Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  1. White had been to Sarasota, Florida, with Roger and Carol Angell, while Roger was visiting ballparks there and writing a piece on spring training.

  1. Muskie had presented White with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

  1. In truth, Xero-Lube, manufactured by Colgate-Palmolive, is a saliva-substitute for the relief of dry mouth and contains calcium phosphate monobasic, fluoride, and citrus flavoring.

  1. The review by Russell Lynes, titled “The Divided Life of Stuart Little’s Father,” was published in their February 26, 1984 issue. It begins, “Near the beginning of his nice biography of E. B. (Andy) White, a very nice and very gifted man . . .” and it is what you might call a nice review. The “recent” photo shows White wearing his eye patch.

  1. Alpheus Waldo Smith (1898–1977) entered Cornell University in 1915, left for military service during World War I, and received his A.B. in 1919, a year after White graduated, then went on for a Ph.D. at Harvard. A psychologist, Smith later taught at the University of Minnesota and at Cornell, among other universities. In his 1969 interview with Elledge, Smith recalled White’s early contributions to the Cornell Sun.

  2. Notes and Comment, 25 December 1948, a Christmas piece about Harold Ross, as Scrooge, reading Fowler’s Modern English Usage, while White quotes Bible examples of the proper use of “that” and “which.”

  1. At the time, Sally Krasnowiecki lived in Brooklin and her mother lived in Surrey, England (not to be confused with Surry, Maine, near Brooklin). Mollie Panter-Downes (1906–1997) had been a New Yorker correspondent, writing “Letters from London” (1939–1984), later published in book form as Letters from England (1940) and London War Notes (1972). She also wrote One Fine Day (1947) and other books.

  1. Alice had fudged a picture to show how she looked with bobbed hair.

  2. Bradley Fisk, a junior counselor.

  3. A visiting fireman-cousin of Robert E. Treman, who was the proprietor of an Ithaca sporting goods store and the husband of Irene Castle.

  1. Hugh Thompson, a fraternity brother.

  1. Another of White’s Cornell friends, a former editor of the Widow.

  1. In November White had left UP and gone to work for a public relations man, George S. Wheat. One of his tasks was to write “human interest” stories for the papers publicizing the efforts of the Municipal Employment Bureau on behalf of the unemployed.

  1. The principal building of the Arts College at Cornell.

  2. A hamlet east of Ithaca.

  1. Herbert Bayard Swope, editor of the New York World, where Vischer was a reporter.

  1. Mae Gleason was a waitress at Gram Gleason’s in Belgrade. White’s garrulous “Auntie Blanche” McCarten was the second wife of his Uncle Arthur McCarten.

  1. If the machines were sent, they are probably still there. The two travelers never got to Olympia.

  1. A gold charm worn on their watch chains by board members of the Cornell Sun.

  2. This was the only serious trouble the travelers had with their car. White drew on the incident in the piece “Farewell, My Lovely,” which appeared in The New Yorker over the pseudonym Lee Strout White and which was published as a book in 1936 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons under the title Farewell to Model T.

  1. The Cruise of the Kawa by “Professor Walter E. Traprock” (George Shepard Chappell of Vanity Fair), a burlesque on the South Sea school of writers.

  1. Everett, Bristow, Jr. (Tote), and Gertrude were Bristow Adams’s children.

  1. While working on a paper in New Rochelle, Cushman had courted and married one of his co-workers in the city room. They had a daughter, Nancy. The marriage ended in divorce shortly afterward.

  2. Gertrude Lynahan, who had been the women’s editor of the Cornell Sun. She later married Joel Sayre.

  3. Carl Helm, White’s boss at the American Legion News Service, had been so impressed by his young assistant’s carefree departure for the West that he had quit his own job and, with his wife, headed for the Coast.

  1. The “vacation” was unauthorized—White simply disappeared without telling anyone where he was going. He stayed at Bear Spring Camps on one of the Belgrade Lakes. The proprietor of the camps was Bert Mosher, whom White had known since his early days in Maine.

  2. Ralph Paladino, Ross’s secretary.

  1. The address was intentionally wrong—White was still living at 112 West 13th Street. The telephone number is scrambled, too.

  1. “Dr. Vinton” was rejected by Ross, who said he didn’t understand it. It was published in England in The Adelphi magazine in January 1931. White later included it in his collection of pieces, Quo Vadimus?

