Letters of E. B. White
Page 82
May 28 [1983]
Dear Scott:
Here are some notes on the captions. [Numbers correspond to photographs, rather than consecutive notes.]
2. Sidney Avenue, not Chester. (The area was known as Chester Hill.)
16. It’s all right with me to use the quote about my memory of the presidency. (“My memory of the presidency [of Phi Gamma Delta, at Cornell University] is of the sadness of Sunday nights, the foul musty robes, the dim lights, the childish ritual.”)
17. Gustave [S. Lobrano], not Gustav.
26. Are you sure Ingersoll preceded Katharine and me? I didn’t think he did.
28. Are you sure that I am the author of that advertisement? If it’s a Sterling Finny ad, I am the author. If it’s not, Corey Ford may have written it. He did some ads called “The Making of a Magazine.”
30. I suspect that the dog in the picture is Daisy’s mother Jeanie, but I’d have to see the picture to know. Why not just leave out the dog’s name if you are in doubt.
51. When I got to the hummingbird-feeder that was “out of sight,” I burst out laughing. I’d be inclined to leave out that sentence unless you’re looking for laughs in the wrong places.
I’m glad to know that the galley proofs are due back on my birthday. Don’t let Norton down. I’m due at Bert Mosher’s Camps on my birthday, if I live.
Yrs,
Andy
P.S. I’ve written a jacket blurb for you, to add to yours:
“Quite simply, the best in-depth study ever made of an
out-of-his-depth man. Hilarious.—Better Homes & Gardens.”
To ANN HONEYCUTT
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[June 12, 1983]
Dear Honey:
Nothing has become of me. I sometimes wish something would become of me, but I can’t think what it would be. Obviously nothing has become of you or you wouldn’t even raise the question.
I am reclusive, stubborn, crumbling, far gone in the general depression that belongs to hay fever. If I were to die tonight and they did a post-mortem on me, they would undoubtedly find a well-marked effusion on the arachnid membrane, just as they did on Daniel Webster’s when he died. The heat today has been great and has affected my eyes, one of which is going to undergo surgery tomorrow at 9:30 for a droopy lid. The clowns are too late to operate on the degenerated retina, so they salve their conscience by lifting my lid to make me beautiful.
The man who is writing my biography is in worse shape than I am. He has pulmonary trouble and is worried because he picked the wrong person to write a biography about. After all, I’m no Norman Mailer, with his seven wives and occasional knifings. Nobody in his right mind would pick me for the subject of a biography. I never did anything interesting other than trying to get you to skinny dip in that midnight glade at Amawalk.
I have an airtight design for solving the overpopulation of the world, but I am not going to tell you what it is. It would work, though. I just have to get it in the hands of the right party.
Love,
[Andy]
To HERBERT MITGANG
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[ca. June 22, 1983]
Dear Herb:
Thank you for The Chicken Book [by Page Smith and Charles Daniel; 1982]. I have a bantam rooster named Raoul who will, I am sure, be amused by it. Raoul was a Father’s Day gift to me a year ago, and he hasn’t had an idle moment. I did not hang the name Raoul on him—he arrived with it. He had been with me only twenty-four hours when I realized that he was not built for a life of celibacy, and I went out into the town of Brooklin and came back with a little grey bantam hen for his delight. In almost no time, there was a family of nine chicks hatched in the manger of a horse stall. The chicks were so small they could go right through chicken wire, which is one-inch mesh, or “mash” as it is known locally. I gave away seven and saved one for Raoul, who loves incest.
His wife Ruth loves cottage cheese. I discovered this early on, and it enabled me to get the newly hatched chicks out of the manger and onto the barn floor. Using a stepladder and armed with a dish of cottage cheese and a basket, I climbed to the nest, placed the cheese at the far end of the manger, and when she went after the cheese I scooped up the chicks, placed them in the basket, and carried them down.
I think I have told you enough about my affairs to thank you for the gift of the book, so I will close.
