by Michael Sims
The orb web has long been a symbol of the spider in the mind of man, who sees in its shimmering lightness and intricate, symmetrical design a thing of wonder and beauty. Such esteem is well merited, for the orb web is the most highly evolved of all the space webs developed by the sedentary spiders. It represents a triumph in engineering worthy of great mechanical ingenuity and learning; yet it was arrived at by lowly spiders, which even by their most ardent supporters are credited with hardly a gleam of what is called intelligence.
Taking advantage of improvements in both photography and printing, Gertsch had much better images than his predecessors. One photo, showing the troubled courtship and mating of black widows, had a caption reminiscent of a Thurber cartoon: “The cautious approach of the small male.” There were also excellent diagrams that Andy noted. Early on in Gertsch’s book he found Figure I, labeled External Anatomy of a Spider. It comprised three illustrations. The first on the left, A, was labeled Dorsal view, showing the left side of the body as seen from above, with the pear-shaped front part labeled cephalothorax, and behind it the more oval, mango-shaped section labeled abdomen. In the text Gertsch explained that, unlike insects, which usually have three distinct body parts—head, thorax, and abdomen—spiders have only two visible, because the head and thorax are largely merged into the cephalothorax.
In the center of the page, figure B portrayed a Frontal view of face and chelicerae. Not for another ten pages did the text inform Andy that chelicerae are the “jaws, which are the offensive weapons of the spider.” Scientists thought, explained Gertsch, that these mouthparts evolved from the same appendages that became the second antennae in crustaceans. At the top of figure B, like a diagram of a cell, was a semicircle with eight ovals inside it labeled eyes—four in a flat row below, four in an arch above. To round out this faceless face, the chelicerae looked vaguely like the fangs of a walrus. This diagram did not resemble anything that Andy thought of as a face.
On the right of the page was the most complex drawing, C, labeled Ventral view, most legs omitted. It showed the busy-looking underside of the spider’s body, like the view of a car overhead on a rack in a garage. It included one of the short, hairy appendages labeled palpus, which the text explained was more of a jointed feeler and tongue than an antenna. Where the eight legs joined the cephalothorax, only one was shown in full—the parts labeled, the trail of words moving outward from the body, following the knee crook of the leg downward and then up again to the finely haired last joint.
Andy noted the evocative labels, then penciled, Legs have 7 joints, and listed them in a numbered column:
1. coxa
2. trochanter
3. femur
4. patella
5. tibia
6. metatarsus
7. tarsus
They discuss legs, + the spinneret, he wrote.
Charlotte enume names them for Wilbur, who likes to hear her run over the names.)
Last of the joints are lined with spines, bristles, and hair.
“You have awfully hairy legs, Charlotte.”
The spines on the hind legs are like the “flyers” of a spinning wheel. They are used for the flocculation of the threads as they pass from the spinning tubes.
On yet another yellow sheet Andy scrawled other identifying terms:
caput
forehead
fang
thorax
sternum (plate)
hair
mandible
falx
labium
palpa or palpi
palpal claw
Farther down on Gertsch’s page, below the cluttered cephalothorax, was the underside of the abdomen, marked with mysterious, vaguely facelike squiggles labeled epigynum and genital furrow. On each side of this area was a slit with the intriguing label opening of book lungs. Gertsch explained, “The book lungs of the arachnids are closely packed sheets of body surface bound together like the leaves of a book, to give the maximum surface for aeration.”
Gertsch’s diagram of the spider’s body told a story in itself. At the bottom of the oval abdomen, looking in this chassis view like twin exhaust pipes, were the crucial parts of the spider in Andy’s growing story, the reason why a spider was the best possible heroine: the spinnerets, the silk-spinning organs with which Charlotte, like the Greek fates, would reweave destiny. The runt pig’s life was going to seem insignificant until two unlikely benefactors, a young girl and a spider, cared for him—and changed his fate.
Chapter 15
PAEAN
a paean to life, a hymn to the barn, an acceptance of dung.
