Letters of E. B. White
Page 58
tail bicolored—greyish brown above, white below
feet white
ears large
whiskers long
Color—brownish grey, faint dark dorsal stripe
Can climb
From the above I deduced that my mouse was maniculatus, and that’s the way it stands here at the moment. Once, when I was a child, sick in bed, I had a mouse take up with me. He was a common house mouse and I think must have been a young one, as he was friendly and without fear. I made a home for him, complete with a gymnasium, and he learned many fine tricks and was pleasant company. Enough of mice.
Enough of everything. Hope you are well and that Johnny is thoroughly enjoying Brooks. Katharine is miserable and I’m going to take her to Sarasota to see if that will help some.
Yrs,
Andy
To ROBERT F. KENNEDY
[North Brooklin, Maine]
24 December 1963
Dear Mr. Kennedy:
It was kind of you to write me about the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I was awfully sorry that I was unable to be on hand for the presentation, and to meet you there.
I know President Kennedy must have approached the freedom award list as he approached everything else—with personal concern, lively interest, and knowledge. To find myself on his list was the most gratifying thing that ever happened to me, as well as a matter of pride and sober resolve. The accomplishments of presidents in office are usually measured in rather exact terms, but your brother gave the country something immeasurable and almost indescribable, for which we all will be forever grateful.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To ALLENE WHITE
Sarasota, Florida
15 January [1964]
Dear Allene:
I hope these greetings get there in time for The Day. Many happy returns and much love! My gift is enclosed. It isn’t shiny or fluffy or the wrong size or just what you needed, but it has some interesting symbols in the lower left, and it does carry my love.
We have had rough going since our arrival. Something queer happened to my mid-spine while I was in New York (perhaps from being manhandled by an orthopede) and the pain grew to such proportions that I went off my feed and landed in the Emergency Room of the hospital on a dismal Saturday morning, because Saturday is emergency day in Sarasota, when doctors don’t open their offices but just hang round the entrance waiting for collision cases. His name is Peterson and he looks like Ogden Nash and won’t make house calls. Yesterday I was better but K went into a very bad spin, with terrible pain and not much relief even from quinine. The weather has been no help. I was dubious about coming to this crazy sandbar under the circumstances, but maybe it will smooth out eventually. Florida is a wasteland as a result of the Great Freeze of last fall. Almost all of the Australian pines (tall feathery, handsome trees) were killed. The sea grapes are gone and the punk trees and the coconut palms and the Royal palms and the banyans. Even the mangroves, which live with their feet in the water are about half dead. Orange trees and grapefruit trees are loaded with frozen fruit; they stand in the groves looking like wild apple trees on a December morn in Maine. Nothing has been cut down yet—everyone is waiting to see which tree will come back, if any, and also everyone awaits the appraiser, who will estimate the amount of storm damage for tax write-off. But despite the dreary prospect I think it won’t be long before the jungle asserts itself and grows lush again. Nature has a lot of bounce and will not stay down.
Our landlady really threw herself into the new enlarged kitchen and it is a dream of convenience and wonder, but still capable of delivering a nasty punch to the forehead with the leading edge of the upper cabinet doors, as my bloody brow can testify. She even built for my pleasure a new bird bath, only bird bath in America that is located on top of the septic tank. (She doesn’t remember where the tank is, But I do, because I had to exhume it last year in order to check the backup of sewage into the shower bath. The bird bath has a statue of St. Francis worked into the scheme, and if the plumbing goes on the blink again, I’ll have to start by dismantling a saint. That’s my life, as Ross used to say.)
Got to get to the newsbreaks now. Happy Birthday! Come see the wonders here if you ever get the chance.
Love to all
Dad
• Compared with many authors, White lived quite peaceably with his publisher. In 1964, however, Harper got out a new edition of One Man’s Meat for their Torchbooks paperback line, and when White received an advance copy of the book he was unpleasantly surprised to find that it had an introduction that Harper had not bothered to tell him about. The piece was by Professor Walter Blair, of the University of Chicago. White was annoyed that it had been sprung on him, and he phoned Cass Canfield and told him so.
