7

My Debt to E. B. White

In 1929, when I moved to New York, I was immediately attracted to The New Yorker magazine, that was then in its fifth year, and to E. B. White, who had helped make it a remarkable magazine, and who had been on the staff for three years. My debt to Mr. White, after 55 years of living with his writings, stems from two gifts that are rarely possessed by one person: the ability to see things whole, or more whole than most, and the language to tell us ordinary mortals what he sees.

I am not a literary person, but I know that White’s writing style is greatly admired among some literary folk. His revision of Strunk’s The Elements of Style is a widely used text. He is sometimes identified as a humorist, and I find good laughs in his work. He is a fellow who, when the spirit moves him, just naturally breaks into song—so there is quite a bit of poetry. In his later years, there have been stories for children. As a so-called adult, I find them delightful. But his writing style, his humor, his poetry, and his children’s stories are not the central focus of what I want to acknowledge here, though, obviously, they are the context within which it is housed.

I have not received from reading E. B. White the solutions to any of life’s dilemmas, but for these 55 years, I have had constant assurance that if I will see clearly where I am (and where I and others in similar dilemmas have been), and if my direction is right (uncluttered with zany ideas), I will always better know what to do now. This has been a valuable learning, and I am exceedingly grateful that I received it early. I am not aware that, in the course of my formal education, I heard anything about this. But then, it probably takes an artist to put this over, and for the most part, my teachers were not artists. E. B. White is such an artist.

James Thurber, White’s good friend and collaborator from their early days on The New Yorker, freely acknowledges White as his mentor on writing. And he seems to have understood White’s unique gifts better than White himself understood them. Thurber, writing in 1938 from France, chides White for publishing a piece in The Saturday Evening Post (which may have paid better at that time than The New Yorker). Thurber, after lamenting the confusion in the world and the crazy things people are doing, says, “It remains for a few people to stand aside and watch them and report what it looks like and sounds like. Among such persons, there isn’t anybody better qualified for the job than you—if you will quit sending pieces to The Saturday Evening Post.” Thurber goes on to express his concern that White does not understand or appreciate his gift and reminds him that his writing is not simply a response to the writer’s urge but is a matter of “moral necessity.” It is the kind of letter that only a cherished friend would write. In short, Thurber tells White (in my language) to get with it and make the contribution to our times that only he can make. Thurber seems to be saying to White, “You see things whole, and that is what you should write about—in the only place that is likely to let you do it—The New Yorker. Maybe Harpers, but not The Saturday Evening Post.”

Thurber and White as young men shared a small office at The New Yorker. In that period, they collaborated on a spoof of psychoanalysis to which they gave the provocative title, “Is Sex Necessary?” It was a best-seller. After Thurber died, White wrote a new introduction for a new edition. In it he said, “You would think that a couple of young fellows trying to get along in the world could have found something better to do.”

Elwyn Brooks White was born in the close-in suburb of Mt. Vernon, New York in 1899, the sixth child in a family whose father was a successful piano manufacturer in New York. As a child, he developed a fondness of animals and had pets and kept chickens and pigeons, a disposition that emerged later when he retired to his farm in Maine. About his childhood, White says in the introduction to his collected letters:

If an unhappy childhood is indispensable for a writer, I am ill-equipped: I missed out on all that and was neither deprived nor unloved. It would be inaccurate, however, to say that my childhood was untroubled. The normal fears and worries of every child were in me developed to a high degree; every day was an awesome prospect. I was uneasy about practically everything: the uncertainty of the future, the dark of the attic, the panoply and discipline of school, the transitoriness of life, the mystery of the church and God, the frailty of the body, the sadness of afternoon, the shadow of sex, the distant challenge of love and marriage, the far-off problem of a livelihood. I brooded about them all, lived with them day by day. Being the youngest in a large family, I was usually in a crowd but often felt lonely and removed. I took to writing early, to assuage my uneasiness and collect my thoughts, and I was a busy writer long before I went into long pants.

“In school,” he continues, “I contracted a fear of platforms that has dogged me all of my life and caused me to decline every invitation to speak in public.” When White turned 70 in 1969, a New York Times reporter went up to Maine, where he then lived, to interview him. In the course of the interview White said, “I was born scared, and at 70 I am still scared.” I will come back to this comment later. In that interview, White had some things to say about growing old.

“How should one adjust to age!” Mr. White was asked, and replied: “In principle, one shouldn’t adjust. In fact, one does. (Or I do.) When my head starts knocking because of my attempt to write, I quit writing instead of carrying on as I used to do when I was young.

“These are adjustments. But I gaze into the faces of our senior citizens in our Southern cities, and they wear a sad look that disturbs me. I am sorry for all those who have agreed to grow old. I haven’t agreed yet. Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself—a lad of about 19.

“A writer certainly has a special problem with aging. The generative process is slowed down, yet the pain and frustration of not writing is as acute as ever. I feel frustrated and in pain a good deal of the time now; but I try to bear in mind the advice of Hubert Humphrey’s father. ‘Never get sick, Hubert, there isn’t time.’”

