When my son Evan was five years old, he would not let me read him Charlotte’s Web. He’d seen both movie versions of the book, beginning with the lousy Hanna-Barbera animation that came out in the 1970s, while E. B. White was still alive and couldn’t even roll over in his grave. (White wrote in a letter, “After listening to Wilbur sing ‘I Can Talk, I Can Talk’ … I can take anything. I wanted to run on my sword but couldn’t find it.”) Evan had also seen the better but not great movie from 2006, with real people and real animals, and with Wilbur’s lips and Charlotte’s lips and the other barnyard characters’ lips digitally manipulated when they talked. Julia Roberts is the voice of Charlotte, and to be fair, she does a pretty good job.
Charlotte’s Web, however, is a perfect book, a masterpiece about living and dying well. There should be some universal magic spell that prevents a child from seeing any Charlotte’s Web movie before reading the book. Evan is 22 now, a college senior studying psychology and philosophy, but he has still not read Charlotte’s Web. I read aloud to him so many books when he was little and later, well into his elementary years. I loved this, and he loved this. I loved reading to him as much as anything I have loved. That I did not read Charlotte’s Web aloud to Evan has to be considered one of the real failures, among many, of my parenting career.
How else to do right by one’s favorite authors than to pass them on, read them aloud, urge them on the ones we love? On anyone who will listen?
When I was 19, in 1990, I went into a secondhand bookstore in Char-lottesville, Virginia, and bought Eight Modern Essayists. One of the eight was E. B. White. I had read and loved Charlotte’s Web as a boy, and Stuart Little also, but did not know White as an essayist at all. I did not know that an essayist was something one could be or become. I hadn’t read “Once More to the Lake,” one of the finest essays ever written about fathers and sons, in which White takes his 10-year-old son, Joel, to a lakeside camp for a week, to the same lake where White’s father had taken him when he was a boy.
Who can say exactly why a writer’s voice reaches out and takes hold of us across the years? But that’s what happened with me and White, the Maine gentleman farmer who wrote the essay “Death of a Pig” before he wrote the best children’s novel of all time, who would help transform the essay from its belletristic origins to the intimate, personal form we know today: I was charmed, enamored, spellbound. Out of affection and the hope of influence and intimacy, in an unscholarly, casual way, I’ve been reading him ever since.
When I read Scott Elledge’s biography and the moving, elegiac, testimonial essays about White written after his death, I discovered that people who knew White well knew him as Andy. Not E. B. or Elwyn or Elwyn Brooks. Andy. A nickname given to him when he was an undergraduate at Cornell. (One of Cornell’s founders was Andrew Dickson White, and apparently, any student with the last name White was called Andy.)
In the last year of his life, White could no longer see well enough to read. So every evening, Joel, now a father of grown children himself, came to his father’s house and read to him. Joel White read E. B. White to Andy White. What might Joel have read to him? Certainly E. B.’s stories and sketches and “Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker. Perhaps the essays, the novels, The Elements of Style—I imagine it was the whole oeuvre, a word White never used because he couldn’t pronounce it. (He couldn’t pronounce genre, either, which always came out sounding to him like “John.”) What better way for White to reacquaint himself with such an important figure from his past than to have his work read to him aloud? What better way to comfort and console a near-blind man struggling with despair than to read to him a writer who believed that literature “should tend to lift people up, not lower them down”?
White’s letters had been collected and published before, and Joel read from these as well.
Of all unexpected items of enchantment, I cherish White’s letters most, feel closest to him in reading them. In the farewells, especially, I find E. B. at his most Andy:
Yours,
Yours entirely,
Yours very truly,
Yrs gratefully,
Best regards to all—yours,
With most affectionate regards,
Yours faithfully,
Yrs frantically,
Yrs in haste,
Yrs proudly,
Love to all,
Ever thine,
Yrs as ever,
Yrs suspiciously,
Lots of love,
Your lazy, tired, grateful friend,
Yr lucid and disciplined old friend,
See you soon,
Love from lucky old
Andy
To his older brothers, Albert and Stanley, White is En or Elwyn:
Yours,
Lovingly,
As before,
EnLovingly,
Elwyn
Once, to Albert (Dear Ally):
From
Master Elwyn Brooks White
Once, to Stanley (Dear Stan):
Faithfully,
Buttercup
Another time, to Stanley:
Always
$970
Years later, to Stanley (Dear Bun):
Zoe mou, sas agapo.
