Letters of E. B. White
Page 67
To GARTH WILLIAMS
[North Brooklin, Maine]
December 31, 1969
Dear Garth:
Your letter saddened me, but I was feeling sad before it arrived. I had always hoped that Williams and White would be as indestructible as ham and eggs, Scotch and soda, Gilbert and Sullivan.
When I turned in my book manuscript, just before Thanksgiving, I asked Ursula to please get the book out in the spring—not wait till fall, which would have been more to Harper’s liking. I think this put some extra pressure on her, and I got a letter back asking about “illustration.” I replied, saying that the decision was hers, and that I felt deeply indebted to you, and that she would have to take it from there. An author is not in a position to make a deal with an artist.
The impression I got, after a couple of phone calls, was that, although everybody wanted you to do the book, distance was a controlling factor, and they didn’t think—since it is a long book requiring thirty or forty pictures—that spring publication would be possible with you working from Mexico. This is the impression I got, and I held out for spring publication; so the blame, if any blame is to be attached to anybody, belongs with me.
Anyway, I am very sad tonight, the last night of a disturbing year. I’m not entirely happy about the text of the book—I am old and wordy, and this book seems to show it. But my chief source of woe is Katharine’s long illness. Our house is rigged up now like a hospital, complete with hospital bed and nurses in white uniforms and off-white shoes. K has had to take cortisone for such a long period and at such a high rate, her bones gave way under the strain.
Although you and I have had very little communication and contact over the years, I have always felt immensely in your debt—particularly for your characterization of Stuart, which really blew life into him and was the start of the whole business. Without your contribution, I don’t think Stuart would have traveled very far. Whether my cygnet ever gets off the ground remains to be seen. Whether he does or not, I am unhappy about being separated from you after these many fine and rewarding years. I never expected it to happen, and I never wanted it to happen.
Yrs,
Andy
To HELEN THURBER
North Brooklin, Maine
January 9, 1970
Dear Helen:
My ears still ring, and I’m very late in thanking you for our Christmas surprise.1 It was a terrific gift, and it’s a great Thurber—one of the best. I would have written you sooner, spilling out my gratitude on this heavenly blue stationery, but I’ve been rassling a set of Harper galleys and the work has exhausted this old author. I think the Harper copydesk has found a happy (for them) solution to the problem of punctuation: wherever you see a comma, take it out; wherever none exists, put one in. This is easy to remember, gives a girl something to do with her pencil, and irritates the author. Anyway, I have just finished the awesome task of restoring about five thousand commas to their original position and removing an equal number from some very unlikely crevices indeed.
I don’t remember that business about the martini in the thunderstorm—it sounds like an invention of the great man himself. I am sorry to say that martinis, if anything, have a muting effect on the constant ringing in my ears, and as five o’clock approaches, my thoughts turn toward the elixir of quietude. Gin stops the bell from tolling. Thunderstorm or no thunderstorm, it is a great treat for me to have an original Thurber sitting on the mantel waiting for an itinerant picture framer to stop by. Oddly enough, this house is almost completely lacking in Thurbers. I have never been a collector, and a few years ago when I was shipping off stuff to Cornell preparatory to dying, I bundled up the “La Flamme and Mr. Prufrock” series (Jim’s wedding present to K and me) and sent the pictures along, where they would be preserved under fireproof conditions.
We had a rather odd, uneasy Christmas. Joe had undertaken to help sail a 52-foot schooner across the South Atlantic and we had had no word from him since the Cape Verde Islands. He had expected to be home for Christmas. As things turned out, the passage went well and Joe made good progress while at sea under sail but got stopped cold at LaGuardia on December 26 when our modern flying machines came to a full stop in a NE blizzard. Joe took a train to Boston and found flights still being cancelled, so he continued to Brooklin in a taxi driven by a man who had an artificial foot, which he kept on the seat beside him in case he needed a spare.
