Letters of E.B. White: The Quiet Life of a Literary Master

The collected Letters of E.B. White is a surprisingly easy and entertaining read. It is surprising because the letters consist of 685 pages - nearly eight decades’ worth of correspondence to the family, friends, colleagues and fans of an unadventurous, shy, buttoned-down literary man.

Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) lived his life close to the ground. He had a reserved personality, and maintained reserved habits. He travelled rarely - was never on a plane in his life - and, apart from attending the formation of the United Nations in San Francisco as a journalist in 1946, was directly involved in none of the major events of the twentieth century.  He had strong social and professional connections to New York’s literary society through his job with the New Yorker magazine, but was otherwise uninvolved in New York cultural life. He seldom attended concerts, shows, art exhibits, or even sporting events.

He spent most of his middle and old age living in a large farmhouse in Brooklin, Maine where he indulged his love of the countryside, of animals small and large and domestic and wild, and spent long days sailing and fishing on the Atlantic. It was there that he and his wife, Katherine Angell, an editor with the New Yorker, raised their three children.

The farmhouse was also where White produced most of his work including the children’s books for which he is most known today – Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan – as well as the writer’s bible, The Elements of Style, which he co-authored, and, over the course of nearly six decades, hundreds of pieces for the New Yorker, including personal essays, political analysis - particularly on the topic of freedom of speech - and cartoon captions.

In both his writing and his life, White valued simplicity, directness, and clarity. As his English professor at Cornell University, William Strunk, wrote in the first edition of The Elements of Style (which White would update and add to several decades later), “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” White’s letters are models of such precision, but are also full of wit and elegance, and are perfect blends of fact, opinion and emotion, without ever blurring the distinctions between those realms.

His colleague at the New Yorker, James Thurber, once said, “No one can write a sentence like E.B. White.” The Letters contain hundreds of notes, office memos and letters, each one unique in its content and notable for its care in composition and sensitivity of emotion. In 1942, for example, he wrote a friend who was serving in the Marines:

Glad to hear you’re fighting the war in the Marine Division. I’m fighting it with brown hens’ eggs, and waiting -- a bit nervously -- to be drafted. We’ve been having practice raids here, and I dash around the roads at night blowing a horn and feeling kind of silly. Am also learning to shear sheep. The sheep look as though they’d been through the siege of Corregidor when I get through with them. But wool brings a good price this year.

In only a few lines, he paints a detailed picture of the simultaneous anxiety, absurdity, and continuity of life on a farm during a war that is taking place thousands of miles away.

White’s self-deprecating humour and story-telling abilities are again shown to good effect in a note written to his secretary at the New Yorker, Daisy Terry, relating his situation in the midst of a late-winter New England cold snap:

Blowing a living gale here from the NW, and the temperature this morning early was 10 degrees [Fahrenheit]. All water pails frozen solid, pasture pond solid, all doors resisting all attempts at ingress and egress, frost-proof valve on outside water line frozen, master of house all alone and frozen, barnyard sunny and full of little black-faced lambs and their mammas. I have spent most of my time, since getting here, keeping the kitchen stove hooked up to fever pitch. Coldest 4th of April since 1879.

Am living on a straight diet of rye whiskey and Franco-American spaghetti. The first night I was here, though, I boiled a potato and it was quite an experience. We have a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen here, and I finally found one of them that told how to boil a potato, and  I followed directions to the letter and it came out fine. I am sitting here right now planning my Sunday dinner menu and it has just come to me -- rye whiskey and Franco-American spaghetti. Luckily we had a wonderful spaghetti crop last summer, and it keeps well.

I find it the most convenient of all foods because while it is warming in the saucepan I keep tasting it to see whether it is warm enough, and by the time it is warm enough to eat, it is all eaten, so that means there are no dishes to wash -- all I have to do is rinse the empty saucepan and hang it up on its nail over the stove. If everybody knew my secret it would revolutionize domestic life in America.

If you encounter my wife you might tell her that I am alive, as she will be wondering about that.

These letters demonstrate White’s ability to craft a vivid image, or a series of images, that will hold the reader’s attention, even if the action depicted is nothing more momentous than a man living by himself in a farm during a bout of cold weather.

White didn’t live a turbulent life. He is an example of a writer who does not have to lead a hectic or tortured life in order to produce imaginative or entertaining work. All he needs is to observe closely the life around him, carefully note his reactions to it, and then record them in a well thought out, clear manner. His individual style – his particular sense of humour, or melancholy, or drama, whatever makes his work unique and valuable as a piece of art – will naturally transmit itself to the reader.

Other prominent American writers at the time E.B. White was writing, and who also blended journalism, biography and fiction, included Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway. Their lives were marked by alcoholism, drug use, multiple marriages, and belligerent behaviour towards friends, lovers and foes alike. They gave us wild works of mercurial genius that changed the way we look at our lives and our world, but they also suffered catastrophic defeats artistically, commercially, and personally.

White, on the other hand, serves as the more useful model for the rest of us, both in terms of how to live and how to create art: find out what you like and what you are good at, discipline yourself and work hard to maximize your capabilities. The most important thing for a creative individual is to develop one’s own character and self-knowledge, engage with the people and the atmosphere and the scenery around you, and react to them honestly.

This is not necessarily an easy program to follow. White himself explained his occasional frustration in a letter to a young fan who inquired about the relationship between his and his wife’s work:

My wife is helpful to me in my writing, but she does not write. She is an editor. An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do, but who has escaped the terrible desire to write. I have been writing since 1906 and it is high time I got over it. A writer, however, writes as long as he lives. It is the same as breathing except that it is bad for one’s health. Some of my writings have won prizes but awards of that sort are not very much fun or satisfaction and I would rather have a nice drink of ginger ale, usually. Writing does have its rewards but they do not come in packages.

Though White had to work hard at his writing, and was often frustrated by it, he was able, because of his disciplined style, to avoid the embarrassments that often accompany over-exuberant prose. In contrast, this month Norman Mailer posthumously won the 2007 Bad Sex Writing award. The winning excerpt can be found here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/11/28/bbsex128.xml).

White would never have blemished his writing with such florid excess; his natural reserve and understated elegance would not allow it.

E.B. White died as simply and gently as he lived and wrote, in 1985, eight years after the death of Katherine. In the winter of 1984, he fell and hit his head, and from then on, suffered from rapidly increasing dementia. His family and friends tended to him, particularly his son Joel. He was often confused, but always recognized his children and grandchildren, and he never lost his sense of humour; he was always able to laugh at his own errors.

The first edition of his correspondence was published in book form several years before, and, nearing his death, his favourite activity was to sit back in a comfortable chair and have Joel read from his own letters of decades past. His mind would transport itself back in time, and he would imagine himself to be in the situations his letters described: visiting friends at the Algonquin Hotel in New York; touring London with his wife on the one overseas trip he ever took; and, most of all, simply enjoying the New England outdoors: sailing, walking his dogs, playing with his children.

It was the very clarity and vividness and directness of his own writing that allowed his failing mind to enjoy such a pleasant, carefree descent into its final darkness, and provided the perfect example of the writer’s ultimate aim, as he stated in The Elements of Style: “Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer plays to an audience of one.” White’s lifelong dialogue with himself, though, is of sufficiently masterful linguistic quality that it can provide both instruction and entertainment for hundreds of thousands – and that is an accomplishment to be celebrated – maybe with a glass of ginger ale.

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