Talk of the Town

IN HIS NEW BIOGRAPHY of E.B. White, author Scott Elledge reports a remark about White which the poet Adrienne Rich made in a letter to Katharine Angell. White's late wife. Rich said "she thought, without detracting an inch from H.D.T., that it must be a good deal more difficult to be E.B. White in the 20th century than Henry Thoreau in the 19th ... How's this? Is White a troubled or oppressed American? Famous as a stylist, essayist, and author of children's books. White has long been identified with the The New Yorker. America's most prestigious and profitable magazine, for which he has worked much of his adult life. It is difficult to imagine White weighed down with worries.

And yet, judging from the attacks on White which Elledge relates, twentieth-century Americans have not always liked White. In 1935, when The New Yorker was nine years old, both White and his wife Katharine Angell, together with their mutual friend James Thurber, had been making names for themselves through their work on the magazine. Desiring to be both witty and disinterested, informative but sophisticated. The New Yorker:

made it its policy from the start to stay away from solemn discussions of the great issues and problems of the day, on the grounds that such discussions had no place in its humorous pages.

Several people attacked this policy. Ralph Ingersoll, a friend of White's, published a polemic against the magazine in Fortune that year. He wrote personally of White that:

He is shy, frightened of life, often melancholy, always hypochondriac.... The record of E.B. White's absorptions is written for all to see in "Notes and Comment" first his Scottish terriers, then his guppies, more recently a serious interest in economics--and a continuation of his long campaign against war.

Most of The New Yorker's vices, as Ingersoll told it, were the fault of the White family:

If you complain that The New Yorker has become gentler and gentler, more nebulous, less real, it is the Whites doing: Andy's gossamer writing, in his increasingly important "Notes and Comment," and in his flavoring of the whole magazine with captions and fillers. Katharine's ... civilizing influence on Ross.

No-one would assert that White's life has been traumatic. But White's mental and physical vulnerability to such attacks has caused most of the troubles of his adult life. These troubles stand out in a story one naively imagines as placid. Indeed, it is the achievement of biographer Elledge that he conveys not only what White has done or meant but what it must be like to be White. He does not simply transcribe the hard facts of accomplishment, tempting though this might be when the subject is alive, he also captures the fluctuating essence of White's predominantly genial character

WHITE'S CHILDHOOD seems to have been happy. He was born in 1899, "in the fashionable section of Mounte Vemon. New York," to loving and prosperous parents Elwyn Brooks White was the sixth and youngest child of his family. His father taught him" to respect the responsibilities of the head of a family as well as the rights of all its members to privacy, independence, and self-realization.... But much more important, during his most impressionable years, he learned from his father to be an optimist, and to believe in his luck." From his mother, White seems to have received his unpretentiousness and his love for the natural world.

By the time White was in his teens, the lineaments of his mature character were visible. He was not weak, but was never in good health. He was fascinated by boats and animals, the natural world providing an alternative to "loneliness, boredom, and fear." His self-confidence was not what it might have been. Elledge remarks:

Though he had good friends among his peers, could write better poems than his classmates, and could state, swim and canoe at least as well as any one of them, he was afraid to speak to girls he liked, forgot his speech in a debate, and failed to make the track team. At parties he felt ill at ease. The first signs of hypochondria seem to have appeared during his adolescence

In 1917, when war broke out, White was typically uncertain of what he wanted. He didn't know whether to enlist or to go to Cornell and wait for the draft. In the event, he chose Cornell, working as a Farm Cadet the summer before he left to satisfy his feelings of patriotism.

According to Elledge, White's college education seemed to strengthen and confirm rather than shape or remold his character. He chose Cornell rather than any other college because his older brothers had studied ther and because "Cornell was less uncomfortably elitist, less discriminatory, less homogenous than Harvard. Yale or Princeton,"--schools he could easily have entered. In the course of his years in college. White became editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun, a post which seems to have meant more to him than any other single experience.

College experience, though inadvertently preparing for his later work as an essayist, seems not to have kindled any great ambition for literature, Elledge remarks that:

To be sure, "the sanctity of the English sentence," is something few students discover, but a good literary education leads to other discoverers, wider in scope, among them the discovery that the works of great writers nourish the imagination and augment the wisdom of experience. Andy took courses under professors capable of giving such a literary education but none seems to have succeeded with him.

White's own attitude may be glimpsed in an editorial he wrote on a Cornell dean's defense of education. The dean had completely rejected an utilitarian understanding of education. White wrote, "It takes a genius to ignore the material side of education and still leave his mark. And universities aim to develop men and not geniuses. "It is characteristic of White that he wished to be thought of as a man and not as a genius.

FAILING TO BE OVERWHELMED by his education, White also missed the experience of a passionate romance. Though he paid attentions to a girl named Alice Burchfield, their relationship was troubled by poor timing and repeated misapprehensions. Shortly after graduation, while White was in a period of moving from job to job and of travelling across America, he proposed marriage to Alice; she turned him down. For a while they corresponded, as White worked his way across the country. As White was returning to the East Coast:

Alice, not aware of his impending arrival, had mailed him a long letter. When they met in Buffalo, Alice did not tell him what she had said in that letter. The reunion was uncomfortable.... What Alice had wanted Andy to know and had implied in her letter, but could not bring herself to tell him face to face, was that if he were to propose to her now, she might say yes.... By this time, however, Andy had decided that he was no longer in love with her.

