Letters of E. B. White
Page 77
My “holiday” season was real wild. I started in the Intensive Care Unit of the Blue Hill hospital, unable to turn over in bed because there were so many wires and tubes attached to me; I ended it in the hospital, first in Room 10 with a man from Stonington who talked all the time in a voice so low I couldn’t catch the words, then in Room 14—a dead-end room that nobody visits except the technician who comes in before breakfast to draw blood. In between these hospital sessions, I ate Christmas dinner on December 24 at Joel’s, ate another Christmas dinner at my dentist’s house on the 25th, attended my grandson John’s wedding at the Baptist Church in Blue Hill on December 30, joined my neighbors the Hayeses for New Year’s Eve, spent January 1 alone with the newsbreaks and the chores, and acquired the virus that, along with tachycardia, sent me back in the ambulance to the hospital on January 3. Busy holidays. I never got a chance to decorate the tree and did not begin opening presents until the morning of January 2. Behind schedule every inch of the way.
Much love,
Andy
To MISS JANICE H. WHITE
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[February 1979]
Dear Jan:
I’ve owed you this letter for quite a while but have kept putting it off, hoping for a moment when I had a sense of leisure. Oddly enough, those moments seem to come infrequently in my old age. I had supposed it would be just the other way and that I would find time hanging heavy on my hands.
I’m so glad that the Landscape Architects Society are planning to hang Stan’s drawing of the big tree, and it’s great that he was able to know about it and take pleasure in it. Seems to me I once saw the drawing but am not sure about that.
The enclosed letter is from a reader. It struck me as such an odd coincidence, I thought you would like to see it.
Even though I seldom saw Stan all during my mature life, he was always a presence, and his image was fade-proof. Long before you were born, he was showing me how to do things and teaching me basic principles. He really taught me to read before I ever went to school; his system was to hand me a copy of the New York Times and show me how simple it was to sound out the syllables and short words. Nothing to it. I have always suspected that my first grade teacher, Miss Hackett, was a little sore that she had one kid in her class who could read when the others couldn’t. I probably made life difficult for her. And I remember one day when Stan decided he would demonstrate centrifugal force for me (he loved demonstrations that called for a lot of action.) We were in the backyard at 101 Summit. He took a pail of water and cried, “Now watch this!” Then he started twirling rapidly in wild circles until the pail was swinging horizontally. The water, despite the angle of the pail, did not run out. “You see?” yelled Stan. “Centrifugal force!” A boy doesn’t forget sights like that. I have just looked up “centrifugal force” in the dictionary and this is the best the lexicographer could do: “The component of apparent force on a body in curvilinear motion, as observed from that body, that is directed away from the center of curvature or axis of rotation.” Stan said the whole thing with a pail of water, much to his little brother’s delight.
I think I mentioned to Blanche that Dorothy Wyvell called me and asked me about the William Hart painting of our infant sister who died. She said Stan had wanted Dorothy to have this painting, and if she (Dorothy) didn’t want it, it should go to me. Well, we talked this over, and we thought the painting should properly be yours. I hope you will want to keep it. I’m at the point in life when my aim is not an acquisition but a dispersal.
The page proofs of Aunt K’s garden book are due to arrive here very soon, and I’ll be deep in proofreading—which is hard for me now because my eyesight is weak. My vision is fairly accurate, but I tire easily when reading, and I have to work in short takes and often with a magnifying glass. Lately my heart has been behaving pretty well, but my joints are rusty and my step is slowed. One of my problems is that I don’t sleep well and am up and down all night. Some of the nights in this empty house seem interminable. As a result, I feel tired all day. I really hate getting old—haven’t got the temperament for it.
In my upstairs hall hangs the large picture of the White family, taken circa 1900. (I am an infant in Mother’s arms, Stan is in profile, his hair sporting a cowlick. I’m sure you know the picture.) Every time I pass it these days, I get a twinge around my heart, seeing so many faces of those who have departed. None comes through more clearly than the face of your beloved father. He was something. I know how hard it must be for you to have him gone, but you were lucky to have known him so well for so many good years.