Yrs,
[Andy]
To DR. DALE R. CORSON
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[ca. July 1, 1983]
Dear Dale:
I’m glad you had such an interesting and far-ranging year, and I’m glad Nellie’s troubles have relaxed somewhat. My own year was unproductive, full of small matters and long waits in a private world that shrinks and grows more and more confining. I never left Maine, celebrated Thanksgiving in the Blue Hill hospital, and had to return there a few weeks later for another bout with my arrhythmic heart. I have a “project” buried in a box in a closet, but never seem to get to it—always too busy trying to keep the old body held together with safety pins. My biggest disappointment is that I can’t read and can drive my car only very short distances. Thus I have become something of a vegetable. Haven’t decided yet which vegetable, but it’s probably a stewed tomato.
You and Nellie are always welcome here, and it would be a pleasure to see you again for another lunch, if you can stand stewed tomatoes.
Yrs,
[Andy]
To SALLIE COOLIDGE
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[July 6, 1983]
Dear Sallie:
Thanks for your letter and the enclosures and sales report. I wish I could come to town and meet you, but less and less do I get around.
I had seen some of the reviews but not all. As for the sales, I am surprised that POEMS & SKETCHES has done as well as it has, and am disappointed that the new “One Man’s Meat” is going slowly. But I suppose it stands to reason that I can’t expect a glowing sale from a 40-year-old book. I’m lucky to be alive on the shelves.
If you come to Maine I will place you in the bow seat of my canoe if you can make the weight. It’s comparable to a jockey’s—126, with or without lead.
Yrs,
[E. B. White]
To D. ANTHONY ENGLISH
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[August 4, 1983]
Dear Tony:
My old iron furnace not only served me for 45 years, but right in the middle of everything I blew it up by throwing in a wooden plank that, unbeknownst to me, contained either dynamite or a high-power rifle bullet. I didn’t get a scratch from the explosion, by some miracle yet to be explained. And the furnace, after repairs, went right back to work. The new toy in my cellar is a tiny steel shiny thing looking as though it had ridden in on a UFO—half the size of my old black beauty and full of curious bumps and knobs and warts. I feel cold already.
Thank you for offering to advance some money toward this dubious enterprise. I don’t need the money, I just needed the information about the date of its arrival. I am grateful to you for your concern. Stay warm.
Yrs,
[E. B. White]
To PENNELL PECK
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[ca. August 20, 1983]
Dear Pennell:
Thanks for the letter—it was good to hear from you. I have a feeling that that description of the Newberrys that I dashed off to you was a bit on the breezy side, although I can’t recall it clearly. Anyway, Linda Davis will have to show me everything she writes about Katharine and I can catch up with it then, if there is any catching up that needs doing.
How am I? Well, I’m 84, which doesn’t help any. I have a first degree heart block and a 15-foot green Old Town canoe. First one wins, then the other.
Love,
[Andy]
To MR. GARY MERRILL
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[ca. September 13, 1983]
Dear Mr. Merrill:
&nb
sp; You were probably born too late to remember the Hall-Mills murder case. It was a beautiful murder, including a choir singer and a pig woman. The setting was New Jersey, and the pig woman lived in De Russey’s Lane. I think it was the pig woman who lived in the Lane, but it might have been one of the other characters. I’m not surprised that you failed to find De Russey in Webster’s.
Sincerely,
[E. B. White]
D. ANTHONY ENGLISH
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[ca. September 16, 1983]
Dear Tony:
Salvation-through-electronics has not won my confidence, but if Macmillan wants to use selections from the little book in a wild scheme called TERMPAPER, you may go ahead. Like chicken soup, it can’t hurt.
I had a letter in today’s mail that began, “Dear Friend: We have had serious computer problems with our mailing list which has just been resolved.” It’s clear that this man faces a problem far more grievous than a balky computer and knows not where his real problem lies.
What this world needs, Tony, is a good five-cent school teacher.
