Essays of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  Most of us were stayers. Aiken appeared in print four times in 1903 and once in 1904. E. Babette Deutsch rang the bell no fewer than nineteen times during her childhood; John C. Farrar twenty-two; E. Vincent Millay twenty; Susan Warren Wilbur twenty-one. Joseph Auslander made ten successful appearances in two years, and was twice publicly reprimanded by having his name published on the “Careless Roll”—once for no address, once for sending in a contribution without the proper endorsement. (All League contributors had to get a parent or guardian to write on the back “This is Joseph’s own work” and sign it. If you forgot to, your name was published among the Careless.) Morris Ryskind was careless twice in the spring of 1913, but later redeemed himself with a poem, “Dawn,” and a prose piece, “A Family Tradition,” both of which would have been published had space permitted.

  It would have been unsafe to predict the professional future of the Leaguers from the type of work they turned in. Viola Beer-bohm Tree drew pictures for the League and turned out to be an actress. Laura Benét wrote several prose pieces and turned into a poet. Elinor Wylie (Elinor M. Hoyt) distinguished herself twice, both times for drawing; and that young comer Ringgold W. Lardner gained double honors—in verse and in puzzles. (Note: his poem was not considered good enough to publish, and was merely mentioned.) Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote a poem J. Deems Taylor and Janet Flanner, in a mad May of 1901, rose to fame together, each with a drawing called “Household Joys,” a suggested subject. Master Taylor scored again later, copping a silver badge in December 1901, for his photograph “Moonrise in December,” a snapshot of an extremely peaceful snow scene. Alan Seeger succeeded with a photograph “From My Best Negative.” Sigmund G. Spaeth, with his eye on timely topics, wrote a poem about the first springtime of the twentieth century. John C. Mosher took signal honors with his camera in 1906, and, had space permitted, would have enlivened the January 1906 issue with his pleasing photograph “The View from My Home.” Norman Geddes was mentioned in 1909 for a drawing, “My Best Friend’s Favorite Occupation.” And so it went. They were happy days.

  Contributions came even from across the sea. A little English girl named Vita V. Sackville-West, bursting with an ancient pride, wrote in 1902 from Knole, Sevenoaks, Kent, England:

  Dear St. Nicholas League: This story about my home is quite true, and it may amuse you. The archbishops of England possessed Knole first. It then passed into the hands of Queen Elizabeth, who gave it to my ancestor, Thomas Sackville. After Thomas’s death, Knole went to Richard Sackville, who was Thomas’s brother. It then became the seat of the dukes of Dorset, and then it belonged to the earls of that county, and from then the Sackvilles have had it. There are 365 rooms in Knole, 52 staircases, and 7 courts. A priest’s cell was found this year. The altar in the chapel was given by Mary of Scotland just before she was executed. Knole began to be built in 1100 or 1200 up to 1400. Most of the kings and queens of England have made Knole a present. We have here the second organ that was made in England. There are 21 show rooms in the house. Vita V. Sackville-West.

  And another little English girl, Stella Benson, was taking cash prizes for her verses, and writing thank-you letters to the editor telling him she didn’t really deserve any money.

  We Leaguers even grew up and married one another. I married a League girl (silver badge for prose); and I see by the files that William R. Benét did, too. His girl was Elinor M. Hoyt, who received honorable mention for “A Heading for March” in 1901, three months before William received honorable mention for a poem “When School Is Done.” My girl’s sister was a gold-badge holder: she won it in wild-life photography by sneaking up with her camera on an affable duck in a public park in Worcester, Mass. And speaking of photography, one of the most unflinching of the League’s camera enthusiasts, judging from published results, was a tot named Lois B. Long. Apparently she was banging away with her Brownie from morning till night, and as a result we have, credited to her, a picture of a girl standing in a wheat field, a picture called “Face to Face,” another called “At the Corner,” and another called “Where I Spent My Vacation.”

  We were a hardy and a versatile lot, all right. There were William Faulkner, Alice Hughes, Normal Klein, John Macy, Corey Ford, Frances Frost, Ward Greene, John S. Martin, Margaret E. Sangster, Niven Busch, Jr., Robert Garland, Peggy Bacon, Faith Baldwin, Margaret Kennedy, Clarence C. Little, Reginald Marsh, Bennett Cerf, Kay Boyle, Alice Harvey, Frieda Inescort, Weare Holbrook, Horatio Winslow, Lee Simonson, Marjorie Allen Seiffert, Richard Whorf, Anne Parrish, Leane Zugsmith, Clement Wood, Edmund Wilson, Lyle Saxon, Marion Strobel, Mary F. Watkins, all the Benéts, Jeanne de Lamarter, Henry Dreyfuss, Susan Ertz, Elizabeth Hawes, and how many others I’ll never know.