Lot of love,
Andy
To WILFRED BOB ROBERTS
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[March 1, 1979]
Dear Mr. Roberts:
I was glad that Joe Berk did not take the first trumpeter that came along but instead waited until he found you. I’m not much of a reader and I needed the kind of help from the horn that you gave me. Many thanks for your part in the recording.
I played a disc last night to refresh my memory, and was pleased all over again. You have, of course, the dubious distinction of being the first musician to perform my song “Oh, ever in the greening spring.” Usually I leave song-writing for the people who know what they are doing, but I thought I’d have some fun for myself this time.
Your rendition of it from the room in the Ritz was everything I could have asked for, and I send you my greetings and my thanks for a splendid performance.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To NANCY ANGELL STABLEFORD
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[April 17, 1979]
Dear Nancy:
Thanks for the good report on the Bryn Mawr affair. I thought your remarks were not only appropriate but lively, and I am darned glad you were there to make them. The rest of us were mostly conspicuous by our absence. I stayed away deliberately but was hoping to take in the exhibit on my way home from Florida, where I was headed until a virus felled me in the Algonquin and this in turn put my heart on the blink for a couple of days. So I scratched Florida and came back to Maine, in a Saab driven by a chance acquaintance.
I’m glad you remembered that comical anecdote about how M. Carey Thomas solved the problem of the censorship of the press. K was fond of telling it, and it never failed to make me laugh. It has universal overtones.
A nice woman named Mrs. Leahy at the Library had some pictures taken of the show and sent me a set, so I’ve an idea of what the thing looks like. From all appearances, the Library really threw itself into the mounting of the exhibit. The absence of Bill Maxwell was a catastrophe—he is a dandy speaker, knew your mother very well, learned a lot about editing from her, and is in general an extremely nice guy to have around. He actually got back east the night before the show, but he was too bushed by hitchhiking on the struck airlines to make an appearance.
Linda Davis must have been a big help. She has absorbed a great deal about K. She dearly loves the business of running it all down—interviews with you, me, Roger, librarians, publishers, etc. She even got to see Shawn, which is like getting to see the Pope or Brezhnev. What I am not sure about is whether she is going to like the business of getting it all down on paper—starting with Word One. But anyway, she must have been a help at Bryn Mawr, and I’m very glad of that.
Spring is slow arriving hereabouts, but it is trying. I have an insane duck that has chosen to make her nest a few feet below the ridgepole of the barn roof. When the ducklings hatch, Henry and I are planning to be down below, wearing catcher’s mitts.
Love,
Andy
• On April 27, 1979, Nathaniel Benchley had written EBW to say he’d heard about the massage parlor named for Charlotte’s Web and joked that the “girls in promotion” had missed an opportunity when they overlooked his children’s books, including The Several Tricks of Edgar Dolphin and Sam the Minuteman.
To MR. NATHANIEL BENCHLEY
[North Brooklin,
Maine]
[ca. May 1979]
Dear Nat:
Keep plugging—you may make it yet. I had the foresight to name a character “Charlotte.” All the massage parlor had to do was hire a madam whose name was Charlotte and they were in business, free of any taint of illegal exploitation. They could always point to their madam and say, “There she is, and this place is her web.” Harper’s lawyer wrote a stern letter, but I doubt if he has a leg to stand on, and Charlotte probably has two—one as shapely as the other.
“Onward and Upward in the Garden,” by Katharine S. White, will be out this summer. (Farrar Straus). (Adv.)
Yrs,
Andy
To MISS LINDA DAVIS
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[July 1, 1979]
Dear Linda:
Fish’s recipe goes like this—
Equal parts lime juice, apricot brandy, honey, and dry vermouth. Stir this all together (you only need a tiny amount of the whole business), then add 4 times the amount of gin. Plenty of ice, stir, and serve. In other words, there is 4 times as much gin as there is all the rest of the stuff put together.
