The Books: Essays of E.B. White, “Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street”

Next book on my essays bookshelf:

Essays of E. B. White

Growing up, E.B. White’s children’s books, Charlotte’s Web, Trumpet of the Swan and Stuart Little were hugely formative influences. I read them over and over and over again. I maintain that Charlotte’s Web has one of the most moving endings in literature.

I can’t even re-type these words without tears coming to my eyes:

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

Perfection.

White has an interesting background. He began as a reporter. Shortly after The New Yorker was founded in 1925, White started submitting stuff to it. A woman named Katherine Angell (her son is, famously, Roger Angell, another New Yorker institution) was the literary editor, and these manuscripts caught her eye. Angell thought White should be a staff writer for the magazine and that is what ended up happening. Angell and White also ended up marrying. So it was all very cozy and insular and literary and awesome. Angell died in 1977, and White followed her in 1985. E.B. White, along with his children’s books, and, of course, penning The Elements of Style with Mark Strunk, was a staff writer for The New Yorker for the entirety of his career, which lasted six decades. He also wrote columns for Harper’s Bazaar.The majority of the essays in this collection were originally published in The New Yorker. He was a master of the essay form. Life in minutia. Life boiled down into three pages. The essays are so simple, and yet so deep. He takes the mundane, the everyday, and ponders it, turning it over, his emotions accessible to the deeper meanings in these small moments (today’s essay being a perfect example).

In today’s self-confessional world, where personal essays are par for the course, his work acts as a refreshing tonic. They are confessional, but only because he wrote personally and simply about the things that mattered to him, about his observations and thoughts.

He also is one of the best “writers of New York” that there is. He writes about the city in ways that are still being imitated. He’s the one to beat. After September 11, his essay “Here is New York” resurfaced, and was mentioned constantly, due to one strangely prophetic paragraph about the vulnerability of skyscrapers to attacks from above. It is, perhaps, his most famous essay.

Here is another “New York” essay. In it, he describes the challenges involved in packing up his apartment in order to move somewhere else. It seems that he and his wife are moving out of the city. And so they are attempting to do a purge of their belongings, and finding it challenging. What to do with all your diplomas, say? Your “trophies”? Isn’t it depressing to keep them hanging around? Why do we keep acquiring stuff? We don’t even have to WORK at it and stuff piles up. The key is to throw out as much stuff as you acquire, but who does that? There’s always more coming in than going out. So he and his wife are “bivouacked” in a nearby hotel during the process, and go over every morning to tackle their possessions once again.

It’s disheartening in a way. White wonders if they will ever get it done. In the middle of the process, he suggests that they escape out of town for a weekend. They go to a country fair, up in Maine. Perhaps not a smart choice for those trying to avoid acquiring more stuff, because a fair is all about acquisition. There’s even a cattle auction.

And here is where White shines. Up until now, we’ve heard a mildly funny and extremely observant description of what it feels like to box up your apartment, and how you have to make choices about what to take and what to throw away. A universal experience. Anyone could relate. But while they were at the fair in Maine, Sputnik was launched up into the atmosphere.

Sputnik brings the essay to a new level. The world is also an “acquisitional” world. It seems to be our destiny.

Excerpt from Essays of E. B. White, “Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street.”

The day we spent at the Freyburg Fair was the day the first little moon was launched by the new race of moon-makers. Had I known in advance that a satellite was about to be added to my world, in this age of additives, I might have stayed in New York and sulked instead of going to the Fair, but in my innocence I was able to enjoy a day watching the orbiting of trotting horses – an ancient terrestrial phenomenon that has given pleasure to unnumbered thousands. We attended the calf scramble, the pig scramble, and the baby-beef auction; we ate lunch in the back seat of our flashy old 1949 automobile, parked in the infield; and then I found myself a ringside seat with my feet in the shavings at the Hereford sale, under the rattling tongue and inexorable hammer of auctioneer Dick Murray, enjoying the wild look in the whites of a cow’s eyes.

The day had begun under the gray blanket of a fall overcast, but the sky soon cleared. Nobody had heard of the Russian moon. The wheels wheeled, the chairs spun, the cotton candy tinted the faces of children, the bright leaves tinted the woods and hills. A cluster of amplifiers spread the theme of love over anything and everybody; the mild breeze spread the dust over everything and everybody. Next morning, in the Lafayette Hotel in Portland, I went down to breakfast and found May Craig looking solemn at one of the tables and Mr. Murray, the auctioneer, looking cheerful at another. The newspaper headlines told of the moon. At that hour of the morning, I could not take in the exact significance, if any, of a national heavenly body. But I was glad I had spent the last day of the natural firmament at the One Hundred and Seventh Annual Exhibition of the West Oxford Agricultural Society. I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

But that was weeks ago. As I sit here this afternoon in this disheveled room, surrounded by the boxes and bales that hold my undisposable treasure, I feel the onset of melancholy. I look out onto Forty-eighth Street; one out of every ten passers-by is familiar to me. After a dozen years of gazing idly at the passing show, I have assembled, quite unbeknownst to them, a cast of characters that I depend on. They are the nameless actors who have a daily walk-on part in my play – the greatest of dramas. I shall miss them all, them and their dogs. Even more, I think, I shall miss the garden out back – the wolf whistle of the starling, the summer-night murmur of the fountain; the cat, the vine, the sky, the willow. And the visiting birds of spring and fall – the small, shy birds that drop in for one drink and stay two weeks. Over a period of thirty years, I have occupied eight caves in New York, eight digs – four in the Village, one on Murray Hill, three in Turtle Bay. In New York, a citizen is likely to keep on the move, shopping for the perfect arrangement of rooms and vistas, changing his habitation according to fortune, whim, and need. And in every place he abandons he leaves something vital, it seems to me, and starts his new life somewhat less encrusted, like a lobster that has shed its skin and is for a time soft and vulnerable.