Yr heretical friend,
[E. B. White]
JON WILSON
North Brooklin, Maine
October 11, 1983
Dear Jon:
Just recently I caught up with your piece in the Mercedes Magazine. [“Craftsmanship Lives: Master Boatbuilder,” written about Joel White.] Although I own a 13-year-old Mercedes and am the father of a 52-year-old son, neither the car company nor my son keeps me abreast of what’s going on in the world. It was Sam Neel who sent me the magazine.
I’m writing to thank you for the piece. It has been a great satisfaction to me to have watched Joel work his way into the big time—which is excellence, no matter what the product is, or the craft, or the profession. I love boats without knowing much about them, and I was glad to find Joe pursuing the matter to the last ditch and the final hill, because that is where the fun is and the balm of accomplishment.
Your article, so loaded with the mystique of wood and boats, will be an inspiration to anyone who respects the ideal of excellence in this increasingly slap-dash world of plastic toys and pre-fab construction. I had forgotten that I ever told Joe that the big thing was to enjoy what you do. It never seemed to me that he paid much attention to anything I told him, but if he listened to that one, I feel good about it.
The first wooden boat in his life, incidentally, was not the Brutal Beast or Shadow, it was an 8-foot scow named Flounder, built for him by that master craftsman his old man, who couldn’t hit a nail with the head of a hammer but would try anything. The scow was Joe’s first solo experience with the water. I built her from a picture in the American Boy’s Handybook, using pluck in place of know-how, and when she glided into the frog pond with thole pins at the ready and Joe dancing around, it was my finest hour. She soon graduated to the shore and the salt sea and the cold fog and the pre-dawn work of hauling traps before school began in the morning. These days, the little scow lies rotting on my shore. If you ever want to take a look at the boat that launched a thousand ships, I’ll take you down to the shore and show you the incriminating evidence. Thanks for your good piece about a good man.
Yrs,
Andy White
To MR. STEPHEN WHITE
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[October 21, 1983]
Dear Steve:
I have a grandson named Steven White, but that’s not your fault. He builds better boats than you build, but that’s not your fault either.
Thanks for your report. It makes me feel very old to learn that nobody has ever heard of Minsky’s. Except for my loss of eyesight, my loss of hearing, and my loss of four or five marbles, I am plugging along. Hope your book goes well—it should be called “The Written Word Processor” and be published in microfilm form, not between covers. A few more years and there won’t be any books, or writers of books.
Yrs,
[E. B. White]
• David Broder has been a longtime political columnist for The Washington Post. In May 1973, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.
To DAVID BRODER
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[22 November 1983]
Dear Mr. Broder:
Although many commentators revived the famous “ask not” sentence in President Kennedy’s inaugural, none of them pointed out where JFK got the words from. I’m reasonably sure the words came right out of Don Marquis’s piece about the toad by the name of Warty Bliggens. You probably remember Warty. He sat under a toadstool feeling contented, and he explained that when the cosmos was created the toadstool was especially planned for his personal shelter. When somebody asked,
TO WHAT ACT OF YOURS
DO YOU IMPUTE
THIS INTEREST ON THE PART
OF THE CREATOR
the reply was,
ASK RATHER
SAID WARTY BLIGGENS
WHAT THE UNIVERSE
HAS DONE TO DESERVE ME
Kennedy simply reversed the meaning, and the rest is history.
Thanks for your two recent columns—the Kennedy one and the one on nuclear deterrence. It’s amazing how many people believe that weapons trigger an all-out war, when the recent evidence is quite the opposite.
