by E. B. White
The newspaper story says Khrushchev leads a “very busy” life. So do I. I can’t quite figure out why I am so busy all the time; it seems silly and it is against my principles. But I know one thing: a man can’t keep livestock and sit around all day on his tail. For example, I have just designed and built a cow trap, for taking a Hereford cow by surprise. This job alone has kept me on the go from morning till night for two weeks, as I am only fairly good at constructing things and the trap still has a few bugs in it. Before I became embroiled in building the cow trap, I was busy with two Bantam hens, one of them on ten eggs in an apple box, the other on thirteen eggs in a nail keg. This kept me occupied (“very busy”) for three weeks. It was rewarding work, though, and the little hens did the lion’s share of it, in the old sweet barn in the still watches of the night. And before that it was haying. And before haying it was baby-sitting—while my daughter-in-law was in the hospital having John. And right in the middle of everything I went to the hospital myself, where, of course, I became busier than ever. Never spent a more active nine days. I don’t know how it is in Russia, but the work they cut out for you in an American hospital is almost beyond belief. One night, after an exhausting day with the barium sulphate crowd, I had to sit up till three in the morning editing a brochure that my doctor handed me—something he had written to raise money for the place. Believe me, I sank down into the covers tired that night. Like Khrushchev, I’m just a bundle of activity, sick or well.
Khrushchev’s wife, it says here, is a “teacher.” My wife hap-pens to be a teacher, too. She doesn’t teach school, she teaches writers to remove the slight imperfections that mysteriously creep into American manuscripts, try though the writer will. She has been teaching this for thirty-four years. Laid end to end, the imperfections she has taught writers to remove from manuscripts would reach from Minsk to Coon Rapids. I am well aware that in Russia manuscripts do not have imperfections, but they do in this country, and we just have to make the best of it. At any rate, both Mrs. Khrushchev and my wife are teachers, and that is the main point, showing the uncanny similarity between Khrushchev and me.
Khrushchev, it turns out, has a daughter who is a “biologist.” Well, for goodness’ sake! I have a stepdaughter who is a biologist. She took her Ph.D. at Yale and heads the science department at the Moravian Seminary for Girls. Talk about your two peas! Incidentally, this same stepdaughter has three children, and although they are not technically my grandchildren, nevertheless they go walking in the woods with me, so that brings the woods total to five, roughly speaking, and increases the amazing similarity.
Khrushchev’s son is an “engineer,” it says. Guess what college my son graduated from! By now you’ll think I’m pulling your leg, but it’s a fact he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He hasn’t launched a rocket yet, but he has launched many a boat, and when I last saw him he held the moon in his hand—or was it a spherical compass?
“The few hours Khrushchev can spare for rest and relaxation he usually spends with his family.” There I am again. I hope when Khrushchev, seeking rest and relaxation, lies down on the couch in the bosom of his family, he doesn’t find that a dog has got there first and that he is lying on the dog. That’s my biggest trouble in relaxing—the damn dog. To him a couch is a finer invention than a satellite, and I tend to agree with him. Anyway, in the hours I can spare for rest, it’s family life for me. Once in a great while I sneak down to the shore and mess around in boats, getting away from the family for a little while, but every man does that, I guess. Probably even Khrushchev, devoted family man that he is, goes off by himself once in a great while, to get people out of his hair.
Already you can see how remarkably alike the two of us are, but you haven’t heard half of it. During vacations and on Sun-days, it says, Khrushchev “goes hunting.” That’s where I go, too. It doesn’t say what Khrushchev hunts, and I won’t hazard a guess. As for me, I hunt the croquet ball in the perennial border. Sometimes I hunt the flea. I hunt the pullet egg in the raspberry patch. I hunt the rat. I hunt the hedgehog. I hunt my wife’s reading glasses. (They are in the pocket of her housecoat, where any crafty hunter knows they would be.) Nimrods from away back, Khrush and I.
Khrushchev has been an “avid reader since childhood.” There I am again. I have read avidly since childhood. Can’t remember many of the titles, but I read the books. Not only do I read avidly, I read slowly and painfully, word by word, like a child reading. So my total of books is small compared to most people’s total, probably smaller than the Chairman’s total. Yet we’re both avid readers.
And now listen to this: “Mr. Khrushchev is the friend of scientists, writers, and artists.” That is exactly my situation, or predicament. Not all scientists, writers, and artists count me their friend, but I do feel very friendly toward Writer Frank Sullivan, Artist Mary Petty, Scientist Joseph T. Wearn, Pretty Writer Maeve Brennan, Artist Caroline Angelí, Young Writer John Updike—the list is much too long to set down on paper. Being the friend of writers, artists, and scientists has its tense moments, but on the whole it has been a good life, and I have no regrets. I think probably it’s more fun being a friend of writers and artists in America than in the Soviet Union, because you don’t know in advance what they’re up to. It’s such fun wondering what they’re going to say next.
