by Michael Sims
When Allen tried to talk him out of it, Andy replied that, yes, having such a commitment was good discipline, but discipline was not what he needed at the moment. “I want,” he said flatly, “to write when and if I feel like it.”
What he did not know was when the urge might strike him or what he might then want to write. During 1943 he wrote Comment as usual, but mostly he avoided his typewriter. It was a scary time. During this period he experienced what he described as a “nervous crack-up.” For many months he had had trouble sleeping. He had been experiencing dizziness, possibly related to his ongoing sinus troubles, for which he finally underwent an operation that seemed to have little effect. He consulted a psychiatrist, took tests, was told that perhaps even his dizziness and hyperventilation were psychosomatic. What helped him more than doctors, he thought, was tinkering at his workbench, taking lots of showers, drinking small amounts of dry sherry, and playing favorite old recordings over and over.
Many changes were taking place. Joe was now attending Exeter. In 1943 Andy and Katherine gave in to Harold Ross’s wartime pleas for help—and offers of higher salaries—and had decided to return to full-time New Yorker work, which meant wintering in the city rather than at the farm. The magazine provided a furnished apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street and life fell back into a semblance of its old routine—except that more than ever Andy was experiencing a sense of failure, of having never accomplished the significant writing of which he dreamed he might be capable. He complained that his head felt like an overcharged car battery. He told his brother Stan that he was going to consult a psychiatrist because his brain also felt like a tree with a kite tangled in its branches.
The next year, when he published a few clues to his mental state, a particular image recurred. In February The New Yorker published his poem “Home Song,” including the line “Ever at home are the mice in hiding.” In October the magazine published his brief poem “Vermin,” in which he confessed, “The mouse of Thought infests my head … He is too quick for me, / I see only his tail.” The next year, 1945, he told Stan that he suffered from “mice in the subconscious.” Mice had always been a recurring theme in his writing. He had identified with them even more than most children do, especially after the visits to his Summit Avenue bedroom by his secret mouse friend. His first published writing was about this creature, the childhood poem that won him an award from Woman’s Home Companion when he was nine, titled “To a Mouse.” And once, back in the fraternity house at Cornell, he found a mouse hiding in one of the cubbyholes of his rolltop desk, and both sat unmoving, staring at each other until one of Andy’s fraternity brothers walked in and broke up the tableau. In 1926 Andy’s first unsigned Comment paragraph for The New Yorker had been not about a mouse but about buying a mousetrap.
During the winter of 1944–45, convinced that he was going to die or at least go crazy, Andy sat looking across his desk at West Eleventh Street below, and he was able to complete Stuart Little within two months. Originally Stuart’s surname was Ade. While Andy was writing the book, however, he and Katharine were also editing an anthology, A Subtreasury of American Humor, in which they decided to include a story by George Ade. Maintaining his policy of steering away from resemblance to real people, Andy switched Stuart’s name to the more apt Little. Perhaps the oddest aspect of the novel, considering the animal that kept infesting Andy’s brain, was that he explicitly stated that Stuart was not a mouse, merely a boy who looks like a mouse, weighing so little at birth that “he could have been sent first class mail for three cents.” Like his creator, Stuart turned out to be handy, versatile, and plucky, and the opening chapters of the book found him in lighthearted adventures down a bathtub drain and inside a piano. Later, after Stuart’s Andy-like decision “to run away from home without telling anybody,” Andy’s text became more emotional and resonant. The carefree early adventures Andy had written while in his late twenties. The later material emerged from this difficult year in his forties.
Stuart even found himself paddling one of the souvenir birchbark canoes that Andy had seen at Bean’s store on the Maine lake in his childhood. Although he portrayed Stuart’s infatuation with the young teacher, Miss Harriet Ames, as a poignant romantic comedy in which Harriet is far wiser, it expressed much of the author’s own experience with romance—including a failed date after much anticipation. Following this interlude with another human, Andy kept Stuart’s vision of ideal love untainted by the complexities of human interaction, by having it take place not only between a bird and a human mouse, for whom sexuality could never complicate matters, but also mostly keeping his bird friend Margalo offstage and, presumably, unattainable. The book ends not with the culmination of the quest but with his committing to it.
