I could say that I’m not obsessed with the New Yorker, but that would be wrong. If you don’t believe me, go here, or here, or here, or here, where I’m in the midst of a 30-part examination of the writings and life of James Thurber.
Back in the day, E. B. White was almost as celebrated as Thurber. Furthermore, since White was personally a fairly patient and gentle soul, rather than a pathologically quarrelsome drunk, he was a lot more popular than Thurber. He also lived a lot longer, dying in 1985 while Thurber, only a few years older than White, cashed in his chips in 1963.
Today, White’s fame rests largely on his little book Elements of Style and two children’s books, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, but back in the fifties, sixties, and even the seventies, he was a quasi-legendary figure, almost the conscience of American letters, displaying an austere, ascetic high-mindedness that was clearly, and proudly, modeled on that of Henry David Thoreau.
Well, I was never crazy about Thoreau, and never crazy about E. B. White either. In the years immediately following World War II, White, quite naturally horrified by the most spectacular bloodletting in human history, invested emotionally in the idea of world government as the only possible cure for humanity’s quite obvious hunger for self-destruction. I don’t blame White for wanting the world to be ruled by reason rather than wrath, but the prose he employed to argue his case gave me the creeps. Among other things, he came up with the following, which always struck me as the ne plus ultra of coy manipulation: “Trust the men with short first names: Tom Jefferson, Al Einstein, Manny Kant.”
Both “Tom” Jefferson and “Al” Einstein are pretty awful, but “Manny” is over any possible limit. And what about “Joe” Stalin? Is he a good guy?
All of which is to say that when I came across a copy of Essays of E. B. White in a pile of discarded books, it was a contrarian impulse indeed that made me take it with me. Okay, White! Let’s see just how bad you can be!
Well, I came to scoff but stayed to read. White himself put together the collection, published in 1977, shortly after retiring from the New Yorker in 1976. Though he draws on his entire career, he includes nothing that was done later than the early sixties. Presumably, he considered the collection in some way his “best,” though he never uses that word. He includes a large chunk of One Man’s Meat, a collection of smug, faux-folksy pieces he wrote for Harper’s back in the thirties about running his farm in Maine, which I read many years ago and detested, gagging over too-E. B. lines like “I don’t know which is harder, literature or chickens.”
Naturally, I skipped those, but most of the rest were, well, more than first rate. They were fantastic! What is (perhaps) remarkable is that in the first-rate pieces, White is always looking backwards. White was, too often, given to waxing precious over the evanescence of the moment, but, in these essays, he usually gets it right.
The first essay I read was “A Slight Sound at Evening,” written on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Walden. E.B. on H.D.! What better goad for my contempt? Naturally, White does an excellent job, praising Thoreau for all things about him that I found so irritating, and getting most of them (or at least some of them) right.
“It is the testament of a man in a high state of indignation because (it seemed to him) so few ears heard the uninterrupted poem of creation, the morning wind that forever blows. If the man sometimes wrote as though all his readers were male, unmarried, and well-connected, it is because he gave his testimony in his callow years. For that matter, he never really grew up.”1
For Thoreau, the whole point was not to be like everyone else. He would have been massively if not mortally depressed if everyone did hear the uninterrupted poem of creation as clearly as he did, because then he would have to admit that he was just like everyone else. Still, White makes me feel, and accept, his enthusiasm for Thoreau—his abiding affection for Thoreau’s cockiness, his irresponsibility. It’s a book that should be read when one is young and not afraid to be unfair. And to remember it is in some measure to be young again.
The winner of winners for me is “The Years of Wonder,” a long memoir provoked in White’s mind in 1962 when the Soviet Union, in an early fit of glasnost, suggested that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. join together to build an enormous dam across the Bering Strait and tap the force of the Arctic tides to generate electricity. White smugly notes that the plan came to nothing (he had the gentleman’s contempt for experts) but uses it as springboard to recall a remarkable Alaskan adventure he undertook as a young man.
In 1923 White was working as a reporter for the Seattle Times. He was fired, it would seem, for displaying Thoreauish qualities. His life may have been empty, but his heart was full. He wrote in his diary “A man must have something to cling to. Without it he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.”
The particular trellis that White lit upon was a notice in the paper that members of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce would be leaving that city on the steamer Buford, stopping in Seattle en route to ports of call in Alaska and even as far as Siberia in search of commercial opportunities.
At first, White tried to get a job on the Buford. When that failed, he took most of the money he had in the world ($40) to buy a first-class ticket to Skagway, the fourth of a more than a dozen projected stops on the journey. Once on board, he surely would be able to find employment.
