by Michael Sims
The Story of
Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the
Birth of an American Classic
Michael Sims
To the amazing Dr. Patterson
CONTENTS
Cover
Title
Dedication
Source Note
Epigraph
Introduction:
Translating Yourself
PART I: ELWYN
Chapter 1:
Enchanted
Chapter 2:
Fear
Chapter 3:
Trustworthy
Chapter 4:
A Writing Fool
Chapter 5:
Liebesträum
PART II: ANDY
Chapter 6:
Olympus
Chapter 7:
Interview with a Sparrow
Chapter 8:
Crazy
Chapter 9:
As Spiders Do
PART III: CHARLOTTE
Chapter 10:
Dream Farm
Chapter 11:
The Mouse of Thought
Chapter 12:
Foreknowledge
Chapter 13:
Zuckerman’s Barn
Chapter 14:
Spinningwork
Chapter 15:
Paean
Chapter 16:
Some Book
Chapter 17:
Completion
Coda:
After Charlotte
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for Frequent Sources
Notes
Selected Bibliography and Further Reading
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Imprint
Every unattributed quotation that appears before a chapter or between chapter sections is a comment by E. B. White on his own life. Because of house style at The New Yorker, where the first person plural resulted in such royal phrasing as “we saw it ourself,” and because of White’s habit of reminiscing about his childhood in third person (“I knew a boy”), these remarks appear in a number of voices, but they are all E. B. White’s.
But real life is only one kind of life—
there is also the life of the imagination.
Introduction
TRANSLATING YOURSELF
MY WIFE AND I were in Maine, standing in the barn that had belonged to E. B. White and chatting with the current owners, when I backed up to get a better view for a photograph and hit my head on something. Turning around, I saw a heavy old rope dangling in front of me, and I glanced up to where it was looped through a ring attached to a beam over the barn doors. Then I realized what I was staring at.
I turned to the South Carolina couple who had bought the White farm after his death in 1985. “Is this—”
Mary and Robert Gallant smiled and nodded. “Fern and Avery’s rope? Yes.”
“So it was real too.”
I was in the barn that had inspired Charlotte’s Web because, a few years earlier, I had been reading E. B. White’s collected letters when I ran across his reply to a letter from schoolchildren: “I didn’t like spiders at first, but then I began watching one of them, and soon saw what a wonderful creature she was and what a skillful weaver. I named her Charlotte.”
“Wait a minute,” I said aloud to the empty room. “There was a real Charlotte?”
This question was my first step toward discovering the story behind Charlotte’s Web. Was there a real Charlotte, I wanted to know, or was White merely performing in this letter? As I traced the inspirations, discoveries, and research that White brought to one of the most acclaimed children’s books of the twentieth century, I soon learned that there had been numerous Charlottes and Wilburs and Templetons in his life—but that there was indeed a particular clever spider who helped inspire the book.
Robert and Mary Gallant showed us the barn cellar, where White kept the pigs that inspired Wilbur. We saw the stalls for sheep and cattle, the doorway that had held the webs of countless orb weavers, the path through the woods, the rocky pasture with its view of Allen Cove and misty Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island. We stayed for a while in the boathouse down by the water. As I sat at the plank table White had built, I noticed that a patterned brown spider hung motionless in a web to my right.
Many novelists admit that their characters are inspired by real individuals, but it seldom occurs to us that the authors of children’s fantasy might make the same confession. Yet examples abound. Brave and levelheaded Alice was based upon the young Miss Liddell. The name of the Dodo in Wonderland reflects Lewis Carroll’s stuttering trouble in pronouncing his true surname, Dodgson. Christopher Robin was not only a real boy but actually often played inside a large hollow tree on the Milne property—and Eeyore is gloomy because a broken wire in Christopher’s toy donkey made its head hang low. Most of the characters in Beatrix Potter’s stories she drew from life as well, because she spent her days with rabbits and ducks on Hill Top Farm in the Lake District.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising to learn that, while composing his most popular book, E. B. White was obeying a cherished maxim: Write about what you know. He knew his characters from the barns and stables where he spent much of his childhood and adulthood. He knew a barn’s earthy smells and sounds, the variety of its animal population. Charlotte’s Web was hardly a simple report from the barn, as White claimed, but it grew from his experiences there with many animals. His return to a barn in adulthood ignited smoldering memories of the stable in his childhood home in Mount Vernon, New York. By creating a fictional hybrid of the most enchanted settings from both childhood and adulthood, White became one of the rare authors who solve what the American critic and essayist Clifton Fadiman once called “the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole.”
White’s attitude toward nature, with its unblinking response to the inevitability of death, strikes me as realistically hardheaded despite being wrapped in anthropomorphism. A farmer who wrote children’s fantasies needed both ways of thinking. During my research I became fascinated by other aspects of White’s personality as well. From childhood to old age, he was painfully shy, terrified of speaking in public or before a microphone—yet hugely ambitious and willing to try almost anything when no one was looking. Afraid of commitment and romance and confrontation, he hid behind animals even in his early love poems and letters to his wife.
