Tongue and Groove

By Stefan Kanfer

LETTERS OF E.B. WHITE

Edited by DOROTHY LOBRANO GUTH 686 pages. Harper & Row. $15.

The most succinct definition of fine English prose remains Jonathan Swift's "proper words in proper places." For 40 years the proper place was the pages of The New Yorker, where E.B. White's graceful perceptions and polished ironies became touchstones of style.

The same civilized tone pervades this epistolatory collection--missives, telegrams and interoffice memos--thai ranges back to White's suburban boyhood in Westchester, N.Y., then follows him through careers as student, editorialist, humorist, farmer and, finally, retiree to the shores of Maine.

Elwyn Brooks White was the son of a carpenter, and there are times when the father's profession marks his son's tongue-and-groove sentences. Hardly a word is ever out of place; his postcards can no more be excerpted than his essays. As these letters reveal, White was, like many humorists, a secret sufferer. For most of his adult life, the writer lightly chronicles a series of illnesses and operations: "They got at the bone through my right nostril, which I consider very resourceful, and the morphine was just what I had been needing all along." In the mid-'40s he suffers fron a mental crackup. His prescription for recovery: "Drink dry sherry in small amounts, spend most of your time with hand tools at a bench, and play old records till there is no wax left in the grooves."

Read Santayana! This sly deprecation tries to mask an aggressive and sometimes furious writer. Despite a distaste for self-revelation, White frequently boils over: he takes after fascists in the '40s, loyalty oaths in the '50s, school prayer in the '60s and commercialism in the '70s. But the author's unwritten motto is always Multum in parvo (much in little). He avoids issues like integration and Viet Nam; the sharpest attacks concern mistakes that are less global than verbal. When the Reader's Digest changes one of his sentences, for example, he fires off a note to the publisher announcing that, unlike the vanilla bean, White does not wish to be extracted.

When a New Yorker editor makes White's "fresh" into "afresh," the author fumes: "My characters will hence forth go afishing, and they will read Afield & Astream. Some of them, perhaps all of them, will be asexual . . ."

White's collections of essays (One Man 's Meat': The Second Tree From the Corner) have proved him a master of belles-lettres. This collection makes him a master of crank letters as well. Many of them may seem too personal to amuse any but White's immediate family. But the author's journalism and classic children's books--Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little--have expanded that family by millions. Moreover, readers of the Letters of E.B. White may be purchasing a textbook at no extra price. In a brief note to the mother of a young writer, White counsels: "Tell Johnny to read Santayana for a little while, it will improve his sentence structure." Change Santayana to White and the advice will hold for generations.

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