Letters of E. B. White
Page 49
The weather has suddenly turned very fallish and the outlook is clearly end-of-season—front door of the yacht club locked, three or four rowboats still hanging to the float half full of water with the oars sloshing around in the bottom. I think Joe and Tue [Wearn] leave today. I haven’t decided about my own departure yet. I feel pretty good, although tired from the labors of the summer, and there are a few things I want to get done. . . .
Mrs. T and Mrs. F1 are fine and everything is good here except that you are not here, and when you are not here the place has a hole right down through it from attic to cellar. I still mourn my goose, and I miss you every hour.
Love,
A
To STANLEY HART WHITE
[New York]
[September 27, 1956]
Thursday
Dear Bun:
This is the way to put your head in traction.
You need a weight of about fifteen pounds, and in your case I have shown an electric iron. I plugged it in just to give the whole experience an extra dimension. In Maine, I use a boat anchor because I happen to have a boat anchor. You have to buy the head halter—at one of those surgical appliance places that have a window display featuring bedpans and artificial legs. It might be a sensible idea to pick up an artificial leg while you are in there buying the halter, to have in reserve. Head traction is quite pleasant once you get the hang of it. All it does, I think, is to exercise the big neck muscles that have lain idle since we all came down out of trees. The dose is ten minutes of traction, two or three times a day. I usually follow it with two or three highballs, but I follow almost everything with that. The thing I like best about traction is that it takes place in the barn. I never use it in New York because it would seem inappropriate. I climb trees instead.
We are going to Maine by train tomorrow night to spend about a week, and will then return to town. Joe is working in a small boatyard in Brooklin and has rented a house in the village.1 A partially blown-out hurricane seems to be coming up the coast just in time to make our journey a memorable one, and the rain and the wind have already arrived in Manhattan.
Haven’t any particular news at the moment but just wanted to be sure you got into traction smoothly. If you added a table and got the adjustment just right, it is conceivable that you could take your pants off and have Blanche iron them while traction was going on. I never tried it, but I use a boat anchor.
Yrs,
En
To J. DONALD ADAMS
[New York]
September 28th, 1956
Dear Mr. Adams:
Thanks for your letter inviting me to join the Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower.
I must decline, for secret reasons.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To KATHARINE S. WHITE
[North Brooklin, Maine]
1 November (bang bang!) [1956]
Dear K:
The latest Reader’s Digest says people should actually express their love for one another, otherwise it withers. So I will just mention that I love you. I always do everything the Digest tells me to do.
Have had a perfect trip so far. Fern went into the shallow muddy water Tuesday morning, with workmen actually at work on deck while she was being launched.1 I watched, saying a little prayer for her and chuckling at the same time—the way you acted at Nancy’s wedding. It was very comical and exciting to me. And then the mast was stepped, then Aage came whirling out from Boston and leapt into action, and we rigged her with odds and ends of string and twine and anything we could find, and bent the sails on. Before you could catch your breath, Aage had hoisted the sails, and I jumped aboard in my shirt sleeves—a perfect Indian summer day—and Aage backed the jib, and we were off, narrowly clearing a mud bank and headed for a nearby causeway. Variable winds swept us back and forth, dodging boats, moorings, mud banks, government markers, and flotsam with here and there a little jetsam. Fern whistled along with hardly any air in her sails, and left the smoothest wake I ever saw behind me—you would think nothing at all had been through the water. With Aage at the tiller we ran hard up on an invisible mudbank. “Do you suppose you could run that little engine?” he asked, drawing hard on his pipe. “Certainly,” I said. I pressed the starter, there was a cry of response from the Palmer, and I threw her into reverse, and we backed off the mud and glided away under sail again. It was a wonderful day. Fern is almost unbearably beautiful, and easy to manage. And comfortable. And roomy. You would hardly know there was an engine in her, so nicely is the engine concealed. When Aage and I got back to Boston, on your father’s elevated railway, I invited him to the Lincolnshire lounge for a drink and we lifted our glasses to the boat. Also I had a nice talk with him about naval architecture in general, and he opened up, about Joe and everything. He said nobody should design boats for a living unless he truly loves to create something and is willing to stand the ups and downs of a luxury business. And he said yard work, such as Joe is doing, is very important.
Yesterday I started to fly to Maine, got to the airport, asked for my flight and was told that my plane was “overhead.” “Overhead?” I said. “Oh, yes,” the man said. “They can’t get down now on account of this ground fog.” So I went away from there and found a nice Boston & Maine train that was not overhead, and had a beautiful quiet trip on the little old ground, through the nice woods and fields.
Today am hunting steer calves while every other man in Maine is hunting bucks and does. Men regard me as a real daft one, and I guess I am a daft one all right. But I have a pretty boat and a pretty wife and I will find a couple of calves, and I will get along some how. I heard the President on the air last night and thought he did all right, but we are certainly on one of Mr. Dulles’s well-loved brinks. Apparently the Labor party in England is going to make it tough for Eden.