  1. Hope Crouch (now Mrs. Ray Nash), a friend who lived nearby, had been looking after White’s pets during one of his periodic absences from the city. “Baby” was White’s canary, the subject of several pieces in The New Yorker.

  1. Cornell professor and artist, brother-in-law of Bristow Adams.

  2. Stanley was working as landscape architect at the Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine.

  1. White liked the name Sam Beaver and years later gave the name to the boy in The Trumpet of the Swan.

  1. Josephine Buffa, the cook, a North Italian woman who was crazy about puppies. According to White, she was the only person he ever knew who, when a dog got sick on the floor and she had to clean up the mess, felt sorry for the dog.

  2. Palmer Lewis owned the cottage the Whites had rented in Bedford Village so they would have a place in the country to take Nancy and Roger on weekends.

  1. One of White’s nephews, who spent the summer of 1930 at Camp Otter.

  2. Serena was a name the Whites used for the unborn baby.Willy was the son of Josephine Buffa, and Miss Heyl a governess on loan from Katharine’s sister.

  1. Another name for the unborn baby.

  1. Daisy had been hit by a car in Bedford Village but had escaped with a broken leg.

  1. Wright and Duerr were camp counselors. Wright, a Canadian, and White took many canoe trips together and became lifelong friends.

  2. The camp paper. With James Thurber contributing drawings, it was in a peculiarly happy position.

  1. It was probably hepatitis.

  2. Paul Hartzell, who conducted religious services at Camp Otter.

  1. Koffler, a travel agent, had chartered a royal yacht and converted it to a cruise ship.

  1. Ann Honeycutt, later married to St. Clair McKelway.

  2. Madge Kennedy, an actress whom Ross was courting. White’s New Yorker casual “The Doily Menace,” which later appeared in Quo Vadimus? was based on an incident at dinner at Madge Kennedy’s.

  1. Paul Nash, British art critic, who was full of praise for Thurber’s drawings.

  1. In fact, Henry C. Earp is a character in “The Key of Life,” one of the pieces in Quo Vadimus?

  2. Adams had launched the aircraft company after an interlude in Hollywood. He eventually found his niche in advertising in Atlanta.

  3. Mike Galbreath, seemingly the steadiest and most solid of the quartet of roommates from 112 West 13th Street, was at this time still working for McGraw-Hill. A few years later he suddenly became mentally ill—victim of schizophrenia. He was placed in a mental hospital, languished there and, years later, died there.

  1. Bergman was managing editor of The New Yorker, and had to cope with the financial aspects of White’s comings and goings.

  2. The “black sloop” was a famous boat. She was originally called the Great Republic, and was about thirty feet overall. Her builder, Howard Blackburn, had been a sailor of considerable renown along the Atlantic Coast. He had once gotten lost in a dory while fishing on the Grand Banks and had deliberately let his hands freeze to the oars so he could continue to row. He made it to shore and later, despite having lost most of his fingers, sailed the Great Republic alone across the Atlantic.

  1. Daisy was run over on December 22, 1931, by a yellow cab that jumped the curb at the corner of University Place and 8th Street. Mrs. Lardner, who had been wal
king the dog and who loved her dearly, was so upset by the accident that she left the Whites’ employ. An account of Daisy’s death appears in “Obituary,” a New Yorker piece later included in Quo Vadimus?

  2. Katharine White had once absent-mindedly thrown the family’s Maine-to-New York railway tickets in the garbage pail. A search of the local dump followed, and the tickets were recovered.

  1. Howard Pervear, caretaker and gardener for the farm in North Brooklin. He was working on the place when the Whites bought it and stayed with them for many years.

  1. A yawl White had chartered one summer.

  1. A large sumptuous power yacht owned by tycoon Robert F. Herrick.

  1. Carl Rose, a New Yorker artist, and his wife Dorothy.

  1. Eugene Schoen, an architect, managed the building at 16 E. 8th Street for the Sailors Snug Harbor, owners.

  2. James Thurber married Helen Muriel Wismer on June 25, 1935, a month after his divorce from his first wife. Thurber took Helen to Martha’s Vineyard, then to the Whites’ in North Brooklin. On their return to New York, the couple sublet a furnished apartment at 8 Fifth Avenue.