White attended Cornell University, whose founding president was one Andrew White. By tradition, every male student to enroll whose name was White was nicknamed “Andy,” and to his close friends, Elwyn Brooks White has always been Andy. At Cornell, he quickly joined the staff of the campus newspaper and, in his senior year, he was editor. White was not a scholar at Cornell, but he was active in a fraternity, and in his senior year, he was its president.

On graduation, he spent a year in New York trying to get a job in journalism, and the best he could do was The American Legion News Service. When a footloose Cornell classmate showed up in New York, they decided to drive to the West Coast in a model T roadster, named Hotspur. They set off early in 1922 and arrived in Louisville, Kentucky, at derby time. White wrote a sonnet on a winning horse which he showed to the editor of the Louisville Herald, who asked, “Do you do this for glory or for money?” “For money,” White replied. The editor paid him $5 and ran the sonnet on the front page next day.

The trip across the country in Hotspur was eventful. Arriving in Seattle, White got a reporter’s job on a Seattle daily which he held for a year, when he was fired. The reason was that when he covered an event, he was so much a perfectionist and took too long to write his story. Frequently, in later life, he acknowledged that he was a failure as a reporter.

Then there was a boat trip to Alaska. Returning to New York after 1½ years in the west, he got a job with an advertising agency where he hated to work—but which was a living, and it gave him an opportunity to write. He says:

The arrival on the scene of Harold Ross’s New Yorker on February 21, 1925, was a turning point in my life, although I did not know it at the time. I bought a copy of the first issue at the newsstand in Grand Central, examined Eustace Tilly and his butterfly on the cover (every Washington’s birthday issue has that cover) and was attracted to the newborn magazine, not because it had any great merit but because the items were short, relaxed and sometimes funny. I was a “short” writer, and I lost no time in submitting squibs and poems. In return, I received a few small cheques and the satisfaction of seeing myself in print as a pro.

Harold Ross encouraged White to submit more to The New Yorker and asked him to drop in. When he did drop in, the editor who greeted him was Katharine Angell. White said, “I noted that she had a lot of black hair and the knack of making a young contributor feel at ease. I sat there peacefully gazing at the classic features of my future wife without, as usual, knowing what I was doing.” Forty years later, in an interview, White said of his wife:

I have never seen an adequate account of Katharine’s role with The New Yorker. She was one of the first editors to be hired, and I can’t imagine what would have happened to the magazine if she hadn’t turned up. Ross, though something of a genius, had serious gaps. In Katharine he found someone who filled them. No two people were more different than Harold and Katharine. What he lacked, she had; what she lacked, he had. She was a product of Miss Windsor’s and Bryn Mawr; Ross was a high school dropout. She had a natural refinement of manner and speech; Ross mumbled and bellowed and swore. She was patient and quiet; he was impatient and noisy. On one thing they usually agreed—what was funny. Katharine was soon heading the Fiction Department, sharing the personal woes and dilemmas of innumerable contributors and staff people who were in trouble or despair, and, in short, accepting the whole unruly business of a tottering magazine with the warmth and dedication of a broody hen.

I had a bird’s eye view of all of this, because in the midst of it, I became her husband. During the day, I saw her in operation at the office. At the end of the day, I watched her bring the whole mess home with her in a cheap, bulging portfolio. The light burned late, and our bed was lumpy with page proofs, and our home was alive with laughter and the pervasive spirit of her dedication and her industry. I suspect that one of Ross’s luckiest days was the day a young woman named Katharine Angell stepped off the elevator, all ready to go to work.

I have said that my debt to E. B. White is that he is the person who alerted me to the gift of seeing things whole, and my attachment to his writing, beginning when I was 25, encouraged me to cultivate that gift in myself. My career as an organization man and a bureaucrat in a huge institution, where I was very much at home, was radically different from White’s, who never was an administrator and who had great difficulty keeping regular office hours. Yet, across that great gulf of temperament and experience, he was able to communicate to me his great gift of seeing things whole, and it has proved to be an asset all my life.

What was the man like who was able to do this for me? I have never met E. B. White, and in over 50 years I have exchanged only two or three letters with him. Yet, I feel that I know him very well. His collected letters are interspersed with biographical notes that give quite a complete account of his life. He was a great letter writer and, his letters being literary gems, people saved them. But most of the insight I have about White comes from reading what he has said about other people. There is an old saying, “What Peter says about Paul tells us more about Peter than it does about Paul.” This observation seems to be particularly true of White. Let me quote what he has written about three people to whom he was very close: the first, Henry Thoreau, whom White knew only from his writing, and two with whom he worked closely, James Thurber and Harold Ross, whose obituaries he wrote for The New Yorker.

On the 100th anniversary of the publication of Thoreau’s Walden in 1854, White wrote a long piece for The Yale Review entitled, “A Slight Sound at Evening.” I will note a few excerpts from his essay on Thoreau’s Walden.

I think it is of some advantage to encounter the book at a period in one’s life when the normal anxieties and enthusiasms and rebellions of youth closely resemble those of Thoreau in that spring of 1845 when he borrowed an ax, went out to the woods, and began to whack down some trees for timber. Received at such a juncture, the book is like an invitation to life’s dance, assuring the troubled recipient that no matter what befalls him in the way of success or failure he will always be welcome at the party—that the music is played for him too, if he will but listen and move his feet. … It still seems to me the best youth’s companion yet written by an American, for it carries a solemn warning against the loss of one’s valuables, it advances a good argument for travelling light and trying new adventures, it rings with the power of positive adoration, it contains religious feeling without religious images, and it steadfastly refuses to record bad news. …

When he went to the pond, Thoreau struck an attitude and did so deliberately, but his posturing was not to draw the attention of others to him but rather to draw his own attention more closely to himself. “I learned this at least from my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” The sentence has the power to resuscitate the youth drowning in his sea of doubt. I recall my exhilaration upon reading it, many years ago, in a time of hesitation and despair. It restored me to health. And now in 1954 when I salute Henry Thoreau on the 100th birthday of his book, I am merely paying off an old score—or an installment on it.

There has been much guessing as to why he went to the pond. To set it down to escapism is, of course, to misconstrue what happened. Henry went forth to battle when he took to the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives—the desire to enjoy the world, and the urge to set the world straight. One cannot join these two successfully, but sometimes, in rare cases, something good or even great results from the attempt of the tormented spirit to reconcile them. Henry went forth to battle, and if he set the stage himself, if he fought on his own terms and with his own weapons, it was because it was his nature to do things differently from most men, and to act in a cocky fashion. If the pond and the woods seemed a more plausible site for a house than an in-town location, it was because a cowbell made for him a sweeter sound than a churchbell. Walden, the book, makes the sound of a cowbell, more than a churchbell, and proves the point, although both sounds are in it, and both remarkably clear and sweet. He simply preferred his churchbells at a little distance. [I suspect that White also preferred his churchbells at a little distance]

I confess that I have not been a Thoreau fan. The first thing I ever read of Thoreau’s was his essay on “Civil Disobedience” which he wrote in a fit of pique after spending a night in jail for refusing to pay his Poll Tax. I wrote him off as a wooly anarchist and never read him again. But after rereading White’s essay recently, I decided that I had better have a look at Walden. So, I read it. And I discovered, to my surprise, that there is more of Thoreau in me than I had been aware of. Such is the fate of one who falls under the spell of one who sees things whole (a trait that White may have acquired from Thoreau since he read Thoreau when he, White, was young and was greatly influenced by him).

Harold Ross, the great founding editor of The New Yorker, died December 6, 1951. Writing of him in the December 15th issue, White wrote:

Ross died in Boston, unexpectedly, on the night of December 6th, and we are writing this in New York (unexpectedly) on the morning of December 7th. This is known, in these offices that Ross was so fond of, as a jam. Ross always knew when we were in a jam, and usually went on the phone to offer advice and comfort and support. When our phone rang just now, and in that split second before the mind focuses, we thought, “Good! Here it comes!” But this old connection is broken beyond fixing. The phone has not in its power to explode at the right moment and in the right way.

Actually, things are not going as badly as they might; the sheet of copy paper in the machine is not as hard to face as we feared. Sometimes a love letter writes itself and we loved Ross so, and bear him respect, that these quick notes, which purport to record the sorrow that runs through here and dissolves so many people, cannot possibly seem overstated or silly. Ross, even on this terrible day, is a hard man to keep quiet; he obtrudes—his face, his voice, his manner, even his amused interest in the critical proceedings. If he were accorded the questionable privilege of stopping by here for a few minutes, he would gorge himself on the minor technical problems that a magazine faces when we must do something in a hurry and against all sorts of odds—in this case, emotional ones of almost overpowering weight. He would be far more interested in the grinding of the machinery than in what was being said about him.

All morning, people have wandered in and out of our cell, some tearfully, some guardedly, some boisterously, most of them long-time friends in various stages of repair. We have amused our-self thinking of Ross’s reaction to this flow. “Never bother a writer” was one of his strongest principles. He used to love to drop in himself, and sit around, but was uneasy the whole time because of the carking feeling that if only he would get up and go away, we might settle down to work and produce something. To him, a writer at work, whether in the office or anywhere in the outside world, was an extraordinarily interesting, valuable, but fragile object, and he half expected it to fall into a thousand pieces at any moment.

The report of Ross’s death came over the telephone in a three-word sentence that somehow managed to embody all the faults that Ross devoted his life to correcting. A grief-stricken friend in Boston, charged with the task of spreading the news but too dazed to talk sensibly, said, “It’s all over.” He meant that Ross was dead, but the listener took it to mean that the operation was over. Here, in three easy words, were the ambiguity, the euphemistic softness, the verbal infirmity that Harold W. Ross spent his life thrusting at. Ross regarded every sentence as the enemy, and believed that if a man watched closely enough, he would discover the vulnerable spot, the essential weakness. He devoted his life to making the weak strong—a rather specialized form of blood transfusion, to be sure, but one that he believed in with such a consuming passion that his spirit infected others and inspired them, and lifted them. Whatever it was, this contagion, this vapor in these marshes, it spread. None escaped it. Nor is it likely to be dissipated in a hurry.

