Essays of E. B. White (46 page)

In 1942, the Whites returned to New York and, for the next fifteen years, commuted between the city and North Brooklin. Even though they were not on the farm year-round now, they were determined to do their share as farmers in meeting the demands of World War II. Roger Angell has reported that “among White's production goals for 1942 are 4,000 dozen eggs, 10 pigs, and 9,000 pounds of milk. . . .” The war and the attendant threat to democracy also engaged White's attention as a well-known writer; and he began addressing issues that he saw as critical to American democracy and world peace. He continued to the end of his life to speak out in defense of individual conscience, freedom of the press, the rights of minorities, and world unity. As Bruce Allen commented, in the
Christian Science Monitor
, “it's as if he felt his minor-key mastery wasn't enough, that he had to step forth, and speak forth.” Even in connection with what were for him the most serious of issues, however, he maintained his remarkable balance between humor and seriousness. In 1984, Strout reported on White's response in July 1943 to the Writers' War Board request that he write a statement on “the meaning of democracy.” As quoted by Strout, White responded:

He was also one of the first to speak out against McCar-thyism and the blacklist. In 1947 he took the
New York Herald
to task for supporting loyalty oaths and the blacklisting of Hollywood writers. The idea of requiring employees “to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs,” he wrote, “is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.” He was also among the very first to inveigh against the testing of hydrogen bombs, and his warnings about pollution and calls for environmental preservation were consistent from the mid–1950s on.

Since 1938 White had continued thinking about children's books. And during all those years, unable to extemporize when his eighteen nephews and nieces requested a story, he had been jotting down and storing in his desk brief episodes concerning a small “mouse-boy.” The legendary children's editor at Harper & Brothers, Ursula Nordstrom, immediately saw the worth of what would become known to the world as the adventures of
Stuart Little
, the first of White's classic tales for young people. White once remarked that the character of Stuart Little had first come to him in a dream in the 1920s, “not as a mouse, but a second son.” He elsewhere described the now famous motorcycle-riding hero as “a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.” The book was an immediate success, and continues to capture the hearts and imaginations of children and adults. In response to children's queries if Stuart ever finds the vanished Margalo, White wrote, “They are good questions but I did not answer them in the book because, in a way, Stuart's journey symbolizes the continuing journey that everybody takes—in search of what is perfect and unattainable. This is perhaps too elusive an idea to put into a book for children, but I put it in anyway.” Stuart Little's quest is not unlike that of his creator.

White's second classic book for children is, of course,
Charlotte's Web
, his immortal 1952 barnyard tale of Wilbur the pig, Charlotte the weaver of wondrous webs, and Fern, the young girl who joins them in their chronicle of life, death, and renewal. Eudora Welty's judgment of this wonderful novel—“Just about perfect”—has stood the test of nearly half a century. By White's own account, the story arose from his ruminations on the fate of a pig that he kept on his farm and his observations of an endlessly patient and clever spider in his barn. “One day when I was on my way to feed the pig,” he told Lee Bennett Hopkins, “I began feeling sorry for the pig because, like most pigs, he was doomed to die. This made me sad. So I started thinking of ways to save a pig's life. . . . Gradually I worked the spider into the story . . . a story of a friendship and salvation on a farm.” The story did not come easily, however. In his introduction to
The Annotated Charlotte's Web
(1994), Peter Neumeyer points out that White “labored tirelessly over eight manuscript drafts, researched thoroughly the habits of spiders, and meditated on the habits of pigs. En route, he corresponded with editors, filmmakers, and friends, as well as fulfilling his role as a distinguished writer for
The New Yorker.
” Indeed, he took as many pains with his books for children as he did with his polished writings for adults. Eighteen years after
Charlotte's Web
, White's third children's book appeared.
The Trumpet of the Swan
(1970) was prompted by its author's fascination with animals and his admiration for eggs, to his mind one of the most perfect of the world's treasures—as he stated more than once. The hatching, growth, and behavior of birds, especially geese and swans, also fascinated him, and so he wrote a book about a stately bird with a very special talent.

White's second collection of essays,
The Second Tree from the Corner
, published in 1954, provided clear evidence of White's move, physically and spiritually, away from the city and into the country, where he could find a harmony and conciliance rapidly disappearing from urban society. He also found peace and contentment in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, especially
Walden.
“A Slight Sound of Evening,” reveals the reverence in which he held Thoreau and the empathy he held for Thoreau's attitudes toward human society and the world of nature. In 1957, White finalized his move; he and Katharine took up at last permanent residence on the North Brooklin farm, escaping what Charlotte called the “rush, rush, rush” of mid-century city life and settling in to care for the pigs, geese, chickens, and dogs and to enjoy his own comforting barn. He would also make great use of the boathouse, not only keeping his small sloop there, but also using it as a study in which he wrote most of his subsequent essays.

“Will Strunk,” his 1957 homage to his Cornell professor, prompted the publishers of Strunk's
Elements of Style
to ask White to “revise and amplify” the book. With his usual modesty (“I discovered that for all my fine talk I was no match for the parts of speech . . . [and] I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric”), he took on the job, producing in 1959 what has since then been the standard handbook of style, known simply, familiarly, and affectionately as “Strunk and White.”

