Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollins.com

  1. Kezzie Simpson was an English girl who had been employed by the Whites to help care for the infant Elwyn. Later, when she had children of her own, she named her firstborn Elwyn.

  1. Esther and Winnie were domestics in the Whites’ house. The comet was Halley’s.

  2. Wallace Hart Wyvell was the infant son of White’s sister Clara. Clara was a permissive parent, according to White. She let her children eat practically anything they wanted to.

  1. Stanley had just launched himself as a landscape architect, and had dragooned his young brother into giving the home place a face lift.

  2. White’s father sold the house at 101 Summit Avenue shortly before White left for college, and the family moved to 48 Mersereau Avenue, a much smaller and more modern house.

  1. Melvil Dewey, founder of the Lake Placid Club and pioneer of Simplified Spelling.

  2. A collie—White’s first dog.

  1. White was staying with relatives on Archer Avenue for a few days while his parents were away.

  2. The signature is in a code that the youngest White had invented.

  1. Mr. Eisenberg, a reader, had complained about The New Yorker—always the same stable of writers, too many reminiscences. It wasn’t White’s job to answer letters of this sort, but once in a while he did it anyway.

  1. Given by the Whites to honor William Shawn on his being named editor of The New Yorker. There were 140 invited guests.

  1. Worried that his spider story might resemble other spiders in literature or in life, White had questioned Miss Nordstrom about it, and she had come up with the story about the Scottish king Robert the Bruce. Robert, while in prison, watched a spider make several attempts to spin a web. The persistence of the spider inspired him to break jail and return to the wars.

  1. When he was a student at Cornell, White once attempted to cross Fall Creek gorge by walking the handrail of the Stewart Avenue bridge—an aerial challenge that would have been perfect for the Wallendas.

  1. After the cool reception the New York Public Library had given Stuart Little, White was not above taking a poke at librarians. His wife had regaled him with tales of the candlelight meetings she had attended at the Library when she was reviewing books for The New Yorker.

  1. Miss Moore, writing in the Horn Book for December 1952, said: “Fern, the real center of the book, is never developed. The animals never talk. They speculate. As to Charlotte, her magic and mystery require a different technique to create that lasting interest in spiders which controls the childish impulse to do away with them.” (The letter Miss Moore wrote about Stuart Little was not addressed to White but to his wife.)

  2. British poet and the author of Mary Poppins and its sequels.

  1. Louis de Rochemont is Richard de Rochemont’s brother. While Richard continued his efforts to make a movie out of Here Is New York, Louis was after Charlotte. Nothing came of either pursuit.

  2. In the early days at The New Yorker, when White was a reporter for The Talk of the Town, Managing Editor Ralph Ingersoll discovered that White didn’t mind heights and sent him aloft at every opportunity. On the occasion referred to here, White had discovered, after making the ascent by elevator and ladder to the top of the unfinished Chrysler Building, that the base of the needle, where he was standing, was only about eight feet square.

  1. John Detmold’s mother managed the houses on Turtle Bay Garden. Peter was John’s younger brother.

  1. De Rochemont’s efforts to make a movie of Here Is New York had led him to William Zeckendorf, the real estate developer.

  1. Right of everyone to a job.

  1. “The ABC of Security,” published in The New Yorker, May 9, 1953.

  1. “Visitors to the Pond” (The New Yorker, May 23, 1953) was an imaginary visit to Concord and Walden, poking Senator McCarthy in the ribs.

  1. May Hill Arbuthnot, librarian and authority on children’s literature.

  1. Sullivan’s book of collected pieces entitled The Night the Old Nostalgia Burned Down.

  1. The division of the income from BOM on The Second Tree From the Corner would have been 50 percent to White, 50 percent to Harper’s.

  1. He had applied for (and later was offered) a job with the Newport News Shipbuilding Corporation.

  1. Mrs. Ames was Executive Director of Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs.

  1. Samuel Tilly White was born March 12, 1854.

  2. “The Notself,” said White, “lives in the dark subbasement of the psyche. He helps the janitor.”

