Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  Andy White and my mother wove daily illness and incipient pain into their routines and conversations and their letters as they grew older. Her health was worse than his—she suffered from an exfoliating skin disease, went through a spinal-fusion operation and another dangerous procedure to clear a carotid artery, and endured painful bone deterioration in her old age, as a result of steroid treatments for the dermatosis—but if in the end she won their amazing sick-off, she took no pleasure in it and talked of his symptoms with the same concern and detail as her own. Their conversation became studded with lovingly enunciated medical reference: tachycardia, ileitis, the ethmoid sinuses. My older daughter, Callie, believes that what was most surprising about the Whites' joint hypochondria was its energy; they were falling apart, they felt terrible, but they weren't depressed. The narcissism and intimacy of their exchanged symptoms could be infuriating, since it excluded everyone else, but it was so dopey that you laughed at it and forgave them. When you turned up at their house after an absence, they'd ask you about your kids and your job and your recent doings, and almost in the same breath bring up a lingering migraine or this morning's fresh back spasm. Someone in the family—someone who'd been reading about astronomy lately and remembered the "red shift" phenomenon as a measure of radiation and distance—named this the "White shift," and it stuck.

  All this, as I've said, showed itself late in their marriage, but a moment's effort can bring back for me the way things were at home in better days, a couple of decades back—say on a late morning just after the mail has arrived. Their studies face each other across the narrow front hall, with the doors always open. My mother, in soft tweeds and a pale sweater, sits at her cherrywood desk, one leg tucked under her, with a lighted Benson & Hedges in one hand and a brown soft pencil in the other as she works her way down a page of Caslon-type galleys, with her tortoiseshell glasses down on her nose. Her desk is littered with papers and ashes and eraser rubbings. Across the hall, Andy sits up at his pine desk, facing her; a paste pot and a jar of pencils and some newspaper clips are arrayed before him, next to an old "In" basket, and a struggling winter sunlight touches the white organdy curtains by the north window. There are messages to himself taped up on the bookcase behind, near the worn stacks of the Encyclopedia, some bound volumes of The New Yorker, and a trusty Roget's. The wallpaper here, curling a bit in the corners now, is made of connected blue-and-tan Coast and Geodetic Survey maps of Penobscot Bay, from the hills of Rockland in one corner, narrowing to a strip above the fireplace mantel, and all the way around to the waters near Mt. Desert Rock, in the other. Andy reads a passage aloud from today's letter from Frank Sullivan or his brother Stanley or a grain merchant in Ellsworth, and my mother laughs, scarcely lifting her eyes from the page. Soon the noises of her typing out another letter to Harold Ross or Gus Lobrano are joined by the slower clatter of his Underwood: a New England light industry is again in full gear, pouring out its high-market daily product, and the labor force, for the moment, seems content. Soon it will be lunchtime.

  To me, the Whites' later concern with their health was a substitute joint effort, more loving than angry, and constituted a fresh form of intimacy as the two grew older. Andy missed the joy and youth that he had known in my mother and the passion that she had brought to her work as an editor, an obsessive gardener, and a non-stop letter-writer; once he told me how he mourned the day when she decided that she'd have to give up her evening martini or Old-Fashioned. We in the family often speculated that Andy's hypochondria wasn't a way to stay close to her as much as fear of death in another form: if he could intercept each twinge and malaise as it arrived and bring it squirming to the light, then the ultimate event might yet be forestalled. But this is too easy. Rather, I've come to believe that his anxieties were a neurotic remnant of childhood. He was the last child of affectionate but older parents—his father, Samuel White, a piano-company executive, was forty-five when he was born and his mother, Jessie, forty-one. There were two prior brothers and three sisters; the oldest sibling, a sister named Marion, was eighteen years older than he was, and the youngest, Lillian, already a five-year-old. There seems to be no dark family event to seize upon, but one can imagine that a cough or a skinned knee or a passing stomach ache would have brought a rush of attention to young En (as he was called then) amid the daily news and doings of so many vibrant elders.

