Essays of E. B. White (45 page)

Mrs. Elizabeth L. Burbank, of Sandwich. Observed male robin act in peculiar manner. While female incubated eggs on nest, male crouched on lawn, imitated her—fluffing out feathers, rising up, pretending to turn eggs. No date,

Mr. Fred G. Knaub, of New Haven. Male bluebird neglected own family in order to tend young house wrens in nest box nearby. Fought wren parents to a fare-thee-well. No date.

Dr. Mary F. Hobart, of Needham. Male bluebird became infatuated with caged canary. Began flirtation on May 16th, continued it while own mate was busy incubating eggs. Frequently alighted on canary's cage, offered worms, caterpillars. July 1st, saw error of ways or tired of color yellow, returned to mate, resumed parental duties. No date.

Of all Mr. Forbush's tipsters, the only one I am jealous of is Fred G. Floyd, of Hingham. Mr. Floyd beat me to a very fine niche in
Birds of Massachusetts
—he beat me by some thirty years. There is just one record of a Harris's sparrow in
Birds
, and Mr. Floyd, along with his wife, get the credit for it. The bird was seen in Hingham in April 1929, shortly after Mr. Forbush's death but still in time to get into the unfinished Volume III. Five or six years ago, I, too, was visited by a Harris's sparrow; one showed up at my home in Maine and hung around the feeding station for three days—a beautifully turned-out bird, reddish-brown, with a black face and throat and white waistcoat. At first I didn't know what I was looking at, but I soon found out. The bird is almost unknown in New England, and this one was at least a thousand miles from where he belonged. We had had a gale not long before, and he must have ridden it all the way from Nebraska or Kansas.

I have never seen a loon rinse its mouth, but once I liberated a hummingbird from a spider's web. Mr. Forbush, I think, would have wanted to hear about that. I have never watched a merganser commit suicide, but once, in Florida, I saw two flickers dancing at one end of a tin rain gutter to music supplied by a red-bellied woodpecker, who was drumming on the gutter at the other end. Mr. Forbush came instantly to mind. I have never seen a bullfrog with a swallow in its mouth, but the first cast I ever made with a spinning reel (it was a practice shot on a lawn) was taken by a mockingbird, who swept down out of a bush and grabbed the bob. These are my noteworthy bird experiences. Alas, they are too late. (And I should add that I know a man who, while hunting in the woods, learned over to pick up a glove and was bit on the nose by a bittern. He is Mr. Ward F. Snow, of Blue Hill, Maine. November 1965.)

If Edward Howe Forbush's prose is occasionally overblown, this results from a genuine ecstasy in the man, rather than from lack of discipline. Reading the essays, one shares his ecstasy. I have nothing in my bookshelves that I turn to more often or with greater satisfaction than his
Birds.
He is a man for all seasons, and, like a flight of geese, he carries his reader along into season yet to come. On a winter's evening, it is a pure pleasure to read, “When the spring rains and mounting sun begin to tint the meadow grass, when the alewives run up the streams, when the blackbirds and the spring frogs sing their full chorus, then the Snipe arrives at night on the south wind.”

“The theme of my life,” E. B. White wrote in his fifty-eighth
year, “is complexity-through-joy.” Four years later, in a 1961 statement to the
New York Times
, he wrote that “All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find it in there, if you dig around.” He also loved the English language, American variety. All those things—complexity-through-joy, love of the world, and love of American English—combined to establish E. B. White as the greatest American essayist of the century. The complexity that gave him greatest joy was that of life itself. And he found joy in nearly everything he saw, from a battered old willow tree “held together by strands of wire” in a city interior garden to a freshly laid goose egg, from a barn spider's web to a railroad locomotive, from his opportunist “dash-hound” Fred to the United States Constitution and American democracy. His eye and heart delighted in the specifics of life's complexity, and he celebrated those specifics in his incomparable essays and his three books for children. And in celebrating them, he gave them a lasting place in our Literature. “I discovered a long time ago,” White wrote in a letter, “that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the hearth, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sanctity or grace.” With a prose style unmatched for its grace and “sanctity,” he revealed—and revelled in—what is permanent and joy-giving in the “inconsequential” and the “trivial.”