K has had a rotten time lately, being high on cortisone. She is trying to write a garden piece but is as tense as an E-string. We have no snow but steady, hard cold. My storybook will probably appear in the spring, I hope, when my goose starts to lay. (I don’t want to be the only one around here who’s laid an egg.) So far, the book has given me little joy and lots of headaches. . . .
Thanks, thanks for your gift. I hope you are up and around, enjoying the 1970s in good health and good spirits.
Love,
Andy
To CASS CANFIELD
North Brooklin, Maine
January 30, 1970
Dear Cass:
It’s good of you to want to bring out “Here Is New York” in a larger format and with photographs. I wish I thought it a good idea, but I’m unable to make myself believe that it is.
You mentioned bringing the book up to date. This would really mean writing a whole new book, and I can’t undertake that under the present circumstances. The book as it stands is a period piece belonging to a day long gone and about a city that no longer exists. On my infrequent visits to New York, I am painfully aware that the city I wrote about in the summer of 1948 has changed beyond recognition and that the mood I used to entertain is no longer upon me. To reissue “Here Is New York” in its present text would be unthinkable (the title would have to be “Here Isn’t New York”), and to catch up with New York and get it on paper would, for me at my age, be an assignment beyond my powers.
How sad! I would like to feel differently about the matter.
Yrs,
Andy
• Whit Burnett asked White for an explanatory note to accompany his piece “Death of a Pig,” which Burnett proposed to include in his anthology This Is My Best.
To WHIT BURNETT
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[January? 1970]
Dear Mr. Burnett:
“Death of a Pig” is a straight narrative, and, as I indicated in the opening sentence, I felt a peculiar compulsion to give an accounting. My involvement with suffering and death became great, but I was pursued by the shadow of the irony (or perhaps idiocy) of a man’s desire to save the life of a creature he had every intention of murdering. And, of course, I was aware of the farcical notes that seem always to intrude, even in the great theme of death.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To J. G. CASE
North Brooklin, Maine
February 16, 1970
Dear Jack:
Thanks for your letter.
I don’t think the librarians have really surrendered to Stuart Little, but they are retreating in disorder. My new book, by the way, has a character in it who receives a medal. Available at all bookstores, come Spring.
I can’t get going on “The Elements” until some of the dust has settled around here. It has been a dusty year in more ways than one. But I am saving stuff in a folder, against the day when I can make a start on revising the book. And I’ll need your help, as usual.
I regard the word “hopefully” as beyond recall. I’m afraid it’s here to stay, like pollution and sex and death and taxes. I wrote a comment in the New Yorker about “hopefully” when it first reared its ugly head, but without any belief that my remarks would act as a deterrent. I heard the word first when I took a very pretty granddaughter of mine to dinner at Le Cheval Blanc. I asked her when she expected to move into her new apartment, and she replied, “Hopefully, on Tuesday.” I can’t remember what I was stuffing into my mouth at the time, but I remember choking on it.
Yours,
&nb
sp; Andy
To JAMES RUSSELL WIGGINS
[North Brooklin, Maine]
February 20, 1970
Dear Russ:
The pollution of Center Harbor by the waste from the Faith School is something the town may have to cope with directly. I attended the recent hearing, when the Environmental Improvement Commissioners were on hand, and I doubt that the State is going to prevent that school from flushing its toilets into our salt water. Even if the State denies the petition to dump treated sewage into the Harbor or the Reach, the School could, I think, file a third petition and continue to pollute. The School has been in violation ever since the first petition was denied, but they continue to flush the toilets, and in about two weeks from now there will be a big influx of students and a corresponding outflow of human waste.
I would like to see the town take this health problem on. The Commissioners are not concerned with public health, they are concerned with a classification of water. It’s a different matter, even though the two are related.
Do you see any chance that this question could come up at Town Meeting, or at a special meeting? I think somebody has got to discover a way to put some teeth into health enforcement in Brooklin, Maine. I’m hoping you will get excited about it. I have deep feelings about it, but I can’t speak publicly, and I’m not well informed about town structure, and I have serious health problems here at home, with Katharine so ill.
