by Michael Sims
Clara had been tending their mother since Samuel’s death. Because of her husband’s mental breakdown, she needed work and was about to launch a country inn that would serve three dozen guests per day, a venture requiring a huge investment of her energy and money. It was time for someone else to care for Jessie, so Lillian and Andy discussed alternatives. They looked at a nursing home in Chevy Chase, Maryland; Lillian suggested that she could rent a beachside cottage near Washington and move their mother in with her; and Andy considered moving her and a nurse to Maine to be near him and Kay.
But Jessie’s energy and will to live raced downhill over the next couple of weeks. On Wednesday, May 13, Andy was back in Washington, arriving at the Catholic hospital during a hot and noisy thunderstorm—ominous dark clouds, lightning flashing, the heat and air pressure wreaking havoc with Andy’s always delicate respiratory system. Jessie lay in her hospital room, small and frail amid the antiseptic white sheets and metal bed frame, frightened by the loud, bright lightning and suffering almost unbearable pain. Her tormented children stood around in a helpless tableau, looking at the tortured limbs of silent Christ on a crucifix at the foot of her bed.
The storm cleared the air. During the night the humidity and temperature both fell, and Thursday morning was clear, the blue sky fresh and clean. Back at the hospital, Andy found his mother also looking cleansed and calm. She seemed to be past the pain, at least for now. Light flooded in the window and showed Jessie small and weak in the bed, yet almost alarmingly bright-eyed.
The contrast between last night and this morning prompted Andy to indicate the benign weather and say, “Isn’t it beautiful, Mother?”
But Jessie was thinking about death, not weather. With surprising fervor she exclaimed, “Oh my, oh my—it’s perfectly beautiful.”
Her mood seemed exalted, transcendent. Knowing she had little time, apparently worried she might even run out of energy to speak, she assured them that the approach of death was actually a beautiful experience. They could hear children singing in the parochial school across the street, and Jessie said she loved the sound of their voices. Andy didn’t know how much she was influenced by painkillers—she could barely focus her gaze on them—and how much her own internal system was deluding itself.
Clara took Jessie’s hand and asked, “Mother, you’re perfectly comfortable, aren’t you?”
“Perfectly comfortable.”
“And you’re perfectly happy?”
“Perfectly happy,” Jessie sighed. She seemed to need desperately to reassure her children, as if to soften their loss of her. Whenever a spasm of pain went through her, making her whisper “Oh” again and again, she would soon manage to conjure a weak smile and murmur, “That means absolutely nothing at all.”
She died that night, with Clara beside her in the darkness.
That summer the long, slow rhythms of life were more visible than usual. As he grieved over the deaths of his parents only nine months apart, Andy’s mind kept journeying down old back roads to revisit the best days of his childhood. He was only thirty-seven, but he kept looking back. He decided to risk returning to Belgrade Lakes, to try to recapture his magical experiences there. He took the train again, the Bar Harbor Express, and watched mist rise from the pastures as the tracks skirted around Lake Messalonskee. He revisited old sensations and renewed their potency: the chime of a distant cowbell, the scent of woodsmoke and lumber and coffee, the taste of birch beer at Bean’s old lakeside store, the sparkle of whitecaps in the wind, his bare feet on the warm wooden boards of a dock. It all seemed reassuringly familiar, as if he had returned to the one place in the world where time didn’t move, where nothing changed, where childhood and parents lived forever. Toward the end of his visit there, overwhelmed with observations and memories, Andy sat down to write a long letter to Stan, detailing a few changes but mostly reminiscing and emphasizing the similarities between then and now. “Yes, sir, I returned to Belgrade, and things don’t change much,” he wrote. “I thought somebody ought to know.”
