by Michael Sims
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.…
The first person to read Charlotte’s Web particularly admired the turn of events foreshadowed when a voice in the dark barn asks the pig, “Do you want a friend, Wilbur? I’ll be a friend to you.” She liked Wilbur’s tone when, the next morning, he spoke to the air around him and asked his mysterious nighttime friend to please make her presence known. As she read through the typed pages, Nordstrom found the story remarkably engaging. Soon she decided that she knew a great book when she met one, and before she even finished the manuscript she called Andy at The New Yorker to share her excitement.
She wasted no time. Four days after Andy turned in the manuscript, she told him that the Advertising Department would soon be sending catalog copy for his approval. The description of the book for its jacket copy could wait, but catalog materials had to be prepared months in advance.
URSULA NORDSTROM TURNED forty-two the month before Andy delivered the manuscript of Charlotte’s Web to her office. She had been director of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls for twelve years, following nine spent working her way up the ladder. Writers knew that they could speak their mind to Nordstrom and she would reply in kind. Famous for defending her authors’ books and careers, risks and gambles—and for flattering, cajoling, and coercing them into producing ever better work—in 1946 she had instituted the Nordstrom Award for the Most Amiable Author of the Year, which a Harper staffer designed and hand-set annually. Often her letters included profane complaints about an uncooperative typewriter or sly parodies of the pablum that many writers manufactured for the children’s market.
After more than two decades in the business, she had long outgrown her insecurities about not having a college education, as well as most other worries about her inadequacies. In 1952 she was confident enough about her status and worth to admit to horrified Harper colleagues that she had bought a television set, which was considered the mark of a philistine because of the poor quality of programs available. Commercial network programming, which was now four years old, was slowly growing more diversified. For the rare evenings when she wasn’t editing manuscripts at home, Nordstrom could choose between programs such as The Texaco Star Theater, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Howdy Doody, or a recently launched morning news-and-talk program called Today.
Nordstrom was well-known in her field and highly respected, having worked with many of the established and promising names in children’s literature, from Crockett Johnson, who wrote Harold and the Purple Crayon, to Margaret Wise Brown of Goodnight Moon fame. Recently Johnson’s wife, Ruth Krauss, had published her first book with Nordstrom, A Hole Is to Dig, illustrated by a promising young man named Maurice Sendak. But no children’s book that Harper had published was more popular than Stuart Little. From her first quick reading, Nordstrom knew that Charlotte’s Web was possibly even better. She asked Andy his opinion about the contract and advance and he suggested she follow whatever Harper had done for Stuart Little, which was basically the same contract he had had for One Man’s Meat. It called for an advance of five hundred dollars against future royalties. When she sent him two copies of the contract later in March, she told him that she had had two more copies typed up as well, one for Garth Williams, who would soon be in touch. She then added, It is a wonderful book.
Andy ran the contract by Milton Greenstein, a lawyer who in his few years at The New Yorker had become invaluable. Andy wanted to take advantage of the Internal Revenue Service’s maximum-payment clause, which would permit Harper to hold the majority of profits on the book and to dispense them to Andy in a fixed amount per year to reduce his tax rate. He chose an annual payment of seventy-five hundred dollars. “It sounds like an extravagant dream to me,” he wrote to Nordstrom, “as I never believe that any book is going to sell.”
Only a few days after seeing Nordstrom in her office, Andy sent her a report from the barnyard—a newborn lamb already exploring the snowy pasture, a goose nesting atop a manure pile. Spring was struggling to break through the Maine winter. “Charlotte’s children,” Andy added, “are due shortly.” He also brought up a topic that had been worrying him. He asked Nordstrom if she had read elsewhere any story that included as plot element a spider writing in its web. He insisted that he wasn’t any better read in children’s books than in adult books, which left him anxious that he might inadvertently have used an idea already claimed by another author.
