Letters of E.B. White
Grant, James
only to guide further reading, but to stiffen his claims that quantitative studies and modern research have sharply qualified some of the hypotheses and artistic visions of these grand...
...His letters show that he disowned World Federalism not long after his editorials endorsing universal government appeared in the New Yorker, at the close of the Second World War...
...In the days following Pearl Harbor, White was summoned to Washington to help prepare a pamphlet explaining Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, which needed all the help they could get...
...Send to: The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 29 Ross, founding genius of the New Yorker, "which I often brood over...
...There are dis appointing omissions in White's torte spondencewno references, for instance, tr Evelyn Waugh or Red Smith, two of hi., peers in style...
...I discovered a long time ago," he wrote to his brother Stanley the same year, "that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace...
...Anda lot more...
...The above is an excerpt from the December 1976 issue of ACCESS TO ENERGY...
...Other than these few and rather precise little paragraphs, into which we pour the slow blood of our discontent, we never get around to writing anything at all, in a world when not to write is considered i r r e g u l a r . " Dorothy Lobrano Guth, White's godchild and editor of this marvelous collection of letters, observes that White is the least literary of men, that he commutes to the world of books, but lives at his farm in North Brooklin, Maine...
...The New Yorker," White related in 1929, his thirtieth year, "has a tendency to make me morose and surly, [and] the farther I stay away from it the better...
...his son, Joel, has a degree in naval architecture from MIT and runs a boatyard in North Brooklin...
...Yet White conquered all, including White...
...Anthony Harrigan in SENSING THE NEWS ACCESS TO ENERGY is the best single concise source of up-to-the-minute facts-facts to confound the anti-science, antitechnology, anti-free enterprise demagogy of the eco-freak doom-criers...
...Ideas, in their unadorned state, seem to worry White, who casts his though~ it specifics...
...his stepson is Roger Angell, who turns baseball into poetry in the New Yorker, White has an ulcer...
...A puzzling charge (hardly credited in White's Letters), although White surely suffered...
...He took leave of home and job for a while in 1934 and 1937 to write a long autobiographical poem, something enduring, but the months yielded littleuWhite soon "wearied" of the project, the editor reports, "or fell short of being able to sustain it"--and White, his wife and son in tow, set off for Maine...
...For fifty years, he has stewed about his output--verse, essays, children's books, and the redoubtable Elements of Style, with William Strunk, Jr...
...To James Thurber, White's early cellmate at the New Yorker, on the history of the United States: "...fast the pilgrims, with a dead fish in every hill of corn, then the long winter at Valley Forge, then Emerson and the exaltation of those transcendental days when the Peabodys and the Hawthornes and the Hales were founding a pure blood strain that finally produced Katharine, then bloody Shiloh, and the blizzard of 1888, and the wonderful vital Bull Moose era when you were running your electric backwards to unwind the speedometer and I was playing cops and robbers and wondering why I couldn't pee except when I was alone, then Verdun, and a brave new streamlined world crumbling from its own strange malefactions...
...Neither does White refer tc Brendan Gill's Here at The New Yorker, ". bitchy book got out for the magazine'., fiftieth anniversary two years ago, in whic~ Gill, the New Yorker's drama critic hazards: "It was in Thurber's nature tc inflict pain, and I suppose it was in White'., nature to wish to accept it...
...Nevertheless, the central point is that none of these marvelous creations--the sociological landscapes and portraits by Weber, Marx, and the others, which in one way or another have directed sociological inquiry ever since--none of these originated in a sedulous attentiot~ to scientific method or were, at least for many years, scientifically verifiable...
...White is a reluctant master...
...His "Sloth," an essay, begins: "As the year (1933) goes into its dying phase, the thing that most distresses us is the paucity of our literary output...
...Published by Dr...
...If Pulitzer Prizes were given on an unbiased basis to outspoken and authoritative journals, one certainly would be given to ACCESS TO ENERGY...
...The Germans are setting down to practicing the only type of energy conservation that makes sense--cutting the waste, not the use, of energy...
...If being at the magazine depressed White, writing for it pleased him...
...This newsletter is an incisive, tell-it-as-it-is journal that is fast developing a nationwide following...
...D.O.H., St...
...briefly underwent psychoanalysis...
...He writes beautifully, yet dreads writing, and is, therefore, a star and guide to every writing man...
...This same issue also contained articles on the progress of geothermal energy, on the disposal of nuclear wastes, onthe pros and cons of coal, and a commentary on the nuclear ballot results in recent state elections...
...Thanks to a project called AGROTHERM, run by a number of West German power companies...
...Still, writing lies heavy on White's mind, and words haunt his letters...
...As a reporter, I was a flop, because I always came back laden not with facts about the case, but with a mind full of the little difficulties and amusements I had encountered in my travels...
...BOOK REVIEW Letters of E.B...
...only to guide further reading, but to stiffen his claims that quantitative studies and modern research have sharply qualified some of the hypotheses and artistic visions of these grand thinkers...
...LIBERTARIAN REVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To" ACCESS TO ENERGY Box 2298-A, Boulder, CO 80302 Enter my subscription to ACCESS TO ENERGY for one year (12 monthly issues...
...This is a big book--662 pages of letters, all by White--and we readers learn a good deal about our man...
...Illness, worry, and reluctance are themes that lace his writings to friends...