Professor Blair, who was caught in the middle, good-naturedly accepted White’s suggestions for revision and sent him as a peace offering a copy of a very funny little painting—a self-portrait showing Blair on an imaginary visit with Mark Twain in Elmira.
To CASS CANFIELD
Sarasota, Florida
27 January 1964
Dear Cass:
Thanks for the phone call and for agreeing to the recall of books. I am distressed that this should have happened, but do not feel that I am to blame for it.
I started a long letter to you last night, in which I attempted to set down in detail what I thought was wrong with the Walter Blair introduction. But there is no point in my sending the letter now: instead I’ll get to work as soon as I can on the piece itself, so that you can have something in hand. Repairing the piece isn’t going to be easy, as some of the stuff that I object to has a sort of built-in quality. Also, it is never easy, or even advisable, to try to evaluate one’s own life and work. I’ll try to do the minimum of tinkering, and we’ll just have to hope that I can come up with a revision that will be satisfactory to Professor Blair—one that he will be willing to set his name to. I think in general his trouble was that, like many a teacher of English, he felt that to write effectively a man had to be master of certain tricks and devices, had to know the formula. My own belief is that no writing, by anybody, begins to get good until he gets shed of tricks, devices, and formulae.
The factual part will be easy. Professor Blair’s picture of my “fashionable” background in fashionable old Mount Vernon, appropriate “preparation” for my activity with the fashionable New Yorker, is to me hilarious because it is so far afield. For the first eighteen years of my life I never even knew there was such a thing as a dinner party. Nobody got into our fashionable house unless he was kinfolks, and even then he had to beat his way in. I might as well have been living in the Rain Forest.
I’ll be in touch with you. And thanks again.
Yrs,
Andy
To WALTER BLAIR
[Sarasota, Florida]
1 February 1964
Dear Professor Blair:
I presume Cass Canfield will be sending you this revision of your Introduction, and I’m writing to say how sorry I am that this incident occurred. Also, I want to explain briefly what I have done and why. Despite the appearance of the manuscript, I haven’t done much, and I hope that nowhere in the piece have I done violence to your ideas or twisted your meaning.
First, the opening paragraphs contained a few errors of fact, and these were easily set straight. I was never an editor of The New Yorker, for instance. Ross was never Managing Editor—he was the Editor.
Second, I took the liberty of placing Eustace Tilley where he properly belongs, an early figure that was appropriate in the early carefree days of the magazine but whose top hat has been flattened by the events of the world and the sobriety of the periodical. Tilley occurs once a year for sentimental reasons, but his butterfly is long gone.
Third, I have put my dukes up in a few places where I felt that you were making me into something that I’m not or were giving me a stance I had never taken. There was nothing even remotely fashionable in my Mo
unt Vernon phase—I was a middle class public school kid whose parents were not in the swim and didn’t want to be. Oddly enough (yet it really isn’t odd at all), only two staff people in the early days of The New Yorker had a background of Society: Ralph Ingersoll and Fillmore Hyde. The rest of us just popped up out of the subway somewhere.
In a couple of places you had me “aligning” myself with certain writers. I was, in fact, a loner, busy trying to line myself up with me. But like all youngsters I was greatly influenced by my elders—Benchley was one—and I am perfectly sure I imitated him.
In your passage about self-depreciation I removed one quote—the one about hay fever. That piece was pure satire, about Daniel Webster and me, and it hardly qualifies as an example of self-depreciation. I also changed the scarecrow business; I wasn’t afraid a crow would pick on me, I was afraid I might appear quite effective to a crow, but not to anybody else.
The part about Thoreau is self-explanatory. My home in Maine resembles the cabin on Walden Pond about as closely as it resembles Buckminster Palace.
On p. 9 of the copy I have added a phrase in order to forestall what might be an unfair implication. You say that nowhere will one “catch me showing a book-learned city man’s contempt for farm and frontier ways . . .” This sounded to my ears as though you felt I did feel such contempt but was careful to conceal it, for literary reasons. I not only never felt contempt for my country neighbors, I felt deeply envious of their skills, their savvy, their self reliance, and their general deportment.