  For ten years (from 1899 to 1909) the League was edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. I bought a copy of St. Nicholas the other day to see what changes time had wrought. The magazine is now grown tall and limp, like Collier’s—strange to the touch. The format is changed, but the League goes on, in its fashion. The proprietors have, it seems eased the bitter problem of silver, gold, and cash awards by tying up, in the approved American manner, with manufacturers of the indispensable tools of the arts, fountain pens and drawing materials. I noted, uneasily, that a current minor named Ruth Blaesing, 13, was receiving for her “Ode to the Earth” not the silver badge of courage but the Waterman Pen Company’s award of a fountain pen. And that Rose Doyle, 13, was receiving, for her drawing, the “First Higgins’ Ink Award.”

  But the cheering thing was that the contributions in the current issue showed the same tenderness for life, the same reverent preoccupation with Nature, the same earnest morality that we early Leaguers showed in the days of our glory. No graduate can read over the old copies without a lump in the throat; for beneath the callow phrase and the young solemnity, the roots of beauty sometimes throve. Listen to the Miss Millay of November 1908, and you can hear already the singer singing:

  How lovely is the night, how calm and still!

  Cool shadows lie upon each field and hill,

  From which a fairy wind comes tripping light,

  Perching on bush and tree in airy flight.

  Across the brook and up the field it blows,

  And to my ear there comes, where’er it goes,

  A rustling sound as if each blade of grass

  Held back a silken skirt to let it pass.

  This is the bedtime of the weary day;

  Clouds wrap him warmly in a blanket gray;

  From out the dusk where creek and meadow lie,

  The frogs chirp out a sleepy lullaby;

  A single star, new-kindled in the west,

  A flickering candle, lights the day to rest.

  O lovely night, sink deep into my heart;

  Lend me thy tranquillity a part;

  Of calmness give to me a kindly loan,

  Until I have more calmness of my own.

  And, weary day, O let thy candle-light,

  And let thy lullaby be mine tonight.

  And hark to the William R. Benét, of Watervliet Arsenal, West Troy, N. Y., examining the harvest at the age of fifteen:

  Yon lie the fields all golden with grain

  (Oh, come, ye Harvesters, reap!)

  The dead leaves are falling with autumn’s brown stain

  (Oh, come, ye Harvesters, reap!)

  For soon sinks the sun to his bed in the west,

  And cawing the crows fly each one to his nest;

  The grain will soon wither, so harvest your best.

  (Oh, come, ye Harvesters, reap!)

  Hear young Briton Niven Busch, Jr., before he had discovered the cinema, finding peace in August 1919, in a calm sonnet beginning:

  Beneath the radiance of the quiet stars

  The earth lies beautiful as in a dream.

  And search the heart of youth with fourteen-year-old Stella Benson:

  Borne upwards on its gold and silver wings

  Rises the Heart of Youth,

  With its fond hopes a
nd sweet imaginings

  It wanders through this sordid world, nor brings

  To mind the hard, undecorated truth;

  And future cares and sorrows left behind

  Are spurned, because the Heart of Youth is blind.

  The League is still our white plume. We graduates know what it was like to wear it. These later, slight victories, such as they are, fail to make the heart pound; the twilight of an Honor Member is a dim and unsubstantial time. Give me again October 1914 and my drawing (which would have been published had space permitted) called “The Love of a Mother Rabbit.”

  A Slight Sound at Evening

  ALLEN COVE, SUMMER, 1954

  In his journal for July 10-12, 1841, Thoreau wrote: “A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be in Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.” The book into which he later managed to pack both Uranus and the shutter was published in 1854, and now, a hundred years having gone by, Walden, its serenity and grandeur unimpaired, still lifts us up by the ears, still translates for us that language we are in danger of forgetting, “which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard.”

  Walden is an oddity in American letters. It may very well be the oddest of our distinguished oddities. For many it is a great deal too odd, and for many it is a particular bore. I have not found it to be a well-liked book among my acquaintances, although usually spoken of with respect, and one literary critic for whom I have the highest regard can find no reason for anyone’s giving Walden a second thought. To admire the book is, in fact, something of an embarrassment, for the mass of men have an indistinct notion that its author was a sort of Nature Boy.

  I think it is of some advantage to encounter the book at a period in one’s life when the normal anxieties and enthusiasms and rebellions of youth closely resemble those of Thoreau in that spring of 1845 when he borrowed an ax, went out to the woods, and began to whack down some trees for timber. Received at such a juncture, the book is like an invitation to life’s dance, assuring the troubled recipient that no matter what befalls him in the way of success or failure he will always be welcome at the party—that the music is played for him, too, if he will but listen and move his feet. In effect, that is what the book is—an invitation, unengraved; and it stirs one as a young girl is stirred by her first big party bid. Many think it a sermon; many set it down as an attempt to rearrange society; some think it an exercise in nature-loving; some find it a rather irritating collection of inspirational puffballs by an eccentric show-off. I think it none of these. It still seems to me that best youth’s companion yet written by an American, for it carries a solemn warning against the loss of one’s valuables, it advances a good argument for a traveling light and trying new adventures, it rings with the power of positive adoration, it contains religious feeling without religious images, and it steadfastly refuses to record bad news. Even its pantheistic note is so pure as to be noncorrupting—pure as the flute-note blown across the pond on those faraway summer nights. If our colleges and universities were alert, they would present a cheap pocket edition of the book to every senior upon graduating, along with his sheepskin, or instead of it. Even if some senior were to take it literally and start felling trees, there could be worse mishaps: the ax is older than the Dictaphone and it is just as well for a young man to see what kind of chips he leaves before listening to the sound of his own voice. And even if some were to get no farther than the table of contents, they would learn how to name eighteen chapters by the use of only thirty-nine words and would see how sweet are the uses of brevity.

