Essays of E. B. White
Page 36
White’s second collection of essays, The Second Tree from the Corner, published in 1954, provided clear evidence of White’s move, physically and spiritually, away from the city and into the country, where he could find a harmony and conciliance rapidly disappearing from urban society. He also found peace and contentment in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, especially Walden. “A Slight Sound of Evening,” reveals the reverence in which he held Thoreau and the empathy he held for Thoreau’s attitudes toward human society and the world of nature. In 1957, White finalized his move; he and Katharine took up at last permanent residence on the North Brooklin farm, escaping what Charlotte called the “rush, rush, rush” of mid-century city life and settling in to care for the pigs, geese, chickens, and dogs and to enjoy his own comforting barn. He would also make great use of the boathouse, not only keeping his small sloop there, but also using it as a study in which he wrote most of his subsequent essays.
“Will Strunk,” his 1957 homage to his Cornell professor, prompted the publishers of Strunk’s Elements of Style to ask White to “revise and amplify” the book. With his usual modesty (“I discovered that for all my fine talk I was no match for the parts of speech . . . [and] I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric”), he took on the job, producing in 1959 what has since then been the standard handbook of style, known simply, familiarly, and affectionately as “Strunk and White.”
These were years of contentment, country peace mixed with concern for environmental pollution, the relaxed life of a relatively remote community mixed with the constant stress of deadlines. And he continued to meet those deadlines, writing matchless essays on Maine Christmas trees, a spring day, the “Death of a Pig,” hurricanes, raccoons, Maine winters, the beauty of brown eggs, nuclear generating plants, politics, the Constitution, disarmament, the threat of radiation, world peace, racism, the Model T Ford . . . and on, and on, and wonderfully on. The sway held by contentment over anxiety was upset, in 1961, by Katharine’s development of a rare skin disease. She would battle the disease for sixteen years, finally succumbing to a series of congestive heart failures in 1977. “She survived four of them,” White would remark. “She missed the fifth.” She retired from The New Yorker in 1968, but even as she fought her debilitating affliction, she compiled a collection of her writings on gardening, and her husband made certain that Onward and Upward in the Garden was published.
White’s own essays and the books continued. A third volume of collected essays, The Points of My Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South, appeared in 1962. The Whites had begun wintering in Florida, because of the severity of Maine’s winters and of Katharine’s malady. As he did with nearly everything in his life, White wrote about what he observed as being most telling in Southern life and behavior, and tried to devise suitable Christmas decorations from available Florida flora. White was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1968, only the first of well-deserved medals, awards, encomiums, and citations (all of which embarrassed him, because he had to prepare a speech of thanks for each). John Updike’s 1968 recollection, “Writers I Have Met,” reveals the non-public, spontaneous E. B. White:
Standing next to E. B. White, one is imbued with something of the man’s fierce modesty, and one’s sentences haltingly seek to approximate the wonderful way his own never say more than he means. . . . Once I barged through a door in the New Yorker offices, and powerfully struck an obstacle on the other side. White had been hurrying down the hall, and stood there dazed. Reading in my face my horror, my fear that I had injured this sacred and fragile person, this living embodiment of the magazine’s legend, he obligingly fell down as if dead.
Israel Shenker quoted the seventy-nine-year-old White as complaining that “old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself—a lad of about 19.” In 1970, the year of The Trumpet of the Swan, this preternaturally observant, preternaturally gifted “lad” was awarded the American Library Association’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for “a lasting contribution to children’s literature.” And he 1971, he accepted the National Medal for Literature with the remark that encapsulates his writer’s philosophy: “Writing is an act of faith, nothing else. And it must be the writer, above all others, who keeps it alive—choked with laughter or with pain.”
And he kept at his frequent, not-quite-curmudgeonly tweaking of authority’s nose. The December 21, 1972, Ellsworth American (the Whites’ local newspaper in Maine) reported that the seventy-three-year-old White delivered a letter on his bicycle, in eighteen-degree weather (and with “a stiff head wind”) by way of protesting a new postal regulation that required all local mail to go to Bangor, more than sixty miles away, for sorting, and then returned to North Brooklin and vicinity for delivery. The Ellsworth newspaper quoted a letter (with the stated suspicion that the famous cyclist had a hand in its writing) from the Brooklin General Store’s proprietor to the letter’s recipient: “I have engaged an old man on a bicycle to carry [the letter]. He is an aging writer—feeble but plucky. He says he has arthritis, and dizzy spells, which is why he likes to ride his cycle in winter. When I mentioned that snow is predicted, he just shrugged. . . . He’s an odd sort, anyway—comes into the store and never buys anything but domestic sardines and a marking pencil.”
