E.B. Whiter than White

there is something insufferable about good old E.B. White

I had been hoping to see a great movie on the big screen, but ended up going to see Blue Moon, the new film about the break-up of Rodgers and Hart. I went more out of a sense of Lorenz Hart’s genius being worth the ticket, than in any hope that it would be, in itself, a great film. And so it went. Blue Moon was decent enough, but it is written like a play, not a movie. Sometimes it is laugh out loud funny. It ended about five minutes after I got sick of it.

Lorenz Hart was a lyrical genius. You can skip the film, but be sure to put his songs on. Along with Porter, Gershwin, and Berlin, Hart is one of the great lyricists of the Great American Song Book. Manhattan, Bewitched, Isn’t it Romantic, This Can’t Be Love, My Funny Valentine, The Lady is a Tramp, I Could Write a Book, Thou Swell, Where or When, and, of course, Blue Moon are some of his songs that became standards.

One mystery of the film was the presence of E.B. White. I don’t know why E.B. White is in Blue Moon, and I doubt that the screenwriter does either. Hart’s character needed a foil, having worn out two others, and White provided the dour counterpoint necessary to keep the scene in balance. Time magazine reports that this was more or less the explicit reason for including White: “so Hart would have someone with whom to discuss the art of writing.”

It is little wonder they chose White to be Hart’s interlocutor. No figure could have more immediate cachet with a film-watching audience for a “conversation about writing” in the mid twentieth-century. White has frequently been held up as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century. James Thurber said that “No one can write a sentence like E. B. White.” That still seems to be the consensus.

Kurt Vonnegut called him one of the best stylists America has ever produced, and praised the “charming” things he has to say. In Lithub this year Sam Weller called him not only a “beloved children’s author” but an “innovative and revered essayist”. Last year James T. Keane said White should be better known for his essays than his children’s books. White is a staple of anthologies and writing classes thanks to these essays. Another writer said of White: “he… shaped the voice of American prose more lastingly than any of his noisier contemporaries. A writer of crystalline clarity and unobtrusive wisdom.”

So esteemed is White that Cornell holds an archive of some twenty-five thousand of his letters. He is the sort of writer whose quotes are still popular on Twitter. There is even a scholarly monograph about his work. And he is, of course, the White of Strunk & White, beloved by a certain sort of American writer as the supposed last word on the rules of writing.

After a while, White simply walks out of Blue Moon. It left me wondering, how long has it been since I read his work? In fact, I wondered, how much have I read it, other than Charlotte’s Web and ‘Here is New York’?

So I picked up a copy of the Essays of E.B. White to see what all the fuss is about. And I found that there is something insufferable about good old E.B. White.

Everyone loves Charlotte’s Web and rightly so—it’s a children’s book of the highest order—but the man of the essays, the temperate voice of the mid-century New Yorker, whose whole persona has a keen nostalgia value today, has the sort of insistent, supercilious gentleness that soon drives me to ungenerous thoughts. Page after page, White recounts the little events of his life, activities with Fred the dachshund, the books and profiles he keeps in bed with him when he is ill, the fattening and then grieving of a pig who died from an unknown illness. O who can object to such moderate stuff? Isn’t it mere grouchery to complain of a friendly tone that never ever snaps?

Consider the pig. The whole essay is clear and neat, a sort-of New England Variation on Orwell’s Elephant. (Orwell wrote in ’36, White in ’47.) White has the knack of opening an essay with the conceit of an alarming diary entry: “I spent several days and nights in September with an ailing pig.” It’s a neat trick, to begin with something so hum-drum, and to create a reverse effect with such a small but unexpected word—pig—, like a literary double-take. But it is just so expectedly charming (one becomes comfortable with White’s voice after only a few sentences; it is like slipping into a cardigan made of the finest wool) that it defeats itself: once White’s dry manner becomes obvious, it cloys. A first stolen spoon of treacle is delicious, but by the end of the bottle we feel dismal, like the pig to whom White forcibly administered a bottle of tonic.

