Picked-Up Pieces (67 page)

Our cities, not too long ago the farm boy’s dream and the place where every girl with a straight nose was advised to find her fortune, have become the national disgrace, the huge proofs of our native greed and haste. Who wants to live in them? The long-winded lady admits, “New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay.” Yet she has lived there, during this slum of a decade, and also testifies, “In fact this is a wonderful city. It is always giving me something to think about.”

T
HE
T
RUMPET OF THE
S
WAN
, by E. B. White. 210 pp. Harper & Row, 1970.

E. B. White’s third novel for children joins the two others on the shelf for classics. While not quite so sprightly as
Stuart Little
, and less rich in personalities and incident than
Charlotte’s Web
—that paean to barnyard life by a city humorist turned farmer—
The Trumpet of the Swan
has superior qualities of its own; it is the most spacious and serene of the three, the one most imbued with the author’s sense of the precious instinctual heritage represented by wild nature. Its story persuasively offers itself to children as a parable of growing, yet does not lack the inimitable tone of the two earlier works—the simplicity that never condescends, the straight and earnest telling that happens upon (rather than veers into) comedy, the “grace and humor and praise of life and the good backbone of succinctness” that Eudora Welty noted nearly twenty years ago, reviewing
Charlotte’s Web
.

At first glance, one’s heart a little falls to see that wash drawings by Edward Frascino have replaced Garth Williams’ finely furry pen-and-ink illustrations, which are wedded to White’s other children’s texts as
intimately as Tenniel’s to
Alice
and Shepard’s to the Pooh books. From the jacket flap we learn that the tale, daring the obvious, tells of a Trumpeter Swan that learns to play the trumpet. More daringly still, he is called Louis. And in the first chapter we meet Sam Beaver, an eleven-year-old boy who, but for the dark touch of Indian about him, is too reminiscent of the many other bland, “interested” boy-heroes of books that bid us crouch behind the tall grass and spy out the wonder in a swan’s nest. Yet soon White’s love of natural detail lifts the prose into felicity, and the father and mother swan begin to talk to each other with a surprising animation, and the reader settles to a joyride through the rolling terrain of the highly unlikely. Louis discovers himself to be mute, an inconvenience during childhood but downright agony during the mating season. Louis’ father, a bombastic old cob, gets him a trumpet, and to pay for it Louis turns professional. How does Louis’ father acquire the trumpet? Why, by diving through the display window of a music store in Billings, Montana, and carrying the instrument off through a hail of shards and buckshot. How does Louis pack his trumpet, and the slate upon which he learns to write, and the lifesaving medal he wins, and the purse of money he makes? All are attached by strings around his neck, flapping and clanking together whenever he flies. How does he carve out his career? First, as a bugler in a boys’ camp; next, as accompanist, swimming one-footed, to the swan-boats in the Boston Public Garden; last, as a night-club performer in Philadelphia, operating out of a pond in the city zoo.

If the author once winked during this accumulation of preposterous particulars, it would all turn flimsy and come tumbling down. But White never forgets that he is telling about serious matters: the overcoming of a handicap, and the joys of music, and the need for creatures to find a mate, and the survival of a beautiful species of swan. When Louis realizes that he must graduate from the bugle to the trumpet with its three finger-operated valves, he unflinchingly asks Sam Beaver to slit the webbing of his right foot. The boy does, not omitting to point out that henceforth the swan will tend to swim in circles. What other writer, in such a work of fancy, would not have contrived to omit this homely, even repellent, bit of surgery?

White’s concreteness holds the door open for unpleasantness and also engenders textures of small surprise and delightful rightness. In one
chapter Louis spends the night at the Ritz in Boston. He orders a dozen watercress sandwiches for dinner and then puts himself to bed in the bathtub. “Then he turned out the lights, climbed into the tub, curved his long neck around to the right, rested his head on his back, tucked his bill under his wing, and lay there, floating on the water, his head cradled softly in his feathers.” The large bird’s calm and successful attempt to cope with an unfamiliar environment has a benedictory charm. This is how an intelligent swan of good will behaves in a hotel room; it is also how a child feels, and indeed how we all feel, enchanted out of our ordinary selves by rented solitude.

The world of E. B. White’s children’s books is eminently a reasonable one. Nature serves as a reservoir of common sense. Nobody panics, and catastrophes are taken in stride. When Mr. Brickle, the director of Camp Kookooskoos, is sprayed by a skunk, he does not do the slow or fast burn a meaner comic spirit would conjure up; he announces that the camp has been given “a delicious dash of wild perfume” and that “A swim will clear the air.” Similarly, in
Stuart Little
, when a mouse instead of a baby is born to human parents, they promptly improvise for him a “tiny bed out of four clothespins and a cigarette box.” Not birth nor death is meant to dismay us. When, in
Charlotte’s Web
, the pig squeals “I don’t want to die!” the spider says, “I can’t stand hysterics,” and eschews hysteria when her own death draws near. Her death-web speech is memorable: “After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies.”

