Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

I hope life in Lelystad will continue to amuse and sustain you. Many thanks for your good letter.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To DR. AND MRS. RAY CONOVER

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [January 1984]

  Dear Hana and Ray:

  Right after lunch is a terrible time to write a letter, but I don’t want to delay the matter: I’m writing this while my stomach is still engorged with the third and last of the Belgrade Bass—the Revonoc special, just up from the freezer and bristling with memories and wonderful taste. Cabin 25, I salute you! My stomach salutes you! Thank you again for the gift of life.

  Thanks, too, for your Christmas note containing the photographs—or what Hana described as the “lousy pictures.” The one of sunrise at Great Pond is tearing me to pieces as I sit and stare at it, wondering whether I’ll live to see that splendid dawn again. The year is only a few days old but I am already in my thoughts careening toward summer and fall, awaiting the day when I can boost my canoe on top of the car and set out for the lake. The two long loneliest holiday weekends of the year, Christmas and New Year’s, are at last over for me, and I can look toward easier times ahead. I had a note from Jodie Mosher, reporting a visit with you. I must hear all about that.

  I hope 1984 will be kind to you both. Thank you again for everything.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To MRS. MILDRED [HESSE] SMITH

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [January 1984]

  Dear Mitzy:

  Thank you for the Rev. Robert Walker on the ice of Duddingston Loch. I should have learned to skate with my arms folded across my chest. One of my hands was usually otherwise occupied, when I was with you. Most skaters cross their arms behind them, for better balance. But, then, most skaters don’t own a hat like Mr. Walker’s. Incidentally, I’ve been studying his cheek, and it looks to me as though the Reverend may have been something of a bibber—with those tiny red telltale veins. Come to think of it, I should have taken you to Loch, which would have been a welcome change from the Siwancy, and I could have learned to drink Scotch.

  I quit skating a couple of years ago, on the theory that I am now too brittle to fall on the ice with any pleasure or safety. My skates still lie on the floor of a clothes closet, and I examine them from time to time, always with longing.

  Can’t imagine why reading “Once More to the Lake” caused you to send me a Christmas card, but I’m glad it did. I skipped the card ritual in December and sent nobody anything in the way of a friendly greeting. Here is one for you now, however: I hope Mr. Orwell’s 1984 will prove a pleasant disappointment for you in every way.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To MRS. HOWARD [JIT] CUSHMAN

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [January 17, 1984]

  Dear Jit:

  Thanks for worrying about me. I’m OK in a general sort of way. In a wild attempt to introduce a little simplicity into Christmas, I decided I wouldn’t send any cards. I should have known it wouldn’t work—just made people either mad or worried. The only way the American Christmas could be simplified would be to change the date from December 25 to February 29. Then it would come every four years. I’ve advocated this for a long time but nobody pays attention to me.

  Like you, I’m housebound in winter. And I’ve lost the sight of one eye. I stay alive on a colorful assortment of seven pills. So far they’ve worked. Hope you continue to thrive into the troublesome Eighties. And thanks again for your note.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To SCOTT ELLEDGE

  North Brooklin, Maine

  January 20, 1984

  Dear Scott:

  This is just to report the safe arrival of the book and to send my thanks for the gift of the book and the sixteen years of labor that went into it. I’ll be along with a fuller report later. About twenty pages a day is all I can do, with my failed vision. But I look forward to the trip.

  I like the photographs and am glad you unearthed the Thurber drawings.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  P.S. I have misgivings about the jacket blurb. It calls the book “the first biography.” What about the one Sampson published some years ago? And the blurb calls me “America’s most beloved writer.” That is not only open to question, it isn’t a good pulling idea anyway. I’m an old advertising man, and I know that people would rather buy a book about a writer everybody hates the guts of.

  [Handwritten addition:] The photo of you is a gem. You look like an irreverent Henry Ward Beecher.

