The Man Who Was Walter Mitty, page 8
Years later, when White was seventy and wrote the child’s story, “The Trumpet of the Swan,” the father swan addressed his cygnets:
“Welcome to the pond and the swamp adjacent!” he said. “Welcome to the world that contains this lovely pond, this splendid marsh, unspoiled and wild! Welcome to sunlight and shadow, wind and weather; welcome to water! The water is a swan’s particular element, as you will discover. Swimming is no problem for a swan. Welcome to danger, which you must guard against—the vile fox with his stealthy tread and sharp teeth, the offensive otter who swims up under you and tries to grab you by the leg, the stinking skunk who hunts by night and blends in with the shadows, the coyote who hunts and howls and is bigger than a fox.... Be vigilant, be strong, be brave, be graceful, and always follow me! I will go first, then you will come along in single file, and your devoted mother will bring up the rear. Enter the water quietly and confidently!”4
This was indeed, his father’s voice, decades removed from the birthday letter White received when he was twelve. The swan was, in fact, the voice and personality of his father:
Samuel White resembled the old swam in other ways: in his love for his wife, in his male pride, in his pleasure in fatherhood, in his vanity, his competence, his decisiveness, his courage. Samuel White’s children were amused by the comic aspects of their father’s pride, but they loved and respected this benevolent master and disciplined leader whose family was his chief concern and greatest joy.5
(His mother didn’t seem to have much effect on the family; she was not very strong after Elwyn’s birth, but did live to be seventy-eight.)
Because of the ages of his older brothers and sisters, White spent much of his youth by himself. He remembered the dank cellar of his White Plains home with its old coal furnace and:
The early sound of the Italian furnace man who crept in at dawn and shook the thing down. “As a small boy,” he writes, “I used to repair to the cellar, where I would pee in the coal bin—for variety.” White once referred to a part of his troubled, middle-aged psyche as “the ‘notself,’” which he said, “lives in the dark sub-basement of the psyche (and) helps the janitor.”6
Like Thurber, White had particular memories of dogs:
I can still see my first dog (Mac) in all the moods and situations that memory has filed him away in, but I think of him oftenest as he used to be right after breakfast on the back porch, listlessly eating up a dish of petrified oatmeal rather than hurt my feelings. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home—a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn’t forget that sort of association.7
The Whites had a garden and a barn and there were horses and hay, geese, ducks, turkeys. Elwyn witnessed chick hatching, and rats which lived under the stable and wild cats. Eventually, he would draw on them all for Charlotte’s Web, in 1952.
In his brother Albert’s room was a huge Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, where his father sent all the children to look up words they did not know.
He received an education without equal from his brother Stanley:
Stan taught me to read when I was in kindergarten and I could read fairly fluently when I entered the first grade—an accomplishment my classmates found annoying. I’m not sure my teacher, Miss Hackett, thought much of it, either. Stan’s method of teaching me was to hand me a copy of the New York Times and show me how to sound the syllables. He assured me there was nothing to learning to read—a simple matter. He imparted information as casually as a tree drops its leaves in the fall. He taught me the harmonic circle on the pianoforte. He gave me haphazard lessons in the laws of physics: centrifugal force, momentum, inertia, gravity, surface tension, and illustrated everything in a clowning way. He taught me to paddle a canoe so that it would proceed on a straight course instead of a series of zigzags. He showed me how to hold the scissors for trimming the fingernails of my right hand. He showed me how to handle a jackknife without cutting myself. Hardly a day passes in my life without my performing some act that reminds me of something I learned from Bunny. He was called Bunny because he wiggled his nose like a rabbit.8
And in his brother Stanley’s room was an Oliver typewriter, with keys in a crescent to the upper left and upper right over the keyboard. He taught himself to type about the age of five. As he said later:
It was the noisy excitement connected with borrowing and using this machine that encouraged me to be a writer.9
... and ... as late as 1947, he wrote Stanley ...
I’m glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me—more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight yeas old and thinking, “This is where I belong, this is it.”10
White’s biographer Scott Elledge suggests that “much of the story of the life of E.B. White is the story of how he came to terms with his fears; and that story begins early.”11
He had a fear of public speaking, engendered by his grade school, the alphabet and the accident of his name.
It was in P.S. 2 that I contracted the fear of platforms that has dogged me all my life and caused me to decline every invitation to speak in public. For the assembly performances, pupils were picked in alphabetical order, and since there were a great many pupils and my name began with W, I spent the entire term dreading the ordeal of making a public appearance. I suffered from a severe anticipatory sickness. Usually the term ended before my name came up, and then the new term started again at the top of the alphabet. I mounted the platform only once in my entire career, but I suffered tortures every day of the school year, thinking about that awesome—if improbable—event.12
As the last of the White children, he may have felt especially vulnerable to fears and anxieties. He later wrote about “A Boy I Knew”:
I remember this boy with affection, and feel no embarrassment in idealizing him. He himself was an idealist of shocking proportions. He had a fine capacity for melancholy and the gift of sadness. I never knew anybody on whose spirit the weather had such a devastating effect. A shift of wind, or of mood, could wither him. There would be times when a dismal sky conspired with a forlorn side street to create a moment of such profound bitterness that the world’s accumulated sorrow seemed to gather in a solid lump in his heart. The appearance of a coasting hill softening in a thaw, the look of backyards along the railroad tracks on hot afternoons, the faces of people in trolley cars on Sunday—these could and did engulf him in a vast wave of depression. He dreaded Sunday afternoon because it had been written in a minor key.
