I finished reading E.B. White Essays moments ago. Since the essay genre happens to be my favorite indulgence, I found White fascinating, the great master, and among the finest American essayists of the last century that includes the likes of Didion, Dillard, Wallace, Baldwin and Sontag.
White wrote several thousand essays, 1800 of them for the New Yorker. I have liked his modesty, his unaffected style, keen powers of observation, evocative musings, and love of nature.
He adored Thoreau’s Walden, my favorite American classic. Like Thoreau, White questioned some of the assumptions of his fellows, that technology assured happiness and that man could improve upon nature.
How can I not admire this good man who found beauty in life’s complexity and changing moods?
I must say a chill went up my spine when I read “Here is New York,” written in a steamy 1948 summer and, for many critics, the finest tribute ever rendered to Gotham. White was deeply troubled by the advent of the atom and hydrogen bombs, fearing their exponential future consequences. America had escaped WWII’s destruction, but danger stalked its future, with New York vulnerable as a primary target:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers….
I can’t say I’ve ever encountered anything more prescient than this foreboding passage written 52 years before 9/11.
But this is partially witness to why White is worth your time, observant, asking the hard questions, sifting out the implications.
Unfortunately, if you google “greatest 20th century American essayists,” he gets omitted. This is perhaps due to his three best selling children’s books, including Charlotte’s Web, resulting in his essay prowess being overshadowed.
Those of us who did English composition in our freshman year of college are more apt to associate him with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, one of the most effective writing guides ever published. White had studied at Cornell under Dr. William Strunk, Jr. who had originally published it in 1920. White revised it in 1959, adding to it substantially. A no nonsense guide, it called for concise prose, accurate grammar, unified paragraphs, concrete description, and avoidance of the passive voice.
White carried out its precepts and is famed as a writer of the unembellished style, direct, easy to follow, yet sophisticated in its declarative sentence structure and keen observations with their implications. You’ll not find many subordinated clauses or inverted sentences. No semicolons or dashes. No arcane vocabulary.
Of the 31 essays in this collection, chosen by White for inclusion, my favorite is “Back to the Lake,” moving in its reminiscence as he takes his eleven year old son back to the Maine lake of his childhood, an essay critic Joseph Epstein remarks “shimmers like a perfect poem; everything in it clicks” in its theme of birth, rebirth, and death:
When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.
Though critics often refer to White’s humor, there looms a stubborn apocalyptic streak in his writing as in “Here is New York.” Or take this passage:
I think when the end of the world comes the sky will be its old blue self, with white cumulus clouds drifting along. You will be looking out of a window, say, at a tree; and then after a bit the tree won’t be there any more, and the looking won’t be there any more, only the window will be there, in memory—the thing through which the looking has been done. I can see God, walking through the garden and noticing that the world is done for, reach down and pick it up and put it on His compost pile. It ought to make a fine ferment.
White struggled with general anxiety, beginning in his childhood. There were so many fears that plagued him, especially about his health. He was afraid of meeting people and of giving speeches. He didn’t show when being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He avoided parties and weddings.
White would ultimately be honored with virtually every literary prize, including a Pulitzer, yet remained a shy, unassuming man, modest in his wants, relishing farm life in Maine.
Some readers may find White too dry or intellectual for their taste and some of his essays dated or discursive. White was never fated to win the Nobel, but he always made sense in half the space, which would have made Strunk smile. White excels when he foregoes political commentary, taking up instead depictions of everyday life:
I like the cold. I like the snow. I like the descent to the dark, cold kitchen at six in the morning, to put a fire in the wood stove…. I steal down in my wrapper carrying a pair of corduroy pants…and fill the kettle with fresh spring water…with a poker I clear the grate in the big black Home Crawford 8-20, roll up two sheets of yesterday’s Bangor Daily News, and lay them in the firebox along with a few sticks of cedar kindling and two sticks of stovewood on top of that” (“The Winter of the Great Snows”).
I have loved keeping company with White these last several days, his honesty, clarity, remonstrances, love for animals and nature uplifting. So many passages, wise and luxurious in sentiment like this one from “Letter from the East”:
With so much that is disturbing our lives and clouding our future, beginning right here in my own little principality, with its private pools of energy (the woodpile, the black stove, the germ in the seed, the chick in the egg), and extending outward to our unhappy land and our plundered planet, it is hard to foretell what is going to happen. I know one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded pink of the snow fences, a spot of color to the vast gray-and-white world.
White passed from us at his beloved North Brooklin home in Maine on October 1, 1985. He was 86.
His legacy, like that of Thoreau, will endure, for talent always makes room for itself.
—rj
Brimmings: up from the well 