  To SCOTT ELLEDGE

  North Brooklin, Maine

  February 10, 1984

  Dear Scott:

  This letter is overdue. I would have written you sooner, but I wanted to read the book first, and that has been slow work—mostly because I can’t see, partly because you are a good writer. Good writers always slow me up.

  Although I didn’t want a biography, didn’t expect to see one while I was still alive, didn’t want to encourage you when you first got in touch sixteen years ago, since there seemed to be no escaping it once it got rolling, I feel greatly relieved that the book was done by you and not somebody else, and I am awed by the amount of digging you must have done to come up with such an exhaustive, perceptive, and sensitive narrative. When I turned you loose in the [Cornell] Library, I had no idea you were not going to stop till you’d opened the bottom drawer. How in the world did you interview Alpheus Smith?1 The last I heard of him he was teaching in Minnesota or somewhere out there, and that was about fifty years ago.

  Physically, the book turned out well, I think. The selection of photographs is good, and the pictures and manuscript reproductions show up quite nicely on the rough paper. The views of me are not quite up to date, since I now wear an eye patch and have grown a crop of wrinkles, but anyone interested in my appearance will soon be able to see me in the New York Times Book Review, I guess—I just had a phone call from a woman there demanding a “recent” picture. She wanted to send a photographer here, but I quieted her down and hired a friend of mine who works for the Weekly Packet in Blue Hill to take some shots. The background of snow was dramatic.

  Your text had an odd effect on me, as I plowed my way along, day after day, night after night. I was reduced alternately to tears and to laughter. The tears were generated by memories of old and better times and by recollections of Katharine that came flooding back. The laughs were generated by rediscovering what a consummate ass I was, early and late. They were mostly directed at myself, with a few reserved for the author of the book when he got tangled in the coils of an interpretive passage. Occasionally your explanation of what I was thinking about, or doing, gained by piecing together the wispy shreds of evidence, gave me a chuckle—but that’s inevitable in a book of this sort. Anyway, the constant shift from tears to laughter and back to tears again gave the book an emotional impact I wasn’t quite ready for. It left me exhausted but fulfilled.

  The book contains many things that gave me pleasure to reread—things I was particularly glad you dug up. My Christmas comment about Ross and Fowler2 is one. My snotty letter to Jack Case is another—the one in which I knocked Case back for suggesting that I adjust Will Strunk to the new liberals of the English departments. I had a good time writing that letter but was doubtful, when I got it done, whether I should mail it, it sounded so cocky. I’m glad now I did. It would have been cowardly of me to back down at the last minute after having arranged Will’s apotheosis.

  I was also happy to read your appreciation of “An Approach to Style.” I had misgivings about that thing when I was laboring over it, and when I turned it in to Macmillan I was quite sure scholars and pedagogues would write it off as puerile. Thanks for giving it the nod. One of the things that tickled me about the book was your obvious sadness at my not being a scholar or a poet, your disappointment that I was reading Don Marquis when I should have been reading Pound. You tried manfully to conceal your unhappiness, but it kept breaking thr
ough. I caught you up on one thing, though, and this gave me exquisite enjoyment. After a mournful passage on Page 90 about my addiction to journalism, to Lyric Forms From France, and to poets of no pretensions, you said, “White’s experiments with the lyric forms from France are not, however, worth quoting.” Behold! On Page 286 what were you quoting but the deathless rondeau I wrote Katharine for a Valentine! Hmmm. Not worth quoting, eh?

  And now back to the real purpose of this letter, which is to congratulate you on your dedicated and workmanlike job of writing “E. B. White A Biography,” and to express my deep gratitude for your steadiness and industry. The book could sell three million copies and you’d never get your money back for the time and labor you put in. I wish you joy of the book and am only sorry my life wasn’t crowded with exciting, bawdy, violent events. I know how hard it is to write about a fellow who spends most of his time crouched over a typewriter. That was my fate, too.

