Letters of E. B. White
Page 48
To DODY GOODMAN
[New York]
January 24, 1956
Dear Miss Goodman:
The “Queen Bee” is available for the kind of use you have in mind.1 The only catch is, I have to be convinced that it would be presented with good taste. I don’t know just how that can be accomplished, but maybe you can suggest a way. The poem obviously lends itself to being loused up if somebody happens to want to play it dirty. I didn’t write it as a plug for insemination, I wrote it as an appreciation of the upper air. And I don’t want it brought down to earth by being given the wrong emphasis.
The only sort of deal I would be willing to make would be on a licensing basis—that is, no outright sale. But that part is less of a problem than the matter of taste.
So far as I know, the only person who has performed the Queen Bee in this country (it has been done on BBC) is Helen Taft Manning, the daughter of President Taft, who does it with great regularity—and, I hear, great effect—at Bryn Mawr to edify the young ladies. I have never seen her interpretation but have always wanted to.
Sincerely yours,
E. B. White
To TED PATRICK
[New York]
February 8, 1956
Dear Ted:
I don’t want to try a piece on Downtown New York. It is a foreign land to me, and if I’m going to wander around a foreign land in the near future for any gainful purpose it’ll damn well have to be some long pink subtropical paradise where I can lie down between drinks. I’m bushed. The only place in lower New York where they lie down between drinks is the sidewalks of the Bowery, and that’s too hard a bed for me now.
Your lazy, tired, grateful friend,
Andy
To WARREN M. DAVISON
[New York]
February 17, 1956
Dear Mr. Davison:
Thanks for your invitation to take part in the Forum program on humor.1 I can’t do it, because I am incapable of making a speech.
I have known about this deficiency all my life but just this week I discovered, through X-ray examination, the true cause of it. There is a small exit called the “pylorus” leading from the stomach, and in me it closes tight at the slightest hint of trouble ahead—such as a speech, a platform, an audience, or a panel discussion. It closes and it stays closed, awaiting a turn of events that suggests smoother going. A man with a tightly shut pylorus is in real trouble and should be in a hospital, not a forum.
So I must beg off, as I always do when it comes to speech making. But I am grateful to you for the chance and I am sorry I have to miss the occasion.
Sincerely yours,
E. B. White
• En route to Sarasota, the Whites were visiting Dr. and Mrs. Joseph T. Wearn at their Castle Hill Plantation. The piece referred to in this letter was the “Letter from the East” published in The New Yorker, February 18, 1956. It was later included in the collected essays, The Points of My Compass, entitled “Bedfellows.”
To JAMES THURBER
Yemassee, South Carolina
24 February 1956
Dear Jim:
Thanks for the kind words about my piece, and also for the instructions on how to spot a Communist. . . . There is a wonderful pond on this plantation, and among its inhabitants are alligators and otter. I thought of the picture you painted on the side of the boathouse at Camp Otter. Remember? Of course nobody ever saw an otter on Otter Lake, and I haven’t seen one here yet, but I encountered an otter once in a lake in Nova Scotia and it is the only animal in the world that really looks as though it had been designed by you. You thought you were drawing a Thurber otter, but by God you were drawing an otter.
K and I pull out of here on Monday and head for Sarasota for a drink of sun tan oil. Love to all.
Andy
To FRANK SULLIVAN
Siesta Key
Sarasota, Florida
3 March [1956]
Saturday
Dear Frank:
Your name came up on my last visit with Gus and I thought you might like to hear what he said. I went out to Chappaqua on a Saturday afternoon—it was two weeks ago today—and sat with him for about an hour, in short takes. He was a surprising sight, terribly thin of course, and with a Lincolnian beard. The bones of his face, accentuated, plus the chin beard, actually made him look like Lincoln and I got quite a jolt. I had known for only a few days that he was a dying man—the secret had been rather closely held. Gus gave a little cry of recognition when I was brought into the room by Jean and presented. I sat down and began dropping a few names by way of making a stab at conversation. He kept fading in and out, with the drug, and when he was in he was pretty close to being on the ball. I said that we’d heard from you, and that you’d been visiting Governor Harriman of all people. Gus stared at me a second and then pursed his lips behind the whiskers, smiled faintly, and said: “Now wouldn’t you think a man in his position . . .” Then he faded. It was pretty obvious that the sentence would have ended, “. . . could avoid the company of low clowns.” Or words to that effect. Or you can write your own ending. I am sure it was leading up to a little old joke of some sort.
Did I ever tell you about the day I walked Gus through Boston to show him a few sights—this was a few years ago. We started up Beacon Hill and turned into Louisburg Square. “This,” I announced, “is Louisburg Square.” Gus gazed quietly at the cozy scene. “Is it all right to smoke?” he asked.
K and I are here until about the 26th, and we both send our love.
Yrs,
Andy
• Dorothy Wirth had written the G. & C. Merriam Company complaining that the biographical section of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary failed to list E. B. White, although it listed P. G. Wodehouse, Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker, John Kieran, William Saroyan, and others.