There is always the reassuring glow of a lamp at the other end of the room in the background of White’s tone. He has clothesline and castor oil to hand, not to mention the inner spirit to tackle a pig and force feed it a bottle of medicine. He is able to winch things up, tie them down, sort them out. And so he is able to deadpan his way through a word like enema without breaking the charmed spell of his prose: “I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema, there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles.”

Well, White’s persona is one of life’s more stereotyped roles—what else would we expect from a personal essayist than these familiar tricks of misdirection and juxtaposition? Isn’t the whole turn of phrase—“I discovered that once… there is no turning back… no chance of…”—simply a well-known formula, well used?

White has the pretense of being an ordinary man who understands things in an ordinary way, which means he often ends up sounding like he is writing a letter to his grandchildren: “Two hurricanes have visited me recently, and except for a few rather hasty observations of my own (which somehow seem presumptuous), all I know about these storms is what I’ve heard on the radio.” In this, he very much resembles the writer Alistair Cooke. Indeed, if I am not paying attention, I could all too easily mistake the one for the other. They each insist on their authorial presence by being soothing, neighborly, comfortable in their gentle wisdoms. It is as if they took the genre of easy listening and created easy reading.

They are Emerson inverted, exhorting you with all calmness to stay at home, stick to the old ways, take pleasure in the comfortable values of life as was until just recently, and to not by any means go questing into the future.

This is all well and good—sometimes it is no bad thing to spend an hour or two reading White or Cooke, if for no other reason than to know what made a writer prominent in the mid-century, even if we remain, afterwards, more dedicated to Jospeh Mitchell, David Halberstam, or Gay Talese—but when White slips out of his comfortable shoes and starts striding into declarations, judgements, and summations about politics, the whole act starts to fall apart, and I find myself wishing it was time to bring on the girls, the jugglers, Fred the dashchund, anything else at all—even the pig.

Here is White objecting to atomic energy in 1956:

I am not convinced that atomic energy, which is currently said to be man’s best hope for a better life, is his best hope at all, or even a good bet. I am not sure energy is his basic problem, although the weight of opinion is against me. I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man is he spent less time proving that he could outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

It goes on in this jumpy manner for some time. Oh wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be as nice as that terribly wonderfully nice E.B. White? Notice that it does not follow to say that atomic energy is our best hope and to then call it our basic problem. White is allowed to proceed by non-sequitur because modern personal essays proceed on the basis not of making sense or seeking truth but of expressing the mood of the author. What outwitting Nature means, or respecting her seniority for that matter, is not explained, but White sets out the sort of concerns we are still familiar with: giving antibiotics to chickens, the cumulative effect of having X-Rays, and so on. He makes no attempt to consider these problems on their own terms, or by thinking about the trade-offs, but merely pronounces in a mode more suited to his humorous style:

The raccoon, for all her limitations, seems to me better adjusted to life on earth than men are: she has never taken a tranquilizing pill, has never been X-rayed to see whether she is going to have twins, has never added DPPD to the broiler mash, and is not out at night looking for thorium in rocks. She is out looking for frogs in the pond.

Although White talks about “the confused situation on this planet” he doesn’t see both sides of the confusion. Having X-Rays is, as he would well know if he wasn’t trying to fit his thoughts to the mood of his column, really quite a good thing on balance. As is the existence of the medical industry that provides the tranquilizers. Only a few pages earlier, White was extolling the vet who tended his pig! If you want to make your living by writing these sorts of columns for the New Yorker while living in Maine and ambling with your dachshund, the Faustian pact of the modern world is really quite a good one. White’s theorizing is weak because he has no ideas. He knows only what he feels. He is an ambler.

