Letters of E. B. White Read online

  And that is what is known as “upsetting the dope” or “a bad day for the followers of form.” And I would write you many more things about nights in the Blue Grass, with the heavy breathing of asthmatic cows next our tent, and about the high bridge across the Kentucky River south of Willmore, and about the remarkable beauty of the women of Louisville, and about the road from West Point to Cave City, and about Elizabethtown, and about the hospitality of the people of the state, and about little fires at dusk—but it is now seven of the clock in the morning, and Cush will be awakening in about ten minutes and we will be wanting our breakfast, which is lying before me on the ground, in its natural state, and which I must set about preparing. Haven’t heard from you in a long while, but we haven’t heard from anyone in a long while, not hitting the right post-offices.

  Andy

  • The two young horse players, flushed with their success in Lexington, tried again at Churchill Downs, where they were a complete flop. White, in the hope of recouping their losses at the track, wrote a sonnet to the winning horse, Morvich, right after the race, and sold it the same evening to the Louisville Herald (after being turned down by the Courier). The poem appeared the next morning in a two-column box on the front page, under the byline “Elwyn Brooks White.” The sonnet began, “Bold son of Runnymede. . . .” It is conceivable that this is the only time in the history of horse racing that a gambler managed to recoup his losses by selling a sonnet.

  To ALICE BURCHFIELD

  Chicago, Illinois

  [May 1922]

  Monday night

  Dear Alice:

  I waited over the week-end before writing hoping I’d hear from you, but no letter came today, so I’ve decided to write anyway.

  . . .From Cave City we went back up the Dixie Highway toward Louisville. We landed the night before the Kentucky Derby, on the outskirts of the city in the dark. Picking out a nice soft spot near the road we went comfortably to sleep and arose the next morning to find ourselves in the municipal dumping grounds. That’s the joy of picking beds in the dark. Another time we awoke and found we had come darn close to sleeping on the lawn of the Governor of Kentucky, near Frankfort.

  The Derby was a sight worth going all the distance for. I picked up a sudden spasm of hayfever at the vital moment, but saw a good deal notwithstanding. It’s Kentucky’s big day. Everyone gets all dolled up and excited in the morning, and drunk at night. After a vigorous afternoon of betting on various animals I came out only 60 cents to the good. Cush lost six dollars. We rode dejectedly in to Childs on a dumpy street car, and I told Cush that I felt a sonnet coming on—indited to Morvich, the winning horse. He worked strenuously to dissuade me, but I wrote it on a paper napkin while he was busy with chicken giblets, and then afterward we went round and got Hotspur and drove to a street light in front of the public library where I pulled out my loyal Corona and typed it off. “Now I shall sell it,” I cried, while Cush sat on the curbing and tried to act as though he didn’t know me. “Do you do this for glory or for money?” the editor of the Louisville Herald wanted to know when I presented the gem. “I do it for money,” I replied, coming quickly to the point. So I took the five dollars and Cush celebrated with glass after glass of Coca Cola, drowning his guilt thus. We left town that night (sleeping next to a cow that suffered from some chronic disorder that caused her to cry all night) and the next morning bought a Herald in Shelbyville and found the sonnet jumping at us from the front page, next to the news story of the big race. My name was in such large type I could hardly eat my fried egg. I now claim the distinction of being the only person that ever wrote a sonnet to a race horse and got away with it.

  . . .Today is rainy. Chicago in the rain is a forlorn prospect. Hope the post office has something to offer—and one thing in particular.

  Yours,

  Andy

  • Enclosed with the following letter was a clipping from the Minneapolis Journal listing E. B. White as “Last Week’s Winner” of the limerick contest the paper was running at the time. With the $25 prize for the best last line in their pockets, the wayfarers were able to shake the dust of Minneapolis from their feet.