I changed “formula” to “technique.” In my book, “formula” is a dirty word, and so, as I say, I put my dukes up.
I greatly hope you will find my tampering acceptable to you, and that you will want to lend your name to this Introduction in its revised form. I like the piece, admire the thought and work you put into it, and am grateful to you for having written it. If Cass had just shown it to me before rushing into print with it, all would have been well.
Sincerely,
E B White
To WALTER BLAIR
[Sarasota, Florida]
14 February 1964
Dear Mr. Blair:
I was relieved to get your letter saying you will sign the piece. The episode was an unusual one for me, and I am sure an embarrassing one for Harper. They have been publishing me, man and boy, since 1929, and should be ready for anything. If, as Canfield suggested over the phone, the recalled books are to be dumped into the East River, I think you and I should be on hand to supervise a modest pyrotechnic display for the benefit of the natives.
Thanks for the very fine view of you and Mark Twain in Elmira. It occupies the second most favored position on my desk, in the lee of a couple of school photographs of my grandchildren, and it has already given me much pleasure. And thanks again for your kind letter and your toleration.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
• Scott Elledge, professor of English at Cornell University, had a biography of E. B. White in progress. In the fall of 1963 Elledge had published in the Carleton Miscellany an essay in which he showed that a work of real literary merit such as One Man’s Meat has none of the characteristics of literary merit as defined in a “test” designed to measure students’ appreciation of that quality.
To SCOTT ELLEDGE
[Sarasota, Florida]
16 February 1964
Dear Mr. Elledge:
Thank you for sending me the copy of the Miscellany, and thanks for revisiting the old book. I was surprised to find it among the survivors and delighted that you could discover in it no signs of literary merit. The only real trouble you got into in your piece was when you tried to spell Katharine. My wife does not take any variations lying down.
I was interested in your remarks about the writer as poser, because, of course, all writing is both a mask and an unveiling, and the question of honesty is uppermost, particularly in the case of the essayist, who must take his trousers off without showing his genitals. (I got my training in the upper berths of Pullman cars long ago.)
Thanks again for your kindness and for your estimate. One Man’s Meat is the product of just about the best period in my life—best because at that time I could be almost continuously active without fatigue. And that’s where the fun is, for me, anyway.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To CASS CANFIELD
Sarasota, Florida
21 February 1964
Dear Cass:
Congratulations on receiving the Lasker Award, and in such a noble cause.1 I don’t know just what you’re going to do with the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which will simply make Jane2 uneasy, but I certainly hope you are going to spend the $2500 on contraceptives for the women of China. The figures on the population explosion are frightening, but there are a few things that are going for us, despite all. I’m thinking of the rate of increase of the punched cards that issue from the maws of business machines. It ought not be many years before the civilized peoples die off from suffocation—an avalanche of paper. Tax lawyers are already beginning to look pale and short of breath.. . . .
I was very glad to get Walter Blair’s letter. My chief reason for kicking up the fuss was on the score of The New Yorker. I feel that a man is privileged to say anything he wants to about the magazine, but that he can’t use one of my books as a platform. This is known as White’s Principle.
Yrs,
Andy
• In explanation of the following letter, Frank Sullivan said: “Andy was being facetious about Pete Vischer living ‘close to the line.’ Pete had a luxurious country estate in Port Tabac where he and his third wife lived.... Pete sent me a view of his manor and I passed it on to Andy. Then Andy sent me the folder of photos of their grand place at North Brooklin. I enjoyed them and then returned them, as per Andy’s request.”
To FRANK SULLIVAN
North Brooklin, Maine
May 14, 1964
Dear Frank:
My thoughts have often turned to Vischer, down there in Port Tabac, but until your letter arrived I hadn’t known how close to the line he was living. The whole place can be encompassed within a single post card, stables and all. I want to extend an invitation to you to visit me and Katharine here in decent surroundings, which are so ample and well appointed as to require eleven frames to depict fully. See enclosures. Our house was built by a man who did not sign the Declaration of Independence (an impudent document) and who probably had quite a time signing his own name, which I think was Allen. As for yearlings, I have a pair of yearling orioles that are about to hang their nest from the branch of an elm in our dooryard (Section I, Frame 2). I bought them from the oriole man.
