Letters of E. B. White Read online

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  Ideally, a book of letters should be published posthumously. The advantages are obvious: the editor enjoys a free hand, and the author enjoys a perfect hiding place—the grave, where he is impervious to embarrassments and beyond the reach of libel. I have failed to cooperate in this ideal arrangement. Through some typical bit of mismanagement, I am still alive, and the book has had to adjust to that awkward fact. But since I am still around, I shall seize the chance to thank the three people who brought the book into being: Dorothy Guth, my goddaughter; Corona Machemer, my Harper editor; and Katharine White, my wife. Mrs. Guth proved as resourceful and as tireless as a hound dog in finding letters; Miss Machemer knocked herself out in a remarkable show of dedication and organizational frenzy; and Katharine White gazed steadily and skeptically at the whole mess with a patience born of her long years of dealing with unruly writers and untidy manuscripts. I salute all three and send my love.

  E. B. W.

  July 19, 1976

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  With this updated second issue, E. B. White got his wish to be a posthumous author. A stumble while unloading a canoe, late in the summer of 1984, led to a year’s decline into senile dementia. He continued to recognize his family and friends throughout that year and enjoyed being read to by his son, Joel, often from Letters and others of his books. E. B. White died in October 1985. It may have proved advantageous for him, but not for me. As both editor and granddaughter, I could have used his help in unraveling the identities of some of the letter recipients, his wisdom in sorting the humorous from the libelous, and the Strunk in him for untangling or omitting footnotes. The steady and skeptical eye of my grandmother, Katharine White (who died of heart failure in 1977) would have been welcome, also. My father, Joel, died of lung cancer in 1997; otherwise, I would have enjoyed his comments on the project, as well. Fortunately, my mother Allene White, my uncle Roger Angell, and archivist Lucy Burgess, at the Kroch Library at Cornell University, did their best to keep me straight and I owe all three my heartfelt thanks. I have loved this romp through the family letters.

  Martha White

  August 31, 2005

  I

  MOUNT VERNON

  1908–1917

  * * *

  • (Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on July 11, 1899, the youngest of the six children of Samuel and Jessie Hart White. Mount Vernon was a quiet, leafy suburb in the early years of the new century, and Elwyn, sometimes called “En,” grew up in a child’s paradise of backyards and skating ponds, bicycles and pets. He attended public schools, where he got good grades, and he did some writing for the Oracle, the high school paper. White himself can best supply the details and introduce the characters, and the following introduction is, therefore, in his own words.—Ed.)

  If an unhappy childhood is indispensable for a writer, I am ill-equipped: I missed out on all that and was neither deprived nor unloved. It would be inaccurate, however, to say that my childhood was untroubled. The normal fears and worries of every child were in me developed to a high degree; every day was an awesome prospect. I was uneasy about practically everything: the uncertainty of the future, the dark of the attic, the panoply and discipline of school, the transitoriness of life, the mystery of the church and of God, the frailty of the body, the sadness of afternoon, the shadow of sex, the distant challenge of love and marriage, the far-off problem of a livelihood. I brooded about them all, lived with them day by day. Being the youngest in a large family, I was usually in a crowd but often felt lonely and removed. I took to writing early, to assuage my uneasiness and collect my thoughts, and I was a busy writer long before I went into long pants.

  Our big house at 101 Summit Avenue was my castle. From it I emerged to do battle, and into it I retreated when I was frightened or in trouble. The house even had the appearance of a fortress, with its octagonal tower room for sighting the enemy and its second-story porches for gun emplacements. Just inside the massive front door was the oak hatrack, next to the umbrella stand. On the left the parlor, where the action was; on the right the “reception room,” where no one was ever received but where I found my mother one day stretched out on the settee, recovering from an accident with a runaway horse. I thought she was dead.

  I remember the cellar, its darkness and dampness, its set tubs, its Early American water closet for the help, its coal furnace that often tried to asphyxiate us all, and the early sound of the Italian furnace man who crept in at dawn and shook the thing down. As a very small boy, I used to repair to the cellar, where I would pee in the coal bin—for variety. Out back was the stable, where I spent countless hours hobnobbing with James Bridges, the coachman, watching him polish harness and wash carriages.

