find out a few things about authors from biographical notes on book jackets, from prefaces, and from reference volumes in the Noble & Greenough library, but the best way is to read their works—they always give themselves away sooner or later. I cannot outline my life briefly unless you pay me an enormous fee—it would take me months. I was born in 1899 and expect to live forever, searching for beauty and raising hell in general.
Please give my best
to your father when you see him.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
• The following is White’s reply to a letter that began, “Dear Mr. White: I am a confused senior at Newton High School.”
To ARTHUR HUDSON
[New York]
April 1, 1955
Dear Mr. Hudson:
I am a confused writer at 25 West 43 Street, and one of the reasons for my confusion is that students want me to explain myself. I can’t explain myself. Everything about me is mysterious to me and I do not make any very strong effort to solve the puzzle. If you are engaged in writing a theme about my works, I think your best bet is to read them and say what you think about them.