The Letters of E. B. White appeared in 1976, providing previously unknown additional evidence of his mastery as a prose stylist. And in the following year, the Essays of E. B. White confirmed what many readers had long suspected. These premier essays of half a century, grouped within broad themes, reveal one of America’s finest writers at the amazingly prolonged height of his considerable powers. Beginning his review of the Essays in the New York Times, Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote, “Every now and then they give us reviewers a break, and this week is one of those occasions.” The accolades that greeted the Essays were drowned out, however, by his grief upon the death of his wife that same year, a grief that was not lessened the following year with a special Pulitzer Prize citation presented for the body of his work. He spent the next seven years missing his wife terribly, but still going about his life’s business, writing and caring for his farm and his animals. And his humor remained. “I have nine grandchildren and six great grandchildren, with another one coming up in June,” he told the New York Times’ Nan Robertson, in one of his very rare later interviews. “I am full of years and descendants. It’s a hazard.” In 1981, on the publication of the Poems and Sketches of E. B. White, Edward Hoagland wrote, “E. B. White is 82, and it’s a pleasure to report that, as far as this reader can tell, all the principal decisions of his life were for the best.”
White died at his North Brooklin farm on October 1, 1985, ensured of a lasting place in the pantheon of American letters. In its obituary on October 4, the New York Times noted that “Like the First Amendment, E. B. White’s principles and style endure.” In a 1969 interview, Israel Shenker had asked White what he cherished most in life. “When my wife’s Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: ‘Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.’ I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive world.” Along with William Shawn, Harold’s Ross’s great successor as editor of The New Yorker, all readers can cherish E. B. White’s writings. “E. B. White was a great essayist, a supreme stylist,” eulogized Shawn. “His literary style was as pure as any in our language. It was singular, colloquial, clear, unforced, thoroughly American and utterly beautiful. . . . He was ageless, and his writing was timeless.” And at a February 10, 1986, memorial reading, novelist and humorist Peter De Vries commented on E. B. White’s place in American literature:
He lived a long and full life. . . . He loved his fellow men and he loved his fellow creatures. I wouldn’t know whether White ever prayed in the technical sense of that term. He certainly attended no church. Well, he prayeth best who loveth best, all things both great and small. I trust it is not too cry
ptic to say that he had too much natural reverence to need religion. Thoreau was his god, or one of them. And did our modest friend, I wonder, ever suspect what we all now seem quite sure of—that all those years he was worshipping an equal?”
—Hal Hager
About the Author
E. B. WHITE was born in 1899. He is widely known as the author of two children’s classics, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, as well as one of the finest essayists of the twentieth century. He died in 1985.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Also by E. B. White
Essays of E. B. White
Letters of E. B. White
The Trumpet of the Swan
The Points of My Compass
The Second Tree from the Corner
Charlotte’s Web
Here Is New York
The Wild Flag
Stuart Little
One Man’s Meat
The Fox of Peapack
Quo Vadimus?
Farewell to Model T
Every Day Is Saturday
The Lady Is Cold
An E. B. White Reader
edited by William W. Watt and Robert W. Bradford
The Elements of Style
William Strunk, Jr. (revised and enlarged by E. B. White)
A Subtreasury of American Humor
co-edited with Katharine S. White
Is Sex Necessary?
with James Thurber
Copyright
Essays copyright © 1934, 1939, 1941, 1947, 1949, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1963, 1966, 1971, 1975, 1977 by E. B. White.
“Farmer White’s Brown Eggs,” © 1971 by the New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. (Now titled “Riposte.”)
“Farewell, My Lovely!” Copyright 1936, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
Introduction to A Subtreasury of American Humor. Copyright 1941, by E. B. White and Katharine S. White.
Introduction to the lives and times of archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis. Copyright © 1950 by Doubleday & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1977 by Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.
ESSAYS OF E. B. WHITE. Copyright © 1977 by E. B. White. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Harper Colophon edition published 1979. Reissued in HarperPerennial 1992.
First Perennial Classics edition published 1999.
Perennial Classics are published by HarperPerennial, a division of HarperCollins
Publishers.
* * *
White, E. B. (Elwyn Brooks), 1899–
Essays of E.B. White.—1st Perennial Classics ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-093223-6
EPub Edition February 2014 ISBN 9780062348753
1. American essays—20th century. I. Title.
PS3545.H5187A16 1999
814'.52—dc21 98-56019
* * *
05 06 07 08 ♦/RRD-H 20 19 18 17 16
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollins.com
*In 1962, two years after this piece was written, Nelson Rockefeller managed to discuss unity in exact terms in his Harvard lectures. He proposed the federal design as the correct theoretical solution to mankind’s urgent problem. This is the first and hardest step. Until a design is welcomed in theory by persons high in public life, not much progress can be made among the people toward the political goal of liberty-in-unity.
*This piece originally appeared in The New Yorker over the pseudonym Lee Strout White. It was suggested by a manuscript submitted by Richard L. Strout, of The Christian Science Monitor, and Mr. Strout, an amiable collaborator, has kindly allowed me to include it in this collection. The piece was published as a little book in 1936 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons under the title “Farewell to Model T.”
*Adapted from the preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor, Coward-McCann, 1941.
*This essay, in a slightly different form, appeared as the introduction to Doubleday’s 1950 edition of the lives and times of archy and mehitabel.