For 2 people, you need only 1/2 ounce of each of the four funny ingredients. Then you need 8 ounces of gin, or what a baby would drink from a bottle.
Andy
To MRS. KATHERINE ROMANS HALL
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[July 6, 1979]
Dear Kathy:
On page 47 of a recent Times Book Review (date unknown to me because the clipping fails to include the dateline) you will find the name Katherine Romans Hall. It appears under “Book Ends,” by Herbert Mitgang, and it is headed “2,190 Items by E. B. White.” (See enclosure.) I just thought you might not have noticed this. Imagine my having had to write 2,190 pieces in order to get the name Katherine Romans Hall into the New York Times! Greater love hath no man. I would do it all over again for you.
Yesterday was a big day: the book itself arrived in the mail. Two copies. The first thing I noticed about it was that it was green, which I was glad of, and the second thing I noticed was that it smelled, which I wasn’t. I haven’t been able to figure out where the smell comes from, unless it is that a list of my writings naturally smells. It might be the ink. It might be the acid-free paper, which is supposed to give the book a life of 250 years. Since many of my pieces had a half life of about three days at the most, the book is full of corpses in various stages of decomposition. This may account for the smell. Autumn leaves have a lovely smell when they decompose, but English prose doesn’t. Sometimes the stench is unbearable. I feel uneasy about this book, but I can hardly wait to get you to autograph a copy for me. You will be, I think, the first person in the world I have asked to autograph a book—I cannot recall ever having made such a request before, although I have known many writers of books.
I think Garland has done a fine job, and I hope you are pleased with the way it turned out. I had no idea there would be a lot of illustrations, including one of a book by Don Marquis who was a really gifted writer. I’m glad you rang him in—it gives the book a quick burst of class. And I am glad there is a view of “Less Than Nothing,” surely one of the least known works in the entire field of American literature. The first five pieces in that series netted me the largest check I had ever received from the New Yorker—two hundred and fifty dollars (fifty dollars a piece). I can still remember the look on Elsie Dick’s face when she walked in my room to hand the check to me—a face that said “Look what I have for you!” And I’m glad you included the original jacket of “Is Sex Necessary?” (Harpers & Brothers were so taken aback by the book I figured they would never get around to getting up a dust jacket for it, so I designed one myself, using Thurber’s man and woman, and they used it. I was a busy boy in those days.)
I am still a busy boy but along other lines. Night before last, I spent most of the evening extracting porcupine quills from Jones’s face. Jones was under the impression he could lick a porcupine, and he gave it a good try. Susy sat back and watched the fight, thank God....
Next week I’ll be 80. All in all, an eventful month, this July. Had a letter from CBS-TV News on Saturday, delivered to my house by Yellow Cab from Bangor. They asked if they could send a camera crew here for an interview on the Cronkite News broadcast, since I was now “the oldest living man.” I declined.
Love,
Andy
To MR. D. ANTHONY ENGLISH
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[July 20, 1979]
Dear Tony:
Here’s a report from Minneapolis, home of the Twins. A mother of two, named Blakely, who works in a bookstore, says the ELEMENTS [of Style] is propped up on the front table with all the other hot paperbacks—between the Rand McNally Road Atlas and The Joy of Sex—and is selling faster than either of them. Actually, it’s scary to learn that the country is turning from sex to semicolons. Makes me uneasy.
Thanks for your birthday greetings and for your own report on the book.
Yrs,
Andy
To JOHN RIMER FLEMING
North Brooklin, Maine
July 26, 1979
Dear Jack:
Thanks for the salute and for the Colman McCarthy clipping. Please accept my condolences in advance, on your joining us octogenarians in September. I, too, find it hard to think up reasons for bothering to live. Yesterday a hundred-year-old elm that has overhung this house almost all its life quit trying any more. My tree man from Blue Hill gave it the coup de grace, and the thud it made when it hit the lawn will be in my ears forever more.
