Keep it Simple: Notes on our times and the times of E.B. White
Even though I have never read the classic children’s books "Charlotte's Web" or "Stuart Little" by E.B. White, he has been my favorite author of the past decade. Nevermind White passed away at the age of 86 back in 1985 or that his New Yorker essays and columns, of which I am obsessed, were mostly written in the first half of the last century before I was even born.
Prior to discovering White the essayist in a used bookstore, I was familiar with his name as it applied to his extensive revision of William Strunk Jr.’s "The Elements of Style." His work on this book kept me and many other grammarians on the straight and narrow during our college years.
It wasn’t until I discovered "One Man’s Meat" at the above-mentioned bookstore (for which I shall be eternally grateful) that I became an official member of the E.B. (short for Elwyn Brooks) White fan club.
"One Man’s Meat" and nine other of his non-fiction books, including "Essays of E.B. White" and "The Points of My Compass," now occupies honored space in my front porch bookcase. It was his rural essays of life on the farm; a gentleman’s farm that is, on the coast of Maine, which I most closely related and ate them up in a wondrous bliss one rarely experiences with an author.
White could wax poetic about his pet dachshunds; in particular the irascible Fred who watched life go by with a jaundiced and amused outlook. One time Fred allegedly told White in a very matter-of-fact sort of way “I just saw an eagle go by. It was carrying a baby.” Priceless, at least to me. Or his dark essay about the death of a pig which must have served White well in his later endeavor in "Charlotte’s Web."
White, who spent a good part of his career at the New Yorker, raised a family in the Big Apple but later in life purchased an old farm in Maine, complete with the requisite wood-burning stoves and tumbledown barns, while continuing to submit work to the venerable magazine. After many years of commuting between the city and his country home White and his wife Katherinne, an editor for the New Yorker, settled down in rural Maine where he lived out the remainder of his life.
The last book of White’s I recently came across, "Notes on Our Times," is a slim volume by any measure and can be read in one sitting and includes short essays from the New Yorker written between 1947 and 1952. By short I mean about half the length of the column you are now reading.
The essays touch on the times, his times, including the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, television and the United Nations. They touch on topics and themes which still occupy “our times” here in the 21st century and are as fresh today as they were back in what some folks still think of as the “good old days.”
"The Age of Dust White" introduces us to the innocence of a little girl, a homemade swing under an apple tree and the lunacy of the atomic age. “The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man’s adjustment to it. Already bombproofing is on approximately the same level as mothproofing.”
It is indeed a bit perplexing and scary to realize the times of E.B. White and his peers continue to be the times we find ourselves confronting here in the fragile present. Have we learned nothing?
Either way, I thank the literary gods for the day I stumbled upon the non-fiction works of Mr. White in the aisle of that forgotten shop. My misfortune is I think I may have happened upon the last of this remarkable wordsmith. And for that, I am all the poorer.
Who knows? One of these days I may have to sit myself down and plunge into White’s fictional works aimed at children (of all ages) now that I have likely read the last of his provocative and whimsical words from a time of a long-ago past/present.
— Michael Jones is a columnist and contributor for the Gaylord Herald Times. He can be reached at mfomike2@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Keep it Simple: Notes on our times and the times of E.B. White
