Thank you -- I'm not familiar with White essays, but I was startled to enjoy Charlotte's Web so much as an adult reading it to my children. For a long family car journey, I recommend the audiobook recording of 'The Trumpet of the Swan,' read by White.
As the kids say, "Sames!" I had never read Charlotte's Web and found myself even more moved than my kids were. To this day-- my kids are now teenagers-- we will sometimes repeat Wilbur's ingenuous "I don't wanna die" in a playful way, but there is always the unspoken memory of the tears we shed later when Charlotte died.
Oh, my! A take-down of E. B. White, with Alastair Cookie thrown in! And on Thanksgiving. Have you no heart? This would be a bit like calling Queen Elizabeth a bore after The Queen’s Christmas Message. Just kidding, all is forgiven. What you say is entirely true. Still, I love the man. He is more of an institution than a writer. His real crime lies not in his harmless essays, but in the devastating effect of The Elements of Style, which blighted American prose for nearly a century, by depriving us of any style whatsoever. For style one should read Style by F. L. Lucas. You might also enjoy the essayist A. J. Liebling as an antidote to White.
No matter whether one agrees on the target, Oliver raises important questions for appraising White’s style, his ideas, and his longevity as an essayist. Not least, the piece elicits chuckles: The subject “has the sort of insistent, supercilious gentleness that soon drives me to ungenerous thoughts.” The accusation that some writers have taken “the genre of easy listening and created easy reading.” And, of course, the business with the pig.
Thank you for making me think about E.B. White today, Thanksgiving Day. My wife and I have purposely made no plans for a feast. We did the turkey, etc, to the nines on Canada's equivalent to Thanksgiving in October with our daughter who came home from there. We filled the table with friends we'd never otherwise see on the American holiday. Now, free to lounge in front of a fire, with old clothes and favorite books, I'll pull E.B. White close like a blanket and read his stories of his days on his little farm. I had such a farm once myself, and every word which he wrote is entirely accurate in the world of the "Gentleman Farmer". Cheers to all.
His trifecta of classic children's literature ("Charlotte's Web", "Stuart Little" and "The Trumpet Of The Swan") will keep him in print even if no one cares about his essays now.
Ach: so mean! :) I guess I cannot wholly disagree, except to say -- as you yourself have argued previously -- that it's a little unfair to adjudicate a writer taken out of his history by the standards of our time. I haven't read all of White's essays, but the columns published in One Man's Meat (1942) have, beneath their seemingly placid surface, an underlying current of dread, associated of course with the War, but also with technological and social change. I think a great deal of his appeal during his time was that his readers felt the same way. Where you (validly) see an insufferable absence, White's readers may have taken comfort. If his work is ultimately an elegy of a passing era, it's a worthwhile saudade.
I had no idea White was part of Strunk and White! Cool! (although I am deeply ambivalent about S+W)
Wonderful. Long overdue. Can clarity be simulated? This question occurs to me when reading certain notional stylists of the White school. The Stoner cat comes immediately to mind. But more importantly, why are we so frightened of lashing out at tedium. (Perhaps because we’re nodding off.) Again, the Stoner cat comes immediately to mind. At least Elements of Style, once you start reading closely, looks a bit like the hall-of-mirrors shootout at the end of The Lady from Shanghai. It’s hard to tell what just happened. And you think you’re the problem.
Trumpet of the Swan was and remains my favorite children's book. It is beautiful. And it took on new meaning when my Mom got a tracheostomy and could no longer talk. She would write on a dry erase board. Agreed about the essays - insufferable is the right word.
It is Thanksgiving morning and I remain grateful for EB White. If you are not, you do not have to read him. He loved his dogs, and he was torn between the competing desires (for finite beings like ourselves) to save the world and to enjoy it. Me too. Some writer.
Greetings. This is an interesting take on White's style that I both enjoy and take some umbrage with. Before we get to all of that, I'd like to point out a possible misreading on your part and I wonder if, after considering another take, you will find White less "insufferable" and more emblematic of late modernism thrust on a post WWII early postmodern American literary scene.
White's text in question: "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."
Your response: "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..."
I don't think that White's text here reads as a non-sequitur. He states that he is "not convinced (that)...atomic energy is man's best hope for a better life." Here, he is clearly (if one looks at the other popular texts of the time) writing about the post WWII American-dominated "Nuclear Age" and all of the advertising and public pronouncements, and willingness to just plow forward without questioning how or to what extreme we are doing so. In the next sentence, his thought that he is "not sure energy is his basic problem" has to do with the use of and pursuit of energy sources and the expanding technological and industrial world that the zeitgeist of the time is promoting as overwhelmingly positive. This is not a non-sequitur at all; it is merely stating that the popular solution to all of our troubles at the time is to run headlong into the atomic age and that that may very well be a solution to a problem that is not the fundamental problem of mankind.
Again, before I continue, I am interested in your thoughts on my reading and if reading it this way changes your perception of White's writing.
Thanks in advance for your response and thanks for the writing!