ANDY’S CAREER HAD proven as unpredictable as his personal life. In a surprising 1934 critique of The New Yorker in Fortune, Andy and Katharine’s former colleague Ralph Ingersoll had taken the magazine in general and Andy in particular to task. He referred to Andy’s “gossamer” writing, describing him as “frightened of life,” complaining that his recurring themes were terriers, guppies, and a crusade “against the complexity of life.” The latter criticism was true and not necessarily wounding. The charge of ephemeral irrelevance, however, stabbed Andy in his most sensitive doubts about himself. Ingersoll was right about another point: Andy had indeed been a part of the magazine’s decision to resist for too long commenting upon the poverty and strife of Depression-era America. This kind of attitude had kept Hollywood producing comedies—Swing Time, Bringing Up Baby, Show Boat—at which hard-earned quarters could be traded for escape from breadlines and rumors of war.
Ingersoll’s mockery helped fuel Andy’s restlessness with The New Yorker and with New York itself. Despite glowing reviews of his 1935 collection of Comment pieces, Every Day Is Saturday, he was unable to persuade Ross to let him write a longer signed column and thus escape from the anonymity and lightweight reputation of the Comment pieces. The Atlantic and Scribner’s rejected his essays, leaving him yearning for the opportunity to prove himself, or perhaps find himself, in a more demanding form. But his growing fame led to a timely invitation from Harper’s to write a monthly essay-length column, roughly twenty-five hundred words, for three hundred dollars apiece. “I was a man in search of the first person singular,” he wrote. He continued to write Comment for The New Yorker, but in his Harper’s column, “One Man’s Meat,” he explored new ground. He published a lighthearted tribute to, yes, his long-deceased Boston terrier, a survey of a new kind of field guide invented by a man named Roger Tory Peterson, nostalgic snapshots of the journals young Elwyn had kept in high school during World War I, passionate meditations on freedom and democracy in the new world situation, lyrical glimmers of mortality, and an ode to his favorite writer, Henry David Thoreau. Andy seldom wrote about books or other writers, but he returned often to Thoreau. He once described Walden as the only book he “owned,” that others merely lived with him. “The note he sounded,” he wrote of his hero, “was like the white-throat’s—pure, wavering, full of the ecstasy of loneliness.”
Often Andy thought of Thoreau and Walden Pond. The neon distractions of Times Square could not compare in Andy’s mind with the seals that swam beside his boat in the cove, raising their slicked wet heads out of the water like mermaids and barking through the fog. In 1938 the White family moved to the farm full-time—despite the looming obstacles of long-distance editing and writing, despite having to pull Joe out of a private New York school and move him to a one-room schoolhouse in a village—and despite Katharine’s decision, in wanting Andy to be happy, to leave what their colleague Wolcott Gibbs called “the greatest job in the world,” a prime editorial position at one of the most influential literary magazines in America.
Having moved as the war was building up in Europe, Andy often felt that his new preoccupations were trivial and even futile. Why was he so fortunate as to be able to milk his cows and write his sly New Yorker paragraphs rather than die on a battlefield? One cold early-spring evening he was tending the fickle brooder stove in his henhouse, trying to maintain a maternal fire for the 254 innocent chicks gathered around it—depending upon its warmth for survival—when Joe came out to tell him that dinner was ready and the war news on the radio was bad. A few months earlier, Germany, Italy, and Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact to form the Axis. Clearly they were planning to invade Russia. When Andy wrote up this particular evening for his Harper’s column, he thought of recent Third Reich propaganda claiming that Aryan domination was the spring (Frühling) that would not end, so he said, “I soon knew that the remaining warmth in this stubborn stove was all I had to pit against the Nazi idea of Frühling.” He redistribute
d a hundred or so chicks to areas where they were likelier to stay warm and went indoors to be with his family. The kitchen was cozy and the lights bright. In his essay he crafted a home-front manifesto featuring his favorite symbol of life: “Countries are ransacked, valleys drenched with blood. Though it seems untimely I still publish my belief in the egg, the contents of the egg, the warm coal, and the necessity for pursuing whatever fire delights and sustains you.”