These were years of contentment, country peace mixed with concern for environmental pollution, the relaxed life of a relatively remote community mixed with the constant stress of deadlines. And he continued to meet those deadlines, writing matchless essays on Maine Christmas trees, a spring day, the “Death of a Pig,” hurricanes, raccoons, Maine winters, the beauty of brown eggs, nuclear generating plants, politics, the Constitution, disarmament, the threat of radiation, world peace, racism, the Model T Ford . . . and on, and on, and wonderfully on. The sway held by contentment over anxiety was upset, in 1961, by Katharine's development of a rare skin disease. She would battle the disease for sixteen years, finally succumbing to a series of congestive heart failures in 1977. “She survived four of them,” White would remark. “She missed the fifth.” She retired from
The New Yorker
in 1968, but even as she fought her debilitating affliction, she compiled a collection of her writings on gardening, and her husband made certain that
Onward and Upward in the Garden
was published.

White's own essays and the books continued. A third volume of collected essays,
The Points of My Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South
, appeared in 1962. The Whites had begun wintering in Florida, because of the severity of Maine's winters and of Katharine's malady. As he did with nearly everything in his life, White wrote about what he observed as being most telling in Southern life and behavior, and tried to devise suitable Christmas decorations from available Florida flora. White was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1968, only the first of well-deserved medals, awards, encomiums, and citations (all of which embarrassed him, because he had to prepare a speech of thanks for each). John Updike's 1968 recollection, “Writers I Have Met,” reveals the non-public, spontaneous E. B. White:

Israel Shenker quoted the seventy-nine-year-old White as complaining that “old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself—a lad of about 19.” In 1970, the year of
The Trumpet of the Swan
, this preternaturally observant, preternaturally gifted “lad” was awarded the American Library Association's Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for “a lasting contribution to children's literature.” And he 1971, he accepted the National Medal for Literature with the remark that encapsulates his writer's philosophy: “Writing is an act of faith, nothing else. And it must be the writer, above all others, who keeps it alive—choked with laughter or with pain.”

And he kept at his frequent, not-quite-curmudgeonly tweaking of authority's nose. The December 21, 1972,
Ellsworth American
(the Whites' local newspaper in Maine) reported that the seventy-three-year-old White delivered a letter on his bicycle, in eighteen-degree weather (and with “a stiff head wind”) by way of protesting a new postal regulation that required all local mail to go to Bangor, more than sixty miles away, for sorting, and then returned to North Brooklin and vicinity for delivery. The Ellsworth newspaper quoted a letter (with the stated suspicion that the famous cyclist had a hand in its writing) from the Brooklin General Store's proprietor to the letter's recipient: “I have engaged an old man on a bicycle to carry [the letter]. He is an aging writer—feeble but plucky. He says he has arthritis, and dizzy spells, which is why he likes to ride his cycle in winter. When I mentioned that snow is predicted, he just shrugged. . . . He's an odd sort, anyway—comes into the store and never buys anything but domestic sardines and a marking pencil.”

The
Letters of E. B. White
appeared in 1976, providing previously unknown additional evidence of his mastery as a prose stylist. And in the following year, the
Essays of E. B. White
confirmed what many readers had long suspected. These premier essays of half a century, grouped within broad themes, reveal one of America's finest writers at the amazingly prolonged height of his considerable powers. Beginning his review of the
Essays
in the
New York Times
, Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote, “Every now and then they give us reviewers a break, and this week is one of those occasions.” The accolades that greeted the
Essays
were drowned out, however, by his grief upon the death of his wife that same year, a grief that was not lessened the following year with a special Pulitzer Prize citation presented for the body of his work. He spent the next seven years missing his wife terribly, but still going about his life's business, writing and caring for his farm and his animals. And his humor remained. “I have nine grandchildren and six great grandchildren, with another one coming up in June,” he told the
New York Times
' Nan Robertson, in one of his very rare later interviews. “I am full of years and descendants. It's a hazard.” In 1981, on the publication of the
Poems and Sketches of E. B. White
, Edward Hoagland wrote, “E. B. White is 82, and it's a pleasure to report that, as far as this reader can tell, all the principal decisions of his life were for the best.”

White died at his North Brooklin farm on October 1, 1985, ensured of a lasting place in the pantheon of American letters. In its obituary on October 4, the
New York Times
noted that “Like the First Amendment, E. B. White's principles and style endure.” In a 1969 interview, Israel Shenker had asked White what he cherished most in life. “When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: ‘Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive world.” Along with William Shawn, Harold's Ross's great successor as editor of
The New Yorker
, all readers can cherish E. B. White's writings. “E. B. White was a great essayist, a supreme stylist,” eulogized Shawn. “His literary style was as pure as any in our language. It was singular, colloquial, clear, unforced, thoroughly American and utterly beautiful. . . . He was ageless, and his writing was timeless.” And at a February 10, 1986, memorial reading, novelist and humorist Peter De Vries commented on E. B. White's place in American literature: