Letters of E. B. White
Page 56
I must leave you now to build a support for an espaliered apple tree with the wind NW at 30 miles per hour. Everything around this place depends on me for support—it is disgusting.
Yrs,
Andy
To J. G. CASE
North Brooklin, Maine
July 13, 1962
Dear Jack:
You chose a real whiz (“Whizzer White,” they call me) when you picked me for your grammarian. A man named Betz, in Riverside, Connecticut, has turned up the best boo boo yet. Look on P. 52, first paragraph. “There is no. . . .”
There is no inflexible rules, all righty!
Some day I shall make a trip to the attic, examine the original manuscript, and find out whether I really wrote that. Meantime, I plan to burn my typewriter and scatter the ashes over Lower Fifth Avenue.
Yrs,
Andy
To CASS CANFIELD
North Brooklin, Maine
18 September 1962
Dear Cass:
A copy of my book arrived yesterday and I hasten to say that I am pleased with its appearance. The text is a little weak, but physically it’s a fine book, and I thank you one and all.
You even managed to get it here on Katharine’s birthday, which was a help to me, as I had no gift for her and palmed this off on her.
I wish I looked like Niccolò Tucci. Have you seen his picture on the jacket?1 That’s the way an author should look. Now compare it with the picture of me. I appear to be digging a piece of wax out of my left ear.
Yrs,
Andy
To DAVID E. LILIENTHAL
[Sarasota, Florida]
February 26, 1963
Dear Mr. Lilienthal:
Thanks for sending me the copies of your Stafford Little Lectures. I am reading them with a good deal of interest and agreement.
To be against disarmament, these days, is like being in favor of influenza—people don’t seem to grasp what you’re talking about. I think the popular acceptance of weapons control, or weapons reduction, as the road to peace is easily as alarming as the power of the accumulated weapons themselves. You’ve done a great service in your attempt to dispel these fantasies of life.
Sincerely yours,
E. B. White
To FAITH MC NULTY MARTIN
Sarasota, Florida
11 March [1963?]
Dear Faith:
Johnny is right, you can be stuck with your private monsters. I never thought of it that way until I read his piece, and as you say, he has been reading around in The Works.1 But he is right about your own private monsters.
I’ve got a leafy jungle down here, in case you want an adventure, but the weather has been so lousy nobody would even settle for an adventure. Luckily, my real estate man, who weighs 230 pounds and is a friend of Ted Williams, lent me a rod and reel and a fast boat—he did this in desperation—and I have been having good fishing, for me.
Tell Johnny to read Santayana for a little while, it will improve his sentence structure.
Yrs,
Andy
To ROBERT M. COATES
Fiddler Bayou
[Sarasota, Florida]
11 March [1963]
Dear Bob:
At the end of a day of sickness I stumbled on “Special Care” in what I believe is called “working proof” and read it and felt better right away.1 It is a wonderful piece. Coates in his stride, life-giving as death so often is. Of course I bridled when I got to “from his own vantage point of twenty-eight.” You fiction writers! As an elderly essayist who ages on paper, year by year, just as he ages in the mirror in the bathroom, I resent this literary license that enables a lovesick old recovery case to lop thirty years off his hide at the stroke of a typewriter and with the lovely Mrs. DeCasiris, an older woman, dying in the next bed. I felt that she suffered an undeserved hardship in a hard time. But these are mere quips and quibbles; the thing is, it’s such a fine piece. Gives me courage to go on, in the mournful sixties. Shows what man can do, with what he remembers. And one of the best parts, I thought, was the part about time becoming fluid in a hospital, and the way you float in it. Last summer I spent seven days in Harkness, floating. Nobody came to see me, nothing happened, I didn’t eat or drink, I didn’t read, it was a private room, my doctor left town, the nurses disappeared one by one into the heat of summer and vacations, and I was alone, truly afloat in time, more alone than I have ever been in my life.
We’ve been here in Sarasota since early January, enjoying indifferent health and the scraping sound of dead palms. I have an ulcer, K has a blocked artery, and we sit around waiting for a change in weather and in luck. The water in the Gulf, despite the severe winter, has warmed to a tolerable 62° and I stumble into it every morning from a convenient little strip of sand at the mouth of the bayou, within stroking distance of dolphins. I have abandoned writing after two sterile years, and good riddance. But then there come these uneasy days, when I pick up a “Special Care” and feel a return of the old special itch.
The throat, as you discovered the hard way, is unquestionably the seat of the emotions. In January, on this unheated sandbar, I developed about ten ailments all within a week, and as a result went into what in happier days we used to call a “nervous breakdown.” The thing I remember with the greatest chill is the way my throat closed up on me, my vocal cords got rough, and I couldn’t swallow pills. Fortunately I was able to swallow whiskey, from long practice, and continued to do so. And recovered after a fashion.
Hope you and Boo2 are wintering well, and congratulations to you, Robert M. Coates, for doing it again.
Love from us both,
Andy
To CAROL ILLIAN BAKER
Sarasota, Florida
15 March 1963
Dear Cally:
It was so nice to get your letter. . . . I think the biggest trouble with the best-seller list is its title, because the word “best” has a sneaky way of attaching itself to the books themselves. Time Magazine publishes two lists—the first is called “Best Reading” and the second “Best Selling,” which is a step forward.
As an author of books, I like to study the best-seller list; it lets me know how I’m doing in the marts of trade. I have never run a bookstore, but I can see that a list such as your boss suggests would be helpful. One of the reasons people consult the best-seller list when selecting a book is simple fear—they’re scared they will be caught in a social group without having read what other people have read.
It’s my belief that the publishers, rather than the book reviewers and the compilers of lists, are the real jokers in the litry world today. Twenty or thirty years ago, a good house like Harper or Scribner had good editors, whose mind was on their work and who were interested in finding and developing promising writers. At Harper’s there was Eugene Saxton. At Scribner’s there was Maxwell Perkins. And there were others. Nowadays most of the publishing houses are operated like a garment business—someone tries to find out what the public wants and then someone is delegated to produce it. This results in non-books, or near-books. Considering the low state of the publishing business we are lucky to get as many creditable books as we do. . . .
Haven’t seen the albino dolphin but have been swimming with porpoises who like this tiny strip of beach.
Love,
Andy
To ROGER ANGELL
[Sarasota, Florida]
5 April [1963]
Dear Rog:
Now that the grapefruit days are over, I can report that your man Al Weis looks good. Lopez has used him a lot, both at short and at second, and he has been all you could ask for, defensively, but hasn’t done much with his bat. For my money he is a more capable shortstop than Hansen—but you would have to get that confirmed by Lopez, I guess. They’ve been saving Fox, on account of his Great Age, and Weis has filled his shoes nicely, although his feet don’t turn out the way Nellie’s do.
Baseball was a life saver for us this winter—the one thing K was able
to manage in the way of relaxation. She was able to attend most of the games, walked to and from the car without much pain, and generally enjoyed herself. Nothing else down here has given her any pleasure this season and she has been very depressed because of her disabilities and very disappointed at her lack of progress. . . .
Both of us, of course, are suffering from the onset of professional inactivity, or inadequacy, or both, and in her case it is greatly aggravated by her almost-lost dream of writing another garden piece or two, so as to put a book together. She came down here with a foot-locker loaded with catalogues and garden books, and she has hardly been able to touch it. She hasn’t quite given up but her spirit is badly cracked, and it is the saddest thing I have ever had to live with, to see her this way, after having done so much for so many, and now unable to do a small thing for herself. I sometimes think I would give everything I own for one garden piece, one book, and one restored lady.
Your letters have been a big help, as she feels she is really in touch with the way things are. . . . We’ve had a month of consistently good weather, but Florida usually manages to mess things up somehow or other—this year a “red tide” has been hanging off the coast, and we were visited with a beach-full of dead fish. It can be dreadful—in 1947 they were using bulldozers to clean up the fish piles, two people died of respiratory troubles, and many had to leave the Key. About ten days ago, cormorants, raccoons, manatees, and sea turtles began dying from paralysis—unexplained. We had a sick shag in the Bayou, and a general uneasiness because nobody could get anything analyzed in a lab. People have been knocked over from eating oysters and clams, and so it goes. This may not have been the winter of Kennedy’s discontent but it has been the winter of mine.
Love,
Andy
To MARK VAN DOREN
[New York]
April 29, 1963
Dear Mark:
Sorry I can’t sign the letter. I’m for a test ban treaty, as I think it is worth the risk involved. But I don’t think coexistence with a nation whose territorial ambitions are, by its own admission, unlimited, is or can be peaceful. And I am flatly against disarmament, which I believe to be a delusion—a harmful and costly one. The best statement I’ve seen on this was in David Lilienthal’s series of Princeton lectures recently.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To CHARLES MORTON
Hotel Algonquin
New York
6 May 1963
Dear Charley:
I take up my ballpoint to thank you for your three fine pieces,1 the last of which I just finished, having returned to the hotel after a session (my first) with a periodontist, who proposes to remove a small section of my gum, or goom, tomorrow noon, thus detaining me another day in this city of shadows and memories. To a large extent my memories of the early New Yorker agree with yours more than with those of the other memoirists who have tackled that difficult subject and those elusive years. And I thought that you, more than the others, recaptured the amiable spirit and wondrous intent of the magazine and its hopeful editor. Too much has been written, I think, by people who nursed a particular grudge, like some drowsy sailor nursing his last beer at the end of the bar—people who failed to see the sandstorm for the grain of sand in their eye. So I found your genial and comical account extremely refreshing and gratifying, for those were, by & large, good days for all of us, dead or alive. Your description of the depression was quite enchanting, and also disturbing to me, because I have lived all my life with a guilty feeling about the depressed years. The New Yorker was, of course, a child of the depression and when everybody else was foundering we were running free, and I still feel that I escaped the hard times undeservedly and will always go unacquainted with the facts of life.