IN 1950 THE New Yorker reached the quarter-century mark. “Twenty-five years of working on a weekly magazine,” Katharine sighed, “certainly makes one realize the passage of time!” She and Andy had been married for two decades. Joe was halfway through college and, following in his father’s footsteps, was working summers as a camp counselor. Katharine’s son Roger Angell was thirty already and had a young daughter. His big sister, Nancy, had three children, six and four and eighteen months. Neither Roger nor Nancy lived nearby, so when they brought their spouses and children to visit—often renting a cottage nearby—it was a special occasion.
Katharine was busily working for the magazine still, editing authors such as Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, her husband, Edmund Wilson, John O’Hara, and Vladimir Nabokov. Several years before, Katharine had persuaded Harold Ross to lend Nabokov a desperately needed advance against future submissions, resulting in a first-reading agreement. Nabokov had since contributed both stories and a beautiful series of autobiographical essays. Katharine was one of the few editors with whose suggestions Nabokov might comply; he even called her “a subtle and loving reader.”
While Katharine maintained her busy schedule of editing stories and writing hordes of letters for the magazine, Andy turned his spare minutes from farming toward Charlotte’s Web. Often he sat in the boathouse down by the dock, on the simple banquette he had built—with the knothole in the seat that he had to slide across—and faced the stack of yellow copy paper on the plank desk in front of him. A lot of what he wrote went into the nail-keg wastebasket to the left of the table. He had set up a cord and pulley that raised the big, single glass pane to his right to let in the salt air from the bay, with Cadillac Mountain visible over on Mount Desert Island. On cool mornings he lit a fire in the belly of the ancient black iron cookstove, with its two heavy, round burners glowing red at the top.
At first Andy wasn’t sure what he wanted to write about the spider and the pig. But he decided that it didn’t matter, because he found himself caring deeply about these characters. He knew he had to trust his instincts. What he did not want to do was retell animal life in human terms, or at least he wanted to do so no more than was necessary to tell his story. He enjoyed playful representations of nature such as Archy. He considered Donald Duck an amusing character too, but felt that Walt Disney forced animals to dance the way he wanted them to, with no regard for how the character’s natural inspiration in the world might actually behave.
Andy’s actors in Charlotte’s Web, he decided, had to be true to their nature—as far as possible within the story he was beginning to imagine. For one thing, he considered animals amoral, so he didn’t want to twist their personalities into moral versus immoral decisions. Charlotte was basically a trapper. She was a predator waiting patiently at the center of an architecturally dazzling fly-doom, and he didn’t want to overemphasize her decision to try to help the frightened piglet.
The same rule applied to the rat in his story. Templeton would not undergo a Scroogean change of heart; he would remain motivated by rodent selfishness, his help available only for a price. Andy wanted his own respect and affection for most animals in their natural state to be implicit in the story. Templeton could get from Andy only a nod of grudging admiration for his adaptability. He had hated rats for too long.
In these first glimmerings, the major characters—except for the
barn itself—were all animals. He sketched out tentative scenes.
The barn—
Wilbur’s friends—
Charlotte + her web Repairing the web—
Wilbur’s future
Fog − + an idea
Zuckerman’s surprise
Charlotte’s busy time—The buttermilk bath
The Fair
Death of Charlotte
Return of Wilb
Wilbur’s homecoming
or
Wilbur’s Return.
He started the story on paper where it had started in his mind—with the spider on her web. For the chapter heading he penciled a firm Roman numeral I, stabbed a determined period after it, and began.
Charlotte was a big grey spider who lived in the doorway of a barn.
Immediately he realized that the spider was no more important as a character than the barn itself, so his second sentence became But there is no use talking about Charlotte until we have looked into the matter of the barn. He paused to write a sentence at the top of the page and then mark out part of it: She was about the size of a gumdrop, and she had eight legs, which is enough for anyone. He circled the sentence and drew a line down to where it needed to be inserted, after the first sentence. This barn was large. It was old. It was white. He inserted painted before white, then wrote off to the side, It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. Then he returned to his main block of text, although he kept stumbling, failing to pick up speed.
