Essays of E.B. White, by E.B. White
Miller, Stephen
BOOKS IN REVIEW - Essays of E. B. White E.B. White / Harper & Row / $12.50 EB. White is, as everyone . knows, an essayist, which means that he practices a peculiar trade, one that many regard with...
...Yet the garden White cultivates—however charming and urbane—is finally a small one, a garden that leaves out too much...
...an account of White's struggles with his Model T Ford —are perfectly wrought essays that are destined to find their place in anthologies of American writing...
...Gold writes, "The idealistic researcher-speechwriter, for his own peace of mind, needs to pin his candidate down...
...White's essays go down too easily...
...Hardcover $8.00, Softcover $2.00...
...Their importance is underscored by the fact that the seriousness of a nascent campaign is often judged not by the candidate's positions on major issues, but by his success at recruiting top-rate public-relations experts...
...Gold offers example after example of public-relations experts who spent their time promoting themselves at the expense of their candidates...
...Gold contends that "from the beginning, this was to be the most public relations-oriented Presidential campaign in history...
...However whimsically intended, the phrase turns Johnson into a lovable English eccentric...
...Today, of course, few politicians write anything, and everyone knows it...
...More than that: the news media, under pressure of their own accelerated needs...would be active participants in the games the flacks would play...
...And White, I must regretfully report, does not bear comparison with them...
...Stephen Miller are often quite predictable...
...These words hint of complacency and snobbishness, and they betray a certain well-bred sanctimoniousness that often can be sniffed in the pages of the New Yorker, which was the usual outlet for White's writings...
...One of White's problems—if we can call it a problem—is his absolute lack of pretension as a writer...
...White is, as everyone . knows, an essayist, which means that he practices a peculiar trade, one that many regard with suspicion...
...Oh yes, there was also Jimmy's commitment to a government of love and competence...
...32 The American Spectator February 1978...
...To do him justice, though, White does not take himself seriously enough to serve as an apostle of the simple life—or, indeed, as an apostle of anything...
...The virtues of diffidence and modesty tend to become vices if we feel that the writer is bent upon ingratiating himself with the reader...
...Ford's campaign specialists, according to Gold, continually generated publicity that reinforced "the widespread view that he is an affable oaf who needs help to thread his way through a sentence...
...Though this tradition, which currently nourishes the fine American essayist, Edward Hoagland, lacks the kind of astute observation of human conduct that we find in the best English and Continental essayists, it has its own energies and attractions...
...A landmark of political thought in this century"—Walter Lippmann...
...Speech-writers, along with pollsters, advance men, advertising copywriters, media specialists (print), media specialists (electronic), and other assorted image-makers have come out of the closet...
...at the beginning of the very television commercials which had been criticized...
...Instead, then, of being too hard on White for what he does not have to offer, we should recognize his successes in this vein—a handful of essays that have, as White puts it, "the odor of durability clinging to them...
...measuring up to them is another...
...BOOK REVIEW PR as in President Vic Gold / Doubleday / $8.50 Baron Von Kannon One Saturday morning in October 1960, I was listening to a group of farmers discuss politics in the back room of Cotton Jones' grocery store...
...Jasper County, Indiana, was -staunchly Republican then, not to mention Protestant, so it wasn't surprising that most of the men supported Richard Nixon...
...It is a bad sign, I think, that in his foreword White chooses to call Samuel Johnson "the good doctor...
...they lack the aggressiveness of journalists, the patience of scholars, and the imagination of novelists...
...For the most part he is content to be a quirky and refreshing observer of the antics of animals Available: The Servile State By Hilaire Belloc A perceptive warning, first published in 1913, of the consequences of statism and the effect of socialist doctrine on capitalist society...
...By his own admission, Rafshoon responded to the charge that Carter was vague on the issues by merely adding the line "Jimmy Carter on the issue of...
...We hear in his work not only the voice of Thoreau, to whom he pays his respects, but also the voices of Whitman, Williams, and Roethke...
...We miss in White's work what we find in the best essayists—the tension between the world of ideas and the world of ordinary life, a sense of the myriad waysin which the mind—and I don't mean only the intellectual's mind—makes sense of experience...
...Hardcover $9.00, Softcover $3.00...
...I say regretfully because White is an attractive and agreeable man, and his essays are always gracefully written—usually both lucid in their meanderings and tactful in their silences, in their knowing when not to go too deeply into something...
...The most enlightening revelation concerning the flacks and their games comes through Gold's description of the public-relations experts...
...More important, Jimmy's good old boys were so proud of their success at getting Jimmy the nomination, they just had to brag to the press...
...Arator By John Taylor The most popular and influential work by John Taylor of Caroline, foremost philosopher of the conservative Jeffersonians...
...But White lacks the kind of restless intellect that the best essayists possess, an intellect that is never satisfied with itself—that continually thinks about old things in new ways or new things in old ways...
...Popular Government By Sir Henry Sumner Maine A classic inquiry into the conditions necessary for the success of representative government, by the author of Ancient Law...
