Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  Although seventy years have gone over the dam, I still remember how you could wing a baseball with your left arm. I was a fantastically stupid ball player, among other things. I remember a game when they had me playing at shortstop, and with a man on first the batter clouted the ball right at me—an easy roller. Instead of tossing it to second to get the runner, I threw to first, and all my teammates hurled oaths at me for being so dumb.

  I’ll be 85 in July. Am still riding a bike but have lost the sight in one eye, along with a lot of other losses. Last fall I was tooling along on my 3-speed Raleigh when a coyote emerged from the woods and followed me. I don’t think he was anything but curious, but it was kind of spooky to have a wild animal tailing me. I was probably his first octogenarian on wheels and he just wanted to get a good look at it.

  Hope you’re still playing ball and beating people at tennis.

  Yrs,

  [E. B. White]

  To SCOTT ELLEDGE

  North Brooklin, Maine

  May 30, 1984

  Dear Scott:

  Thanks for your phone call to the hospital, and thanks for your letter. I left the hospital when Medicare began putting pressure on my doctor, a couple of days before I really wanted to leave. My recovery from pneumonia would have been a normal one, but it got all mixed up with the collapse of Henry Allen [White’s longtime caretaker on the farm] from a bad back. Just as I got out of bed, Henry got into bed, leaving me to take care of the place, finish putting the vegetable garden in, transplant and water about two thousand seedlings from the greenhouse, do the house chores and the barn chores, and in general keep this pleasure dome alive pending his recovery. Since the operation of my place is largely mysterious to me even after fifty years of occupancy, and since the slightest physical activity left me feeling extremely weak from the aftermath of the pneumonia, I’ve had a pretty rough three weeks of it and contracted a severe case of battle fatigue.

  But things are looking better today. Henry is partially recovered, and I’ve hired a new hand—a woman known locally as “Sally Kraz” [Krasnowiecki]1 because nobody can pronounce her last name. Sally Kraz is an English woman to whom gardening comes naturally and who loves to work outdoors. Her mother lives in Surrey and is a friend of Mollie Panter-Downes.1 I would feel a whole lot better about life, though, if I could break the chain of my migraine headaches—today’s is Number 21, which is a lot of migraines for one springtime.

  Last night I was looking around in your book about the American author who never quite made it into the big time, and I discovered an error. I don’t know why I failed to catch it when I was reading the manuscript but I did. In your chapter on the WILD FLAG, you said my ideas derived chiefly from Clarence Streit. I had read Streit, but it was a guy named Emery Reves who got me going. He had written a book called “A Democratic Manifesto” and was just finishing another when he came into my office with his manuscript. He had a lousy title for it—I forget what it was—and I suggested he call it “The Anatomy of Peace.” He grabbed the title, and the book was published. It had a profound influence on my thinking about the world, and I was soon to encounter Emery again in San Francisco for the formation of the UN. He and Cord Meyer, Jr. (who had lost an eye in the Pacific) and Cord’s bride Mary Pinchot Meyer and an ex-soldier named Charles Bolté (who had lost a leg somewhere or other) and I formed a happy quintet and spent almost every night together for two weeks in the bars and restaurants thereabouts. It was a great experience. Every night we took the world apart and put it all together again, the most nourishing fortnight I ever put in.

  I don’t know what happened to Emery Reves. Somehow or other he got connected with Winston Churchill, had a job with him, I think. Like all my compatriots, he’s probably dead. Haven’t heard from him in years.

  Your book has been an eye-opener to me. I never realized how many people were waiting to get me. That latest review I’ve read (from the Sacramento Bee) ends: “Anyway, it may be a long time before someone comes along who wants to find the dark side of this gentle writer.” It’s clear that this reviewer hopes he’ll live long enough to find it. He’s got a great title: “The Dark Side of E. B. White.” I envy him the title.

  Congratulations on your joining the “new emeriti.” I would like to have been there to salute you.

  Yrs,

  Andy

  • Jane Phillips had written to say that she remembered White from when he and Howard Cushman stayed in Yakima, Washington, with the Van Vliet family, circa 1921. Carol Van Vliet had been her close friend in high school. Shortly after, Phillips attended the University of Washington in Seattle, when White was employed with The Seattle Times, and the two of them went to a dance hall to see Rudolph Valentino.

  To MRS. JANE BAKER PHILLIPS

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  [ca. June 13, 1984]

  Dear Jane:

  How could I forget the combination of you and Rudolph Valentino! Of the two, I thought you were the prettier. But it was a long time ago. Anyway, we outlived him.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  To JOHN R. FLEMING

  North Brooklin, Maine

  12 September 1984

  Dear Jack:

  Welcome to the club!

  As one who turned eighty-five in July, I have a message for you: Don’t fall down. I waited what I thought was a decent interval, then fell on rough ground and broke a couple of ribs. There is no way to get to sleep when your ribs are broken, so you stay awake, turning things over in your mind—what’s left of it.

  I hope you have a nice party, and I hope you live as many more years as you can be either useful or happy or both. Stay on your feet, it’s the place to be!