“I believe Charlotte is the first spider since Miss Muffet’s,” Nordstrom replied. She did, however, recount key details from the old story about Robert the Bruce. The hero of Scottish independence was crowned in the spring of 1306 and defeated at the Battle of Methven less than four months later. He fled to an island off the northern coast of Ireland, where, legend claims, he encountered an inspirational spider. He watched it trying to attach the necessary lines to launch a web. Six times it tried and six times it failed. Robert supposedly admired this perseverance and considered the demonstration an omen, because he had tried and failed six times in his attempts to rout the English. Heartened, he went on to win many battles against the English, culminating in the decisive Bannockburn victory in 1314. Nordstrom didn’t mention similar stories perhaps more analogous to Charlotte’s method of rescuing Wilbur, tales in which a fugitive hides in a hollow tree (or similar shelter) and a spider quickly weaves a web over the entrance to the sanctuary. The pursuers assume that no one could possibly have hidden there without disturbing the web. This kind of unlikely rescue had been told about Muhammad, King David of Israel, and lesser personages, but wasn’t too similar to Charlotte’s behavior.
Certainly there had been few arthropod protagonists in children’s literature. A spider writing in a web, however, had been a minor point in a children’s book published only eight years earlier, in 1944—in a series that also featured a group of talking barnyard animals. Freddy and Mr. Camphor was the eleventh in Walter R. Brooks’s acclaimed series of smart, amusing, and literate novels about a pig named Freddy and his animal friends on the Bean Farm in upstate New York. The pig and the spider and the other farm creatures had been appearing in the series since 1927. In Brooks’s story, however, the web’s sign, created by a spider named Mr. Webb, plays no role in the plot. It reads, “Patriotic Mass Meeting. Tonight at 8:30. All Bugs, Beetles, and Caterpillars Invited. Fireworks, Music, Dancing. Mr. Webb will speak.” Brooks, who also wrote a series of stories about a talking horse named Mr. Ed—similar to the premise behind the Donald O’Connor movie Francis, about a talking mule, which had appeared in 1950—had published stories in The New Yorker.
On April 9, a week after Nordstrom’s mistaken assurance that a spider hadn’t been seen in children’s fiction since Mother Goose, both Katharine and Andy dined with her in New York City. They discussed the draft of Harper’s catalog copy for Charlotte’s Web that Nordstrom had sent to Andy, and she made notes of their suggested changes. She also reported that Garth Williams loved the story and, eager to illustrate a second White volume, was already sketching. During dinner Nordstrom, with some hesitation, brought up the title of the last chapter, which in the manuscript Andy had called “Charlotte’s Death.” Apparently she felt that the title foretold too much information and in too blunt a form. At home, later the same evening, she consulted a favorite book of hers, Little Women, to learn how Louisa May Alcott had heralded the demise of an important character. The title of the chapter in which Jo learns of Beth’s approaching death is “Beth’s Secret.” The death itself occurs four chapters later, in “The Valley of the Shadow.” The next morning at work, Nordstrom typed up some of these details and sent them to the Whites.
Nordstrom picked the perfect example with which to sway Andy. A few years earlier, during the winter of 1940–41, he and Katharine and Joe had read Little Women aloud every evening. Andy called it their after-dinner mint. He found it a wrenching experience to read about Laurie and Amy’s troubles during th
e Civil War, while a new and larger war was raging across Europe. In the final version of Charlotte’s Web, on the page proofs, Andy changed the chapter title to “Last Day.”
Nordstrom also conveyed to Andy the concern within Harper about his decision to kill off the heroine. On this point Andy refused to budge. Natural history could not be dodged: Charlotte’s species of spider dies after spinning its egg sac. He could arrange to have a pig rescued by the spider’s concerted efforts, but even her compassion and determination couldn’t alter her own fate.