  My father, Samuel Tilly White, was born in Brooklyn, the son of a carpenter and the grandson of a contractor. I don’t know a great deal about my father’s upbringing and home life. I don’t think there was much money there, and there may have been some rough times. My father was, all his life, a sober and abstemious man, but I’m not sure his father was. His mother, Mary Ann Elizabeth Tilly, was an admirable woman. She came of “landed Gentry” in England but was deprived of her share of her father’s estate because she married a tradesman. At any rate, young Samuel, my father (he always wrote his name “Sam’l”), felt obliged to quit school at thirteen and go to work. He found a job as “bundle boy” (wrapping packages) with the piano firm of Horace Waters & Company, at 134 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. This company had a factory in Harlem, where the cases for uprights, squares, and baby grands were manufactured by a crew of beer-drinking Germans, skilled artisans. The actions (keyboard, hammers, dampers, etc.) were bought from a company that specialized in that and were installed at the Horace Waters factory.

  Sam White not only wrapped bundles for his employer, he began pulling at his own bootstraps. He informed himself about every aspect of the business, learned bookkeeping, learned to play the piano, kept his eyes and ears open, and was soon climbing life’s ladder. He was successively a clerk, a salesman, a branch manager (there were two or three retail stores scattered about the city), an officer of the company, finally president. When I was a child, I used to watch parades from a front-row seat next to the big plate glass window on the second floor of 134 Fifth Avenue—a splendid vantage point. I was “Mr. White’s boy,” marked for the special treatment. I made many visits to 134 and remember particularly the wonderful sad sound of a piano being tuned somewhere in the building.

  Old Horace Waters, who founded the company, was an active temperance man. This may have had some effect on Father’s life—I don’t know. I do know that he spent most of his life as a teetotaler; only near the end did he occasionally treat himself to a glass of wine. He was a man of great probity, scrupulously honest and fair, a wing-collar, starched-cuff man, whose speech was never blurred by obscenities or profanities. He had a sentimental turn of mind, which led him into songwriting, and two or three of his compositions were published in the form of sheet music. But essentially he was a man of affairs, of business. He was what we call “well to do,” a moderately successful businessman who ran both his company and his private life with caution and thrift. Over the years he accumulated enough money to build a house in Mount Vernon in the district called Chester Hill, which was classy. I have no idea how he met Mother. Their backgrounds were quite different. Father was forty-five years old when I was born; Mother was forty-one. So my parents and I were separated by almost two generations. I never knew my grandparents—they were all either dead or dying when I came along.

  One of the fringe benefits of being the son of a piano man was that our parlor at 101 Summit Avenue was well supplied with musical instruments: a Waters grand, a reed organ with phony pipes, and, at one period, a Waters player piano called an “Autola.” There were six of us children, and we were practically a ready-made band. All we lacked was talent. We had violins, cellos, mandolins, guitars, banjos, and
drums, and there was always a lot of music filling the air in our home, none of it good. We sang, composed, harmonized, drummed, and some of us took lessons for brief spells in an attempt to raise the general tone of the commotion. My brother Stanley was a fiddler. I played piano, picked at the mandolin, and at one point acquired a three-quarter-size cello and took lessons. But I failed to develop musical curiosity, learned nothing about the works of the great, and was content to make a noise, whether ragtime or schmalz or Czerny. Like my father, I liked the sound of music but was too lazy to follow it to its source.

  My mother, Jessie Hart White, was also born in Brooklyn. She was of Scottish ancestry. Her father, William Hart, left Scotland for America in 1831. A Bible that survives in our family had belonged to James Hart, of Paisley, father of William. The inscription, after noting the union of James Hart and Marion Robertson, gets right into the swing of marriage.

  We have a great work to do and but a short time to do it.

  Get this principle wrought in your heart

  That there is nothing got by sin but misery

  Nothing lost by holiness but Hell.