FOR STUART LITTLE, Andy was working with a new division at Harper & Brothers—with Ursula Nordstrom, head of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls. In the late-nineteenth century, there had been a movement in the United States to create children’s reading rooms in public libraries; by the first decades of the twentieth century, these were commonplace nationwide. Gradually many publishers added departments devoted to children’s literature, focusing especially on meeting the needs of the growing library market. Although they had already been producing notable books for generations of children—the company was established in 1817—Harper & Brothers didn’t create an official children’s department until 1926. Originally it comprised only an editor, an assistant editor, and a secretary. The first directing editor was Virginia Kirkus, who in 1933 founded Kirkus Reviews, which quickly became an influential review publication, giving bookstores and publishers a heads-up about the thousands of upcoming titles each year.
A timid New Yorker named Ursula Nordstrom, barely out of her teens, joined Harper’s staff in 1931. When she walked in the door, her literary talents were not immediately apparent. She began not as an editor in Books for Boys and Girls but as a clerk in College Textbooks. Despite her intelligence and her interest in the arts, Nordstrom’s parents—both actors, her father the famous silent film star Henry E. Dixie—had declined to send her to college and had instead lobbied for secretarial school. Quickly learning the business and outgrowing her shyness, Nordstrom became known as a bright and ambitious young woman with a good sense of humor. After five years of relative boredom in a corner of the company that didn’t excite her imagination, Nordstrom was eager to take what she had learned about publishing and apply it in a more congenial environment. When Virginia Kirkus retired in 1936, her former assistant, Ida Louise Raymond, replaced her and took Nordstrom along as assistant editor. Soon, amid messy offices, she was dealing with such writers as Laura Ingalls Wilder.
In 1940 Nordstrom was promoted to director. During the four years since then she had critiqued, encouraged, and cajoled such writers as Margret and H. A. Rey, the married cocreators of a farcical romp entitled Curious George, and Margaret Wise Brown, author of a lyrical picture book called The Runaway Bunny. Nordstrom was no proponent of artificially sweetened pablum for tots. A witty and talkative workaholic, she believed passionately in the importance of good literature for children, but she did not idealize either children or the world of adulthood to which they were headed. She liked Stuart Little’s ambiguities and the unresolved quest at the end.
As Andy well knew from previous experience, the public reaction to a book was unpredictable. One of the stranger responses to Stuart Little came from Anne Carroll Moore, the New York librarian who had encouraged him to write the book in the first place. Before it was even published, she wrote again, saying that she had seen the proofs—Harper had sent a set, expecting applause—and she felt that the novel was inconclusive and not affirmative. She actually argued that it was unfit for children. In her surprising battle with Stuart, Moore launched two more salvos: she wrote a letter to Ursula Nordstrom, insisting that the book should not be published, and followed up with a fourteen-page missive to Katharine, advising that Andy cancel the planned publication, insisting that Stuart was unruly and that his stor
y failed in every way to correspond to time-honored patterns for fantasy. Andy ignored her. Katharine replied with restrained politeness.
Nordstrom approached several artists to illustrate the book. Nominees included Aldren Watson, a muralist and illustrator, and Don Freeman, most of whose artwork concerned the world of theater in New York City. Nordstrom and Andy were both also interested in the possibility of getting Robert Lawson, who had gained recognition as illustrator of Munro Leaf’s 1936 book, The Story of Ferdinand—a tale of a timid bull that, in the prewar years, was denounced as pacifist propaganda. Both author and editor admired Lawson’s elegant draftsmanship and commitment to research, but he had long-running commitments to Harper’s rival publishers Viking and Little, Brown. (In 1945, the year that Stuart was published, Lawson won the Newbery Medal for Rabbit Hill, a dream of peaceful coexistence that he wrote and illustrated.)
Then Andy thought of drawings he had seen in The New Yorker off and on through the later war years by an ambitious young man named Garth Williams, who had not yet illustrated any books. Under a tight deadline from Harper, Williams submitted preliminary sketches, which included thoughtful attention to detail and respect for the story. Andy chose Williams. He mentioned to Nordstrom how Ernest Shepard had enlarged the proportions of Mole and Toad in The Wind in the Willows. Williams tried this approach but found that he couldn’t make it work because in the text Andy often referred to Stuart’s diminutive size.