His ambition was to publish one good magazine, not a string of successful ones, and he thought of The New Yorker as a sort of movement. He came equipped with not much knowledge and only two books—Webster’s Dictionary and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. These books were his history, his geography, his literature, his art, his music, his everything. Some people found Ross’s scholastic deficiencies quite appalling, and were not sure they had met the right man. But he was the right man, and the only question was whether the other fellow was capable of being tuned to Ross’s vibrations. Ross had a thing that is at least as good as, and sometimes better than, knowledge: he had a sort of natural drive in the right direction, plus a complete respect for the work and ideas and opinions of others. It took a little while to get on to the fact that Ross, more violently than almost anybody, was proceeding in a good direction, and carrying others along with him, under torrential conditions. He was like a boat being driven at the mercy of some internal squall, a disturbance he himself only half understood, and of which he was at times suspicious.

In a way, he was a lucky man. For a monument he has the magazine to date—one thousand three hundred and ninety-nine issues, born in the toil and pain that can be appreciated only by those who helped in the delivery room. These are his. They stand, unchangeable and open for inspection. We are, of course, not in a position to estimate the monument, even if we were in the mood to. But we are able to state one thing unequivocally: Ross set up a great target and pounded himself to pieces trying to hit it square in the middle. His dream was a simple dream; it was pure and had no frills: he wanted the magazine to be good, to be funny, and to be fair.

We say he was lucky. Some people cordially disliked him. Some were amused but not impressed. And then, last, there are the ones we have been seeing today, the ones who loved him and had him for a friend—people he looked after, and who looked after him. These last are the ones who worked close enough to him, and long enough with him, to cross over the barrier reef of noisy shallows that ringed him, into the lagoon that was Ross himself—a rewarding, and even enchanting, and relatively quiet place, utterly trustworthy as an anchorage. Maybe these people had all the luck. The entrance wasn’t always easy to find.

He left a note on our desk one day apropos of something that had pleased him in the magazine. The note simply said, “I am encouraged to go on.” That is about the way we feel today, because of his contribution. We are encouraged to go on.

When you took leave of Ross after a calm or stormy meeting, he always ended with the phrase that has become as much a part of the office as the paint on the walls. He would wave his limp hand, gesturing you away. “All right,” he would say. “God bless you.” Considering Ross’s temperament and habits, this was a rather odd expression. He usually took God’s name in vain if he took it at all. But when he sent you away with his benediction, which he uttered briskly and affectionately, and in which he and God seemed all scrambled together, it carried a warmth and sincerity that never failed to carry over. The words are so familiar to his helpers and friends here that they provide the only possible way to conclude this hasty notice and to take our leave. We cannot convey his manner. But with much love in our heart, we say, for everybody, “All right Ross, God bless you.”

When James Thurber, one of White’s closest friends, died on November 2, 1961, White wrote of him in the November 11th New Yorker.

I am one of the lucky ones; I knew him before blindness hit him, before fame hit him, and I tend always to think of him as a young artist in a small office in a big city, with all the world still ahead. It was a fine thing to be young and at work in New York for a new magazine when Thurber was young and at work, and I will always be glad that this happened to me.

It was fortunate that we got on well; the office we shared was the size of a hall bedroom. There was just room enough for two men, two typewriters, and a stack of copy paper. The copy paper disappeared at a scandalous rate—not because our production was high (although it was) but because Thurber used copy paper as the natural receptacle for discarded sorrows, immediate joys, stale dreams, golden prophecies, and messages of good cheer to the outside world and to fellow-workers. His mind was never at rest, and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action. The whole world knows what a funny man he was, but you had to sit next to him day after day to understand the extravagance of his clowning, the wildness and subtlety of his thinking, and the intensity of his interest in others and his sympathy for their dilemmas—dilemmas that he instantly enlarged, put in focus, and made immortal, just as he enlarged and made immortal the strange goings on in the Ohio home of his boyhood. His waking dreams and his sleeping dreams commingled shamelessly and uproariously. Ohio was never far from his thoughts, and when he received a medal from his home state in 1953, he wrote, “The clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.” It is a beautiful sentence and a revealing one.

He was both a practitioner of humor and a defender of it. The day he died, I came on a letter from him, dictated to a secretary and signed in pencil with his sightless and enormous “Jim.” “Every time is a time for humor,” he wrote. “I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.” Once, I remember, he heard someone say that humor is a shield, not a sword, and it made him mad. He wasn’t going to have anyone beating his sword into a shield. That “surgeon,” incidentally, is pure Mitty. During his happiest years, Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

Although he is best known for Walter Mitty and The Male Animal, the book of his I like best is The Last Flower. In it you will find his faith in the renewal of life, his feeling for the beauty and fragility of life on earth. Like all good writers, he fashioned his own best obituary notice. Nobody else can add to the record, much as he might like to. And of all the flowers, real and figurative, that will find their way to Thurber’s last resting place, the one that will remain fresh and wiltproof is the little flower he himself drew, on the last page of that lovely book.