And so things worked out, more or less. He got a job as a waiter and, somehow, was allowed to keep his first-class cabin. Good, but not good enough. As a passionate young socialist, White longed to join the international proletariat and got his wish when he became a waiter of another sort, serving, not the first-class passengers, but rather the crew, below decks in the firemen’s mess, where he inhaled “a special smell—a blend of cabbage, garbage, steam, fuel oil, engine oil, exhausted air, exhausted men.” The smell, in a word, of reality.
Life got even better for White when he was evicted from his first-class cabin and housed instead in the ship’s brig, which was fortunately otherwise unoccupied. The brig was essentially a large steel box set in the hold. During high seas, White would be ankle-deep in cold sea water. Reality!
Alaska proved to a delight precisely because it was so awful. Snow-capped mountains? Yeah, they were probably around, but what you really noticed was a sordid, pathetic northern colonialism, the dregs and leavings of “civilization” poured out a barren shore, exploiting a miserable and misbegotten native population.2
Nome proves to be particularly picturesque: “Everybody in Nome lived out of tin cans, and the disposal system was simple and direct; the empties got heaved out of rear windows, and landed on the beach. The beach was an enormous dump, with the accumulated cans comparing favorably with the buildings themselves for architectural mass.”
Later, life at sea is enlivened by a walrus hunt, which proves, if anything, too successful. “All over the deck lay the stinking walruses, the massive carcasses slashed and gouged by the knives of our hungry Eskimos, who gnawed at the raw trophies as you might work away at a cheese if you were hungry for a snack.” Finally, a glimpse of exotic Asia: “a bleak headland called Cape Serdze, with patches of snow spotting the ground.”
The capper is a three-day gale so brutal that not even the crew can keep a meal down, but White doesn’t flinch. He rolls with the punches, taking the worst Nature can throw at him and laughing at her fury. A pleasure cruise? For the few—for the great-souled—Yes!
Returning to Seattle, White spends a night in the Frye Hotel and writes a poem about a waitress in the Chantecler Restaurant:
How many orders of beef have you passed over the counter,
Girl with white arms, since I’ve been gone?
How many times have you said
“Gravy?”
Your arms are still white
And you’re still the thing in all the room
That transcends foodstuffs.
By standing there
You make the restaurant part of September,
And September, girl, is part of the world—
A sad-voiced, beautiful part.
How many orders of beef have you passed over the counter,
Girl with white arms, since I’ve been gone?
I wasn’t writing poems about waitresses when I was 23, that I can recall, but I did write one last year:
The Hostess
Exigencies of the tanning bed
Have no time for oranges or cockatoos.
Look at my body!
The short skirt I wear, the three-inch heels,
My long legs flashing, a match for Diana’s!
For what?
To carry heavy glasses of artisanal beers,
Explain modern menus to old men,
Bear extravagant dishes for impatient young couples
Fretting as though I were an inconvenience
An obstacle to their happiness
Who could not be dispensed with too quickly.
While they eat and consider
Another glass of wine
I rush to gather
The soiled napkins and glasses, plates and silverware
Ever collecting in unceasing heaps,
A cycle that binds me
Like a donkey to a cart.
Were my loins made for this?
Who among you could look on my nakedness unafraid?
Where is the man who will take me from this
Who will make me Mistress of Nature, as I should be,
And not Mammon’s slave?
Afterwords
Born in 1899, E.B. White lived through among the most momentous, and most tragic, decades in human history. His upper-middle-class childhood3 must have seemed beyond Edenic when viewed from the vantage-point of post-World War II America. Despite his immense post-war prestige, White had the feeling out of place in America ever since the McCarthy period, which he apparently experienced as a rejection of the right of established, East Coast WASPs like himself to run things. Like so many of his generation, he tended to see the atom bomb, television, and tranquilizers as equivalent horrors. The Essays includes a remarkably long, and remarkably bitter, diatribe on the decline of passenger rail service in Maine, which has not aged well. So skip that one and go to Alaska instead.
- White quotes Thoreau’s famous line “A man who lives by the sweat of his brow sweats more easily than I do” but doesn’t call him, as he should have, on the fact that Thoreau had neither a mortgage or a family to keep him busy. He was living gratis on land owned by, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson. ↩︎
- As a “gentleman socialist,” White had an infinite contempt for anyone who wasn’t just like him. It didn’t matter if they were Shriners or Eskimos. He notes that in his diary, he invariably describes himself as “lounging” or “sauntering” about, the boulevardier at sea. ↩︎
- When he was a teen-ager, White used to take his dates to the Plaza Hotel for tea dances. Where else would you go? ↩︎
