I Must Decline For Secret Reasons

Letters of E. B. White

Nov. 21, 1976

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November 21, 1976

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New Yorker writers have always denied that there is such a thing as New Yorker style, and by now they are probably right. (All rumors about that magazine are automatically denied, but some are false nevertheless.) But in the heyday of Gibbs, Thurber and White, readers knew better. There was such a style, and its name was E. B. White.

Not that all the writers used the style (in fact, most of the best avoided it). But White's notes and comments established, as they say in Rock, The Sound. "Harold Ross and Katharine Angell, his literary editor [and later White's wife, were not slow to perceive that here were the perfect eye and ear, the authentic voice and accent for their struggling magazine," wrote Thurber in 1938 before his blindness had stiffened everything into private myth; and no one knew sounds better than Thurber. fact, he was a bit of a mimic on the side and presumably without trying, he himself took White's style and ran with it. But from comparing their juvenilia, there's no question that White got there first, by about 20 years.

Enough. White doggedly downplays this kind of talk because down‐playing is his very essence. A nimbus modesty surrounds him, as it does the magazine itself, because boasting is so second‐rate. But if you read these letters with half an ear, the jig is up. White's notes to the milkman achieve effects that the others sat all night for. If the present editor has allowed the style to semi‐retire, it is not just because of his own raised consciousness, but because too many people were sitting up all night to too little purpose. They don't make writers like White anymore, and rather than plug on with inferior imitations, Mr. Shawn has wisely let in new subject matter with the voices to match.

Still, it was, and is, an intriguing style, and any American writer, from pastoral to Spillane, who hasn't learned from it has missed a trick or two. Essentially it combines the English sensible (as crystallized in Fowler's "English Usage') with the rustic colloquial. Look for phrases like "horn in on," "going some" and "mighty" followed adjective: look, in short, for an imitation of a New England farmer, and a darn good one (or jimdandy). This inspired concoction removed at a blow much of the lace and stuffing from American belles lettres and even com

Wilfrid Sheed's most recent novel is "People Will Always Be Kind." manded the respect of the British, who have yielded their language rather more grudgingly than their empire. On the evidence, White began writing this way around the age of 11.

Not exactly of course. One of the grim pleasures reading collected letters comes in watching a style being built year by year until it resembles a model prison, with the writer on the inside. Only in this case, White had a magazine in there w:th him. Because, since you could only say certain things in White's style, light dry quick things, the magazine tended only to say those things too.

Which was fine so long as humor was the main order of business: but humor is a young man's game, after that it is just a chore, and by World War II we find White declaring himself heartily sick of Eustace Tilley, the dandy with the monocle who personified The New Yorker. Yet it proved hard to convert Eustace to serious purposes. This fretful fellow was accustomed to feeling Itimpy," "edgy" and plain "scared" over things like the disappearance of ferry boats and double‐decker buses; now suddenly he was asked to feel jumpy about the erosion of freedom and such, and it didn't sound right.

So one turns to White's letters first off to find how much of this was manner and how much White; and the first thing you discover is that he indeed jumpy, edgy and nervous about just about everything. Where Thurber had used edginess as a purely comic device (the edge of a tantrum as often as not) with White it was a simple statement of fact. He is, it seems, so finely strung that keeping his sanity has been a struggle at times and writing brightly for The New Yorker potential torture. No wonder his stuff seemed almost preternaturally sane and well‐balanced. It had to.

All this puts into new perspective White's retreat Maine in the thirties, which had seemed the ultimate in fastidiousness. In fact he was closer to running for his life. Near breakdowns in his thirties and forties left his head feeling funny, as if something bad was running around in the attic (a painful image: he had been scared of the attic in his childhood home in White Plains). such a state he took, like Hemingway's shell‐shocked Nick Adams, to fishing and doing simple country tasks well.

Much of this he describes here to his friends in such painstaking detail that it could be a boy writing home from camp. The act of description seems itself a country task, a necessary branch of farming. Just as you could barely tell by the end whether Hemingway was writing or fishing, White hammering a nail and fashioning a sentence looks more and more like the same fellow.

The effect was obviously good for his prose and his nerves, and a treat for his friends (he is clearly a charming man). Yet, as nature writing goes, White's still gives off a slight sense of a city boy writing about the country: not precisely a Eustace Tilley, but someone just a little too delighted with everything, whether the birth of a lamb or the ways of the titmouse. This is an urban mind in exile, trying to find the same quaint excitements among animals that it used to find on the sidewalks.

Fortunately White hit on the perfect form for this: the children's book in which the animals double as people, forming their own city. In "Charlotte's Web" especially, White's world is perfectly rendered. There is evil in it, no blinking that: the bad stay bad (Templeton the rat), and Charlotte the spider dies. But the evil is housebroken. These are farm animals and by contract an extension of civilization: that is the price they pay for living. .White is more than happy to point out their discords and loneliness because this confirms that these defects are manageable by people too. Later, as part of the sobering up of Eustace Tilley, he extended this Victorian daydream into real life, with a gallant theory of world federation published in The New Yorker. But that's what happens when you try to write children's books and editorials at the same time, and it should not be held against "Charlotte," his masterpiece, or "Stuart Lit

In fact the worst thing about his federalist period was that he felt it necessary to get into that stuff at all. Unless he is holding something back here, there is no evidence that he read any books on politics—in fact he makes an impressive point of his intellectual sloth—or had worked his way through the historical and cultural barbed wire; yet in the best gentleman amateur tradition he waded in anyway.