It was pleasantly warm in winter, pleasantly cool in summer; it had stalls for horses, tie-ups for the cows, an enormous scaffold loft up above for the hay where children would jump and roll and a place down below underneath for sheep, a place pen down below for a pig, a grain bin, a rat trap, a lot of sunlight coming in through the big door.
This false start also petered out, but it established that the barn itself would be an important factor. Eventually Andy moved these details later in the manuscript, to open the third chapter, when Wilbur leaves Fern’s home and moves to the Zuckerman farm. Despite his considerable attention to the barn itself and the society within it, he decided not to include the nearby ocean in his story. Thus the Zuckerman and the Arable farms, as well as the portrait of Andy’s beloved Blue Hill Fair, wound up feeling like settings in an unnamed American heartland.
Andy tried a number of other ways to get the characters moving around. One day he began a draft on the back of the sheet of paper on which he had written Charlotte’s scientific name. He had long since named the spider and had already dubbed the pig Wilbur, but he had yet to name the farmer—the character who, at first, was actually closest to Andy himself in this life-and-death drama.
Wilbur + Charlotte, he wrote at the top of the page, and underlined it. Then he launched into a description of the pig and his habitat together.
Some people might think that Wilbur’s place was rather messy. Wilbur liked it, though. He lived underne in the bottom part of the barn, under Over him, on the main floor of the barn, the cows were tied up. Every morning and evening the farmer would scrape the cow manure down through the trap door. Wilbur always greeted each new deposit enthusiastically. When the door opened, Wilbur would grunt, and look up. Then the dressing would come slipping and sliding down. Wilbur always investigated it right away
This attempt didn’t work out, either. So he tried several other ways to launch the book. In his endless revising as he went along, he wrote new sections below and to the side, circled them, drew arrows to their new location, then crossed out those as well. He drew vertical lines down the left margin of the text and wrote, Fix. Make better. Sometimes he scrawled a quick squiggly line, sometimes a hard firm slash. He drew large X’s across entire pages.
He wrote a variation on this pig-and-farmer opening with the farmer now named. He tried a slightly different approach to opening with a description of the barn, revising each thought as he went along.
Chapter I. The Barn.
The best + warmest + pleasantest part of Zuckerman’s barn was the part under the shed roof on the south side cellar. part underneath the cows
He paused to insert where the cows were.
on the south side. Mr. Zuckerman had a trap door in the main floor, and twice a day he would take his shovel and open the trapdoor It was warm because the cow manure kept pile.
He paused to insert of after because, then added at the end, I can’t explain why manure piles are warm, but they are.
Dung would be a recurring motif in the story. In one scene Andy wrote about Wilbur’s environment, A manure pile is not the cleanest place in the world, but it is warm—and young pigs need warmth. The topic didn’t make him uncomfortable even in writing a children’s book. He referred to it often in his essays. In one he remarked, “There is no doubt about it, the basic satisfaction in farming is manure, which always suggests that life can be cyclic and chemically perfect and aromatic and continuous.” Manure had impressed him ever since his early childhood, when the warmth of its decomposition had somehow hatched the eggs that the coachman had already declared infertile.
On one occasion Andy rolled a piece of paper into the typewriter—he composed most of his New Yorker paragraphs and letters on the machine instead of in pencil—and centered the heading Chapter I and the title ESCAPE, skipped a few lines, and began typing, At midnight, John Arable pulled his boots on. Arable goes out into the barn and admires the newborn piglets, only to find that there is one more than the mother can feed. But Andy decided that this gambit didn’t work, either.
The draft that held together began with the pig:
I shall speak first of Wilbur.