Elledge's picture of the White who went to New York City in search of work shows a young man who, though recognizably American, lacked the early experience of maturity and the personal flamboyancy so often equated with life after World War One.

White supported himself in New York through work at several jobs, chiefly in advertising. He contributed light poems to the literary magazines of the day, and a few humorous items to The New Yorker, a new magazine being formed by Harold Ross. On the suggestion of Katharine Angell, one of Ross's assistants. White was hired as a more or less regular staff member: only after several months did he give up his advertising job to work full time for the magazine. White began by writing short items and graduated to writing the "Talk of the Town" section. Though troubled health and personal restlessness sometimes took White away from New York City and from the magazine, he had found what he later recognized as his life's work.

He also found the woman, Katharine Angell, who was to be his wife. Katharine was a beautiful woman, striking for her looks, dress, manner, and not least for intelligence: she gave crucial guidance to the fiction department, helping to develop the distinctive features of the magazine's short stories. Though she was married when she first met White, Katharine obtained a divorce both to spare her children troubled scenes and to marry the man she loved. Though neither of them enjoyed good health, their marriage was in other ways happy. After her death White wrote, "I don't know what I ever did to deserve a wife with Katharine's qualities, but I have always had a lot of luck, and she was the most notable example."

WHITE'S MATURE WORK, in essays or in fiction, dealt very much with the real world; White championed environmental concerns long before they were socially acceptable. He refuted Anne Morrow Lindbergh's The Wave of the Future, which he thought disguised the real evil of fascism. He opposed hydrogen-bomb testing and McCarthyism; he was capable of finding, in the deceits of American advertising, "a family resemblance" to the propagandas of the German Nazis. And in Charlotte's Web White offered:

a modern book based on the integrity of a humble and skeptical view of the natural world and of the human beings in it. It gives no support to prejudice in favor of the superiority of human beings or of one sex over another. It does celebrate a child's generous view of the world and a child's love of that world.

Most of White's problems seem to have resulted not so much from any refusal to face life but from the refusal of American critics to accept the personal diversity of writers. American society, though by no means always moral, is overwhelmingly moralistic; at different times, under certain conditions, some Americans will do anything to establish their favorite slogans. Writers who do not proclaim or support values are dismissed as godless or decadent--annoying labels, however, writers who do take strong moral stands often feel that they have been tricked into doing so, that they will now be dismissed either for impractical idealism or for boring preachiness. White's sensitive health and unaggressive integrity, taken with the fact that he wrote in the highly personal form of the essay, made him vulnerable to shrill attacks long before vulnerability was the fashion.

White did not take all of this lying down. He objected strongly to those writers who sought to control opinion. Working on a World War Two government pamphlet with Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Lerner, and Malcolm Cowley, White wrote:

It is always sobering to encounter the intellectual idealists at work, for they seem to live in a realm of their own, making their plans for the world in much the same way that any common tyrant does. The conversation today reminded me a little of the early New Deal period when Wallace was talking about one God and one king--and it all seems so far removed from the people, who are all full of tiny faults and virtues and whose name is Schmalz and Henderson.

Yet White was not entirely unsympathetic to intellectual radicalism. When Roosevelt was trying to pack the Supreme Court (an attempt White opposed), White observed that:

Fascists, Communists, New Dealists all seem to me persons who have been so tortured by the horrors of the world today that they have simply been unable to live amidst so much that is unsolved, and so cling to the first logic that appeals to them.

But even while he tried to understand the behavior of such intellectuals. White rejected them as role models. On a more emphatic day he wrote that:

This is one of the greatest menaces there is, people with intelligence deciding that the point is to become grimly gray and intense and unhappy and tiresome because the world and many of its people are in a bad way. It's a form of egotism, a supreme form.... How can these bastards hope to get hold of what's the matter with the world when they haven't the slightest idea that something just as bad and unnatural has happened to them?

At times, White's struggle over what American literature and values should be like took comic forms. After Stuart Little had appeared, the reactions at The New Yorker were mixed. Harold Ross shouted at White for saying that the mouse was born, not adopted. White had committed the mortal sin of using the wrong word. Then, reports White:

My next encounter--was with Edmund Wilson, who stopped me in the hall "Hello, hello," he said in his wonderfully high and thrilling voice that sounds like a coaching horn. "I read that book of yours ITI found the first page quite amusing, about the mouse, you know. But I was disappointed that you didn't develop the theme more in the manner of Katka."

Elledge's sympathetic and engaging story tells the life of a man who developed and did not sacrifice his humanism, decency, and commitment to freedom. White's character and achievement must be weighed against the sickness to which his sensitivity exposed him and against the shrillness of those who could accept him only by condescending to him as a humorist. What American letters might have lost in a novelist it gained in an essayist; and what culture might have missed in a hero it found in a sensible, if limited, man.