  3. Walker, a long-time city editor of the Herald Tribune, had taken a job with The New Yorker.

  1. In 1935 The New Yorker moved from 25 W. 45th Street to 25 W. 43rd Street.

  2. William Gebert, the magazine’s purchasing agent; described by White as “a man who always had a cigar between his teeth.”

  1. With his father dead and his mother moved to Washington, White was closing up the house in Mount Vernon.

  1. Hobart G.Weekes, a copy editor at The New Yorker, and the man in charge of last-minute fixes.

  2. William Levick, who had done a short trick as managing editor, was now head of the Makeup Department. He was “a man of incomparable irascibility” (according to White).

  1. Of White’s poem “H. L. Mencken Meets a Poet in the West Side Y.M.C.A.” The Saturday Review ran it, and White later included it in his collection The Fox of Peapack.

  1. Charles Scholz, executor of the wills of both White’s parents.

  1. Russell Maloney had become the chief rewrite man of Talk and was a contributor of satirical and humorous pieces. His “Inflexible Logic” became one of the most famous casuals the magazine ever published.

  1. Center Harbor Yacht Club fleet’s semiweekly race.

  2. The Mattie was a coasting schooner, built to carry lumber and firewood.

  3. A red dachshund. White had bought Fred as a puppy in a Madison Avenue pet shop. His AKC papers, White always thought, had been forged. He was a large, strong-willed, beer-drinking dog about whom much has been written by his master. Katharine White loved dachshunds, but her husband’s feelings about the breed were mixed. “For a number of years,” he wrote, “I have been agreeably encumbered by a very large and dissolute dachshund named Fred. . . . He even disobeys me when I instruct him in something that he wants to do. And when I answer his peremptory scratch at the door and hold the door open for him to walk through, he stops in the middle to light a cigarette, just to hold me up.” Fred died at thirteen, “of his excesses and after a drink of brandy.”

  4. Madeline Day, a high-school girl, came to the Whites as extra help during her summer vacation.

  1. Theodore Keller and his wife, summer visitors to Blue Hill. Ted Keller was master of Dickinson House at Lawrenceville School and head of the school’s music department. The Kellers had two daughters, Lucy and Elsa.

  2. The Blue Hill Fair-which later was the setting for the Fair in Charlotte’s Web. Jean was a live-in baby sitter.

  1. Morley was co-editor of the eleventh edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and the “spinach joke” was included in the book. It was White’s caption for a cartoon by Carl Rose which appeared in The New Yorker of December 8, 1928. The caption was one of many that White contributed to the magazine over the years:

  “It’s broccoli, dear.”

  “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

  1. Bellport, Long Island. White had spent summers there.

  2. Arthur Illian had guided White in investing his savings.

  3. Best friend and severest critic.

  1. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Katharine White’s sister. She was eleven years older than Katharine, unmarried, and a writer.

  2. Phillips Lord, who played “Seth Parker” in the radio serial.

  3. Phil Hoyt worked for a while at the magazine. He had been an Assistant Commissioner in the Traffic Division of the New York Police Department.

  4. The Whites’ rubber plant.

  1. White wrote: “The Northeast Harbor fleet, about seventy-five yachts from Mount Desert Island, held an annual racing cruise that often took them to Allen Cove in Blue Hill Bay for the night. The skippers and their crew members used the Whites’ float, camped on the Whites’ beach, and made themselves at home generally. After several of these visitations, the Club had the medal struck, citing the Whites for tolerance above and beyond the call of duty.”

  1. An early contributor to The New Yorker’s Reporter at Large Department. Wolcott Gibbs once said of him, “Markey has reached the point where he believes that everything that happens to him is interesting.”

  1. The piece was “Memoirs of a Master,” in which White, using the pseudonym “Detweiler,” recollected all the domestics who had enriched his home. The Saturday Evening Post rejected it, and it appeared in The New Yorker in 1939 over the signature “M.R.A.” It was one of the pieces by White included in A Subtreasury of American Humor.

  1. White had suggested Berry, a former graduate manager of athletics at Cornell, as a possible substitute writer of Comment during the “year off.” Berry took the job, but the connection was short-lived.