  If Thoreau had merely left us an account of a man’s fife in the woods or if he had simply retreated to the woods and there recorded his complaints about society, or even if he had contrived to include both records in one essay, Walden would probably not have lived a hundred years. As things turned out, Thoreau, very likely without knowing quite what he was up to, took man’s relation to Nature and man’s dilemma in society and man’s capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight, and produced an original omelette from which people can draw nourishment in a hungry day. Walden is one of the first of the vitamin-enriched American dishes. If it were a little less good than it is, or even a little less queer, it would be an abominable book. Even as it is, it will continue to baffle and annoy the literal mind and all those who are unable to stomach its caprices and imbibe its theme. Certainly the plodding economist will continue to have rough going if he hopes to emerge from the book with a clear system of economic thought. Thoreau’s assault on the Concord society of the mid-nineteenth century has the quality of a modern Western: he rides into the subject at top speed, shooting in all directions. Many of his shots ricochet and nick him on the rebound, and throughout the melee there is a horrendous cloud of inconsistencies and contradictions, and when the shooting dies down and the air clears, one is impressed chiefly by the courage of the rider and by how splendid it was that somebody should have ridden in there and raised all that ruckus.

  When he went to the pond, Thoreau struck an attitude and did so deliberately, but his posturing was not to draw the attention of others to him but rather to draw his own attention more closely to himself. “I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” The sentence has the power to resuscitate the youth drowning in his sea of doubt. I recall my exhilaration upon reading it, many years ago, in a time of hesitation and despair. It restored me to health. And now in 1954 when I salute Henry Thoreau on the hundredth birthday of his book, I am merely paying off an old score—or an installment on it.

  In his journal for May 3-4, 1838—Boston to Portland—he wrote: “Midnight—head over the boat’s side—between sleeping and waking—with glimpses of one or more lights in the vicinity of Cape Ann. Bright moonlight—the effect heightened by seasickness.” The entry illuminates the man, as the moon the sea on that night in May. In Thoreau the natural scene was heightened, not depressed, by a disturbance of the stomach, and nausea met its match at last. There was a steadiness in at least one passenger if there was none in the boat. Such steadiness (which in some would be called intoxication) is at the heart of Walden—confidence, faith, the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen, undeviating gratitude for the life-everlasting that he found growing in his front yard. “There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.” He worked to correct that deficiency. Walden is his acknowledgment of the gift of life. It is the testament of a man in a high state of indignation because (it seemed to him) so few ears heard the uninterrupted poem of creation, the morning wind that forever blows. If the man sometimes wrote as though all his readers were male, unmarried, and well-connected, it is because he gave his testimony during the callow years. For that matter, he never really grew up. To reject the book because of the immaturity of the author and the bugs in the logic is to throw away a bottle of good wine because it contains bits of the cork.

  Thoreau said he required of every writer, first and last, a simple and sincere account of his own life. Having delivered himself of this chesty dictum, he proceeded to ignore it. In his books and even in his enormous journal, he withheld or disguised most of the facts from which an understanding of his life could be drawn. Walden, subtitled “Life in the Woods,” is not a simple and sincere account of a man’s life, either in or out of the woods; it is an account of a man’s journey into the mind, a toot on the trumpet to alert the neighbors. Thoreau was well are that no one can alert his neighbors who is not wide-awake himself, and he went to the woods (among other reasons) to make sure that he would stay awake during his broadcast. What actually took place during the years 1845-47 is largely unrecorded, and the reader is excluded from the pri
vate life of the author, who supplies almost no gossip about himself, a great deal about his neighbors and about the universe.

  As for me, I cannot in this short ramble give a simple and sincere account of my own life, but I think Thoreau might find it instructive to know that this memorial essay is being written in a house that, through no intent on my part, is the same size and shape as his own domicile on the pond—about ten by fifteen, tight, plainly finished, and at a little distance from my Concord. The house in which I sit this morning was built to accommodate a boat, not a man, but by long experience I have learned that in most respects it shelters me better than the larger dwelling where my bed is, and which, by design, is a manhouse not a boathouse. Here in the boathouse I am a wilder and, it would appear, a healthier man, by a safe margin. I have a chair, a bench, a table, and I can walk into the water if I tire of the land. My house fronts a cove. Two fishermen have just arrived to spot fish from the air—an osprey and a man in a small yellow plane who works for the fish company. The man, I have noticed, is less well equipped than the hawk, who can dive directly on his fish and carry it away, without telephoning. A mouse and a squirrel share the house with me. The building is, in fact, a multiple dwelling, a semidetached affair. It is because I am semidetached while here that I find it possible to transact this private business with the fewest obstacles.