  Yrs,

  Andy

  • White followed his own advice to Jack Fleming to “live as many more years as you can be either useful or happy or both.” The fall that White mentioned occurred after a canoeing outing to nearby Walker’s Pond. A rapid onset of Alzheimer’s seemed to be the result, although doctors later amended that diagnosis to senile dementia. Nurses and other household help were hired and occasionally White was able to dictate a letter, but increasingly his son, Joel, came to read to him and answer the mail. White continued to recognize family and friends. He never lost his sense of humor, often laughing at himself when his mind drifted. He sometimes didn’t know where he was, but his mind wandered to other happy moments in his life. It was not uncommon, for instance, to overhear him mistaking his Maine bedroom for one at the Algonquin Hotel.

  To PETER F. NEUMEYER

  [WRITTEN BY JOEL M. WHITE, ON BEHALF OF HIS FATHER, EBW]

  North Brooklin, Maine

  October 26, 1984

  Dear Mr. Neumeyer:

  I am answering your letter to my father, whose health is increasingly poor.

  As he is really not able to engage in the “conversation” you propose, I think we will not be able to help you pursue your project at this time.

  Sincerely yours,

  Joel White

  To CORONA MACHEMER

  [North Brooklin, Maine]

  5 January 1985

  Dear Corona,

  Thanks for that lovely Perlman record. I have already had a great deal of pleasure from it. Oddly enough the swift passages were rendered on fiddle and piano by me and my brother Stanley in the early part of the century and they on that account have a comic value for me. The Perlman is unusually beautiful, and I can’t tell you how much I have really loved it.

  I am dictating this letter to Pat Fowler because I really can’t type decently any more. I shall make it brief but send my love.

  [Andy]

  To CHARLES G. MULLER

  [FROM JOEL M. WHITE]

  North Brooklin, Maine

  July 5, 1985

  Dear Charlie,

  Many thanks for sending Dad the piece on Walden Pond.

  Dad is now in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, which is the reason this letter comes from me. He can’t do any desk work now
—in fact is mostly confined to his bedroom. But I will read him your note, and he will be pleased to have it.

  I read to him every day, mostly from his book of letters, which he seems to enjoy most. Not a few of those letters were written to you, and we both get great pleasure from these trips backward in time. The reading takes me back to days of my youth, when Astrid was the biggest and best cruising boat on the coast, and Charlie Muller was a legendary seafaring man, hero of many a foggy passage.

  Thanks again,

  Joel

  Elwyn Brooks White (1899–1985) died on Tuesday, October 1, at his home in North Brooklin, Maine. A gathering of friends and relatives was held in his memory at the Blue Hill Congregational Church in Blue Hill on October 26th, and the church was packed. Among others, White’s stepson, Roger Angell, spoke, recalling White’s reluctance to join public gatherings. Angell hypothesized, “If White could have been here today, he wouldn’t have been here.” Likewise, if White could have received the hundreds of letters that flooded in after his death, he wouldn’t have been able to answer them all.

  PHOTO SECTION

  Family portrait, taken a few months after White’s birth in 1899. Top row, left to right: Samuel Tilly White, Jessie Hart White, Elwyn Brooks White, Marion Robertson White. Bottom row: Lillian White, Albert Hunt White, Stanley Hart White, Clara Frances White.

  101 Summit Avenue, Mount Vernon, New York

  “I slept at one time in that tower room, hating the journey upstairs through the dark attic and the isolation of the room. The room I was born in, right below, is in full view in this photograph. One big maple by the front entrance seems to have disappeared. . . .”

  Jessie and Elwyn in Mount Vernon, with Beppo, an Irish setter.

  Samuel Tilly White posing at Rangeley Lake.

  Lillian and Elwyn, taken in Clinton Corners, New York, where the Whites summered at that time.

  Elwyn, tending a rabbit.

  Samuel and Elwyn.

  Lillian (eleven and a half) and Elwyn (seven), about 1906.

  “I played piano, picked at the mandolin, and at one point acquired a three-quarter-size cello and took lessons. But I failed to develop musical curiosity . . . . and was content to make a noise, whether ragtime or schmalz or Czerny.”

  Elwyn, in elementary school.

  Elwyn, in grammar school.

  Probably at Cornell.

  The White family men: father Samuel, and sons Albert, Stanley, and Elwyn.

  Great Pond, North Belgrade, Maine. Clockwise: Jessie, Clara, Stanley, Albert, Lillian, and “En,” 1905.

  Elwyn in the bow, Stanley in the stern, and the canoe is called ELWYN. Belgrade, about 1910. At age thirteen, White wrote, “[Belgrade Lake] is one of a series of lakes, which are connected with each other by little streams. One of these streams is several miles long and deep enough so that it affords an opportunity for a fi ne all-day canoe trip.”

  The White family, aboard Jessie, named for Elwyn’s mother.

  White wrote of his Model T, called “Hotspur,” that it “was not a fussy car. . . . It had clearance, it had guts, and it enjoyed wonderful health.”