Etched in my memory when my wife Esther and I were living as young people in New York in the 1930s and following the contemporary art scene is the incident of the Rivera mural in the new Rockefeller Center. Nelson Rockefeller, then a young man, was interested in contemporary art and was in charge of building the Center. He had commissioned Diego Rivera, the radical Mexican artist, to paint a mural in the entrance hall of the main building just above the skating rink. The work was done in fresco in which a plasterer lays up the surface just ahead of the painter who uses water-soluble pigments that penetrate the wet plaster—so when the plaster dries, it is really on there. When Rivera arrived at the lower-right corner when he would normally sign, he introduced a large head of Lenin and the hammer and sickle, signed his name and was through. There was a great uproar and the mural was ultimately destroyed—chipped off the wall. White wrote a poem about it in The New Yorker.

I Paint What I See

(A Ballad of Artistic Integrity, on the Occasion of the Removal of Some Rather Expensive Murals from the RCA Building in the Year 1933)

“What do you paint, when you paint on a wall?”

Said John D.’s grandson Nelson.

“Do you paint just anything there at all?

“Will there be any doves, or a tree in fall?

“Or a hunting scene, like an English hall?”

“I paint what I see,” said Rivera.

“What are the colors you use when you paint?”

Said John D.’s grandson Nelson.

“Do you use any red in the beard of a saint?

“If you do, is it terribly red, or faint?

“Do you use any blue! Is it Prussian?”

“I paint what I paint,” said Rivera.

“Whose is that head that I see on my wall?”

Said John D.’s grandson Nelson.

“Is it anyone’s head whom we know, at all?

“A Rensselaer, or a Saltonstall?

“Is it Franklin D.? Is it Mordaunt Hall?

“Or is it the head of a Russian?”

“I paint what I think,” said Rivera.

“I paint what I paint, I paint what I see,

“I paint what I think,” said Rivera,

“And the thing that is dearest in life to me

“In a bourgeois hall is Integrity;

“However …

“I’ll take out a couple of people drinkin’

“And put in a picture of Abraham Lincoln;

“I could even give you McCormick’s reaper

“And still not make my art much cheaper.

“But the head of Lenin has got to stay

“Or my friends will give me the bird today,

“The bird, the bird, forever.”

“It’s not good taste in a man like me,”

Said John D.’s grandson Nelson,

“To question an artist’s integrity

“Or mention a practical thing like a fee,

“But I know what I like to a large degree,

“Though art I hate to hamper;

“For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks

“You painted a radical. I say shucks,

“I never could rent the offices —

“The capitalistic offices.

“For this, as you know, is a public hall

“And people want doves, or a tree in fall,

“And although your art I dislike to hamper,

“I owe a little to God and Gramper,

“And after all,

“it’s my wall …”

“We’ll see if it is,” said Rivera.

Rivera was born 50 years too soon, because I understand that New York now has a law that gives the artist some control over how his work is shown. They might have some trouble getting rid of that mural today. A replica of Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural is now on the wall of a museum in Mexico City. It pleases me to think that some day ours will become a mature enough society that that mural will return to New York, head of Lenin and all, and be given an appropriate spot so that people can judge its artistic merit. When and if that happens, it may be that this poem of E. B. White’s, which is widely anthologized, will have helped keep alive the idea that there is some unfinished business from the 1930s.

When White was about 40, he and his wife moved from New York to a farm on the coast of Maine. They both continued to work for The New Yorker with occasional trips to New York. Katharine, who was the older, died in 1977. Mr. White died October 1, 1985.

White, as we know from his comments on his childhood, confirmed in several letters, has lived all his life in a state of anxiety with several long illnesses. A friend commented on his leaving New York, “Andy moved to Maine to save his life.” Living in Maine in a small community and close to farm animals was a necessary condition for his existence, and much of his later writing has been about life on his farm and among small-town people in whom he found much-treasured wisdom.

Despite his lifelong anxiety, White was a very social guy. He and his wife, Katharine, had many friends, spent much enjoyable time with them, and carried on a lively correspondence.

My most interesting, and perhaps my most significant experience with White’s writing came in 1969. After retiring from AT&T in 1964, I spent some active years in consulting work. Two of my clients in that period were universities during the traumatic years of student unrest. Time has healed some of the scars, but I have vivid memories of that period, particularly talks with the radical students. It was a wild time, and I was right in the thick of it.

In September of 1969, my alma mater, Carleton College, did an interesting thing. As a smaller college of 1500 students, they were not as threatened by the unrest as were large universities, but they were disturbed enough to convene, for two weeks ahead of the opening of school that year, all of the student leaders. This included class officers, team captains, editors of paper and year book, etc., plus three or four faculty and the college chaplain who presided. Their purpose was to just have a leisurely talk about the problems of operating the college under these disturbing conditions. I was invited to meet with them for two days as a resource person (since I had been up to my ears in this confusion in other places).