I am booked on the State of Maine for Saturday night, so will see you Sunday for breakfast.
Much love,
A
To FAITH MC NULTY MARTIN
North Brooklin
2 Jan [1957]
Dear Faith:
What do you mean you want to “let us know that you’ve gotten married”—don’t you think I have my own sources of information and that I keep track of you day and night? I would have written sooner but I got a Christmas tree ornament stuck in my pancreas, and it kept winking on and off, and I was too distracted to write letters. As for giving you my blessing, anybody who can combine marriage and Christmas is a proper genius and you not only have my blessing but I am lost in admiration. As far as that goes, I have always been lost in admiration—which was obviously Martin’s condition, too—and any blessing I could bestow on you would be relatively useless as it would be tinged with envy for this Martin. But if it’s my blessing you have set your little heart on, then by God my blessing you shall have, useless though it may be around the place and probably a great dust-catcher, too. Your letter sounded as though you and Johnny were fine and happy, and that made me feel fine and happy, and in addition to these crazy blessings of mine I send you all my love and best wishes for this wonderful occasion. I can’t stand people being unmarried, it just makes me edgy, and besides that I was worried about you and was hoping that your life would get straightened around again and in the best possible and practically only way. Which has happened and which makes me delighted.
That Christmas greeting you mentioned in your letter was one of the damndest offbeat literary snarls I ever got myself embroiled in.1 Sullivan can pick and choose and when a name comes up that works he can include it and when a name doesn’t work, he can just pitch it out. But not old White. The personnel sheet (actually 4 sheets, single spaced) was what I set out to go by, and little did I know what was ahead. . . . A couple of times I gave up and saw Katharine quietly reach for the supply of personal greeting cards which would have to be dispatched if I failed my loony mission. Then I would go back and pick up the beat again, between visits from the doctor and the laying on of his hands.
Some higher power, plus my great love for the staff of The New Yorker, kept me at it, and I finally got it in the mail—with only one name misspelled—and a non-staff member at that, Vincent Sheean.
My pain departed on the 24th, so I set to work drinking and laughing and had a fine Christmas.
Please give my warmest greetings and felicitations to Mr. Richard Martin and tell him I received a table saw with a tilting arbor for Christmas and he can make use of it any time he can get down this way. Best to Johnny and lots of love from
Yrs,
Andy
To ROBERT M. HUTCHINS
[New York]
January 4, 1957
Dear Mr. Hutchins:
My ideas about civil liberties are pretty much limited to what I know intimately, which is the press.1 At the moment I’m not in good health and for that reason, if for no other, cannot offer you much in the way of constructive criticism. Your outline certainly seems comprehensive and good.
Under the press, I presume the Fund will examine the tendency of newspapers to die or merge, leaving a city like Bangor, Maine, without an opposition press. Under television I should think the Fund might notice the fact that performers of all kinds (newscasters, actors, singers, entertainers, commentators) have been persuaded to speak the commercial. The sound of news and the sound of soap are a blur in the ear—an unhealthy condition essentially, I think. Under privacy, the captive audience is a field worth study. The New Yorker, as you may recall, did a bit of spade work in this area.
I don’t know how much teaching the Fund’s program calls for, in proportion to study. Studies tend to get over-subtilized, sometimes. Teaching, I think, can well stand great simplification and can begin with the primary grade sort of instruction, since the majority of people have a rather shaky conception of the anatomy of liberty. There is nothing much to be “taught” about equality—you either believe it or you don’t. But there is much that can be taught about rights and about liberty, including the basic stuff: that a right derives from a responsibleness, and that men become free as they become willing to accept restrictions on their acts. These are elementary concepts, of course, but an awful lot of youngsters seem to emerge from high school and even from college without acquiring them. Until they are acquired, the more subtle, intricate, and delicate problems of civil rights and freedom of speech are largely incomprehensible.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To ALICE SHERMAN
[New York]
January 9, 1957
Dear Alice:
Thanks for the letter. I don’t believe I can write a book about a horse because I don’t know any horse.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
• Odette Arnaud, a French literary agent, represented White in negotiations with the French publisher Hachette, which was bringing out a new edition of Charlotte’s Web with new illustrations. The first French edition had appeared in 1954 with the original Garth Williams drawings.
To ODETTE ARNAUD
[New York]
January 25, 1957
Dear Miss Arnaud:
Thank you for submitting the illustrations for “Charlotte’s Web” (Les Aventures de Narcisse).
I would like to make one suggestion which Hachette’s artist may find helpful. A spider’s legs are attached to the thorax, which is the section between the head and the abdomen. None of the legs originates in the abdomen. It is a very common mistake, in spider drawings, to have the legs misplaced in this way.
With best regards, I am
Yours sincerely,
E. B. White
• Sol Linowitz, a lawyer, had submitted an “Amplification” letter to The New Yorker taking issue with some of White’s arguments in the “Letter from the East” in the December 15, 1956, issue. The magazine had not published Linowitz’s letter, which prompted him to write another.