Yrs,
Andy
• Arlyn Adolf from Williamsville, New York, had written in late July 1979, enclosing a newspaper clipping, to say that she and at least one other caller had made a correction to a printed error.
To MRS. ARLYN S. ADOLF
[North Brooklin, Maine]
August 2, 1979
Dear Mrs. Adolf:
Thank you for sending me the clipping about my untimely demise. I shall post it on the bulletin board in the kitchen, to remind my cook that I am still taking nourishment. You didn’t say what paper published it, but I don’t suppose it makes any difference.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To ANN HONEYCUTT
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[September 15, 1979]
Dear Honey:
Stand firm! No despondency, please—it just upsets me. And who are you to be worrying a white-haired old man? Many a night the black dog gets into bed with me, the same one that used to get into bed with Sullivan. And no jumping. Too messy, jumping is. I’ve thought it all out and it’s too messy.
The coming of fall has a tonic effect on me. Summer is the bad time for me, with its sad afternoons and partially insane visitors—most of them strangers. Even with Christmas looming, I feel that if I can just get through summer, I’ve got it licked for another year. In summertime, cars pass slowly by the house, with people gaping to see where America’s oldest living author lives and sulks. In summertime, bad boys on fast motorcycles roar by at naptime, and the phone rings and it is a man calling from a bar in Palo Alto or a bar in La Jolla to tell me that he is in tears because of something I wrote in 1937. (He has had three martinis and could easily break down from reading a Macy ad.) In summertime, my boat hangs idle at her mooring because I am subject to dizzy spells and prefer to have them on land. I won’t go on about summertime, as I know you like it and I don’t want to badmouth anything you like, as I am essentially a courtly man, sensitive to a female’s whims and notions.
Two rotten things—no, three rotten things have happened here recently (to add to the tonic effect of fall). One evening, because it was raining, the raccoon came out early—the masked marauder—and took my seventeen baby ducklings when they were on their way back from the pond with their sainted mother. Foxes and coons do their hunting early on rainy nights, and I know that but failed to act. So I am responsible for seventeen lives lost. Another
rotten thing was, my great elm tree got the disease, sickened, and was struck down by the chain saw—a fearful sight, a terrible loss. And then, to round out my life nicely, I threw my back out of whack eleven days ago, inviting the brilliant pain that accompanies a bad back.
And now for the good news. K’s book has been getting fine reviews practically everywhere, and I have been receiving wonderful letters from nice people.
When I fall off my bicycle I’ll send you a mailgram.
Yrs,
Andy
P.S. I came on a fine sentence in a child’s letter the other day. She was telling me about herself and her general situation. She said, “I have a mother and a father, and they are not separated, and they are not divorced, and they are alive.”
To MR. HARRY CLOUDMAN
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[January 3, 1980]
Dear Harry:
It was good to receive your Christmas letter, along with that hilarious Washington Square scene, complete with the fallen horse and several non-fallen women. I didn’t do much about Christmas except fall ill and take to bed. I had just returned from a trip south, and anyway, I can’t manage Christmas without Katharine.
Her book, “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” continues to get good notices and good sales in the bookstores. If it had been a flop, I would have had to run on my sword, as I felt a terrible sense of responsibility about the whole posthumous business. She had planned a lot of changes in the text, but I was helpless on that score. Very little editing was done. Luckily, Farrar Straus did a splendid job of book making, for which I am very grateful.
Thanks for offering to send Cornell your copy of “The Lady Is Cold.” I’m quite sure they have a copy, but it was a generous gesture and I appreciate it. I was in New York for four or five days around the first of December and had you in mind as someone I wanted to see, but my heart went on the blink after a visit to a sister of mine who is in a nursing home on Long Island, and I ended up seeing hardly anybody at all. I just went to bed at the Algonquin and waited for my heart to get back on the beam again.