...Nearly everyone, from time to time, ha., wanted White to accept a medal or run a magazine or endorse a cause, but White mostly declined, often explaining, in effecl (as he did in fact to Christopher Morley, who offered him editorship of the Saturda~ Review ofldterature, in 1936): "My health is always whimsical, and I turn out shockingly little work in the course of a week...
...There he raised chickens and kept a cow and wrote a monthly column for Harper's, "One Man's Meat," which inspired John Updike's mother, among unnumbered other city folk, to buy a farm...
...White wrote "Notes and Comment," the magazine's editorial department, through 1949, and a series of essays called "Points of My Compass" during the early sixties...
...We now have a full blown Fascist movement underway," White declared in 1965, with a nod toward Governor Wallace, yet in more than a hundred pages of letters written during the Vietnam era, he never mentions the war...
...White set the tone for his own irregular employment on the New Yorker by falling ill immediately upon being hired, thus leaving Ross in the maddening lurch of at once having and not having exactly the man he needed...
...Paul, Minn...
...These are White's letters, all of them, and at times one longs to hear the other side of the conversation...
...Bloomington, Indiana 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977...
...And eggplant...
...He was a New York Giants fan, in their day, and wears Brooks Brothers shirts, which are too long in the sleeves...
...Politics isn't White's best subject, but the love of plain expression and Henry David Thoreau, whom he knows by heart, rescue him from most philosophical scrapes...
...When Rexford G. Tugwel hatched a harebrained and sinister popula tion resettlement scheme during th, thirties, White rose up in defense of free dora, armed not with dogma but with ." lyrical statement of the joys of city lifethe life which Washington wished tc disturb...
...I don't know which makes me more miserable," he brooded to Bristow Adams, in 1957, "writing, or being unable to write...
...But White wanted m do more than what came naturally and well...
...That, Friends of the Earth, is "thermal pollution...
...he once picked up James Joyce's Ulysses, but the book made him nervous, and he put it back down...
...The project made him miserable...
...The good man had no choice...
...Actually, as White suggests, it is advertising--' 'the jungle through which winds the thin, clear stream of our discourse' '--that justifies nearly everything at the New Yorker...
...But hearing it would mean a bit less White, whose charm lies in how he writes rather than in what he says when provoked by another mind...
...He returned to the New Yorker's wardepleted staff in 1943, staying on through the early fifties...
...to 6 p.m...
...and the days Monday through Friday, and who quit the magazine for Maine and a respite from weekly deadlines in 1937...
...The conversation today," White wrote his wife, Katharine AngeU, from Washington, "reminded me a little of the early New Deal period when Wallace was talking about one God and one king-and it all seems so far removed from the people, who are full of tiny faults and virtues and whose name is Schmaltz and Henderson...
...As cooling water leaves electric generating plants, it is piped into the German soil with amazing results: Corn grows 3 feet taller, potatoes mature 4 weeks sooner, and the sugarbeet crop increases by 70...
...To this day, he prepares the newsbreaks and taglines that gently fill out, or "justify," New Yorker columns...
...Certainly Sociology as an Art Form, whose 139 pages are filled with the lively thoughts of one sociologist about the living thoughts of others, is a step in the right direction...
...There is something passionate about the early hours of a scorcher it town," White wrote in the Satxrda2 Evening Post, "a vibration, as thoug} something fierce were brewing, a thunder storm of the senses...
...As a letter writer, White is in his glory, saying the words...
...while a student at Cornell, he tried to cross the Fall Creek Gorge in Ithaca on the handrail of the Stewart Avenue bridge...
...he chooses not to fly...
...Thank you for your many courtesies," White tells Harold * The New Yorker, April 28, 1928...
...I'm a literary defective--I read so slowly and so infrequently that it causes talk even here in my own family...
...Most sensible data-packed publication on the market...
...Petr Beckmann, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, it is written for the layman...
...From the outset, White proved himself invaluable to Ross, but Ross never proved himself invaluable to White, who chafed at the hours 10 a.m...
...ACCESS TO ENERGY is a pro-science, pro-technology, pro-free enterprise monthly newsletter, now in its fourth year of technical enlightenment, opposition to government interference in free markets, and the exorcism of environmental Prophets of Doom...
...White Edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth / Harper & Row / $15.00 James Grant E.B...
...To Howard Cushman, White's partner in youthful vagabonding: "I wish you were along, tramping along...
...By redirecting attention to these men, and by reconsidering the very nature of sociology, Nisbet may help restore a little life, in all senses of the word, to contemporary sociology...
...White's words have delighted the public at large since 1925, when they fast appeared in Ross' new fifteen-cent (the competiton was a nickel) weekly...
...As to politics, White, a part-time farmer, doesn't accept government lime, on principle...
...More then that, it is fun to read...
...I enlcose $9...
...They were, rather, creations of imaginative intellects, open to art as well as science, who sought determinedly to make sense out of the great changes rolling over European society...
...Not till the New Yorker came along did I ever find any means of expressing those impertinences and irrelevancies...
...But Ph.D's renew, too...
...Once he wrote a poem about not writing, titled "Ballad of Little Faith...
...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...Excellently written, too...
...It reads, in part: When I sit down with proper zeal To write the play I really feel Gird on the pen With strength of ten And try to do some thinking I find it's time to pay a call Or put the laundry in the hall Or kiss a maid Or build my trade Or do a little drinking...
...Even pineapple crops are being tried in the once-cold soil of Germany...
...Like cotton...
...he James Grant is an associate editor of Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly...
Vol. 10 • April 1977 • No. 7