  To JESSIE AND SAMUEL WHITE

  Billings, Montana

  25 June 1922

  Dear Folks:

  Little Falls, Brainerd, Walker, Akeley, Park Rapids, Detroit, Moorhead, Fargo, Mapleton, Buffalo, Tower City, Oriska, Valley City, Sanborn, Jamestown, Cleveland, Medina, Crystal Springs, Tappen, Dawson, Steele, Driscoll, Sterling, McKenzie, Mencken, Bismarck, Mandan, New Salem, Glen Ullin, Hebron, Almont, Richardton, Taylor, Gladstone, Dickinson, South Heart, Bofield, Fryburg, Medora, Sentinel Butte, Beach, Yates, Wibaux, Glendive, Fallon, Terry, Miles City, Rosebud, Forsyth—these will fill out your map for you. By these have I come circuitously and stoutly to Billings.

  South of Hardin, Montana

  27 June 1922

  I am now seated in the shade of one of Montana’s seven trees. When you are in Montana you can say, “You know that tree near Helena . . .” Trees and water scarcely exist in this state, and when you do find them they are always together. A thin line of foliage running between the hills forty miles in the distance means that there is a creek there. It is quite likely dried up. But that is not all I could say about Montana.

  From St. Cloud—which was our camp at last writing—we journeyed north through the fertile river-bottom country of Minnesota. Gradually the open fields of grain were left behind and lakes with wooded shores began to appear. Brainerd is a county seat, where fishing tackle and canvas buckets are on sale to north-bound tourists. We picked up some grub there, and some flour bags for containers. That afternoon we washed dirt from ourselves and our clothes in Ten Mile Lake and slept there in a little pine grove. Slipping on a pine needle, I tumbled on my right elbow the next day, and dislocated it. The mayor of Walker, who is also the president of the Board of Education and the town physician, gave me a good manly sniff of ether, and when I again awakened to the world some four hours later, I found the elbow neatly done up in a plaster cast. The next morning Cush and I drove over to a T.B. sanitorium on Leech Lake and I had an X-ray taken of the wayward member to see what the Doctor had been doing in my temporary absence. The fellow there was a sort of photographic bug, and he took a wonderful stereoscopic picture. It showed the bones to be uninjured and properly set. The principal damage of course was to the ligaments, muscles, soft tissues, and other items constituting an arm. The Doctor, who incidentally was a very capable sort of person—having taken care of the whole town of Walker for 29 years single handed—advised me against too much idleness, so I ripped the plaster cast off the following morning at 4 o’clock, and now after twelve days am pleased to report that all that remains of this dark and terrible chapter in my life is an empty bottle of Sloan’s liniment—which we still keep with us when we sleep because the smell keeps mosquitoes away.

  Walker is on Leech Lake. It is a decadent lumber town of a thousand souls. The two big days of the year are the days when the Indians from a nearby reservation get paid off by the Government. For a week prior to these days the shop windows of Walker are dressed in Christmas splendor. We had a lot of fun in Walker, lingering there over the weekend to clear up the Doctor’s bill and allow my arm to get under way. Saturday morning Uncle Tom’s Cabin came to town—a genuine little road company, heralded by a genuinely superlative handbill depicting the ferocity of the bloodhounds and the departure of the soul of little Eva. It was a big day for Walker. The two railroad cars which carried the troupe were shunted off onto the freight siding across from the depot at an early hour; long before the town—with the exception of the male population age 8 through 14—was bestirred. The cars had seen better days. Even in the midst of early morning, long before the first Siberian bloodhound had commenced to bark—even before the fat cook had yawned and rolled over, preparatory to starting breakfast—one could see that they were the merest shadow of their former selves. . . . Despite the playbill’s adequate announcement that the
company would arrive “in their own private palace cars” there was a lack of lustre somewhere. One doubted not the lineage of these cars but their fortune.

  By nine o’clock things were getting under way for the noon parade. The small, fat ponies were grazing on the little grass plot next to the siding, rolling their pink, vicious eyes at the town boys who edged in to take a stealthy pat. The bloodhounds were leashed to the side of the car, napping and growling by turns. They were the sort of mongrel mastiffs which you see in any Italian quarter, evidently picked up by the astute manager for a petty farthing. Through the dirty windows of the car, little Eva’s mother was discernible. She was washing her hair. Colored gentlemen practised laconically on cornets and trombones, sounding the meaningless, isolated notes dear to the hearts of horn-blowers. The success of one small town boy in setting off a string of fire-crackers under the nose of one of the bloodhounds marked a little crisis in the hot, tense morning. By ten o’clock the flunkeys were fussing with harness and with bolts and coupling pins and traces. Things fitted together in the easy, exact way which denotes long weeks of packing and unpacking, buttoning and unbuttoning. There was no shouting of orders. You felt that things would come naturally and normally to a head at twelve o’clock. The manager appeared in a grey suit. He unleashed the hounds personally, and the Siberian animals were frantic with joy. They recognized real blood when they saw it. Fifteen town boys stood proudly in line and were fitted with faded red jackets to augment the parade.

  By five minutes of twelve the horn-notes of the negro band had increased almost to the fervor of a symphony. The miniature cabin had been assembled and was lined up behind a span of mules. The brown pony had been put into the tiny red buggy with gold trimmings, and all eyes were turned ready for the advent of little Eva. She came unabashed before the worshipful gaze of a hundred urchins—pink-befrocked and thirteen. What a sight to see her climb daintily and demurely into her tiny buggy and raise her pink parasol above the golden curls that had been so carefully tied with pink ribbon! What a growling the bloodhounds set up! What a stamping of ponies’ hoofs and beating of negro drums! What a race for the curb on the part of Walkerites! Where was Uncle Tom? No one knew. I had a suspicion he was the second cornetist from the right, but it was a thing I said nothing about. What a flutter of banners!—And what am I writing all this for . . .

  Monday we made fifteen dollars. Cush had been talking with the editor of the Cass County Pioneer—a typical country weekly. The editor put him next to some dope—so the editor said. Anyway, it worked. A new hotel had recently been erected on Leech Lake. Cush went to the manager and told him that he (Cush) would supply the room cards, containing rules and regulations, free of charge if the manager would let him solicit small ads for the margins. So we drew up a dummy, and out of about thirty business men in Walker (you ought to see a Walker business man) we sold fifteen. That netted $26.50 and the printing bill was $11.00. The whole thing consumed less than twenty-four hours, and we shook the dust of Walker Tuesday noon.

  The region around Walker used to be wonderful lumber country. It has now all been either lumbered or burnt over—a thing, however, which has not marred its beauty but simply given it a new kind of beauty. South of Walker there used to be a town called Lothrop, which was a lively gambling center, full of the business of lumbering and of lumbermen. Today there is not a stick left of the town. Natural dirt roads crisscross the state. They are smooth and beautiful. Along one of these we went, through Akeley and Detroit—which people in Minnesota really call “De-trō-it.” Every curve in the road brought forth a new lake to view, shining blue and peaceful and unmolested. It was a day of very white clouds, and very blue skies, and very dark green spruces behind the lighter hardwoods. Wild roses lined the road timidly all of the way.

  It was Tuesday noon, hot and bright, when we left Walker; and it was Saturday noon, hotter and brighter, when we dismounted and stretched before the post office in Billings. Eight or nine hundred miles. To attempt to tell you about it would be like attempting to tell you how a piece of music sounds. But I wish you could have been with us. If you have never rushed along through eastern North Dakota, mile after mile, with never a turn, with never a landmark in all the great sea of grain—rushed along on a two track road that comes from the sky thirty miles behind and leads to the sky thirty miles ahead—why then you ought to drop your task and do it.

  There are so many things about the west which you learn and unlearn. Your popular conception of a national highway would be blasted were you to ride, as we rode, into the capital of North Dakota on a road which had grass in the center just as the roads of North Belgrade used to. With the exception of city streets, we have not been on a single artificial road since the marvelous concrete highway from Minneapolis to St. Cloud. All the roads here are “natural.” Of course they are what is called “improved,” but they are nothing more nor less than the old trunks worn down with the passing of centuries of hoofs and wheels.