  “That afternoon we washed dirt from ourselves and our clothes in Ten Mile Lake and slept there in a little pine grove. Slipping on a pine needle, I tumbled on my right elbow the next day, and dislocated it.”

  “Played piano for meals in this cafe. Hardin, Montana.”

  August, 1923, on the S. S. Buford, near Nome, Alaska. White’s journal entry: “The walrus hunt. Consensus of opinion among ladies was that the icebergs were beautiful but the walruses were disgusting.”

  Katharine Sergeant Angell, shortly before her marriage to White.

  White in his New Yorker offi ce. The dachshund is Minnie.

  Andy and Katharine, around 1930, in a group photo taken at Samuel and Jessie White’s golden anniversary party.

  Andy and Katharine at work on A Subtreasury of American Humor.

  White and James Thurber, Sneden’s Landing, about 1929.

  and 27. Harold Ross (above, right) is alleged to have described James Thurber (below left) and E. B. White (below right), by saying: “Look at them, my two best writers, one can’t see to cross the street and the other one is afraid to.”

  Andy with his son, Joel McCoun White, born December 21, 1930.

  Some day when I’m out of sight

  Travel far but travel light!

  Stalk the turtle on the log,

  Watch the heron spear the frog,

  Find the things you only fi nd

  When you leave your bag behind;

  Raise the sail your old man furled,

  Hang your hat upon the world! . . . .

  Joe my tangible creation,

  Happy in perambulation,

  Work no harder than you have to,

  Do you get me?

  [“Apostrophe to a Pram Rider,” “The Conning Tower,” New York World, February 11, 1931 (and The Fox of Peapack)]

  Katharine with infant Joel in the pram and Daisy on a leash.

  Katharine White and her three children: Joel White and Nancy and Roger Angell.

  The Whites’ farm in North Brooklin, Maine. “This is where life centers—kitchen porch, woodshed, well with concrete curb, driveway with remains of blue gravel in it. We planted some fl ags to hide the well curb.”

  White, 1940s.

  Roger Angell and Joel White.

  Katharine, editing, and Joel on the shore at Walker’s Pond.

  The cutter Astrid in Tenant’s Harbor, Maine.

  Joel White at Exeter Academy, about 1945.

  Dachshund, Fred. “He was the Cecil B. DeMille of dogs. He was a zealot. . . .” (“Bedfellows,” The Second Tree from the Corner and Essays of E. B. White)

  Katharine, aboard Astrid, about 1935.

  Katharine and Andy and dachshund, Minnie.

  Nancy Angell at the helm and her mother, Katharine.

  Katharine and Andy, feeding the sheep.

  Joel’s wife, Allene White, in Maine. (Courtesy of Stanton A. Waterman)

  Allene and Joel, with Steven and Martha, stationed in Grossenhausen, Germany, 1955.

  Katharine White, by Peter Arno.

  E. B. White, by James Thurber.

  William Strunk, Jr., author of The Elements of Style. (Courtesy of Cornell University)

  White receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Maine’s Senator Edmund Muskie, 1964.

  Katharine in her New Yorker offi ce.

  Colson Henry Allen, a Brooklin neighbor and a man of many talents, came to work for the Whites as caretaker in August 1952. He had applied for the job some years earlier and been turned down—a decision White later regarded as the craziest mistake he ever made in his life. Allen continued working at the farm, even after White died.

  White with a robin on his shoulder and a cup of worms, 1964.

  Joel M. White, in his Brooklin Boat Yard offi ce, early 1990s.

  The good sloop Martha, built by Joel for his father and named for Joel’s daughter.

  One of White’s rare sspeeches, at launch day.

  Rowing out to the Martha, Brooklin Boat Yard in the background.

  White, feeding the sheep outside the barn. (Courtesy of Jim Kalett)

  Katharine and Andy and dog, Susy, 1976. (Courtesy of Jill Krementz)

  White in his eye patch, early 1984. The dog is Jones. (Courtesy of Bette Britt)

  INDEX

  * * *

  “The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.”

  Names in SMALL CAPITALS are recipients of letters. Titles without author’s name pertain to works by E. B. White. The following abbreviations are used:

  “The ABC of Security,” 347, 347n.

  “About Myself,” 242, 242n.

  Acheson, Dean, 273, 273n.

  Ackerly, C. E. (Bugs), 21, 22

  ADAMS, BRISTOW (B.A.), as Cornell Pl
antations editor, 398n.; Cornell president and, 316; death of, 410–411; EBW’s friendship with, 18; as host to students, 27, 32, 65, 143; sports officiating by, 74. Letters: 357, 398

  Adams, Bristow, Jr. (Tote), 65, 65n.

  Adams, Burke Dowling (Bob), 69, 73, 74, 106, 106n.

  Adams, Everett, 65, 65n.

  Adams, Franklin P., biography of, 576, 659–661; Conning Tower, 18, 69, 502

  Adams, Gertrude. See Turner, Gertrude Adams

  ADAMS, J. DONALD. Letter: 391

  ADAMS, LUELLA, 27, 65. Letters: 27–29, 409–411