TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capmil.8

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                                                                                October 14, 1985

A Master of Luminous Prose

E.B. White:  1899-1985


Imagine a house filled with books, and then try to track down
the one bearing his name. The Elements of Style should be
somewhere by the desk where the letters get written. The
clutter of children's rooms ought to yield dog-eared copies of
Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. The
Essays and Letters are both within easy reach of the overstuffed
armchair in front of the fireplace. For A Subtreasury of
American Humor, the best bet is probably the bedside table in
the guest room, where Aunt Mary left it a month or so ago. E.B.
White's death last week, at 86, was cause for sadness in many
spots in millions of homes.

By the time he was 30, White had earned a reputation as a master
of luminous prose, and over a career that spanned more than 50
years, he never let his standards of his audience down. He
insisted that words, his own and others', should communicate
rather than confuse: "When you say something, make sure you have
said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair."
He had no patience with the sloppy of faddish. The spreading
misuse of the term hopefully drew a pithy rebuke. "This once
useful adverb meaning 'with hope' has been distorted and is now
widely used to mean 'I hope' or 'it is to be hoped.'  Such use
is not merely wrong, it is silly."  He gave "finalize" even
shorter shrift:  "A pompous, ambiguous verb."  Funny was a word
that should also be held at arm's length:  "Nothing becomes
funny by being labeled so."

White would have achieved eminence in any case, but the path he
took ambled through a series of happy circumstances. The sixth
child of a well-to-do piano manufacturer, he grew up in Mount
Vernon, a tree- lined suburb of New York City. He went to
Cornell, where he gladly surrendered his given names, Elwyn
Brooks, for the moniker Andy (after Andrew D. White, the
university's first president). After graduation, White held
jobs in journalism and advertising without finding an employer
who could make good use of his whimsical temperament and
lapidary prose.

Along came Harold Ross, the demanding young editor of a new
magazine called "The New Yorker. White submitted pieces to the
fledgling publication, one of which appeared in an early issue.
Before long he was invited to take a staff position. Reluctant
to report to any office on a fixed schedule, he nevertheless
showed up for an interview. There he met Katharine Angell, the
fiction editor. He remembered later that "she had a lot of
black hair and the knack of making a young contributor feel at
ease."  He did not know at that moment that the course of his
professional and personal lives had been set for good.

He and Katharine fell in love and married, after her divorce in
1929. They lived happily ever after until her death in 1977.
He also joined The New Yorker and along with Founding Editor
Ross and Contributor James Thurber, gave the magazine its voice
and character. White could do, and did, everything Ross wanted.
He took over "Notes and Comment," the opening section of each
week's "Talk of the Town." These paragraphs did not take
political sides but mused, sometimes acerbically, on the passing
scene. Using the editorial "we," White once described how this
processed worked:  "We write as we please and the magazine
publishes as it pleases. When the two pleasures coincide,
something gets into print."  He also turned his hand to cartoon
captions ("Mother:  'It's broccoli, dear.'  Child:  'I say it's
spinach and I say the hell with it.'") and to "Newsbreaks,"
those column-ending snippets of published gaffes, capped by New
Yorker quips. A Pittsburgh paper once garbled as follows:
"Gent's laundry taken home. Or serve at parties at night."
White's response:  "Oh, take it home."

His competence at the New Yorker eventually bored him. In 1938,
he and Katharine moved to a 40-acre farm in North Brooklin, on
the Maine seacoast. Ross was flabbergasted by the desertion of
his most valuable player:  "He just sails around in some God
damn boat." Farming and rural life enchanted White, although he
wrote Thurber in 1938, "I don't know which is more discouraging,
literature or chickens."  He kept tending to both, writing a
monthly column called "One Man's Meat" for Harper's magazine
between 1938 and 1943. He continued to contribute to The New
Yorker via the post office. The children's books and gatherings
of essays that would ensure his fame followed with reassuring
regularity.

Because he so consistently favored straight talk over polemics
and specific details over abstractions, White has been dismissed
in some quarters as a miniaturist a little too long on charm and
short on substance. It is true that big ideas seldom engaged
him unless they could be broken down into parts that made clear
and common sense. His response to the hue and cry for loyalty
oaths during the Communist witch hunts in the early 1950s was
typical. He ignored ideology and compressed the body politic
into a single form:  "If a man is in health, he doesn't need to
take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going."

Since he so carefully watched and reported the small workings
of nature, nothing that White wrote is very far removed from the
central subject of life and death. In the long run, if there
is one, Charlotte's Web should overshadow any number of
manifestos. The story of how Wilbur the pig was saved by the
unusual weaving skills of Charlotte the spider has taught
countless children, many of them now middle-aged, how to weep
and exult at the same moment. Wilbur's tribute to his departed
benefactor bears repeating, with a nod to the man who created
them both:  "It is not often that someone comes along who is a
true friend and a good writer."

--By Paul Gray