Letters of E. B. White Read online

  Al bought a car the other day. It’s a 1910 Buick four. The machine itself is funny in itself, but the reason why he bought it, plus the car constitutes the real humor. He said it was “to get in right with the girls.” He took it out of the garage last night with the help of George Cottrell, and the thing gave forth such immense clouds of smoke that one man came running up and asked me where the fire was. It stood in the driveway over night, and this morning, Al went out to try to take it back to the garage. I held a little wire while he turned the handle round and round. About every third turn he cussed, and that kept it from getting monotonous. Finally it wheezed a little, and then broke into a loud rattle. This lasted for a little while (I calculated that it was just about long enough to wake up the Eddies) and then it gave a couple of coughs, a muffled sob, and died. However, it is certainly a good investment—it’s so different from other cars!

  I have four pairs of large, mated Homer pigeons out in the chicken coop. One pair already has a nest and two eggs which will hatch into squabs the 30th of May provided Mac2 doesn’t scare the germ out of them with barking.

  Pigeons are much easier and more profitable to keep than chickens. They take up far less time, and they cost far less to bring up. The parent birds feed the squabs which stay in the nest till they are four weeks old (killing age). The squabs which my birds will raise weigh from ¾ to 1 lb. at 4 weeks and sell at from $1.00 to $1.50 per pair. I tried to pan off an egg laid by another hen, on the pair which have the nest, but they took it and smashed it outside in the fly pen.

  Don’t forget to write me about Lake Placid, will you?

  As before,

  En

  To STANLEY HART WHITE

  118 Archer Avenue1

  [Mount Vernon, New York]

  [May 26, 1916]

  Thursday morning

  Dear Stan:

  I got a letter from Mother telling me that you were going to ask Mr. Dewey if he had a job for me. I’m glad you are thinking about me, but what I had intended you to do (perhaps I didn’t make it clear in the letter) was to tell me what work seemed favorable, and then I would make an application for that position myself. This may seem to you to be a finicky notion, but I think I would stand a better chance if it were done this way. It would be more like a business deal, and less like a frame up; more as if I was just looking for a vacation.

  I appreciate your trying to help me a lot, but if you have not already spoken to Mr. Dewey, please do not do it.

  Last night I had a good time. After supper I went to the library to try to make up some Virgil. Mac tagged along and I let him come in and lie by me in the reading room because I had done it twice before successfully. About quarter to eight a dead silence hung about the whole room. Learned men pored over ponderous volumes; sentimental ladies were engrossed in the latest best seller; white haired old men quietly turned the pages of a magazine; and I was lost in Virgil. From a distance there came a scarcely audible yap-yap of a far off poodle. Mac gave a dive for the window through which the sound came, and let out a succession of his deepest barks, which echoed and re-echoed throughout the whole big room and which ruthlessly tore the learned men, the sentimental ladies, the white-haired old gentlemen, and me from their respective pieces of literature. Words cannot adequately describe it—I leave the rest to you.

  Always

  $9702

  II

  CORNELL AND THE OPEN ROAD

  1917–1925

  * * *

  • In January 1917, White graduated from Mount Vernon High School, where he had done well enough to win two scholarships totaling $1,000—a significant sum in those days, when the tuition at Cornell was $100 a year. He waited until fall to enter the university, meantime occupying himself with a course in bookkeeping and with raising pigeons.

  “When I landed in Ithaca,” White wrote, “I was a green boy if ever there was one.” He stepped off the train three days earlier than other entering freshmen and took a room downtown in the Ithaca Hotel, where he became so engrossed in the ebb and flow of life on Main Street that he failed to present himself on the campus for registration until a day or two after classes had begun. When he finally got straightened around, however, he settled into college life and began enjoying it all. He tried out for the Cornell Daily Sun and made it, joined a fraternity (Phi Gamma Delta), and acquired a new name, “Andy,” after Cornell’s first president, Andrew D. White. It was a nickname commonly bestowed on Cornell students named White and one that Elwyn Brooks was pleased to have, since he had always disliked his given name. Because of his association with the Sun, he gradually became a Big Man on Campus, and by the end of his college career, as he puts it, “glowed with a fraudulent self-confidence, alight with love, full of importance.”

