Arts and Letters

The subtleties of civilized intercourse exacting, as they often do, a measure of dissimulation, many of us in this context or that may offer to the world an exterior not always in strictest harmony with the private self. With E. B. White one had the feeling that any such variance between—to oversimplify—the personality and the character was at an absolute minimum, if not nonexistent. This very lack of complexity made him a phenomenon among expectedly intricate types. The façade was the edifice. What you got was what you saw, from earliest acquaintance through ripening friendship. What was it you got, then? A gentleman, in that pristine sense of the word best apprehended by mentally dividing it up into the two words it comprises. And imagine my being so acutely conscious of White the stylist and style authority that in writing the foregoing sentence I looked up the word "comprise" to make sure I was using it correctly and not in the often mistaken sense of "compose"; all this in the certainty that I understand the distinction completely. The whole comprises the parts, not the parts the whole. Well, as a gentleman he might have smiled seeing me do this, but gently. He was that not only in his personal relations but even when engaged in literary contention. Every boxing referee states the principle in that ritual huddle with the combatants just before the fists begin to fly. Come out fighting, but no low blows, and break even in the clinches. Perfect English, not a wasted word.

Most of us when on the attack occasionally reach for the old meat axe, but for him the scalpel sufficed, because he wielded it with such persuasive dexterity, the precise language ever at the service of a clear mind. "Limpid as dammit," as the Wodehouse character so limpidly put it. American journalism never had anyone quite like him, though he shared one quality with an essayist he could not have been more unlike in other respects—H. L. Mencken. That trait was clarity. Mencken was also limpid as dammit. He stated the case for both of them when he said of himself, "There is never any doubt about what I mean." There was never any doubt about what White meant. He meant business. And once he meant business with Big Business. For we remember the time he took on Xerox and got the company officers to desist from a practice he persuaded them was corrupt, and corrupting. For that one episode we might exchange our scalpel metaphor for that of the slingshot, because it was a case of little David felling a corporate Goliath with a single well-shot stone.

If, as the Oscar Wilde character says, a man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies, White was not attending to his life at all. No gift for enmity here. No one ever met anyone who didn't like him personally, however many may have envied him his protean talents—humorist, short story writer, essayist, author of some of our most enduring stories for children, even gag writer for cartoonists. We recall with pleasure his magazine cover showing a seahorse wearing a feedbag, certainly whimsicality at its freshest. And of course half a century of snappers for The New Yorker newsbreaks alone qualify him as one of the wits of our time.

As to his legendary hypochondria I can offer no personal testimony, except to say that if you greeted him with "Hi, Andy, how are you?" the chances were good that you would get an answer. Hardly evidence of the heavy malade imaginaire I had been led to expect by the dispensers of Andy White lore, which made me conclude that most of it was apocryphal.

If in those days Andy no longer carried his tattered copy of Walden around with him, it was probably because he knew it by heart. It was understandably the Bible for a man with his love of nature, combined as that love never was in the case of Thoreau with an equal passion for the swarm and swing of the city. No man ever more lyrically blended the rural and the urban. This combination may have alchemized what became his twin preoccupations after the Second World War—the earth and the world. The two are not the same at all. The former is being steadily ravaged by the second, as his feature called "These Precious Days" emphasized with its systematic concern for the wanton pollutions we inflict on what as a civilization we are privileged to inhabit. The humorist writing delightful entries in the portion of "The Talk of the Town" known as "Comment" became a polemicist for the United Nations, and the ideal of a unified mankind. Harold Ross was acutely aware of the change being wrought in his magazine, and was said to have said, on receiving yet another piece of Comment on the UN, "White's being cosmic again." But he wisely gave him his head. Ross founded The New Yorker, but two or three of his early luminaries helped him create it, chiefly White and Thurber as the most stunning journalistic pair since Addison and Steele, together with Andy's beloved Katharine, with whom he came to share a marriage of true minds to which impediment can scarcely be imagined. The subject of marriage offers the eulogist an occasion to recall one of his own favorite pieces of White light verse, "Husbands and Wives":

Those that call each other Darling
Spend a lot of time in quarreling.
Those that call each other Hey
Live in peace by night and day.

We're sure Andy and Katharine managed an idyllic union without recourse to the lowly vocative.

Early on, he had—to pluck Eliot out of context for a moment—found "some way incomparably light and deft, some way we both should understand," which served him equally in dealing with casual and weighty matters. Becoming heavy-hearted never made him heavy-handed. What a river of gentle yet consistently trenchant belles-lettres. What delectable parodies, what funny stories. What finely honed humanitarian admonitions. What delightful poems. What a contribution to the gaiety of nations!

I doubt that the Academy walls will tremble or its members gnash their teeth if I pause to observe that truth is stranger than fiction. That's why reality continually dishes up to the writer coincidences and symbolisms unusable because too pat or obvious—or too strong for the delicate stomach of art. However, I'll chance an example in conclusion. In the last pictures we saw of Andy White he was wearing an eyepatch, because of retinal degeneration which plagued his closing years. There is one especially touching snapshot showing him in the barnyard playing with his geese, which—or we might even say whom—he considered great clowns, a fancy that would occur to few in city pent. Seeing him with his eyepatch, I was lured into the most grotesque yet somehow sadly pertinent association. I thought of the monocle still sported by Eustace Tilley, trademark of a magazine, indeed an institution, into which the genius of E. B. White breathed its first true and abiding soul.

He lived a long and full life, full enough, certainly, to include his own share of that human staple, simple melancholy. He loved his fellow men and he loved his fellow creatures. I wouldn't know whether White ever prayed; he certainly attended no church. Well, he prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small. I trust it's not too cryptic to say that he had too much natural reverence to need religion. Thoreau was his god, or one of them. And did our modest friend, I wonder, ever suspect what we all now seem quite sure of, that all those years he was worshipping an equal?