  With only a short time allotted them, James and Marion speedily produced ten children, two of whom, William (my grandfather) and his younger brother James, managed to make a name for themselves in American art. William was a redhead. He began his career as a painter in Troy, New York, where he was apprenticed to a coachmaker, helping to decorate the carriages and coaches and fire trucks of that horse-drawn era. He would tie three brushes together, spin a wheel, and produce three decorative stripes. An Albany man named Armsby, who was a doctor, took an interest in William Hart and helped him get his start as a professional painter. For a while, my grandfather was an itinerant portrait painter, traveling about and doing portraits for a small fee. After a bit, he was drawn to landscape painting and ended up as one of the pillars of the Hudson River school. He was particularly excited by a landscape that contained cows. Many of his best and most ambitious oils featured cattle. I have seen some of his sketch books: they are loaded with the details of udders, rear ends, heads, horns, and hooves.

  William Hart became known in art circles, got good prices for his large canvases, and was the first president of the Brooklyn Academy of Design. My mother, although a shy and simple person, liked being the daughter of an illustrious father, and she often referred to him as “an Academician.” The word gave her a lift. She worshiped my father, but I think in a subtle way she pulled rank on him, now and then, by pulling William Hart on him. After all, Father was just a businessman, son of a carpenter. Her father was an artist. Mother herself had no knowledge of art beyond the limits of her father’s studio. She had no artistic pretensions or gifts. But it meant something to her to have an artist for a parent—an artist was special. Toward the end of his life and before I was born, Grandfather Hart moved from Brooklyn to Mount Vernon, to a house on Sidney Avenue. I presume this influenced my father to make the same move. It enabled Mother to be near her own family.

  In the order of our arrival, we were Marion Robertson White, Clara Frances White, Albert Hunt White, Stanley Hart White, Lillian White, and Elwyn Brooks White. There was a seventh child—Mother’s second—who died in infancy. Father and Mother almost never mentioned her, and it was as though she had never existed.

  Marion was red-haired. She was a quiet, gentle girl—soft-spoken and long-suffering. When I was three years old, she married a Mount Vernon man named Arthur Brittingham. They had five children—Arthur Jr., Frank, Jessie, Stanley, and Sam, who was tragically killed in a bicycle accident. Arthur Brittingham was a brisk, opinionated man with a penetrating voice, a jolly manner, and the ability to do practically anything. Father complained that he didn’t bring home the bacon. He brought a lot of other things home, though: firecrackers, jack o’lanterns, toys, baby alligators, cameras, tools, magic sets, and the ingredients for candy. He made the best candy of anyone in Westchester County. He irritated the life out of my father, who soon found himself contributing regularly to the support of the rapidly increasing Brittingham family. Arthur was a Bull Mooser—loved Teddy Roosevelt and carrying the big stick. Father was a Woodrow Wilson man, and the clash of political ideas was intense. Children found Arthur completely fascinating. He was always ready to drop anything to build a kite, spin a top, set up a toy railroad, or whoop up a batch of candy. Halloween and the Fourth of July, occasions that simply made Father uneasy, were practically designed for Arthur Brittingham, who prepared for them well in advance and gave them everything he had. He was a greatly gifted photographer and a dedicated gardener. The Brittinghams lived first in Mount Vernon, then in Tuckahoe, then moved to Bridgeport, where Arthur went to work in a factory and brought home a paycheck. At one time, the family acquired a couple of baby alligators. Many American families have enjoyed a short interlude with baby alligators, but the Brittingham alligators were no transients: they settled right in. When they were six or seven feet long, they were moved down cellar and dwelt there in morose seclusion, terrorizing the man who was supposed to read the meter.

  Marion died of cancer in 1959 and was buried in Arlington Cemetery, to await her husband. Arthur, desolated but courageous, lived on alone in the Bridgeport house until his death at ninety. He was the king of the neighborhood children. He never slacked up on celebrating the great occasions and fete days. The last time I was in his house (it was just before Halloween) there was a large stuffed alligator on the hearth, its wicked jaws slowly opening and closing, to reveal a red interior glow.