Charlotte’s Web is about animals because throughout his long life animals were E. B. White’s favorite acquaintances. He had plenty of friends; he got along well with editors and other colleagues; he was happily married and a proud father, stepfather, and eventually grandfather. But he liked to spend as much time as possible around nonhuman creatures. “This boy,” wrote White about himself as a child, “felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people.” It’s all the more impressive, therefore, how many people have felt a kinship with E. B. White.
The book for which most people cherish him fits into a long-standing tradition in literature—tales of animals who think and speak like human beings. From Aesop’s ungrateful eagle through the trickster fox Reynard in the Middle Ages, from the autobiography of Black Beauty in the nineteenth century to the quest of Despereaux in the twenty-first, talking animals have accompanied us throughout history. Folklore around the world laments our loss of innocence in the golden age of humanity, when we could speak with our fellow creatures. In Charlotte’s Web this lost era is childhood.
“Remember that writing is translation,” White wrote to a student while composing this tale about the animals in his barn, “and the opus to be tr
anslated is yourself.” The Story of Charlotte’s Web explores how White translated his own passions and contradictions, delights and fears, into a book that has had astonishingly broad appeal across age groups and national boundaries. He knew that empathy is a creative act, an entering into another’s reality. Empathy and curiosity happily coexisted in his spacious imagination. He studied the lives of spiders for a year before writing his novel. “I discovered, quite by accident,” he explained, “that reality and fantasy make good bedfellows.”
White himself emphasized that biographical writing is always a matter of interpretation—and he was wary of it. As I wrote this book, I became aware that, although I was determined to portray Elwyn Brooks White as accurately as possible, he was also becoming a character in a particular story I wanted to tell. I invented nothing; to the best of my ability, I misrepresented nothing. But by focusing on particular aspects of his career, such as his interest in natural history and farming, I have produced an account inevitably biased toward this facet of his life. His writings about government and civil rights, for example, find little room here, and beyond his childhood I don’t explore his relationship with his family in depth. I hesitated over presuming to refer to White by his first name, but this is a personal book about his intimate daily life, so in childhood I call him Elwyn and in adulthood Andy—the latter a nickname he acquired at Cornell and kept for the rest of his life. This book is a biographical narrative distilled from hundreds of sources, but at every stage I tried to keep in mind that these people did not know what was going to happen next.
More than a quarter century after his death, E. B. White lives in our cultural dialogue. Some of his personal essays are canonized anthology standards, and to the connoisseur of the genre he stands beside Montaigne. Students underline every axiom in The Elements of Style. Charlotte’s Web is better known than Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn and usually described as “beloved.” How beloved? Charlotte’s Web has already sold many millions of copies; in annual summaries of bestselling children’s books in the United States, often it still outsells even Winnie-the-Pooh. For Publishers Weekly, a poll of librarians, teachers, publishers, and authors, asked to list the best children’s books ever published in the United States, set Charlotte’s Web firmly in first place. A 2000 survey listed Charlotte’s Web as the bestselling children’s book in U.S. history, with Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan both following in the top one hundred. As of 2010, Charlotte’s Web has been translated into thirty-five foreign languages. Thus every day somewhere in the world, countless children and adults are opening the book and turning to the first page and reading in English or Norwegian or Chinese or braille:
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.…
Part I
ELWYN
Our rich experiences, as a child, were secret, unexpected, and unreported.
Chapter 1
ENCHANTED
He lived a life of enchantment; virtually everything he saw and heard was being seen and heard by him for the first time, so he gave it his whole attention.
THE COACHMAN SAID the eggs would never hatch. They were infertile, he insisted, as he tossed them onto the manure pile outside the stable. Elwyn’s indulgent father had bought his children an incubator with fifty eggs and only these three failed to hatch. Barely more than a toddler, skinny big-eared Elwyn had stretched on tiptoe to peer over the edge of a workbench and excitedly witness the primordial ritual of chicks’ tapping inside their shells as they prepared to emerge into the world. He didn’t want to give up on the remaining eggs—and later he was the first to hear a cheeping sound outdoors. He ran outside, thrilled to find that the chicks had hatched by themselves, rejected by human beings and incubated by nothing more than the manure pile’s own natural warmth. The birds were scurrying around, tiny and wet and rumpled, squawking hungrily.