When the novel was published in October, reviews were mostly very positive, including praise from critics who treated it as serious literature. Children and adults both read the book and sales were impressive. As far as Andy could tell, Stuart’s unnatural mousiness turned out to be a preoccupation only around the New Yorker offices. When he ran into critic Edmund Wilson in the hallway, Wilson said in his high-pitched voice, “I read that book of yours. I found the first part quite amusing—about the mouse, you know. But,” he confessed, “I was disappointed that you didn’t develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka.”
Earlier Harold Ross had dropped in to Andy’s office. Andy looked up to find him standing in the doorway. He looked jaunty with his briefcase hooked on a walking stick over his shoulder, but his expression was solemn.
“Saw your book, White.”
Andy looked at him.
Ross growled, “You made one serious mistake.”
“What was that?”
“Why, the mouse! You said he was born.” Always volatile and always sensitive to implications about sexuality or other behind-the-scenes intimacies, Ross was suddenly shouting. The logistical implications of a mouselike child born to a normal human mother were too much for him. “God damn it, White, you should have had him adopted!”
Meanwhile Stuart had come alive for other readers as he had for his creator. Before publication, Andy had written a letter to Nordstrom, offering his vast barn as a cemetery for unsold copies of Stuart Little. (His hero, Thoreau, had once bought up all the unsold copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, remarking in his journal, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”) But Nordstrom replied that she wasn’t worried because Harper was about to increase the first printing to more than fifty thousand.
Like every other book, Andy’s first children’s fantasy was out in the world without him, having its own adventures. In the autumn of 1945, for example, a man in New York named Stuart Little wrote to Nordstrom. Despite the name on his letterhead, she thought this claim was a joke and called his number and asked cautiously for Mr. Little. He was real. He wanted only a signed copy of the book. And while riding Manhattan buses in the first few months after publication, Garth Williams kept seeing commuters reading Stuart Little, sometimes three at once around him. He found these repeated glimpses of his carefully composed cover—Stuart paddling in his souvenir canoe down a rushing brook—so heartening he decided that, rather than pursue other kinds of artwork, he would concentrate on illustrating children’s books. Perhaps he could make a living at it.
Chapter 12
FOREKNOWLEDGE
Confronted by new challenges, surrounded by new acquaintances—including the characters in the barnyard, who were later to reappear in Charlotte’s Web—I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens.
AFTER THE UNITED States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eventually killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, Andy spent the last half of the 1940s expecting Armageddon. The war’s ravages, its global reminders of the innate human lust for blood and destruction, left scars on millions who never saw the front, and Andy kept thinking about it. Were human beings really about to annihilate themselves?
In late March of 1948 Andy was in New York, unable to celebrate the vernal equinox in the countryside. Shortly before his favorite seasonal milestone, he went out to a moody lunch alone at the Roosevelt Grill, in the Roosevelt Hotel on East Forty-fifth Street, only three blocks from the New Yorker offices. The Roosevelt’s two-story lobby was like a stage set and its grand ballroom complete with Cinderella mural to guarantee a fairy-tale feel to Guy Lombardo’s performances. Lombardo’s renowned New Year’s Eve concerts at the Roosevelt had established “Auld Lang Syne” as a holiday standard. The hotel’s other famous innovation—street-level shops to help replace the income it would lose from Prohibition—had been featured since it opened in 1924, the year after Andy moved to Manhattan and began his job at the Seaman advertising agency, back when he was contributing unsigned squibs to F.P.A.’s “Conning Tower” column in the World. Andy sat in the dark-paneled restaurant, with Vanderbilt Avenue distantly visible in golden light beyond the blinds, and picked at the sweet white flesh of the weakfish he had ordered. It was so dark in the grill that he could barely read the gloomy editorials in the News. Then the waiter silently appeared beside him, stared out through the blinds, and sighed eloquently. The day outside was beautiful, he said, but the forecast was “Tomorrow snow, turning to rain.”
Soon Andy wrote up the incident for “Notes and Comment,” adding a larger perspective on the waiter’s and his own melancholy: “He was a man carrying foreknowledge in his breast, and the pain was almost unbearable.”