  What is certain is the way that writing about death became a strength for him, and brought a lasting power in his best work. No one who feared death could have written the end of Stuart Little, in which the hero-mouse goes off in search of the heroine, a bird named Margalo, who has flown away "without saying anything to anybody." But Stuart is also a romantic, like his creator, and interrupts his search for Margalo to invite a young girl he has met, Harriet Ames—she is just his size—to a picnic. He plans it carefully, but nothing goes right. The day is cloudy, Stuart has a headache, and some idle boys smash the souvenir birchbark canoe in which he means to take her for a paddle. He is disconsolate, and, when Harriet can't cheer him up, she leaves.

  The first sentence of Stuart Little, to be sure, is just as surprising as its shadowed endings—the fact that the Littles' second child, on arrival, is a mouse, not a boy. White never explains the anomaly, and simply gets on with the story, but some critics and teacher-parent groups—and Anne Carroll Moore, the retired but still formidable children's librarian at the New York Public Library—were collectively aghast. Harold Ross, who read everything, stuck his head into Andy's office one afternoon and said, "God damn it, White, at least you could have had him adopted." The author and his readers—kids and their read-aloud elders—stayed calm, however, and Stuart Little sold a hundred thousand copies in the first fifteen months after publication.

  Andy was not mouselike, but in these pages he is ready for love, though rueful about the results. In life, he was intensely, almost manically, domestic but always ready to fall a little in love, without the plans or bother of a full affair. Pretty girls, with brains and laughter, entranced him. One of them, a New Yorker assistant named Maryan Fox, by a later coincidence became a sister-in-law of mine. He also admired Susy Waterman, the wife of a Maine neighbor, Stan Waterman, and felt that she would be the perfect narrator for the Pathways of Sound recording of "Charlotte's Web"—an assignment he took on himself in the end. For a long time, there was a Steinway baby-grand piano tucked in a corner of Andy's study in Maine, and I can still hear him playing and singing the verse of a lilting old song of his own composition:

  How often in the greening spring,

  'Neath bough and bank reclining,

  For love I shall be sorrowing

  And gay young girls declining.

  Years later—waste not, want not—he worked a variation of this into The Trumpet of the Swan.

  On another day, he contrived an epochal whine, murmuring to Carol that he always came in third in my mother's heart: first there was The New Yorker, then me (me, Roger), and then, way down the line somewhere, himself. "Are you crazy!" she cried. "How can you say such a thing? You're always first with her—there's nobody else. Then the magazine and then all the rest of us. Everybody knows this."

  Death was a more reliable companion. There is not even a concealing metaphor by the time Charlotte's Web comes along, in 1952, seven years after Stuart: a great short novel that begins with "Where's Papa going with that ax?" and ends, or just about, when Charlotte, the spider, describes her coming death to the disbelieving young pig Wilbur, whom she has saved from that ax. Then comes the line—experienced teachers or reading-aloud parents check to make sure that the Kleenex is handy—"No one was with her when she died."

  Andy showed class, that pause again, in waiting to write Charlotte's Web until he had the country stuff in it down by heart. He knew how geese sounded when they were upset, and on what day in the fall the squashes and pumpkins needed to be brought in and put on the barn floor—which is to say that he'd still be himself in writing about it, and would not put in a word that mig
ht patronize his audience. He must have known as the chapters emerged that this would be his masterpiece, but it would not occur to him to feel uneasy that his best book was for children. Money and celebrity were not much on his mind. When his old friend James Thurber died, he wrote that he'd known him "before blindness hit him, before fame hit him." Andy also turned down a Book-of-the-Month Club offer for a later book, The Second Tree from the Corner, because he did not want to delay its publication until it suited the promotional plans of the B.O.M. He wrote an apology to his publisher, Cass Canfield, for the loss of the promised extra revenue, in which he said, "There are other things in life besides twenty thousand dollars—although not many."