  The Sun was, for a college paper, unusually large, prosperous, and influential—a seven-column, eight-page sheet that appeared six days a week. It was free of faculty control and carried AP news that came in over a nightly telephone hookup. White made it to the Sun Board as a result of winning the freshman competition, a grueling race that began in the fall and ended in the spring. One of the freshmen competing against him was Allison Danzig, who later made a name for himself as a sports writer on the New York Times. According to White, the competition was supposed to be decided on the basis of space filled in the paper, and a daily record was kept of the inches each competitor amassed. Danzig ended up with the most inches, but White was named winner. “I never knew why,” White says. “Danzig was so sore he left Cornell in a huff. I suspect that my victory had something to do with campus or fraternity politics, and I strongly suspect that the late Peter Vischer, who was both a Sun man and a member of Phi Gamma Delta, masterminded it. I did not feel any guilt about it, as I had nothing to do with it, but I sympathized with Danzig just the same and still think he got a raw deal.”

  White’s career on the Sun was interrupted briefly at the beginning of his sophomore year, when he joined the Army and did a stretch in the Student Army Training Corps. But the war ended in November, and by the first of the new year he was back in mufti and back with the Sun. Near the end of his junior year, he was elected editor-in-chief and during the following year wrote most of the editorials. Academic life faded into the background. Although the young editor attended classes and got passing marks, there was nothing of the scholar in him and his education, he says, suffered from his being submerged in printer’s ink. Nevertheless, he was tapped for Aleph Samach, the Junior Honorary Society. He became president of his fraternity and was elected to the Senior Honorary Society, Quill and Dagger.

  Of all the friendships White made in college, the two that were to prove most solid and lasting were the ones with Howard Cushman, editor of the Widow, and with Gustave Lobrano, whom White got to know at his fraternity house and also at the Sun. For a year, Lobrano ran the column in the Sun called The Berry Patch, to which both White and Cushman contributed—“a chatty, pseudo-literary column” according to White, patterned after the famous newspaper columns in New York: Franklin P. Adams’s Conning Tower, Christopher Morley’s Bowling Green, and Don Marquis’s Sun Dial.

  White made three good friends among the faculty—Bristow Adams, Martin Sampson, and William Strunk, Jr. He came to know them intimately through his membership in the Manuscript Club, a group that met informally on Saturday nights at Sampson’s house on Buffalo Street. Each member arrived bearing something he had written—a sketch, a poem—which was then deposited, unsigned, in a cardboard box. After a round of shandygaff and some light conversation, Professor Sampson would open the box and read the compositions, a ritual followed by a discussion period. It was at the MS Club that White first encountered Morris Bishop, an alumnus at that time working for an advertising agency in New York (he went back to Cornell to teach in the fall of 1921).

  Adams, who was known as “B.A.,” was a professor in the College of Agriculture. He had liberal arts learnings, however, and liked to entertain students at his home on Fall Creek Drive every Monday night,
for cocoa and talk. His house became a second home for White, a friendly place where he was always welcome. Among the students he often encountered there was Russell Lord. Sampson taught English literature courses, and Strunk gave a course called English Usage and Style. It was Strunk’s small textbook, The Elements of Style, that White, years later, revised with such success for the Macmillan Company.

  To JESSIE HART WHITE

  [Ithaca, New York]

  [December 1918]

  Wednesday

  Dear Ma,

  It is time, so I see, for my mid-week’s effusion which I’ll start with the sad news that, through some delusion, you’ve been led to believe that our Christmas vacation has entirely escaped from war’s grim depredation. The date of my homecoming, if you remember, is Saturday morn—21st of December.

