Tidbits & Pieces

THE SECOND TREE FROM THE CORNER (253 pp.)--E. B. White--Harper ($3).

One of the original authentic voices of The New Yorker belongs to E. B. (for Elwyn Brooks) White. As an editor and frequent lead-off man in the "Talk of the Town" section, E. B. White has done much in the past 28 years to set the urbane, casual pitch which is its hallmark.

The Second Tree from the Corner, a sampling of his New Yorker pieces, is "a dog's breakfast," according to White--short stories, parodies, poems, essays, table talk--some of it funny, some of it scary, almost none of it dull.

As if to highlight the plight of modern-day humor, the title piece focuses on a psychiatrist and his neurotic patient who stymie each other with the question, "What do you want?" The doctor finally admits that what he really wants is a new wing for his house in the suburbs. Going home, the patient glimpses the tremor of a leaf in the afternoon sun and sets his heart on something at once simpler and more complicated: "I want the second tree from the corner just as it stands." Several of White's other tales roll along this same rim of near hysteria. In "The Hour of Letdown," a man enters a bar, plunks down a mechanical brain, and orders rye & water for two. After ingesting a couple of drinks, the wonder machine unnerves the barflies by multiplying 10,862 by 99 in a split second, then caps the stunt by getting behind the wheel of a Cadillac and driving off. In "The Morning of the Day They Did It," two U.S. military men on SPCA duty ("Space Platform for Checking Aggression") blow the earth to bits out of sheer boredom. "About Myself is a nightmare comedy of numbers set in an Orwellian bureaucracy. ("My left front tire is Number 48KE8846, my right front tire is Number 63T6895".) But if Humorist White jangles the nerves with predictable frequency, he remembers how to jiggle the funny bone too. His four-page "Across the Street and into the Grill," a parody of Hemingway, is a minor triumph of satirical humor.

His random digs at classics clubs ("I, connoisseur of good reading, friend of con noisseurs of good reading everywhere"), sloppy diction ("what one weather prophet on the radio calls 'inner mitten' showers"), "personalized" writing ("As for us, we would as lief Simoniz our grandmother as personalize our writing"), usually blend good fun with good sense. Full of engaging tidbits, the "dog's breakfast" does not offer much to chew, but more than enough to tickle the taste buds.

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