When he writes about the loss of things, such as the decline of the railways in Maine, he has a splendid power of narrative brevity and intrigue : “Death came quickly to the railroads of Maine.” He is also able to turn personal experience into representations of larger events: “I was watching television one day and saw the tower of Portland’s Union Station fall over, struck down by a large steel ball swinging from the boom of a crane. I felt the blow in the pit of my stomach.” But his only interest in thinking about the future of the railways is just as personal, just as impressionistic, relying on the formulas of “it seems to me” and “I am reasonably sure”—phrases that allow him to say whatever he wants to be true.

It is admirable to write so beautifully about trains—“I will miss cracking the shade at dawn—and the first shafts of light in the tinted woods”—but it is just plain silly to make grand generalizations merely for the force of argument and the pleasure of prose. “A state without a rail service is a state that is coming apart at the seams,” he proclaims in his typical manner. Well, much as I, too, would like more trains in America, that was as patently untrue in 1960 as it is today.

At his best, though, as in ‘Here is New York’, White brings large observatory power to describe with loving attention the workings of human life.

A man starts for work in the morning and before he has gone two hundred yards he has completed half a dozen missions: bought a paper, left a pair of shoes to be soled, picked up a packet of cigarettes, ordered a bottle of whisky to be dispatched in the opposite direction against his home-coming, written a message to the unseen forces of the wood cellar, and notified the dry-cleaner that a pair of trousers awaits call. Homeward bound eight hours later, he buys a bunch of pussy willows, a Mazda bulb, a drink, a shine—all between the corner where he steps off the bus and the apartment. So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within an area smaller than the confines of a village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he will be uneasy until he gets back.

One must read this as fiction, of course, or at least, non-fiction conglomerated to the point of fiction. The aggrandizing use of “missions” is part of White’s trompe l’oeil fantasy, as is the comforting “homeward bound”. As with the pig essay, he is adept at combinatorial clichés, both in his phrasing and images. If you want a real sense of New York you would be better off reading some novels or a writer like Jan Morris. Reading White does not help us understand the world, but escape it. His method and approach might best be summed up in his own words. Here he is, talking about his lifelong habit of daydreaming about boating:

I have noticed that most men, when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea-wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended. There is hardly a waiting room in the East that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or the drill begins to whine.

What others call White’s world-class prose style, I have come to think of as the aesthetic of a day-dreamer. All that well-turned phrasing and neat, clear sentences, are little more than the well-refined style of a writer who works by impressions, not ideas, impulses not understandings. As a children’s story teller and pseudo-fictional observer of life, this works exquisitely. But as a thinking essayist, he is too tame, too much like “a gentle, steady, morning breeze.” The clean style is adhered to strictly, and no hard thinking is allowed to upset those strictures.

As I say, White just leaves Blue Moon after a while, like a boat that sails round the cove. He smiles his poignant smile, the wisdom wrinkling round his eyes, makes tired intellectual play with a few one-liners, and then he becomes one who is acquainted with the night. I felt—and feel—no wish to follow him, or to hear any more. He is, ultimately, too patiently gloomy without being original, too softly-spoken while foreboding doom, too much at the beck and call of his too-neat style. His demeanor starts out as something fresh and ends up rather overfamiliar, and all within a page.

I was happy enough to bob along with White “under a slight press of sail” (a perfectly expressed metaphor for his writerly manner), but it is unlikely that I shall ever go back to his dream life. One immersive visit has been quite enough.

I shall hope to read Charlotte’s Web again, but that seems to me to be exactly the problem. The small, simple lines in which he draws the world of his children’s books are the same ones he uses to sketch out his personal essays. He wants to make the world still and simple for us. When writing about the loss of the railroads, it’s just lovely, but it is lovely as a fiction. When he tries to talk about the world as we really have to live in it, this childish innocence becomes diminishing. We cannot go back to the world of the pig, however many plain tales he enchants us with. It is not just that his Strunk & White prose style is limiting: so is his consoling vision of the personal-essay genre.

E.B. White’s writing lives in the waiting room of another world, and much as he writes very nicely, I have no wish to wait with him there any longer. The pig is dead and we must go on with our lives.