  1. A leather-bound copy of Charlotte’s Web was presented to White when 100,000 copies of the book had been printed.

  1. Mr. Volente is the man in White’s piece called “The Hotel of the Total Stranger,” which appeared in the “One Man’s Meat” department of Harper’s magazine and later in the book The Second Tree From the Corner.

  1. In a letter, Marx had accused White of adopting the mantle of Garbo. The letter ended, “. . . to me you are just a wraithlike figure who lives in a spirit world.”

  1. From Harvard. White’s cousin, a Baptist minister and Colby College alumnus, had also sent him some church literature.

  1. Lobrano, who had been plagued by bad health, had gone into a hospital for tests. Nothing turned up, and he was released, still not feeling well. A year and a half later he died of cancer.

  2. Dr. Dana W. Atchley of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital was for a number of years White’s New York physician.

  3. The piece, “Walden—1954,” was published in the September issue of the Yale Review. White later included it in The Points of My Compass under the title “A Slight Sound at Evening.”

  1. Ebba Jonsson, the New Yorker’s librarian.

  1. Robert Saudek, executive producer of the CBS “Omnibus” program, had persuaded White to write a short TV documentary on lobstering and had sent a young director, Arthur Zegart, to see the Whites, scout the coast, and shoot the picture. Together White and Zegart put together a film showing a Deer Isle fisherman, Eugene Eaton, hauling his traps on a rough day in Jericho Bay. The film was broadcast on December 5, 1954.

  1. Miss Margolis, a reader, had asked White the meaning of his piece “The Second Tree From the Corner” from the book of the same title.

  1. The offending passage was changed. It now reads, “. . . to remind us daily of wounded soldiers and tortured Jews.”

  1. Patterson, the schoolboy son of a friend of White’s who lived on Mount Desert, was struggling with an English assignment, and had asked White to outline his life briefly.

  1. Where Cushman’s daughter Nancy (Mrs. Martin Dibner) was living.

  1. In his piece, “A Canoe on the Border Lakes,” Brooks had explained the derivation of “whisky-jack”—a common name for the Canada jay—from the Indian weeskaijohn (“he who comes to the fire”) and had quoted nineteenth-century explorer and geographer David Thompson’s description of the bird.

  1. Both Benson and Dulles were claiming not to have read pieces published with their imprimatur—Benson a letter in Harper’s, Dulles the “brink of war” article in Life.

  1. Miss Goodman, a professional entertainer and comedienne, had requested permission to perform White’s poem “Song of the Queen Bee.”

  1. Davison was Program Coordinator for the Harvard Law School Forum.

  1. Of February 18, 1956.

  1. Leonard was a producer at Channel KETC in St. Louis, Missouri.

  1. A “Letter from the East” in The New Yorker, June 30, 1956, entitled “Coon Tree.”

  1. Claribel Tainter, housekeeper, and Mrs. Arlene Freethy, the cook.

  1. Joel White, on completing his military service, returned to Brooklin and found a job with Arno Day, owner of the boatyard in Center Harbor. Day was a good builder of wooden boats and Joel, with a degree in naval architecture, was eager to learn the practical side of construction.

  1. Fern was a 20-foot sloop, a double-ender, built for White in Denmark from a d
esign by Aage Nielsen. The launching took place from a shipyard a few miles south of Boston.

  1. For Christmas in 1956, White wrote a rhymed greeting that included the name of everyone on The New Yorker’s personnel sheet.

  1. Hutchins, president of the Fund for the Republic, had asked White to comment on a prospectus Hutchins had written setting forth the Fund’s program on civil liberties.

  1. White’s teacher and friend was in a nursing home near Ithaca.

  2. A bronchoscopy, to find the cause of some trouble White was having with his throat.

  3. The Cornell Plantations, a quarterly which Professor Adams had edited before his illness.

  1. The course was English 8, not English 20.

  2. Stevenson replied but didn’t have all the answers. The Macmillan Company later discovered that the book—first privately printed by Strunk in 1918—had subsequently undergone some transformations. It had been revised and circulated for many years before White got his hands on it, but was still, in 1957, unheard of outside the academic world.

