Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  Should you decide that you want to re-issue the book, I would feel justified in giving Macmillan permission to use my piece only if I was satisfied that the Strunk heirs were happy about the project. Professor Strunk’s widow is alive, I believe—living at 380 Crown Street, Meriden, Conn. There is a son Oliver Strunk who is on the Princeton faculty, 80 College Avenue. And there is another son, Edwin, with the Chrysler Corporation. He lives at 1594 Penistone Road, Birmingham, Mich. Whether the copyright is in effect or not, I would expect you to get permission from the estate and pay royalties to the estate.

  As for me, I think I should receive a share of the royalties, and I’d like your suggestion as to what sort of division you would think fair to all concerned.1 The New Yorker, incidentally, doesn’t enter the picture—it does not take any reprint money. Never has. The contributor gets all. (It’s a very lovable old weekly.) See Page 40 of the little book—use of the word “very.”

  As for my essay, I’m quite willing to fix the first sentence (burn fewer books). I am also willing to do whatever I can to make the piece useful and suitable as an introduction. I may even have a bit more to say on the subject of rhetoric, now that I am suddenly faced with this unexpected audience.

  I’m leaving for Maine on Wednesday night. My address there is North Brooklin. Please take good care of “The Elements of Style.”

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To WAYNE MORSE

  [New York]

  September 17, 1957

  Dear Senator Morse:

  Thanks for your letter and the copy of your remarks on fallout. I’m glad you plan to open up the subject in the Senate in January.

  It seems to me people in all countries, with the possible exception of Japan, accept without challenge the authority of anybody at all to contaminate sea, air, and earth. This is a “right” that is as dubious as it is catastrophic. If national security results at last in general unwholesomeness, surely none of us will be secure. We will simply all be sick.

  Sincerely yours,

  E. B. White

  • In September 1957, Dr. Frank Barron, director of the Creative Writing Project at the University of California Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, wrote White asking him to come to Berkeley, along with twenty-nine other individuals, and be studied, as part of a research program funded by the Carnegie Corporation. Dr. Barron, in describing the project, wrote: “. . . we have conducted research on such topics as these: independence of judgment and resistance to conformity pressures, social responsibility, motivation towards professional achievement, personal soundness, recovery from neurosis, complexity in personality structure, and esthetic and ethical sensitivity.”

  To FRANK BARRON

  [New York]

  September 18, 1957

  Dear Doctor Barron:

  Thanks for your kind and unexpected invitation to come to California and be investigated. I shall have to decline, although the trip sounds exciting.

  I don’t suppose I should feel any deep disinclination to be studied, but the fact is I do. Even if you were to find that I had made no recovery from my neurosis, and that my personality was complex (which it may well be), and that I was sound, sensitive, and well motivated, I still don’t know that anything would have been added to the field of knowledge. As a guinea pig I would be unreliable and shifty. My tendency would be to get drunk, to escape the embarrassment of being watched, and this unsavory episode would have to go in the record, to be studied for hidden meanings that weren’t really there. In short, I feel that my best bet as a writer is to sit still and write. As my time gets shorter and shorter, I feel that more and more.

  But I do thank you for the chance.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To EDWARD W. WEIMAR

  [New York]

  November 11, 1957

  Dear Mr. Weimar:

  Thanks for your letters and the [Ambrose] Bierce blacklist.1 I had never seen it. I’m sorry to be so late in acknowledging your gift—am right in the middle of dispersing the contents of our city apartment, preparatory to moving to Maine, and I am covered with dust and distraction.

  I don’t know anything about baseball, and wrote the Giants piece2 because I spent July watching my wife watch television. It was hot and I like to write when it’s hot. You could count the times I’ve been inside the Polo Grounds on the fingers of Mays’s glove. My wife, by the way, is the former Mrs. Angell who you say helped you with John McEntee Bowman.3 She is a truly gifted writer-helper, and I have had to do my own work in secret for twenty-eight years in order to maintain any feeling of personal accomplishment. We are planning a trip to San Francisco, come spring, to see if we can pick up second base in the fog.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To LUELLA ADAMS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  24 November 1957

  Dear Mrs. Adams:

  When I was young and full of beans I used to keep a diary, only I called it a “journal” to make it sound more impressive. I wrote in it so steadily and over so many years that it is eight inches thick and contains probably the world’s finest collection of callow and insipid remarks. Anyway, I have been thumbing through it this morning. An entry dated “January 26, 1920—10:00 P.M.—Monday” includes the report that “Last night I sat in Bristow Adams’ den before an open fire, with Peter Vischer, Lee A. White, Mr. Church, Russ Lord, Russ Peters, and Stevenson, and talked until about two o’clock. We discussed a great many things from the ethics of newspaper work to the oppression of Korea by the Japanese. We smoked pipe upon pipe, drank coffee, and had a very enjoyable time.”

  And a month later (February 24, 1920—12:20 A.M.) I wrote: “I have spent the evening at Professor Bristow Adams’ house where several students gather every Monday evening to smoke and talk. I admire B. A. a great deal for his good humor and his sincerity and I value him as a friend. He is hospitable, tolerant, just, and jovial. He considers it part of his duty to entertain undergraduates. Sympathetic, kindly, and apparently without a care in the world, he is a fine balm for a frenzied spirit. I hope that our friendship will not be interrupted.”