  It's my belief—I can't prove it—that there are still readers and writers who feel a debt to E. B. White because of the sparkle and directness they found in a few lines or passages he wrote decades ago. Some of them, to be sure, were third graders who were encouraged by their teachers to write him in North Brooklin, asking whether Stuart ever found Margalo, or what became of Wilbur in the fullness of age: these letters came in by the bagful, and in time Andy had to turn over the task of replying to others. Readers also remember the power of his pieces on freedom and the Constitution—his 1947 "Party of One" letters to the New York Herald Tribune, for instance, which took the paper briskly to task when it supported the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten and others who refused to answer questions about their loyalty or past political affiliations. The Trib didn't back down, and wrote that members of "the party of one" were "nearly always as destructive as they have been valuable." White's reply, which pointed out that "a difference of opinion became suddenly a mark of infamy," won a fan letter back from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

  White's gift to writers is clarity, which he demonstrates so easily in setting down the daily details of his farm chores: the need to pack the sides of his woodshed with sprucebrush against winter; counterweighting the cold-frame windows, for easier operation; the way the wind is ruffling the surface of the hens' water fountain. Clarity is the message of The Elements of Style, the handbook he based on an early model written by Will Strunk, a professor of his at Cornell, which has helped more than ten million writers—the senior honors candidate, the rewriting lover, the overburdened historian—through the whichy thicket. "Write in a way that comes naturally," it pleads. "Do not explain too much." Write like White, in short, and his readers, finding him again and perhaps absorbing in the process something of that steely modesty, may sense as well the uses of patience in waiting to discover what kind of writer will turn up on their page, and finding contentment with that writer's life.

  He was a demanding worker. He rewrote the first page of Charlotte's Web eight times, and put the early manuscript away for several months, "to let the body heat out of it." Then he wrote the book again, enlarging the role of the eight-year-old girl, Fern, at the center of its proceedings. He was the first writer I observed at work, back in my early teens. Each Tuesday morning, he disappeared into his study after breakfast to write his weekly Comment page for The New Yorker—a slow process, with many pauses between the brief thrashings of his Underwood. He was silent at lunch and quickly went back to his room to finish the piece before it went off to New York in the afternoon mailbag, left out in the box by the road. "It's no good," he often said morosely afterward. But when the new issue turned up the next week the piece was good—unstrained and joyful, a snap to read. Writing almost killed you, and the hard part was making it look easy.

  What gets left out of an account like this, of course, is most of a life: Andy and my mother's son, Joel, and Joel's wife, Allene, three grandchildren—all grown now, with kids and life stories of their own—and the Brooklin Boat Yard, where Joe built a career and earned a reputation as a master boat designer and builder that matched or continued his father's as a writer. The Whites' pasture isn't here, sloping past the woodlot toward the shore, with the shapes of Harriman Point and then Mt. Desert coming clear beyond as the morning fog thins, nor is Fiddler Bayou, on Siesta Key, Florida, where the Whites passed so many winters. My mind, still in Maine, takes in the rubbly shore of Allen Cove, and the redolent boathouse, its surfaces softened with age, where we changed our clothes before swimming, and where Andy took himself, some days, to write or to work on his Newsbreaks selections for the magazine. Andy, getting ready to swim on a morning when the icy incoming tide has been warmed a fraction by its journey over mudflats, wades out until the water reaches his knees, then unfurls his old Abercrombie & Fitch thermometer and flings it out to the end of its twine tether. If the temperature is bearable—I think the red line stands at sixty-four degrees—he shakes his head and commits himself to the shallow deep.

  Many in the family, including my children, have their own lasting and complex attachments to Andy and the Whites' place. My daughter Alice, at about ten—an age when she'd read and been read Charlotte's Web over and over again—was shocked to learn that a young pig in residence in an enclosure to the southwest of the garage would be converted to ham and bacon shortly after her departure in September. She worked late that evening, crayoning a large replica of Garth Williams's "SOME PIG!" drawing in the book—the miracle web that saves Wilbur—and had me drive her back to the Whites' that night, so she could secretly thumbtack it to the side of the pen. The agrarian Andy was startled but unmoved, and the pig went to his smoked reward on schedule.