Near the end of my two days with them, I read them E. B. White’s essay “The Second Tree from the Corner.” Before reading it, I told them a little about White and reminded them of White’s statement to the reporter, “I was born scared and at 70 I am still scared.” I asked them to bear this in mind because I suspected that the essay was somewhat autobiographical. Some years later when White’s letters came out, I confirmed that it was written after a session with his psychiatrist in New York.

The essay, “The Second Tree from The Corner,” concerns a man named Trexler in a routine session with his psychiatrist, and what Trexler thinks about as he walks down the street after the session. The interview deals with Trexler’s fears and a question that the doctor repeatedly pressed, “What do you want!” In the course of the session, Trexler turns the question on the doctor, “What do you want!” And the doctor, caught short, stammers, “I want a new wing on my house on Long Island.”

When I finished reading, I commented to the students that I thought that White, in this essay, had a literary strategy somewhat similar to that of Camus’ when he wrote The Stranger (which I knew they had all read in freshman English). Camus takes 100 or so pages to describe a situation, a murder, and the trial and conviction of the murderer to set the stage, it seems to me, for three or four pages at the end which tell of the conversation between a priest and the convicted man on the eve of the latter’s execution. I believe that the content of this interview was what Camus really wanted to get across to us. White, more devoted to economy of language than Camus, takes five pages to describe this session with the psychiatrist to set the stage for two paragraphs at the end where, it seems to me, he tells us what he really wants us to get. And I reread those two paragraphs.

It was an evening of clearing weather, the Park showing green and desirable in the distance, the last daylight applying a high lacquer to the brick and brownstone walls and giving the street scene a luminous and intoxicating splendor. Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted. “What do you want!” he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted; and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep, formless, enduring, and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick, and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the dim saloons, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of the glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it. Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of these things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down, and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor’s office would fall flat on his face.

Trexler felt invigorated. Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene. “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,” he said, answering to an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away. He felt content to be sick, unembarrassed at being afraid; and in the jungle of his fear he glimpsed (as he had so often glimpsed them before) the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage.

There were a few moments of silence after I finished, and the students took off and talked for two hours. I didn’t say another word—just listened. Condensing two hours of discussion into one sentence: they ultimately identified the problem of the students of their generation as a sort of mental illness, and, like White, they would only recover their poise when they accepted their illness as health—and got on with their work. It was the most fascinating two hours of discussion I ever listened to.

The sequel to his session came several weeks later when Professor Maitland, the Chaplain, sent me a copy of the first issue of the college newspaper in which this two-week session was reported. The report concluded with the announcement that the group had agreed to continue to meet during the school year and that they had named their group The Second Tree from the Corner. That was over 15 years ago, and I still hear the occasional reverberation from that meeting. Such is the influence of thinking that sees things whole, and of language that tells us what one sees that is powerful and beautiful.

One of the things one discovers by reading White’s letters is that, in the early days of The New Yorker, he was the handyman. He did everything. He wrote essays, poems, newsbreaks, reported events, and wrote the opening “Talk of the Town.” He even drew one cover, and he wrote captions for cartoons. My favorite quote from an early issue of The New Yorker is the caption on a full-page cartoon. As I remember it, there is a rich kid of 8 or 9 seated alone at dinner in a big posh dining room, being served by maid and butler, and with his governess standing behind him saying, “Oswald dear, please eat your nice broccoli.” Says Oswald, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” I have found that line appropriate on several occasions over the years. And I discovered in the letters that it is pure E. B. White.

White was not a “cause” man—with two exceptions. During the war, he became interested in world government and wrote extensively on that subject with one of the loveliest pieces on that theme entitled, “The Wild Flag.” But then, after the war, he covered the founding meeting of the United Nations for The New Yorker and concluded that world government was not a realistic expectation in our times. In a letter to a niece explaining his position, he said, “I think the most precious thing in the world is not the concept of world federation but the concept of justice—that is, justice as it has developed in the Western world. The only sort of one-world I would settle for is a one-world firmly based on that type of justice.”

The other cause, long standing and still much alive in White as an old man, is the cause of integrity in journalism. Over the years, there have been three major public manifestations of this concern. Some years ago, White discovered the practice of Reader’s Digest commissioning and paying for articles, giving them to other publications to print, and then condensing them in Reader’s Digest. He strongly condemned this practice in the pages of The New Yorker, others joined in, and there was quite a stir about it. It didn’t deter the Digest. But it did result in a New Yorker policy not to permit the Digest to take any of their stuff.

Then when a fellow New Yorker writer, Alexander Woolcott, gave a testimonial for a beer ad, White took out after him—in the pages of The New Yorker. Maybe okay for a movie actor, he said, but not for a journalist. This created something of a stir, but I doubt that it influenced Woolcott.

In 1974, when White was old, he learned of the arrangement wherein Harrison Salisbury, retired associate editor of the New York Times, accepted a substantial fee from Xerox Corporation to write an article that would appear in Esquire Magazine with a full-page Xerox ad before and after it. White took pen in hand and wrote a letter to the editor of the The Ellsworth (Maine) American describing the details of the arrangement and taking sharp exception to it.