  Please give my best to Liane, and my thanks to her for the help she gave you.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To HENRY—

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [ca. March 1984]

  Dear Henry:

  Thanks for the bumpy ride down Memory Lane. It reached a high point when you exclaimed, “What I remember most about you is that beautiful collie, Caesar.” (His name was Mac. He was a good dog, though.)

  I don’t want you to go around thinking that you are the only M.V.H.S. graduate who ever hears from his old high school sweetheart. I had a chatty letter from Mildred Hesse just the other day. She’s the official historian of Garden City, Long Island, and has written a book about the place. I don’t remember Marien Robinson, which can only mean that she wasn’t as pretty as Mildred Hesse. I remember the way Frank Gaebelein could play the piano—as though he was in a hurry to get somewhere before it started to rain. There was another guy named Sheridan who could play better, but I don’t think he ever went to classes. Just played the piano.

  You can tell your neighbor’s daughter that a coyote came out of the woods one day last spring when I was riding my old Raleigh 3-speed bicycle on the highway and loped along after me for fifty yards out of, I think, simple curiosity. It could have been his first glimpse of an octogenarian on wheels.

  End of nostalgia. There’s no chance of old acquaintance being forgot as long as my beautiful collie Caesar lives in memory.

  Yrs,

  [E. B. White]

  To MRS. DOROTHY GUTH

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [ca. March 16, 1984]

  Dear Dotty:

  It’s too early to go to bed and too late to do anything foolish like taking a drink, so I will settle for doing something sensible like writing you a letter to thank you for yours and for the batch of stuff that didn’t make the book of Letters edited by Dorothy Guth of undying fame. I took the bundle immediately to the attic so that I wouldn’t waste my time rereading the letters and I have marked them to go to Cornell. Cornell will take anything, just like the Smithsonian. I could send Cornell my last night’s apple core and they would house it. I would like to send Cornell the Spirit of St. Louis, to make up for all the junk they’ve received from me, but I never flew the Atlantic and so am handicapped in that respect. I must remember to fly the Atlantic.

  Nothing good has happened to me in a long while, unless you want to count the cluster of thirteen migraine headaches during the past thirty days. A record. I usually think I’m doing all right if I get a cluster of three. (They come in clusters.) April is the toughest month here and the coldest. The pussywillows are out but are just showing off, the way they always do. My two bantam hens are both sitting, but all during the days when they were laying their clutch of eggs, I had to visit the barn every night and bring the eggs indoors so they wouldn’t freeze, then return them to the nests in the morning so the hens wouldn’t think they’d been robbed. This wouldn’t have been such an onerous chore if bantams ever chose an accessible place for nesting, but you should see where these two birds of mine decided to set up housekeeping. Only a small, wiry, determined old man in his dotage could reach the nests on hands and knees, so high and so remote are they. A bantam hen isn’t happy unless she is in a high, remote place, impossible to get to by any normal person. I was lucky to be born abnormal. It ran in the family.

  Last week I fell asleep while eating lunch alone at the dining table and crashed to the floor. After seven years of eating lunch alone, I apparently find sleep more attractive than food. A normal man of 84 would have broken a hip, but I didn’t break anything, except another lousy record.

  I guess the worst thing that happened all winter was the Elledge biography. The mail is oppressive. Yesterday I got a letter from Professor Martin Sampson’s great grandson Aaron. People want to come and visit me and view the remains.

  I want to go to bed. Good night, dear Dorothy. Thank you again for your letter. My love to Ray, Chipper, Jeanie, Frances, and the U-Haul. I think of U-All.

  Love,

  Andy

  To JUDITH W. PREUSSER

  North Brooklin, Maine

  19 March 1984

  Dear Judy:

  I’ve always felt that my hypochondria was greatly exaggerated. Brendan Gill, at the New Yorker, liked to make a great thing of it, but Brendan liked to make a great thing of anything that served his immediate purpose. I don’t regret the time I spent worrying about myself. Things do happen to people, and only a very unimaginative, lumpish sort of person could go through life without conjuring up a few personal disasters. I knew a girl once who pricked her finger on a Victrola needle and although it was a tiny scratch, it developed into a first-class infection that had to be taken very seriously by the doctors. If I tend to pour a few drops of peroxide on a surface wound, it isn’t because I am a violent hypochondriac, it’s because I have a strong sense of disaster, rooted in solid experience.