GARTH WILLIAMS HAD been told to work as quickly as possible so that Charlotte’s Web could be published in the fall despite its spring delivery. The morning after the Whites dined with Ursula Nordstrom, Williams was heading out the door of his apartment with sketchbook in hand, to draw spiders in the arachnid displays at the American Museum of Natural History, when the phone rang. Ursula Nordstrom was calling to discuss further ideas about illustrations. Williams explained that he wanted Fern to appear in a number of the early drawings. It was good that she wouldn’t appear in all of them, because her looming presence would keep the animals too small—and Charlotte would be invisible. Those scenes in which Fern was not present could thus be opportunities to zoom in on the animal characters and explore their world more fully. Williams emphasized that he was open to suggestions of any kind. But clearly, as an experienced professional, he had ideas of his own and was already pursuing them.
At forty Williams was in demand. He was so well thought of at Harper’s that, while he was undergoing financial troubles the year before, Nordstrom had offered to reinstate a monthly stipend of five hundred dollars, a regular advance against royalties. Since his start illustrating Andy’s first children’s book in 1945, he had provided drawings and paintings for a dozen other books in the field and outside it. They ranged from a reissue of Henry Gilbert’s version of the Robin Hood saga to Damon Runyan’s famed story collection In Our Town. The year before he tackled Charlotte and Wilbur, Williams illustrated Simon and Schuster’s anthology Elves and Fairies. His style varied from project to project—delicate and evocative pencil work for one book and for the next ink drawings in great detail. Some of his illustrations were in color, beginning the year after Stuart Little with Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Fur Family, which was bound in actual rabbit fur whose previous owner hadn’t fared as well as Brown’s characters. But Andy’s new book was to have black-and-white drawings reminiscent of those chronicling the adventures of Stuart.
In his wide-ranging work, Williams drew upon constant travel and knowledge of both urban and rural ways of life. He was born in New York City in 1912 to English parents and had a peripatetic life practically from birth. He spent his infancy in France, preschool years back in New York, the next few years in Canada, and at the age of ten was in England again. Williams particularly enjoyed drawing Andy’s New England farm in Charlotte’s Web, because some of his earliest memories were of what he called his barefoot Huck Finn years in farm-country New Jersey and in Canada. His mother was a French-trained painter and his father a cartoonist for the British humor magazine Punch. With everyone in his home drawing or painting in some way, he naturally gravitated toward the same kind of activity. His father claimed that at the age of nine months, while strapped in a high chair, young Garth had reached a finger over to draw a simplified pine tree in the condensation on a window. Unlikely or not, it was a story full of family pride in the arts. Once in his childhood Garth had found a portfolio of his father’s drawings that were ready for presentation. He calmly proceeded to add to them, sketching in what he thought of as improvements. His father merely said, “I’m afraid he’s going to be an artist,” and erased his son’s contributions.
Williams grew up wanting to also become an architect, but came of age just after the crash on Wall Street in 1929. His family could afford to send him for only three months to Westminster Art School, but with talent and hard work he promoted this experience into a full scholarship to the Royal College of Art. Winning the British Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1936 gave him the opportunity to study further in various European countries. He was back in England a couple of years later, where his participation in a planned new women’s magazine was cut short by the war. Soon he was an ambulance dispatcher with the Civilian Defense arm of the British Red Cross. He continued to work as both painter and sculptor. After being wounded in the spine while driving an ambulance, Williams returned to the United States and began looking for outlets for his urge to draw. Eventually The New Yorker gave him a chance, and Andy soon noticed and recommended him to portray Stuart.
Williams felt that an illustrator must strive to see the characters and the setting through the eyes of the author, to try to achieve a kind of graphic equivalent of the resonance that first inspired the writer to record or imagine these people and places. He understood that Andy’s goal of natural behavior for his imaginary creatures needed to be reflected in their appearance. When drawing animal characters, he liked to begin by sketching a realistic portrait of the creature as his guide. This initial image he would rework in successive drawings, gradually incorporating human expressions and postures. In drawing the nesting geese watching Templeton roll away their egg that wouldn’t hatch, Williams turned their bills downward just enough, and narrowed their eyes just enough, to suggest a human scowl of distaste. He showed Templeton’s smug self-satisfaction by drawing the rat leaning on his left elbow with his chin resting in tiny rodent fingers and his right arm akimbo at his waist. To portray rudeness in the lamb who refuses to play with young Wilbur, Williams drew it with head held high as it walked away, turning to speak over its huffy shoulder.