To DOROTHY WIRTH
[New York]
April 23, 1956
Dear Mrs. Wirth:
Very sporting of you to cross swords with the G. & C. Merriam Company in defense of my honor. I loved the answer you got. It has always seemed to me that when there are more candidates for a biographical list than there is space to publish their names, some sort of field trial should be held, in which persons of equal “importance” could vie with one another by running twice around a track, or doing a back flip off a diving board. I can stand on my head, and might easily have Orson Welles at a disadvantage in this respect.
But don’t let the matter worry you. It doesn’t bother me any.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To LORLYN L. THATCHER
[New York]
April 23, 1956
Dear Miss Thatcher:
I see that The New Yorker addressed you as “Mr.” Thatcher in a recent communication. My apologies.
The interpretation of my “Letter from the East”1 by one of your pupils is quite staggering. But you can tell her that I probably wouldn’t be able to do any better myself. You can also say that there are no symbols in the piece, to my knowledge. Why does everyone search so diligently for symbols these days? It is a great vogue. Fred symbolizing “the government as a whole” is such a terrifying idea that I am still shaking all over from fright—the way he used to shake from the excitement of anticipation. I’m afraid your pupil (perhaps because my wording wasn’t clear) got the idea that Fred was afraid of a red squirrel. Fred wasn’t afraid of a cage of polar bears laced with rattlesnakes and studded with porcupines. The only time a wave of terror would overtake him would be when he would discover that he wasn’t able to emerge backwards from situations (or holes) that he had entered frontwards. He suffered from claustrophobia at this point, and was really in fright. Twice I had to take up the floorboards of buildings under which he had pursued a skunk, because even though he had managed to kill the skunk and stink everything up, he was then too exhausted and sick to his stomach to back out the way he had come in.
Please give my regards to your pupil and suggest that some day, when
she’s in a relaxed mood, she read the thing again, this time without symbols. Or she might try my “Letter from the South” (April 7th issue), which has no politics in it and might give her more pleasure.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To J. JOSEPH LEONARD
[New York]
April 30, 1956
Dear Mr. Leonard:
I admire your pluck, but I don’t want you to try to adapt “The Door” for a TV show.1 I am a fellow who likes to leave well enough alone, and I am not even convinced that “The Door” is well enough. Anyway, I’m going to leave it alone.
Thanks for asking.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To EDMUND WARE SMITH
[New York]
May 21, 1956
Dear Mr. Smith:
I haven’t been to Maine in so long I have forgotten what it feels like, almost. My wife is held close to New York nowadays by her job, and I stick around and watch the Giants on TV. I was interested in the size of your wife’s vegetable garden. My wife’s plot is the same (200,000 acres) but there is an annex called “the asparagus patch.” This adds about a third again.
I have run through the kodachromes without encountering a single bird that I am acquainted with, and I see no point in writing about what I don’t know about at first hand. I can’t blame you for wanting to introduce western birds, but I think you’d better get a western bird man to write the captions. I really don’t want to attempt it. Incidentally, if you ever need a caption on the European bullfinch, I am your man. I purchased one two weeks ago (found him in Queens across from a cemetery—“ring twice” the sign said over the doorbell), and he is sitting on my foot as I write this. He has a little song that goes: “The hell you say.” A very pleasant bird to have around. Wears a black hood, like the Sandeman sherry character.
Sorry I can’t take on your assignment. Am returning the kodachromes herewith.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To STANLEY HART WHITE
[New York]
19 July 1956
Dear Bun:
Did you know that in Charleston, S. C., there is an old French Protestant Huguenot church that bears the following notation cut in the stone of the stairway to the entrance:
Built 1681 Rebuilt 1845
E. B. White, Architect
Joe and his family got back from Germany last week and landed in Brooklyn, by military transport, early in the morning of my fifty-seventh birthday. My grandson immediately propositioned me and said he would like to go spazieren.
En
To FRANK SULLIVAN
25 West Etcetera
20 July [1956]
Dear Sul:
You wrote me a letter on my birthday although in your bumbling way you made no mention of that, but I was just as pleased to get it as though you had realized that I was born July 11, 1899, a fact you could easily have verified by turning to any standard reference volume that gives little known facts about little known people. On your suggestion I am having the passage from my last piece1 carved in stone feldspar. The expense is considerable so I am sending the bill to you, as I think of you as a “good fellow.” My birthday was unusually nice this year. A military transport named the Upshur, which my secretary calls the Upstart, docked at 8 a.m. at 58th Street, Brooklyn, carrying Sp-3 Joel White US 51331642 and his unnumbered wife and two children. You don’t get to 58th Street, Brooklyn, at eight in the morning without a bit of dawn busting, but my wife Kate and I were fit and ready and out on the streets that day before the Daily News. The scene on the dock was the kind of emotional binge you forget keeps happening two or three times a week even in these relatively peaceable days—about twelve hundred wonderful looking foot soldiers, with their wonderful faces, staggering and lurching down a gangplank under the crushing load of an immense duffle bag, to set foot again in the land of the Big PX, and, about one in every twenty, to collapse into the arms of hungry mothers, fathers, wives, and sweethearts. I got so excited by the moving scene and the earliness of the day that I had to be led away to a stable bench by my stable wife, to set for a few minutes. My two grandchildren’s faces were visible on deck for about an hour before the Army managed to disgorge the little group onto the dock, but we finally made it. Joe got in a bus for Fort Hamilton and the rest of us got in a cab for Turtle Bay, where we lived violently and happily ever afterward. . . .