  Of course, anxiety can be a disease in itself and can make you sick, and I can recall times when I have been sick from anxiety, whether justified or not. But it is really a matter of degree. Go ahead and be a little worried about yourself if it suits your temperament. I doubt if it will harm you in the long run, unless you break down under the strain of too vivid an imagination. I haven’t broken down yet, and I’m 84. But I must admit that the things that have happened to me are things I least expected—the loss of the sight in one eye, the arrhythmia in my heart. I was usually worrying about some quite different disasters, if I was worrying at all.

  I still think your head is on straight. Your letter is a clear indication of it.

  Love,

  E. B. White

  To JOHN RIMER FLEMING

  North Brooklin [Maine]

  April 23, 1984

  Dear Jack:

  If you have some letters headed for Cornell, it might be a good idea to send them by way of North Brooklin so I can take a gander at them. I doubt I’ll want to pull anything, but I’d have to see them to know. My aim is to protect living persons from embarrassment or harm—that’s all. God knows there aren’t many living persons any more. So if it isn’t too much trouble, why don’t you send the stuff here and I will speed it on its way to Lucy Burgess, my girl in Rare Books. (The head man at the Library is Louis E. Martin.)

  Thanks for the tip about Eudora Welty’s book. I’m going to get hold of it, though reading-for-pleasure is not part of my life any more, I regret to report. The retina in my right eye is a goner because of degeneration—medical term for old age. So I have no depth perception and can read only through force of will and a magnifying glass. At a typewriter, I see half the keyboard and try to remember what the other half looked like. The worst thing about my eye problem is not so much loss of vision, it’s the constant eye strain—which makes me either nervous or drowsy or both. I can drive a car only about ten miles, then I’m asleep, which I’ve decided is hard on other people on the road. So when I go anywhere now I usually have a driver. Her name is Ethel. She’s pretty good on the highway but goes to p
ieces in a parking lot. Harlan Fiske Stone was right, there’s nothing much left but gin. And of course I have the Red Sox, but they spent most of April unable to see the ball as it crossed the plate. I think they may have a retina problem.

  It was good to hear from you.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  To SENATOR THOMAS R. PERKINS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [ca. April 26, 1984]

  Dear Tom:

  Many thanks for sending me the Monitor containing a review of the biography. I am glad to add it to my stockpile.

  I don’t think my biographer quite understood my poultry life. I’m not sure anybody else does, even the chickens themselves. You asked about eggs for this summer—I’m afraid I’m not your man. My bantam hen Ruth just hatched seven chicks from a nest in the crib of a horse stall, and although the chicks are doing well and living high on cottage cheese, Alpo, and rolled oats, their overall length is only an inch and three-sixteenths. I would doubt that they will reach the peak of ovulation until after Labor Day. You had better look around for a more promising and productive bunch of birds. Sorry I can’t help you in this vernal crisis.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  P.S. Bantams are really a poor source of eggs, because when a bantam feels an egg coming on, her first thought is, where can I hide this thing where nobody can find it. If she’s out and around (which is where bantams like to be) she usually succeeds.

  To MR. MILES KATZENSTEIN

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [ca. May 1, 1984]

  Dear Katzy:

  I was glad to see by the Argus that you haven’t forgotten my superb sense of balance. You were wrong, though, about the bike. It wasn’t an English 3-speed machine, it was a wheel I inherited from an older brother, and it was called a “Racycle.” It had a very big front sprocket, and it had two speeds—high and low. You changed from one to the other by backing up on the pedal for a second and then pumping forward again. I was very proud of it. Everybody noticed it because of the unusually big sprocket—as big around as a schoolhouse clock.