He dreaded Sunday also because it was the day he spent worrying about going back to school on Monday. School was consistently frightening, not so much in realization as in anticipation ...
The fear he had of making a public appearance on a platform seemed to find a perverse compensation, for he made frequent voluntary appearances in natural amphitheaters before hostile audiences, addressing himself to squalls and thunderstorms, rain and darkness, alone in rent canoes. His survival is something of a mystery, as he was neither very expert nor very strong. Fighting natural disturbances was the only sort of fighting he enjoyed. He would run five blocks to escape a boy who was after him, but he would stand up to any amount of punishment from the elements. He swam from the rocks of Hunter’s Island, often at night, making his way there alone and afraid along the rough, dark trail from the end of the bridge ... up the hill and through the silent woods and across the marsh to the rocks.
* * *
This boy felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people. Against considerable opposition and with woefully inadequate equipment, he managed to provide himself with animals, so that he would never be without something to tend. He kept pigeons, dogs, snakes, polliwogs, turtles, rabbits, lizards, singing birds, chameleons, caterpillars and mice. The total number of hours spent just standing watching animals, or refilling their waterpans, would be impossible to estimate; and it would be hard to say what he got out of it. In spring, he felt a sympathetic vibration with earth’s renascence, and set a hen. He always seemed to be under some strange compulsion to assist the processes of incubation and germination, as though without him they might fail and the earth grow old and die. To him a miracle was essentially egg-shaped.13
(The “processes of incubation and germination” could also be synonyms for the craft of writing.)
He was never really ill, but never in robust health; in 1905 he had such severe hay fever that the family took him to Maine during August, hoping the climate would help. The White clan liked Maine so much they made it an annual vacation and eventually White, at the height of his career at The New Yorker, moved from the city to Maine and mailed in his contributions to the magazine.
In 1909, when he was ten, he won a prize from the Woman’s Home Companion magazine, for a poem about a mouse; when he was eleven he won an award—a silver badge—from St. Nicholas magazine and again won—the second time, a gold badge—from St. Nicholas magazine when he was fourteen. When he discovered the joy of putting words on pristine paper, he began writing a journal. Years later, he used some of his entries, revised, in The Trumpet of the Swan, (which he would publish in 1970) in the voice of a boy named Sam, who was unmistakably White himself.
When he attended Mount Vernon High School, in 1916, he was the assistant editor of The Oracle, the school’s literary magazine. He contributed two stories, an editorial urging nonintervention in the World War and a version of Hiawatha in which Hiawatha gets married to avoid the draft.14
White matured slowly. In high school he knew he should be dating, but couldn’t bring himself to talk to girls. He believed that he could do none of the things clever boys did to be successful with girls: he was not a football player; did not smoke; couldn’t make small talk. He “dated” a girl named Mildred Hesse—they ice skated on frozen ponds together, hour after hour, neither talking nor touching. And ever after, winter ponds and the silent figures of ice skaters were burned into his memory as images synonymous with young love.
There was no question where he would go to college—his brothers Albert and Stanley had gone to Cornell and Elwyn would go there too. (He had some thoughts about volunteering to join the Army to go to World War One, but he did not weigh enough to pass the Army physical and family bonds to Cornell were too strong.)
At Cornell, in Ithaca, New York, Whit found some of the same beauty he loved in Maine. Ithaca is in the upstate New York Finger Lakes region and the Cornell campus has a imposing view of Cayuga Lake. White found it to be cosmopolitan and congenial. Cornell was founded by Ezra Cornell in 1864 and its first president was Andrew D. White. By tradition, any male student named White attending Cornell received the nickname “Andy” in honor of its first president.
White was rushed and pledged to Phi Gamma Delta; some of the fraternity were members of the Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, and White joined them. His first semester grades were only marginal—barely passing—because his main interest was the Sun.
Entering his sophomore year, White discovered the Sun had set, because too many of its staffers had gone off to war. He joined the Student Army Training Corps, but a month after the Armistice in November, 1918, White and others were mustered out. He returned to classes with his dog, Mutt.
When the Sun rose again, White was one of four members of his class elected to its board of editors.
He wrote clear, accurate news stories and brief, informative headlines. His interpretive pieces drew letters of praise from members of the faculty, and his poems and one-liners were funnier than anything anyone else could produce. Though only a few members of the board knew him by sight, and fewer knew him personally, he won his place easily, because everyone on the board was convinced that he was a better writer than any of his competitors, including a classmate named Allison Danzig, who later became a distinguished sportswriter for the New York Times.15
In his junior year, in 1920, he was named editor-in-chief of the Sun, which was not only the university newspaper, but Ithaca’s morning paper. It was a subscriber to the Associated Press and it was—in contrast to almost all other university newspapers—a real paper. White also took Professor William Strunk’s course, “English 8.” Strunk used as a text, his own unpublished forty-three page pamphlet of rules and guidelines for English usage and White loved Strunk and the class. He received an “A” for the first Strunk class he took and an “A” for the second.