  Others in or around the Whites' house are missing as well—Henry Allen, Edith Candage, Shirley Cousins, Tink Hutchinson, Howard Pervear. Andy's lobsterman neighbor Charlie Henderson. Harold Ross—yes, Harold Ross, the magazine's founder and editor—who probably never made it to the Whites' place but who, right up until his death in 1951, was so much a part of their daily thoughts and mealtime conversation that I sometimes almost saw him sitting at the table across from me, with his hunched shoulders and that gap in his teeth. Henry Lawson, Joe and Tooey Wearn, Russell Wiggins, Dottie Hayes. Fifty years of Brooklin friends and neighbors, who all knew or almost knew Andy, and respected his emphatic privacy. (When he was old, Brooklin townspeople would turn away pilgrim tourists who'd come all this distance to visit the shrine. "The E. B. White place? Well, it's hard to say how you'd get there from here. Anyway, I don't think he's around right now.") Sometimes, away for months on end, I felt in danger of falling out of touch, but then another letter from Andy would arrive, like this one from June 24, 1964: "I'm the father of two robins and this has kept me on the go lately. They were in a nest in a vine on the garage and had been deserted by their parents, and without really thinking what I was doing I casually dropped a couple of marinated worms into their throats as I walked by a week ago Monday. This did it. They took me on with open hearts and open mouths, and my schedule became extremely tight. I equipped myself with a 12" yellow bamboo stick, split at one end like a robin's bill, and invented a formula: hamburg, chicken mash, kibbled worm, and orange juice. Worms are hard to come by because of the drought, but I dig early and late and pay my grandchildren a penny a worm. The birds are now fledged and are under the impression that they know how to fly. When I come out of the house at 6 a.m. they come streaming at me from bush and tree, trying for a landing on shoulder or cap, usually overshooting me in the fog and bringing up against a wall. This exhausts them and me." (The stimulating "Letters of E. B. White," out of print for some time, will reappear shortly, in a new and updated printing, edited by his granddaughter Martha White.)

  My mother died in 1977, and Andy stayed on alone in the house for the rest of his life. Well, not entirely alone. As he grew older, he began to spoil himself a little, and why not. Sometimes when he was having a bad spell with his head he would check himself into the Blue Hill Hospital for two or three days, until he felt better. He liked a meal out now and then, at the Blue Hill Inn, sometimes with company and just as often alone. He took drives in the afternoon with Ethel Howard, the wife of a Sedgwick garage man, whose conversation he enjoyed; and had occasional visits from Corona Machemer, a Harper & Row
editor who had worked with him on late collections of his works. He gave up sailing the sturdy twenty-foot sloop Martha, named for the same granddaughter, which Joel had built and rigged for use by a cautious single-hander; he was a morning sailor by now, anyway. Andy worried what might befall him when he was alone, and paid a succession of nurse-companions to be in the next room if he woke up in the night and needed a morsel of talk or a glass of milk. Older women, quite a few of them, set their caps for him, of course, and were disappointed. He told Carol once that he didn't plan to marry again. "I'm afraid I might get a lemon this time," he said.

  He was the same, still lithe and only a bit slower, and one evening in August, 1984, when he came for dinner he complained that he'd knocked his head the day before while unloading a canoe from the roof rack of his car, over at Walker Pond; now he was having trouble knowing exactly where he was or what was happening around him. Carol and I smiled at him. "Yes, that happens sometimes, doesn't it?" we assured him.

  But he knew better. A couple of months later, after we'd left, he took to his bed and never again knew exactly where he was. It looked like a rapid onset of Alzheimer's, but more likely, the doctors thought, was a senile dementia brought on by the blow to his head that day. He was eighty-five now. Nurses and practical nurses and other local ladies were hired, round the clock, who took extraordinary care of him. My brother managed it all, and somehow managed his own life as well. When I came up for a visit, early in the winter, Joe said that Andy would know me but that our conversation would be interesting. "How do you mean?" I said. "You'll see," he said.