The School petitioned to be allowed to introduce a certain number of gallons of “treated waste” into the salt water. The amount was great. I have been reading about treated waste, and whether the amount is great or small, it is bad news. Our coastal cities have been dumping sludge into the ocean from barges for many years. A recent study showed that all marine life had disappeared from the areas where the waste was dumped. Scientists predicted that within fifty years, if the practice were to continue, all marine life along the coast would be destroyed. Meantime, Brooklin could have an epidemic of hepatitis.
Let’s all get together and figure out a way of ending the pollution of Center Harbor. It would be a beginning.
Yrs,
Andy
P.S. I’d like to seize this moment to say that the reincarnation of the Ellsworth American is the best thing that has happened to Hancock County in years. My congratulations!
To DOROTHY HAYES
North Brooklin, Maine
February 21, 1970
Dear Dottie:
I’ve owed you a couple of letters for a long time, and I am really ashamed of myself, but I’ve been drove up lately. My life is too full of goatfeathers at the moment, and it causes me to neglect my friends.
I stopped in to see the twins [lambs], and they are beautiful. Those little white faces—how I love them! And Russell1 has been here with his sawing machine, and all one morning we listened to that magical sound: the one-lung engine throbbing its heart out, the whine of the saw as it bites its way in, then the slowing and laboring of the engine as it comes to grips with a really big stick, then success and a new burst of acceleration. Our whole house was full of this glad and busy noise, carrying the promise of next winter’s warmth.
I don’t know how to thank you properly for the interest you have taken in my book and for the real help you gave me. The latest news is that Frascino is switching to wash, so I guess there will be no line drawings in the book. I have seen only one sample of his wash, not counting the jacket, but I think it will be an improvement. It will slow up the production of the book, of course, as he is setting to work and doing everything over. I’m appearing as artist in one spot in the first chapter, where Sam, the boy, draws a pencil sketch in his diary. It shows a swan standing at the edge of her nest, gazing down at four eggs. I decided to do the sketch myself, as my ability with a pencil is just about right for an 11-yr-old boy. . . .
Love,
Andy
• For the recording of Charlotte’s Web, White had suggested that his friend and summer neighbor Susanna Waterman read the story for Pathways of Sound. His hunch was that her untrained voice would be more effective than the voice of a professional actor. Mrs. Waterman, surprised but pleased, went to Boston and recorded several chapters. Her reading, however, did not satisfy Joe Berk, whose ideas of how something should be read differed markedly from White’s.
To SUSANNA WATERMAN
North Brooklin, Maine
March 15, 1970
Dear Susy:
. . . I’ve always lived by playing my hunches, and on the whole it has worked well and I have no regrets. My mistake with Pathways of Sound was that I failed to get in touch with you first, before dropping your name. I don’t know that it would have made any difference in the long run, but at least you would have had a little time to think about the project and would not have had to field a strange phone call with no warning. . . .
It all started with a letter I had from my agent, Jap Gude, asking me whether I wanted Pathways to record Charlotte. (They had already done Stuart Little, with Julie Harris at the controls, gunning her engine all the way—a fast trip.) I wrote Jap and said I had no objection to having Charlotte recorded, but that I might be more interested in the proposal if the book were read, not by Julie Harris, but by a friend of mine named Susy Waterman. I told Jap that if Joe Berk wanted to consider this suggestion, it would be all right for him to get in touch with you and see if you had any interest in the thing. (At this point I should also have signalled you, but I was busy with many other matters and I rather doubted that Berk would pay any attention to my weird idea anyway. People, in general, pay not the slightest heed to anything I say, and I am always surprised and pleased when someone does.) I knew that Julie Harris had already put “Charlotte’s Web” on a piece of tape, in the hope that I would make a deal with Pathways. That’s another bit of information I should have communicated to you. You perhaps wonder what quirk it is in me that causes me to keep bringing up the subject of your voice with people in the motion picture business and the recording business. It’s partly a hunch, partly that I prefer an untrained voice to one that has been trained. Both you and Stan have unusual voices. Stan’s has great clarity and a kind of natural elegance. Yours is clear, earthy, humorous, and sometimes has an almost childish sound that I like. But I’m familiar enough with the ways of persons in the performing arts to know that their interest in money is always at fever pitch and that they would rather have the name Julie Harris on the dust cover than the name Susanna Waterman.