The stable was behind the family’s spacious home in Mount Vernon, New York. During his childhood in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was one of Elwyn White’s favorite places. Painted pale gray, matching their big, handsome house even to the gables in the loft, it had a square towerlike peak that sported a weather vane as high as the domed turret on the front of the house. Elwyn loved the pungent scent of hay in the stable’s loft above his head and of the dusty oats in their bin with its chute that carried grain down to the three stalls below. He liked to walk into the dark stable, through the coach doorway created when the main door slid left into its wall pocket, and find himself surrounded by the exciting wild scent of the horses themselves. In front the barn was lit by a small, four-paned window to the right of the sliding door, as well as by a couple of similar windows in the loft, on each side of the high door that opened downward for loading or unloading wagons. Still the corners inside were always enticingly dark, the light angling down and splashing on hay to turn it golden. Outside, to the left of the big door, stood a lattice-walled stall, and nearby was the fragrant manure pit whose warmth rescued the chicks. Sometimes the coachman, Jimmy Bridges—whom Elwyn admiringly followed around—smelled more horsey than human, mixed with the aroma of liniment and harness dressing. Bridges had his own private room upstairs among the hay bales. Most of the coachmen in the neighborhood were Irish immigrants, friendly to Elwyn and his pals; often he knew a friend’s stable well without ever having entered his home.
Young Elwyn tended various animals in the stable, especially birds; he kept pigeons, chickens, a turkey, ducks, geese. He helped with the horses as much as he was allowed, and a hutch housed his soft-furred, big-eyed rabbits. But not every animal there belonged to the White family. Elwyn enjoyed watching the predatory antics of a stray cat that sometimes camped out under the stable. And sneaking around the stalls, as well as nesting under them, were thieves who added a frisson of villainy to the happy scene—rats. Elwyn saw no contradiction in loving mice and hating rats.
From early childhood, Elwyn found the dark and pungent stable intoxicatingly rich in romantic associations of life and death and adventure. But it was also a refuge where a thoughtful young boy could spend time by himself. From infancy, he saw barns and stables and farms in a symbolic light. The White family owned a toy farm that had belonged to Elwyn’s mother in her own childhood—an entire nighttime scene with moon and stars in a dark blue sky over a bucolic farm with toy sheep and cows. “My dream farm,” she called it. Every December she placed this peaceful miniature world at the foot of the Christmas tree, where its barn and duck pond were at Elwyn’s eye level as he sprawled on the rug and wondered what was inside the colorfully wrapped Christmas gifts behind it.
Much of the year in New York, the stable was too cold for animals less hardy than the rats. Because his mother wouldn’t allow a dog in her handsome and well-kept home, Elwyn kept his first of a long parade of canines, a bright-eyed collie named Mac, in the always dank cellar. The dog’s bed was near the nineteenth-century servants’ toilet that Elwyn sometimes sneaked down to use, although now and then he walked past it to secretly pee into the coal bin instead. Keeping Mac in the cold and dark left Elwyn racked with guilt. Whenever he opened the big door, the dog was already at the top of the stairs, waiting with barely leashed affection and smelling of ashes and darkness. In better weather, Mac was assigned a sheepskin-lined bed in the barn. He accompanied Elwyn on neighborhood explorations, panting happily and looking back over his shoulder to keep an eye on his young master. For years, as Elwyn returned from school in his beret and tweedy knickers and high-button shoes, he found Mac waiting at the same rendezvous to escort him home. Sometimes Elwyn would sneak Mac into the public library, where the dog would lie on the wooden floor nearby as Elwyn tried to decipher Virgil or worked on other schoolwork or simply prowled the shelves. The drowsy quiet of one spring evening at the library was shattered when Mac heard the high-pitched yap of a poodle outdoors and bounded to the window to reply in deep barks that resounded throughout the building—startling a white-haired
old man nearby out of his browse through a magazine.
There were secretive animals in Elwyn’s life as well. His many childhood illnesses included severe hay fever and other allergies. Once, while he was sick in bed, a fearless young house mouse not only visited him in his bedroom but proved interested enough in this large but quiet neighbor to gradually become a tamed pet. Elwyn supplied him with a house and watched rapt as the mouse explored with its tiny paws and turned its dark eyes to look up at him. He even taught it several tricks. He also kept an array of less cuddly pets—frogs and turtles, caterpillars and lizards, canaries and snakes—but they didn’t come alive in his imagination the same way that mice did, with their fellow-mammal warmth and air of miniature humanity.
The basement and stable were havens for even smaller animals that caught the boy’s eye. In every corner of the stable, from stall planks near the ground to roof beams above the hayloft, different kinds of spiders spun their webs and waited for manna to fall into them. Some of the spiders were anonymous gray smudges in cobwebby corners, others elegantly patterned and displayed in the center of their web like a cameo in a necklace. All of the webs were wonderfully engineered and many were beautiful. The stable’s sweaty animals and fresh dung attracted countless flies and other insects that ended their brief lives struggling in a spiderweb. Nearby, chicks were hatched and foals born. A scurry and squawk in the eaves might mean a snake or a rat had invaded the barn swallow’s nest and eaten eggs. For a sheltered middle-class suburban child, the stable provided a memorable everyday glimpse of a world that managed to be both beautiful and cruel.