I still do newsbreaks for the magazine but am otherwise disengaged, and for the last two years have been unable to write. They have been bad years for the Whites, with Katharine continuously ill. . . . We have been in Florida this winter (it helps relax the arteries but otherwise makes one rather tense) and are trying, against odds, to get home to North Brooklin. . . . Miss Terry is still at work but in an easier job. I lunched with Shawn today; he had a banana on Special K, I had a 3-minute egg on white toast. Thanks again for the memories.
Sincerely,
Andy White
P.S. Forgive this cautionary postscript: this letter is for your eyes, not for the readers of the Atlantic. EBW
To JOAN LARKIN
[New York]
May 7, 1963
Dear Miss Larkin:
To answer your letter of inquiry, my essay “Walden,” written in 1939, is a factual report of a visit to Concord and the pond.1 In the early parts of the essay, the reader is reminded that the world changes very little, basically, and that Thoreau’s account is “a document of increasing pertinency.” Thoreau was a prophetic man—many of his observations seem truer today than when they were written. The complexity of life, which he deplored and which he warned against, increases year by year.
There is no satirical intent in the essay: I simply reported on what the modern visitor to the Pond sees—the popcorn wrapper, the DuBarry pattern sheet, littering the place, but along with them, the immemorial frog note, bridging the years and tying us all together. The boys singing “America” were there on the pond, skylarking, having a fine time, making what was once a quiet place into a rather noisy one. There was nothing derogatory in this report—I loved the boys and I love America, popcorn wrappers and all. I also love to think back on an earlier Walden Pond, before it had been taken over by civilization, and when its principal visitors were fishermen, trappers, and philosophers.
The final paragraph is a commentary on Thoreau’s bachelor state—to remind the reader that his ideas on “economy” were those of an ascetic, a celibate, and not all of them are realistic when applied to a young married man (which is what I was at the time) whose thoughts were on taking home a baseball glove to his small son.
Usually, I don’t explain my writings at length, but your letter with its suggestion that the piece was derogatory of our society showed that you were reading things into the essay that are wholly false. So I am taking this chance to straighten you out. You might like to look up another piece on “Walden” that I wrote on the 100th anniversary of the book’s publication. It appears in my collection called “The Points of My Compass,” which you can probably find in your public library if you are so minded.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To BEULAH HAGEN
North Brooklin, Maine
1 June 1963
Dear Beulah:
Thanks for all the things you have been sending me—the citation, the original drawings, the Delta paperbacks, and the nifty copy of my latest book in blue and gold. Now what I need is YOU, to file all these fine gifts in their proper places, which, in this house, means a trip to the attic. I’ve made one big improvement in the attic since my return home: I gave the cream separator away, to a neighbor who has a cow that has recently freshened, and in its place built bookshelves all around the base of one chimney, to hold bound volumes of The New Yorker. We have a complete set of the New Yorker bound volumes; starts in 1925, and you can imagine what that does to an old house that has many windows and no wall space.
We’re right in the middle of apple blossoms, lilacs, and hay fever, and are coming to the end of tulips, daffodils, and fritillaries. Next thing that’s going to happen is my birthday, then the total eclipse of the sun.
Yrs,
Andy
To CASS CANFIELD
[North Brooklin, Maine]
7 June 1963
Dear Cass:
Thanks for sending me the ad in the New Statesman. The British reviewers have been very kind to my book, and I hope it will mean that a few Englishmen will take a chance on buying the book, if only to keep Jamie [Hamish] Hamilton’s courage up.
The sales here have exceeded my early guesses and I’m pleased that I was able to get u
p over 50,000. Not bad for a clipbook.
The other day I read a letter Thoreau had written his mother and it had a reference to you in it. He had been visiting publishing houses to see if he could earn some money. “Among others I conversed with the Harpers—to see if they might find me useful to them—but they say that they are making fifty thousand dollars annually and their motto is to let well alone.” I thought you might be amused by this.
Yrs,
Andy
• Howard Cushman sent White a telegram to congratulate him on being named by President Kennedy to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The wire read:
This morning’s tidings make me glad.
Congratulations, Freedom’s lad.
To HOWARD CUSHMAN
North Brooklin
July 9 [1963]
Dear Cush:
Your merry telegram pleased both me and the Western Union gal in Ellsworth, who had to deliver it over the phone and who was relieved not to be interrupted in the middle of it, an experience she had had a couple of days before when she began reading Kennedy’s wire to my skeptical wife. The President was a bit long-winded, and after K had dutifully scribbled the first thirty or forty words on a scratch pad, she said to the girl, “Is this a practical joke?” (There’s a wife for you!) “No,” said the girl a little stiffly, “Western Union is not allowed to transmit practical jokes.” And where was I while this embarrassing exchange was going on? Why, in the tub, of course, where Freedom’s lad should be, soaking the gurry out of me armpits.
Anyway, it was good of you to start warming up the wires. Most of my distant friends were much too heavily engaged celebrating the Fourth, and the local crowd maintained a decent silence—anything Kennedy does to you, in these parts, is considered no worse than a bad cold. . . . For a couple of days I sneaked around the house in a hangdog fashion, but am gradually recovering my natural poise. . . .
Love,
Andy
To CASS CANFIELD
[New York]
July 19, 1963