  Clara was the second child in our family. We called her “Tar.” She was brown-haired, high-spirited, handsome, with not a care in the world. When a young attorney named Manton Marble Wyvell, from Wellsville, New York, took a look at Clara he decided he had seen it all, and they were married. She bore him nine children, of whom seven—Marion, Manton Jr., Dorothy, Conrad, Eleanor, Janet, and Donald—survived.

  Manton was an ambitious fellow, impressive to look at—a large, commanding man with a massive head, who often seemed utterly oblivious of the presence of others. Oil was in his blood. He drilled wells, and speculated. He practiced law, dabbled in politics, and made money. He was a Democrat and a devotee of William Jennings Bryan. When Bryan became Secretary of State, Manton became Bryan’s personal secretary and front man. At one time he was worth a good deal, and the Wyvells lived in a big house in Washington, D.C. He loved Clara but was so preoccupied with his own intricate affairs (of which she knew nothing) he had little time for family life. It often seemed to me that he hadn’t really learned the names of his own children. Manton overreached himself, the bubble burst, he went broke and then collapsed mentally. Tar, cheerful and imperturbable, placed him in an institution and turned her home into a boardinghouse. Manton died in the thirties. Clara, at this writing, is still living, almost blind, cared for by one of her children.

  My two brothers, Albert and Stanley, were near of an age though not at all alike. As teen-agers they were close pals and were a pair of busy boys. They built a boat in our barn, they built the first skis to be seen in Mount Vernon (if they weren’t the first they were easily the most unmanageable), they constructed a cable aerial railway from our barn loft to our pear tree, they entered Cornell together, founded a fraternity there, graduated together in 1912, and married sisters—the Bigney girls of Brockton, Mildred and Blanche.

  When Albert was born, my father and mother were tickled to have a boy child for a change. It was the era of Little Lord Fauntleroy, and as soon as little Albert was ambulatory, my doting parents dressed him up in a Fauntleroy suit. He was a handsome child, kindly and with winning ways. He had a tough time adjusting to life, nonetheless, and never managed to carve out a career that brought him much satisfaction or ease. He had two children, a son Bill and a daughter Frances. Al died in 1964 at the age of seventy-one, well loved and still busy trying to solve the riddle of this difficult world.

  Stanley, nicknamed “Bunny,” was number four. He was a redhead like his grandfather
Hart, tall and rangy and bespectacled. Of all my brothers and sisters, Stan was the one I was most with. Although eight years older, he latched onto me because he liked to have someone to instruct. He was a born teacher and spent most of his life on the faculty of the University of Illinois, professor of Landscape Architecture. He is alive, retired, and living in Denver with his wife Blanche, whom he married in 1916. They have one daughter, Janice, an artist.

  Stan taught me to read when I was in kindergarten and I could read fairly fluently when I entered the first grade—an accomplishment my classmates found annoying. I’m not sure my teacher, Miss Hackett, thought much of it, either. Stan’s method of teaching me was to hand me a copy of the New York Times and show me how to sound the syllables. He assured me there was nothing to learning to read—a simple matter. He imparted information as casually as a tree drops its leaves in the fall. He taught me the harmonic circle on the pianoforte. He gave me haphazard lessons in the laws of physics: centrifugal force, momentum, inertia, gravity, surface tension, and illustrated everything in a clowning way. He taught me to paddle a canoe so that it would proceed on a straight course instead of a series of zigzags. He showed me how to hold the scissors for trimming the fingernails of my right hand. He showed me how to handle a jackknife without cutting myself. Hardly a day passes in my life without my performing some act that reminds me of something I learned from Bunny. He was called Bunny because he wiggled his nose like a rabbit. He resembled Grandfather Hart and, like his grandfather, he liked to draw and paint. Both Stanley and Albert took Agriculture at Cornell—perhaps because New York State residents got free tuition in that college. It was on my visits to Ithaca to see my older brothers that I fell wildly in love with the trolley car that ran up and down the hills and across the gorges on the high bridges, and so chose Cornell for myself when the time came.