Another point of similarity: Mr. Khrushchev, according to the news story, “devotes a great deal of his attention to American-Soviet relations.” So do I. It’s what I am doing right this minute. I am trying to use the extraordinary similarity between the Chairman and me to prove that an opportunity exists for improving relations. Once, years ago, I even wrote a book* about the relations between nations. I was a trifle upset at the time, and the book was rather dreamy and uninformed, but it was good-spirited and it tackled such questions as whether the moon should be represented on the Security Council, and I still think that what I said was essentially sound, although I’m not sure the timing was right. Be that as it may, I’m a devoted advocate of better relations between nations—Khrush and I both. I don’t think the nations are going about it the right way, but that’s another story.
“No matter how busy Khrushchev is,” the article says, “he always finds time to meet Americans and converse with them frankly on contemporary world problems.” In this respect, he is the spit and image of me. Take yesterday. I was busy writing and an American walked boldly into the room where I was trying to finish a piece I started more than a year ago and would have finished months ago except for interruptions of one sort and another, and what did I do? I shoved everything aside and talked to this American on contemporary world problems. It turned out he knew almost nothing about them, and I’ve never known much about them, God knows, except what I see with my own eyes, but we kicked it around anyway. I have never been so busy that I wouldn’t meet Americans, or they me. Hell, they drive right into my driveway, stop the car, get out, and start talking about contemporary problems even though I’ve never laid eyes on them before. I don’t have the protection Khrushchev has. My dog welcomes any American, day or night, and who am I to let a dog outdo me in simple courtesy?
Mr. Khrushchev, the story goes on, “has a thorough knowledge of agriculture and a concern for the individual worker.” Gee whizz, it’s me all over again. I have learned so much about agriculture that I have devised a way to water a cow (with calf at side) in the barn cellar without ever going down the stairs. I’m too old to climb down stairs carrying a twelve-quart pail of water. I tie a halter rope to the bail of the pail (I use a clove hitch) and lower the pail through a hatch in the main floor. I do this after dark, when the cow is thirsty and other people aren’t around. Only one person ever caught me at it—my granddaughter. She was enchanted. Ellsworth, my cow, knows about the routine, and she and her calf rise to their feet and walk over to the pail, and she drinks, in great long, audible sips, with the light from my flashlight making a sort of spot on cow and pail. Seen from directly above, at a distance of only f
our or five feet, it is a lovely sight, almost like being in church—the great head and horns, the bail relaxed, the rope slack, the inquisitive little calf attracted by the religious light, wanting to know, and sniffing the edge of the pail timidly. It is, as I say, a lovely, peaceable moment for me, as well as a tribute to my knowledge of agriculture. As for the individual worker whom Khrushchev is concerned about, he is much in my mind, too. His name is Henry.*
Well, that about winds up the list of points of similarity. It is perhaps worth noting that Khrushchev and I are not wholly alike—we have our points of difference, too. He weighs 195, I weigh 132. He has lost more hair than I have. I have never struck the moon, even in anger. I have never jammed the air. I have never advocated peace and friendship; my hopes are pinned on law and order, the gradual extension of representative government, the eventual federation of the free, and the end of political chaos caused by the rigidity of sovereignty. I have never said I would bury America, or received a twentyone-gun salute for having said it. I feel, in fact, that America should not be buried. (I like the Times in the morning and the moon at night.) But these are minor differences, easily reconciled by revolution, war, death, or a change of climate. The big thing is that both Khrushchev and I like to walk in the woods with our grandchildren. I wonder if he has noticed how dark the woods have grown lately, the shadows deeper and deeper, the jay silent. I wish the woods were more the way they used to be. I wish they were the way they could be.
MOON LANDING
7/26/69
THE MOON, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin* went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.
7
Body and Mind
HUNGER
4/4/31
YESTERDAY IN THE GRAYBAR BUILDING I bumped into my friend Philip Wedge, looking like the devil. The sight of him gave me a start—he was horribly thin, nothing but skin and bones.
“Hello, Wedge,” I said. “Where is the rest of you?”
He smiled a weak smile. “I’m all right.”
We chatted for a few moments, and he admitted he had lost almost forty pounds; yet he seemed disinclined to explain. Had it been anybody but Philip Wedge, I would have dropped the subject, but this queer skeleton fascinated me and I finally persuaded him to come along to lunch. At table, we got to the root of the thing quickly enough, for when the waiter appeared Wedge simply shook his head.
“I don’t want anything.”
“Good Lord,” I said, “why not?”
Wedge fixed his eyes on me, the hollow gaze of a death’s-head. “Look here,” he said, sharply, “you think I’m broke, or sick. It happens I’m neither. I can’t eat food, and I’m going to tell you why.”
So while I listened he poured it out, this amazing story. I shall set it down as it came from him, but I cannot describe his utter emaciation of body, his moribundity of spirit, as he sat there opposite me, a dying man.
“It wasn’t so bad,” he began, “while I still had coffee. Up to a few weeks ago I used to get along pretty well on coffee. Practically lived on it. Now even coffee is gone.”
“Gone?” I asked.