  1. For many years Forrest Allen delivered the mail.

  1. The “original manuscript” was a piece about the Model T which Strout had submitted to The New Yorker. It was the piece from which “Farewell, My Lovely” by “Lee Strout White” grew.

  1. Sullivan had sent White a birthday letter, cataloguing the good things he wished for him.

  1. Royalties are divided equally between White and the Strunk estate.

  1. Of literary faults.

  2. “The Seven Steps to Heaven,” which ran in The New Yorker of September 7, 1957.

  3. Subject of a Profile in The New Yorker.

  1. Case had commissioned three or four grammarians well versed in the textbook field to submit suggestions to White.

  1. Keeper of the Vermont Country Store mail order operation.

  1. Under “Clever” in his word list, White wrote: “Note also that the word means one thing when applied to men, another when applied to horses. A clever horse is a good-natured one, not an ingenious one.”

  2. “Case balked,” White says, “at ‘Writing good standard English is no cinch.’ He said it sounded like a horse’s girdle.”

  3. Harry Cloudman, a Macmillan executive.

  1. The piece was written, and The New Yorker ran it as a “Letter from the East” in the issue of January 28, 1960. It was included in The Points of My Compass, under the title “The Railroad.”

  1. Frances White Earl, Albert’s daughter, had just died, leaving three little girls.

  1. Howard Cushman’s second wife, Jeannette.

  2. The Years with Ross, by James Thurber.

  1. In 1960 the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded White the Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  1. At the American Academy of Arts and Letters. White’s medal was awarded him in absentia.

  2. During the party following the proceedings a cocktail glass came crashing down into the courtyard. The assumption was that it had been tossed by Norman Mailer.

  1. Bishop collected old postcards and showered them on his friends.

  2. To speak at Book and Bowl, the undergraduate literary society at Cornell. Rae Keast was professor of English.

  3. Alison Bishop Jolly, anthropologist, daughter of Morris.

  1. The Buford had at one time been owned by the U.S. government. When Goldman and Berkman were deported, it was the Buford that carried them away.

  1. Yale did get many of the Thurber papers, but the larger part went to Ohio State University.

  1. “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island,” in The New Yorker of January 13, 1962.

  1. Of Before My Time.

  1. Young Johnny McNulty had been reading his father’s writings and had sent White a story he himself had written.

  1. Coates had been hospitalized for a throat ailment and had written a story that he called “Special Care.” It ran in the May 25, 1963, issue of The New Yorker under the title “The Captive.”

  2. Astrid Peters, Coates’s second wife, herself a New Yorker short story writer.

  1. In the Atlantic Monthly—reminiscences of The New Yorker in the thirties, when Morton had worked briefly for the magazine.

  1. The piece appeared in the “One Man’s Meat” department of the July 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

  1. Bradley, author of No Place to Hide, had taught English in Helsinki for two years. He had written White that One Man’s Meat occupied a “unique place in the hearts and minds” of his students there.

  1. Mrs. Martin had written White that she was being visited by a fine mouse.

  1. Planned Parenthood, in which Canfield had been active for many years.

  2. Mrs. Canfield, a sculptor.

  1. In the fall of 1963 Roger Angell had married Carol Rogge, then a secretary in The New Yorker’s fiction department. The girls are Roger’s daughters, Caroline (Callie) and Alice.

  1. Harper had a safe full of manuscripts by Zane Grey, which they continued to publish long after his death.

  1. Miss Frank was a Cornell Daily Sun reporter who had come to North Brooklin, armed with a tape recorder, to get an interview with White.

  1. Of An E. B.White Reader. Jennison was the editor in charge of the project.

  1. The recording was issued by Pathways of Sound, which Berk heads.

  1. After reading White’s “What Do Our Hearts Treasure?” in The New Yorker, Mrs. Cook had written urging the Whites not to be sad about having to celebrate Christmas in Florida.