Berk phoned me a couple of days ago to report on the Boston affair, and I gathered from our conversation that his idea about how a storybook should be read differs from mine. I gather that he was trying to get you to shift your voice incessantly from the spider to the pig and the rat and all the rest of them. It is no wonder you buckled under the strain. “Charlotte’s Web” shouldn’t be dramatized for a recording, it should just be read, and the voice should always simply be the voice of the person reading the book. This doesn’t mean that the reader shouldn’t occasionally put a little English on the ball, but beyond that I think it’s wrong to go, and it sounds to me as though Berk were trying to goad you into some sort of theatrics. A motion picture, with actors, would be a different matter—there the spider would have its special sound, the pig his. But not in a reading.
Anyway, Berk said he will send me some tape from Julie Harris and some tape from you. He seemed willing to do this, although I didn’t make it a condition of our continuing to do business together. . . .
Meantime I send you my apologies and my
Love,
Andy
• Greta Lee and Parker Banzhaf were friends and former winter neighbors of the Whites’ from Sarasota.
To GRETA LEE BANZHAF
North Brooklin, Maine
1 April 1970
Dear Greta Lee:
Thanks for your Easter card. Our day was a bit unusual—K was taken quite suddenly with heart failure on Saturday morning and was unable to get her breath. This was right after breakfast. I
got our doctor on the phone and he whizzed over here and after examining her put in a call for our local ambulance, which is a volunteer affair. Very soon the Corps arrived, with the old DeSoto and an oxygen tank. They gave K a few whiffs of oxygen, then loaded her into the ambulance. Meantime her nurse and I were wildly trying to assemble all the one thousand things she would need in the hospital.
Once we got there, our doctor gave her three shots and then put her in an oxygen tent. True to form, K wanted to take everything into the tent with her: morning paper, latest New Yorker, cigarettes (!! bang bang). Anyway, she responded beautifully to the treatment, slept all night in the tent, and was dramatically improved by Easter morning. There was very little left of me, as I had been sick myself with a springtime resurgence of the old ulcer. But I was so pleased to see the way she bounced back, I didn’t mind, and I felt very lucky that we had been able to get such prompt attention on the Saturday before Easter. The three corpsmen who showed up were (1) the editor of our weekly paper—at the controls, (2) the parson of the Congo church in Blue Hill—oxygen, and (3) the industrial arts teacher at the Academy—heavy lifting. It makes a lot of difference, at such moments, to have your friends drive in and go to work. And our doc was marvelous.
K is on complete bed-rest (she’s as busy as a monkey from morn till night), looks well, and will probably be returned to me on Saturday.
Hope the Banzhaf Easter was less turbulent.
Love,
Andy
• The attempt to record Charlotte’s Web was an unhappy experience for everyone concerned, including Julie Harris, who had read the book for Berk without White’s knowing anything about it. The upshot was that White, after listening to all the tapes, decided to read the story himself.
To JOE BERK
[North Brooklin, Maine]
May 6, 1970
Dear Mr. Berk:
If we are in a quandary, it is because we differ on the way a story should be read. You tend to throw the job to someone in the theater—Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris. I have listened with the greatest attention to these three talented thespians this evening, in the melancholy quiet of my livingroom, and I hold the same opinion I held before I started to listen. They dramatize a book—especially Cronyn and Tandy, Harris less so. I think a book is better read the way my father used to read books to me—without drama. He just read the words, beginning with the seductive phrase “Chapter One,” and I supplied my own dramatization.