  Just as we got to Bismarck, the capital, Hotspur coughed, wheezed, and died of malnutrition. It was late at night and we had been running since early morning, having come all the way from Fargo. Being sufficiently tired ourselves we automatically climbed into the bed roll, and awakened the next morning on an island in the middle of a boulevard. But we hadn’t bothered to take our trousers off, so the embarrassment was slight. That is the beauty of our equipment—it works right in the heart of cities.

  A stern-wheeler carried us across the rushing Missouri, and at Mandan we ran upon a tremendous sign which said, “This is where the west begins.” Not much farther, out on the prairies, we passed our first prairie schooner. It was a man and his young wife—moving from west to east. First came the cattle—ambling slowly along at the insistent pushing of a clever pony which the man rode splendidly. Then came the schooner, drawn by two sturdy horses, and driven by the girl. She was very sun-burned and very beautiful. She stared, wide-eyed, and seemed very much a part of things. You felt she could stand motionless all day, like a horse dozing by pasture bars. Behind the schooner—which contained all their worldly estate—were a couple of ponies, a mule, and a colt. We took a picture of the outfit, and drove on. Then we turned and watched it crawling steadily along, like a ship at sea, steadily on to the horizon.

  I’m drawn up by the road as I write this, with my Corona set up in Hotspur’s tonneau. (Did you know he had a tonneau?) An Indian with his family just passed in a buckboard drawn by two spotted ponies. I am on the Crow reservation. As he passed he asked me to take a picture, and I have just performed that duty, handing the three-months old baby a quarter. The Indian spoke effortless, correct English. “My name is Fred Oldhorn,” he said, and, squatting, quickly wrote it in the dust. He said this was the only independent Indian reservation—the only one in which the Indians are not paid by the government. . . .

  There is a magic to this state of Montana. Of course we have not yet come to the mountains, nor to the “scenery.” But there is something about Montana ranch country so wildly enchanting as to be almost fearsome. Stand on the plains in the valley of the Yellowstone; watch great herds advancing grimly, like the ranks of an army, into the sun. The leaves of the aspens quiver down by the banks of the Yellowstone. And you don’t know anything of what they whisper. And the herd which you thought was a mile away you now know is three miles away. You look at the painted buttes, silhouetted majestically, and you don’t know whether they are a hundred feet high or a hundred thousand. . . .

  Yesterday noon we turned south from Billings toward Hardin. I spent two hours helping a fat red-headed family up a hill with their Ford. It was a screamingly funny outfit. The day was hot and the Ford was hot and all the red-headed fat people were hot and the hill was steep. The total weight must have been in the neighborhood of forty thousand pounds. They were typical tourists—left their house home when they started but took everything else with them in a trailer and hung promiscuously about the flanks of the Ford. When I got there, the Ford had refused to pu
ff any longer and the red-headed baby had taken to wailing because he had been so long without a drink of water. Out of the sticky mass of debris I excavated the trailer, unhooked it, and laid it aside. Then I excavated the entire family one by one from the back seat, the fenders, the front seat, and the hood. I laid that too aside, including a faint son-in-law who was the only thin thing in the outfit. Then I hailed three cars in succession and milked a gallon of gasoline from each, and placed these in the belly of the Ford. And I wiped his timer, and patted him gently on the hood, and gave him cool water. Then I hailed a fourth car and tied the trailer to its rear and let it pull the trailer to the top, which it could do easily, being a good robust car. Then, having got the Ford reduced pretty well to simple terms, I mounted and rode easily and swiftly to the top of the hill. And pretty soon the family came panting up from where I had laid them aside, and after we had got the trailer hooked on again and all the wash-basins, fine-tooth combs, handy toolkits, collapsible chairs, and patent tent pegs too, why then the family got in and were off in clouds of dust and exhilaration. And truly it was a splendid sight, and well worth the effort.

  Hardin is a genuine western town. I can’t write you about it at this sitting because I am due at my labors very shortly. Cush and I both have jobs. Cush is a hay hand in the fields, and I play the piano at “Becker’s Cafe.” I now close this account, such as it is, with love and greetings to all.

  Yours,

  Andy

  To JESSIE AND SAMUEL WHITE

  Hart’s Ranch

  near Melville, Montana