Letters of E. B. White
Page 81
Because of the overwhelming difference in our ages—she in her late 30s, I in my early 80s—we were free of the strain of any emotional or romantic involvement. It could be placed safely on the shelf, and was. Instead, we could address ourselves to the serious business of having a good time: keeping a canoe on its course, following road maps in a car, inflating bike tires, sunning ourselves, and taking photographs. For me, the pleasure of Corona’s company in these last desperate years has been great. We see each other only a few days in every year, but the visits are something I look forward to, as a child looks forward to a day at the circus.
End of rundown.
The book still seems long to me, but I found some of your interpretive passages interesting and readable. I’m glad you unearthed that letter from McNulty. I had forgotten it completely, and it’s a nice funny thing to have in the book.
As soon as I see the still-unwritten ending, I will presumably give you formal permission for the use you have made of my Cornell Library archive, if that’s what you need. Good luck!
Yrs,
Andy
To SCOTT ELLEDGE
North Brooklin, Maine
September 23, 1982
Dear Scott:
You must have been through hell worrying about Liane’s trouble, and I am deeply sympathetic. I hope it will soon be diagnosed as a simple matter and your mind relieved—not to mention hers. This letter of mine will serve to give you formal permission for the use of my papers in the Cornell Library, and you may consider the permission granted.
I liked very much the way you handled the additional section that you sent me. I thought it was moving without being maudlin, and I have no quarrel with your treatment of the Corona Machemer relationship. I am glad you decided to include these last few years in the book—it would seem derelict not to.
As usual, I am enclosing my notes on your latest manuscript. Incidentally, I want you to know that I consider some of my suggestions in these notes, as in previous ones, as cheeky, inasmuch as they overstep the bounds of mere correction and get into the writing itself. I know perfectly well that it is none of my business how you say a thing. The temptation is strong, though, when I see an easy fix for a passage that stopped me when I read it. It’s the Will Strunk coming out in me, and I hope you’ll forgive my presumption. . . .
I hope you will let me see a copy of the Foreword that you say you are planning to revise. My memory of your Foreword is that I liked it, just as it stood. I would think twice about describing “the vigorous part” I played in your final revisions lest you give readers the idea that I’ve been breathing down your neck and writing my own story. It is, after all, unusual to have the subject of a biography still alive and kicking, and I have felt uneasy in this role and uncertain just how to behave. I have been torn between the strong desire to keep out of it and the equally strong desire to help clarify it. I know it has been hard on you to have me skulking in the shadows but there wasn’t much I could do about that. Anyway, I would like to see your revision of the Foreword, for the reason I stated above.
And now about photographs. How I wish the pictures were as you envision them, in “a pile of photograph albums!” The scene is chaotic beyond belief—the pictures are everywhere except in albums: they are in dusty boxes and envelopes in the attic, in nooks and crannies wherever you step, and I’ve got to do something to clean up the mess. But every time I have addressed myself to the task, I’ve been stopped by my outraged sinus cavities that start screaming when a bit of attic mold or house dust enters them. Susan Lovenburg learned about my problem and sent me two face masks, but I’ve not had a chance to try them yet. I would gladly turn you loose in the house if I thought it would work, but I know that it wouldn’t, and I will have to do the spade work myself. I’ll get at it as soon as I possibly can and will try to find the items you named. If you propose to publish a drawing from Thurber’s “La Flamme and Mr. Prufrock,” I would like to see it and the context before giving permission.
Please give Liane my love and keep me informed on how things are going with her.
Yrs,
Andy
To SCOTT ELLEDGE
North Brooklin, Maine
October 27, 1982
Dear Scott:
I don’t think Thurber ever took a picture of me and Katharine. He was not a man who carried a camera. He carried a pencil that put a camera to shame.
I’d forgotten having signed an agreement with the New Yorker, but it appears from your evidence that I did. The way it was worded would give a lawyer ulcers, which is probably why I signed it. As you say, I never renewed it.
I will try to find an heir of Charles Henderson and Percy Moore, but it isn’t going to be easy. I think you would probably be safe to go ahead and use something from the letters, without permission. Henderson had a son and three daughters. His widow is dead. If I can scrape up anything for you, I’ll let you know.
I’ve been ill and may call off my Florida trip. I don’t know at this writing. I’m so glad Liane is out of the woods. It must have been scary.
Yrs,
Andy
P.S. I’ve just learned that Charley’s daughter Louise is living in Ellsworth. . . .
To SAM NEEL
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[December 3, 1982]
Dear Sam:
I think my first encounter with the word “parameter” was in a pronouncement by our late Governor Longley. Since then there have been many encounters, for it is a much-loved word by those who like words that sound impressive without meaning anything. I was surprised at Russell, though. He’s old enough to know better.
I’m enclosing a recent letter from Jacques Cousteau, an underwater stylist. Jacques has been “quantifying the horizontal and vertical distribution of nutrients and sediment in the Amazon,” and, as you see, he finally wound up with a mouthful of parameters. They probably slipped through his face mask.