...Essayists—even the best of them—suffer from obvious faults...
...This edition includes Maine's famous essay on "The Constitution of the United States...
...Governor Carter's flacks seem to have had more respect for their candidate, but were even more vain and self-serving than Ford's or Reagan's...
...she has never taken a tranquilizing pill...
...Most pieces are genuinely amusing, and one—"Death of a Pig"—manages to move towards larger questions and deeper feelings...
...Edited and with an introduction by M. E. Bradford...
...Only in "The Years of Wonder," a mini,autobiography in which White describes a peculiar rite of passage he underwent as a feckless young man, do we get the kind of generalizing power that we expect from the best essayists...
...they move too smoothly towards their conclusions...
...In his latest book, Vic Gold (himself a former Washington PR man, or "Retired Flack") supplies a highly entertaining account of political image-building in the 1976 presidential campaign...
...He speaks of the need to simplify one's life, complains about "the technologists," laments about "a world that has got almost completely out of hand," and moralizes about a raccoon who "for all her limitations, seems to me better adjusted to life on earth than men are...
...For the first time I realized that there actually exist people who are more vain, more petty, even more peculiar than politicians...
...No less than three key aides—Peter Bourne, Hamilton Jordan, and Charles Kirbo—claimed to be the one man responsible for persuading Carter to run...
...Such pieties about the simple and natural life are not, I should add, an insistent strain in White's work, but they are there nevertheless...
...For in this piece White takes a close look at the strange amalgam of ideas that tossed around in his head at the time—ideas, he implies, that are often in the heads of young men in their twenties...
...Both this piece and "Farewell, My Lovely...
...Jerry Rafshoon, Carter's man in charge of advertisements, went so far as to boast on national television how he flimflammed the voters of Pennsylvania...
...The reporters obliged by spelling their names right, and the good old boys continued to announce their campaign plans to the world...
...nor is he in the same league with such 20th-century masters as Orwell and Trilling...
...An aura of coziness suffuses many of White's essays, a coziness that becomes at times cloying...
...They uncover no scandals, discover no theses, and tell no tales...
...tinguished from paid advertising exposure, so that the campaign had to be built around media events...
...Whether or not the proposal had merit, its timing forced Reagan into debates with emotionally hostile voters fearful that local hospitals would be boarded up...
...Thus humiliated, Ford would step down, and Reagan would begin preparations for the general election...
...And White is a writer distinctly in the American grain—a solitarysoul intent on celebrating, in his own humorous way, the mysterious interconnectedness of things...
...Invoking Montaigne and Johnson, though, is one thing...
...While my recollection of the discussion is understandably fuzzy (I was eleven at the time), I do remember the major indictment against John Kennedy: He didn't even write his own speeches...
...White himself often seems to be straining to become an American equivalent...
...For instance, Don Penny, a top Ford flack, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, "The trouble with the President is that half the time he sounds like a Florsheim shoe salesman...
...We learn, for example, that in Maine the sun "is less strong than Florida's, but so is the spirit of development, and I can stare at the sea without peering through the wire mesh of a trash basket...
...Governor Reagan had a similar staff problem...
...Reagan's strategy, one will recall, was to score early and decisive victories against Ford in New Hampshire and Florida...
...Only one pops to mind, the Panama Canal dispute, and the candidate closest to popular sentiment on that one failed to receive his party's nomination...
...Yet White also knows that anyone who practices a trade that has been worked by Michel de Montaigne and Samuel Johnson—to name the two that he mentions in his foreword to this selection of essays—need not be apologetic about what he is doing...
...To order these books, or for a copy of our catalog, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...White himself realizes that the essayist is a second-class citizen in the kingdom of letters—and realizes, moreover, that "some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist...
...As such an avuncular figure—the crusty old neighbor down the road—White offers us amusing views of various matters...
...LibertyPress LibertyClassics We pay postage on prepaid orders...
...Not simply because Gerald Ford...operated the most public relations-oriented Presidency in history...not simply because post-Watergate federal election spending laws placed a premium on pure flackery, as disBaron Von Kannon is publisher of The American Spectator...
...This edition includes sixty-four essays, practical and political, on farming and the social order of an agricultural republic...
...But, as is usually the case with such offbeat "characters," the opinions he serves up Stephen Miller is with the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...After reading PR as in President, one wonders why Gold did not spend more time on the issues—though come to think of it, what were the issues of 1976...
...A major hitch developed, however, when one of Reagan's flacks became prematurely concerned that President Reagan would not be sufficiently conservative...
...He did, with the now-famous speech in which Reagan advocated a $90 billion re-duction in federal expenditures...
...As a result, he lost his momentum and the all-important early primaries...
...Hardcover $7.95, Softcover $1.95...
...A5 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 The American Spectator February 1978 31 —especially geese, raccoons, and dogs—as well as the antics of people, especially himself...
...BOOK REVIEW Essays of E. B. White E.B...
...The Years of Wonder" is also very much an American tale of adventure on a new frontier—what was then the strange new world of Alaska...
...With an introduction by Robert Nisbet...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
