Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  If you want your original manuscripts, try dropping a line to Daise Terry or Harding Mason or Roger. I truly believe that the manuscripts are there—but it will take a little time. Don’t tell anybody I told you.. . . .

  I have a brilliant scheme for our joint presentation of artifacts, or, as I now call them, artifarts, to Cornell. My stuff almost fills a pickup truck, and by some miracle of thrift, good management, and chicanery I actually own a pickup truck—a lovely thing, grey. When the frost is on the pumpkin, I’ll load everything aboard, leaving enough room under the tarpaulin for your mizzling little artifarts, and I’ll swing up to Saratoga Springs. Then we two will head west, in bright yellow October, stopping or calling at every likely pub to down a drink and make a little water, and fully loaded in every sense of the word we will draw up, or back up, to Healey’s drophole, and call for the boys to turn us over to posterity. When the sun sinks far away in the crimson of the west.

  Let me know about your wishes. And stay the same as you’ve always been, which is good enough for

  Yrs,

  Andy

  • When White failed to show up in Washington to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, President Johnson asked Senator Edmund Muskie to take the medal to Maine on his next trip home and make the presentation. White, accompanied by his daughter-in-law, Allene, drove over to Waterville and received the award in the office of the president of Colby College, Robert E. L. Strider.

  To ROBERT AND HELEN STRIDER

  North Brooklin, Maine

  30 May 1964

  Dear Dr. and Mrs. Strider:

  Yesterday was a fine day for me and you had a big part in making it so. Occasions of this sort are not always easy for me and I usually waste a lot of time dreading them, but your warmth and friendliness were so immediately apparent that I felt at home as soon as I arrived. I send you my thanks and gratitude.

  I really had not intended to put anyone to any trouble about the medal, which I muffed last December, but Senator Muskie’s scheme gave me the pleasure of returning to the Colby campus and of becoming acquainted with you. The only thing that marred the day for me was that Mrs. White couldn’t be along. She makes much more sense than I do. But you would have had quite a time prying her loose from that Hugonis rose. She had one and lost it, and she hasn’t recovered yet.

  I was awfully glad to see Dean Marriner again. I was moved by the Senator’s presentation, astonished at the sound of my own voice, touched that it all came about on President Kennedy’s birthday, and very proud to strut around your living room in my decorated condition among your delightful company. I hope you both will visit my living room when you come down along the coast, and I’ll try to find some suitable decoration for you as a reward for yesterday’s good conduct. We’ll let you look at the spot where the rose was before it died, and at the interesting places in the front lawn where the big Balm of Gilead trees stood before they collapsed. Our place is full of points of interest.

  I shall always look back with pleasure on my Presidential day at Colby. Thanks again for everything.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To ROGER ANGELL

  North Brooklin, Maine

  June 24, 1964

  Dear Rog:

  Thanks for the Tom Sawyer—just what I wanted. Remind me to pay up when we meet. I gave it to Steven for camp, but I have an idea he may already have consumed it, as he approaches things directly.

  We’ll be glad when you and Carol and the girls get here1—both of us have had a bellyful of the month of June and would like to go on to pleasanter times. I’m the father of two robins and this has kept me on the go lately. They were in a nest in a vine on the garage and had been deserted by their parents, and without really thinking what I was doing I casually dropped a couple of marinated worms into their throats as I walked by a week ago Monday. This did it. They took me on with open hearts and open mouths, and my schedule became extremely tight. I equipped myself with a 12” yellow bamboo stick, split at one end, like a robin’s bill, and invented a formula: hamburg, chicken mash, kibbled worm, and orange juice. Worms are hard to come by because of the drought, but I dig early and late and pay my grandchildren a penny a worm. The birds are now fledged and are under the impression that they know how to fly. When I come out of the house at 6 a.m. they come streaming at me from bush and tree, trying for a landing on shoulder or cap, usually overshooting me in the fog and bringing up against a wall. This exhausts them and me. But I have proved one thing—a man can bring up young robins if he is foolish enough and hardy enough. My next, and most important job, is to hop about on the lawn with my head cocked on one side, to show them how to get their own living and stop breathing down my neck.

  Tell the girls I also have two fine little field mice in the Shipmate stove in the boathouse. They, thank God, have a mother on duty.. . . .

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To J. STEVEN WHITE

  North Brooklin

  August 2, 1964

  Dear Steve:

  It seems a long time since I have seen you, and I will be glad when you and Martha get home again. Do you remember the young robins that I fed when their parents deserted them? They grew very tame. When I would come out of the kitchen door at six o’clock in the morning, they would be waiting for me. One would fly up and sit on my head, and the other would perch on my shoulder while I walked out to the sink in the garage where I fed them their breakfast. I have a picture of them sitting on me and I’ll send you a copy of it when I get one. One afternoon when I walked out to feed the pullets, both robins flew along ahead of me and were waiting on the roof of the pullet house when I got there.

  I had to go to New York in July to get my teeth fixed, but am home now and glad to be here. New York was hot and sticky and I didn’t enjoy it much, but some day I would like to take you there for a visit so you can see the sights.