  This error corrected, I gracefully turn to the topics of interest, and first you should learn that in spite of the Ithaca weather’s contortions (this topic alone might assume large proportions), I now—this is really a subject for prose—am entirely rid of my cold in the nose. My health is restored—I am chipper and brisk, to be brief I’m convinced that it’s taking no risk to give to the world—though you never can tell—the astounding report that I’m perfectly well.

  This morning came news of my utter redemption from deepest of gloom, for I got an exemption from any more of those weekly abortions which the English Department deals out in large portions—which is merely to say in a casual way, that I don’t have to write so much stuff every day.

  There’s been nothing extraordinary happened of late—there’ll be lots more to do when we’re able to skate. Just at present the pond is quite infirm of purpose and it wouldn’t be I that would step on its surface.

  It’s time I was leaving to go to the town; through the tortuous graveyard I’ll shamble down, twixt tombs to the right of me, tombs to the left of me, tombs in front of me, gaping in silence.

  I make this last statement with naught of compunction, that, if in these lines you perceive aught of unction, you must know that this vile deed (I see you are frowning) is due to an over abundance of Browning.

  Thanking you lots for the interest money, I beg to remain

  Most lovingly

  Sonny

  • In White’s senior year a freshman named Morelli defied tradition by refusing to wear the little gray beanie that every first-year student was expected to wear. Public opinion, including editorial opinion in the Sun, was strongly against him. He was twice attacked by mobs of students: once he was chained to a tree; another time he was tossed into Beebe Lake. But Morelli had his champions, chief among them the famous George Lincoln Burr, professor of medieval history and hater of anything that smacked of orthodoxy and of lynch law. It would appear from the following letter that Professor Burr had written to the Sun defending Morelli; when the Sun failed to publish his letter, Burr took his complaint to the Ithaca Journal News. Whereupon White, though his term as editor-in-chief had expired, felt called upon to defend the Sun.

  To GEORGE LINCOLN BURR

  [Ithaca, New York]

  April 24, 1921

  Dear Professor Burr:

  As a former editor of the Cornell Sun, I have a most intense interest in everything which pertains to the Sun and to the University.

  When I read your communication to the editor of the Journal News, my interest was naturally awakened. When I read the part which expressed your hope that the article would prove “less unwelcome” to the Journal than to the Sun, my interest stretched to the point of investigation, for, after all, it goes pretty deep to hear the journal for which I feel a sense of loyalty accused of editorial bias and a tendency toward the suppression of news. As far as I have been able to learn, your article failed to appear in Saturday’s issue because of a misunderstanding and not because of the dereliction of editorial duty on the part of any one connected with the Sun.

  My ideas on freedom of speech and of the press coincide very closely with yours and they are the ideas and principles which I have tried, during my regime, to pass on to the Sun.

  Sun editors, Professor Burr, sometimes commit journalistic errors, but Sun editors are not journalistic miscreants, and your article, I feel very sure, was not “unwelcome.”

  Very sincerely yours,

  E. B. White

  • In the summers of 1920 and 1921 White worked as a counselor at Camp Otter, near Dorset, Ontario—a boys’ camp owned by Professor C. V. P. Young, Cornell’s physical education director. Canoe trips were the big thing, and the woods and lakes of Ontario opened White’s eyes to a wilderness far removed from the Belgrade Lakes region of his childhood summers in Maine. He loved the life. Almost fifty years later, he drew on his memories of Camp Otter in his account of “Camp Kookooskoos” in The Trumpet of the Swan.

  The camp had a strong Cornell flavor: Howard Ortner, varsity basketball star, was a counselor, along with C. E. (Bugs) Ackerly, featherweight wrestling champion at the 1920 Olympics, and Howard Cushman. Abram T. Kerr, a teacher in the Cornell Medical College, was camp doctor. Another counselor, not from Cornell, was Robert (Hub) Hubbard. He and White became good friends and in later years became joint owners of the camp, a partnership that turned out to be ill-fated.

  During his junior year, White had fallen in love with a Cornell coed, Alice Burchfield, a Buffalo girl. She was petite and by all accounts pretty. Their romance, rather cautious and ill-starred, lasted a long time, and many letters passed between them.