On July 11, 1899, in Mount Vernon, New York, Elwyn Brooks White first opened his eyes to the world that he would come to view daily with a newborn's freshness of vision. His parents—“respectable people,” as he would fondly characterize them—had moved to Mount Vernon from Brooklyn because, White later speculated, “the town's name sounded tonier.” The youngest by five years of six children, White disliked his given name from the start. “I never liked Elwyn,” he would insist, years later. “My mother just hung it on me because she'd run out of names.” The White family shared a comfortable life in a spacious and rambling Queen Anne house, and young Elwyn early on became familiar with the prosperous town in which he would spend all his school years. The older E. B. White, in an attempt to find some childhood unhappiness that would explain his having become a writer, claimed that he worried incessantly as a child. “I was uneasy,” he said in a 1976 interview, “about practically everything.” What would become a lifelong aversion to public speaking also made his childhood less than perfect. All through school, he spent every year worrying about the recitation required annually of each student; but every school year ended before the W's were reached. His shyness persisted throughout his life; whenever an occasion required a speech, White would write the words but ask someone else to read them.

Young Elwyn explored Mount Vernon in wider and wider circles, riding—and stunt-riding—his bicycle through the town and, as he got older, into the surrounding countryside. (He would be a lifelong cyclist, graduating to a ten-speed version after he and his wife moved to Maine in 1957.) Of all the places he discovered, he loved the neighborhood barns and stables the most, and delighted in exploring or just sitting and observing. Among the animals encountered in these warm, peaceful havens, he took a particular liking to mice and spiders. Indeed, for several years he had a pet mouse that accompanied him on his forays, tucked in a jacket or sweater pocket. And he loved Maine from the time, in 1904, when his father first rented a camp on a Maine lake and, as White later wrote (in “Once More to the Lake”), “took us all there for the month of August. . . . We returned summer after summer—always on August 1 for one month.” (White would return to that same camp, with his own son, Joel, in 1941.) Young Elwyn also began, at an early age, to describe what he saw and heard, in writing and in drawings submitted to the popular children's periodical
St. Nicholas Magazine
and other publications. He was nine when he won his first award, from
Women's Home Companion
, for a poem about a mouse. He also collected gold and silver badges from
St. Nicholas Magazine
as a repeat member of the St. Nicholas League, which he later recalled in his 1934 essay, “The St. Nicholas League.”

White's high school years broadened his horizons and apparently intensified his shyness and his observational powers. He was the editor of his high-school newspaper, but his dread of speaking in front of the class went unconquered. In 1917, White enrolled at Cornell University, where he studied under William Strunk, Jr., the great grammarian (whose handbook on English style,
The Elements of Style
, White would later revise), wrote in profusion for the
Cornell Daily Sun
and became its editor-in-chief, and picked up the nickname—Andy—that he would happily carry for the rest of his life. (The nickname Andy was bestowed on every Cornell student with the surname of White, in honor of Cornell's first president, Andrew D. White.) After graduating from Cornell, White worked as a reporter for the United Press in New York and then for the
Seattle Times.
He also contributed articles and poems to the
New York Evening Post
and the
New York Herald.
“My prose style at this time,” he wrote later in “The Years of Wonder,” “was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H. L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys.” White was also looking for adventure and in July of 1923, discharged by the
Seattle Times
, he booked passage to Alaska aboard a not-quite-converted troop carrier, the
Buford
, ending up by working off part of his passage. But he saw Alaska. Almost immediately upon his return to Seattle, he set off with a friend, Howard Cushman, in a convertible Model T Ford, the two of them working their way back East. Their odd jobs included playing piano in a cafe, pitching hay, selling roach powder, and selling writing to local newspapers.