Despite the huge success of CHARLOTTE'S WEBi, he had a "maximum payment" clause in his contract with Harpers, limiting his annual royalty payments to a maximum of $7,500 to protect him from high taxation.
In 1971, at 70 years old, he suffered injuries in a car crash and needed money for his expenses and well-staffed household. He was a a writer and archivist who saved nearly all the letters he received and kept copies of most of his replies, which formed the basis of the extensive E.B. White Collection at Cornell University Library.
What did you make of “Once More to the Lake" if you got to it?
White might at times write with the "aesthetic of a day-dreamer” as you well put it, but it seems to me that elsewhere he speaks clearly, and in a weightier way, to human experience - “Lake” being the best example of which I know.
To me such pieces are wonderful, and they redeem his less substantive stuff, though it’s not clear to me a day-dreaming aspect in an essayist demands redemption.
Plucked from obscurity (and now referenced almost daily) by Marginal Revolution I might suggest that what amounts to the commodification of an enormous stroke of luck has really gone to your head. “The Elements of Style”
endures for a reason, as does Charlotte’s Web and E.B. White’s
oeuvre in general. Your “woke” tilt is what’s becoming insufferable. What would the reaction have been if the headline had made a pin of the name of Langston Hughes?
You'd probably like White better if you read what he wrote and not what you read. For example, there's no non sequitur in White doubting that atomic energy is man's best hope or that energy even is man's basic problem. Man's basic problem in fact may well be living in harmony with the natural world. That's what he means by not trying to outwit Nature and spending more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
Any mid-20th century literate reader, not to mention one from 2025, would understand that, wouldn't need to have their hand held as they traversed that very straightforward idea. Think of it as stylistic reserve and respect for the reader.
"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."
Yes, quite right, it's White's voice that earned him his reputation. I wonder, however, whether you undervalue its significance?
"A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death."
Do I want to live in a world where children climb trees and adults cooperate to care for those very trees, that is to say, for all their children? Cooperate to halt and reverse nuclear proliferation (climate change, mass extinctions, pandemics, etc.)? Cooperate to liberate families from fear of cold shadows? Of course I do.
The very first thing that has to happen is that we must come to believe, individually and corporately, that we don't have to live the way we're living right now. Give me a writer who can convince us that we have agency and choice. The rest is just details.
Thank you -- I'm not familiar with White essays, but I was startled to enjoy Charlotte's Web so much as an adult reading it to my children. For a long family car journey, I recommend the audiobook recording of 'The Trumpet of the Swan,' read by White.
I don’t know it was available read by him! That’s a must
As the kids say, "Sames!" I had never read Charlotte's Web and found myself even more moved than my kids were. To this day-- my kids are now teenagers-- we will sometimes repeat Wilbur's ingenuous "I don't wanna die" in a playful way, but there is always the unspoken memory of the tears we shed later when Charlotte died.
Oh, my! A take-down of E. B. White, with Alastair Cookie thrown in! And on Thanksgiving. Have you no heart? This would be a bit like calling Queen Elizabeth a bore after The Queen’s Christmas Message. Just kidding, all is forgiven. What you say is entirely true. Still, I love the man. He is more of an institution than a writer. His real crime lies not in his harmless essays, but in the devastating effect of The Elements of Style, which blighted American prose for nearly a century, by depriving us of any style whatsoever. For style one should read Style by F. L. Lucas. You might also enjoy the essayist A. J. Liebling as an antidote to White.
agree about S&W—will look at Lucas thanks
No matter whether one agrees on the target, Oliver raises important questions for appraising White’s style, his ideas, and his longevity as an essayist. Not least, the piece elicits chuckles: The subject “has the sort of insistent, supercilious gentleness that soon drives me to ungenerous thoughts.” The accusation that some writers have taken “the genre of easy listening and created easy reading.” And, of course, the business with the pig.
Thank you :)
Thank you for making me think about E.B. White today, Thanksgiving Day. My wife and I have purposely made no plans for a feast. We did the turkey, etc, to the nines on Canada's equivalent to Thanksgiving in October with our daughter who came home from there. We filled the table with friends we'd never otherwise see on the American holiday. Now, free to lounge in front of a fire, with old clothes and favorite books, I'll pull E.B. White close like a blanket and read his stories of his days on his little farm. I had such a farm once myself, and every word which he wrote is entirely accurate in the world of the "Gentleman Farmer". Cheers to all.
His trifecta of classic children's literature ("Charlotte's Web", "Stuart Little" and "The Trumpet Of The Swan") will keep him in print even if no one cares about his essays now.
Agreed although they do seem to care very much about the essays
Ach: so mean! :) I guess I cannot wholly disagree, except to say -- as you yourself have argued previously -- that it's a little unfair to adjudicate a writer taken out of his history by the standards of our time. I haven't read all of White's essays, but the columns published in One Man's Meat (1942) have, beneath their seemingly placid surface, an underlying current of dread, associated of course with the War, but also with technological and social change. I think a great deal of his appeal during his time was that his readers felt the same way. Where you (validly) see an insufferable absence, White's readers may have taken comfort. If his work is ultimately an elegy of a passing era, it's a worthwhile saudade.