  Our raspberries are ripe now and they are good, but most of the vegetable garden is suffering from lack of rain. A few mackerel have been caught, some of them over near the Benjamin River and some in East Blue Hill. I think John went fishing for them but don’t know whether he caught any. I have not caught a fish this summer. I may try Walker’s Pond for bass pretty soon. Are there any fish in the lake your camp is on? I had a post card from Martha yesterday and she said she had been on a trip. Write me if you get the chance and let me know how things are going.

  Love from

  Grandpa

  • Early in September 1964, White got a letter from Cass Canfield stating that Harper would like to publish One Man’s Meat in their Perennial Library paperback line. The letter went on to say: “The contract for this book provides that on a cheap edition published by ourselves we should pay a royalty of 10% of the wholesale price specified as retail, less 42%. Actually, on this paper edition the average discount will be 47% and I am proposing a royalty of 51⁄2% on retail. This royalty is the equivalent of 10% on wholesale at 45% off.”

  White was enchanted. He immediately dusted off his typewriter and hammered out the following reply.

  To CASS CANFIELD

  25 West 43rd Street

  New York

  September 11, 1964

  Dear Cass:

  The prospects for a Perennial One Man’s Meat are inviting, and Katharine has agreed to introduce it into her perennial border with the holly phlox and the acrimony. Instead of a royalty of 10% of the wholesale price less 42%, I have been turning over in my mind the idea of a 42% royalty but without cross-fertilization, less ten of the little ones. This would be the equivalent (if my mathematics are right) of six long ones, if they’re the size I think they are. I am accepting your offer assuming. I mean, I can’t not go along with anything that is as exciting and challenging as this except.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  P.S. I saw Zane Grey on the street the other day. He looked awful.1

  To MRS. GORDON KEITH CHALMERS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

 
September 23, 1964

  Dear Mrs. Chalmers:

  Was the adjective “wry”? I’ve forgotten, too.

  Thanks for your nice letter. My wife and I are two little old characters who live in Maine and have nothing to do with the advertising content of The New Yorker. But I shall pass your protest along to someone who does. It was good of you to write.

  Advertising is always a problem and, of all the magazines that carry advertising, none has waged a longer, sterner fight to keep it within the limits of taste and good sense than has The New Yorker. Advertising is the jungle through which winds the thin, clear stream of our discourse. Sometimes it’s difficult to tune out the strange cries that come from the forest, but remember, it is the jungle that supports the stream.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To GEORGE H. HEALEY

  North Brooklin, Maine

  28 September 1964

  Dear Mr. Healey:

  Katharine and I were delighted to get your letter, with the news of Frank and the clarification about my papers. Tomorrow or next day I am shipping four more boxes, courtesy of Brooks Brothers and other good box people. (I’m holding back on the patented boxes to conserve my strength.) A list of the contents is enclosed.. . . .

  I’m glad Professor Keast has been interested in the collection, particularly some of the early New Yorker manuscripts. Physically they are rather dull, being only the finished typescript, and if he ever did a brochure he would have to note that the true collection is in the hands of the world’s charwomen—those resolute females who cleaned out from under my desk in the small hours. It is they, not Cornell, I fear, who hold the evidence of my journalistic crimes.

  Katharine hasn’t committed herself as to her willingness to send along my letters to her, and I am not bringing any pressure to bear on her. For her last birthday I gave her a poem in thirteen cantos, called “Urine Specimen Days—A Backward Glance O’er Rumpled Beds,” which is a chronicle of her many hospitalizations. So you can see your chances of receiving anything from her are not good. I’m proud of the title, just the same.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To SUSAN FRANK

  North Brooklin, Maine

  15 October 1964

  Dear Susan:

  I was glad to hear that you got back safely to Ithaca after your wild dash into darkest Maine.1 The Sun has come and I want to thank you and congratulate you on your handiwork. I now think of this typewriter as “old” and when I pass a mirror I glance in quickly, hoping to get a glimpse of the country squire. I think you are the first person to take careful note of what I had on, and this is a step ahead for me. I’ve always secretly hoped to pass for a country squire, but my friends and neighbors, by and large, have thought that I looked like a transplanted city slicker who wouldn’t know how to whittle a button for a backhouse door and who will probably vote Democratic in the fall. So your remarks were very reassuring to me.

  I wish I could congratulate myself on my own piece, which seems to take a long while to say nothing at all. I simply wasn’t ready for the tape recorder. If I had known about that I would have had something ready and would have practiced up before your arrival. . . . I never even mentioned Professor George Lincoln Burr, who was perhaps the best thing that happened to me in Ithaca. He led me by the hand through the Middle Ages, and for the first time in my life I learned what men will endure in order to keep alive the fires of freedom when they have been almost extinguished. This opened my eyes and my heart in a way that I have not forgotten. Burr was a tiny little fellow, usually seen hustling across the quadrangle carrying a stack of books higher than his head. I live in his debt. And although I can’t remember a darned thing about medieval history I learned the meaning of freedom-of-conscience.