Have just returned from New York’s air raid drill and am pretty tired, so will close. (Air raids in this building are celebrated by having everybody go to the tenth floor—a number somebody thought of.) I just wanted to thank you for your birthday letter. K. gave me “Ring Lardner” for my birthday and I finished it last night and it made me unutterably sad, along toward the end.
Yrs with love,
Andy
P. S. One reader who pondered about my head being in traction advised me to give up the pulleys and weights and just tie on a cluster of balloons, which, he said, would give me more freedom to move about. I like this idea a lot, but am counting on you to shoot me down if I overplay it.
• John McNulty died in July 1956 of a heart ailment, leaving his wife Faith and a small son, Johnny.
To FAITH MCNULTY
North Brooklin, Maine
31 July 1956
Dear Faith:
I’m sending this to the NYer because I don’t have your Rhode Island address, and I guess it doesn’t make much difference when you get it anyway. The letter I’m really late on is the one I failed to write John when I knew he was sick and miserable. When K phoned me yesterday morning and told me that he was dead it was a double blow—I felt not just old and sad and lonely but guilty too. I used to envy John his ability to get off a letter. A lot of the ones he wrote me seem to have been written just as he stepped out of bed in the morning and before the rest of the world was conscious. I have most of those letters, as I seldom throw letters away, and they are sort of in a class by themselves as they were almost always the kind of communication that required no answer. I hate letters that have to be answered (don’t answer this one) and John’s always left the recipient perfectly free to enjoy himself, no obligation. I don’t know who I’m going to lounge around the streets with any more. He was the only deliberate walker of my acquaintance (I was never sure how much his gait owed to his bad heart and how much to his temperament, but it didn’t really matter). I’m afraid this is already beginning to sound like a letter of condolence and I want to nip that in the bud. You know I loved John and I don’t have to give reasons but just want to send my love to you. The papers haven’t got here yet (they make the last few miles to Brooklin by oxcart) so I have not seen the notices. Katharine is getting here tomorrow morning on the sleeper and will probably have them with her.
I think an awful lot of John’s stuff is going to stand the nasty test of time. His ear was so wonderful—better than anybody’s I can think of, better than Lardner, O’Hara, or any of those contenders. And when I think of all the recent dead ones whose names still mean something but whose works are lost in the files, the Brouns and the Woollcotts and the rest of them, it makes me feel good that McNulty is going to be more durable in black and white. I guess I told you about the automobile ride with John and Johnny which ended with a bedtime story, designed to soothe and regale the little boy—a long, detailed and beautifully spoken recital of morningtime in the home of a horseplayer. It was both funny and touching and although I would not be able to repeat any of it with any accuracy, I haven’t forgotten any of it, either.
Much love from
Andy
• Eugene Kinkead, a New Yorker editor and contributor, had written a profile of the great spider authority, Dr. Alexander Petrunkevitch. White intended to pass along any useful information to Arthur Zegart, who hoped to film Charlotte’s Web.
To EUGENE KINKEAD
North Brooklin, Maine
13 August 1956
Dear Gene:
Thinking of spiders wit
h a cameraman’s problems in mind, do you know how much they are good for under studio conditions? I mean, is an orb weaver likely to spin and repair her web in confinement, as in a terrarium?
I am trying to advise and assist a man who aspires to make a naturalistic movie (no animation) of “Charlotte’s Web.” He will need all sorts of spider shots—construction of web, repair, fly in web, wrapping up of fly, spinning egg case, laying eggs, emergence of young spiders, maybe even ballooning if it is possible to photograph. I am trying to figure out the best way to go about it. If you have any ideas, from your Petrunkevitch association or your easy-going personal relationship with spiders themselves, would appreciate your word on the subject. I have already worked out the problem of getting a word spun in the middle of the web: I intend to get Daise Terry to spin it.
As you have perhaps noticed, I am always in some kind of trouble.
Yrs in Arachne’s toils,
Elwyn
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
North Brooklin
[September 15?, 1956]
Saturday morn
Dear K:
. . . Joe and Allene moved into their place yesterday afternoon, taking me somewhat by surprise. I didn’t know, when you phoned yesterday morning, that they planned to leave. They just sort of glided away taking the two children and not much else. Everything seems to be going—stove, refrigerator, brand new Maytag washing machine, lights, and water. I stopped by for a few minutes at the end of the afternoon to make a gift of eggs and beer and found Joe and Allene seated in apparent tranquillity in the kitchen. Steve was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. Wash was hanging on the line. That house has tide in front of it and Tide in back of it. When Steve came out of the bathroom his hair was sopping wet—his idea of brushing his teeth was to turn a glass of water over the top of his head, for thoroughness. . . .