In the summer of 1941 he further sustained himself by turning again to Belgrade Lakes, this time with Joe. He worried that time would have tarnished what he thought of as a holy spot, but the major change was in Andy himself. Emotionally disoriented, he kept seeing his own childhood in Joe’s every move with a fishing pole or canoe. And if Joe was the young Andy, then Andy had to face that he, now orphaned, had become his father.
Chapter 11
THE MOUSE OF THOUGHT
Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
ONE OF ANDY’S early essays for Harper’s concerned the shipments of children’s books that Katharine received every autumn for her annual review roundup in The New Yorker. Publishers’ nominees, forwarded to Maine from the magazine’s offices, flooded into the house, sometimes ten or twenty in a single package. Because the Whites’ shelves were already full, the new books teetered in stacks, stealing floor space and climbing onto the furniture like unruly pets, until eventually most wound up donated to the Brooklin area’s public schools.
Katharine briefly reviewed as many books as possible and listed others, thereby covering an average of fifty volumes per review, sometimes as many as eighty. She chose books she found well written or amusing or that particularly appealed to Joe, her in-house junior critic. She quoted him, for example, on the author of The Little Prince: “He seems to be writing about grownup things in a childish way.” Her own comments were similarly brisk but often salty. Of The Travels of Babar, the second installment in Jean de Brunhoff’s series about an orphaned elephant, Katharine wrote, “This year Babar is officially blessed by A. A. Milne in a prefatory paragraph, an unnecessary and misleading condescension, since de Brunhoff is witty without being Poohish, and Babar is an elephant who can stand on his own feet.”
Every year Andy began the season by resenting the influx of books, then soon found himself sprawled on the hearth and immersed in a tome about how to build a tree house. He read many of the books, from William Karl Harriman’s The Story of Tea to Lynnwood M. Chace and Evelyn M. Chadwick’s Little Orphan Willie-Mouse, which featured photographs of an actual wood mouse. Impressively detailed historical accounts stretched from Los Angeles to Tibet, from Williamsburg to Bali. Frances Cavanah’s Boyhood Adventures of Our Presidents featured on the front, stamped in red on the beige cloth, a Tom Sawyerish lad apparently running away from home; chapters were along the lines of “Tom Jefferson Climbs a Mountain.” The hero of the lushly colored Soomoon, Boy of Bali, who seemed to have the same idea as the boyhood presidents, was carrying his belongings on a pole, along with a white rooster in a cage. Bumblebuzz, by Rosalie K. Fry, drew Andy in with a painting on the cover of a bumblebee strolling along with a two-spotted ladybug.
Many of the more practical volumes struck him as unwittingly humorous—especially tirades about safety. “It is an odd place, this front yard of World Crisis,” he wrote, “where adults with blueprints of bombproof shelters sticking from their pants pockets solemnly caution their little ones against running downstairs with lollypops in their mouths.” A disappointing number of the books, he thought, lacked imagination and a sense of language. One that had plenty of both was an odd prose narrative entitled The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, by someone calling himself Dr. Seuss (which Andy misspelled in his essay).
“Close contact with the field of juvenile literature,” he wrote, “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 that must be exciting is finding a place, a period, or a thing that hasn’t already been written about.” He pointed out that “with science dominating life nowadays,” perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the authors of many children’s books at least nodded dutifully toward an animal’s actual behavior. “Even the cute animals of the nonsense school move against impeccable backgrounds of natural history,” he noted; “even a female ant who is sufficiently irregular to be able to talk English lays her eggs at the proper time and in the accepted manner.”