In due course, White received a letter from Xerox outlining their ground rules for sponsoring articles and asking, “With these ground rules, do you still see something sinister in the sponsoring?” White’s reply of January 30, 1976, said unequivocally, “Yes, I do,” and he went on to support that judgment with careful reasoning. This is what he wrote:

Letter to Mr. W. B. Jones

Director, Communications Operations

Xerox Corp.

January 30, 1976

Dear Mr. Jones,

In extending my remarks on sponsorship, published in The Ellsworth American, I want to limit the discussion to the press—that is, to newspapers and magazines. I’ll not speculate about television, as television is outside my experience, and I have no ready opinion about sponsorship in that medium.

In your recent letter to me, you ask whether having studied your ground rules for proper conduct in sponsoring a magazine piece, I still see something sinister in the sponsorship. Yes, I do. Sinister may not be the right word, but I see something ominous and unhealthy when a corporation underwrites an article in a magazine of general circulation. This is not, essentially, the old familiar question of an advertiser trying to influence editorial content: almost everyone is acquainted with that common phenomenon. Readers are aware that it is always present but usually in a rather subdued or nonthreatening form. Xerox’s sponsoring of a specific writer on a specific occasion for a specific article is something quite different. No one, as far as I know, accuses Xerox of trying to influence editorial opinion. But many people are wondering why a large corporation placed so much money on a magazine piece, why the writer of the piece was willing to get paid in so unusual a fashion, and why Esquire was ready and willing to have an outsider pick up the tab. These are reasonable questions.

The press in our free country is reliable and useful not because of its good character but because of its great diversity. As long as there are many owners, each pursuing his own brand of truth, we the people have the opportunity to arrive at the truth and to dwell in the light. The multiplicity of ownership is crucial. It’s only when there are few owners, or as in a government-controlled press, one owner, that the truth becomes elusive and the light fails. For a citizen in our free society, it is an enormous privilege and a wonderful protection to have access to hundreds of periodicals, each peddling its own belief. There is safety in numbers: the papers expose each other’s follies and peccadillos, correct each other’s mistakes, and cancel out each other’s biases. The reader is free to range around in the whole editorial bouillabaisse and explore it for the one clam that matters—the truth.

When a large corporation or a rich individual underwrites an article in a magazine, the picture changes: the ownership of that magazine has been diminished, the outline of the magazine has been blurred. In the case of the Salisbury piece, it was as though Esquire had gone on relief, was accepting its first welfare payment, and was not its own man any more. The editor protests that he accepts full responsibility for the text and that Xerox had nothing to do with the whole business. But the fact remains that, despite his full acceptance of responsibility, he somehow did not get around to paying the bill. This is unsettling and I think unhealthy. Whenever money changes hands, something goes along with it—an intangible something that varies with the circumstances. It would be hard to resist the suspicion that Esquire feels indebted to Xerox, that Mr. Salisbury feels indebted to both, and that the ownership, or sovereignty, of Esquire has been nibbled all around the edges.

Sponsorship in the press is an invitation to corruption and abuse. The temptations are great, and there is an opportunist behind every bush. A funded article is a tempting morsel for any publication—particularly for one that is having a hard time making ends meet. A funded assignment is a tempting dish for a writer, who may pick up a much larger fee than he is accustomed to getting, and sponsorship is attractive to the sponsor himself, who, for one reason or another, feels an urge to penetrate the editorial columns after being so long pent up in the advertising pages. These temptations are real, and if the barriers were to be let down, I believe corruption and abuse would soon follow. Not all corporations would approach subsidy in the immaculate way Xerox did or in the same spirit of benefaction. There are a thousand reasons for someone’s wishing to buy his way into print, many of them unpalatable, all of them to some degree self-serving. Buying and selling space in news columns could become a serious disease of the press. If it reached epidemic proportions, it could destroy the press. I don’t want IBM or the National Rifle Association providing me with a funded spectacular when I open my paper. I want to read what the editor and the publisher have managed to dig up on their own—and paid for out of the till.

My affection for the free press in a democracy goes back a long way. My love for it was my first and greatest love. If I felt a shock at the news of the Salisbury-Xerox-Esquire arrangement, it was because the sponsorship principle seemed to challenge and threaten everything I believed in: that the press must not only be free, it must be fiercely independent—to survive and to serve. Not all papers are fiercely independent, God knows, but there are always enough of them around to provide a core of integrity and an example that others feel obligated to steer by. The funded article is not in itself evil, but it is the beginning of evil, and it is an invitation to evil. I hope the invitation will not again be extended, and, if extended, I hope it will be declined.

About a hundred and fifty years ago, de Tocqueville wrote: “The journalists of the United States are generally in a very humble position, with a scanty education and a vulgar turn of mind.” Today, we chuckle at this antique characterization. But about fifty years ago, when I was a young journalist, I had the good fortune to encounter an editor who fitted the description quite closely. Harold Ross, who founded The New Yorker, was deficient in education and had—at least to all outward appearances—a vulgar turn of mind. What he did possess, though, was the ferocity of independence. He was having a tough time finding money to keep his floundering little sheet alive, yet he was determined that neither money nor influence would ever corrupt his dream or deflower his text.