Years later, he would revise and edit Strunk’s unpolished guide to usage and add two-names-and-a-title to the vocabulary of everyone who has ever taken an English course at the college or university level: Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. It has become the most widely known style guide ever written in English, with over three million copies sold in paperback, followed by Kate Turabian’s University of Chicago Style Guide for graduate students.
White also was influenced by journalism professor Bristow Adams and his wife Louella, as well as history professor George Lincoln Burr. White was transformed:
My chance encounter with George Lincoln Burr was the greatest single thing that ever happened in my life, for he introduced me to a part of myself that I hadn’t discovered. I saw, with blinding clarity, how vital it is for Man to live in a free society. The experience enabled me to grow up almost overnight; it gave my thoughts and ambitions a focus. It caused me indirectly to pursue the kind of work which eventually enabled me to earn my living. But far more important than that, it gave me a principle of thought and of action for which I have tried to fight, and for which I shall gladly continue to fight the remainder of my life.16
In his senior year, Andy White, as editor, led the fight for a new honor code at Cornell, following a widespread cheating scandal. As the voice of the Sun, White wrote in favor of the new Cornell code. When it was passed, it was sent to the faculty senate, where it also passed.
And, for the first, real true, time in his life, Andy White had a girlfriend. She was Alice Burchfield, called “Burch”; she had
A happy and outgoing temperament; her smile was almost a grin; her laugh was generous; her eyes were lively and blue; and her handshake was firm.17
White had met her when she appeared in a campus production of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo.
When he graduated from Cornell, Andy White had overcome his initial shyness and his habitual self-doubt; he had become a positive, outgoing campus leader. He had discovered journalism (but knew he didn’t want to be a beat reporter—he knew his best talents lay in features, observation, essays, leadership); he had met Bristow Adams and George Lincoln Burr and others on the faculty. And especially William Strunk.
Between his junior year and senior year, and after his graduation, White worked at Camp Otter, near Dorset, Ontario, Canada. The camp scenes and experiences gave him additional details for The Trumpet of the Swan.
After graduation, White headed for New York. It was a rude awakening:
There are four hundred thousand of me, and we sit on the park benches and develop a hungry, glassy stare. But I am coming along fairly well, having interviewed the managing editor of the Post, the assistant managing editor and the city editor of the Sun, the director of the Bureau of Publications of the N.Y. Edison Company ... not to mention the thousands of interviewing and short skirted secretaries .... New York is a wonderful city ... but it makes wrecks of men. I see them on the benches—old grizzled men in dusty derbies, asleep in the sun, old broken souls snatching at candy wrappers because the tinfoil brings a few cents when you get enough of it....
he wrote to Louella Adams, wife of his Cornell Journalism professor.18
He tried The New York Times, The Globe, The World, and The Evening Mail and finally got a job as a reporter with United Press, the second- or third- or perhaps fourth-best wire service in the country. A week into his job, he was sent to Valley Forge, to over the funeral of U.S. Senator Philander C. Knox. White missed the route, got to the cemetery just in time to see the coffin lowered into the ground and quit. He knew he did not want to be merely a reporter; he knew there was more than just wire service journalism.
But he tried again. He applied to The Greenwich (Conn.) News and Graphic, The Mount Vernon Daily Argus, The Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press. He got a job writing meaningless press releases for a silk mill, but the job only lasted a few weeks. He then got a job with the American Legion News Service. Working in the building at the same time, was a ex-Stars and Stripes staffer named Harold Ross. White never met him.19
That job didn’t last long either. He was living at home, in Mount Vernon, with his parents. His love affair with Alice Burchfield continued, sporadically, through the nails. Andy couldn’t bring himself to tell Burch he loved her; his letters were trivial, anecdotal.
In the spring of 1922, Andy and a college friend, Harold Cushman decided to drive west. Andy had bought a Model T Ford, which he named “Hotspur.” He and Cushman would find adventure—and jobs—heading west. It took them several days to drive from Mount Vernon to Ithaca. Reaching Ithaca, Andy learned by rumor that Alice had become engaged to someone else. Whether in anger, fear or heartsickness, he made no move to telephone her. He decided the best way to meet her was “by accident” on a bridge near the Cornell campus. But she didn’t cross the bridge at the usual hour on her way to classes. So Andy and Cushman made their way to East Aurora, near Buffalo.
There, Andy waited for her to return to her home in Buffalo. When she did, he met her and proposed. She must have been astonished. White had never previously told her he loved, nor even held her in his arms. She was not engaged, despite rumors, but she said she did love the other man, Jim Sumner. She also said that she didn’t believe that Andy White was really in love with her. So they parted. Or perhaps just drifted away from each other. White later characterized his love affair with “Burch” as “immaculate romancing.”20 It was probably just as well.