En
To his mother (Dear Ma):
Most lovingly
Sonny
To a Cornell friend, Howard Cushman (Hum and Sweet Hum):
Yours till we’re both immortal,
Thine,
Ho
More than 40 years later, in 1968, to Howard Cushman again (Dear Cush):
Love,
Ho
Sometimes he uses initials only, no periods:
Yrs in error,
Till then, and even then, I am yrs,
Yr overexposed friend,
EBW
Irregularly:
Best love,
Yrs with love,
WhiteYrs in deep purple,
Mr. WYrs lovingly,
Yrs with love and grace,
Ah welleday.
Mr. White
From Daisy (the Scottish terrier of his new wife, Katharine) to Katharine herself:
Well, the truth is White is beside himself and would have said more about it but is holding himself back, not wanting to appear ludicrous … What he feels, he told me, is a strange queer tight little twitchy feeling around the inside of his throat whenever he thinks that something is happening which will require so much love and all on account of you being so wonderful. (I am not making myself clear I am afraid, but on the occasions when White has spoken privately with me about this he was in no condition to make himself clear either and I am just doing the best I can in my own way.) I know White so well that I always know what is the matter with him …
Lovingly,
Daisy
Ten days after Joel is born, Daisy is at her desk again and writes to him as “Joe”:
Dear Joe:
Am taking this opportunity to say Happy New Year, although I must say you saw very little of the Old Year and presumably are in no position to judge whether things are getting better or getting worse. … White tells me you are already drinking milk diluted with tears … so I take it life is real enough for you, tears being a distillation of all melancholy vapors rising from the human heart. …
I walked around the block with White just before he went to the hospital with Mrs. White so you could be born, and we saw your star being hoisted into place on the Christmas tree in front of the Washington Arch …
Faithfully yrs,
Daisy
Ten years later, (Dear Joe):
Affectionately,
Dad
And now Joel is grown and married. To Joel’s wife, Allene:
Love to all
Dad
Joel is a father. To Joel’s son J.
Steven White (Dear Steve):
Love from
Grandpa
To Joel’s daughter, Martha White (Dear Martha):
That long letter I wrote you yesterday wasn’t a good letter but I was in such pain I was not up to writing a letter, good or bad. What I really wanted to say was that it is a delight to have you for a granddaughter. There. That’s been said.
Love,
Grandpa
And from the author himself:
Sincerely,
Amen.
Yrs,
Yrs. rhythmically,
Very quietly yours,
Yrs for healthy livers,
Yr distant friend,
E. B. White
The letters are wry, loving, testy, fragile, complaining, grateful, direct, professional, hopeful, modest, longing, bereaved. But most often playful and intimate. White’s frequent correspondent John Updike wrote this after his friend’s death in October 1985:
He possessed abundantly that most precious and least learnable of writerly gifts—the gift of inspiring affection in the reader. Affection and trust: for why should we like a writer who gives us anything less than the trustworthy truth, in his version of it, delivered up without fuss or shame?
My copy of the Letters of E. B. White runs to 713 pages. The author’s note at the beginning was written by E. B. W.:
Ideally, a book of letters should be published posthumously. The advantages are obvious: the editor enjoys a free hand, and the author enjoys a perfect hiding place—the grave, where he is impervious to embarrassments and beyond the reach of libel. I have failed to cooperate in this ideal arrangement. Through some typical bit of mismanagement, I am still alive, and the book has had to adjust to that awkward fact.
Now, E. B. White is 40 years in the grave. And my gratitude, my affection, for his letters has no bounds. Who writes letters anymore? Do you? I don’t. But there’s no point, and no good, in chastising ourselves, or anyone, for the world’s relentlessly evolving technologies.
Will Evan ever read Charlotte’s Web? Perhaps. Perhaps he will read it aloud to one of his children someday. Perhaps he will read it aloud to me. But I’m not counting on it. Will I read Charlotte’s Web again, to and for myself? Or to a future grandchild not yet known? Definitely. Certainly. As certain, anyway, as anything can be certain.
When Evan and I text, as we occasionally do multiple times a day, we are often playful, wry—mischief hasn’t been lost. We are sometimes serious or worried or hurting or blunt or thoughtful or caring, the wide array of human emotions available to us, communicable with our thumbs. But there is no signing off, no farewell, no “formal” valediction. We may not use paper and ink, and yet, surprisingly, strangely, uncannily, wistfully, the work of preservation continues. On my phone, in Settings/Apps/Messages/Keep Messages, I have selected: Forever.