Why? Perhaps because this country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man. White must surely have been aware of this. In the mid‐thirties he took a year off to write something "major" and found that he just couldn't. Maybe it rattled his nerves too much; maybe the creature in the attic would have got loose; most likely, it simply went against the grain of his style. So instead he made the common mistake of enlarging the subject matter while playing the same basic notes: like a minuet in honor of Napoleon.

The tactical mistake may cost him a bit among younger readers, who don't remember how windy everybody got around World War II, from Roosevelt to Archibald MacLeish. White himself was asked to help write a pamphlet on the four freedoms, and at least he saw the joke of that and of committeewriting in general. But he did do some bloviating for the Human Spirit, before returning to what he does best: the hammering out of fine sentences about small matters. In later years he returns fitfully to the big picture only to find that liberty entails responsibility and that pornography leads to censorship, but these BoyScoutisms are just exercises in citizenship like remembering to

One reads the book for the words, which should be good enough for anyone. The studied informality of his New Yorker style turns out not to be studied at all but bred in the bone. And it loosens just the right hit more for his friends. Hemingway's writing "reminded me of the farting of an old horse." (Too bad he couldn't have said things like that out loud.) A famous trick of his, of doubling back on a word or phrase and playing with it like a cat shows up early. To wit: "The only Earp I ever knew was neither Wyatt nor Henry—he was Fred Earp, a copy‐reader on the Seattle Times. All this is getting us nowhere, all this Earp business. It carps me. I suspect it carps you, too." This is the secret of The New Yorker's famous one‐line newsbreaks and, formula or no, no one else has been able to do it. In fact, being inimitable within a formula is the very

Letters by a living man arc a bit like a stately home with the owner around—one isn't sure how much one can touch. Keeping psycho‐history to minimum, we are confronted with a passion for independence that seems alternately fearful and almost truculent. In the twenties he breaks off from a girl with a curiously icy letter and in the thirties he appears to send his wife packing for a year, with a similar demand for loneliness. That was to be the year of his masterpiece, which called for a crescendo of isolation in an already quiet life.

In that same ambitious decade (his thirties and ours), he even tried to distance himself from The New Yorker, once again for breathing room. Being identified with a great magazine was no substitute for being great writer. and he made brief break for Harper's and freedom. In the same prickly vein, he has always refused to be 'exploited, to make money on the cheap or to have his children's books butchered by the media. His recent show of integrity in the Xerox case (Xerox had commissioned an outside article in Esquire, as might place an ad) was not just the old New Yorker hand striking one more perfect pose but the of whole life.

That is the plus side of his gift for saying no: but on the other hand is a sorry stream of negation, a refusal to do virtually anything at all, from lecturing to joining the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He had his good reasons: the few times he ventured out he erupted in a wild array of disorders issuing from head and stomach. But the malaise seemed to spread to the magazine itself, whose psycho‐history is fair game. One had a pie, ture of New Yorker writers (whom one seldom saw) vying with each other in feats of hypochondria and shyness: also of flinching and shrinking, jumping at small sounds, and in the American writers will compete at just about anything.

Not White's fault, of course: he never tried to influence any body. But his retreat from life sounded so tasteful and amusing that it cried out for imitation. When the Whites phased up to Maine in the thirties and forties, they became gray eminences with a vengeance. It was rumored that they disapproved of Thurber's book on Harold Ross, a harmless enough ragbag of toooften‐told anecdotes; but then one fancied that they didn't approve of much that was written about The New Yorker. When Tom Wolfe did a feckless spoof of the magazine for New York, a slew of contributors, including White, dashed off indignant letters which, while more than justified, unwittingly bore out Wolfe's image of The New Yorker as an old person with bad nerves. The young magazine would have handled it bet

But White's era at The New Yorker was a great one, unique in magazine history. Surely never before has a house‐style influenced the prose of a generation for the better—even if White isn't strictly speaking a house. And his personal era continues of course as chirpy as ever, as he rides out sickness and the loss of friends with good humor, kindness and courage. A valuable man, but beware of imitations. His letters are equivalent to a weekend in the country and should be read as such. The shorter, sharper ones he wrote in the City give hints of another kind of writer, but we may never know for sure. Meanwhile, the is fine with me. ■

3 Sept. 1963

Dear Updike (John)

In youth. when I was the creator,

I was a lusty dedicator:

But now,•'the blood all drained from me,

At last 1 rise a dedicatee

(All thanks to thee.)

Katharine and I were surprised and very pleased to turn at the head of your telephone poles. It was kind of you to admit us to this fine book, and I've been reading and re‐reading the poems with an extra pleasure and satisfaction. I particularly love "The Great Scarf of Birds," "Mosquito," and the CastroHemingway. Our bird scarf here is formed of cowbirds—those wicked little feathered friends who are a living testimonial shiftlessness, irresponsibility, and promiscuity. My pasture their pool hall. and their sudden flight is as you described in the startling poem.

Did I ever tell you that my first book. "The Lady Is Cold" (1929), was dedicated (I thought) to my mother. Turned out didn't even know her name. I thought it was Janet Hart White, but it was really Jessie. That's how I started my dedicatory days.

Thanks again for "Poles." There's only one line in the book I don't care for. It's on the last page: "John Updike was horn 1932." This, considering the body of your work, I thought offensive and in bad taste. Yrs.

Andy [E.B.] White.