A Master of Luminous Prose E.B.

By Paul Gray

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 the 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 or 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 or 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 process 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."