The vague sense of yearning and loss that had haunted Andy’s teen years had only grown over the decades. He was the writer who had confessed some years earlier, “A man sometimes gets homesick for the loneliness that he has at one time or another experienced in his life.” Even tending animals could leave him half ecstatic and half melancholy. But in 1948 in particular, he couldn’t help casting a retrospective eye across his life and work. Over the previous few months he had been awarded three honorary degrees for his contributions to literature, from Yale, the University of Maine, and Dartmouth. It was difficult for Andy to maintain his outsider/country-boy pose now that Irving Penn had photographed him for Vogue, sprawling across a burlap-covered prop, dressed in a flannel suit and with his hands in his pockets.
As he approached fifty, his married life was mostly serene and comfortable and so was his professional life, except perhaps for his ongoing preoccupation with his health. It had always shown up even in his letters and poems to Katharine, in frequent updates about sniffles, fevers, dizziness, intestinal troubles. Once, when he omitted such intimate bodily details in a letter, Katharine replied, “You say nothing about nasal discharge or stomach upheavals. How are you—really?” On a 1934 trip to Florida with friends, he wrote home to Katharine that he had experienced a brush with death. The night before, he discovered that his face was swelling. Convinced that he had a brain tumor, he wrote a loving farewell note to Katharine, unlocked the hotel room door so that people could find his corpse without trouble, and collapsed on the bed in a panic attack. The next morning, surprised to find himself still alive, he consulted a doctor, who informed him that he had a sunburn. Andy considered this diagnosis ridiculous. He argued instead that perhaps he had been bitten by a spider. Even in describing his
deathbed scene to Katharine, he included the detail that he went to bed “full of flatulence, dizziness & fear.” Earlier, while still in his twenties, he had published in The New Yorker a light-verse ode to how a hot-water bottle could warm and comfort a sick and lonely man who kept imagining that he was dying. “Small is the solace in being dead,” he observed, “With never a love at my side.” To the water bottle itself he murmured the creepy image “Pretend I’m a woman that’s birthed a child / And you are that warm little armful.”
ONE ISSUE THAT haunted Andy was the morality of raising farm animals. As he walked along through the early-morning mist, around the corner of the barn and down to the barn cellar, carrying a sloshing pail of slops for a pig, he faced again and again what he thought of as his own duplicity. His pig relied upon him to deliver the food and guard the door, and Andy performed these tasks conscientiously. But in a few months he was scheduled to betray the creature’s confidence and slaughter it. Andy had the same troubled relationship with those sheep that were to be eaten rather than merely sheared. He would sit up late in April, tenderly nursing a lamb back to health, only to slaughter it come August. So much gentleness to end in so much blood, in a hammer blow to the head, a knife slash to the throat—only hours after Andy had dutifully served what the lamb did not know was its last meal. There was no bucolic innocence in farming. It seemed a quiet and benign life only from the distant city, much as the lights of Broadway glowed naively festive when recalled from a twilit country porch.
Yet paradoxically he found it even more confusing when nature did the killing and interrupted his own plan. He had been left especially melancholy after the death in September 1947 of a pig whose life he had worked hard to save. With seventeen-year-old Joel assisting, Andy had followed a neighbor’s advice, pulled the pig off-balance and turned him upside down, to pour castor oil down his throat—which orifice Andy learned, glimpsing it for the first time at this angle, was a striking corrugated pink. Fred, the Whites’ beloved, arthritic old dachshund, also attended the sickbed. With his two-legged and four-legged assistants, Andy visited the pig at all hours during foggy nights and unseasonably hot days, delivered medicinal slop to an apathetic patient, imitated the pig’s own slurping noises to inspire memories of the joy of gluttony, even performed an enema on the poor animal—all to no avail. The veterinarian was unable to help. Andy empathized strongly with the pig. On good days he had often felt a kind of kinship in its noisy appetite, seeing it as a healthy lust for life, so he found it dispiriting to watch the pig lose interest in food and finally even in water. At last the exhausted animal was unable to even push his snout through straw to fluff his bedding. Soon afterward he died. Andy found him outside the barn, stretched on the grass, his face neither anguished nor peaceful.