We’re not having much of a winter here—a lot of fog, ooze, rain, drizzle, snow changing to rain, rain changing to snow. There is about a forty degree swing between the top and the bottom of our thermometer readings—a truly mercurial climate, fit only for coyotes and parameter-watchers. It’s quite pretty here today, though.
Yrs,
Andy
To DR. AND MRS. DAVID ANDERSON
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[January 1983]
Dear Kathy and Dave:
Thanks for your Christmas gift of State-of-Maine maple syrup. The label says I may use it on pancakes, waffles, and ice cream, but I have been known to pour it into my coffee and onto my oatmeal, with good results. There hasn’t been any Maine syrup in this house since the late thirties, when my small son used to tap certain questionable trees across the road and bring back a fluid that eventually boiled away into something vaguely suggesting cylinder oil. It had a sugary taste and we used to drink it, stoically.
I hope you had pleasant holidays. . . .
[Andy]
To MS. SALLY ASHLEY
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[January 12, 1983]
Dear Ms. Ashley:
I know nothing about the musical called Lo. It wouldn’t be hard to guess, though, that it was a bad play. Adams was not much of a writer—he was a gifted columnist and editor, but not essentially a creative fellow, in my opinion.
I’m not sure what you meant by “smart.” He was a classicist, though not a dedicated scholar. He was bright, well-informed. He knew a good poem from a bad one. He did his work well and, I guess, managed his affairs pretty well until his late years. Then, as I recall it, he held the Tribune up for more money and when they didn’t come through he quit. I think he fell on hard times as a result. His final years were spent in a nursing home, and with his sharp mind dulled.
The thing I remember best about him is that he was one of the great figures in the newspaper columning world at a time when I was trying to break into the world of letters. He was an enormous help. Those days of th
e “literary column” were a fine time for a young fellow like me to be alive in—you had something to wake up to in the morning, you had a place to mail your deathless prose and verse, and you felt yourself to be part of a group. B. L. T. in the Chicago Tribune must have started the whole business when Adams himself was a young, aspiring writer. In New York, I had the Conning Tower in the World, later in the Trib. I had Christopher Morley in the Evening Post. And Don Marquis in the Sun. Marquis was a pure creator and didn’t monkey around with contributors—didn’t want to. Adams was the opposite: the “Tower” was about 90 per cent contributed, I would think. And the column was a transmittal center for messages—love notes, intelligence notes of all sorts. I was perennially in love in those days, and I remember very well what it meant to be able to impress your girl by landing a poem at the top of the “Tower.” It was an exciting time for a beginner. No money was involved (nobody ever got paid) and so the contributors were operating on the loftiest level—they were writing for the pure love of it, and the glory. I’ve recently been looking into some old journals of mine, when I was keeping a diary, and there are several entries in which I describe the excitement of finishing a love poem long after midnight, then carrying it out into the cold streets to drop it in a letter box at the corner. Two mornings later, I would be up early, to buy a paper, hot off the presses, and find my immortal verse enshrined, for all to digest and interpret. I signed E. B. W., as further evidence of the purity of the adventure. It was great. I’m not kidding. The world was your oyster. Today, the literary column is pretty much of a dead duck, certainly in New York. And there’s nothing that corresponds to the part it played in the life of the city and the lives of the contributors. You have to have been alive in those years to appreciate what it meant. Adams, of course, was a towering figure in the whole thing. The top of his column was as high as you could go in life.
I don’t recall ever having said that I didn’t see why anybody would want to write a biography of FPA. There’s hardly anybody, alive or dead, that wouldn’t make a good subject for a biography, so strange are the lives we all lead.
As for the man himself and what he was like, I didn’t know Adams too well, but we were acquainted. He liked to wear a mask of severity, or grumpiness. He liked to pose. He spoke with a kind of slow precision, as though afraid of betraying some weak spot or ignorance or clumsiness. I think he may have been, deep down, insecure—perhaps because he was . . . homely in appearance. (He was so homely he was almost handsome.) I think he greatly enjoyed his self-appointed role of Mr. Pepys, and he enjoyed games and the company of his peers—most of them celebrities like Ross, Ferber, Parker, Woollcott, et al. I gather that his first marriage was anything but happy, and I know that his marriage to Esther Root revitalized him. She gave him children, for one thing. He showed up at my apartment on Eighth Street one day where I was living with my wife and son, and stormed his way in, with little Anthony in tow. He was walking his son, as you would walk a dog, and wanted someplace to visit. It seems to me this was my first meeting with him, but I’m not sure of that. I think he was a very proud, concerned, and considerate father.
I’m sorry I can’t tell you much more about the man. I know what Margalo Gilmore meant when she said you could spend a lot of time with him and not really know him. He usually seemed to be playing a part—acting the way he wanted people to imagine the conductor of the Conning Tower would act. It was hard for him, I think, to just relax and be himself. Maybe he didn’t even like himself—I wouldn’t know. He was a grammarian, a perfectionist, he liked being a celebrity, and I think he liked the truth. But what he was really like is less important than what he managed to accomplish, and his contribution to those who, like myself, contributed to him.
Good luck,
E. B. White
To DUANE GRAY
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[January 20, 1983]
Dear Duane:
Thank you for your persistence in locating Xero-Lube.1 I will report on its efficacy after I’ve had a chance to evaluate my night-times.
