A Charmed and Charming Life

By Paul Gray

E.B. WHITE: A BIOGRAPHY by Scott Elledge; Norton; 400 pages; $22.50

Charmed lives are probably more entertaining to lead than to read about. The ideal subject of a biography is someone who has succeeded at something, but at a pretty stiff price; the story of such a person inspires both envy ("I could not wage war on most of Europe") and the soothing balm of pity ("What a wretched place Elba must have been"). Yet there are some rare souls on whom fortune constantly grins. Their set-backs turn out to be short outs to triumph; their disappointments in love prepare them for the mate of their dreams. Money, fame, the respect of peers and the warmth of friends, all pursue them.

They may, indeed they often do, protest that unvarying good luck is a hell of its own. To ordinary humans, such complaints in such circumstances verge on the insufferable.

It is just this response that Biographer Scott Elledge, an English professor at Cornell, tries to deflect. The life of Author E.B. White, 84, Elledge keeps insisting, has been harder than it looks, from birth onward: "Elwyn was not a weakling or a sickly child, but he was not robust . . . his hay fever was so severe that his father took him (with the rest of the family) to Maine for the month of August in the hope of escaping the pollen that made him miserable." After enduring these hard knocks, this youngest of six children of well-to-do parents went to high school in Mount Vernon, a leafy suburb north of Manhattan, then on to Cornell, where he picked up the nickname Andy (after Andrew D. White, the university's first president). He won $1,000 in scholarships for his freshman year, against an annual tuition of $100. He eventually became president of his fraternity and editor of the school's daily newspaper. Notes White's biographer: "Among the many fears Andy suffered, his fear of failure may have been the most debilitating one."

Such worried interjections amount to a side order of applesauce. White's life has unquestionably been blessed, and his biography is strongest when it just records the charming confluence of circumstances and skill that made him one of the most admired, imitated and influential writers of his time. After graduating from college, White took odd jobs in journalism, advertising and public relations. He was, in retrospect, simply waiting for Harold Ross to dream up The New Yorker. Nine weeks after the inaugural issue appeared in February 1925, the first of thousands of White contributions graced its pages. When he was invited to join the magazine's staff, his interviewer was Ross's assistant, Katharine Angell. She was seven years older than White, and a mother of two children who was growing dissatisfied with her marriage. She and White fell in love, married and lived happily together for nearly 50 years, until her death in 1977. In the meantime, Ross discovered that "there was practically no purpose to which words could be put that White was unable to master." White was soon writing everything from light verse and cartoon captions (Mother to child: "It's broccoli, dear." Child to mother: "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it") to "Notes and Comment," the opening section of each issue's "Talk of the Town."

As the magazine prospered, and gossip about its inner workings leaked out, White became the country's best-known anonymous journalist. His casual, pithy approach to a paragraph defined brevity and wit for a generation of aspiring stylists. He was so good at what he did that he grew bored with it.

During the Depression, he bought a 40-acre farm in North Brooklin on the Maine sea-coast (where he lives to this day), and beat the first of several retreats from the tender trap of The New Yorker. A mystified Ross was heard to complain: "He just sails around in some God damn boat." During his sabbaticals White also compiled (with Katharine) the enormously successful A Subtreasury of American Humor; he revised and updated the yellowing strictures of one of his Cornell English professors into The Elements of Style, a tiny textbook that has sold in the millions; he wrote three children's books, including one (Charlotte's Web, 1952) that has achieved the status of a classic.

All the while, he fretted over not producing the big book that his ability seemed to decree. But writing novels did not interest him, and his curiosity about the world was too sprightly to be harnessed for the long haul. He regularly worried himself sick; hypochondria be came a lifelong pal. As a Cornell student, he was convinced that he had consumption; in his later years he noted: "I have had a frog in my throat for some time now, and of course with me this develops almost instantly into cancer of the larynx, because that is the way I'm built." He was also constructed, as this biography makes clear, to share his mastery of English syntax with countless readers, who seek out E.B. White's prose the way an older generation gravitated toward dark, warm-smelling barns or clear wild pools. He was given much; unlike most of his small, happy company, he has given more in return.

EXCERPT

"He may have felt imprisoned by his ambition and pained by doubts about the limits of his power as a writer. In the letter he had written Katharine in 1929 just before his 30th birthday, he said that he wanted to be more than a successful New Yorker writer. Now, four years later, still hoping to produce a major work, he had in mind something he referred to as his 'magnum opus.' And in 1934 he seems to have made at least one concerted attempt to get it under way. In mid-January 1934 he went to Camden, S.C., to the same resort hotel he had been taken to by his father in 1911. He went there 'to work on a piece away from the distractions of office and home.' But while he was there he saw a polo match, made friends with a fox terrier, rented a bicycle, walked ten to 20 miles a day, wrote several charming letters home, and reported that he felt fine; and he returned to New York after five days."