In some ways Williams found Charlotte’s Web less interesting to illustrate than Stuart Little. With Stuart, he had had fun drawing the contrast in size—the telephone repairman towering above Stuart like Gulliver, Stuart himself climbing a fire hydrant as if it were the Washington Monument. There were also lively fantastic elements such as a trash can hit by the invisible car that a dentist gives Stuart. Williams found the human characters in Charlotte’s Web, in contrast, rather ordinary to draw, except for Fern herself. Williams employed his own daughter Fiona as a model for Fern, which may be why she turned out such a beguiling figure: courageously grabbing the ax that her father holds, smiling maternally while feeding the newborn Wilbur, flying through the air on the rope swing in the barn. Wanting, like Andy, to reflect the passage of time in the book, toward the end Williams drew Fern looking taller and older, even in an unaccustomed frilly dress, as she strolls off toward the midway with a boy named Henry Fussy.
FROM THE FIRST, the question of Charlotte’s appearance was the most difficult obstacle that Williams faced. For Stuart Little Andy had suggested numerous illustration ideas; he even sent a clipping from a Sears & Roebuck catalog that showed a girl who fit his mental image of diminutive Harriet Ames. This time he had many new ideas and didn’t waste time in passing them along. On March 28 he wrote the first letter to Nordstrom in which, after seven years of knowing her, he addressed her as Ursula. “I am too exhausted to call you Miss Nordstrom any longer,” he explained. “Too much typing for a man of my years.” (He was fifty-two.) He suggested that Williams ought to consult some of the books that Andy himself had read while researching the scientific background of spiders. He mailed Nordstrom his own copy of Willis Gertsch’s recent book American Spiders, so that she could lend it to Williams. He also sent her the New York Public Library call number for Henry McCook’s three-volume compendium American Spiders and Their Spinningwork.
Andy particularly advised Williams to examine McCook’s plate 23, opposite page 85 in Volume I. It showed a spider standing on six legs and holding up two like a dancer. From the front, it appeared to have only two eyes—in the location where human beings would expect to find eyes—and three smaller ones below seemed to form a frowning mouth. On the top of its head it wore what looked like a sporty little haircut. “The eyes and hair,” Andy remarked, “are quite fetching.
” He also pointed out a plate that showed an orb weaver’s web spangled with dew. “Garth might find it helpful to thumb through these majestic tomes,” he added. “He’d better watch out, though—once a man gets interested in spiders, there’s no time left for art.”
Aside from the question of accuracy, Williams faced another challenging issue: how could he make a spider—with numerous eyes and a pincerlike mouth—charming? He did not share Andy’s affection for spiders and found the photographs in Gertsch and McCook gruesome. Williams had told Nordstrom that he wanted to tackle the challenge of portraying a spider in close-up, but would he be able to convey human emotion on such an alien face? Determined at first to be as realistic as he had with the sheep and the pig, he drew Charlotte’s face as a portrait, with the scattered eight eyes that real spiders possess—two in front where eyes are in human beings, two near what Williams intended to be a nose, two on the top of her head, and two low on the sides. Then he also sketched a portrait of Charlotte with a simple human-looking visage, one he thought of as a Mona Lisa face.
Despite his remark to Nordstrom that he was going to start slowly, Williams delivered sketches to her office on the morning of April 28, barely a month after Andy had arrived with the manuscript. She was thrilled with his portrayal of Wilbur, declaring that he looked “darling.” She also liked the way that he had envisioned Mr. Arable and Lurvy.
The sketches of Charlotte were more problematic. Nordstrom pointed out that giving a spider a human face didn’t necessarily accomplish the goal of portraying a spider, that perhaps the less Charlotte looked like a person the better. Perhaps, Nordstrom suggested, the many-eyed drawing might be modified to make Charlotte more spiderlike by omitting the line that Williams had intended for a mouth and enlarging some of the eyes.