  1. Hellman had written a “Department of Amplification” about White’s piece “The Annals of Birdwatching” for the April 16, 1966, issue of The New Yorker: The major, who had once witnessed the courtship of whippoorwills “from a small outbuilding,” is one of the dozens of birdwatchers enshrined in Birds of Massachusetts.

  1. In The New Yorker, about the Houston Astrodome.

  1. Mrs. Martin had sent White a newspaper clipping in which it was reported that Swiss agriculturists receive the “high price” of $9.28 per quart of mouse milk.

  1. Lost New York, by Nathan Silver.

  2. Maggie and Jones. White writes: “Jones was a small, poorly shaped Norwich Terrier, a bundle of neuroses. He had been whelped in England. By the time he arrived in Maine he was a nervous wreck, and had to be restored to life. Maggie, a lovable little mongrel bitch, was assigned the task and did it beautifully.”

  1. “Snow White,” by Donald Barthelme, in The New Yorker of February 18, 1967.

  1. The Saratoga Racing Association, at the suggestion of Roger Angell, got up a stake race in honor of Frank Sullivan’s seventy-fifth birthday

  1. The reference is to the knighting of Francis Chichester on his return to England after sailing around the world single-handed. White’s sloop Martha was built by Joel White at the Brooklin Boat Yard.

  2. The Time of Laughter, by Corey Ford.

  3. A piece about computers in banks. It ran in the New York Times, September 23, 1967.

  1. Mitgang was then a member of the editorial board of the New York Times.

  2. Betty Pomerantz, Mitgang’s secretary.

  1. Wolfers was a summer resident of Brooklin, director of the Johns Hopkins Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research.

  2. In Women’s Wear Daily, July 1, 1968.

  1. Frueh had been The New Yorker’s theater caricaturist for forty years.

  1. Mildred Dilling was a harpist who had many literary friends and numbered Harpo Marx among her pupils.

  1. Shenker went to Brooklin and interviewed White on his 70th.

  1. Philip Booth—poet, sailor, and professor of English at Syracuse University— is a summer resident of Castine. He met White on a visit to the Brooklin Boat Yard.

  1. A neighbor of Coates’s in Old Chatham.

  1. A young film maker who wanted to know why Charlotte’s Web had not been made into a movie.

  1. In late October, Joel White had
flown to Lisbon to join the crew of the 52-foot schooner Integrity and help sail her to Grenada in the Caribbean.

  1. Mr. MacKinnon had written on behalf of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California. This was the Institute’s second attempt to involve White in their research.

  1. Don Bolognese had been commissioned to illustrate the book. Harper, after

  1. An original Thurber cartoon—the one about the woman who had a constant ringing in her ears.

  1. Russell Smith, a neighbor.

  1. The recording session did begin in Joel White’s home. However, because of continual interruptions from background noise, White managed to read only about half the book the first day. On the second day, the crew moved to the secluded house of White’s friend Dr.Wearn and there completed the recording.

  1. A Day in the Life of Roger Angell.

  2. “The Browning Off of Pelham Manor.”

  1. Chandler Richmond was curator of the Stanwood Wildlife Foundation and the man to whom everyone brought wounded creatures.

  1. An award for excellence in film making.

  1. Anthony English had taken over as editor for the revision of The Elements of Style after the death of Jack Case.

  1. “Letter from the East” (about geese) in The New Yorker, July 24, 1971.

  1. Professor Chatterton of Boise State College, Idaho, had written White for help on a biography of Alexander Woollcott.

  1. Writers José and Helen Yglesias were neighbors of the Whites’.

  1. Arvida, a development company, was often the center of controversy.

  1. A collection of baseball pieces by Angell.

  1. In Charlotte’s Web, Wilbur challenges the phrase “less than nothing”: “What do you mean, less than nothing? I don’t think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It’s the lowest you can go. . . .”

  1. Sampson had finished his biography of White and had sent him a copy of the manuscript for checking.

  1. Local name for Lake Messalonski.

  2. Of these Letters.

  1. The New Yorker, August 1, 1977.

  1. White had sent a pair of earrings and a pendant to Cindy, from some odds and ends of jewelry in Katharine’s estate.