Near the end of
The Trumpet of the Swan
, Louis’ father faces death with a grandiloquent soliloquy: “… Man, in his folly, has given me a mortal wound. The red blood flows in a steady trickle from my veins. My strength fails.… Good-bye, life! Good-bye, beautiful world! Good-bye, little lakes in the north! Farewell, springtimes I have known, with their passion and ardor!” The rhetoric is comic, but the tribute is sincere.
The Trumpet of the Swan
glows with the primal ecstasies of space and flight, of night and day, of nurturing and maturing, of courtship and art. On the last page Louis thinks of “how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky he had been to solve his problems with music.” How rare that word “lucky” has become! The universe remains chancy, but no one admits to having good luck. We and our children are lucky to have this book.

on the Occasion of E. B. White’s Receiving the 1971
National Medal for Literature on December 2
,
1971
 

A
GOOD WRITER
is hard to talk about, since he has already, directly or by implication, said everything about himself that should be said. In the case of E. B. White, a consummate literary tact and a powerful capacity for reticence further intimidate the would-be eulogist. And indeed where would eulogy begin? E. B. White’s
oeuvre
, though not very wide on the shelf, is far-flung in its variety; it is a nation gaily built on scattered islands, and the mind moves retrospectively through it as if sailing in a flirtatious wind. Letters arrive from all points of the compass; peaks glisten in unexpected places; sunny slopes conceal tunnels of anonymity; a graceful giddiness alternates as swiftly as cloud shadows with sombre sense; darkness threatens; and but for the North Star of the writer’s voice, his unflickering tone of truth, we would not know where we are. White’s works range from some of the noblest essays of the century to the most famous cartoon caption of the Thirties, the one that goes,

He broke into print as a poet and has most recently triumphed, for the third time, as the author of a novel for children. Along the line he edited and augmented what has become a standard college textbook on English style and usage. He has been associated with
The New Yorker
for almost all of the magazine’s life, and indeed he has demonstrated mastery of every kind of thing
The New Yorker
prints, from poetry to fiction to the quips that cap other publications’ typographical errors. But also he wrote the grave and graceful essays of
One Man’s Meat
for
Harper’s Magazine
, and
Holiday
elicited from him his beautiful tribute,
This Is New York
. Daunted, then, by this body of work so polymorphously expressing concern, wit, and love, I will, as writers tend to when confronted with a subject too big for them, take refuge in the more manageable topic of myself. My life and E. B. White.

After reading White’s essays in
Harper’s
throughout World War II, my mother in 1945 bought a farm and moved her family to it. It is one of the
few authenticated cases of literature influencing life. White’s adventures in Maine, rather than Thoreau’s recourse to the Concord woods or Louis Bromfield’s
Malabar Farm
(a book White reviewed in the last verse review I have seen anywhere), gave my mother the necessary courage to buy eighty rundown acres of Pennsylvania loam and turned me overnight into a rural creature, clad in muddy shoes, a cloak of loneliness, and a clinging aura of apples.

Oddly, I sought the antidote for my plight in the poison that had produced it, and devoured the work of White, of Thurber, Benchley, Perelman, Sullivan, and all those other names evocative of the urban romance that not so long ago attached to New York City, the innocent longing for sophistication that focussed here. When, infrequently, my parents brought me to New York, I always imagined I would see E. B. White in Grand Central Station. I never did, but the wish in its intensity gouged a distinct memory imprint, delicate as a leaf sedimentized in limestone, of White’s dapper, crinkled-haired, rather heavy-lidded countenance, that I had studied on book flaps and in caricatures, superimposed upon those caramel-colored walls. I still never enter the station without looking for him. For me, he
was
the city, and I wonder, will anybody ever again love this city, and poeticize it, as he did, when, to quote one of his poems,

I did at last meet White, an ocean away, in Oxford. He and his wife Katharine came through the door of our basement flat on Iffley Road. E. B. White himself! It was an experience that had all the qualities of a nightmare, except that it was not unpleasant. He spoke; he actually uttered words, and they were so appropriate, so neutral and natural yet—in that unique way of his—so
trim
, so well designed to put me at ease, that I have quite forgotten what they were.

A consequence of that awesome visit was employment of sorts; while working on West 43rd Street, I would see White in the halls and what struck me in his walk, in the encouraging memos he once or twice sent me, and in the editorial notes that in lucky weeks headed up the magazine,
was how much more fun he had in him than us younger residents of those halls. Not loud or obvious fun, but contained, inturning fun, shaped like a mainspring. I dealt mainly with Mrs. White, I want to add, and what a fine warm mentor she was!—a formidable woman, an editor of the magazine before White was a contributor, gifted with that terrible clear vision some women have—the difference between a good story and a bad one loomed like a canyon in her vision—yet not burdened by it, rather, rejoicing in it, and modest and humorous in her firmness, so that she makes her appearances in White’s accounts as a comic heroine, a good sport helping him dispose of their surplus eggs by hurling them against the barn wall.

After I quit my job and the city, my encounters with White became purely those of a reader—a reader to myself, and a reader aloud, to my children. When I asked my ten-year-old girl if I could say today that
Charlotte’s Web
was her favorite book, she said, “No, tell them
Stuart Little
is.”

Eulogy is disarmed. White has figured in my life the way an author should figure, coming at me from different directions with a nudge, a reminder, a good example. I am not alone in feeling grateful, or he would not be winning this prize. For three generations he has reinforced our hopeful sense that the kingdom of letters is a fiefdom of the kingdom of man. He writes as one among us, not above us, a man pulling his mortal weight while keeping a level head and now and then letting loose with a song.

Composed for the Awarding of the 1968 National Book Award for Fiction to
The Eighth Day,
by Thornton Wilder
^§

T
HROUGH THE LENS
of a turn-of-the-century murder mystery, Mr. Wilder surveys a world that is both vanished and coming to birth; in a
clean gay prose sharp with aphoristic wit and the sense and scent of Midwestern America and Andean Chile, he takes us on a chase of Providence and delivers us, exhilarated and edified, into the care of an ambiguous conclusion.