WHEN HE CAME to write a children’s book himself, only a few years after this essay, Andy casually mixed human and animal characters. Although Katharine and Andy purchased the Maine farm more than a decade before Stuart Little was published in 1945, the characters in it weren’t based upon the animals in their daily lives. Long before, Stuart had arrived in Andy’s mind in a direct shipment from his subconscious. In the spring of 1926 he had visited the lush Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. During his return train ride to New York, while he slept in an upper berth to the rhythm that he had loved since his first rail trip to Maine, he dreamed of a tiny, mouselike child—adventurous, polite but straightforward, dapper, and even supplied with hat and cane. The next morning, when Andy awoke, he remembered this odd character and scribbled a few notes about him.
Soon he made use of them. By then, between his various siblings, he had eighteen nieces and nephews, but no children of his own, so he often found himself called upon at family gatherings to amuse the youngsters with a story. Fond of children and popular with them, he was nonetheless embarrassed in the spotlight. He stammered and struggled, worrying that his poor performance was disappointing as he tried to invent a story on the spot. So he turned to the mouse-child in his mind and wrote up a few adventures for him, providing himself with narrative ammunition that he could pull from a desk drawer whenever a child begged for a story.
These typed manuscripts appealed to others besides children—including Katharine, not surprisingly. In 1935 she showed Clarence Day the Stuart adventures that had thus far accumulated. A regular New Yorker contributor best known for his humorous autobiographical stories culminating in Life with Father, Day was also a respected family friend. When he said, “Don’t let Andy neglect Stuart Little—it sounds like one of those real books that last,” the remark counted. But Andy still didn’t pursue the stories. Then in late 1938 he published his essay about rambling through Katharine’s flood of children’s books. At the New York Public Library, the prominent and influential children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore read Andy’s essay and wrote to him, encouraging him to tackle the need for great children’s literature himself, to create something that would “make the library lions roar.” He replied, “My fears about writing for children are great—one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness.”
Meanwhile Katharine had spread the gospel of Stuart elsewhere, to Eugene Saxton, Andy’s editor at Harper (until his death in 1942), who asked to see whatever adventures already existed. Andy sent the pages, adding up to more than ten thousand words, in March 1939, with the note, “It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it.” He pointed out that, while Stuart was an imaginary mouse, he did not in any way resemble Mickey of dubious fame. He explained that because Stuart had appeared to him in a dream, as a gift rather than an invention, he didn’t feel free to metamorphose him from a mouse into a wallaby or a grasshopper.
Harper responded enthusiastically and Saxton encouraged Andy to complete the book as soon as possible. Naturally the aim of simply moving forward on a project made Andy nervous. (He had informed Anne Carroll Moore that he resisted goading like a mule.) He replied, “I can’t make any promises,” and explained that he was currently tending two hundred and fifty chicks. He hoped he might have the book finished by autumn.
It took him six years.
IN EARLY SPRING of 1943, Andy was as busy as ever on the farm. He sold cows and chopped lambs’ tails, built sheds and started a new set of chicks. With the war on and
many shortages back home, he had to persuade the gas ration board to allow him to drive once a week to Blue Hill’s post office to mail in his New Yorker “News and Comment” pieces. Now and then he took time out to fish for smelt brought in by the tide. He could also be found gazing upward in the sunset to watch the woodcocks’ mating dance in the sky. Thirteen-year-old Joe had noticed that the lovesick male always flew back down to the place from which he took off, so the boy was able to walk a few steps closer during each flight, then stand perfectly still as the male came back to land. Eventually he crept to within ten feet of the plump, long-billed bird.
What Andy was not doing was writing. Despite ongoing depression, he was in a better mood—after a long, lingering winter and the dreary rains of spring—in part because he had yet again renounced a writing commitment. He had written to Frederick Lewis Allen, his editor at Harper’s, to confess that, although he had no complaints about how the magazine had treated him, he had always had great difficulty in writing his monthly “One Man’s Meat” column. He explained that a regular commitment didn’t come naturally to him, and he knew that sometimes he sent in subpar work because of a looming deadline. He used the kind of sentence he had employed in many situations when things seemed to everyone else to be going well: “So the only thing for me to do is quit.”