When I visited the Mukluk plant in 1922, I discovered that they were in an extremely favorable position for the manufacture of the product. The town of Mukluk has four saloons, each one equipped with several old-fashioned brass spittoons for the convenience of its customers. This posed, of course, a disposal problem for the saloonkeepers, and that’s where the Mukluk Xero-Lube people stepped in. They arranged with the saloon owners for a late-night pickup of full spittoons (or “garboons” as they are sometimes called), in return for which they agreed to send the cuspidors back thoroughly cleaned and shined against the next day’s marksmanship. The pickup was usually between one and two o’clock in the morning, when a pony hitched to a small buckboard made its way through the town in almost total darkness, stopping at every bar. On the return to the factory, the contents of the receptacles was removed and underwent refinement—the tobacco juice was filtered out through a secret process, and the remaining saliva first strained then homogenized. Finally a flavor was added—the juice of the persimmon. The resulting spit was then put into Xero-Lube plunger bottles for shipment to all parts of the country with, naturally, a great margin of profit to the company, since the ingredients had been acquired free of cost.
I thought you would want to know about this for future reference and in case the Senator should die of retroactivity.
Yrs gratefully,
[Andy]
To CAPT. H. C. LAWDER, U.S.N.R. (RET.)
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[Spring? 1983]
Dear Hervey:
It’s been quite a while since I have addressed an expensive scion of nobility, but I’ll do my best.
You ask what else is new. Very well, I got a letter just the other day from Mildred Hesse, the blond you secretly admired. My admiration for her in 1917 was probably a thousand times as intense as yours, but it wasn’t secret. Raymond Giere introduced her to me on the skating pond at the Siwancy, and from then on I managed to encounter her every frosty afternoon on the ice, and we knocked off about half a million miles together. Skating was the only thing I was ever any good at. Mildred (now known as “Mitzy”) is a widow, is the official historian of Garden City, L.I., and has published a book about the place—a very good book, too.
Thanks for the playbill. It has proved the best reading I’ve had lately. Can’t read much anyway, as I’ve lost the sight in my right eye. Pinero was really in high gear on that evening of May 18, 1917. Let me know when you get a letter from Frances Marlatt. I’ll be glad to give you Mitzy’s address, if you’re still dreaming about Dinah Rankling.
Yrs,
[E. B. White]
To MR. JOHN G. GUDE
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[April 1983]
Dear Jap:
I used to have trout in a pond here, but they disappeared. I didn’t have any litmus paper, so I don’t know whether it was the acid rain or the Great Blue Heron. Generally speaking, the outlook is desolate.
I was sitting around the other day, wearing my Holter Monitor and thinking of all the things I’ve ever known. And somehow my thoughts returned to the midtown speakeasies that you and I used to frequent in better days. And I thought I would write to you for clarification about names, addresses, and chronology, because you probably have a better memory than I have. There was, of course, Tony’s on Sixth Avenue, but what street was it? The day K and I got married we prepared ourselves for the ordeal by lunching at, I think, a speak called Louis and Martin. It was west of Fifth on, perhaps, 49th Street, in the days before Radio City. Mino was “on the door.” Then there was Mino’s, east of Fifth, and it seems to me it was Mino and Martin. Then the Louis of Louis and Martin opened up a place with Armand—Louis and Armand. Right? And somewhere in there, there was a Cheerio’s. You’d better straighten me out if you can. A nice place in those days was Hapsburg House, run by Ludvig Bemelmans, wasn’t it?
Enough of this idle romancing. It makes me want a drink.
Love to Helen. Thanks for the clip.
Andy
To LINDA DAVIS
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[ca. April 10, 1983]
Dear Linda:
If you use that Tucci anecdote, make it read “shoeshine man,” not just “shoeshine.”
As for the egg-throwing, I’m afraid it’s apocryphal. I can’t recall either Katharine or myself hurling eggs at the barn, although I may have jokingly said we did. It would have been unlike K to toss eggs away. I occasionally lob an unwanted egg into the hayfield below the barn, as the easiest way to get rid of it. The egg would be one known to be overripe, or perhaps cracked, or so badly soiled as not be worth cleaning up. At any rate, I don’t think you should portray Katharine as throwing eggs at the barn. Doesn’t ring true.
Yrs,
[E. B. White]
To MS. ELSIE MYERS STAINTON
[North Brooklin, Maine]
May 24, 1983
Dear Ms. Stainton:
(Can you imagine Will Strunk using “Ms.”?)
Thank you for sending me your little book, and thanks for all the kindly references to the Professor and me. The first thing I learned from you was the place of his burial—Pleasant Grove, up beyond the golf course on the hill. I would like to visit the grave but am not much of a wanderer anymore.
I’ve discovered that one’s “ideal editor” changes as one ages. At 83, with one eye gone and a lot of my hearing, my ideal editor is a young woman, preferably a pretty one, who doesn’t necessarily know anything about prose but who is a good driver and willing to take me on long journeys in my car. I’ve been lucky so far.
I like your book and hope you have good luck with it.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
To SCOTT ELLEDGE
North Brooklin, Maine