“Full of rancid oil,” said Wedge, drearily. “In its natural state the coffee bean contains a certain amount of oil. This gets rancid, same as any oil.” He drew from his pocket an advertisement telling about rancid oil in coffee. When I had read it, he folded it and returned it to his pocket.
“I haven’t always been this way,” he continued. “I used to eat what was set before me. I believe it all started when I learned about marmalade’s being made out of bilgewater.”
“Out of what?” I gasped.
“Bilgewater. I was only fourteen. A friend of my father’s, visiting at our house, told us. The oranges are brought to Scot-land from Spain in the holds of ships. During the voyage the oranges float around in the bilge, and when they are unloaded the bilgewater is dumped out with them. The manufacturers find that it gives the marmalade a rich flavor.”
“Holy Moses,” I murmured. Wedge raised his hand.
“I could never eat marmalade after that. Wouldn’t have mattered, of course, but soon other foods began to be taken from me. A year later I learned about wormy pork. Saw an item in the paper. Whole family wiped out, eating underdone pork. Awful death. I haven’t had a mouthful since.”
I glanced down at my plate and gently pushed it to one side.
“Used to be crazy about cheese,” Wedge went on. “Did you ever see the bulletin that the Department of Agriculture issued in regard to mold? If you sniff mold it starts to grow in your lungs, like seaweed. Sometimes takes years but finally gets you. I gave up everything that might be moldy, even bread. One night I was opening a bottle of French vermouth, and the top of the cork was alive with mold. I haven’t had a peaceful moment since. Jove, it seems as though every day I learned some-thing awful about food. Ripe olives—every time I opened a newspaper, one or two dinner parties poisoned, people dying like rats. Sometimes it was éclairs. In 1922 I learned about what happens if you eat spinach from a can.”
Wedge looked at me steadily.
“The vaguest rumors used to prey on my mind: casual re-marks, snatches of overheard conversation. One time I came into a room where a radio was going. A speaker was ending his talk:’. . . or sulphuric acid from dried apricots, or the disintegration of the spleen from eating a poor grade of corn syrup.’ That was all I heard. Haven’t touched any dried fruit or any syrup since.
“Maybe you recall the track meet some years ago in Madison Square Garden, when Paavo Nurmi* collapsed. Put his hand to his side, threw back his head, and collapsed. That was veal. Still, even with wormy pork and veal gone, my diet wasn’t so bad until I found out about protein poisoning: somebody ate meat and eggs and nuts, and swelled up. I gave up all meat and all eggs, and later all nuts. At meals I began to see not the food that was actually before me—I’d see it in its earlier stages: oysters lying at the mouths of typhoid rivers, oranges impregnated by the citrus fly, gin made from hospital alcohol, watercress in drainage ditches, bottled cherries dipped in aniline dyes, marshmallows made of rotten eggs, parsley vines covered with green caterpillars, grapes sprayed with arsenate of lead. I used to spend hours in my kitchenette testing cans of foodstuffs to see if the cans sat flat. If a can doesn’t sit flat, it has an air bubble in it, and its contents kill you after a few hours of agony.
“I grew weaker right along, hardly took a mouthful of any-thing from day to day. I weigh ninety-five now. All I’ve had since yesterday morning is a graham cracker. I used to drink quite a lot—alcohol kept me going. Had to quit. Fragmentary bits of gossip I picked up: ‘. . . lay off the Scotch in the West Forties,’ ‘The liqueurs contained traces of formaldehyde,’ ‘. . . she died of fusel oil in homemade wine.’ I even gave up cigars when I heard how they were made. You know how the ends of cigars are sealed?”
I nodded.
“Life is hell these days. I’m wasting away fast, but it’s better than eating things you’re scared of. Do you know what happens inside the human stomach when fruit is eaten in c
ombination with any of the root-vegetables such as carrots, turnips . . . ?” Wedge’s voice was failing. His eyelids drooped.
I shook my head.
“Enough gas is formed to inflate a balloon the size of . . .”
Wedge swayed in his chair, then slumped down. The poor chap had fainted. When he came to, I held a glass of water to his lips, but he motioned it away.
“Not potable,” he murmured. “Reservoirs . . . too low.” Then he fainted again. In the sky over Forty-third Street a buzzard wheeled and wheeled on motionless wings.
UP AND DOWN
3/13/37
FEELING FIT AS A FIDDLE, we dropped into the Psychiatric Institute the other afternoon, to pay a small call. Maybe you don’t know it, but the Institute has two entrances—one on Riverside Drive, another about a hundred feet above on 168th Street. Anyway, we entered from 168th Street, stepped into the elevator, and asked for the sixth floor. Just as we were bracing ourself for the ascent, the car dropped out from under us, descended a flight or two, the door flew open, and the operator (who by this time we suspected was one of the patients) waited for us to get out.
“Sixth floor,” he said, sternly.
We stepped out, gibbering, and it was the sixth floor. Luckily we come from hardy stock and can withstand colossal japes like that; but we should think it would be tough on the nervous patients of the Institute, particularly those that are troubled by little men who chase them up airy mountains, down rushy glens.
MY PHYSICAL HANDICAP, HA, HA
6/12/37