  1. John Hanrahan, a magazine consultant, had been taken on by Raoul Fleischmann shortly after The New Yorker was started, when it was floundering. There was no money available to pay him, so he was paid in stock. It was he who urged Fleischmann to buy Stage. When that proved a fiasco, the magazine insisted that Hanrahan return his stock, and he did.

  2. “The Birth of an Adult,” April 23, 1938.

  1. Ray Wilder, owner of the boatyard where White stored his boat.

  2. Son of Franz Kneisel, first violinist of the Kneisel Quartet. Several of the early rusticators in Blue Hill were musicians, among them Wulf Fries, cellist, Bertha J. Tapper, pianist, and Henry Krehbiel, critic. Franz Kneisel owned land and conducted a summer music school, his pupils boarding in the homes of villagers. Concerts were given, and eventually a hall was built on a slope at the foot of the mountain. The school has survived, and one of the pleasures of summertime in Blue Hill is listening to chamber music in “Kneisel Hall.”

  1. For many years Gluyas Williams and his family had a summer home on Sylvester’s Cove, Deer Isle. They and the Whites used to visit back and forth.

  1. “Daniel Webster, the Hay Fever, and Me” was published in the July 30, 1938, issue of the magazine. The piece appears in One Man’s Meat under the title “The Summer Catarrh.”

  1. An ocarina is an oval wind instrument, related to the flute.

  2. The Eureka Pavilion once stood in the center of Brooklin.

  3. Red lead was bottom paint from a boat.

  1. A piece about White by James Thurber appeared in the Saturday Review, October 15, 1938.

  1. Morris Bishop had married the painter and muralist Alison Mason Kingsbury. Their daughter was also called Alison.

  1. It was Candage who gave White his most prized bit of agricultural advice: “The time to cut hay is in hayin’ time.”

  1. A Pearl in Every Oyster.

  1. Annie Barrows Shepley, sister of Katharine White’s mother. She was the “Aunt Poo” about whom White wrote in the “One Man’s Meat” essay dated June 1942. In middle life, she had surprised her New England family by marrying a young Japanese student, Hyozo Omori, whom she had hired as a cook at her home in Woodstock, Connecticut. Although Poo’s roots were in Maine, in 1907 she and her aristoc
ratic young husband went to live in Tokyo, where he founded Japan’s first settlement house, Yurin En. Mr. Omori died in 1912, but Poo continued to live on in her adopted Japan. During the Second World War, with Japan our enemy, the Whites were uneasy about her health and her safety; but when word came of her death, all indications were that she had been showered with honors and that she had died of natural causes.

  1. When the Whites moved to Maine, Katharine was the children’s book reviewer for The New Yorker. She continued in the job, writing from North Brooklin. Review copies littered the house, and from time to time Katharine passed them on to the Friend Memorial Library in Brooklin-an institution to which she became deeply devoted.

  1. Amy Loveman, an editor of the Saturday Review of Literature.

  1. “They Come with Joyous Song” appeared in The New Yorker, May 13, 1939. The piece was later reprinted in One Man’s Meat under the title “The World of Tomorrow.”

  1. White thought Vischer’s attempts at music criticism in the World wildly funny.

  1. In its early years The New Yorker occasionally gave its writers a bonus payment of stock. The magazine was unable to pay contributors and staffers a high rate, and this troubled Ross. Stock was one way to take up the slack. It was also a bait to encourage greater production-in this case more Comment from White.

  1. “I’d Send My Son to Cornell,” which had appeared in University.

  1. Raymond Gram Swing was an influential radio commentator at the time, broadcasting on Voice of America about political issues.

  1. “Barney Steele,” writes White, “was a Joel White hero who had a team of work horses and who sometimes let a boy take the reins.”

  2. Leon F. Sylvester, poultryman and storekeeper of South Blue Hill.

  1. On August 11, White’s poem “Radio in the Rain” was broadcast with “Nightmare at Noon” by Stephen Benét.

  1. Edmund Devol, M.D., and his friend Bishop Samuel Trexler were New York acquaintances of the Whites’, summering in Bar Harbor. Devol was a fashionable physician-a high irrigationist. He had at one time attended Harold Ross.

  2. Minnie, a black dachshund bitch.

  1. A “car” is a floating wooden crate for holding live lobsters—or, in this case, live eels. Lawrence Matthews was Joel White’s best friend at this time.