  To ALICE BURCHFIELD

  Dorset, Ontario

  [July 1921]

  Sat.—almost Sunday

  Dear Alice:

  You’re right about the mails improving—nothing like practice, you know. Thanks for the snapshots. Your idea was pretty good but the execution was rotten.1 I was prepared for a back view, anyway. But I thought you could pick out someone not a decided brunette. And how tall you are growing, Alice! Oh well. . . . I’ll try to get my moustaches registered on a film, although that’s as tough a job as you and your bobs. Until last night my moustaches have been spread all over my face—a six foot growth during the trip. The poor things were all gnarled and matted when I returned. But my whiskers were perfectly beautiful—everyone agreed that I looked like Saint Peter, except Brad,2 who said I resembled the man who used to take his garbage up. And Art Treman3—who had just arrived—failed to recognize me for the first three minutes.

  Our return to camp was phenomenal—and the cookies played a vital part which is getting ahead of the story. The trip was awfully good—the best I’ve taken this year. Hub and I pushed hard the first couple of days to get the work done and the ground covered, and then lay on our backs and absorbed sunlight. We swatted bullfrogs whenever we hit a swamp, and kept ourselves supplied with legs. The second afternoon out we left the canoes at Big Trout Lake and walked through to Wolf Lake to look the trail over. Hub will be leading a trip through that way next week and I am scheduled to take one the week after. The trail is a good five miles and pretty bad. We had to go most of the way by the blazes, the trail itself being overgrown. It used to be a lumber road forty years ago when the pines were still standing in this country. At Wolf we came out on a little sand beach that ended in a marsh. There were fresh deer tracks all along the shore and the woods were crisscrossed with runs. It was the grimmest lake I’ve seen yet. On the morning of the third day I took the coldest pre-breakfast plunge of the summer. (Hub and I are under a silent agreement to go in every morning.). . .That day one of the kids got sick. He had been a little low when we started, but seemed to revive as we went on. But when he began to develop a temperature and had passed out a couple of times, we began to hit for camp. We ate lunch at a lake that was about eleven miles north of camp, and put the kid to sleep. When he woke up late that afternoon, his eyes looked queer and he was too weak to stand. Hub and I decided that it wasn’t safe to keep him out over night. And the only way to get him to camp was to leave the three other kids and the grub and to come through with him and on
e canoe. The sun had been down fifteen minutes, and the only light was the glow in the west. There were four lakes and three portages between us and camp, and then a two mile walk from the last lake. We got three teaspoonfuls of tea down the kid’s throat, took a little snack ourselves, lifted him into the canoe, and beat it. It was a weird journey. We had to make time to get to the last portage while there was still a vestige of light. On the carries, Hub took the boy and I took the canoe. On one of the lakes I stepped too far over toward the log where the trail ended, and went down to my hips, being prevented from going any further by the canoe. We were in too much of a hurry to even laugh—although we did the next day when I was combing the mud from my pants. We made the last portage just in time to get through without missing the trail. The kid had just strength enough to sit on Hub’s shoulders without falling off. Luckily he only weighed about 90 pounds. The last two miles were darker than hell’s cellar. We left the canoe and took turns with the kid, picking our way along. We reached camp just as Mr. Young was putting the fire out—a record trip of a little over two hours. And this is where you come in. After giving the kid to Doctor Kerr, Hub and I went into the shack to look for something to set us up. We had come all the way from the Boundary of the Reserve that day, and all we had tasted since lunch was a bowl of tea. The kitchen was locked as usual. Ackerly had eaten the last of a community pie that we had cached under the stairs. Cush donated a thimbleful of cheese—but that didn’t help much. When life was at lowest ebb, Cush mentioned that a couple of packages had come for me and that he had put ’em in my tent. Good Lord if you knew what those cookies meant in our lives. . . . You can bob your hair and grow a moustache and a couple double chins and I’ll still love you—you can have my last shirt, and I’ve only got two.