The Valedictions of Elwyn Brooks

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.