I was on the point of writing Mr. Healey when your letter came. Your courtesy and kindness in consulting K and me about our wishes threw something of a bombshell into my own artifacting operation, which has been under way here for some time. I have never consulted a damn soul about his wishes, and suddenly I realized that I am neither courteous nor kind but merely compulsively tidy. (I’m also fighting a losing battle; more stuff arrives here each day than leaves, and I’m afraid I shall die of congestion of the attic.) First I’d better answer your question—and will answer for K, too.
Send me no artifacts. Since you and I are both in the happy position of emptying our drawers into Cornell, I am quite content to have you donate my letters, and I will donate yours. They will sleep side by side through the unthinkable ages. However, at this juncture, I’ll put on a show of courtesy myself: do you want me to send your letters back to you? I can easily and will gladly do this, if you wish. There, sir! An artifact for an artifact.
I got into the bestowal game two or three years ago as a result of my tax lawyer’s tall tales about the Great Worth of manuscripts and other literary shavings. Some of his tales turned out to be not so tall after all. For instance, I gobbled up the manuscript and drafts of “Charlotte’s Web,” together with a lot of letters pertaining thereto, sent them to Cornell, and
that year received a gift allowance of $4800. Correction: $4817.50. The stuff was appraised by John S. Van E. Kohn, of the Seven Gables Bookshop, and I think these appraisers feel that they should end up with some figure other than a round one, to show that they’re not just guessing. Anyway, the episode stuck in my mind; if I could pick up forty-eight hundred bucks for a children’s book, think what I could do with something written for adults! Vistas opened up, and my step could be heard more frequently on the attic stairs. I have an unusual attic; about thirty-five years ago I discovered that trying to decide whether to keep a letter or throw it away was taking too much out of me, so I eliminated the decision-making thing from my life by the simple expedient of keeping everything. My attic is large (Section II, Frames 5 and 6), and the only real trouble I’m in now is that sorting over old papers gives me a terrible sinus condition and most of the letters sound something like this: “Dear Mr. White: I’m taking the liberty of sending you Jane Fetlock’s latest novel, which we here at Random feel shows a subtlety of mind that outranks etc.” I put this squarely up to Healey, and his reply was, “Send everything.” He said modern library procedures had ways of dealing with Jane Fetlock.
In your letter you remarked that your manuscripts ended in wastebaskets “here or at the New Yorker.” I think you are wrong about the New Yorker. As far as I know, every manuscript you turned in to the magazine is still there, in the basement, except manuscripts from the year 1925 to the year 1934. These, too, would be extant had not a patriotic member of our advertising department given way to a burst of emotion in World War II and donated the first nine years’ collection to the paper drive. When Ross learned of this he blew all seven gaskets, and there was a goddamming that could be heard as far as a Hundred and Tenth Street. He goddammed for three days without letup. He was in my office a dozen times, venting his magnificent spleen. He would have taken [the patriot] and disemboweled him with a machete, except he didn’t have a machete. My desk was so full of goddams I could hardly move a comment into position. But I continued to move them into position off and on, and about two weeks ago they all appeared from the New Yorker’s cellar (on my request and after a year’s labors on the part of the basement staff), and I now have a stack of Notes & Comment manuscripts, or typescripts, that is, literally, two feet high. This ought to stop Healey, but he seems ready for anything. Actually, the comment manuscript originals are, in the aggregate, as like as two peas. They simply show that I was, in the final draft, a neat typist, that I spelled most of the words right, and that I got almost everything into the confines of a single sheet of yellow paper. (The days of yellow paper, by the way, are over—we now print in Chicago, and we write, or mumble, on slick thick awful white paper. I would rewolt, but my comment writing days are over, so there is not much point in rewolting.)