  Well, our friendship is at last interrupted. But B. A. has such a secure place in my affections that even the Great Interrupter is not going to do a very good job. Those first years at Cornell were lonely ones for me—the pages of my diary are full of homesickness and other sorrows. But at your house I found relief, and in that upstairs sitting room B. A. dispensed a good deal more than entertainment and coffee. I guess it was his knack of treating a young man as a companion rather than an oddity that made all the difference. I remember so well how good it was for the ego, the spirit, and even the intellect. I used to walk back across the bridge at midnight feeling all smoothed out and peaceful. Oh those nights at the Adamses! The nearest I get to that kind of tranquillity these days is to go out to the barn and pay a call on some of the characters out there, who are also peaceable and good conversationalists.

  I feel very bad that I haven’t written you of late. It takes a full charge of dynamite to get me to the point of starting a letter. But I’ve often thought of you, in your long sorrowful vigil, and I hope that these months have not worn you down. I’m sorry, too, that I did not see Bristow once more before he died, and yet in a way I am content not to have seen him flat on his back—he was essentially an upright man and I want to remember him that way.

  Katharine and I are recuperating from the business of dispersing the contents of our apartment in New York. We are here in Maine for keeps now, I hope, and K has at last given up her full-time job at the magazine and is working part time and at long distance. Our house is in a hooroar, with the back kitchen all ripped to pieces for a face-lifting job, and we can’t even find our way to the refrigerator without a compass. But I guess the dust will settle eventually.

  Please give my love to all the children of your house and tell them that I loved their father, which they know anyway. There should
be more teachers on more campuses like Professor Bristow Adams, and more wives just like you. But that would be impossible.

  As ever yrs, and with

  much love,

  Andy

  • Gardner Botsford was Senior Editor of the Fact Department at The New Yorker.

  To GARDNER BOTSFORD

  North Brooklin, Maine

  6 December 1957

  Dear Gardner:

  The next time you are loitering at the corner of Third and 48th, looking at the girls in their winter dresses and wondering whether to drop in at the Emerald Café for a dram of Seagram’s Old Hemlock, I wish you would kindly deliver a message for me to my friend Joe Vitello, who vends papers and rubs used orange juice on shoes at that intersection. I would like Joe to be told that I misinformed him about the date of the “Here Is New York” television show. He is watching for this show because he is in it, and he naturally wants to see himself in the pitchers. The correct date is Sunday afternoon, December 15. I hope you can see your way clear to deliver this simple, heartfelt message to Joe. I would drop him a line, saving you the trouble, but I have no confidence in the resourcefulness of the Postmaster General. For all I know he is at Cape Canaveral blowing on the fuse.

  If this letter sounds peremptory or bossy it is because I have just dined on wild meat. My son dropped us off a haunch of venison the other day, and we pounced on it tonight, claw and fang. When our cook, Mrs. Freethy, appeared with the platter, she had a funny look on her face and before she left the room she said, “You won’t give any of this deer meat to Augie, will you?” (Augie is our dachshund puppy who is bursting with the most revolting kind of health.) I replied that I hadn’t planned slipping any of the venison to Augie, but why did she ask. “Well,” she said, “I gave a tiny piece of deer meat to Tiny once, and Tiny almost died. She had to be rushed to the vet. It happens to dogs all the time, all over the county.” Katharine and I, needless to say, settled down to our doe steak with enormous relish, and with tall overflowing glasses of replenished Scotch.

  I hope you and Tassie are the same or better. Come here any time you feel like it, you will never return. And don’t fail to deliver the message.

  Yrs as follows,

  A

  To DAISE TERRY

  North Brooklin, Maine

  2 January 1958

  Dear Daise Daise:

  You were a daisy to send us such pears and I am just about to surround another one. We bring them to the stage of ripeness where they not only flow easily down the throat but they run down your chin, too. It’s called runoff by us farmers. Well, they are lovely pears, really loverly. Another good thing you did for me was to clear up my desk paste problem, which is often my number one professional problem. With this dispenser and this quart jar of Cico I feel that I can look ahead to the next fifty thousand newsbreaks with equanimity, by which time I will be dead and somebody else can sit around getting his fingers sticky and thinking of those funny little taglines. . . .

  We had a nice Christmas, all in all. I had been sick for about two weeks but got feeling pretty good on the 24th and started out in a whirl to do my last minute shopping. I figured the stores were all out, so I went down into the woods for stuff and made out all right. Christmas Day was a very pretty day, and we had a mail delivery, and people called up, and I did my usual amount of drinking and cutting up, and we ate some fish eggs and smoked ham. Then I went out while there was still light enough to see by and shut the geese up and gave them a pail of water to play with, and grained the bantams and shut them up, grained and watered the hens, picked up the eggs, carried the eggs to the cellar, pitched down some hay for the heifers and mixed them some grain in the proportions Stanley Walker told me about, filled the woodbox in the kitchen, emptied the garbage and rinsed the pail and dried it and installed a wax paper Sanette filler, closed the garage doors, shut off the outside water line, and plugged in the Christmas tree. I always like Christmas here because there is a barn attached to the house and it makes the whole thing a lot more real than when you just see it on television.