  Thanks again, Susan, for being such a pleasant visitor, and lots of luck in your senior year and in all the years thereafter. If journalism is to be your career, carry the torch high—it’s a nice old torch, much older than this old typewriter.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  • Edward Sampson, son of Martin Sampson, White’s English professor and close friend at Cornell, was writing a biography of White for Twayne’s United States Authors series. The book, No. 232 in the series, was published in 1974.

  To EDWARD C. SAMPSON

  North Brooklin, Maine

  4 November 1964

  Dear Mr. Sampson:

  I recently dispatched to the Cornell Library a copy of the Louisville Herald containing “Bold son of Runnymede . . .” The paper ran it in a two-column box on the front page, the morning after the Derby. Better sonnets have been written but few quicker ones, and I guess this is the only published sonnet whose author was trying to recover his losses in a horse race.

  It was not my first published poem. The Ladies Home Journal, around 1910, gave me a prize (a copy of “Rab and His Friends”) for a contribution to a column conducted by Aunt Janet. Seems to me it was a poem. I had poems in the Mount Vernon High School’s Oracle, and, a bit later, in Christopher Morley’s Bowling Green column. Merit was not in them—but a man can’t have everything.

  Sincerely,

  E. B. White

  To DOROTHY LOBRANO GUTH

  North Brooklin, Maine

  November 10, 1964

  Dear Dotty:

  What a week last week was, with Vermont and Maine going Democratic, and you bearing a son! Weeks like that don’t come along every week in my life, or in yours either. I hope you and Ray did as well as Barry Goldwater—he ended his long campaign a million and a half dollars in the black, a really brilliant defeat. At any rate, I was relieved to get your wire, as I had had no answer to a recent letter inquiring about your health and was beginning to worry about you. Tried to call Jean one evening but with no success. K took the telegram from the Western Union girl in Ellsworth and for a little while there was a certain amount of confusion, which I had to straighten out. K hollered that it was something about “God’s grandchild” and who would that be? We don’t get messages very distinctly here, they all have to be interpreted.

  From one of the department stores (I forget which one) we are sending Raymond Junior a sleeping bag, or bedroll—much the same sort of thing Hemingway worked into his fiction when it seemed to drag. K and I hope this will be useful and will lend a touch of elegance to Tudor Mall on the little boy’s outings. Later, when he buys his first sports car and has a girl named Renata, I believe the thing would serve perfectly well as a footwarmer. I plan also to give your baby a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a Peterson’s “Field Guide to the Birds,” and a copy of “Stuart Little,” as I don’t want him to go through life misspelling words, mistaking the barn owl for the house wren, and failing to realize that his godgrandfather was at one time hard-working. Ray Senior better get busy building a six-inch bookshelf.

  I well remember how wonderful it was to have a son of one’s own, and I hope you and Ray get as much fun and satisfaction out of it as K and I did, in our East Eighth Street days. Even now, some thirty-four years later, I enjoy looking out of my bedroom window at quarter to seven in the morning and seeing the lad go by in his truck on his way to work, his rifle beside him on the seat.

  Write me a note when you get a chance and tell me all about it. Meantime, blessings on the three of you, and

  Love from

  Andy

  To ROBERT S. PALMER

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  December 4, 1964

  Dear Mr. Palmer:

  I think when the UN was founded there was not, as you indicate, “much support” for a world federal government. There was a small scattering of people who were thinking in those large terms, but these people were not of great influence. The time, apparently, was not ripe for any great revolutionary change in the affairs of men, even though the war was fresh in everyone’s mind.

  You are right, I think, in saying that a bad side-effect of the present uneasy peace is that it causes people to beli
eve that the nations, independently, will be able to keep the peace indefinitely through the usual devices of diplomacy and power balance. I think the nuclear stalemate has given the world a priceless breathing spell, free of fighting, in which to reshuffle the cards. But except for the test ban treaty, not much progress has been made. The tendency since the end of the war in 1945 has been for nations to solidify their nationalism, rather than build an interdependent world. The parochial streak in people is perhaps the strongest streak in human nature, and I have no idea how it can ever be eradicated sufficiently to allow a better state of affairs.

  As for the United Nations developing or evolving into a government, I see no chance of it short of a complete overhaul of the Charter—virtually a total rewriting of it. The Charter affirms and extends national sovereignty in almost every clause. However, the total effect of the U.N. is often quite good, in that its very existence suggests the theme of universal government and the rule of law. It suggests our goal, though it fails to provide the machinery for reaching that goal. Curiously enough, the biggest strides toward unity have been taken in the field of economics, with the common market in Europe showing good health. This is encouraging. It may be that our political structure will take shape from our economic structure—but there will have to be a few great statesmen to lead the world along this road. As long as the Communists are bent on capturing the world in the name of Marxism, the job is doubly difficult and formidable. It is, I think, impossible to contain capitalism and communism under one political roof—there are too many fundamental conflicts. The press is an obvious one.