Letters of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  2. Frederick Lewis Allen edited White’s “One Man’s Meat” pieces when Lee Hartman was absent. In this case, White thought he overstepped.

  1. DeVoto’s column “The Easy Chair” followed “One Man’s Meat” in the layout of Harper’s.

  1. Alexander Flick, Lobrano’s father-in-law, New York State Historian.

  1. Actually, a camper who resembled The New Yorker’s William Gebert—big cigar, wise look.

  1. White had completed the first draft of the Preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor. The “sectional” prefaces in the book describe different kinds of humor.

  2. White’s stay in Belgrade had been interrupted by an accident. He was watching an evening movie in the recreation hall when a pile of heavy benches came loose and fell down. One of the benches struck him on the back of the neck, stunning him. He and Joel left the next morning for home.

  3. A wire-haired fox terrier White had won on a 25-cent ticket in a raffle. He took the puppy home in his pocket and gave him to Joel.

  1. Henry Varnum Poor had done the illustrations for the Limited Editions Club edition of Ethan Frome. Nothing came of the idea of using one of the leftover illustrations on the jacket of One Man’s Meat.

  2. During his stay in Washington, White had been a house guest in the Georgetown home of his friend H. K. Rigg’s mother.

  1. Joel had a serious sinus condition for which surgery had been recommended. Eventually the Whites decided against an operation, and the condition cured itself.

  1. “Miss Annie Dollard,” White relates, “was in charge of the library when we came to live in Brooklin. She was a tiny spinster with firm convictions about which books were fit to read. The library had acquired The Grapes of Wrath, but Annie took it off the shelf and placed it on her chair and sat on it. That solved that.”

  2. Nathaniel Peffer, professor at Columbia, was an expert on the Orient.

  1. Rigg was a lieutenant in the Coast Guard.

  2. Astrid had been sold.

  1. To attend Roger’s wedding.

  1. As a wartime security device, signs were posted to keep people out of byways and lonely roads.

  1. The reference is to “Harold Ross and The New Yorker” by Dale Kramer and George R. Clark, which ran in the April 1943 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

  1. Stanley had a malignant tumor near his heart and was being treated with deep X ray at the Illinois Research and Educational Hospital. The doctors were not optimistic, but the treatment worked and he recovered.

  1. “A Classic Waits for Me,” published in The New Yorker, February 19, 1944, and later in The Second Tree From the Corner.

  1. Because the magazine was so short-handed, Ross had seriously considered making it a biweekly.

  1. White did write a piece called “About Myself,” beginning “I am a man of medium height”—a line he stole from a monologue by Charles Butterworth. The New Yorker bought the piece and ran it in the issue of February 10, 1945. It was included in The Second Tree From the Corner.

  1. The Army later had second thoughts about One Man’s Meat and lifted the ban. The book appeared in an Armed Services Edition, and its author received many letters from homesick servicemen overseas.

  1. After Roger Angell was transferred to Hickam Field, in Hawaii, his wife Evelyn spent several weeks with the Whites in Maine with her dog Chloe—according to White, an insane St. Bernard who had running fits, and who insisted on rescuing swimmers who were not in need of rescue.

  1. Christine Weston’s book for children, Bhimsa, the Dancing Bear, had been published in December, and she had sent a copy to White.

  1. To become a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of which Canby was Secretary. White later had a change of heart and accepted a subsequent invitation.

  1. As an editor Katharine White was a behind-the-scenes person. She influenced and guided many prominent authors but seldom saw her name in lights.

  1. Frankfurter’s congratulatory letter to White about his exchange with the Tribune had contained the phrase “speak with the tongues of angels.”

  1. Notes and Comment in the December 6, 1947, issue of The New Yorker, a blast at the Hollywood producers who had fired ten writers in a loyalty purge.

  1. Their first, Caroline S. Angell, called Callie.

  2. After graduating from Exeter, Joel White waited a year before entering Cornell, and took an interim job in New York.

  1. White got three honorary degrees during the spring of 1948: from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Maine.

  2. In 1945, Harry S. Truman had appointed Dean Acheson as his Under Secretary of State and he became Secretary of State in 1949. Acheson was credited with major responsibility for both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, but he was not a dean in the academic sense.

  1. The New Yorker ran the piece (September 4, 1948) and solved the problem neatly by inserting the word “presumably” in front of “headed for the paper mill at Bucksport.”

  1. Hawley Truax. An old friend of Ross’s, his adviser on business matters, and a director of the company from The New Yorker’s early days, he became treasurer in 1943.

  1. Although he liked to write Comment and found the short paragraph a congenial form of expression, White didn’t like the responsibility of producing the first page of The New Yorker week after week. The magazine paid him well to do it, but he found it a strain. For the second time in his life, he decided to quit the job. He continued, however, to contribute to the page.

  1. William Atkin, naval architect, who was drawing plans for a cruising boat for White. (The boat never got built.)

  1. The “Coming of Age” edition of Is Sex Necessary?, with White’s new introduction, was published in celebration of the book’s twenty-first birthday.

  1. Katharine (Kitty), Jonathan (Jon), and Sarah Stableford.

  1. Thurber’s daughter had been in a car accident.

  1. Milton Greenstein, a lawyer who came to The New Yorker in 1945. He proved invaluable to the magazine and to White. “Everybody, including me, consults Milton about everything,” White said. “He always has the answers.”

  1. Race-track columnist for The New Yorker.

  1. In the Introduction Bishop had written for the Harper’s Modern Classics edition of One Man’s Meat, published in February 1950.

  1. Here Is New York was one book of a dual selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

  1. “Thoughts While Sowing Five Pounds of Domestic Rye Grass at 40 Cents the Pound,” published in The New Yorker, September 23, 1950.

  1. In a poem called “Sunday” in White’s first book, The Lady Is Cold.

  1. The book was Charlotte’s Web. White did put it aside for about a year. He then rewrote it extensively, introducing Fern, who was not in the early drafts.

  1. Miss Rausch, an editor at Scott Foresman, wanted permission to reprint White’s Comment in The New Yorker about the wild flag.

  1. John Hutchens was writing on Ross and The New Yorker in the Herald Tribune.

  1. The piece, “Gentleman from Indiana,” was about Thurber’s father, one of several family portraits in The Thurber Album. Robert Thurber, Jim’s younger brother, was furious about it, and the two brothers became estranged.

  1. Truman Capote had once been an office boy at The New Yorker.

  1. Once a year, Mrs. Van Doren, editor of the New York Herald Tribune literary supplement, wrote to a list of well-known people, asking each to name the three books he or she had enjoyed most in the past year.

  1. The telegram informing Elmer Davis—author, journalist, and news analyst for ABC—of Ross’s death had been garbled in transmission.

 

 

 
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