To SOL M. LINOWITZ
[New York]
[February 1957]
Dear Mr. Linowitz:
I do not participate in making editorial judgments, but devote myself to writing and contributing, so the question of whether your letter was to be used was out of my realm. I can say, in general, that while the New Yorker occasionally publishes “amplifications” they are usually on questions of fact, not opinion.
At any rate, I want to thank you for your letter. I think you have me wrong when you say that I argued that the dangers of war could be dispelled if the words of the Charter were different. I don’t think peace is that simple. Nor was I arguing for perfection—merely for clarity and for certain prerequisites of membership being included in the Charter. I quite agree with you that constant use is what makes charters and constitutions come alive and take on meaning: but to begin with, they must not be full of ambiguities and deliberate loopholes, and I think the United Nations Charter is, to some degree.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
• The following letter was written on White’s arrival in New York after an eventful journey that had begun with a flat tire on the way to the railroad station in Bangor. White had transferred to a taxi, leaving Henry Allen struggling with a faulty jack.
To HENRY ALLEN
[New York]
22 February 1957
Dear Henry:
I hated to drive off and leave you lying in the ditch with all your troubles. I figure the wear and tear on your good trousers will set you back at least five dollars and the wear and tear on your nervous system another five, so I am enclosing ten, in the hope of making partial reparation for the damages. The thing I really worried about was that you were going to get bumped off by some passing motorist. Hope you will drop me a line and let me know how you made out.
My departure from Bangor was sensational. The taxi driver had to slow down to 25 miles an hour all the way through Brewer, and then we hit a traffic snarl at the intersection near the new bridge, and the car ahead of us seemed incapable of making a left turn. My watch said 6:30 as we got through the green light. Crossing the bridge, the telephone in the taxi started squawking, and the dispatcher began chatting with the driver, asking him where he was and how he was getting along. “We’re all right,” said the driver. “We’re on the bridge.” I looked at my watch again and it said 6:31. We screamed into the station yard, jumped out, and the engineer saw us coming and I guess he took pity on me. They had the train all locked up, ready to go, the bell was ringing for the start. The taxi driver grabbed my bags and whirled down the platform, and I trotted behind, carrying my fish pole and the Freethy lunch box. The trainman saw this strange apparition appearing, and he opened up the coach door. I plunged on board and the driver threw the bags on, and away we went. I had no ticket, no Pullman receipt for my room, just a fish pole. For the next hour or two, I was known all through the train as “that man.” But the porter got interested in my case, the way porters do, and he stuck me in the only empty bedroom and told me to sit there till we got to Waterville. The conductor stopped by, every few minutes, to needle me, and between visits I would close the door and eat a sandwich and mix myself a whiskey-and-milk, in an attempt to recuperate from my ordeal. At Waterville the conductor charged in and said: “Put on your hat and follow me!” Then he dashed away, with me after him. He jumped off the train and disappeared into the darkness. When I located him in the waiting room he looked sternly at me and said: “Are you the man?”
“I’m the man,” I replied.
“Well,” he said, “go back and sit in the room. It looks as though Bangor didn’t sell it. But we’ll know at Portland.”
So I sat in the room some more and had another drink. At Portland, the porter said: “Get something on and follow me!” He dashed away and I ran after him. He beat me to the station by twenty yards, but I caught up with him at the Pullman desk, where the conductor and the Pullman conductor sat side-by-side, reviewing my case. It was a little like a court martial, but I kept forking out the money, and the porter swiped a pencil and drew a line in the chart
opposite Bedroom B. And finally the case was dismissed, and they handed me a receipt, and I found my room again on the train—which had meantime been switched onto another track, just for the hell of it. Anyway, I made it to New York, and had a good night’s sleep into the bargain, once I got the railroad people quieted down. I guess the next time you and I start for Bangor, it better be at 4:30, and with a jack that fits under the car.
Yrs,
EBW
To BRISTOW ADAMS
229 East 48 Street
23 February [1957]
Dear B. A.:
For a man who has been cut down by about 50 per cent, you write a mighty fine letter, and I was awfully pleased to get it; I realize what it cost you in labor. I am sending you, under separate cover, a bee, to stir up the air in your room.1 He is not a real bee but has a pleasant personality, and comes from Denmark. If you have to lie in bed all day, looking up, then you need something to stare at, and I guess a bee is as good as anything. I hope he will provide a slight link with the outside world which you love so well.
I am just back from Maine, where I spent five or six days admiring the winter scene and visiting with my son and my two grandchildren. Previous to that, I was in the hospital here for a short tussle with the doctors, but I escaped, and not much the worse for the experience.2 They gave me a general anesthetic, and under the influence of it I started to write again, and have been writing ever since—it was sodium pentothal, which is said to be the truth drug. I don’t know which makes me more miserable: writing, or being unable to write. Both are bad. My doctor flew to the Virgin Islands last night for a change of scene.