Back in New York, White signed on at an advertising agency as a production assistant and copywriter, while continuing to submit essays and poems to various newspapers and magazines. Then came the two key events of 1925: the appearance of
The New Yorker
on February 19, and—nine weeks later—the appearance of White's first contribution to the magazine with which his name would become synonymous. White's initial
New Yorker
piece, a parody of an advertising campaign, was the first of more than eighteen hundred pieces that he wrote for
The New Yorker.
(He edited the magazine's “Newsbreaks” items into his eighty-third year.) In 1926, Harold Ross,
The New Yorker
's founder and legendary first editor, hired White as an associate editor. Together with Ross, James Thurber, Katharine Angell (later White's wife), William Shawn, and a handful of others, White shaped the magazine into the sophisticated, witty, and polished epitome of literary magazines, just as the magazine shaped his career and served him for decades as his chief outlet. Not long after joining
The New Yorker
staff, he became the principal contributor to the “Notes and Comment” section. And not long after that, he began his courtship of Katharine Angell, the magazine's fiction editor.

Thirty-three-year-old Katharine Angell had been married for nine years and was the mother of two children. Ross had hired her as fiction editor in 1925 and, through to her retirement in 1968, she shaped the magazine's distinctive reputation for quality fiction. White reported that on his first visit to
The New Yorker
offices, he was immediately struck by Angell's “knack for making a young contributor feel at ease.” Feelings of ease soon evolved into other feelings; and, following her divorce in 1928, Angell and White were married on November 13, 1929. Their only child, Joel McCoun White, became a noted boat builder.

White entered the 1930s doubly lucky, as he had found and married the woman for whom he was clearly destined and he was a key contributor to what had quickly become one of the most respected and famous magazines of the century. In 1931 the Whites began summering in Maine, and in 1933 they bought a forty-acre saltwater farm in North Brooklin, overlooking Blue Hill Bay. The farm gave the couple the chance to escape the hassles of city life: White got to sail his boat and indulge his fondness for animals, while Katharine cultivated her garden (she was an avid gardener), read manuscripts, and, as one commentator has noted, “nursed her nostalgia for New York.”

For four years the couple journeyed back and forth between New York and North Brooklin. In 1937, White took what he called a “sabbatical,” apparently in full retreat from the city. A year later, he persuaded his wife that they should make the farm their permanent residence. With several interludes—their being called back to New York five years later by Harold Ross to help “their” magazine survive financially as well as wintering in Florida—they became the most sophisticated farmers in Maine's history. It was a working farm, however, stocked with 15 sheep, 112 New Hampshire Red pullets, 36 White Plymouth Rock pullets, 3 geese, a dog (Fred the dachshund), a tomcat, a pig, and a captive mouse. And the new “farmers” continued without pause to perform their writing and editing duties. Indeed, from 1938 through 1943, White also wrote a widely read monthly column, “One Man's Meat,” for
Harper's Magazine.
He later told his biographer, Scott Elledge, that the Maine years were the happiest of his life.

In addition to editing fiction for
The New Yorker
, Katharine also produced an end-of-year review of children's books, and every fall the Maine house was inundated with cartons of children's books. It was apparently this invasion of children's books, together with the importunings of his numerous nieces and nephews, that started White to thinking about writing a book for children. In his January 1939
Harper's
column, he wrote that “close physical contact with the field of juvenile literature leads me to the conclusion that it must be a lot of fun to write for children—reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work. One side of it which must be exciting is finding a place, a period, or a think that hasn't already been written about.”

White's only published book of poems,
The Fox of Peapack and Other Poems
, was published in 1938, followed the next year by
Quo Vadimus?
, a collection of satirical pieces that Christopher Morley called a “study of contemporary jitters” and praised for its “low-pitched savagery” and its “gaiety and intelligence.” The essays that would raise White to the status of stylist nonpareil continued to flow from his typewriter, as did letters and the occasional special piece. In 1941, White and Katharine edited
A Subtreasury of American Humor
, and White's introduction (adapted in the collected
Essays
as “Some Remarks on Humor,” with typical modesty) has become a classic commentary on its subject. White's shyness also remained in evidence. On a 1941 visit to the White House, Richard L. Strout moved to guide White through a crowd of reporters for an introduction to President Roosevelt; but White balked. “He wasn't going through with it,” Strout reported.