I had no idea White was part of Strunk and White! Cool! (although I am deeply ambivalent about S+W)
Happy American Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Wonderful. Long overdue. Can clarity be simulated? This question occurs to me when reading certain notional stylists of the White school. The Stoner cat comes immediately to mind. But more importantly, why are we so frightened of lashing out at tedium. (Perhaps because we’re nodding off.) Again, the Stoner cat comes immediately to mind. At least Elements of Style, once you start reading closely, looks a bit like the hall-of-mirrors shootout at the end of The Lady from Shanghai. It’s hard to tell what just happened. And you think you’re the problem.
Amen and thank you. I beg you, tackle Chesterton next. (Not literally, of course.)
Trumpet of the Swan was and remains my favorite children's book. It is beautiful. And it took on new meaning when my Mom got a tracheostomy and could no longer talk. She would write on a dry erase board. Agreed about the essays - insufferable is the right word.
It is Thanksgiving morning and I remain grateful for EB White. If you are not, you do not have to read him. He loved his dogs, and he was torn between the competing desires (for finite beings like ourselves) to save the world and to enjoy it. Me too. Some writer.
Greetings. This is an interesting take on White's style that I both enjoy and take some umbrage with. Before we get to all of that, I'd like to point out a possible misreading on your part and I wonder if, after considering another take, you will find White less "insufferable" and more emblematic of late modernism thrust on a post WWII early postmodern American literary scene.
White's text in question: "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."
Your response: "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..."
I don't think that White's text here reads as a non-sequitur. He states that he is "not convinced (that)...atomic energy is man's best hope for a better life." Here, he is clearly (if one looks at the other popular texts of the time) writing about the post WWII American-dominated "Nuclear Age" and all of the advertising and public pronouncements, and willingness to just plow forward without questioning how or to what extreme we are doing so. In the next sentence, his thought that he is "not sure energy is his basic problem" has to do with the use of and pursuit of energy sources and the expanding technological and industrial world that the zeitgeist of the time is promoting as overwhelmingly positive. This is not a non-sequitur at all; it is merely stating that the popular solution to all of our troubles at the time is to run headlong into the atomic age and that that may very well be a solution to a problem that is not the fundamental problem of mankind.
Again, before I continue, I am interested in your thoughts on my reading and if reading it this way changes your perception of White's writing.
Thanks in advance for your response and thanks for the writing!
So sorry you seem to have missed the truly wonderful LETTERS OF EB WHITE, published in 1978, when he was still alive -- because he needed the money!! https://www.harpercollins.com/products/letters-of-e-b-white-revised-edition-e-b-white?variant=32115761283106
Despite the huge success of CHARLOTTE'S WEBi, he had a "maximum payment" clause in his contract with Harpers, limiting his annual royalty payments to a maximum of $7,500 to protect him from high taxation.
In 1971, at 70 years old, he suffered injuries in a car crash and needed money for his expenses and well-staffed household. He was a a writer and archivist who saved nearly all the letters he received and kept copies of most of his replies, which formed the basis of the extensive E.B. White Collection at Cornell University Library.
What did you make of “Once More to the Lake" if you got to it?
White might at times write with the "aesthetic of a day-dreamer” as you well put it, but it seems to me that elsewhere he speaks clearly, and in a weightier way, to human experience - “Lake” being the best example of which I know.
To me such pieces are wonderful, and they redeem his less substantive stuff, though it’s not clear to me a day-dreaming aspect in an essayist demands redemption.
Plucked from obscurity (and now referenced almost daily) by Marginal Revolution I might suggest that what amounts to the commodification of an enormous stroke of luck has really gone to your head. “The Elements of Style”
endures for a reason, as does Charlotte’s Web and E.B. White’s
oeuvre in general. Your “woke” tilt is what’s becoming insufferable. What would the reaction have been if the headline had made a pin of the name of Langston Hughes?
Leave if you don’t like it!
You'd probably like White better if you read what he wrote and not what you read. For example, there's no non sequitur in White doubting that atomic energy is man's best hope or that energy even is man's basic problem. Man's basic problem in fact may well be living in harmony with the natural world. That's what he means by not trying to outwit Nature and spending more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
Any mid-20th century literate reader, not to mention one from 2025, would understand that, wouldn't need to have their hand held as they traversed that very straightforward idea. Think of it as stylistic reserve and respect for the reader.
"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."
Yes, quite right, it's White's voice that earned him his reputation. I wonder, however, whether you undervalue its significance?
"A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death."
Do I want to live in a world where children climb trees and adults cooperate to care for those very trees, that is to say, for all their children? Cooperate to halt and reverse nuclear proliferation (climate change, mass extinctions, pandemics, etc.)? Cooperate to liberate families from fear of cold shadows? Of course I do.
The very first thing that has to happen is that we must come to believe, individually and corporately, that we don't have to live the way we're living right now. Give me a writer who can convince us that we have agency and choice. The rest is just details.