His boiling point was so low as to be comical. The faintest suggestion of the shadow of advertising in his news and editorial columns would cause him to erupt. He would explode in anger, the building would reverberate with his wrath, and his terrible swift sword would go flashing up and down the corridors. For a young man, it was an impressive sight and a memorable one. Fifty years have not dimmed for me either the spectacle of Ross’s ferocity or my own early convictions—which were identical with his. He has come to my mind often while I’ve been composing this reply to your inquiry.

I hope I’ve clarified by a little bit my feelings about the autonomy of the press and the dangers of sponsorship of articles. Thanks for giving me the chance to speak my piece.

Sincerely,

E. B. White

Xerox thanked White for “telling us what we didn’t want to hear.” A few months later, they wrote saying that Xerox had decided not to underwrite any more articles and that they were convinced that it was “the right decision.”

The Journalism Review of the Columbia University School of Journalism printed this entire exchange of letters under the title of, “What E. B. White Told Xerox—or How a Solitary Man of Letters Talked a Corporation Out of Funding Magazine Articles—and Helped to Define a Free Press.”

I hazard the prophecy that in the long test of history, this one letter will establish E. B. White as one who sees things whole and who has the gift of language to tell us ordinary mortals what he sees.

I want to close with a brief reference to the three children’s stories.

The first, Stuart Little, is about a mouse by that name. The book seems to lack an ending. It just stops. When I first read it, I thought a bunch of pages were missing from my copy. And White received letters complaining about this.

To one of them he replied, “I think many readers find the end inconclusive, but I have always found life inconclusive, and I guess it shows up in my work.”

To another he replied, “Quite a number of children have written to ask me about Stuart. They want to know whether he got back home and whether he found Margalo (the bird he was hunting for). They are good questions, but I did not answer them because, in a way, Stuart’s journey symbolizes the continuing journey that everybody undertakes—in search for what is perfect and unattainable. This is perhaps too elusive an idea to put in a book for children, but I put it in anyway.”

And to a girl named Jill, he writes, “Stuart Little is the story of a quest or search. Much of life is questing and searching, and I was writing about that. If the book ends while the search is still going on, that’s because I wanted it that way. As you grow older, you will realize that many of us in this world go through life looking for something that is beautiful and good—often something we can’t quite name. In Stuart’s case, he was searching for the bird Margalo, who was his ideal of beauty and goodness. Whether he ever found her or not, or whether he got home or not, is less important than the adventure itself. If the book made you cry, that’s because you are aware of the sadness and richness of life’s involvement and the quest for beauty. Cheer up—Stuart may yet find his bird. He may even get home again. Meantime, he is headed in the right direction, and I am sure you are.”

“The right direction,” which White also attributed to Harold Ross in his obituary, is central to White’s concept of wholeness. One often does not know the precise goal, but one must always be certain of one’s direction. The goal will reveal itself in due course.

It seems fitting, in view of White’s closeness to animals, that in his later years he should turn to writing children’s stories about animals. In this period, in a letter to a friend, he wrote that mice and spiders have been around for millions of years without damaging the environment. But, in the few thousand years that so-called civilized man has been around, he has nearly destroyed it.

In another letter he wrote, “if it were not for spiders, the insects would take over the earth.”

Let me note the concluding paragraphs in Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan.

Charlotte, the spider, has woven messages in her web that saved Wilbur, the pig, from being butchered and made him famous. The story concludes:

Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web. Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure and the glory of everything.

Louis the swan, from a genus of swans that make a trumpeting sound, was named after Louis Armstrong. Louis was born without a voice and acquired a trumpet that he learned to play. Sam, the boy who helped him learn to play it, says at the end:

Tonight I heard Louis’ horn. My father heard it, too. The wind was right, and I could hear the notes of taps, just as darkness fell. There is nothing in all the world I like better than the trumpet of the swan. …

On the pond where the swans were, Louis put his trumpet away. The cygnets crept under their mother’s wing. Darkness settled on woods and fields and marsh. A loon called its wild night cry. As Louis relaxed and prepared for sleep, all his thoughts were on how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky he had been to solve his problems with music, and how pleasant it was to look forward to another night of sleep and another day tomorrow, and the fresh morning, and the light that returns with the day.

In the preface to his recent collected book of poems, E. B. White wrote:

To me, poetry is what is memorable, and a poet is a fellow or a girl who lets drop a line that gets remembered in the morning. Poetry turns up in unexpected places, in unguarded moments. I have yet to encounter the line from the song in Oklahoma, “All the sounds of the earth are like music,” without being brought to the edge of tears.

The interview with E. B. White on his 70th birthday ends with the question of what he cherished most in life. “When my wife’s Aunt Caroline was in her ’90s,” he replied, “she lived with us and she once remarked, ‘Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.’ I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave compulsive world.”