Sincerely,
[E. B. White]
To JOHN UPDIKE
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[December 4, 1983]
Dear John:
I was surprised to hear from you, surprised that a bookstore had a copy of “One Man’s Meat” for sale, and surprised to learn that I am a preface writer. I hope it’s true, because introductions are the only thing I’m writing these days. Corona Machemer, who was my editor at Harper’s before she quit them and went to Knopf, didn’t think much of the Meat preface. She conned me into changing some of the early parts, and said, “The end is all right.” She was the least enthusiastic editor I ever had, and I guess on that account one of the best. I would have followed her to Knopf if I hadn’t been married to Harper since 1929—which was also the year I married Katharine. It seemed a bit late to ask for a divorce. So I am still with Harper’s, which gets crazier and crazier by the minute. They are now under the impression that I don’t want my mail forwarded. I often have to wait four or five months to get a letter from a reader.
Sorry to hear you have a word processor, but I was glad my lawyer had one last Friday when I went to sign my Last Will and Testament. Just before signing, I noticed something I didn’t like, and I asked whether it could be changed and have it back within a week. “I can have it back in twenty minutes,” he said. So I watched his secretary push the buttons and make it come out Here.
I still feel guilty about your mother. Glad things aren’t worse than they are. Am not in Florida, haven’t experienced any well-being since the Coolidge administration despite Roger’s reports, am running on the sight of one eye only, can’t last at the wheel of a car more than about fifteen miles, can’t fly, can’t ride the rails because the Maine Central yanked its passenger trains in 1961, and have nobody to go to Florida with now that Corona is a Knopf girl. This letter is being written by a word processor named Jennifer Buckley, who is the managing editor of WoodenBoat magazine on weekdays. Moonlights here with me on Sunday mornings.
Thanks for your encouraging letter.
Yrs,
Andy
To WENDY POLHEMUS
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[December 27, 1983]
Dear Wendy Polhemus:
Thanks for calling me “Professor E. B. White.” It has a nice sound but can be shortened to “E. B. White”—a saving of one word and a long step toward accuracy.
Reader Esther Hautzig is quite right—the blurb for the hardcover edition of The Elements of Style contains a boo-boo. “Addition” should read “edition.” Please correct the error by making the change. Macmillan’s proofreader shall henceforth be known as Macmillan’s “spoofreader.”
Sincerely,
[E. B. White]
To MRS. SUSAN [LOVENBURG] ROBINSON
[North Brooklin, Maine]
[January 1984]
Dear Susan:
I’ve owed you a letter for a long time, but I’m getting lazier and lazier about writing. I can see only one half of the keyboard with my one eye, and that slows me up in itself.
Well, the Great Scott Elledge adventure has at last come to a head, after sixteen years of his wanderings in the darkest corners of the Cornell Library. The book is out and Scott can relax at last, even if I can’t. His publisher is throwing a party for him on the fifteenth at the Coffee House in New York. I shall remain quietly in Brooklin. The New York Times Book Review is after me for a “recent” photograph, to accompany their upcoming review1 of the biography. I am billed on the jacket as America’s “most beloved” writer, and I have already told Scott what a mistake that is, since people really want to read about someone they can loathe. The Washington Post noticed the book briefly a while back, pointing out that my life really hadn’t been interesting enough to warrant a biography. On the other hand, I got a letter this week from John Detmold, a friend of mine who went to Cornell, and he raves about the book and says Scott should be nominated for a Pulitzer.
I am reading the book from cover to cover. A chapter a day is about all I can manage with my failed vision. I must say Scott has done an incredible amount of homework—he has dredged up all kinds of things I’d forgotten or never even knew about or wanted to forget or wanted not to know about. But I’m afraid there is just too much of everything. Scott simply became infatuated with the sound of his own research and couldn’t bear to leave out anything, however trivial, however dull. I dread seeing the reviews—not on my account but on his. Still, one never knows. Maybe the book will go.
I’ve had a dull and sickly winter, with not much going on either inside or outside of my head. I envy you and Peter your trip to France. There’s just a chance I may get to Sarasota for a while in April—Corona has a short vacation and wants to go down.
My little dog Red has turned out very well. He is a natural enthusiast and wants to know everything and go everywhere. Makes a good companion if you can stand his ebullience.