Wilbur was a small, nicely-behaved pig living in a manure pile in the cellar of a barn. He was what farmers call a spring pig …
Other alternatives occurred to him—above nicely-behaved he wrote beautifully and below it he wrote symmetrical—but this time he kept going. Over the next several months of 1950, when he wasn’t farming, he was working on the story of Charlotte and Wilbur. He wrote 134 scribbled-over pages in longhand. In the middle of October 1949 he had written to Cass Canfield at Harper’s adult division to say with unusual optimism that his next book was in sight. “I keep it in a carton,” he added, “as you would a kitten.” Like all his other books, though, Charlotte’s Web took longer than he had imagined. He finished the draft on the nineteenth of January 1951. On the first day of March he wrote a letter to Ursula Nordstrom at Harper’s children’s division:
I’ve recently finished another children’s book, but have put it away for a while to ripen (let the body heat out of it). It doesn’t satisfy me the way it is and I think eventually I shall rewrite it pretty much, in order to shift the emphasis and make other reforms.
Back in 1939, when he was being encouraged to finish Stuart Little, Andy had said firmly, “I would rather wait a year than publish a bad children’s book, as I have too much respect for children.” He had the same attitude about Charlotte’s Web. He set it aside for almost a year. While he incubated eggs and sheared sheep and mended fencing, while he corresponded with Jim Thurber and naturalist Edwin Way Teale and his old college buddy Howard Cushman, the manuscript sat in its box, growing as quickly as a kitten. Its images, its scenes and poetry, ripened in Andy’s mind and matured into a better form. Gradually he realized that he wanted a more human perspective on the barnyard community. When he went back to the manuscript, he added five chapters, introducing a little girl named Fern, who would be the first person to save Wilbur’s life, on the day of his birth.
“Alone? My best friends are in the barn cellar. It is a very sociable place. Not at all lonely.”
—FERN
THE CHARACTERS’ NAMES Andy chose—or they arrived—from various sources. The spider’s name had been in his mind from the first, when he thought she was going to be Charlotte Epeira, before her real species name inspired the designation Charlotte A. Cavatica. He had once owned a pig named Wilbur, besides having known a couple of people with the name, inclu
ding an office boy at The New Yorker. At first the farmhand who works for the Zuckermans was named Larry, but Andy changed it to Lurvy. The name Templeton might have popped into his mind for the rat because it was the name of a New York City telephone exchange that he had called, like Astoria and Murray Hill. It had a nice incongruously fancy air for a rat.
For the little girl who had become a big part of the story—as well as the reader’s way into the world of animals—Andy joined in the tradition of Dickens and Shakespeare in assigning a symbolic name: Fern Arable. He couldn’t have squeezed any more potent nature symbolism into her given name than by christening her after one of the most ancient forms of life. Andy passed ferns every day as he walked down to write. They flourished throughout the woods and elsewhere on the property, especially along the path to the boathouse, where whole colonies of waist-high ferns grew around the lichen-covered granite boulders strewn underneath the trees. Back in 1944, he had used Fern’s surname in “Home Song,” the poem in which he referred to mice in hiding; the next winter, he adapted the poem for the family Christmas card. The line was “Home is the part of our life that’s arable.” In early versions Andy imagined Fern’s brother as a twin, Vern, but soon he renamed him Avery. Fern has empathy for other creatures that her brother can’t equal. The animals clearly understand human speech, but only attentive young humans such as Fern may respond in kind. Her innocent willingness to sit still and listen affords her a glimpse of other lives, to the point that she says to her mother about Templeton, “None of us like him very much.” In Andy’s honest approach, this young attitude also had to change. Late in the book he had Fern wander off with a boy named Henry Fussy and leave the animals behind.
Fern’s father sounded a bit like Samuel White, Andy’s father. When Fern first glimpses Wilbur in the morning light that makes his ears glow, Mr. Arable’s remark (“Saved from an untimely death”) has a rhetorical swing to it reminiscent of the music-loving businessman who had held forth at the head of the White family’s dining table, back in the infancy of a century that was now middle-aged.