  Thanks again, Daise, for everything, and stay strong and fit in 1958.

  Yrs with love,

  Buster

  To MRS. BARD AND FIFTH-GRADERS

  North Brooklin, Maine

  3 January 1958

  Dear Mrs. Bard and 5th Graders:

  Thanks for all those letters. I’m afraid I am very late with this answer, and if I don’t hurry up you will all be promoted into another grade and won’t have Mrs. Bard any more.

  It is quite cold in the barn tonight—the thermometer says 14°. The water pails are frozen and the windows are frosted up. Down in the barn cellar where the sheep used to be are two big Hereford cows. They weigh about a thousand pounds each and they have big white faces and long horns. When I go down there to pitch hay to them, the geese always talk the matter over as I go by. I haven’t seen Templeton in a long time—I don’t think he’s around, these days. A good many of Charlotte’s descendants still live in the barn, and when the warm days of spring arrive there will be lots of tiny spiders emerging into the world. And each of the cows will have a little white-faced calf and will take the calf down the lane into the pasture to drink at the pond and to browse around in the woods. And the goose will fix herself a nest in the barn and she will sit on her eggs for four weeks and then the goslings will arrive. So I am looking forward to spring.

  I enjoyed all your letters and am glad you had a good time reading my book. I don’t know where you got the idea I was retiring. I don’t intend ever to do that. But if I don’t stop answering letters I’ll never get another book written.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To ARTHUR MAC GILLIVRAY, S.J.

  25 West 43 Street

  2 February [1958]

  Dear Father MacGillivray:

  Thanks for the post card showing one of my favorite bodies of water, and the towers it reflects. You ask if some of my writings haunt me; they sure do. At my age I am haunted by the feeling that everything I write I’ve written before, only better.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  • James Thurber, at work on The Years with Ross, sent White a copy of a letter Harold Ross had written to Henry Luce after the two men had had a stormy meeting about Wolcott Gibbs’s Profile of Luce, which was written in the style of Time magazine and published in The New Yorker of November 28, 1936. Thurber did not publish the letter.

  To WILLIAM SHAWN

  North Brooklin, Maine

  20 Oct 1958

  Dear Bill:

  I’m enclosing the document I received from Jim. He says, in his letter to me, that it is “one of two copies” he has had made, and that he got it from “a young lady I don’t know.” This young lady, he says, sent it to him “with the wonderful and hilarious statement that it has been used for years in journalism courses throughout the United States.” Amen.

  My recollection of this affair is that the NYer allowed Luce to see proofs of the Gibbs piece, partly because Fortune through Ingersoll had sent proofs of their NYer piece over to our place. I think they went to Fleischmann, not to Ross, but anyway, they got around. When Luce read the Gibbs parody, he not only checked facts (which weren’t even facts, being parody) but he got sore and began complaining about the tone and everything else. The famous meeting took place, and this letter got written.

  It seems to me that this letter is New Yorker property, not Ross property, but I don’t know the legal side of it. Anyway, both K and I wrote Jim and advised him against using it, on the score that Ross wouldn’t want it published.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To J. G. CASE

  [New York]

  November 3, 1958

  Dear Mr. Case:

  For the guidance of your catalogue writer, here is the way the book stands.

  I have tinkered the Strunk text—have added a bit, subtracted a bit, rearranged it in a few places, and in general have made small alte
rations that seemed useful and in the spirit of Strunk. The first two sections of the “Composition” chapter sustained the heaviest attack; I felt that they were narrow and bewildering. (In their new form they are merely bewildering.)

  I have added a number of entries in the “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” chapter, and as a result that chapter will run longer. In the main, though, the “little book” will end up very nearly the same size as the original: it will still be small, concise, opinionated, non-comprehensive—a squeaky voice from the past.

  My New Yorker piece, I think, should go unchanged (except for the lead sentence) as a preface. I shall write a short note, or foreword, explaining the circumstances that brought the book back into print and telling roughly what has taken place.

  I am dropping Chapter VI, “Words Often Misspelled.” In its place will appear a chapter by me, called (tentatively) “An Approach to Style.” Here I drop a few cautionary, and I fear paternalistic hints; I discuss style in its broader meaning—not style in the sense of what is correct but style in the sense of what is distinguished and distinguishing. The foreword will make clear that this chapter is my work, not Strunk’s, and that my professor might, if alive, heartily disapprove of every word of it.

  This essay on Style—Chapter VI in the book—runs around 3500 words, I would guess. I have been letting it stand, to see if some of the lumps and other impurities would settle, and I hope to improve it before I have done. In writing it, I deliberately departed from the strict rhetorical face of style, in an attempt to give the little book an extra dimension, which, considering what is taking place, it can probably use. In short, I shall have a word or two to say about attitudes in writing: the why, the how, the beartraps, the power, and the glory.